#i understand the importance of messy narratives about gender it's just

[saccharinescorpion]

messaging you here because I’m too shy to respond to your tweets publicly, but fwiw, tengoku daimakyou has a ton of intersex characters and makes a point of exploring the dysphoric disconnect between how kiruko feels and is perceived by others, so I think it’s an intentional attempt at narrative genderfuckery akin to like, that fujimoto story about a character magically waking up as a girl but still wanting to be seen as a man, which very much reads to me as a trans narrative as well

"adding on to my last message about tengoku, the intersex characters were raised in an environment that wasn’t particularly concerned about gender distinctions, so that’s why I mentioned them - I think the manga is making intentional commentary on the subjectivity of gender socialization and not just pulling a clueless cis person move"

i get that, more than anything i just feel bad for viewers who are definitely expecting something very different from that explanation

[seriousbrat]

it’s so interesting to see how the interpretation of teen (boy) behavior in books has changed since they were written. it’s mostly for the better, but i think it does cause some people to refuse to engage in good faith with the source material, or on its own terms. i’ve loved hp since i was a kid, but i had never interacted at all with the fan side of things until maybe a year ago, and it was very odd (on the whole — which is why i’ve mostly just stuck to a handful of blogs with great fics and meta, like yours) to see how a lot of the text is taken now, compared to how my friends and i understood it at the time. i think its totally fair — and good, on a cultural level — to point out that the boy who pulls your pigtails isn’t being cute, and your male friend being in love with you doesn’t mean you owe him anything. but it’s also like … kind of intentionally closing the eyes to how these parts of the story are meant to come across? and i am not coming in here as some kind of “boys will be boys” person, but teenagers are messy in their relationships and their friendships, and more relevantly, it’s very clear what types of dynamics are being presented by the text. and it can be fun to pick apart what kinds of narratives are meant to be taken as romantic in different stories written in different times/places and why, but to look at the story on a story level you’ve got to also work with what it gives you.

Yes I think you make a very good point! I agree and personally I think both Snape and James would be written slightly differently if they were written today. Also, imo there's an element of wishful thinking coupled with naivety (and this has always existed tbf) when people who haven't ever been cis teenage boys try to write cis teenage boys haha. Like the 'closing of eyes' isn't always intentional. I know I keep going on about the Inbetweeners but I literally think watching that as a teen myself gave me an insight that I can never take back about what teenage boys are like haha.

Like this isn't to say that teenage boys are all exactly alike, or that there's some inherent, natural difference between boys and girls in terms of mentality or personality, but there is a social difference, generally speaking, a constructed one that happens because boys and girls are raised and socialised in a patriarchy. It's obviously not universal at all, and that's not even accounting for trans kids and the complexities they face, because even among cis boys and girls or men and women there's endless variety, and gender absolutely does not determine personality, interests, etc. Unfortunately it does influence them, though, that's our reality.

In terms of fiction, especially fanfic, obv one is free to do as they please. But there is such a thing as narrative voice, which can be an important thing to consider. Again when it comes to fanfiction it Does Not Matter that much, it's for fun, but in published fiction (or if you care about quality ig) it just is something you should consider. This is where the 'Men Writing Women' thing comes in, where you read something so obviously written by a man who doesn't understand how women (generally) think or speak or act at all. And in our patriarchal society such usually ends up being offensive and has often been overlooked and accepted when it shouldn't be. I don't think it's helpful to pretend men can't write women either, since plenty of male authors write female characters beautifully and the rest shouldn't be let off the hook. If you can't write women, skill issue and you shouldn't be published.

Anyway it's vastly more forgivable and understandable, and it pains me to say it but I think you can sometimes tell when it's a woman writing a man or a boy too. I will say on the whole I think women are better at writing men than the reverse haha, probably because we've been socialised to empathise with men whereas boys are not taught (by society) to empathise with women. Maybe women even empathise a little too much tbh. Maybe that's the problem, like we subconsciously over-project our ideals onto male characters, making them too nice, too woke, too cuddly, too sweet, because that's what we want to see, and leaving out the nastier elements that are so common. Again, that's not necessarily a problem!! Only if you're trying to create a realistic, effective portrayal of a certain (average) type of teenage boy-- which you don't have to do. I'd raise my eyebrows at an unrealistic portrayal much more in published fiction than fanfiction personally.

And ofc you can always choose to write a character who diverges from the accepted norm, but to do so effectively has to be a deliberate choice and done thoughtfully. For a boy like James, who is very average, the norm, he's decent enough but no Woke Feminist King haha. He's not meant to be.

Anyway, I think that's why the Marauders et al (including Death Eaters lol) are nowadays often portrayed like sweet little babies who all cuddle and take care of each other and respect women LOL. Like whatever, it's escapism haha, it's understandable. But sometimes I do think a lot of these people have never really interacted with many gay men or know what their culture is like. lmao. straight men maybe, but in a limited way. if you've ever had the misfortune to be with a group of cishet men who are talking freely with each other you'll know what I mean. again this is GENERAL. and socially constructed, not inherent. but very common nevertheless.

[greyteanote]

Give your friendships the magic you would give a romance. Because they're just as important. Actually, for us, they're way more important.——《Loveless》

��籍簡介：

For fans of Love, Simon and��I Wish You All the Best, a funny, honest, messy, completely relatable story of a girl who realizes that love can be found in many ways that don't involve sex or romance.

From the marvelous author of Heartstopper comes an exceptional YA novel about discovering that it's okay if you don't have sexual or romantic feelings for anyone . . . since there are plenty of other ways to find love and connection.

This is the funny, honest, messy, completely relatable story of Georgia, who doesn't understand why she can't crush and kiss and make out like her friends do. She's surrounded by the narrative that dating + sex = love. It's not until she gets to college that she discovers the A range of the LGBTQIA+ spectrum -- coming to understand herself as asexual/aromantic. Disrupting the narrative that she's been told since birth isn't easy -- there are many mistakes along the way to inviting people into a newly found articulation of an always-known part of your identity. But Georgia's determined to get her life right, with the help of (and despite the major drama of) her friends.

。…。…。…。…。…。 …。…。…。…。…。

感想：

因為是直接看英文於是最近才真正看完，隨著主角Georgia探索性向與愛的定義，說明沒有浪漫傾向的無性戀者， 以及面對大學新生活與她周遭的人事物。由於這本是在我剛上大學期間看的，因此對書中的情節很有共鳴，也很高興Georgia身邊擁有一群好朋友陪伴。

即使Georgia做出了一些因為不確定自己的性向，為了探索而做的行為（例如跟好友Jason接吻，以及在酒醉的狀態下跟Rooney接吻然後被暗戀Rooney的Pip當場抓到），但Georgia也做出了彌補與道歉，後來與朋友們重新和好，特別是她跟朋友唱歌划小船和Pip大喊"Would you be my girlfriend?"那裡真的特別可愛，營造出的畫面很足夠，她就是一個還在尋找自我的可愛女孩啊。

個人覺得，這幾人的友誼發展到最後，已經變成跟家人一樣不可或缺的感情了，真的很棒。

有一段是學長Sunil說的話，��覺得這段寫得很好。

‘Asexuality means I’m not sexually attracted to any gender.’ ‘So …’ I thought about this. ‘That means … you don’t want to have sex with anyone?’ He chuckled. ‘Not necessarily. Some asexual people feel that way.But some don’t.’

Asexuality means I’m not sexually attracted to any gender. So I don’t look at men, or women, or anyone, and think, wow, I want to do sexy stuff with them. ’

‘Some asexuals still enjoy having sex, for a whole variety of reasons,’ he continued. ‘I think that’s why a lot of people find it confusing. But some asexuals don’t like sex at all, and some are just neutral about it. Some asexuals still feel romantic attraction to people – wanting to be in relationships, or even kiss people, for example.

But others don’t want romantic relationships at all. It’s a big, big spectrum with a whole range of different feelings and experiences. And there’s really no way to tell how one specific person feels, even if they openly describe themselves as asexual.’

Loveless是青少年小說，內容提及了LGBTQ+，友誼與愛情元素，表現上可圈可點，很不錯。

[vtori73]

Hmm, people are making a big deal about interpretations/interpreting that one scene in Dunm3shi with the succubus and La0is and doing deep dives and shit but honestly?

I think it was just mostly a funny gag scene mixed with the author turning the tables on common troupes & readers desires & thoughts when it comes to things like this. In this example, the main characters if the opposite gender will be pushed together either by the story narrative or the readers assuming they have a thing for each other so the author wanted to not only reject that kind of troupe/thinking but also do it in a comedic way.

Most people would assume there are some romantic feelings at least coming from La0is because he is a man and while I can acknowledge her looks probably are closer to his type that doesn't necessarily mean all that much considering people can have types but not be interested in a person who fits that criteria, plenty of people end up with people who aren't technically their "ideal/fav" type physically doesn't mean they find the person less attractive because of it or would want to be with someone more who does fit their "ideal" type because in the end looks really aren't everything. BUT, this is specifically a personal opinion, even more specifically it's what I WANT the scene to mean, I don't really want it to be some big deal that means something deeper and would rather it just be some funny way the author went about spitting on common tropes.

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

Since I'm here anyway I want to mention something I've been wanting to write down but haven't yet... While I like Dunm3shi I also have some "eh" feelings about it and I think I finally (mostly) understand why that is after reading someone's long analysis of the above scene I was talking about (that I didnt even agree with 100% but in one section it did help me understand my feeling/thoughts more on La0is/the series in general). My main thing is that while a lot of people like the series because of its more realistic look on race/racism between various races & creatures and having it actually addressed and spelled out and while I do think it does help enhance the story and build the world up more and make it more realistic I ALSO think it doesn't really at the end of the day say or do much... which I guess it doesn't HAVE to but well... let me explain my thoughts below.

But, real quick I want to add that I also find it interesting how people dont differentiate between racism & fantasy race/creature prejudice/bigotry because racism is specifically about RACE, as in skin color and something that deals with HUMANS and not different creatures/species and to conflate the two is never really a good thing because you can't really and often can lead to messy narratives that we especially find often in fantasy like settings.

Anyway, moving back to my thoughts on this, which aren't too deep but basically while I do like that aspect and that it gets addressed and pointed out moreso than regular fantasy (which I think is why I've never been a big fan of fantasy the old timey-ness mixed with that and real world racism/bigotry coming from the people who make this stuff just never sits well with me it's kind of like the phenomena of white people who wish to live in the 50s or something without thinking for one second how they would be the only ones who could/would be able to live safely in that sort of time) I also have a hard time liking what it actually does do/say with it which isn't much. Sure EVERYONE is bigoted in the world, most people in real life are too but is this REALLY ever stopped & questioned all that much? It is really challenged all that much, does anyone stop to think maybe we should be better? Sure at the end of the story things are changed due to what happens (trying to keep this spoiler free) but like... bigotry in general seems more like an aside thing, not really important and more so the whole idea of desires and how they corrupt and such and humanity or something.

This paired with a protagonist who is not just white, but a little close to what white supremacists hold up as the ideal with having blonde hair (but no blue eyes, gold color instead) who has a BIG prejudice against ALL humans due to personal experiences because he isn't like other humans and always seems like it kind of justified due to how EVERYONE, especially human, even friends, seem to react to him with the added aspect that he himself is not free of being racist/prejudiced either and doesn't seem to ever see or acknowledge it or is confronted by it really (racism/bigotry against Shiro & the mountain people specifically). With the added aspect that even different races (races aka the meaning of race in OUR world) are all the same and treated the same it seems and while we can say MAYBE racism like in our world isn't really a thing in this world or as big of a thing in this world it still is weird considering how race actually IS a big factor in the real world and how just... weird this comes off, the white boy feeling the MOST ostracized and out of place in a world of monsters and different race humans & creatures & such to the point of wanting to BE A MONSTER because monsters kill humans (okay so I failed in being spoiler free my bad)... I mean hell, one of his traveling companions is one of the most oppressed races but he doesn't desire things like La0is does.

Now I do feel like I have to add so people don't get the wrong idea tha, no, I don't hate his character or think he is evil or horrible or the worst thing ever I just acknowledge that it comes off odd is all when you analyze all of his character. Sure, he is heavily implied as not being neurotypical and is mistreated for that and can count as something he is oppressed for but plenty of others in the story are oppressed and don't end up wishing for the kinds of things he does, sure he does care about others at the end of the day but im not going to pretend he's a perfect character just because he has faced hardships due to being different. It just reminds me of all the white people in real life who go on about the one or two area of oppression they face while ignoring they still hold a lot of power in the world for being white and use that oppression they face as a shield and sword against anyone who dares criticize them. Instead of acknowledging they gain to benefit from continually perpetuating bigoted rhetoric & ideas that have long been said and done against other oppressed groups they go on the offense and stick their head in the sand wanting to desperately believe that because they are oppressed in x way means they can't possibly still be oppressors/privileged.

It's all just a little weird to me, I can't even say anything past that it just comes off a bit weird to me when I take a step back to analyze it all.

I mean, technically speaking we could say it's sort of realistic with how at least in America and similar places white men tend to be the demographic that commits the most violent acts (shootings for example) but I don't think that was exactly the authors intentions especially considering it all works out in the end and he ends up saving people and the world due to his desire to want to be a monster/his hatred against humans which is kind of funny because it wasn't even INTENTIONAL on his part it just sort of worked out which is... something. Kind of funny but still.

I really liked dunm3shi when I started it, I thought it was hilarious and was why I picked up the manga because the anime made me laugh but once I got to the end I felt meh about it and didnt really understand why and honestly at first thought it was because everything worked out in the end and i interpreted that as meaning i wasn't thrilled about a happy ending but it was actually something a bit more than that. Pair this ALSO with the fact of how white fandom is reacting to La0is and relating to him and even saying how they find all the characters to be racist in some way "realistic"... (Yeah I know I said the same thing but it wasn't the ONLY thing I said, and you'll see more of what I mean when you continue to read) really REALLY leaves a gross taste in my mouth and makes me feel like the story and La0is as a character is making these people feel more emboldened to excuse their own prejudice/racism for x reason whether it be because "uwu no one gets me because im not neurotypical," to "everyone is just like that so it's fine that I am, I don't need to improve or change at all."

Now, no, I'm not saying the story is LITERALLY doing this or even the author I'm saying that's how people are interpreting/reading it which makes me uncomfortable as not only a non-white person but also someone who ISN'T neurotypical and also isn't cis or hetero that I don't feel the way La0is feels and kind of abhor that kind of thinking and really often tends to come from rather privileged people (yes, especially white people). Sure maybe at most I feel that way against white people, MAYBE, and while some will say to me "that makes you no better," that only shows to me that you don't know enough about racism & power dynamics to have a say on this discussion because at the end of the day people hating and maybe even wanting their oppressors dead is not the same as being an actual oppressor who has the power to not only do what some may wish/fantasize about with little to no consequence but probably already has or done so in the past and actively benefits from it. I know oppression works a TAD bit differently in this world with the long lived races having more power and say in the but... I don't really think it detracts from my overall thoughts much if at all tbh.

Alright... I think that's it, I may have missed something and probably didn't explain as well as I could have but this was kind of an ADHD rant so... YEAH, it is not going to be the most organized/well explained thing, deal with it, lol.

[shakespearean-snape]

Part of what made my brain do a little "ah ha!" at the Harry and Ron and Snape and Lily comparison is that in either case the friendship could be read as wholly platonic or not (though much more has been made of Harry and Draco's dynamic, especially when he became a boy wholly obsessed during sixth year when he just knew he was Death Eater and no one would listen to him which also makes me go ah ha! for how that tends to parallel with a young Snape and how he must have felt similarly where Remus Lupin was concerned but that's a whole other thing, point being Harry and Snape tend to parallel a lot) and how much easier it tends to be for people to see Snape and Lily's dynamic as something strictly romantic (and unfortunately quite predatorily sexual from a far too young an age to be comfortable for me that anyone is reading sexual intentions in the interactions of small children even if only because some people tend to take Voldemort's perception as fact rather than an intentional canon point that Voldemort doesn't understand love beyond desire) over Harry and Ron's friendship.

Importantly, I think that a romantic relationship doesn't always have to carry sexual connotations. There are plenty of people who form romantic, non-sexual relationships. Just like there are many different kinds of love, romance and romantic relationships can look like different things to different people. For me though, the initial fascination was Harry's loss of his friendship with Ron and the way he took it so hard could be for all of the reasons I speculated and we could still read his feelings for Ron as either purely platonic or gay or something more complicated and the specifics of that don't in anyway change the fact that Harry also just feels miserable not talking to Ron because he was his first real friend and connection to the magical world and I just think that perfectly encapsulates what my greatest issue is with the idea Lily's only importance to Snape was because of a possible romantic interest, that without that romantic interest losing her would lose some of its impact.

I think sometimes when discussing romance, especially heteronormative readings of it (which JKR is the worst at for all she wants to rage against the dangers of "evil trans people" in public spaces, her idea of heteronormative romance is about as dated as her second-wave feminist views on gender and gender roles and toxic even by 90s standards of how "males and females" should relate to each other and probably leave her conflicted in the same way she is about Snape as a character because omg let me tell you second-wave feminism at its core had this idea that women could achieve equality by rejecting feminine coded/domestic spheres and carving out a place in the male coded/patriarchal space so you have Hermione with her radical rejection of all things feminine coded by her standards and her sheer disdain for it all because she's not like the other girls and Umbridge who is super pink and frilly and feminine and EVIL and then Snape and you begin to see just how messy a space JKR's head must be trying to unpack gender as we understand it today and as this new gen of readers she's confronted with experience things as a reality and because she's always been petty af let's be real her anxieties and lashing out with transphobia is a thing she just doubles down on because god forbid this white woman with an upper-middle-class traditional English education who got famous off her rags to riches narrative all the same is not going to check her privilege and accept she has anything left to learn, ok sorry rant over!) people get so caught up in the "romance" part they forget all the additional nuances of what it means to have a relationship with someone and that how we form bonds and connections are often more complex than just so long as we love the person in our loves romantically the loss of them is something more profound.

I just think of all those people who fall in and out of romantic love but who continue to share a connection or bond because they know each other on the kind of deeper level you do when spending years in each other's lives. Alternatively, I think of people who spend years together, in each other's lives existing at first only ever as friends and maybe they fall in romantic love at some point but that is only a new component of a connection that has been ongoing for a significant part of their lives and even if it had never happened it wouldn't have made the loss of each other any less profound or painful.

I don't know, maybe I'm not making any sense because I'm already a few morning coffees in, but I just think of how we sometimes get caught up in the cliches of great romantic love stories and forget how human connection outside of that goes much deeper and can be much more complex. Because Snape and Lily are a boy and girl, and to be fair likely because JKR subscribes to very dated and heteronormative views on gender relations, people ascribe romantic feelings to their relationship and even when it isn't read as a negative and people just ship it, I get the sense that perceptually what Lily meant to Snape can sometimes begin and end at "he loved her romantically and even though it was unrequited her loss was profound enough he loved her, always." And that's not to knock anyone who enjoys the romance of that idea, I can fully understand getting caught up in the beauty of the idea of someone loving you so faithfully and fully as someone who grew up watching my parents love each other that way and wanting that too.

It's just to say, love is more than just romance (just as romance and romantic relationships exclude sexual desire or sex and still be equally valid) in the sense that Snape could have loved Lily as a friend or romantically and Harry could have loved Ron as either but what they meant to each other went beyond just platonic or romantic, there was a connection formed between them that included other more complex feelings and significance that tied them together and made the loss of that connection something felt and painful.

I don't know, I just feel there's some very interesting material there for conversation in those kind of parallels. In large part because looking at a friendship between Harry and Ron and paralleling it with Snape and Lily also forces people to step outside heteronormative perspectives and think about issues like that and other things like do we ascribed romance easier to one over the other or do we read the intentions of Harry differently than Snape in his friendship to Ron, etc? There's a lot there for me and I'll probably be thinking on it all week now, so thanks!

looking back at the harry potter books with like… actual time frames you realise that the most ron’s ever gone without really talking to harry was like two weeks but everyone always makes such a bigger deal out of it because harry is the one who makes a gigantic deal out of it. i think the fandom should make fun of him more for how dramatic he gets when fighting with ron.

you read the books and each time ron doesn’t talk to harry the narration is like. harry woke up feeling miserable. he turned to talk to ron but then remembered they aren’t talking and that made him start wallowing in his own sadness. there’s no point in going to the great hall, he can’t eat. he spent the potions class looking at ron who decided to sit with seamus instead of him. he was so busy staring at ron wishing they could make up he didn’t notice his cauldron exploding. snape is screaming but ron is still not talking to him. he has detention? big deal. if ron was there they would have detention together

[soundsfaebutokay]

So I've recc'd this video before, but it deserves its own post because it's one of my favorite things on youtube. It's a Tedx Talk by comics writer, editor, and journalist Jay Edidin, and I really think that it will connect with a lot of people here.

If you live and breathe stories of all kinds, you might like this.

If you care about media representation, you might like this.

If you're neurodivergent, you might like this.

If you're interested in a gender transition story that veers from the norm, you might like this.

If you love the original Leverage and especially Parker, and understand how important it is that a character like her exists, you will definitely like this.

Transcript below the cut:

You Are Here: The Cartography of Stories

by Jay Edidin

I am autistic. And what this means in practice is that there are some things that are easier for me than they are for most people, and a great many things that are somewhat harder, and these affect my life in more or less overt ways. As it goes, I'm pretty lucky. I've been able to build a career around special interests and granular obsession. My main gig at the moment is explaining superhero comics continuity and publishing history for which work I am somehow paid in actual legal currency—which is both a triumph of the frivolous in an era of the frantically pragmatic, and a job that's really singularly suited to my strengths and also to my idiosyncrasies.

I like comics. I like stories in general, because they make sense to me in ways that the rest of the world and my own mind often don't. Self-knowledge is not an intuitive thing for me. What sense of self I have, I've built gradually and laboriously and mostly through long-term pattern recognition. For decades, I didn't even really have a self-image. If you'd asked me to draw myself, I would eventually have given you a pair of glasses and maybe a very messy scribble of hair, and that would've been about it. But what I do know—backwards, forwards, and in pretty much every way that matters—are stories. I know how they work. I understand their language, their complex inner clockwork, and I can use those things to extrapolate a sort of external compass that picks up where my internal one falls short. Stories—their forms, their structure, the sense of order inherent to them—give me the means to navigate what otherwise, at least for me, would be an impassable storm of unparsable data. Or stories are a periscope, angled to access the parts of myself I can't intuitively see. Or stories are a series of mirrors by which I can assemble a composite sketch of an identity I rarely recognize whole...which is how I worked out that I was transgender, in my early thirties, by way of a television show.

This is my story. And it's about narrative cartography, and representation, and why those things matter. It's about autism and it's about gender and it's about how they intersect. And it's about the kinds of people we know how to see, and the kinds of people we don't. It's not the kind of story that gets told a lot, you might hear a lot, because the narrative around gender transition and dysphoria in our culture is really, really prescriptive. It's basically the story of the kid who has known for their whole life that they're this and not that, and that story demands the kind of intuitive self-knowledge that I can't really do, and a kind of relationship to gender that I don't really have—which is part of why it took me so long to figure my own stuff out.

So, to what extent this story, my story has a beginning, it begins early in 2014 when I published an essay titled, "I See Your Value Now: Asperger's and the Art of Allegory." And it explored, among other things, the ways that I use narrative and narrative structures to navigate real life. And it got picked up in a number of fairly prominent places that got linked, and I casually followed the ensuing discussion. And I was surprised to discover that readers were fairly consistently assuming I was a man. Now, that in itself wasn't a new experience for me, even though at the time I was writing under a very unambiguously female byline. It had happened in the letter columns of comics I'd edited. It had happened when a parody Twitter account I'd created went viral. When I was on staff at Wired, I budgeted for fancy scotch by putting a dollar in a box every time a reader responded in a way that made it clear they were assuming I was a man in response to an article where my name was clearly visible, and then I had to stop doing that because it happened so often I couldn't afford to keep it up. But in all of those cases, the context, you know, the reasons were pretty obvious. The fields I'd worked in, the beats I covered, they were places where women had had to fight disproportionally hard for visibility and recognition. We live in a culture that assumes a male default, so given a neutral voice and a character limit, most readers will assume a male author.

But this was different, because this wasn't just a book I'd edited, it wasn't a story I'd reported—it was me, it was my story. And it made me uncomfortable, got under my skin in ways that the other stuff really hadn't. And so I did what I do when that happens, and I tried to sort of reverse-engineer it to look at the conclusions and peel them back to see the narratives behind them and the stories that made them tick. And I started this, I started this by going back to the text of the essay, and you know, examining it every way I could think of: looking at craft, looking at content. And in doing so, I was surprised to realize that while I had written about a number of characters with whom I identified closely, that every single one of those characters I'd written about was male. And that surprised me even more than the responses to the essay had, because I've spent my career writing and talking and thinking about gender and representation in popular media. In 2014, I'd been the feminist gadfly of an editorial department and multiple mastheads. I'd been a founding board member of an organization that existed to advocate for more and better representation of women and girls in comics characters and creators. And most of my favorite characters, the ones I'd actively seek out and follow, were women. Just not, apparently, the characters I saw myself in.

Now I still didn't realize it was me at this point. Remember: self-knowledge, not very intuitive for me. And while I had spent a lot of time thinking about gender, I'd never really bothered to think much about my own. I knew academically that the way other people read and interpreted my gender affected and had influenced a lifetime of social and professional interactions, and that those in turn had informed the person I'd grown up into during that time. But I really believed, like I just sort of had in the back of my head, that if you peeled away all of that social conditioning, you'd basically end up with what I got when I tried to draw a self-portrait. So: a pair of glasses, messy scribble of hair, and in this case, maybe also some very strong opinions about the X-Men. I mean, I knew something was off. I'd always known something was off, that my relationship to gender was messy and uncomfortable, but gender itself struck me as messy and uncomfortable, and it had never been a large enough part of how I defined myself to really feel like something that merited further study, and I had deadlines, and...so it was always on the back burner. So, I looked, I looked at what I had, at this improbable group of exclusively male characters. And I looked and I figured that if this wasn't me, then it had to be a result of the stories I had access to, to choose from, and the entertainment landscape I was looking at. And the funny thing is, I wasn't wrong, exactly. I just wasn't right either.

See, the characters I'd written about had one other significant trait in common aside from their gender, which is that they were all more or less explicitly, more or less heavily coded as autistic. And I thought, "Ah, yes. This explains it. This is under representation in fiction echoing under representation in life and vice versa." Because the characteristics that I'd honed in on, that I particularly identified with in these guys, were things like emotional unavailability and social awkwardness and granular obsession, and all of those are characteristics that are seen as unsympathetic and therefore unmarketable in female characters. Which is also why readers were assuming that I was a man.

Because, you see, here's the thing. I'm not the only one who uses stories to navigate the world. I'm just a little more deliberate about it. For humans, stories formed the bridge between data and understanding. They're where we look when we need to contextualize something new, or to recognize something we're pretty sure we've seen before. They're how we identify ourselves; they're how we locate ourselves and each other in the larger world. There were no fictional women like me; there weren't representations of women like me in media, and so readers were primed not to recognize women like me in real life either.

Now by this point, I had started writing a follow-up essay, and this one was also about autism and narratives, but specifically focused on how they intersected with gender and representation in media. And in context of this essay, I went about looking to see if I could find even one female character who had that cluster of traits I'd been looking for, and I was asking around in autistic communities. And I got a few more or less useful one-off suggestions, and some really, really splendid arguments about semantics and standards, and um...then I got one answer over and over and over in community after community after community. "Leverage," people told me. "You have to watch Leverage."

So I watched Leverage. Leverage is five seasons of ensemble heist drama. It's about a team of very skilled con artists who take down corrupt and powerful plutocrats and the like, and it's a lot of fun, and it's very clever, and it's clever enough that it doesn't really matter that it's pretty formulaic, and I enjoyed it a lot. But what's most important, what Leverage has is Parker.

Parker is a master thief, and she is the best of the best of the best in ways that all of Leverage's characters are the best of the best. And superficially, she looks like the kind of woman you see on TV. So she's young, and she's slender, and she's blonde, and she's attractive but in a sort of approachable way. And all of that familiarity is brilliant misdirection, because the thing is, there are no other women like Parker on TV. Because Parker—even if it's never explicitly stated in the show—Parker is coded incredibly clearly as autistic. Parker is socially awkward. Her speech tends to have limited inflection; what inflection it does have is repetitive and sounds rehearsed a lot of the time. She's not emotionally literate; she struggles with it, and the social skills she develops over the series, she learns by rote, like they're just another grift. When she's not scaling skyscrapers or cartwheeling through laser grids, she wears her body like an ill-fitting suit. Parker moves like me. And Parker, Parker was a revelation—she was a revolution unto herself. In a media landscape where unempathetic women usually exist to either be punished or "loved whole," Parker got to play the crabby savant. And she wasn't emotionally intuitive but it was never ever played as the product of abuse or trauma even though she had survived both of those—it was just part of her, as much as were her hands or her eyes. And she had a genuine character arc. My god, she had a genuine romantic arc, even. And none of that required her to turn into anything other than what she was. And in Parker I recognized a thousand tics and details of my life and my personality...but. I didn't recognize myself.

Why? What difference was there in Parker, you know, between Parker and the other characters I'd written about? Those characters, they'd spanned ethnicities and backgrounds and different media and appearances and the only other characteristic they all had in common was their gender. So that was where I started to look next, and I thought, "Well, okay, maybe, maybe it's masculinity. Maybe if Parker were less feminine, she'd click with me the way those other characters had." So then I tried to imagine a Parker with short hair, who's explicitly butch, and...nothing. So okay, I extended it in what seems like the only logical direction to extend it. I said, "Well, if it's not masculinity, what if it's actual maleness? What if Parker were a man?" Ah. Yeah.

In the end, everything changed, and nothing changed, which is often the way that it goes for me. Add a landmark, no matter how slight, and the map is irrevocably altered. Add a landmark, and paths that were invisible before open wide. Add a landmark, and you may not have moved, but suddenly you know where you are and where you can go.

I wasn't going to tell this story when I started planning this talk. I was gonna tell a similar story, it was about stories, like this is, about narratives and the ways that they influence our culture and vice versa. And it centered around a group of women at NASA who had basically rewritten the narrative around space exploration, and it was a lot more fun, and I still think it was more interesting. But it's also a story you can probably work out for yourselves. In fact it's a story some of you probably have, if you follow that kind of thing, which you probably do given that you're here. And this is a story, my story is not a story that I like to tell. It's not a fun story to talk about because it's very personal and I am a very private person. And it's not universal. And it's not always relatable, and it's definitely not aspirational. And it's not the kind of story that you tend to encounter unless you're already part of it...which is why I'm telling it now. Because the thing is, I'm not the only person who uses stories to parse the world and navigate it. I'm just a little more deliberate. Because I'm tired of having to rely on composite sketches.

Open your maps. Add a landmark. Reroute accordingly.

[for-hunger]

Hello my INSANE Will-Graham-Is-Trans-Coded essay is about halfway done at this point and I’m posting my progress here in hopes that someone will give me some kind of feedback? I’m literally just writing a goddamn manifesto for my own enjoyment/hyperfixation/therapy as I haven’t written an essay since college. I’m also citing various peoples’ metas and stuff from here. CW for the usual Hannibal stuff as well as liberal use of the words vagina/female with regards to transmasculinity, mention of SA/r*pe

First, because of the depiction of Will Graham’s mind as vaginal, and because of his alienation from traditional masculinity that that vaginality causes him, I am defining him as a metaphorical transmasculine figure: a man whose talent is coded as debilitatingly female. Graham is introduced as a thirty-something professor at the FBI academy, antisocial despite his intelligence and physical ability. The reason for his alienation is his “pure empathy” disorder, a way of “[feeling] way too much” (“It’s a Matter of Taste"). This is a pure fantasy invention, explained at points as “too many mirror neurons” (cite). He describes it as manifesting “[close to] Asperger’s and autistics” (1.01). This makes him a medical and psychological curiosity, although he avoids professional attention, as well as leading to his recruitment as an FBI Special Agent by Jack Crawford. Crawford gives him a job as a criminal profiler; he visits particularly brutal crime scenes and, alone in the room, imagines himself acting out the crimes of the murderers, including their feelings. The murderers’ thoughts, feelings, and actions, lingering at their crime scenes, penetrate his overly empathetic (empathic?words lol) mind. Unfortunately, he cannot compartmentalize these penetrations. Like a trauma survivor, he finds motifs, urges, and feelings from these scenes following him into his psychic life. At times, his control slips, and he will blurt out a thought from one of the killers rather than himself (cite?).

Will constantly being described as “liquid”/ “fluid”

Graham’s power, rather than lying in a masculine field such as analysis, forensics, or violence, is distinctly feminized; his mind is a psychological vessel for violent men, whose penetrations corrupt him, body and soul.

Secondly, Graham is non-functional socially as a masculine figure. He has no close personal relationships, instead rescuing stray dogs. At one point, he initiates a kiss with his colleague, but she rejects him because he is “too unstable” (cite). In his past as a police officer, he retired because he was unable to shoot and kill a dangerous suspect, an obvious phallic failure in a show full of weapons. In addition, the show sets up Will’s unfulfilled longing to be a parent through Abigail Hobbs, the daughter of a serial killer who he catches and kills in the show’s opening episode.

Throughout the narrative, Will’s masculinity is contrasted with the masculinity of his boss and paternal figure Jack Crawford. Crawford, despite his tenderness and care for Will, often misunderstands him, either patronizing him or treating his unique needs with impatient scorn. In the first episode, Crawford asks him about his autism, leaning down to gently push up his glasses and force him to make eye contact (Fig 1). Crawford and Graham frequently clash over his inability to compartmentalize and deal with the workload Crawford puts on him, emphasizing how Crawford misunderstands the toll the work takes and expects him to be functional in ways that he’s not. In Jack’s world, the properly emotionally repressed, masculine world of the father, there is no reverence for either Will’s vulnerability or his talent. In addition, Jack’s relationship with Will is caught between the personal (as his quasi-father-figure) and the professional. Jack ultimately values Will’s importance as a tool over his personhood, and a tool that needs to function correctly within its place to be valuable. This further communicates to the viewer that Will’s existence is something unique and dysfunctionally extra-masculine.

If Jack Crawford represents the morally correct masculinity of the father, Hannibal Lecter is a morally neutral, but highly destructive masculine power. It is not a functional masculinity, but a pure force of masculine power that exists beyond good and evil, and even beyond traditional gender and sexuality roles. Hannibal’s pansexuality- Tobias, Will, Alana 3some. The show’s creators represent Lecter as he sees himself, as a godlike figure. A few sentences about Hannibal and god?

Although Lecter is somewhat queer-coded, he’s also by far the most functional, moral, and successful character on the show, a kind of modern renaissance man who charms and is useful to everyone around him. His life is immaculately groomed, planned, and predictable, “without friends, family, or messy romantic attachments” (ailichi). However, as a surgeon and a serial cannibal, he is deeply involved in the work of life and death through bodily violence. At one key early moment, Graham watches Lecter perform emergency surgery on a dying man in the back of an ambulance. Graham and Lecter make sustained eye contact while Lecter is wrist-deep in the man’s chest. At this moment, Graham realizes Lecter not only has the skill set to be the killer, the Chesapeake Ripper, but also more broadly that he possesses the great power to reach into bodies and determine who lives and who dies- he is not simply some fussy European with strange taste.

In general Lecter’s cannibalism is in contrast with his overtly immaculate life- it is a “‘dirty’ crime; gore and liquidity and uncivilisation”. It reveals his true “fertility and passion and eroticism in the quiet abiotic clinical sterility that is his life … his only vice in the eyes of the world… is actually the only thing that humanises him” (ailichi). His dinners with the other characters, in which he feeds them his victims, represent not simply a joke he is playing on them, but also his only ability to provide for and connect honestly with those around him.

Lecter therefore for the viewer and for Graham, comes to represent the truth of a masculinity that can be accessed by them- an amoral masculinity that includes breaking the boundaries of the body, as is Graham’s mind’s power. Lecter and Graham quickly connect intellectually; he is in a unique position to understand the violation, the pleasure, and the shame involved in Graham’s work, because his own humanity depends on his ability to break the boundaries of the body and mind in a way that is too messy and bodily to be simply masculine. The abject as corrupting the gendered?

[tomatograter]

Hey Rads

I just wanted to come out and tell you that since I've started following you for your hs content for almost 2 years now that you've actually really helped me come to terms with my identity. Jake was someone that I always resonated with very strongly as his experiences are very very similar to mine and for the longest time I thought I had to be excluively masculine and binary in my trans identity to be valid in my gender even though I loved being feminine as well. But then when you introduced the idea of Jake being nonbinary it opened a whole new world to me. I rejected it at first, but that was because of my own insecurities and internalized misogyny. However, the more you talked about it, the more I started connecting Jake's experiences with my own and that we both had internalized toxic masculinity. Those thoughts and expectations that I put on myself always made me feel like I couldn't be anything else. Finally, I came to terms with the fact that I'm a nonbinary man and that I never really felt comfortable being labeled as a binary man and just like to be masculine as well as feminine. When I started recognizing these feelings, I worked on them with my therapist and now I'm even more content with myself than I was when I first started my medical transition. I still have the same pronouns as before but I feel like I know myself better than I did 2 years ago. I don't know if you'll read this but I just want to say thank you, you have no idea how much you've helped me be happier with myself. I probably won't ever come out to my family because they wouldn't understand, I'll probably only come out to my closest friends. But I hope you have a good day I'm sorry this is so long

Ive sat on this message for a couple of days, too overwhelmed to find an answer that felt ‘right’ given the importance of the content, but i don’t think i could come up with a good formal one and putting things off never goes well for me. So, from one nonned binaried to another; I’m really glad you were able to find out something new about yourself through my myriad of messy ramblings. I’ve felt similarly displaced among discussions centered strictly on the concept of cis-passing, aesthetically clear-cut, ‘traditional’ transgenderism, and they only ever amounted to making me feel like I wasn’t doing the Trans Thing hard enough to Count. My experiences severely differ from the relatable english-speaking trans boy narrative that was taken for granted as the primary default not even that many years ago, and while it did feel isolating once upon a time I don’t think it’s all that dreadful anymore. You have to build your own with what makes you feel like you’re the most... you! An identity is a deeply personal, self-made thing, and i’m happy enough to know you’re comfortable sharing it with those who make you feel heard. :’) have a great one!!!

[geshertzarmeod]

Favorite Books of 2020

I wanted to put together a list! I read 74 new books this year, and I keep track of that on Goodreads - feel free to add or follow me if you want to see everything! I’m going to focus on the highlights, and the books that stuck with me personally in one way or another, in approximate order. Also, all but two of them (#5 and #7 on the honorable mention list) are queer/trans in some way. Links are to Goodreads, but if you’re looking to get the books, I suggest your library, the Libby app using your library, your local bookstore, or Bookshop.

The Faggots & Their Friends Between Revolutions by Larry Mitchell, illus. by Ned Asta (originally published 1977). I had a hard beginning of the year and was in a work environment where my queerness was just not welcomed or wanted. I read this in the middle of all of that, and it helped me so much. I took this book with me everywhere. I read it on planes. I read it on the bus, and on trains, and at shul. I showed it to friends... sometimes at shul, or professional development conferences. It healed my soul. Now I can’t find it and might get a new copy. When I reviewed it, in February, I wrote: “I think we all need this book right now, but I really needed this book right now. Wow. This book is magic, and brings back a sense of magic and beauty to my relationship with the world.” Also I bought my copy last July, in a gay bookstore on Castro St. in SF, and that in itself is just beautiful to me. (Here’s a post I made with some excerpts)

Once & Future duology, especially the sequel, Sword in the Stars, by A.R. Capetta and Cory McCarthy. Cis pansexual female King Arthur Ari Helix (she's the 42nd reincarnation and the first female one) in futuristic space with Arab ancestry (but like, from a planet where people from that area of earth migrated to because, futuristic space) works to end Future Evil Amazon.com Space Empire with her found family with a token straight cis man and token white person. Merlin is backwards-aging so he's a gay teenager with a crush and thousands of years of baggage. The book’s entire basis is found family, and it's got King Arthur in space. And the sequel hijacks the original myth and says “fuck you pop culture, it was whitewashed and straightwashed, there were queer and trans people of color and strong women there the whole time.” Which is like, my favorite thing to find in media, and a big part of why I love Xena so much. It’s like revisionist history to make it better except it’s actually probably true in ways. Anyway please read these books but also be prepared for an absolutely absurd and wild ride. Full disclosure though, I didn’t love the first book so much, it’s worth it for the sequel!

The Wicker King by K. Ancrum. This book hurt. It still hurts. But it was so good. It took me on a whole journey, and brought me to my destination just like it intended the whole time. The author’s note at the end made me cry! The sheer NEED from this book, the way the main relationship develops and shifts, and how you PERCEIVE the main relationship develops and shifts. I’m in awe of Ancrum’s writing. If you like your ships feral and needy and desperate and wanting and D/S vibes and lowkey super unhealthy but with the potential, with work, to become healthy and beautiful and right, read this book. This might be another one to check trigger warnings for though.

The Entirety of The Daevabad Trilogy by S.A. Chakraborty. I hadn’t heard of this series until this year, when a good friend recommended it to me. It filled the black hole in me left by Harry Potter. The political and mystical/fantasy world building is just *chef’s kiss* - the complexity! The morally grey, everyone’s-done-awful-things-but-some-people-are-still-trying-to-do-good tapestry! The ROMANCE oh my GOD the romance. If I’m absolutely fully invested in a heterosexual romance you know a book is good, but also this book had background (and then later less background) queer characters! And the DRAMA!!! The third book went in a direction that felt a little out of nowhere but honestly I loved the ride. I stayed up until 6am multiple times reading this series and I’d do it again.

An Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon. I loved this book so much that it’s the only book I reviewed on my basically abandoned attempt at a book blog. This book is haunting, horrifying, disturbing, dark, but so, so good. The character's voices were so specific and clear, the relationships so clearly affected by circumstance and yet loving in the ways they could be. This is my favorite portrayal of gender maybe ever, it’s just... I don’t even have the words but I saw a post @audible-smiles​ made about it that’s been rattling in my head since. And, “you gender-malcontent. You otherling,” as tender pillow talk??? Be still my heart. Be ready, though, this book has all the triggers.. it’s a .

Felix Ever After by Kacen Callender. This book called me out on my perspective on love. Also, it made me cry a lot. And it has two different interesting well-written romance storylines. And a realistic coming-into-identity narrative about a Black trans demiboy. And a nuanced discussion of college plans and what one might do after college. And some big beautiful romcom moments. I wish I had it in high school. I’m so glad I have it now! (trigger warning for transphobia & outing, but the people responsible are held accountable by the end, always treated as not okay by the narrative, and the MC’s friends, and like... this is ownvoices and it’s GOOD.)

The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern. My Goodreads review says, “I have no idea what happened, and I loved it.” That’s not wrong, but to delve deeper, this book has an ethereal feeling that you get wrapped up in while reading. Nothing makes sense but that’s just as it should be. You’re hooked. It is so atmospheric, so meta, so fascinating. I’ve seen so many people say they interpreted this character or that part or the ending in all different ways and it all makes sense. And it’s all of this with a gay main character and romance and the central theme, the central pillar being a love of and devotion to stories. Of course I was going to love it.

Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars: A Dangerous Trans Girl’s Confabulous Memoir by Kai Cheng Thom. “Because maybe what really matters isn’t whether something is true, or false. Maybe what matters is the story itself; what kinds of doors it opens, what kinds of dreams it brings.” This book was so good and paradigm shifting. It reminded me of #1 on this list in the way it turns real life experience and hard, tragic ones at that (in this case, of being a trans girl of color who leaves home and tries to make a life for herself in the city, with its violence), into a beautiful, haunting fable. Once upon a time.

I Wish You All the Best by Mason Deaver. I need to reread this book, as I read it during my most tranceful time of 2020 and didn’t write a review, so I forgot a lot. What I do remember is beautiful and important nonbinary representation, a really cute romance, an interesting parental and familial/sibling dynamic that was both heartbreaking and hopeful, and an on-page therapy storyline. Also Mason Deaver just left twitter but was an absolutely hilarious troll on it before leaving and I appreciate that (and they just published a Christmas novella that I have but haven’t read yet!)

The Truth Is by NoNieqa Ramos. It took a long time to trust this book but I’m so glad I did. It’s raw and real and full of grief and trauma (trigger warnings, that I remember, for grief, death (before beginning of book), and gun violence). The protagonist is flawed and gets to grow over the course of the book, and find her own place, and learn from the people around her, while they also learn to understand her and where she’s coming from. It’s got a gritty, harsh, and important portrayal of found family, messy queerness, and some breathtaking quotes. When I was 82% through this book I posted this update: “This book has addressed almost all of my initial hesitations, and managed to complicate itself beautifully.”

Anger is a Gift by Mark Oshiro.  I wasn’t actually in the best mental health place to read this book when I did (didn’t quite understand what it was) but it definitely reminded me of what there is to fight against and to fight for, and broke my heart, and nudged me a bit closer to hope. The naturally diverse cast of characters was one of the best parts of this book. The romance is so sweet and tender and then so painful. This book is important and well-written but read it with caution and trigger warnings - it’s about grief and trauma and racism and police brutality, but also about love and community.

The Prey of Gods by Nicky Drayden.  This is a sci-fi/fantasy/specfic mashup that takes place in near-future South Africa and has world-building myths with gods and demigoddesses and a trip to the world of the dead but also a genetically altered hallucinogenic drug that turns people into giant animals and a robot uprising and a political campaign and a transgender pop star and a m/m couple and all of them are connected. It’s bonkers. Like, so, so absolutely mind-breaking weird. And I loved it.

Crier’s War and Iron Heart by Nina Varela.  I absolutely LOVE LOVE LOVED the amount of folktales they told each other with queer romances as integral to those stories, especially in Iron Heart. A conversation between the two leads where Crier says she wants to read Ayla like a book, and Ayla says she’s not a book, and Crier explains all the different ways she wants to know Ayla, like a person, and wants to deserve to know her like a person, made me weak. It lives in my head rent-free.

Queen’s Shadow by E.K. Johnston @ekjohnston . I listened to this book on Libby and then immediately listened to it at least one more time, maybe twice, before my borrow time ran out. I love Padmé, and just always wish that female Star Wars characters got more focus and attention and this book gave me that!! And queer handmaidens! And the implication that Sabé is in love with Padmé and that’s just something that will always be true and she will always be devoted and also will make her own life anyway. And the Star Wars audiobooks being recorded the way they are with background sounds and music means it feels like watching a really long detailed beautiful Star Wars movie just about Padmé and her handmaidens.

Sissy: A Coming of Gender Story by Jacob Tobia. I needed to read this. The way Tobia talks about their experience of gender within the contexts of college, college leadership, and career, hit home. I kept trying to highlight several pages in a row on my kindle so I could go back and read them after it got returned to the library (sadly it didn’t work - it cuts off highlights after a certain number of characters). The way they talk about TOKENISM they way they talk about the responsibilities of the interviewer when an interviewee holds marginalized identities especially when no one else in the room does!!! Ahhhh!!!

Bonds of Brass by Emily Skrutskie. Disclaimer for this one that the author was rightfully criticized for writing a Black main character as a white author (and how the story ended up playing into some fucked up stuff that I can’t really unpack without spoiling). But also, the author has been working to move forward knowing she can’t change the past, has donated her proceeds, and this book is really good? It has all the fanfic tropes, so much delicious tension, a totally unexpected plot twist that had me immediately rereading the book. This book was super fun and also kind of just really really good Star Wars fanfiction.

How To Be a Normal Person by T.J. Klune. This book was so sweet, and cute, and hopeful, and both ridiculous and so real. I had some trouble getting used to Gus’ voice and internal monologue, but I got into it and then loved every bit after. The ace rep is something I’ve never seen like this before (and have barely read any ace books but still this was so fleshed out and well rounded and not just like, ‘they’re obsessed with swords not sex’ - looking at you, Once & Future - and leaving it there.) This all felt like a slice of life and I feel like I learned about people while reading it. Some of the moments are so, so funny, some are vaguely devastating. I have been personally victimized by TJ Klune for how he ends this book (a joke, you will know once you read it) but it also reminds me of the end of the “You Are There” episode of Xena and we all know what the answer to that question was.... and I choose to believe the answer here was similar.

You Should See Me in a Crown by Leah Johnson. I wish I had this book when I was in high school. I honestly have complicated feelings about prom and haven’t really been seeking out contemporary YA so I was hesitant to read this but it was so good and so well-written, and had a lot of depth to it. The movie (and Broadway show) “The Prom” wants what this book has.

Plain Bad Heroines by Emily M. Danforth. I never read horror books, so this was a new thing for me. I loved the feeling of this book, the way I felt fully immersed. I loved how entirely queer it was. I was interested in the characters and the relationships, even though we didn’t have a full chance to go super deep into any one person but rather saw the connections between everyone and the way the stories matched up with each other. I just wanted a bit of a more satisfying ending.

Honorable Mention: reread in 2020 but read for the first time pre-2020

Red White & Royal Blue by Casey McQuiston. I couldn’t make this post without mentioning this book. It got me through this year. I love this book so much; I think of this book all the time. This book made me want to find love for myself. You’ve all heard about it enough but if you haven’t read this book what are you DOING.

In Other Lands by Sarah Rees Brennan @sarahreesbrennan​ . I reread this one over and over too, both as text and as an audiobook. I went for walks when I had lost my earbuds and had Elliott screaming about an elf brothel loudly playing and got weird looks from someone walking their dog. I love this book so much. It’s just so fun, and so healing to read a book reminiscent of all the fantasies I read as a kid, but with a bi main character and a deconstruction of patriarchy and making fun of the genre a bit. Also, idiots to lovers is a great trope and it’s definitely in this book.

Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe by Benjamin Alire Sáenz. This book is forever so important to me. I am always drawn in by how tenderly Sáenz portrays his characters. These boys. These boys and their parents. I love them. I love them so much. This is another one where I don’t even know what to say. I have more than 30 pages in my tag for this book. I have “arda” set as a keyboard shortcut on my phone and laptop to turn into the full title. This book saved my life.

Last Night I Sang to the Monster by Benjamin Alire Sáenz. This book hurts to read - it’s a story about trauma, about working through that trauma, healing enough to be ready to hold the worst memories, healing enough to move through the pain and start to make a life. It’s about found family and love and pain and I love it. It’s cathartic. And it’s a little bit quietly queer in a beautiful way, but that’s not the focus. Look up trigger warnings (they kind of are spoilery so I won’t say them here but if you have the potential to be triggered please look them up or ask me before reading)

Ella Enchanted by Gail Carson Levine.  When asked what my all time favorite book is, it’s usually this one. Gail Carson Levine has been doing live readings at 11am since the beginning of the pandemic shut down in the US, and the first book she read was Ella Enchanted. I’ve been slowly reading it to @mssarahpearl and am just so glad still that it has the ability to draw me in and calm me down and feels like home after all this time. This book is about agency. I love it.

Radio Silence by Alice Oseman @chronicintrovert . I’ve had this on my all-time-faves list since I read it a few years ago and ended up rereading it this year before sending a gift copy to a friend, so I could write little notes in it. It felt a little different reading it this time - as I get further away from being a teenager myself, the character voice this book is written in takes a little longer to get used to, but it’s so authentic and earnest and I love it. I absolutely adore this book about platonic love and found family and fandom and mental illness and abuse and ace identity and queerness and self-determination, especially around college and career choices. Ahhh. Thank you Alice Oseman!!!

Leia: Princess of Alderaan by Claudia Gray @claudiagray​ . I have this one on audible and reread it several times this year. I love the fleshing out of Leia’s story before the original trilogy, I love her having had a relationship before Han, and the way it would have affected her perspective. I also am intrigued by the way it analyses the choices the early rebellion had to make... I just, I love all the female focused new Star Wars content and the complexity being brought to the rebellion.

[paradife-loft]

james tell me what you like about beefleaf

gasp you want to hear what I like about beefleefs !!!!! ---

the ability to be ever more iteratively sillier in referring to them, constantly, for one thing

oh geez okay well the real first thing that comes to mind for me is honestly The Genders. I am very invested in the way we see aspects of their characters and relationship played out through the vehicle of gender, because it hits that extremely rare spot I like of... the gendery material being pretty integral to what’s going on with the rest of the character and story explored (not a Characteristic Just Slapped On Top For Fun Rep~!), but also not.... straightforwardly About The Thing? or didactic? (or giving me dysphoria?)

but Yeah like - Ming Yi regularly transforming with Shi Qingxuan. the way this indicates a level of closeness and trust imo certainly beyond SQX’s enthusiastic/performative yelling about Ming Yi being her best friend? (or like - the latter is certainly not meaningless, but I don’t think it’d carry the same amount of weight without being backed up in ambient details like that.) - the little bit of difference in how they both approach that, with SQX in her first appearance obviously discernible as a woman, whereas from afar Xie Lian assumes f!Ming Yi is a man? they each do this whole thing differently and I love leaning into the crunch of that, and playing it off the way they’re looking at the relationship they have from two veeerry separate and difficult-to-reconcile perspectives?

also, I love (a certain type of*) “becoming the mask” / “what the fuck is an identity” stories. and obviously that is some bread and butter of He Xuan’s whole angle on the first part of the story! - without (necessarily) falling into the trap of being “heartless angry person Actually Develops a Soft Squishy Human Side All Along UwU” trope that..... can accompany that narrative..... like eh *gestures at the variety of fanfic around* but I would argue that’s not actually the attitude one has to take to what’s going on with HX in the Black Water arc and afterward? there’s a certain... compartmentalisation, imo, to the way HX feels about SQX, and when it spills over into the rest of the Shi Wudu Must Die plot, it only fuels, I think, more justified anger and conflict because the reasons SQX is enjoyable to be around, and the reasons they piss HX off as a person when it comes to the fate-swap issue, are kind of... the same things? I really feel like I’m rambling incoherently now, so I’ll. move on.

third thing I like - the fact that what should have been the “end” of their relationship very much was not an end?! once all the dust has settled, there’s still... awkwardly dancing around one another when the possibility arises, because neither of them actually has emotional closure. and I really do like messy, unresolved, “where do we go from here” suggestions. they both hurt each other and they each understand very much where the other person was coming from, and the scars of that history, that decision that started from something neither of them chose, is going to be sitting oh so visibly in between them both for the rest of (SQX’s) life! ....you might have noticed by now that I enjoy “you did some really awful hurtful shit and it’s not really about forgiving you, it’s just that regardless of how I “should” feel, I still care a lot and I’m gonna cling to what we can still have together anyway” as a dynamic 👀👀

oh, and also/finally, a Very Important part of this whole thing: they are both Very Hot and have the most excellent Friends Who Fuck potential :33 ~ sometimes I am shallow about this, lmao 😂

[dachi-chan25]

Haven't done this in a while but I had the time so why not?

1.- Pizza Girl by Kyoung Jean Frazier

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I really did like it, reminded me a lot of "Convinience store woman". Like clearly our protagonist needed thrapy ASAP to help her deal with her dad's death, her pregnancy, her attraction to women and hell just for existing as an Asian woman in the USA, but I liked how messy and obsesive she was and how the author allowed her to be fucked up and take bad decisions, I love to see female characters simply exist, it's also a pretty short read so I definitely recommend it.

2.-The Authentics by Abdi Nazemian

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Daría is a persian teen who is really involved in her cultural background and feels that the most important thing one can be is authentic, so that's the name she and her friends take for their clique. But everything comes crashing down on her when she discovers she is adopted, and soon follows an identity crisis. I loved it so much, it felt pretty realistic, like Daría could be self absorbed and unlikeable at times, but who wasn't as a teen? And we get such beautiful heartwarming moments between Daría and her family and friends. Totally recommend it.

3.- The Mall by Megan McCafferty

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Cassie has her life completely mapped out but nothing goes quite as planned, first she gets mononucleosis and after she gets better gets dumped and fired almost simultaneously. Determined not to let it get the best of her, Cassie gets a brand new job, reconnects with an old friend and even finds a hidden treasure. This one is so much fun, all the 90s references and the growth Cassie goes through is amazing, honeslty i would love to see this as a Netflix movie.

4.- Luster by Raven Leilani

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This book was hard, Edie is a very raw character, at first she seems flippant even when describing disturbing facts about her past or details about her relationship with a much older man she seems to be talking about something that happened to someone else all this to cope dealing with her solitude, her trauma, her self hate. And gosh it was so intresting to see her interact with Rebecca and Akila, especially Akila as Edie finds kinship in this young girl not only cuz they are both black but because they are both lost and afraid.

5.- Lakewood by Megan Giddings

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Lena decides to participate on a financially compensated medical experiment so her mom can get proper medical care and to lessen their debts after her Grandmother's death.

So I had many mixed feelings about this, on one hand I liked that we are adressing how sistematical racism has permited experiments on black people with no consequences at all and how it has been happening for decades, but there were certain parts of the book that I couldn't enjoy as much because they were very trippy like I get we are on Lena's mind as things are becoming muddled up because of the medications and all those mind games and the words they have her memorize and repeat but all of it took me a bit away from the story. Still I do recommend it just be aware there is quite a bit of body horror in this so if you are sqeamish better skip it.

6.-The Voting Booth - Brandy Colbert

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Marva and Duke meet on election day as she helps him find the precint he is registered on.

This is very enjoyable, the story is very straightforward, and it insists on our right and responsability to vote even if we feel our vote alone can't possibly change all the injustice we see in the world. And also the romance was cute and developed slowly as Marva and Duke are just knowing each other. Really cute and quick read.

7.- Such a fun age - Kiley Reid

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Emira works as a babysitter for the Chamberleins' . She loves her little charge Briar, although she feels preassured to seek a 'real job' by her friends and by her own economic troubles. Emira soon finds herself in the middle of a tug of war between her boss Alix who tries to befriend her, and Kelley the guy she is dating.

So much drama. This is a great example of what performative activism looks like, first Alix is completely nuts, from her obsession to be seen as this wonderful understanding girl boss activist and the down right creepy sense of entitlement to Emira's friendship and intimacy. Like it doesn't surprise me she chose to victimize herself instead of recognizing it had all been a misunderstanding. And even then she still wants to seem atractive to the man she feels victimized by. Girl no.

Kelley is the ultimate fake woke ally. Dude Robbie was wrong period, he had no business inviting people over to someone else's house no matter the color of his skin. You don't get to talk over Emira on matters of what a person of color should do or feel on certain situations. That said it was so funny when he and Alix called each other out for their fetishization of people of color and yet none of them actually gave a damn about what Emira thought/felt/percieved. They just wanted her stamp of approval so they could pat themselves in the back for being such good allies.

8.- The Life and (Medieval) times of Kit Sweetly by Jamie Pacton

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Kit is working as a serving wench at the Castle, medieval themed restaurant run by her uncle, though she really wants to be a Knight, not only cuz the better pay would help around the house but because she really admires Joan of Arc, problem is the Castle management doesn't allow for anyone who is not a cis male to be a knight. Kit is set on changing that.

Ok so I feel a bit lukewarm toward this. Kit in my opinion doesn't get much growth, it seems she just can do whatever and her friends have to be ok w it, her romance w her friend feels pulled out of nowhere like Jett at one point tells her he is not intrested in dating her and then he is ???, those GoT references killed me, I get it I watched the show and sometimes even enjoyed it but it's not representative of anything medieval and Kit was always talking about how much she liked the actual history of the medieval times so...

Also as much as this book was about feminism and how we should fight for equal job oportunities, it feels as though Kit only cared about medieval woman who fought physically and not on the badass medieval woman, like idk it feels as a rejection of tradicional feminity like even the girl playing the Princess is a jerk. But I did like some parts, like her decision to confront her asshole dad to help her mom and the girls training together.

9.-Cien años de soledad de Gabriel Garcia Marquez

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En Macondo, una población Colombiana a un lado del río, vemos como una de sus familias fundadoras crece, se expande y cambia a través de cien años.

Me encanto, hace mucho tiempo que no leía una novela de realismo mágico que me provocará tantos sentimientos. Creo que todos los personajes reflejan aspectos de la humanidad tan diversos y complejos que sería inútil tratar de enlistarlos todos.

Ultimadamente siento que lo que condenó a la familia Buendia a cumplir las profecías de Melquiades fue sus propia naturaleza que ellos nunca tuvieron intención de pelear, siempre sucumbian a las locuras o pasiones que los inundarán sin mesura alguna o consideración por las consecuencias. Y creo que aún así lo prefiero pues es lo que hace a cada personaje por confuso que a veces llegue a ser la repetición de nombres (que para mi es el simbolismo de una naturaleza y destino continuos) único e intrigante. En verdad espero que se den la oportunidad de leer este libro por lo menos una vez en sus vidas.

10.-The Monsters of music by Rebecca F. Kenney

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This is a gender-swaped modern retelling of the Phantom of the Opera.

It was creative to make Mel, our Phantom, a true magical creature, and the singing contest was also cool. Like don't get me wrong I did have fun reading this but it also felt pretty unpolished like most characters were teens on the contest and that kinda made me roll my eyes a bit, like unless it's the Voice Kids age ranges are quite ample on this kind of shows, also kinda clumsy the addition of the magical elements with the modern setting, Kiyo didn't make much of an impression with me even when Christine is my fave on the original book. Still if you are a Phan like me you might wanna check this one out.

11.- Anna K by Jenny Lee

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This is a modern americanized ya retelling of Anna Karenina.

Not gonna lie this made me cry so much at the end. I really liked Anna and Vronski together so much, and I don't like the love at first sight trope, but here it felt so inevitable. Anna was so self contained until she met him and could truly explore being herself and they really loved each other so much. Also I liked the treatment of the side characters Kimmie and Dustin were well developed and I really enjoyed this one can't wait to get to the second book.

12.- Wonderland by Zoje Stage

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It was ok, but I was actually a bit disappointed cuz I had such high expectations for it. Like for about half the book I was really into the atmospheric vibe the book pulls you into, but as we get the reveal it started to go down hill for me, and the ending left me feeling meh. But maybe it was just not my cup of tea.

13.-Home Before Dark by Riley Sager

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This book is so well crafted!!! I love how it goes back and forth between past and present , first it feels as if history is repeating itself, then as both narratives unfold we start to question and discovering things and the twist at the end was chillin and masterful, I truly and wholeheartedly recommend it.

14.- The Girl with the louding voice by Abi Daré

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Adunni, a teenage girl, flees from her husband to work as a maid in Lagos, though everything she has ever wanted is to study.

This broke my heart, as it reflects how people coming from rural backgrounds get taken advantage of in the City, like similar things happen here in Mexico, but also it made me glad to see Adunni fight and keep her spirit so no one could ever silence her.

15.- The Year of the Witching by Alexis Henderson

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Immanuel does her very best to fit in Bethel, follow the scriptures and the Prophets words, but nothing seems to be enough to erase her mother's sin especially when the Darkwood seems to pull her in. As a plague starts to ravage Bethel, Immanuel has to face her past to save her people.

So frickin' good !!!! This story is great, mainly about the explotation of woman and young girls by people in power (in this case a church), the atmosphere is always tense, Ezra and Immanuel 's relationship is very well developed and one can really see how loyal they are to each other. A great option for horror fans.

[trishyeves]

Poorly Planned Halo Post

TO START WITH: SPOILERS FOR ALL OF YOUNG JUSTICE SEASON 3, DO NOT READ IF YOU HAVEN’T SEEN IT. NOT PLANNING ON SPOILING THE WHOLE SEASON, BUT WHO KNOWS WHERE THIS WILL GO

So, because my brain is weirdly cyclical and I’ve randomly gotten back into Young Justice, I’ve been trolling through Tumblr regarding the show. In doing so, I’ve run into a lot of posts that deal with Halo, and they inspired me to write this poorly planned, probably a trainwreck post.

Before I say anything else, I feel like I should make something clear: people react to media really differently (obviously), especially if the material is personal to them in some way. For a lot of people what was done with Halo is season 3 of Young Justice isn’t just hard to watch, it was a travesty that completely ruined the show for them. That is totally fine. I would never pretend I have the authority to tell people if they should or shouldn’t be outraged by something, or mediate their reaction to a show. This is all just a splattering of my thoughts and feelings on this messy as hell lump of topics. If you read this and think my point of view is bullshit and hate what I have to say, I can totally understand why. This is just my two cents, as someone who is genderfluid/non-binary and queer. (Though I am not a person of color, I do not identify as a woman, and I have no connection to the Muslim faith.)

To start with the smaller issues: how Halo does at representing nonbinary people, women of color, Muslim people, and Bisexual/Pansexual/Queer people. I 100% agree that they could have done better in all of those departments, full-stop. In the scene establishing her as nonbinary, it would have been much better if they had established what pronouns she prefers (I’m using she/her throughout because that is what is used in the text and she/her nonbinary people are valid), how she wants to be seen, and it should have been brought up more often. The fact her only brush being interested in a girl/feminine person was a kiss that made her feel guilty for cheating on her boyfriend sucks, as it conflates her kissing Harper with shame. I don’t really feel qualified to wade into the area surrounding the portrayal of her wearing a hijab or the fact that she wasn’t really Muslim, Gabrielle was, but I have heard a lot of people’s thoughts on those topics, and I think they’re important to hear and consider.

On all of those points, I don’t think it’s possible to not consider them at least partial failures. That said, I do appreciate the attempt to give us this intersectional character who can be so many different pieces of representation at once while also being a lovable and well-developed character. I know for a lot of people the failings of her portrayal invalidate any good will their attempts at representation could have fostered, but that’s not how I feel about it.

Onto the big thing: Halo dying, graphically, a lot. It is, to say the very least, a bad look. A lot of people are upset about the fact that one of the handful of queer characters on the show, a woman of color, one who is associated with the Muslim faith, is shown being violently killed episode after episode. They have every right to be. I find it pretty abhorrent too.

It was a bad idea, a really bad idea. BUT I also don’t think it taints the entire show, and I don’t think it signifies that the people creating the show wanted to show women/queer people/poc dying graphically. That was the effect, but I highly doubt malice, sadism, or bigotry was the direct cause.

From here on out, I am talking based on my understanding of worldbuilding, character writing, television production, and what I know about the development of this show in particular. But I am not an insider with special knowledge of what went down behind the scenes, and I could be totally full of shit on a number of points.

First off, Halo is basically a completely original character. The Outsiders comic series had a Halo character who was also a gestalt entity created by a being related to the Source taking over a dead woman’s body, but from what I can tell on the whole they have little to do with her. They made the decision to change her host body’s nationality to Quaraci, probably for better representation, and changed the entity in her body into a Mother Box’s soul, which I am fairly sure was to tie her in better to the overall season’s New Gods focus, the same way they did with altering Cyborg’s origin story.

Second, they changed some of her powers, but one of the ones they kept was the idea of healing and being able to resurrect herself from death. Now, the only way to really make that work in a visual medium is for her to die sometimes, then resurrect. That does create a weird narrative element, since no other characters get badly injured/fatally wounded at the rate Halo does, but it’s a way to show her using her abilities. Of course, a lot of people have said, rightly, that there’s no need for those deaths to be so graphic. They could have been off-screen, or hinted at, or a number of other things. If the season was aired on Cartoon Network, as was originally planned, I am certain that’s what they would have done.

Thirdly, and this is the big one, I am fairly sure the decision to make her deaths as graphic as possible was tied in with it being aired on DC Universe. Sure, the platform means they could do it, but I also think it’s related to why they did it. It’s possible that Greg Weisman wanted to show off some gore thanks to the liberties granted him, but I think the more likely option is this was studio interference. They looked at the audience Young Justice had developed, one that tended heavily towards older teens and adults, and made it a condition for the show being brought back on the new streaming service that they needed to up the age rating of the show itself to match. Specifically, they probably requested more violence and for it to be more gratuitous where possible. After all, this is DC, and we all know how much they adore making things far more graphic and violent than they have any right to be, all for the sake of making their properties look more ‘grown up’.

Now, clearly some of that violence went to other characters. Victor Stone’s transformation into Cyborg is easily the most gruesome version of that story yet, and several characters throughout get pretty terrible deaths. (Baron Bedlam, for example.) But Halo got the brunt of them. After all, they needed to have more violence on the regular, but Greg Weisman hates killing characters, especially in this show. It’s a huge sandbox with as many DC characters from various eras as they can possibly fit inside it, so they don’t want heroes or villains dying when they don’t need to. But they do have this main character, one who can die again and again and again, and who can come back every time. So, Halo became a gore magnet.

I’d also wager that her being non-binary was a late addition to her character, something they only threw in as a scene once they realized that, as a living machine in a human corpse, there was no reason for her to have an attachment to any gender, and when they realized they could use that to bump up their LGBTQ+ representation, they did the scene.

None of this makes what they did good, or right, or acceptable. It still isn’t. I really, really wish it hadn’t been in the show, it turns my stomach. But at the same time, I don’t think they wrote that element for the season in an attempt to sadistically torture a marginalized character. They absolutely should have hired some sensitivity writers to look things over and catch these things, and I hope the controversy all this caused means they’ll be more careful in the future. But I am still happy they created Halo as they did and gave her to us as a fanbase, even with those disgusting death scenes. If Season 4 does actually happen, I think there is a chance they’ll have heard our voices and work to do better. This is a case where ignorance, rather than cruelty, was the cause, at least from what I can see. If you still hate that part of the show, or the show itself, I’m not expecting this to change your mind, and I don’t want it to. I just wanted to throw out my thoughts, before I collapse into sleep from a long shift at work.

[noxstellacaelum]

Filtering Female Characters Through the Male Gaze

Female characters filtered through the male gaze:  A (way) too long post about why we need a more diverse and inclusive approach to staffing showrunners, writers, directors, crew – heck, all roles -- in TV and movies.  

Yes, I know I am not the first person here on this.  

And note that while I have included a few tags b/c I talk about my frustration with Shadowhunters, Veronica Mars, the Irishman, Richard Jewell, and a few other recent shows/movies, I don’t get to this stuff until the very end,  I appreciate that fans may not want to wade through the entire essay, which (again), is a bit of personal catharsis.

I recently had a random one-off exchange with a TV writer on twitter.  The writer said that she had enjoyed the movie Bombshell much more than its Rotten Tomatoes rating would have suggested.  She wondered if the disconnect between her experience/perception of the movie and that of mainstream reviewers might have been shaped by gender: Specifically, she observed that Bombshell is a movie about women, but most reviewers are male.  

I have complicated feelings about Bombshell.  On one hand, yes, there was and is a toxic culture at Fox News.  Yes, Gretchen Carlson and Megyn Kelly were victims of that toxic culture.  But no, these women were not mere bystanders:  They traded in the racism, misogyny, and xenophobia (for starters) that still characterize Fox News today.  Why should these wealthy, privileged white women – both of whom spent many years as willing foot soldiers in the Fox News army -- get a glossy, Hollywood-approved redemption/vindication arc?  On the other hand, I am glad that the movie makers made a film about sexual harassment, and that the movie presented Kelly, in particular, as an at least somewhat complicated character.  This would not be the first time that a movie about women – especially complicated, and not always likeable women – has proven to be polarizing.

My ambivalence about Bombshell notwithstanding, the writer with whom I exchanged tweets is (not surprisingly, since she is in the industry and I am not) on to something when it comes to gender, character development and critical reception. It’s not just that Bombshell was about women, but reviewed largely by men; it’s that stories about female characters (real or fictional) often are filtered through the male gaze in Hollywood:  On many projects – even those focused on female characters – creators/ head writers are male, directors are male, showrunners are male, and producers are male.  This matters, because preferencing the male gaze impacts what stories about women get told, who gets to tell them, and how these stories are received inside and outside Hollywood.  

First, though, the caveats. I do not mean to suggest that men can never tell great stories about women.  Of course they can.   I also don’t mean to suggest that being female exempts creators, writers, directors, showrunners, etc. from sexism or misogyny (or any other forms of bigotry, as my discussion of Bombshell suggests).   There are plenty of women who prop up the patriarchy.  Rebecca Traister’s work speaks to this issue, as does the work of Cornell philosopher Kate Manne.  There is an important literature on the concept of misogynoir (misogyny directed at black women, involving both gender and race), a term coined by black queer feminist Moya Bailey, as well.  Intersectionality matters in understanding what stories are told, who gets to speak, and how stories are received in and outside Hollywood.  I also don’t mean to suggest that there are no powerful women in Hollywood.   Shonda Rhimes; Ava DuVernay, Reese Witherspoon (increasingly, given her role as a producer of projects like Big Little Lies), Greta Gerwig’s work in Lady Bird and Little Women, and others come to mind.  As I am not in the entertainment industry, I am sure others could put together a far more complete and accurate list of female Hollywood power brokers.  And, finally, I appreciate that Hollywood is a business, and people fund and make movies that they think their target audiences want to see.  So long as young, male viewers are a coveted demographic, we are going to see projects with women who appeal to this demographic onscreen.

Given these caveats, why do I think that the filtering of female characters through the male gaze is an issue? For me, it has to do with a project’s “center of gravity” -- that place, at the core of the project’s storytelling, where the characters’ agency and autonomy comes from.  It’s where I look to understand the characters’ choices and their narrative arcs.  When a character’s center of gravity is missing or unstable or unreliable, the character’s choices don’t make sense, and their narrative arc lacks emotional logic. Center of gravity is not about whether a character is likeable.  It’s about whether a character – and the project’s overall storytelling and narrative voice – make sense.  

When female characters are filtered through a male gaze, a project’s center of gravity can shift, even if unintentionally, away from the characters’ agency and point of view:  So, instead of charting her own course through a story, a female character starts to become defined by her proximity to other characters and stories.  She becomes half of a “ship” . . . or a driver of other characters’ growth (often through victimization, suffering, or self-sacrifice) . . . or mostly an object of sexual desire (whether requited or not).   Eventually, she can lose her voice entirely.  When that happens, instead of a “living, breathing” (yes, fictional, I know) character, we are left with a mirror/ mouthpiece who advances the plot, and the stories, of everyone else.

What are some recent examples of this? The two that I have mentioned recently here are Shadowhunters and Veronica Mars S4.  

- With SHTV, I will always wonder what might have been if the show – which is based on books written by a woman, intentionally as a “girl power” story – had female showrunners. Would an empowered female showrunner have left Clary, THE PROTAGONIST OF A 6 BOOK SERIES – alone on an NYC street in a skimpy party dress, in November, with no money, no ID, no mother, no father figure and no love of her life, stripped of her memories, her magic, and chosen vocation, as punishment, after she saved the world?  Would a female showrunner have sidelined Clary’s love Jace, and left him grieving and suicidal, while his family lived their best lives and told him to move on?  Would a female showrunner have said, in press coverage of the series finale, that the future of the Clary and Jace characters was a matter for fan fiction?  After spending precious time in the series finale wrapping up narrative arcs for non-canon and/or ancillary characters.  And to my twitter correspondent’s point, I guess I am not surprised that mainstream entertainment media outlets didn’t call out the showrunners’ mistreatment of Clary, and by extension, Jace, and the obliteration of their narrative arcs -- and yes, I am looking at you, Andy Swift of TV line (who called the above-mentioned memory wipe “actually perfect”).

- Likewise, with Veronica Mars, would a more diverse and inclusive writers room have made S4 Veronica less insightful and less competent than her high school self, or quite so riven with self-loathing, or quite so careless and cruel with the people in her life who love her?  Would a more inclusive creative team have made S4 Veronica less aware of the class and race dynamics of Neptune, yet more casually racist, in her mid-30s, than she was in high school?

- There are so many other examples from 2019.  Clint Eastwood falsely suggesting that a female reporter (who is now deceased and thus unable to defend herself) traded sex for tips from an FBI agent in Richard Jewell. Game of Thrones treatment/resolution of the Ceresi and Daenerys characters – where to even start.  Martin Scorsese’s decision to give Oscar winner Anna Paquin’s character a total of 7 lines in the 3-plus hour movie the Irishman.

- And, in real life, I wonder whether a Hollywood that empowered and supported female creators would make sure that people like Mira Sorvino and Annabella Sciorra got a bunch of work while also making sure that Harvey Weinstein never again is in a position of power or influence.   Same with female comics targeted by Louis C.K. Matt Lauer, Charlie Rose … the list is long, and Kate Manne’s work on what she calls “himpathy” is useful here.

To be clear, I am not saying that stories involving “ships” of whatever flavor, stories of suffering and self-sacrifice, and stories of finding (or losing) intimate relationships are “bad” or “wrong” or inherently exploitive of female characters.  I don’t think that at all.  I also don’t think that female characters have to be perfectly well-adjusted, virtuous, or free from bias, or that they should never be make bad choices or mistakes.  I want female characters who are flawed, nuanced.  I don’t mind lives that are messy, or romantic entanglements that are complicated.  Finally, I don’t think that that faulty, reductive, or unfair portrayals of female characters is a new thing.  Mary Magdalene was almost certainly not a prostitute, after all.  And classicist Emily Wilson – the first woman to translate the Odyssey into English – has brought a hugely important perspective (including an awareness of how gender matters in translation) and voice to the translation and study of canonical characters and works.

At the end of the day, I just want female characters to be able to speak with their own voices, from their perspectives.  I want them to have their own, chosen, narrative arcs.  I want them to speak, act, see, and feel as autonomous individuals, with agency, and not just in reference to others.  And, I think that more a more diverse and inclusive approach to staffing writers rooms and in choosing show runners, directors, and key positions in storytelling would help.  

[buddiebeginz]

So there’s this article that’s going around bashing the Reylo fandom as a response to Katie McCort’s article on ‘Systemic Hatred of Women’. Normally I would link back to whatever it is I’m referencing so people can draw their own conclusions but I refuse to post the link to the first article mostly because it’s just a nicely worded hate piece against Reylo and our fandom and it doesn’t need more attention from me. I’m sure you can find it if you look around the antis are sharing it. I’m still going to respond to some of it though because it’s a lot of the same things I see going around about our fandom and I want to address some of them.

There is this misconception that the Reylo fandom is almost exclusively made up of cis gendered, straight, white women and that’s just not true. We’re an incredibly diverse community made of various races, sexualities, genders, ages, etc. It’s clear that it’s easier for people who dislike us and the ship to dismiss us by saying well they’re all just a bunch of white women who want to ship the two main white presenting characters. They also mostly assume we’re teenagers so that’s another way they get to patronize us by acting like we’re simply a bunch of children who can’t make good choices even when it comes to which fictional characters to ship.

To that effect I think because many dismiss us all as a small (but loud) fraction of white women in the SW fandom it makes it easier to say we’re all racist. We as a fandom need to stop allowing this. This idea that our fandom as a whole is racist is false and in many cases is being used mainly as a weapon against us not to call out real instances of racism. People who don’t like us and our ship have just decided it’s okay to blanket our whole fandom as toxic and racist without real proof to back it up. Even those times when there have been people claiming to ship Reylo sending harassment and being racist they don’t represent our fandom. There’s a different between the actions of single individuals and an entire fandom using their collective power to hurt people and the Reylo fandom has never done that.

I also resent the idea that it’s our responsibility to find these people and deal with them. Is it important to call out problematic behavior when you see it? Of course. But we are not responsible for babysitting every corner of the internet looking for someone who has a Reylo icon and possibility sent out a racial slur. I’m genuinely confused why this responsibility falls on the shoulders of Reylo shippers to police our entire fandom but not on the SW fandom as a whole to do something about the many many problematic people calling themselves SW fans and sending hate. I don’t see people calling all SW fans racist because some chased Kelly Marie Tran off social media. I don’t see people calling all SW fans misogynistic with the amount of disparaging things that’s been said about Rey as a character and with how many didn’t even want a female protagonist for the ST. Or how TLJ was one of the most criticized in large part because it was more inclusive to female fans.

No apparently those are just trolls who don’t represent real SW fans. So why then does that logic not apply to the Reylo fandom? Maybe perhaps because it’s easier to try and get rid of a ship that the general SW fandom hates and silence it’s fandom by claiming it’s one of the worst things a person can be. Who is really going to want to be associated  with a ship or fandom if they think it’s racist right? I’ve seen new SW fans coming on tumblr asking about Reylo and the antis are quick to jump to them and tell them how toxic and racist it is (not to mention they claim it glorifies abuse against women which 🤦) filling these people’s heads with lies. I don’t care what people think of me I’m used to shipping the ships that everyone hates but I do care that people lie about us and our ship and don’t even give people the chance to make up their own minds.

As for the situation with JB which was also included in the anti Reylo article it’s clear the person who wrote this has a huge bias. Anyone who cares how people are treated would look at that situation and recognize JB was out of line, his actions caused real world harm to people. NO ONE is saying JB hasn’t been the target of racism from SW fans but to put ALL of that on the Reylo fandom is not only messed up it’s simply factually wrong. There are people who would never ship Reylo and who never wanted a leading black character in SW who have sent JB hate. The Reylo fandom just continues to be the easy target.

There’s a part of the article that talks about how some of the people who ship Reylo do so as a way to work through trauma in a fantasy that’s not possible in reality. They also say that one of the reasons people ship Reylo is about kink and bsdm which maybe these things play a factor (for some) but it’s not necessarily the main one. In the first place yeah Reylo is a fantasy not possible in reality it’s a soap opera in space. I recognize there are things that happen within their relationship that wouldn’t happen in real relationships but there’s also a lot about their ship that’s very much grounded in reality, which is a significant part of the reason people are drawn to them.

I’ve been through trauma myself and media has definitely helped with healing but I don’t look at Reylo as some fictional manifestation of reclaiming power that was stolen from me. I don’t look at Ben as some de facto stand in for my abuser and Reylo as some fairytale version of how things should have been. I don’t see Rey as someone who managed to get her “abuser” to change and then they lived happily ever after. I see two messy people who helped each other grow and change throughout the course of three movies. If anything I think Reylo helps me because I relate a lot to Ben. He’s shown me that it is possible to break free from the darkness and as person who has struggled with mental health problems my whole life it’s an incredibly important message. Rey and Ben together showed me it is possible to find someone who can understand you no matter what you’ve been through and no matter how alone you feel.

As for incorporating kink into Reylo many of us definitely do enjoy the smuttier side of fandom but I know for me that wouldn’t matter if I wasn’t emotionally invested in the ship. I think some assume the main reason we ship Reylo is because Adam is hot or Rey and Ben together is hot and it’s all simplified to being about sex but for the majority of us the ship is about so much more than that. I’m drawn to Ben and Rey because of the complexities of their stories both together and individuality. There’s this idea now that liking a character who does anything with questionable morals means you’re a bad person but I personally have never been drawn to the innocent characters. Both Rey and Ben are more grey not fully good or evil and I love that about them. More importantly I’m drawn to how much it’s clear they love each. Even in TFA they understood each other in ways no one else could because of their bond.

I feel like in order to get Reylo and especially Ben as a character you have to be willing to think deeper about the media you consume and some people only want surface level SW. On the surface it’s just bad guy Kylo Ren vs Rey but there is so much more going on than that if you look. I think people forget that fictional media is open for interpretation. Scenes like where Ben tells Rey “you’re nothing, but not to me” is one people have twisted to mean something manipulative when I don’t see it that way at all. To me Ben was trying to tell her he sees her. He sees that she came from nothing that she has no one like him (because he’s felt so abandoned by his family for so long) but she’s not nothing, to him she’s everything you can tell in how he literally begs her to stay with him. This is isn’t some example of me deliberately twisting facts to suit my narrative of what I want the characters to be this is simply that I see the scene differently than some one else might. I don’t get what’s wrong with that?

I know this got long and kind of rambly I just needed to vent. I just wish the hate would stop. If you don’t like Reylo don’t ship it. Learn to live and let live. Nothing we are doing is hurting anyone. We are shipping two adult characters because we see something positive here. I don’t get how something that’s about love something that brought so many people together can inspire such hate in others.

[daxolotl]

On Terezi, June, and the "Manic Pixie Dream Girl"

I see a lot of people talk about how in the epilogues, “John was escaping his failing marriage by chasing someone he thought was a manic pixie dream girl, ignoring Terezi’s gremlin nature to view her as the unattainable dream”. See: things like https://twitter.com/tainshir/status/1209537129761521664?s=19 this tweet.

(tweet content: a picture of June Egbert’s default sprite with “I pretend I see it”, with the text reading “john when his marriage starts failing and terezi starts messaging him again and he needs a manic pixie dream girl instead of the depressed and nightmarish girl she is”)

I… really disagree. Not just with the misgendering and the jokes about June being a boring het boy - I disagree for a whole host of reasons.

I don’t view John as a man trapped in a failing marriage seeking a manic pixie dream girl. I view June as a woman trapped in a heteronormative “dream”, seeking something she doesn’t know how describe.

(As a note, those are the only times in this where I will refer to June as “John” or in any masculine ways, except in a brief discussion of her role within her marriage as the “husband” and how alienating she finds that role)

To start, we need to talk about June and Roxy’s marriage in Candy. Other, wiser people have talked about Candy and about its role as Calliope’s sickly-sweet, Narratively Irrelevant dream world. A sickly sweet reality where time races and people get married, have children, and die. A world that clashes and feels unnatural to some of its people, but that they go along with because they feel it’s how things are “meant” to be.

(Rose and Kanaya are the notable exception, with them finding perfect happiness and contentment in that world. That’s a whole other discussion - of how a haunted, mentally ill lesbian found perfect contentment in having a wife and a family. “I never thought I’d get to be happy” is one of the most powerful lines in all of Homestuck.)

June and Roxy’s marriage is the epitome of that. It’s the first thing that establishes itself after choosing Candy. Calliope immediately takes a back seat, pushing Roxy and June together. Roxy and Calliope’s labelless relationship with a broad, fluid approach to gender and presentation is sabotaged before it can begin, pushing Roxy instead into a Perfect Heteronormative Happy Ending. Roxy becomes June’s prize – as, at the beginning of the comic, people viewed Rose. A blonde, femme, pink-themed person for June’s blue masc self to marry and have a Happily Ever After with.

Roxy ultimately finds happiness with what they’re pushed into – because we know they can find contentment as a mother and can view it as something seriously cool. Their approach to gender is fluid and open, and varies based on the circumstances they find themselves in. Roxy is a person shaped by circumstance.

But June? June’s connection with gender is much less fluid and much less open than Roxy’s. Where Roxy can find happiness as a wife and a mother, June fundamentally cannot be a husband or a father. It isn’t right for her, on a deep layer. She just can’t be happy like that.

Enter Terezi.

Terezi is a lesbian (or a bisexual, depending on how you headcanon her) alien who totally lacks a sense of heteronormativity.

Terezi is a chaotic, gremlin-like mess of a woman who doesn’t care about what she’s Meant to be.

Terezi’s most important relationship is to a trans woman, and she doesn’t care about society’s expectations of that.

Terezi’s approach to romance ignores the normal and the accepted. Her love for Vriska goes beyond the quadrants, and whatever feelings she has for June seem to defy labelling, too – no matter how convinced June becomes that Terezi Hates her.

And, finally, Terezi is within the Medium – free of the influence of Calliope’s happily ever after saccharine storytelling.

I want to make a brief aside about Life is Strange and Chloe Price. Chloe is a punky, messy, depressed, chaotic, intensely flawed lesbian who puts up two middle fingers to heteronormativity. And her primary plot arc revolves around her trying to find her former best friend and lover, who went missing before the events of the game. I’m a trans woman. When I first started playing Life is Strange, I hadn’t realised I was a woman or a lesbian. Chloe was a huge part of how I realised both of those things, and how closely tied together those parts of me are. She created this complicated, messy tangle of emotion in my heart. I wanted to be like her. I wanted someone to be as dedicated to me as she was for her lover. I wanted to be her. And I wanted to be with her – but she’s such a lesbian that my interest in her felt...different, compared to my previous, assumed “heterosexual” interest in other women.

In short, my complicated interest in a woman who totally broke all of my expectations of cis heterosexual romance helped me to realise who I am. And that, to me, feels like June’s interest in Terezi.

June isn’t an unhappy husband lusting after an unattainable manic pixie dream girl. June is a closeted trans lesbian trapped in a seemingly-heteronormative marriage, seeing a messy, depressed lesbian who lives and loves far outside of the heteronormative Happy Ending and being filled with a deep longing and melancholy that she struggles to put a name to.

June knows her desire for Terezi isn’t heteronormative. She doesn’t ignore Terezi’s chaotic nature to view her as a manic pixie dream girl – she craves that chaos and that rejection of expectations and gender norms. Terezi’s gremlin nature isn’t an unfortunate reality June ignores, it’s a huge part of WHY June feels the way she does.

She doesn’t know if she wants Terezi or wants to be like Terezi, but in either case, it’s a deeply queer interest. She cares for Terezi in a lesbian way – a way that feels utterly alien compared to cis straight masculine approaches to love and romance with women.

That’s why she keeps her conversations with Terezi secret. That’s why the picture feels like something forbidden that she hides away, close to her (in her wallet, no less – a picture of an unmistakably queer woman loving woman, hidden deep within a symbol of fatherhood and masculinity). Because she yearns for that, in a way she doesn’t fully understand, but that she knows feels forbidden. So she hides it away.

That’s why the scene with her tearing the picture apart is framed and written so dramatically. It’s not an old husband giving up on a creepy teenage dream crush. It’s a closeted trans lesbian giving up on the queer feelings deep in her heart as something impossible. She tears up the picture she held deep within the symbols of masculinity and heteronormativity, and settles for the unhappiness she has as a “cis man”. She accepts that this is her life, and there’s no way she can change it.

Candy June’s feelings for Terezi aren’t that of a husband pursuing a teenage dream. They’re the feelings of a trans woman seeing and adoring Terezi, in a mirror image of the ways that Vriska’s feelings for Terezi are a complicated mess that defy labels.

She loves her. She hates her. She wants to be like her. She wants to be loved and accepted by her.

Her feelings defy any narrow label. Because her feelings for her are the feelings of a trans lesbian who has no real idea of what she wants or how she wants it. She just knows that Terezi is something that she wants, in some indefinable, complex way.

Do I think June and Terezi are a good couple? Not necessarily, and I’m, as always, ride or die for Vrisrezi. I think Terezi is to June what Chloe Price was to me – a complicated crush; a difficult, confusing and wonderful awakening of my feelings as a trans lesbian.

[lyresnake]

I haven’t sat down and read the 2000s Hunger/Anti-Venom run yet, mostly because I am not in a massive hurry to put myself through that, but some things about it and the possibilities of what could have been (particularly in the context of the Current Situation) have been really haunting me.

For all the ruffled nerdbro feathers around “making comics gay**” and the incessant warbling about “but why does it have to be gay?” that you get, Venom as a property really does present an ideal opportunity to explore the experience of a queer relationship, and from the view of an ostensibly bisexual*** man no less. If Cates really was fixed on the idea of dealing with the Hunger arc, and wanted to center Eddie so badly, and actually had any stones instead of shrinking into pathetic no homo spite writing, there really was a lot of fertile ground for it. You could have had Eddie coping with queer desire in the face of Catholic indoctrination and his struggle with still finding solace in the church and its rituals. You could have had him dealing with the perceived conflict between traditional masculinity and inadequacy as represented by his father, by Flash even, or mined Eddie’s generational context to explore his understanding of “gay” desires and fears which drove him to divorce himself from the relationship (the AIDS crisis if you wanted to use the “infection” theme, the terror of the realization that he’d been “like that” all along and the subsequent symbolic gay panic). None of this in any way conflicts with having Venom punching things and Carnage running around being Carnage and while yes in some ways it’s still the “sad gays” story and Venom is much better when it can be funny, I can’t help but feel that the story of a man coming to terms with his bisexuality and accepting the whole of it as part of him, and not contradictory to his love for his previous wife, instead of something to be projected off onto the person who “made him weak (read: gay)” would have been a thousand times stronger story than the pointless, flat mess he’s trying to push. And just maybe, some of the fanbros would have read it and it would have struck a chord, because it may not be a popular opinion but my lived experience is that I didn’t learn I was bisexual until I was an adult. The “always knew/born this way” narrative is important, but it’s not the only one and I think the world would be a sight better if fewer people flipped their lids at the slightest hint that they might be anything but straight. Sexuality is messy, and terrifying, especially for bi guys, and can make you face yourself in ways that some may find uncomfortable. And I’ll eat my hat if that kind of Venom story wouldn’t have resonated with some of those “traditional comic book” fans he’s supposedly catering to, even if they’d die before they’d admit it. And probably some of them wouldn’t get that story anywhere else. I just feel we could have gotten something poignant and interesting (and potentially award winning since his ego seems to be the only thing he cares about) instead of this dull flogging of a tired, nonsensical addiction story spread on the frail cream cracker of Faux Lovecraft. And yet Cates was too weak to see anything but what he wanted to see. And yes I say weak, because the inability to look past your own fears and prejudices(and for what? for fear that you might be perceived as gay? please), is weak.

What a pathetic waste of a narrative.

**please note that when I say “gay” I am shorthand referring to the nerdbro complaining about the inclusion of any type of queer content in comics, not that this specific relationship would be classified as “gay”.

***also please note that when I say “bisexual” I am essentially using it as defined as “attracted to two or more genders”, not “men and women”. This post is not intended to start a debate over whether Eddie would consider himself bi/pan/queer/etc.