#i was not one of those lesbians who knew - at least consciously - that they were gay from a young age

[brattybottombunny]

i don’t want to start Something but can we get over the “gold star lesbian” thing please? no lesbian is less valid just because of previous experiences they may have had

[cyrenesavage]

"At 7 p.m. on opening night, organizer Barbara McLean (1973: 36) wrote in her pocket diary, “I can’t believe it, it’s beginning. FAR OUT. This place is so packed there’s not even aisle room. . . . There are straight sisters here also. There is every conceivable type of woman here. The show has begun, the music sounds so good! There’s electricity in the air, women throwing their arms around each other, I feel as though I’m plugged into an outlet . . . the crowd goes wild! These are magical women!” Indeed, with an attendance of over fifteen hundred women coming from twenty-six states and five countries and representing 129 lesbian organizations or collectives, it was the largest event of its kind to date. Participants were head over heels.

At 9 p.m., Beth Elliott took the stage. Most audience members might have seen something like this abbreviated version: two women came onstage; one grabbed the mic away, yelling that Elliott is a transsexual and a rapist, and insisted that she not be permitted to perform. Chaos ensued; somebody called a vote. Then another vote. Twice the audience voted to keep Elliott on the stage. A small group of protesters left, and a shaking Beth Elliott performed to a stand-ing ovation.

That’s the iconic story we hear most often, with no before or after. It was a violent moment, and along with other similar incidents, its repercussions are still felt to this day. For this reason, it deserves an analysis informed by a larger archive.

By all accounts, organizers were blindsided by the attack, many of them insisting that “no one saw it coming.” The decision to vote was not a collective one but was made in haste by one or two organizers, perhaps to defuse the increasingly physically threatening protests. Perhaps they knew the audience would vote overwhelmingly to keep Beth onstage. But the damage that comes from putting people’s belonging up to a vote was not easily, if ever, undone.

All through the rest of that night, Robin Morgan, author of Sisterhood Is Powerful, rewrote her keynote speech to clarify a melee that left many audience members perplexed. The next day, rather than talking for forty-five minutes on the conference theme of unity, Morgan spent an hour and a half criticizing women who work with men, steamrolling the conference organizers, and elaborating her hatred of transsexuals. As conference participant Pat Buchanan wrote shortly after the conference, “Robin . . . blames the continuing position of the oppressed on our low level of consciousness. . . . She seems to feel . . . that this consciousness can be raised by her attack on everything in sight” (Buchanan 1973:6–7). Not least, Morgan attacked Beth Elliott as “a male transvestite, an opportunist, an infiltrator, and a destroyer with the mentality of a rapist,” terms that would ripple through some feminist and right-wing political platforms to this very day.

For the next two days, many conference participants debated whether biology is destiny, whether our sexist and racist socialization can be overcome, and whether men are trying to take over the lesbian feminist movement. Many felt their discussions had been “shut down” and “bombarded” by Robin Morgan. Many were “bewildered” by the scuffling and blaming and wondered if they had missed the memo that would have explained what the problem was.

Simultaneously at the conference, the Black Women’s Caucus organized for hours, designing and writing a statement offering black feminist perspectives on activism. Reporting from the racism workshop, they reiterated the priority that race had in their lives and must have in the movement. Most tellingly, they stated in their short position paper, “We want it to be understood perfectly that we are here, though few.”Perhaps some among those authors recorded their moment-by-moment conference experiences in their pocket diaries, but those entries did not become part of the published conference record. In the print record, the sheer number of pages devoted to the separatist commotion and fall-out nearly eclipsed the work of the Black Caucus. The parts of the conference that are thus most accessible reinforce the view that in such spaces, race was a separate issue, and one somehow irrelevant to the anxious need to define (or refuse to define) woman in relation to sex assignment.

It is critical that we acknowledge the violences in real time and the elisions from the historical records. It is important to discover how the seeds of trans-phobia managed to take root, how that transphobia submerged efforts to address racist exclusions, and why generations later we might be perversely attached to this legacy."

Excerpt from:

COLLECTIVE MEMORY AND THE TRANSFEMINIST 1970S: Toward a Less Plausible History | Finn Enke

https://pdfhost.io/v/mVCXz8xag_untitled

[baeddel]

Please. Please can you tell me what a baeddel is and why people (terfs?) used it in a derogatory manner on this website for a hot minute but now no one ever uses it at all

you asked for it, fucker

[2k words; philology and drama]

baeddel is an Old English word. i have no idea where it actually occurs in the Old English written corpus, but it occurs in a few placenames. its diminuitive form, baedling, is much better documented. it appears in the (untranslated) Canons of Theodore, a penitential handbook, a sort of guidebook for priests offering advice on what penances should be recommended for which sins. in a passage devoted to sexual transgressions it gives the penances suggested for a man who sleeps with a woman, a man who sleeps with another man, and then a man who sleeps with a baedling. so you have this construction of a baedling as something other than a man or a woman. and then it gives the penance for a baedling who sleeps with another baedling (a ludicrous one-year fast). then, by way of an explaination, Theodore delivers us one of the most enigmatic phrases in the Old English corpus: "for she is soft, like an adulturess."

the -ling suffix in baedling is masculine. but Theodore uses feminine pronouns and suffixes to describe baedlings. as we said, it's also used separately from male and female. but it's also used separately from their words for intersex and it never appears in this context. all of this means that you have this word that denotes a subject who is, as Christopher Monk put it, "of problematic gender." interested historians have typically interpreted it as referring to some category of homosexual male, such as Wayne R. Dines in his two-volume Encyclopedia of Homosexuality who discusses it in the context of an Old English glossary which works a bit like an Old English-Latin dictionary, giving Old English words and their Latin counterparts. the Latin words the Anglo-Saxon lexicographer chose to correspond with baedling were effeminatus and mollis, and Lang concludes that it refers to an "effeminate homosexual" (pg 60, Anglo Saxon). this same glossary gives as an Old English synonym the word waepenwifstere which literally means "woman with a penis," and which Dines gives the approximate translation (hold on tight) male wife.

R. D. Fulk, a philologist and medievalist, made a separate analysis of the term in his study on the Canons of Theodore 'Male Homoeroticism in the Old English Canons of Theodore', collected in Sex and Sexuality in Medieval England, 2004. he analysed it as a 'sexual category' (sexual as in sexuality), owing to the context of sexual transgressions in the Canons. he decides that it refers to a man who bottoms in sexual relationships with another man. i don't have the article on hand so i'm not sure what his reasoning was, but this seems obviously inadequate given what we know from the glossary described by Dines. Latin has a word for bottom, pathica, and the lexicographer did not use this in their translation, preferring words that emphasized the baedling's femininity like effeminatus, and doesn't address the sexual context at all. Dines, however, only reading this glossary, seems to decide that it refers to a type of male homosexual too hastily, considering the Canons explicitly treat them separately. both Dines and Fulk immediately reduce the baedling to a subcategory of homosexual when neither of the sources to hand actually do so themselves.

by now it should be obvious why, seven or so years ago, we interpreted it as an equivalent to trans woman. I mean come on - a woman with a penis! these days I tend to add a bit of a caution to this understanding, which is that trans woman is the translation of baedling which seems most adequate to us, just as baedling was the translation of effeminatus that seemed most adequate to our lexicographer. but the term cannot translate perfectly; its sense was derived from some minimal context; a legal context, a doctrinal context, and so forth... the way Anglo-Saxons understood sex/gender is complicated but it has been argued that they had a 'one sex model' and didn't regard men and women as biologically separate types, which is obviously quite different from the sexual model accepted today; in any case they didn't have access to the karyotype and so on. the basic categories they used to understand gender and sexuality were different from ours. in particular, Hirschfield et al. should be understood as a particularly revolutionary moment in the genealogy of transsexuality; the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft essentially invented the concept of the 'sex change', the 'transition', conceived as a biological passage from one sex to the other. even in other contexts where (forgive me) #girlslikeus changed their bodies in some way, like the castration of the priestesses of Cybele, or those belonging to the various historical societies which we believe used premarin for feminization [disputed; see this post], there is no record that they were ever considered men at any stage or had some kind of male biology that preceded their 'gender identity.' the concept of the trans woman requires the minimal context of the coercive assignment at birth and its subsequent (civil and bio-technological) rejection. i have never encountered evidence that this has ever been true in any previous society. nonetheless, these societies still had gendered relations, and essentially wherever we find these gendered relations we also find some subject which is omitted or for whom it has been necessary to note exceptions. what is of chief interest to us is not so much that there was such a subject here or there in history (and whatever propagandistic uses this fact might have), but understanding why these regularities exist.

a very parsimonious explanation is that gender is a biological reality, and there is some particular biological subject which a whole host of words have been conjured to denote. if this were the case then we would expect that, no matter what gender/sexual system we encounter in a given society, it will inevitably find some linguistic expression. if, like me, you find this idea revolting, then you should busy yourself trying to come up with an alternative explanation which is not just plausible, but more plausible. my best guesses are outside the scope of this answer...

anyway, all of this must be very interesting to the five or six people invested in the confluence of philology and gender studies. but why on earth did it become so widely used, in so many strange and unusual contexts, in the 2010s? we're very sorry, but yes, it's our fault. you see apart from all of this, there is also a little piece of information which goes along with the word baeddel, which is that it's the root of the Modern English word bad. by way of, no less, the word baedan, 'to defile'. how this defiled historical subject came to bear responsibility for everything bad to English-speakers doesn't seem to be known from linguistic evidence. however, it makes for a very pithy little remark on transmisogyny. my dear friend [REDACTED] made a playful little post making this point and, good Lord, had we only known...

it went like this. its such a funny little idea that we all start changing our urls to include the word baeddel. in those days it was common to make puns with your url (we always did halloween and christmas ones); i was baeddelaire, a play on the French poet Baudelaire. while we all still had these urls a series of events which everyone would like to forget happened, and we became Enemies of Everyone in the Whole World. because of the url thing people started to call us "the baeddels." then there was "a cult" called "the baeddels" and so forth. this cult had various infamies attatched to it and a constellation of indefensible political positions. ultimately we faced a metric fucking shit ton of harassment, including, for some of my friends, really serious and bad irl harassment that had long-term bad awful consequences relating to stable housing and physical safety and i basically never want to talk about that part of my life ever again. and i never have to, because i've come to realize that for most people, when they use the word baeddel, they don't know about that stuff. it doesn't mean that anymore.

so what does it mean? you'll see it in a few contexts. TERFs do use it, as you guessed. i am not quite sure what they really mean by it and how it differs from other TERF barbs. i think being a baeddel invovles being politically active or at least having a political consciousness, but in a way thats distinct from just any 'TRA' or trans activist. so perhaps 'militant' trans women, but perhaps also just any trans woman with any opinions at all. how this was transmitted from tumblr/west coast tranny drama to TERF vocabulary i have no idea. but you will also find - or, could have found a few years ago - i would say 'copycat' groups who didn't know us or what we believed but heard the rumours, and established their own (generously) organizations (usually facebook groups) dedicated to putting those principles into practice. they considered themselves trans lesbian separatists and did things like doxx and harass trans women who dated cafabs. if you don't know about this, yes, there really were such groups. they mostly collapsed and disappeared because they were evildoers who based their ideology on a caricature. i knew a black trans woman who was treated very badly by one of these groups, for predictable reasons. so long-time readers: if you see people talking about their bad experiences with 'baeddels', you can't necessarily relate it to the 2014 context and assume they're carrying around old baggage. there are other dreams in the nightmare.

the most common way you'll see it today, in my experience, is in this form: people will say that it was a "slur" for trans women. they might bring up that it's the root of the word bad, and they might even think that you shouldn't use the word bad because of it, or that you shouldn't use the word baeddel because it's a slur. all of this is a silly game of internet telephone and not worth addressing. except to say that it's by no means clear that baeddel, or baedling, were slurs, or even insulting at all. while Theodore doesn't provide us with a description of how we can have sex with a baedling without sinning, and it may be the case that any sexual relations with a baedling was considered sinful, sexuality-based transgressions were not taken all that seriously in those days. there was a period where homosexuality within the Church was almost sanctioned, and it wasn't until much later that homosexuality became so harshly proscribed, to the extent that it was thought to represent a threat to society, etc. and as i mentioned, there are places in England named after baedlings. there is a little parish near Kent which is called Badlesmere, Baeddel's Lake, which was recorded in the Anglo-Saxon Domesday Book (as having a lord, a handful of villagers and a few slaves; perhaps only one or two households). it's not unheard of, but i just don't know very many places called Faggot Town or some such. it's possible that baedlings had some role in Anglo-Saxon society which we are not aware of; it could even have been a prestigious one, as it was in other societies. there is just no evidence other than a couple of passing references in the literature and we'll probably never have a complete picture.

[cardio-girl]

Just so you all know, I am a recently widowed lesbian. I was very shy about being a cardiophile when I began a relationship with my very wonderful late spouse, so we talked about hearts in casual conversation in order for me to feel out if they were receptive. It took me four years to open up to them about my kink, but they were super supportive and accepting; our sex life was already great, but it became amazing after that. We bought our first ekg monitor about two years ago, but it stopped working after rigorous use. The machine I use now is the second one we bought together, it has weathered the wear and tear well and I'd recommend it to anyone who can afford $200 for toys. We had planned on expanding our existing collection of cardiophile toys and trying poppers together, but my spouse's untimely death put a hamper in those plans. My wife told me that they would fulfill my fantasy someday of stopping my heart then starting it up again, promising this to me the last time on the morning that their own heart stopped. That afternoon I gave real chest compressions to the love of my life, vomit erupting from their mouth and nose with each pump on their sternum. It was the worst version of a resus fic, it was graphic, traumatic, and it was real. The paramedics came and shocked my lover on the floor twice before regaining a rhythm, then took them to the hospital where they never regained consciousness and died ten days later. If the outcome had been different, we might just appreciate that their heart stopped and was brought back to life, but this was the worst case scenario and we didn't get so lucky. Playing pretend is very different than the real event. Be careful what you wish for, because when your fantasy comes true in all the wrong ways, you might regret playing with fire. Yes my icon is me holding my lover's hand in the hospital (before I knew all hope was gone); they would have thought my actions at the hospital were romantic if their brain had been functional at that point. I slept cuddled up next to my sweetheart one last time in that hospital bed, tubes and all, and they died in my arms. It was a reminder that kink can be founded on a true thing with real impacts. Please remember this when interacting with any of my posts.

Here are some ground rules for interacting with my blog. I will add more rules if needed:

Men are welcome to interact, but will be blocked for any sexual comments.

Anyone is allowed to play doctor with me on my posts, however I do not welcome sexual role play of any kind with men.

I appreciate compliments and respectful comments, but I cannot respond to replies to my posts because this is a side blog. If you are interested in getting a response to your comments on my posts, you will have to reblog them.

Don't be creepy. I have been lurking on cardiophile tumblr for long enough to know that there are creeps out there who harass women and make uncomfortable comments. If you make me feel uncomfortable, I will block you no questions asked.

Do not ask me for favors. I do not use Snapchat, Skype, or any other video chat service. I will not video chat with you.

I'm not interested in flirting (even with girls), I just want somebody to listen to and appreciate my broken heart again.

My heart is utterly broken. I already had tachy spells and PVCs, but the palpitations beat on my chest harder now than ever. At least I have the equipment to record and share with other cardiophiles again. I will continue to share my play sessions as long as everyone is respectful and tumblr doesn't take me down.

[testudoaubrei-blog]

Content note for discussions of eternal damnation, and all sorts of other shit that will trigger a lot of folks with religious trauma.

Before I get started I might as well explain where I’m coming from - unlike a lot of She-Ra fans, and a lot of queer people, I don’t have much religious trauma, or any, maybe (okay there were a number of years I was convinced I was going to hell, but that happens to everyone, right?). I was raised a liberal Christian by liberal Christian parents in the Episcopal Church, where most of my memories are overwhelmingly positive. Fuck, growing up in the 90’s, Chuch was probably the only place outside my home I didn’t have homophobia spewed at me. Because it was the 90’s and it was a fucking hellscape of bigotry where 5 year olds knew enough to taunt each other with homophobic slurs and the adults didn’t know enough to realize how fucked up that was. Anyway. This is my experience, but it is an atypical one, and I know it. Quite frankly I know that my experience of Christianity has very little at all to do with what most people experienced, or what people generally mean when they talk about Christianity as a cultural force in America today. So if you were raised Christian and you don’t recognize your theology here, congrats, neither do I, but these ideas and cultural forces are huge and powerful and dominant. And it’s this dominant Christian narrative that I’m referring to in this post. As well as, you know, a children’s cartoon about lesbian rainbow princesses. So here it goes. This is going to get batshit.

"All events whatsoever are governed by the secret counsel of God." - John Calvin

“We’re all just a bunch of wooly guys” - Noelle Stevenson

This is a post triggered by a single scene, and a single line. It’s one of the most fucked-up scenes in She-Ra, toward the end of Save the Cat. Catra, turned into a puppet by Prime, struggles with her chip, desperately trying to gain control of herself, so lost and scared and vulnerable that she flings aside her own death wish and her pride and tearfully begs Adora to rescue her. Adora reaches out , about to grab her, and then Prime takes control back, pronounces ‘disappointing’ and activates the kill switch that pitches Catra off the platform and to her death (and seriously, she dies here, guys - also Adora breaks both her legs in the fall). But before he does, he dismisses Catra with one of his most chilling lines. “Some creatures are meant only for destruction.”

And that’s when everyone watching probably had their heart broken a little bit, but some of the viewers raised in or around Christianity watching the same scene probably whispered ‘holy shit’ to themselves. Because Prime’s line - which works as a chilling and callous dismissal of Catra - is also an allusion to a passage from the Bible. In fact, it’s from one of the most fucked up passages in a book with more than its share of fucked up passages. It’s from Romans 9:22, and I’m going to quote several previous verses to give the context of the passage (if not the entire Epistle, which is more about who needs to abide by Jewish dietary restrictions but was used to construct a systematic theology in the centuries afterwards because people decided it was Eternal Truth).

19 Thou wilt say then unto me, Why doth he yet find fault? For who hath resisted his will?

20 Nay but, O man, who art thou that repliest against God? Shall the thing formed say to him that formed it, Why hast thou made me thus?

21 Hath not the potter power over the clay, of the same lump to make one vessel unto honour, and another unto dishonour?

22 What if God, willing to shew his wrath, and to make his power known, endured with much longsuffering the vessels of wrath fitted to destruction:

The context of the allusion supports the context in the show. Prime is dismissing Catra - serial betrayer, liar, failed conqueror, former bloody-handed warlord - as worthless, as having always been worthless and fit only to be destroyed. He is speaking from a divine and authoritative perspective (because he really does think he’s God, more of this in my TL/DR Horde Prime thing). Prime is echoing not only his own haughty dismissal of Catra, and Shadow Weaver’s view of her, but also perhaps the viewer’s harshest assessment of her, and her own worst fears about herself. Catra was bad from the start, doomed to destroy and to be destroyed. A malformed pot, cracked in firing, destined to be shattered against a wall and have her shards classified by some future archaeologist 2,000 years later. And all that’s bad enough.

But the full historical and theological context of this passage shows the real depth of Noelle Stevenson’s passion and thought and care when writing this show. Noelle was raised in Evangelical or Fundamentalist Christianity. To my knowledge, he has never specified what sect or denomination, but in interviews and her memoir Noelle has shown a particular concern for questions that this passage raises, and a particular loathing for the strains of Protestant theology that take this passage and run with it - that is to say, Calvinism. So while I’m not sure if Noelle was raised as a conservative, Calvinist Presbyterian, his preoccupation with these questions mean that it’s time to talk about Calvinism.

It would be unfair, perhaps, to say that Calvinism is a systematic theology built entirely upon the Epistles of Romans and Galatians, but only -just- (and here my Catholic readers in particular will chuckle to themselves and lovingly stroke their favorite passage of the Epistle of James). The core of Calvinist Doctrine is often expressed by the very Dutch acronym TULIP:

Total Depravity - people are wholly evil, and incapable of good action or even willing good thoughts or deeds

Unconditional Election - God chooses some people to save because ¯\_(ツ)_/¯, not because they did anything to deserve, trigger or accept it

Limited Atonement - Jesus died only to save the people God chose to save, not the rest of us bastards

Irresistible Grace - God chooses some people to be saved - if you didn’t want to be saved, too bad, God said so.

Perseverance of the Saints - People often forget this one and assume it’s ‘predestination’ but it’s actually this - basically, once saved by God, always saved, and if it looks like someone falls out of grace, they were never saved to begin with. Well that’s all sealed up tight I guess.

Reading through these, predestination isn’t a single doctrine in Calvinism but the entire theological underpinnings of it together with humanity’s utter powerlessness before sin. Basically God has all agency, humanity has none. Calvinism (and a lot of early modern Protestantism) is obsessed with questions of how God saves people (grace alone, AKA Sola Fides) and who God saves (the people god elects and only the people God elects, and fuck everyone else).

It’s apparent that Noelle was really taken by these questions, and repelled by the answers he heard. He’s alluded to having a tattoo refuting the Gospel passage about Sheep and Goats being sorted at the end times, affirming instead that ‘we’re all just a bunch of wooly guys’ (you can see this goat tattoo in some of his self-portraits in comics, etc). He’s also mentioned that rejecting and subverting destiny is a huge part of everything he writes as a particular rejection of the idea that some individual people are 'chosen' by God or that God has a plan for any of us. You can see that -so clearly- in Adora’s arc, where Adora embraces and then rejects destiny time and again and finally learns to live life for herself.

But for Catra, we’re much more concerned about the most negative aspect of this - the idea that some people are vessels meant for destruction. And that’s something else that Noelle is preoccupied with. In her memoir in the section about leaving the church and becoming a humanistic atheist, there is a drawing of a pot and the question ‘Am I a vessel prepared for destruction?’ Obviously this was on Noelle’s mind (And this is before he came out to himself as queer!).

To look at how this question plays out in Catra’s entire arc, let’s first talk about how ideas of damnation and salvation actually play out in society. And for that I’m going to plug one of my favorite books, Gin Lun’s Damned Nation: Hell in America from the Revolution to Reconstruction (if you can tell by now, I am a fucking blast at parties). Lun tells the long and very interesting story about, how ideas of hell and who went there changed during the Early American Republic. One of the interesting developments that she talks about is how while at first people who were repelled by Calvinism started moving toward a doctrine of universal salvation (no on goes to hell, at least not forever*), eventually they decided that hell was fine as long as only the right kind of people went there. Mostly The Other - non-Christian foreigners, Catholics, Atheists, people who were sinners in ways that were not just bad but weird and violated Victorian ideas of respectability. Really, Hell became a way of othering people, and arguably that’s how it survives today, especially as a way to other queer people (but expanding this is slated for my Montero rant). Now while a lot of people were consciously rejecting Calvinist predestination, they were still drawing the distinction between the Elect (good, saved, worthwhile) and the everyone else (bad, damned, worthless). I would argue that secularized ideas of this survive to this day even among non-Christian spaces in our society - we like to draw lines between those who Elect, and those who aren’t.

And that’s what brings us back to Catra. Because Catra’s entire arc is a refutation of the idea that some people are worthless and irredeemable, either by nature, nurture or their own actions. Catra’s actions strain the conventions of who is sympathetic in a Kid’s cartoon - I’ve half joked that she’s Walter White as a cat girl, and it’s only half a joke. She’s cruel, self-deluded, she spends 4 seasons refusing to take responsibility for anything she does and until Season 5 she just about always chooses the thing that does the most damage to herself and others. As I mentioned in my Catra rant, the show goes out of its way to demonstrate that Catra is morally culpable in every step of her descent into evil (except maybe her break with reality just before she pulls the lever). The way that Catra personally betrays everyone around her, the way she strips herself of all of her better qualities and most of what makes her human, hell even her costume changes would signal in any other show that she’s irredeemable.

It’s tempting to see this as Noelle’s version of being edgy - pushing the boundaries of what a sympathetic character is, throwing out antiheroics in favor of just making the villain a protagonist. Noelle isn’t quite Alex ‘I am in the business of traumatizing children’ Hirsch, who seems to have viewed his job as pushing the bounds of what you could show on the Disney Channel (I saw Gravity Falls as an adult and a bunch of that shit lives rent free in my nightmares forever), but Noelle has his own dark side, mostly thematically. The show’s willingness to deal with abuse, and messed up religious themes, and volatile, passionate, not particularly healthy relationships feels pretty daring. I’m not joking when I gleefully recommend this show to friends as ‘a couple from a Mountain Goats Song fights for four seasons in a cartoon intended for 9 year olds’. Noelle is in his own way pushing the boundaries of what a kids show can do. If you read Noelle’s other works like Nimona, you see an argument for Noelle being at least a bit edgy. Nimona is also angry, gleefully destructive, violent and spiteful - not unlike Catra. Given that it was a 2010s webcomic and not a kids show, Nimona is a good deal worse than Catra in some ways - Catra doesn’t kill people on screen, while Nimona laughs about it (that was just like, a webcomic thing - one of the fan favorite characters in my personal favorite, Narbonic, was a fucking sociopath, and the heroes were all amoral mad scientists, except for the superintelligent gerbil**). But unlike Nimona, whose fate is left open ended, Catra is redeemed.

And that is weird. We’ve had redemption arcs, but generally not of characters with -so- much vile stuff in their history. Going back to the comparison between her and Azula, many other shows, like Avatar, would have made Catra a semi-sympathetic villain who has a sob-story in their origin but who is beyond redemption, and in so doing would articulate a kind of psychologized Calvinism where some people are too traumatized to ever be fully and truly human. I’d argue this is the problem with Azula as a character - she’s a fun villain, but she doesn’t have moral agency, and the ultimate message of her arc - that she’s a broken person destined only to hurt people - is actually pretty fucked up. And that’s the origin story of so many serial killers and psycopaths that populate so many TV shows and movies. Beyond ‘hurt people hurt people’ they have nothing to teach us except perhaps that trauma makes you a monster and that the only possible response to people doing bad things is to cut them out of your life and out of our society (and that’s why we have prisons, right?)

And so Catra’s redemption and the depths from which she claws herself back goes back to Noelle’s desire to prove that no person is a vessel ‘fitted for destruction.’ Catra goes about as far down the path of evil as we’ve ever seen a protagonist in a kids show go, and she still has the capacity for good. Importantly, she is not subject to total depravity - she is capable of a good act, if only one at first. Catra is the one who begins her own redemption (unlike in Calvinism, where grace is unearned and even unwelcomed) - because she wants something better than what she has, even if its too late, because she realizes that she never wanted any of this anyway, because she wants to do one good thing once in her life even if it kills her.

The very extremity of Catra’s descent into villainy serves to underline the point that Noelle is trying to make - that no one can be written off completely, that everyone is capable of change, and that no human being is garbage, no matter how twisted they’ve become. Meanwhile her ability to set her own redemption in motion is a powerful statement of human agency, and healing, and a refutation of Calvinism’s idea that we are powerless before sin or pop cultural tropes about us being powerful before the traumas of our upbringing. Catra’s arc, then, is a kind of anti-Calvinist theological statement - about the nature of people and the nature of goodness.

Now, there is a darker side to this that Noelle has only hinted at, but which is suggested by other characters on the show. Because while Catra’s redemption shows that people are capable of change, even when they’ve done horrible things, been fucked up and fucked themselves up, it also illustrates the things people do to themselves that make change hard. As I mentioned in my Catra rant, two of the most sinister parts of her descent into villainy are her self-dehumanization (crushing her own compassion and desire to do good) and her rewriting of her own history in her speech and memory to make her own actions seem justified (which we see with her insistence that Adora left her, eliding Adora’s offers to have Catra join her, or her even more clearly false insistence that Entrapta had betrayed them). In Catra, these processes keep her going down the path of evil, and allow her to nearly destroy herself and everyone else. But we can see the same processes at work in two much darker figures - Shadow Weaver and Horde Prime. These are both rants for another day, but the completeness of Shadow Weaver’s narcissistic self-justification and cultivated callousness and the even more complete narcissism of Prime’s god complex cut both characters off from everyone around them. Perhaps, in a theoretical sense, they are still redeemable, but for narrative purposes they might as well be damned.

This willingness to show a case where someone -isn’t- redeemed actually serves to make Catra’s redemption more believable, especially since Noelle and the writers draw the distinction between how Catra and SW/Prime can relate to reality and other people, not how broken they are by their trauma (unlike Zuko and Azula, who are differentiated by How Fucked Uolp They Are). Redemption is there, it’s an option, we can always do what is right, but someone people will choose not to, in part because doing the right thing involves opening ourselves to the world and others, and thus being vulnerable. Noelle mentions this offhandedly in an interview after Season 1 with the She-Ra Progressive of Power podcast - “I sometimes think that shades of grey, sympathetic villains are part of the escapist fantasy of shows like this.” Because in the real world, some people are just bastards, a point that was particularly clear in 2017. Prime and Shadow Weaver admit this reality, while Catra makes a philosophical point that even the bastards can change their ways (at least in theory).

*An idea first proposed in the second century by Origen, who’s a trip and a fucking half by himself, and an idea that becomes the Catholic doctrine of purgatory, which protestants vehemently denied!

**Speaking of favorite Noelle tropes

[burneddownthegym]

When do you think Buffy and Spike started developing feelings for each other? I think for Spike it started in season 2 which has been kind of confirmed by Dru, but what about Buffy? Their relationship seemed to change after Spike let Glory torture him to protect Dawn, but I like to believe Buffy had unregistered feelings for Spike way earlier. I don’t know what’s true though. She let him live many times when she shouldn’t and that could just be the writers wanting to keep Spike but it could also be read as Buffy not wanting to kill him for some reason. If I were Buffy I would have at least been attracted to him from the start but I’m not Buffy. What do you think?

oh god. i started writing this and it just got more and more unhinged until i was left with a novel. but here’s my headcanon under the cut.

i think for spike it started in season 2, yeah. kind of immediately. i mean in his second episode he already has like ten tv’s mounted on the ceiling to obsessively watch buffy fight? ok weirdo. obviously the writers weren’t planning on spuffy at the time but it all fits with the dru retcon in “fool for love”. i think any feelings he had were super repressed in him for a while though, and were probably closer to obsession than anything (where does one draw the line between obsession and love? much to think about!!). tbh, and maybe this is controversial, i kind of think it’s not until “intervention” that he really understands just how in love with her he is, or what it really means to be in love with her. he definitely thinks he’s in love, he has a raging, identity-crisis crush, but i don’t know, something just feels different after that episode. i feel like it’s when his feelings for buffy really become less about him and more about her. like, less about having her or wanting her to recognize him, and more about wanting to be what she actually needs. less about *loving* buffy and more about loving *buffy*, maybe. so even though his feelings before then are real, they feel real in a different way to me after “intervention”.

buffy is harder. personally, i don’t think she was ever consciously attracted to spike until maybe s5. (buffy being immediately attracted to him in fic is actually a huge pet peeve for me; it doesn’t feel in character at all and can even make me stop reading). i think there was latent attraction, but spike was just so far outside the bounds of who she thought she would be attracted to that it doesn’t register that way (reason #34095 spuffy is a lesbian ship, obv. also it’s why her being attracted to him immediately can turn me off in fic, bc it makes the relationship feel less gay, and that’s kind of important to me). i think she finds him tacky and annoying and lame and just not a sexual object. he’s a soulless vampire and you don’t sexualize those. and so anything sexual she felt toward him she dismissed the way you might dismiss a weird sex dream about someone you’d never want in real life (jane espenson apparently had notes on her desk pre-s5 saying buffy had sex dreams about him, which i totally buy, especially after “something blue”). i think one of the reasons she freaks out so bad in “crush” is that suddenly spike isn’t in the non-sexualizable category anymore. like, what, vampires and slayers are sexualizing each other now? like in real life not just innuendo? you broke the rules, what am i supposed to do now? it’s why she’s so weirded out when he tries to kiss her in “fool for love” and goes on about how people can’t love without a soul in “crush”. spike isn’t fitting his sexual category and she doesn’t know how to deal with it so she tries to stuff him back in. long story short, i think it’s only after “crush” that she actually consciously thinks about his attractiveness, because before then he just wasn’t someone on the table for her to think about that way.

(oh i should also add—i think spike’s “crush” moment with buffy is “who are you?” when faith comes onto him. because it was sort of a similar thing for him. even though he was attracted to buffy before that episode, it was something he repressed or treated as kind of a game. innuendo and eroticism as a battle tactic but not something you’d actually follow through on in real life. but he thinks buffy breaks the rules in “who are you?” and suddenly makes herself real-life sexualizable. so i think his attraction becomes more conscious after that, even if he’s still trying to act like it’s something that disgusts him, like buffy post-“crush”.)

(also, this is why it’s so easy to read violence and murder as sublimated desire in a gay way with spuffy. it’s not really about murder and violence. it’s about them expressing romantic/erotic desire within the bounds of what their roles allow, because they can’t conceive of each other in other roles.)

but i do think buffy did still have some sort of draw to spike before s5. i feel like instinctually she saw him as more of a person than other vampires pretty early. definitely not consciously, and definitely wasn’t love. but she talks to him like he’s a really annoying guy more than she talks to him like some sort of mindless enemy. she doesn’t bother telling other soulless vampires that she violently dislikes them, or mock them about their breakups. i think the only other soulless vampires she sort of treats that way are harmony and holden in cwdp, which makes sense since both of those are vampires she knew before they were vamped. she didn’t kill harmony either, and wasn’t excited about having to kill holden. but spike is the only “stranger” vampire she sees that way, and i think that’s interesting! i think a lot of her conflict over him is due to this too, tbh. he instinctually feels like both a person and not-a-person to her, and that’s hard for her to process.

i have zero canon to back this up, but i think the first time buffy kind of sort of falls in love with spike is in “the gift”, when he says he’d protect dawn until the end of the world. i mainly think this because i don’t think it can be understated how important dawn is to buffy, or how telling it is that she kisses spike in “intervention”. other people have said this, but she just doesn’t kiss people every time they do something nice for her. i don’t think she would have done that unless she felt some sort of latent *something* for him, and unless he’d done something that really deeply affected her. him being willing to sacrifice himself for dawn’s sake, or protect her above all, affects buffy first: because of how self-sacrificing she is. she’s always the one who has to die or put herself on the line for other people. and second: she’s the only one who cares about dawn the way she does. no one else goes into a coma or threatens giles or vows to protect her until the end of the world…except spike.

so the fact that spike would understand the self-sacrificial and protecting-dawn parts of her, or help her with them in the same unthinkingly committed way, when no one else is, i think hits her where she lives. he understands and is not just supporting, but *embodying* this hugely important thing to her at the time when it counts the most. so she falls a bit in love with him. maybe just a second, or a minute, and then she ignores it and saves the world. but that’s the first time it happens.

then as far as s6 goes, i pretty much take buffy at her word when she says she has feelings for him, but that they’re not love. i think she has really intense and confusing emotions around him and for him, but they just don’t cohere into something that could be called something clear-cut like love. and that’s sort of the tragedy of that season? it has all the potential and intensity and chemistry for love, but she doesn’t like or trust herself and she doesn’t trust him, and he isn’t in a place where he can understand the guilt and self-hate she’s going through, or be moral without her guidance, and so in a lot of ways her lack of trust really is justified. so it just can’t quite reach the realness of love, where you want and want to care for the other person’s whole self. but (adding this edit based on a comment by marinxttes!), i totally agree that a lot of her breakup with spike is about her feeling enough for him that it doesn’t feel right to use him anymore. i think that’s the decisive moment when she stops being confused about whether he is or isn’t a person (and whether *she* is or isn’t), and decides he is one. maybe not one she thinks she can love yet, but one she genuinely cares about doing right by, and that’s a huge shift.

i believe her in s7 too when dawn asks if she loves him and she says she feels for him. i don’t know when exactly that whole mess starts cohering into something that really is love for buffy, but i feel like it’s happening the whole season. like air condensing into water. all the pieces have been there, amorphously, for a long time, and finally they’re allowed to take form. so when she says “i love you” in “chosen”, it’s at once something new, and also something that’s been there all along.

[midground]

Not to sound old, but I’m going to have a “kids these days” moment. I feel like when I was growing up, the older queers I knew put a big emphasis on taking the time you needed to figure yourself out and try out labels to see what worked. My queer identity has been evolving and changing for over 15 years. I feel like I’m still figuring stuff out about myself, and while it’s sometimes exhausting (you ever had to come out about like 6 or 7 different identities?) and sometimes frustrating (I’m almost 30, how am I STILL learning about new facets of myself?), I never felt like I was doing something wrong by learning about myself at my own pace. My gender and sexuality is and has always been a journey, not a destination. 

But these days, I feel like younger queers put a lot of pressure on themselves and each other to know all their labels perfectly and never get them “wrong”. It feels like nobody is telling anyone that it’s ok to try a label out just to see how it fits. Trying labels out helped me immensely, both when I was younger and like... 2 years ago when I was working out my gray-aromanticism. 

The very first thing I came out as was bi (in the early 2000s sense, where being bi meant you were into men and women) and each time I used that label for myself, I was able to pinpoint a little bit better that it wasn’t right for me. So a few months later I came out as a lesbian. A few years later, as I was figuring my gender out, I ditched lesbian because I didn’t identity as a woman anymore. And all of that was ok. 

I mean, some of the labels that I use now didn’t even EXIST 10, 15 years ago. I felt nonbinary long before the term nonbinary came into the public consciousness. And I used androgynous for a few years because it was the best word I had encountered before I discovered agender.

It feels like there are exponentially more labels today then there were when I was growing up, and that “kids these days” are using that wealth of nuance and expression to restrict each other rather than free each other. I’ve been working on a tabletop game recently about (among other things) being nonbinary, and I CONSTANTLY encounter people who are like “I want to be in your playtest, but I don’t ID as Nonbinary, I just have some kind of feelings about gender, so I don’t know if your game is For Me” as though the word nonbinary isn’t just shorthand for “having some kind of feelings about gender”. But people seem to think of it as Capital N Nonbinary instead of lowercase n nonbinary, like an Official Label instead of just a catchall for the plethora of genders that exist outside of the gender binary, and so people are afraid of taking up space not meant for them because they don’t personally ID as Nonbinary. (Which is, in my humble opinion, ridiculous.)

When I was younger, I heard “sexuality is a spectrum” “gender is a spectrum” “gender and sexuality are fluid” a LOT. We didn’t have as many labels, and things were confusing and messy, but also forgiving and exploratory. Now it’s all so rigid.

(And I can’t help but feel like the rise of gatekeeping in queer spaces and T*RF rhetoric is a huge component of that. When you claim that one group of people simply existing and living their truth “takes away” from another queer identity, you can also claim that trying out a label “takes away” from that queer identity as well. Like somehow there’s a finite amount of lesbianism in the world that’ll get used up if too many people ID as a lesbian and then move on from it later.)

I don’t know. I can’t really do anything about people who are going to get mad that some poor 14 year old hasn’t figured out ever single thing about their gender and sexuality by the end of their first year of high school. But I can say this: No matter how old you are, if you are still figuring yourself out, you have my permission to try that label (or those pronouns) out. Just try it out! And if it doesn’t work, put it aside and try a new one. Or don’t! You don’t have to do labels at all. Be kind to your friends when they want to try something out too. And let them move at their own pace.

The labels exist to help us express ourselves. Or at least they should. They don’t exist to arbitrate what kind of feelings we’re allowed to feel or how we’re allowed to feel them. And they CERTAINLY don’t exist to divide us out into separate little boxes. We all exist under the same umbrella. And just to be 100% crystal clear, my big queer umbrella includes asexuals and aromantics as well. And if you don’t like to use the word queer for yourself, you are welcome to think of it as a big LGBTQIA umbrella instead.

[queersatanic]

Bisexuality & Discrimination By Lani Kaahumanu

Source: Bi women: the newsletter of the Boston Bisexual Women's Network, Vol. 3, No. 6 (Dec. 1985-Jan. 1986)

Full text:

One of the biggest “jokes" of the Lesbian/Gay parade every year was observing the bisexual contingent. As far as I was concerned they were a bunch of closet cases, not deserving of serious consideration. As a lesbian, I felt superior in some ways and was embarrassed for them. How naive to take the bisexual “stage” seriously. I was sure their confusion would clear up and they would “come out” when they let go of the very real heterosexual privilege they were obviously clinging to. Why else would anyone say they were bisexual?

This deep rooted contempt and ignorance of bisexuality is common in the Lesbian/Gay community. It is these attitudes that kept me closeted. The few times I was sexual with a man, it was understood that l was a Lesbian who still had some issues to “work out” with men. I didn't even consider bisexuality; it wasn't a legitimate possibility. Furthermore, I would be ostracized from the supportive women’s community and run the risk of [losing] all my friends.

When I first claimed my bisexuality the panic and feelings of isolation were overwhelming, but I knew that trusting myself was the only way to live life no matter what the outside circumstances. I realized that my biphobic attitudes were in direct proportion to my own suppressed bisexual feelings. My new found awareness had nothing to do with privilege, or an inability on my part to make a choice. These feelings had everything to do with being a bisexual in a world that denies our existence.

Since enforced heterosexuality affects us in ways we are still discovering/recovering from, I want to discuss the validity of the idea of stages, and the fact that for my sexuality, Lesbianism was a stage. Now this could be taken as a rather shocking, politically incorrect and unsisterly statement. lt is not meant as such. I am not denying Lesbian existence by expressing my sexual attraction for certain women and men. It doesn't make me wishy-washy, confused, untrustworthy, or more sexually liberated. It makes me a bisexual.

The polarized heterosexist “norm” and, to a lesser degree, the homosexist “norm” sees bisexuality exclusively as a “phase” from one to the other and perhaps back again, invalidating it as a way to be, a chosen sexuality per se. However, if we take a closer look, we see that in our lives we have exploratory periods. Many Lesbians and Gay men had heterosexual and/or bisexual stages before they clarified their homosexual feelings. It is in this way that exclusive heterosexuality and homosexuality are often transitional for bisexuals. So what's important here, is that no matter where your sexual preference ends up, it is the use of the word “stage” of “phase” as a oneup attitude that hurts every one of us.

Bisexuals have been part of the heterosexual communities since the beginning of time. We are an “invisible” minority within both categories. No matter which community a bisexual “belongs to,” hiding feels the same, in that it perpetuates the experience of isolation, fear of discovery/loss, alienation, self doubt—the list goes on and is all too to those closeted. But because AIDS is a menacing presence, there is a false sense of “security” one gets from staying in, or returning to the closet. It is important for me as a lesbian identified bisexual woman, who is politically dedicated to and active in the feminist movement, to discuss bisexuality, as a valid lifestyle, to challenge the prejudices and encourage people to come out.

Regardless of how I want to label or not label my behavior, it must be discussed when I am getting to know someone. I feel a sense of responsibility about being honest with who I am and what my sexual behavior is—whether or not I call myself a bisexual, a lesbian, a lesbian identified bisexual, or even a lesbian who sleeps with men on occasion. It is the behavior that is important. Whatever same/cross sexuality combination there might be, labels and behavior are not mutually exclusive. When some people are made invisible, and others more politically/socially correct it forms new or maintains the old hierarchies. There is no politically/socially correct sexual preference. There is sexual behavior that is on a spectrum of many possibilities.

Since we live in a society that is based and thrives on dichotomous, either/or assumptions, the decision to come out as a bisexual makes the issues surrounding personal behavior and labels confusing, to say the least. When I was coming out I understood that I would be seen as a traitor, weakening lesbian pride and unity. The self doubt and isolation I felt were very real. There is a grain of truth that coming out undermines the lesbian gay movement because bisexuality gives credence to the homophobic/heterosexist belief that there is no such thing as a homosexual. But it is also true that in the long run not coming out as a bisexual undercuts not only the personal liberation of bisexual people, but it perpetuates the equally dangerous belief that there is no such thing as a bisexual.

I recognize that homophobia is at the root of biphobia. I came to lesbianism long before my sexuality was clear to me. I lived an open lesbian lifestyle for four years. I cannot deny the importance of this experience, nor do I want to. For me lesbian identity is more than, and/or in addition to sexuality; it is a political awareness which bisexuality doesn't [alter] or detract from. 10 years ago when I left my husband and full-time role of motherhood, it didn’t make me less conscious of what being a mother means. In fact, it gave me a deeper understanding. I am still a mother. That experience cannot be taken away from me. In much the same way, my lesbian awareness isn't lost now that I claim my bisexuality. When I realized my woman-loving-woman feelings, and came out as a lesbian, I had no heterosexual privilege; yet there were important males in my life, including a son. I am a bisexual because it’s real for me, not in order to acquire or flaunt the privilege that is inherent in being with men. My political consciousness is lesbian but my lifestyle is bisexual. If I keep myself quiet for another's sense of pride and liberation, it is at the cost of my own which isn't healthy—emotionally, politically or medically. Not only is it unhealthy, it’s ineffective.

Since I have come out I have triggered many lesbians to blurt in whispered confidence—“I have a man in the closet. You're brave to be so open. What am I going to do?” These are not easy times. AIDS has given biphobia free reign in the lesbian community (and admittedly with much less destructive effect than how AIDS is fueling homophobia in society at large). It is all right to trash bisexuals, not to trust us for fear of AIDS. Bisexuals are untouchables to some lesbians.

We have to deal with oppression in a constructive way or we will be factionalized forever. Time is running out. We have to see the whole and the part we play in it. Forming family communities with people who share your sexual identity is important, but trashing is nonproductive. The sexual choices we make are equally valid for our individual experiences. AIDS is not a gay disease; it is a human tragedy, a plague that doesn't recognize boundaries. I urge bisexuals to take a political stand, and to become a visible, viable energy force. It is important and timely to open this dialogue in each of our communities. Nobody belongs in the closet. The only way to get a sense of “our” community is for us to begin to speak out and identify ourselves. When we verify the connections and the networks of our oppression, we build a unity that avoids the, "I'm more oppressed than you" syndrome.”

---

Reprinted from the 1985 Gay Pride March magazine, San Francisco.

---

Lani Kaahumanu is a feminist writer, actor, political activist and mother of 2 living in San Francisco. She has B.A’s in Women Studies and Psychology from San Francisco State University, and is currently working on a book on bisexuality and the feminist movement. She co-coordinated the BI-POL contingent in the 1984 Lesbian Gay Freedom Day Parade which won the Cable Car Award for The Most Outrageous Contingent.

[g00ngala]

normally, this is the type of post i would put on my side blog, but i think i want to make a point that people actually see. feel free to unfollow for this i guess, but please finish reading before you do.

i'm gonna start out saying this. i am pan critical. please, if you're pansexual or pro pan, don't stop reading this. just listen for a second, with an open mind. i used to be pansexual, actually, and after that, when i realized i was a lesbian, i was just a supporter. however, the more research i did, and the more bi people who were critical of the label i listened to with an open mind, my preconceived notions stopped lining up with the facts i knew.

i'm gonna let you in on a secret: nobody who's "panphobic" thinks pansexuals aren't lgbt. nobody! well, that's a bit of a generalization, but what i'm saying is thats not the argument.

one thing i want you to know is that if you are pansexual, you and your experiences with sexuality are valid. the only issue i and many others have is not the people, but the label.

it's been covered in many posts before, and in some of my own, but the tl;dr of it is that the label itself not only has a problematic past, but a problematic present.

there have been a few different definitions of pansexuality. in order to prove my first point that there is no fundamental difference between bisexual and pansexual, i'm going to go through the most common ones i see in order of use and briefly go over why they perpetuate biphobia and transphobia, and i will link to some sources explaining stuff in more detail, and probably better because i am not an expert, nor am i bisexual. i am operating off of the information that trusted articles and bisexuals have shared. bisexuals, please feel free to correct me if i present any innacurate information or it i mess up my wording, and feel free to add on if i missed anything!

"hearts not parts": pansexuality is inclusive of trans people while bisexuality is not - this is completely false. it's incredibly transphobic to say that some sexualities include trans people while others don't, and it is also incredibly biphobic to insinuate that bisexuals don't like trans people. trans people are included in every sexuality.

pansexual means being "gender blind"/ caring more about personality while bisexuals have preferences - also false. this is wrong because bisexual people without preference have existed for ages. to say that they are pan instead of bi because they don't have a preference is ahistorical and biphobic. additionally, saying bisexuals only care about gender/ physical appearance is literally a biphobic stereotype. it insinuates that they're in it for the sex and they aren't committed/ they don't care about the emotional connection they have with people.

pansexual means all and bisexual means two/ two or more (most common definition i see today) - false. this is where i direct you to the bisexual manifesto from Anything That Moves: Beyond the Myths of Bisexuality (1990) by the Bay Area Bisexual Network, where it states this: "Bisexuality is a whole, fluid identity. Do not assume that bisexuality is binary or dougamous in nature; that we must have "two" sides or that we MUST be involved simultaneously with both genders to be fulfilled human beings. In fact, don't assume that there are only two genders." pansexual has always been inclusive of all genders, and this is also evidence as to why bisexuality has always been inclusive of nonbinary people. saying that nonbinary people are not included in every sexuality is entirely wrong. nonbinary people are not a monolith, nor are they some magical third gender. you can't say you're only attracted to some genders. you can't divide attraction to nonbinary people based on identity when it comes to sexuality, because no nonbinary person looks the same! please read more about this here, this explains it way better than i can.

now that i've gone through that, i'd like to point out the problematic history of pansexuality, a masterpost on what I've gone over and more by a bi person, more reading on why pansexuality perpetuates biphobia, and even more evidence.

i would recommend checking out all of these sources, as they do a fantastic job covering some of what i tried to cover in this post but much better.

now, where do we go from here? the reason pansexuality rose to popularity, in my opinion at least, is because of internalised biphobia. knowing what you know now, that pansexuality and bisexuality are in no way fundamentally different, why do you choose to identify as pansexual?

i know how it feels to have the word you use to describe your identity, which is such an important part of you, attacked. trust me, i get it. but you have to step past that and look inside yourself a little bit. that discomfort you might feel with the bisexual label? that's internalized biphobia.

i can relate to this to some extent, but obviously not in the same way. as i stated before, i identified as pansexual before i identified as a lesbian. i liked the word. it was inclusive and it had none of the negative connotations lesbian or bisexual had. later, i realized i wasn't attracted to men, so i made the switch to lesbian, but it was hard. because of all those negative connotations from society, i still feel uncomfortable with being a lesbian sometimes. and i recognize that it isn't because i'm not a lesbian, but it's because of how society views lesbians. pansexual is a relatively new term to come into popular consciousness, so it has much less stereotype surrounding it compared to bisexual.

i'm not asking you to change your mind because of one post. i'm asking you to seek out information and other posts by bisexuals, ones you may not agree with, in order to get a clearer picture. and then just think about it for a while. that's all i'm leaving you with. come to your own conclusion. all i ask is just for you to listen, and PLEASE stop acting like actual arguments are in any way similar to "exclusionism" like aphobia, truscum bullshit or making fun of people with unconventional pronouns or ways of describing their genders.

[uncurlinglikeflowers]

Queer Trauma, Coming Out, & the Long Road to Self-Love and Healing

As I’ve reflected on my past, I’ve discovered that my adolescence may be one of, if not THE most traumatic time of my life thus far as a queer person. The last few months with my incredible therapist have made me realize that the years of anxiety, panic, fear, self-loathing, confusion, and depression have scarred me deeper than I had previously thought. She also made me realize that this is at least partially because I have never really talked about it openly and in depth in a healthy and productive way before, which is what inspired me to start this blog to share my experiences with others that are currently struggling with their identity, or to allow those that are also currently healing from the trauma of their previously closeted life feel a little more seen.

I knew from a VERY young age that I was different, but didn’t know how or what it meant. I was a lonely kid for a lot of my childhood without many friends. I didn’t want to play football with the boys during recess. I sought companionship at lunch with a table full of girls more often than not, which in itself also made me feel incredibly self conscious at the time as well. 

I asked, (with incredible shame) for the “girl’s toy” from the backseat in the McDonald’s drive-thru because I loved to play with the mini-Barbies and craft entire storylines for them. They were easier to hide in my room than regular sized Barbies. I spent most summers off school alone playing video games and reading book and book after book. I didn’t really click with the boys down the street. I was obsessed with Britney Spears and the color purple. I was lonely without really knowing what it meant.

I feel as though that fear I felt in my childhood and adolescence held me back from SO much. Middle school in particular was absolute hell. I hated it. I always felt constantly insecure and uncomfortable. I had absolutely zero confidence or self love. I hated my body and how I looked. 

While other kids experienced their first relationships and first feelings of romantic love, I was convinced that it was just not a possibility for me. On top of being deeply closeted, scared, confused, lonely, and in deep denial, girls didn’t go for me anyway. I was the awkward chunky guy struggling with his identity feeling like he had to make up for it by working extra hard to get perfect grades and give himself 100% to other people. I tried not to think about it too much, but hearing about relationships, seeing people kiss in the hallways between classes, and girls talking about what they liked in boys which was the complete opposite of me... it was hell.

To make my self consciousness worse, I felt supremely uncomfortable in gym class and the boys’ locker room in particular. I was ashamed of my body and also self conscious for wanting to look at the other boys; terrified that they would catch on and beat me senseless. Hearing them consistently call each other f*g in a very VERY negative context drove me deep into the closet as the identity I already felt shame for was directly correlated with being a ridiculed outcast, and something that was inherently, disgustingly wrong and unacceptable. The worst insult teenage boys could deliver to each other in the safety of an unchaperoned locker room in a hick town often not kind to queer people or those that were different. I SO desperately wanted to fit in with the other boys instead of being any version of who I actually was.

Part of that façade of blending in with my hetero peers involved having a girlfriend for two months in 8th grade. We didn’t even kiss, let alone approach any sexual situations. I’m sure she had her suspicions. I was utterly obsessed with the concept of blending in by having a girlfriend like the other boys and just having someone special in my life, even if we really didn’t even do any couple things. 

Upon reflection, I don’t think the concept of ever being sexual with her ever crossed my mind in the slightest. Even the idea of kissing her scared the hell out of me, and not just from first kiss nerves. Deep down I knew it wasn’t right for me. Don’t EVER tell a kid they’re too young to know. Fast forward to modern times, my first kiss with a girl was with a close friend YEARS after I came out. Go figure. 

The idea of caring about and loving myself was non-existent at that time. It’s a very VERY new and ongoing journey for me. I didn’t really care about myself at all. I hadn’t learned how to. Mom was in and out of cancer treatments, and would later pass during my senior year of college and kick off my coming out process, but that’s a whole other post for another day. Spending pretty much my entire childhood watching mom deal with being sick, I didn’t want to cause my family any more discomfort. I was full of self loathing, fear, and confusion, but it seemed irrelevant and unimportant because I didn’t want to be a hindrance. 

Instead, I tried so desperately to be the perfect kid and son by befriending my teachers, being a model student, and joining band and a bunch of organizations to stay as busy as possible to stay distracted and impress everyone else.I didn’t love myself because I didn’t think I was allowed to or deserved to in my own head. While I did finally make more meaningful friends in high school, I continued to go through the motions to make my family proud to make up for the scared closeted kid who thought he had to make up for his queerness as though it were a shameful weakness, and it seemed to be the only thing that could possibly matter at the time.

Non-surprisingly, I never really knew any openly queer boys in grade school. It probably legitimately wasn’t all that safe to come out in that environment. I’ll never forget the two boys I saw holding hands in a Wal-Mart that absolutely shook up my entirely reality, because I had never seen romantic same-sex affection in person before. 

There was a lesbian couple at my school, but people said awful, degrading things about them behind their backs constantly and acted like they were the biggest freaks. Another boy in my grade in high school hadn’t come out yet officially but was very flamboyant, and thus was treated just as awful as the lesbian couple, if not worse. Other kids just regularly said despicable things about him without even knowing him at all. I even heard parents make blatantly homophobic jokes about him. 

His life had to have been hell, and as a fully out queer adult, I still regret not being able to stand up for him more. That definitely forced me deeper into the closet. He wasn’t even out but got talked about like he was some disgusting abomination. How could I ever assume that I could ever come out, let alone kiss, date, and love another boy? I HATED the idea of any attention being placed on me, so I just wanted to survive school at that point.

I had multiple people throughout high school ask me if I were gay just as though it were the most casual question rather than a triggering inquiry that sent me into a mental frenzy every damn time it was presented. Having one of the jock boys ask me such a deeply personal question in passing on the way to my seat in Algebra class was traumatizing. I of course always said no, as at the time I was still convinced it was a passing phase and that I couldn’t actually be gay. 

At home, in the days of Myspace, I got anonymous messages telling me they were pretty sure I was gay. The anonymity was arguably worse in some ways. 

At a young age, I became hyper aware of how I carried myself, talked, and acted. I loathed hearing my voice or seeing myself in pictures, for fear of sounding too feminine or standing or emoting too gay. I obsessed over the concept that boys and girls carried their books a certain way, or the boys would be labelled as queer. I was paranoid about where I shopped for clothes, the colors I wore, and the length and fit of my shorts. 

In middle school, I got a lilac colored trapper keeper for school that I ultimately had my parents take back to the store for a different one because I felt so self conscious about it all day. At home I played with my little Barbies, but didn’t dare tell the kids at school for fear of rejection and isolation. Overall, I felt grossly incompetent, irrelevant, and unimportant in my own mind. Unworthy of love and of course, deeply ashamed for my attraction to the other boys.

I never had anyone whatsoever to help guide me through the coming out process, because I didn’t know a single queer person who could. I’ve now dedicated a good amount of my energy trying to be that person I desperately could have used then for anyone else that needs that role to be filled, and for someone to tell them that someone is incredibly proud of them. An obscene amount of queer people don’t ever hear “I’m so proud of you!” when they really need it the most. 

I also didn’t have any good queer representation on TV or in movies, so I really did feel completely alone at times. Most queer characters in media existedly solely to be made fun of and mocked, ratcher than celebrated, properly represented, or God forbid, given a legitimate love story, and the public’s reaction was so frequently one of such repugnance and disapproval. 

This was also probably about the time that a close family member told me that he had punched a gay guy for hitting on him when he was younger, a story he again felt the need to share with a now ex-boyfriend and I when we were dating, as though that’s not a horrifying thing for an already scared and closeted queer to hear from their own family. 

I think during middle school in particular is when my anxiety and depression issues started, but I assumed either that I was being a baby and that my feelings were invalid, or that it was just teenage angst. The idea that boys and men should mask their emotions and feelings and feel shame rather than expressing them was, (and seemingly appears to continue to be) a very real thing in small towns and society in general. 

It didn’t occur to me at the time that I was experiencing varying levels of almost daily trauma that would fuck me up well into adulthood. If you take anything at all from this post, let it be that the conversation around mental health, (and men in particular in this instance) NEEDS to change.

Another particularly noteworthy event in my queer adolescence was when two of my friends, (both girls, shocker) discovered gay porn on my computer. While they pestered me about if it were mine while they laughed, I of course lied. I felt a deep shame and utter humiliation. On reflection, fucking IMAGINE if they had been able to be gentle and understanding with me and told me they loved me and still would even if I were gay. From then on I was terrified that they would bring that day up to our other friends as a joke. Perhaps they did a time or two, I don’t recall. These same friends made jokes about the queer kid I mentioned earlier, and both parents of one of the girls regularly gossiped and made homophobic jokes about him when I was at their house 

By the time school dances rolled around, I knew I would never be able to go with anyone but friends. Even if I weren’t still deeply closeted, I’m pretty sure my school still had pretty strict rules against bringing same-sex dates to Prom. While I definitely had fun with my friends at the dances we went to, I so desperately longed for a world where I could dance with a boy who loved me like everyone else was able to.

The loneliness and isolation I felt at the end of those nights could be unbearable because it didn’t seem possible for me, even as I looked into the future. I was fully convinced I would live a very lonely life without anyone to love me the way I craved. I didn’t belong in that world, and wouldn’t ever be set up for that kind of happiness, joy, and feeling of content. I would live for everyone else but myself because that’s just the way the world worked for us queers.

I wish I had had just one single person then who gave me full permission to be my authentic queer self on any level. Someone who could hug me and tell me life after high school and college could and would be vastly different. Someone to tell me I wasn’t an unlovable disgusting freak, but rather a kind-hearted boy who deserved a deep love someday because I was a valid and gentle soul who deserved the world. I certainly deserved more than the shame and pain that constantly haunted me. 

Maybe then I wouldn’t have thought about death before 30 so much and obsessed over it well into my college career. I might have realized that I needed to learn to be gentle with myself and take care of and prioritize me and my own happiness. So many people let me down and convinced me that I was a filthy sinner and an over-emotional kid with invalid perspectives and feelings. As most of my closest friends, (that I cannot stress enough have been the ones to save my life and encourage the authenticity that I present so proudly today) came into my life after I had already come out fully, they weren’t around during those dark early struggles. 

Sometimes as an adult I still wonder what it would have felt like and how profoundly different my life could be if someone had held me close and sincerely told me they’re proud of me for what I survived and overcame, and told me that they can’t wait to see my eyes light up with the love I’ve always dreamed of in a boy, and that I still continue to seek. 

Young, baby gay Travis would be in absolute awe if he knew what life had in store for him back then. To see a future version of himself painting his nails, wearing whatever he wanted, dancing with strangers at pride festivals, having the time of his life at drag shows with his queer family and falling in love with boys? Proudly holding a boyfriend’s hand walking downtown in a busy city? Openly telling his dad about the cute boy he’s going on a date with? Going Facebook official with a boy? Being a super vocal advocate and inspiration and mentor to not only queer family, but to people he hardly talks to but manages to influence and inspire just by unashamedly being himself? Genuinely looking forward to kissing his new husband in front of family and friends on his wedding day, knowing it’ll be one of the happiest days of his entire life? 

Holy. Actual. Fuck.

Travis of six or seven years ago wouldn’t have even dared to dream this big, let alone baby gay Travis. He probably would have been utterly mortified but SO comforted to see that future life when he didn’t believe it to be any level of possible.

I’m so fucking proud of myself for this journey, and no one will ever take that away from me or water down my trauma or the grueling work I’ve put in. Genuinely, this is the one thing in my life that makes me absolutely burst with pride. 

I think I want to learn how to keep baby Travis in mind with this pride without having to revisit the trauma in the process. Look back at him with open arms, excited to see him learn and blossom into his actual self someday. Even if he could have desperately used someone like the me I am today, he survived then, and continues to persevere today. 

He’s queer as fuck, and proud to shout it from the rooftops. He’s a voice and an advocate for the voiceless. A shining light and beacon of hope for those still navigating their terrifying escape from their closeted life. He’s going to meet a man someday and love him so deeply in the way baby Travis always dreamed of. Above all, he’s going to continue to make that little guy so incredibly proud because he knows now the importance of loving himself in the process. 

I’m so proud of that scared little boy. I just wish he could have known then how proud he would make himself one day.   

As you talk with the queer people in your life, please keep in mind that just about all of us have incredible trauma directly tied to our identities. Talk to them with love, compassion, and understanding. Tell them how proud of them you are for pursuing their own happiness in the face of oppression and rejection. 

Demand better from elected officials. Advocate for us. Shut down homophobic ideals, even if you think it’ll make your family and friends uncomfortable to hear. Support queer content, artists and creators. Be a proud ally, but don’t ever allow yourself to take the spotlight away from actual queer people or our queer spaces. Mourn, love, and celebrate with us. 

Understand why pride is SO fucking important to us, and why you never have to worry about needing your own pride events. Listen to us and love us for exactly who we are, and were always meant to be. Love is the most incredible, beautiful, and often rare human experience we’re able to experience during our short time on this planet, and it should always be celebrated.

Happy Pride!

[hideouspumpkin]

Hi I know this question may be too personal, so I totally respect if u don't wanna answer, but of is ok can I ask when and how you figured out that you like girls and only girls? And how was your first experience with one of them? I got 28 and I've never been with a girl, in my teens I flirted and dated many guys but I never had sex with them and the very little few fisical things I did with them were something that produced a strong aversion and disconfort in me. I also have an ed, so at first I thought it might be because of that. Then, in my twentys I've spend almost 10 years recluse in my home focused in studing my medicine degree and not being very attentive or interested into sexuality until this last tree years in where idnk why (maybe due to a pretty girl of my class) something awake in me and I finally figured out how deeply lesbian I am. Idnk if my experience is very normal or similar to other lesbians with ed. And even if i'm sure about my sexual attraction i steel wonder sometimes how really will be to date a woman. Idnk. I guess I just feel a little bit alone with all this feelings and wanna share and heard about other experiences. Sorry my english and have a good week.

Dear anon, first of all im sending you warm thoughts for the attraction thing, for the eds thing, for everything really, as all of it is pretty confusing and complicated to be honest (and I understand what you're going through)

To answer your question, I actually have a similar story as you : I realized I liked girls when I was 20, and had no clues I did, as least consciously, before that. I also flirted with boys but never anything serious and I also thought that it was because of the eds that I never went further. Then I moved to London at age 20 (im french) and I think being far away from a place where every body knew me helped me realize that I wasn't...quite what they thought I was. It liberated me in some way. Also I was, at the time, spending a lot of time on fandom spaces and those were pretty queer so it helped me coming to terms with my own attraction to women, it being something that actually was ok and actually existed. I remember I read some of the posts on here that were like "lesbians suggestions" and were full of relatable lesbians things like really really wanting to be friend with a specific girl not being a "normal" thing every girl experienced but a sort of sign you were into girls. Those made me reconsider a lot of my past experiences and feelings and I understood that basically I was attracted to girls, and my whole flirting with guys was more to do with societal expectations or searching for male validation than proper attraction. I think, getting better mentally also helped me, as when you're deep into your eds you don't really have the mental space or the energy to think about opening yourself up to this (and eds have also a strong link with pleasure in its many forms so yknow... Punishing yourself by not allowing yourself to even just consider dating a woman because your are "ashamed" or think you don't deserve any kind of pleasurable thing) At the same time I also met a girl, like you did, who uuih helped those feelings come up to the surface because I had a crush and for once I was ready to see it as one. But basically before that I had literally no sexual drive, that I was conscious of at least (Im very good at repressing stuff without even noticing)and still to this day, I struggle with sex, intimacy, desire and stuff.

So don't worry, yours is a perfectly normal experience !!! Its already amazing that you've understood your real identity (women are pretty amazing) About what its like to date a woman well its uuuh just the best if you find the right one !! You don't need to date the first other wlw you meet if you're not actually interested or attracted to her just because you're both into girls, that'd just lead to an unhappy and unfulfilling relationship !!

Idk if this was any help, but basically, your experience is normal, I went through similar things, and im sending you all the love I can ! You're not alone, im with you !

[thequibblah]

⭐ honestly there are so many things that I'd likevto ask which is why I want to ask a broaderish question.. How do you approach the characterisation of your "Main cast"? I think you have created some really great complex characters even though they do not exist in canon or even fanon (Germaine in example)

I hope this isn't too broad lol

no, i don't think it's too broad! just let me know if my answer doesn't actually touch on what you were wondering about haha

character creation for me tends to be spontaneous rather than conscious — i.e. i'm just writing my way through a scene and i'm like anyway, these people are new and they're friends or they're dating or they hate each other, and there's rarely a ton of forethought put into it. the vast majority of the ct cast was like that, i would say, except possibly michael, who was the first love interest i invented so there was a little more intention there

(but other than him i was really pulling things out of nowhere for the rest of the students especially — including with emmeline which sometimes surprises me)

the exception is, of course, the main cast. they and sara were very intentional, and i wrote little bio thingies for them before i started even outlining the fic. i mean the non-canon main cast, of course, lol — mary, dorcas (they're both canon but i've invented virtually everything about them, so), and germaine.

i did actually do a lot of hemming and hawing about how many girls there would be in lily's year in gryffindor. as discussed in a previous "my beef with j/k/r" instalment on this blog, the numbers of the hogwarts population really don't make sense at all, so i knew i could be flexible and kind of hand wave any questionable bits away. but the composition of the gryffindor girls was crucial in deciding lily's characterisation, imo — an easy way to convey implied characterisation is to show someone in contrast to the people around them. so: who is lily within the context of her friend group? is she friends with all the girls she rooms with?

separately, i've always liked writing friends in groups of four. in the planning stage of this i was like urghhh it's four girls, the four marauders, is that like too perfect....... and one thing i HATED was that people could then map on each marauder to each girl (lily = james is a bit questionable, though i firmly believe they're much more alike than they seem, but it kind of works.... mary = sirius, dorcas = remus, germaine = peter). and i didn't, and don't, want to make it seem like i've just made vaguely distinct female versions of each marauder!

i've made my peace with that risk, of course, and i think each of the girls is significantly different from "their marauder" (LOL) that it's actually fine — and, better still, if that thought occurs to anyone i hope that their characterisations will go on to provide interesting nuance to the parallels

but, anyway, tangent aside, i love groups of four because i think basically all my life i've had groups-of-four friendships. to absolutely go to bat for us foursomes, it's nice because no single person is the obvious odd one out, and each combination in pairs brings something different to the table — the role that doe plays in the group of four at large, for instance, isn't exactly the same as who she is in her individual friendship with mary, lily, or germaine.

the three main cast members came of some very clinical answers to those initial questions about lily.

one, i have always liked having mary be one of lily's friends, and in my characterisation of her she's obviously a great foil to lily, as a fellow muggle-born student. so, she was a lock.

two, i wanted to write one other canon order character, but i didn't want it to be marlene because in my reading of her canon mention, lily is unlikely to write a letter to sirius with her full name (paraphrasing but "i was so upset when marlene mckinnon died, i cried for ages") or, indeed, write a letter discussing how sad marlene's death made her, if they were besties and schoolmates. i went with dorcas because why the hell not? in developing her i then added all these thoughts

three, i felt the need to make up an oc so i could have absolute freedom over their fate. i had certain preconceived notions about mary and dorcas and what their stories would be, so there were other things (e.g. playing quidditch) that i wanted to have a friend of lily's do that they couldn't. plus, i wanted to write a massive lesbian.

another little sticking point, though, was that i (for a very SHRUG?? reason) didn't want lily to be besties with everyone she's lived with, but i didn't want to insert a catty rival into her dorm either. (now, don't get me wrong, i do love a good rival. i did, after all, write mary and amelia, and i am a known appreciator of carlotta meloni, and i adore TLE's marlene mckinnon. but i wanted the gryffindor girls to be like lily's safe space — a contrast both to her home life and to her recently-strained friendship with snape, where she's spent some time having to second-guess herself a lot. in my mind her friendships with all three of her besties coalesced at various points organically, until she was like wow wait i do actually have a home base here.)

the compromise was someone who was friendly with lily, but there's no strain on that friendship to be more than it is — which, sara and lily respect each other but have also learned they're not so alike that they need to hang out all the time. sara, to lily, is the girl you do things with because you're schoolmates, and then once you're out of school you amicably drift apart and occasionally leave a nice comment on their instagram

so that was how the gryffindors coalesced in my mind as placeholder figures. i will fully confess i start with tropes and then work out ways to deconstruct them or complicate them — as i've talked about in multiple of these questions, i think a lot of my characters are caught between sticking to their perceived label and acting the way they want to, aka the ripest high school drama fodder known to humankind

Wearing a fake smile and watching her sister’s sickening love life had put things in perspective a little. Why should she always do what was expected of her?

(we construct ourselves in contrast to those around us....)

mary started off as boy-crazy, doe started off as idealistic, and germaine started off as struggling to find her place. then i built up from those foundations, adding in tropey bits i enjoyed and wanted to engage with — i wanted doe to be passionately principled, but the gentler counterpart to mary, and even-tempered where lily runs hot. i wanted germaine to be a little bit thoughtless, changeable, someone utterly herself but still uncomfortable in her own skin. knowing, then, that the other two were going to be, how shall i put it, gentler hearts (LOL), i went back to mary and decided she would have this tough-girl, queen-bee persona.

then doe got her family background, which added in her ambitions and hinted at her future, and made it so her foundation would be threatened by events of the story. obviously i was writing mary in the aftermath of the mulciber/avery incident, so i needed to ask how much her take-no-shit vibe was threatened by it — and if not, why? how? unsurprisingly, even to people like amelia...

“At least I’m not overflowing with insecurity,” said Amelia. Mary laughed. The sound echoed through the courtyard. “We both know that’s not true.”

...the persona is put-on, but the "real mary" is so caught up in the invented mary that even she couldn't hope to uncover an authentic self...nor would she necessarily want to, because her affected self is still her...

wait don't get me started

germaine was already a quidditch player, and i wanted her to be a seeker because that's automatic investment in perhaps the single player with the most impact on the game — crucial for what i knew would be many, many quidditch sequences, where james wasn't always the most important pov! some of that seekery vibe leeched into who she is: she's searching, right from the start, for a sense of self that feels just out of reach:

“This year is going to be a year of change,” Germaine said [...] “Henceforth I will be going by... Gemma.” The girls looked at one another for a beat. Then Lily, Doe, and Mary burst into laughter.

she's more anxious and outwardly uncertain than her friends, and i wanted to consciously engage with that — proper teenage awkwardness, the kind that wouldn't really happen to Main Character lily, I Have No Sense of Shame mary, and I Am Overflowing with Good Sense doe. more than the other three, germaine is a normal person in the context of this world — she's not a muggleborn, so the war has a different impact on her; she's not the child of activists; she's not well-off. an absolutely spontaneous invention that i was really quite thrilled by was having her sister be crouch's secretary, because it's such a sudden, shocking realisation for her that she's got such a close connection in the thick of it

Germaine clapped a hand over her mouth. “Big news soon,” she mumbled. “Big news soon, that’s what Abigail said, only she didn’t say what big news…”

so germaine is really just... living her life, an indie coming of age film in which her friends' subplot is a fucking war LOL

i defined germaine in contrast to the other girls a lot when drawing out the characters for myself, mostly for a practical reason — i didn't want her to overlap too strongly with any of them, since she's the only one who's wholly my invention. i think some of that remains in her characterisation, but i decided to make it conscious instead:

Germaine saw herself as a happy medium, flexible enough to stretch sympathetically between her friends. But— What does it mean that I define myself in comparison to them? Nothing. She was only seventeen and she was finding her way.

i knew germaine was going to get the chaotic sporty romance pretty much right off the bat, but, fun fact, i hadn't actually picked out who her love interest would be until after i started spitballing other sixth years' names and had a basic idea of who emmeline was. wild!

i feel like i haven't said all i want to say but let's stop there or i'd go on forever, ha!

[shutupandshipit]

Coming Home - Part 2

Summary: When Katsuki stepped off the plane, he was greeted with the familiar heat of Musutafu in summer. Humidity like he was sitting in a sauna. He’d been all over America in the past five and a half years, but nothing was quite like the weather of home. It could be similar, primarily along the east coast, but just not quite the same. Just similar.

Breathing in deeply, he gripped the small hand in his and started down the ramp to where he could see Best Jeanist leaning against a car with illegally blacked out windows. Katsuki idly wondered if he was absolutely roasting in his hero uniform.

“Your hand is sweaty, Papa.”

“Your’s isn’t much better, little monster.”

…..

Or where Katsuki disappeared to America to find someone to make prostheses for him. He was gone for five and a half years, and returns with a little tag-a-long.

Pairing: Bakudeku

Rating: T (just for language mostly)

Chapter: 2/2

Part 1 <-Previous

Follow-on: Christmas Preemie

Part 2: what’s in the box?

Katsuki woke with a sudden start to cool sheets and aching ears. The events of the night trickled back slowly as he lay there, blinking into the sunlight peaking in at him around the edges of his curtains. No, not his curtains. They were a disgusting pea green color that had been left there by the owner who had rented the place to them. He'd have to remedy that as soon as possible.

In the confusion of the first good night's sleep he'd gotten in a long time, he could convince himself that everything had been a dream. He was still in America, miserable save for the time he spent with Katsumi. But with a rustle of sheets, Izuku's lightning storm and mint scent misted the air.

Katsuki buried his nose in the pillow Izuku had used, inhaling his scent for several long moments. He'd spent years without his mate's scent. Or he should say, the scent of the person he'd like to be his mate eventually. His alpha's scent. His Deku's scent. If scents could be made into perfumes, he would carry around a bottle of Izuku's scent just to pull out when he missed him. And he did miss him. Katsuki had gotten over the knee jerk reaction to deny any soft feeling towards the other hero a long time ago. It was hard to keep hold of them when he adored their daughter who was the spitting image of her father.

A crash and resounding laughter from the kitchen jerked him from his reverie. His hearing aids squealed, and he flinched before snapping his prostheses into place with a grunt. The palm of his prosthetic arm sparked feebly, but there was no sweat in the arm's tubes to light off. They'd be filled soon enough as he started to move around, collected from ports hooked into his armpit's sweat glands.

He took a moment to let the pain settle, running through his pre-operational checks before pushing to his feet.

His hearing aids squealed again, and with a grunt, he pulled them off. The world around him hushed into silence. He should have thought of taking them out before going to bed that night. He hadn't though, not with Izuku's hands on him. There was the very real chance he wouldn't be able to use them for the rest of the day, not with the way his ears were aching. The ringing built slowly until it was filling his head with static. Tinnitus, the worse part of anything he'd done to himself. Even worse than the prostheses. It would fade in and out throughout the day, leaving him in silence or giving him a splitting headache. There was never an in between.

In the kitchen, the counters were dusted with pancake or waffle mix. Fruit and vegetables sweat by the sink, begging for him to save them from a terrible butchering. Smoke rose damningly from a pan on the stove.

Standing over it, Izuku stood with Sumi on his hip and a spatula in his hand. They laughed in unison as Izuku failed to flip the pancake. 'I'm so bad at this. Your papa is a way better cook than me.' They looked so natural together. Izuku's curls against Sumi's. Izuku's smile matching the one of Sumi's face perfectly. Their freckles vibrant and an identical map across their faces. There was no mistaking what they were.

Katsuki couldn't hear them, obviously, but in five years, he had become passable at reading lips. And reading Izuku's had never been a problem.

'Me too,' Sumi confided, trying just as unsuccessfully to flip the pancake. When she finally got it over, they cheered together with hands raised high above their heads.

Katsuki leaned against his doorjamb, watching the pair interact until Izuku caught sight of him.

Red bloomed in his cheeks as he grinned. 'Kacchan! Good morning!' What Katsuki wouldn't have given to see those lips form his name on his worst days in America.

'Morning, Papa! We're making breakfast!' Sumi frowned down at the pan before turning serious eyes on him. 'Trying to. We burned the pancake.' When she looked back up at him, she frowned and pointed to her ear. She pointed the tips of her index fingers at each other, jerking them towards each other twice. 'Hurt?' the sign asked.

Nodding and stepping away from his room, Katsuki surveyed the destruction of his kitchen. He sighed. Raising his hands to sign to Sumi, 'That's because you two can't be trusted in the kitchen. The heat is way too high. How have you already managed to destroy my kitchen in only a day?'

Sumi grinned and translated for Izuku, but didn't actually answer. Izuku scrubbed at the back of his head, eyes darting over the area. 'We were hungry and didn't want to wake you up, so we thought we'd give it a shot. I'm going to clean up. Don't worry.'

Sighing and rounding the counter, Katsuki pulled on the apron he'd hung up the night before and bumped Izuku out of the way with his hip. 'Well, we have to finish breakfast first. Tell Deku he's eating that burnt monstrosity. Also, can you ask him to wash the dishes so you can set the table?'

Sumi nodded, and turned in Izuku's arms to hold his cheeks between her hands. As the three of them got to work, Katsuki fell into the ease of it all. Their scents mixing together in a harmonious chorus. Katsuki and Izuku orbiting around each other as if they'd never stopped. Sumi incorporated seamlessly into the movement as she worked with Izuku.

Katsuki was, fundamentally, happy for the first time in a long time. Even the usual self consciousness of his bare prostheses and deaf ears couldn't find its way into his body. When he was with Izuku, he was the most confident version of himself.

Breakfast went off without a hitch as Sumi did her best to teach Izuku a few basic ASL signs.

Across the table from them, Katsuki smiled and proceeded to say everything dirty he possibly could. He did them while Sumi's eyes were turned away, and was so lewd that Izuku didn't need to know sign language to know what he was saying.

Face red at a strawberry, he cried, 'Kacchan, stop!'

'Never.'

'Papa, stop teasing Daddy!' Sumi signed as she spoke, glaring at him.

He raised an eyebrow at her in challenge. “I do what I want, punk,” Katsuki said aloud, and though he couldn't hear himself, he knew they had come out correctly when Izuku's shoulders began to shake with laughter.

They were finishing breakfast when Katsuki's eye was caught by a light flashing by the couch. He'd completely forgotten that he'd left his phone out in the living room at the end of the night, and he stood to grab it. He groaned when he saw the name for the video chat request. Accepting the call, he held up a finger without looking at the screen as he returned to the kitchen to find something to stand his phone against. When he had it set up, he stepped back to greet his now ex-boss.

Negative was an imposing woman to say the least. Her eyes were inkwells, blending almost perfectly with her black skin. Her outrageously large Afro was starkly white and just barely being restrained with a Ground Zero themed bandanna she'd bought for the sole purpose of annoying him, but had ended up using often. She was tall and broad shouldered and took up space in a room with her mere presence. Every day he saw her, he thanked the stars that they were both gay. He'd met her wife, a teeny tiny beta woman who was the reason for the term 'lipstick lesbian', and still didn't understand their union.

'What?'

Negative signed as she spoke, mouth tight with consternation, 'You didn't call me, you punk ass bitch. I told you to call as soon as you landed no matter what time it was.'

Katsuki sighed, rolling his eyes. 'Stuff came up.'

'You're a dirty liar. Where's my goddaughter?' she demanded. Cynthia, her wife, appeared in the frame with the widest smile in the world. Her long rainbow dreads swayed as she waved at him and blew him a kiss.

“Hi, Cynthia.” He glanced away from the screen towards the table where Katsumi was waving wildly.

'Is that Shonetta? Aunt Shonetta, I'm over here! I'm over here!' Sumi was yelling, ready to crawl straight across the table to him, but Izuku had an arm around her waist to keep her in place.

Rolling his eyes back to the camera, Katsuki picked up the phone and switched the camera to show Izuku with his still rather sleep-mussed hair and Sumi look just like him. “Shonetta, Cynthia, Deku. Deku, Shonetta and Cynthia.”

Izuku waved at the camera. 'Actually, my name is Izuku. It's nice to meet you.'

Cynthia had crowded in next to Shonetta, staring intently at the screen with wide eyes. Katsuki scrambled to mute the call before she said anything that he was going to regret. 'Holy shit, that's baby daddy, isn't it!' They had always been good at talking while signing for his sake, but sometimes, he wished he couldn't understand them at all.

Which was, of course, a dirty lie. Shonetta and Cythia had singlehandedly kept him sane in America. He had a lot to thank them for. The biggest reason them guiding him through his pregnancy which had been more difficult than most for many reasons. It would take an act of god for him to give them up. Katsuki returned to the counter, glaring at the two women as they continued speculating together.

'Thought you had better taste than that, Kat. Isn't he kind of plain looking?' Shonetta asked.

Cynthia slapped at her wife's arm. 'Be nice! He's adorable! Sumi looks exactly like him! Take us off mute really quick.' Katsuki complied with her request as Shonetta squawked indignantly at not realizing he had muted them in the first place. With a roll of her eyes, Cynthia waves at the camera again. 'Good to know you made it back alright, Kat, Sumi. I've got to get to work, but hope to talk to you soon! Don't be strangers. Bye, Sumi! I love you both!'

Katsuki doesn't turn to catch Sumi's reply, just nodded to Cynthia. "Bye."

When Cynthia seemed to be completely gone, Shonetta turned a wicked grin toward him. 'So, is he... stuff? Have you already-' she signed. By the end, she wasn't even using actual words, just making hand gestures that were so lewd they even made Katsuki's face heat. She was the one he'd learned all of his sign language from, after all.

'No!' he signed aggressively, 'God, you are a menace to society! Leave my mate out of this!'

'Oooooh, mate already?' she crowed, flapping her hands instead of signing. She wrapped her arms around her belly as she began to chortle, and he could almost hear the exact sound of her laughter in his head.

He wanted to strangle every last breath out of her as he peaked at Izuku's red cheeks through the gaps in his fingers. Growling, he reached for the phone. “That's enough out of you. We're alive. You've seen us. Bye. Go die in a ditch.”

Shonetta only continued to laugh as he ended the call, and turned to the table. Without so much as he beat, he pointed at Sumi. 'Breakfast is over. You know the drill. Yoga and then a run. Chop chop. Go get changed. We've got a lot to do today, and not a lot of time to do it.'

Sumi nodded once before turning to Izuku to explain.

'I've got to start heading over to the agency anyway for patrol.' Izuku stood, smiling.

Without missing a beat, Sumi jumped from her chair to wrap her arms around his body and pressed her face into his stomach.

Izuku was taken aback, arms raised to shoulder level as his eyes flicked between Katsuki and Sumi. After a still moment, he let his arms drop around her. He lowered his head, his mouth obscured from Katsuki's views. Sumi grinned up at him before bounding off toward her room.

Izuku turned to look at Katsuki, scrubbing at the back of his head. 'Can I... see you guys again? Tonight maybe?'

“Whatever.” Katsuki pulled Izuku into his body. They tangled together, hips pressed flush, tongues twined, hands on waists and hands in hair. When they parted again, he said, “Gotta make up for five years.” He stared into Izuku's green eyes, brushing a thumb across his cheek. He dropped his eyes to Izuku's lips when he felt them brush against his, pulling back enough just to see what he said.

'Of what?'

“Everything.”

…..

Weeks passed, and things changed. Sumi started going to school. It was weird for her starting Kindergarten in the middle of the school year, but she adjusted well enough.

Katsuki started going back to work. He had more than enough to keep him busy. Relearning the streets and districts of his home city. Figuring out who was still in the city, who was new, and who he would work best with. Reestablishing himself in Japan, and painfully crawling his way up the ranks. Adjusting back to his old hero uniform with the minor adjustments he had made. When he'd gone to America, he hadn't been expecting to stay there for five and a half years, so he hadn't thought to bring his uniform. It wasn't particularly suitable for America anyway, so a uniform had to be made for him while he was there. But just like his original uniform wasn't suitable for America, his overseas uniform wasn't suitable for home.

Izuku became a constant fixture in his and Sumi's life. Every afternoon they came home, it was to Izuku standing on their doorstep. Every night when he fell asleep, it was with Izuku in his arms to soothe the nightmares. Every morning when they left, it was with Izuku beside them. He was around so often and frequently that Katsuki eventually gave him a key, a drawer in his wardrobe and a chunk of space in his closet.

After starting late night patrols again, Izuku was the only one he trusted to watch Sumi. Eventually, he started to let him take over more and more parental responsibilities until they were sharing them as equals instead of Katsuki remaining in his steadfast single parent routine.

He trusted Izuku implicitly, but even that trust was under scrutiny when it came to Sumi.

So, when Katsuki returned home one night with his heat building beneath his skin to Izuku curled on the couch alone, knees pulled to his chest while he watched hero videos, the slightest sliver of betrayal lodge in his chest. “Where's Katsumi? You were supposed to pick her up,” he growled dangerously as he stood behind Izuku, all protective omega father in his voice and stance.

Izuku tilted his head back to look at Katsuki, expression smooth and his scent doing a passable job of being calming. “With your parents and my mother.”

“Why?” Ever so slowly, he began to deflate. He wasn't exactly happy that his daughter was with her grandparents without his knowledge, but happier than if Izuku had forgotten to get her from school.

Blinking slowly, Izuku lifted his head and turned to patiently gaze at him. “We talked about this, remember? When the time came for your heat, Katsumi would stay with your parents and my mom. I know you'll start tomorrow, I could smell it on you every time I passed you on the streets today, but I thought it'd be nice to have a night for ourselves. I wanted to have a date night. Watch a movie, eat some take out, cuddle on the couch. Date nights don't normally include being accompanied by five-year-old daughters.” His expression remained pleasant, but longing crept into his voice. “We haven't spent any time alone together as a couple since you got back. I thought it'd be nice.”

Katsuki stared at him, silent for a long moment while he let his words settle in. Breathing out the spike of betrayal and anger that had stabbed him, he nodded. “Yeah. Okay. I'm going to bathe first. Did you order something already?”

Beaming, Izuku stood on his knees and beckoned Katsuki in for a chaste kiss. “I picked up food from that weird restaurant you like. That one place that has your favorite extra spicy California Roll.”

“Did you get me an extra spicy California Roll?” Katsuki asked, hands resting lightly on Izuku's hips.

Izuku scoffed. “Of course, I did. Do I look stupid to you?” When Katsuki started to open his mouth for a snarky reply, he slapped a hand over his lips. “Don't answer that. Jerk. Just go take your shower.”

Growling low and suggestively in his throat, Katsuki nipped at the soft pads of his fingers, sucking a digit into his mouth for the briefest of moments. When he pulled away, Izuku's face was flaming and he was smirking in satisfaction. “Keep it in your pants for now, Deku. You've got me for three whole days.”

Izuku whined pitifully before slumping back onto the couch in a boneless heap. He pressed his hands over his burning face. “You can't just do stuff like that, Kacchan. I'm not used to it anymore. Especially since we haven't done anything yet.”

Katsuki leaned over the couch, tugging a few fingers away from Izuku's face to look him in the eye. “Yeah, because we were waiting for my first heat together again. Well, it's here now. Prepare yourself because I've got five years of pent up sexual frustration to get out over the next three days.” He grinned viciously.

Again, Izuku whined. “Oh my god, I'm gonna have to go jerk-off or something so I don't cum the moment you touch me.”

Katsuki's smile only grew more vicious. “Do it or don't. You're going to have to figure out a way to satisfy me anyway.”

Izuku squeezed his eyes shut. “Thank god for ruts,” he whispered because when Katsuki's heat hit, Izuku would be catapulted into a rut.

Forty-five minutes later found take-out containers empty and Izuku leaned back against Katsuki's chest while they watched video after video of highlights from All Might's career. They hadn't been able to find a decent movie that they both wanted to watch, and settled for something they were always okay with. Fifteen minutes later though, Izuku turned in Katsuki's arms to face him.

Katsuki raised an eyebrow at him, but remained silent in the face of Izuku's determination.

He pressed close, nipping at Katsuki's lips, coaxing him into a slow make-out session as he crawled his way into Katsuki's laps. Knees on either side of the other hero's hips, he ground languidly down into him.

Hissing, Katsuki ripped their mouths apart as he bucked up into Izuku. “Jesus fuck, Deku, are you trying to make me come in my pants?” He could feel Izuku's smirk against his pulse point rather than see it, and shivered.

“No. But I want you to know I'm going to ride you before anything else. I haven't been filled with anything other than toys in five years. It's all I've been able to think about when we're alone since you got back,” Izuku whispered, breath husky as it ghosted across the exposed skin of Katsuki's ear around his hearing aid, “No one wants to top an alpha. Either way, no one could ever live up to you. You're the best, you always have been. I want you to fill me up. I want you to pin me down and dominate me like only you know how, Kacchan.”

Katsuki groaned deep in his throat, biting shallowly into Izuku's collar bone, fingers bruising against his hips. “And no one wants to be topped by an omega. God,” he breathed, “I've missed you. You're the only alpha I'd waste my time on. No one else could ever compare.” Once upon a time, the admission would have made him embarrassed and then angry at his own embarrassment, but now, it was simply the truth.

“I've never been able to look at anyone else,” Izuku whispered, ducking his head to catch Katsuki's lips again, “You're my only. You're my forever even if I'm not yours.”

Katsuki didn't get the chance to reply as Izuku sealed their mouths together again. They were teeth and tongues and sharp canines and blood mixed with saliva. They were rolling hips and heat and moans and needy pleasure.

“Deku-” Katsuki gasped, but Izuku swallowed down his own name.

“Bedroom, Kacchan, please. I need you,” Izuku gasped between kisses and panted breaths. He moaned into Katsuki's mouth when Katsuki gripped his ass and effortlessly lifted them from the couch. Arms twined around shoulders, legs wrapped around that ever so slender waist.

They tumbled into bed with foreheads pressed together and gasped laughter.

It was hours later, after Katsuki had taken Izuku, allowed Izuku to manhandle his protheses off and his heat had fully set in that Izuku said anything. “I want to exchange mating bites.”

Katsuki was panting, face pressed into the sheets as his body wound back up for another cresting wave of his heat. His mind was hazed with lust, muzzy and indistinct, but he understood that clearly enough. “Still?” He was just curious, but he couldn't tell what his voice sounded like. Sarcastic? Accusatory? Interested?

“I never stopped wanting to,” Izuku whispered while he gently guided Katsuki onto his back and then to sit up so he could press a water bottle to his mouth. “I've only ever wanted to be with you, Kacchan. Ever since we were little. Even when we weren't anything more than rivals.”

Katsuki accepted the water gratefully while Izuku proceeded to wipe his body down with a warm, damp cloth. “I thought you would have stopped after I disappeared without even a text. For keeping Katsumi from you. All of it.”

Leaving the cloth in the bathroom sink, Izuku climbed back onto the bed behind him. He pulled Katsuki flush against his chest, hooking his chin over his shoulder. “No, I'm a stubborn as you are.”

Katsuki pressed back into Izuku, tilting his head so their temples were pressed together. “I don't think I'm ready,” he whispered, eyes closed as he tried to think through his jumbled thoughts.

“There's no rush. You don't ever have to accept. I'll wait for a long as you need even if that means waiting forever. I'm very patient.”

“It won't be forever, idiot. Just... not yet.” Turning his head more completely towards Izuku, he growled, “Now, less talking, more kissing.”

“Needy,” Izuku said with a giggle, but gave him what he wanted all the same.

…..

Katsuki was just walking into the office after his shift -nine in the morning, no coffee since midnight, no Katsumi since the morning before- and he was frustrated. The night hadn't been a good one, and with blood still drying in crusty patches all over his uniform, he was as unhappy as they could come. He just wanted to see his daughter for the first time in what felt like days and cuddle with her and his alpha on the couch.

���Kat! Thank god!” Kirishima shouted, running towards him. He wrapped strong fingers around his bicep, dragging him towards his office. “Come with me. Have you heard?”

“Good fucking morning to you too,” Katsuki snarled, but out of pure mental exhaustion, allowed himself to be dragged into his best friend's office. The door slammed shut behind them, and Katsuki went to raid Kirishima's coffee counter when he was released. “What the fuck's up with you anyway? It's too early in your shift to be acting like a jackass.”

Standing by his door, Kirishima rung his hands, staring out the clouded glass window instead of looking at Katsuki.

When he remained silent, Katsuki snarled and stepped into his space. “What the fuck is going on, Eiji?”

Kirishima jolted, head dropping in submission.

Katsuki stomach curdled with a sudden rush of nausea. It had been a long time since he'd seen Kirishima bare the back of his neck to him, and the last time he had, Izuku had been in a coma with no chance of recovering anytime in his immediate future. He gripped Kirishima's shoulder tightly, positive that his anxiety was being transferred through every pore. “What the fuck is going on?”

Whining, Kirishima covered his hand with his own, “I'm not supposed to tell you. The boss told me to just keep you out of the way so they can handle it.”

“If you don't fucking tell me, I'm just going to go out there and find out what the fuck is going on myself!”

“The- Uh- Your-” Kirishima groaned, scrubbing a hand through his hair. “Some villains have taken a kindergarten school hostage. The call just came through a few minutes ago. The boss and some of the others have already gone-”

Shoving Kirishima aside, Katsuki tore through the door, heart beating a million miles an hour. 'Not again! Not again! Not again!' He burst into the sky towards Katsumi's school, sun bright and hot overhead. He could see the specks of other heroes moving in the same direction, then he saw a flash of green lightning disappear between the buildings.

He wanted to call out. He wanted Katsumi to be safe. He wanted Izuku to be safe. He wanted them both in his arms, and for none of this to be happening. He stumbled to a stop down the street from the school, just like he had the first time. When he saw the flames, his vision went black.

…..

When he came to, it was to the feeling of his breath wheezing in and out, warm familiar weight pressed against his chest, and Izuku staring straight at the ceiling with a far away expression. His fingers worked over something in his palm. His eyes were red, cheeks tear stained. His uniform was bloody and torn, but for once, he was whole. It felt like the first time Katsuki had ever seen him completely unbroken after a battle. Only thing was, he couldn't actually remember what had happened in this battle.

Agonizingly slow, he turned his head to look down at his chest. Katsumi laid there curled in the smallest ball possible, her own face tear stained and her legs removed. Her mane of green hair was tangled and dusted with dirt and ash.

He went to lift his arm, the one she wasn't sleeping on, but found only his stump. Frowning, he turned to glare at it. His mind was what he suspected was drug slow, and he couldn't really understand why his prostheses and hearing aids had been removed. He hadn't gotten that hurt, there was no way.

Lifting his eyes, Izuku was staring at him with a mouth all misshapen like a soft noodle and tears pouring down his face.

'Don't cry, idiot,' he wanted to say, but his hand was held captive and he wasn't sure if his voice was audible. He only knew that when he tried to speak, pain bloomed in his throat. Closing his eyes, his throat vibrated with a groan.

Fingers balled up the front of his gown, pulling the neckline taught against the back of his neck. A hard line pressed into his chest, and Izuku's fists shook against him.

'Don't. Cry. Izuku,' Katsuki tried again, and again, there was pain. He'd been expecting it this time so he was able to crack his eyes open despite the pain.

Izuku was sobbing against his body, forehead pressed to his chest. Head so close to Sumi's that their hair mingled, dirty and green and beautifully curly.

In his chest, Katsuki's heart silently swelled and burst when Sumi extracted a hand from beneath her body to pat Izuku's curls. Closing his eyes, a hot tear tracked down Katsuki's cheek with the sheer relief of having them both with him. He couldn't remember the battle, but for the second time, his daughter's school had been attacked. For the second time, he'd been close to losing her. This scene before him could have ended up as a very different one.

Katsuki could feel Izuku's lips moving against his chest, breath rapid fire with words he couldn't hear. He only opened his eyes again when he felt small fingers press to his ear.

Sumi wasn't looking at him, but instead at Izuku, tugging against his hair to get him to lift his head. When he finally complied, eyes blurry with fat tears, she tapped on Katsuki's ears before pointing to her own.

Izuku's eyes darted up to Katsuki's face. After a moment of staring, he scrubbed quickly at his eyes before stepping away towards a table that had four prosthetic limbs and three bags on it. Sitting back down, calmer than before even though his lips were still that same soft noodle shape, he handed Sumi one hearing aid.

Together, they hooked Katsuki back up. Very carefully, Sumi turned them on, staring at his face intently as she turned the volume up.

The beeping of his heart monitor faded into existence followed by Sumi's and Izuku's breathing. “Good,” he said, and his voice was barely a croak passed the pain. Wincing, he lifted his unpinned hand to his throat.

Izuku and Sumi reached for his hand at the same time, stopping him from touching his throat. “The doctor said not to touch,” Sumi told him.

Katsuki raised an eyebrow over at Izuku.

Tears crowded Izuku's eyes immediately again, and tracked down his face. His voice trembled as he whispered, “You were really hurt, Kacchan. The villain got you by the throat. You were fighting her alone while everyone else was either fighting the rest of her gang or rushing to evacuate the kids and staff. I couldn't get to you fast enough. I thought you were going to die. I felt so useless seeing you like that.”

“Now you know how it feels, dumbass.” Gritting his teeth, he breathed through the pain.

“Don't call Daddy that! It's mean!” Katsumi glared at him, lip puckered in a pout and her own big red eyes beginning to fill with tears. Her lip trembled, and then she was sniffling as her tears fell. “I-I was so scared, Papa. I thought you were gonna leave me and Daddy alone. I don't want you to die, Papa.”

Katsuki pulled her in against his chest, pressing as kiss to her forehead and holding her tight. When he looked to Izuku, he held out his stump, motioning him forward.

Izuku crowded in against his side, and the two loves of his life cried against him for long enough that their tears soaked his gown and the hard edge digging into his shoulder from Deku's palm pissed him off. “Deku, what the fuck is in your hand?” he growled through gritted teeth, “It fucking hurts.”

“Papa, you have foul language,” Katsumi whispered, but didn't pull away from him.

Izuku jumped away from him, his tears abruptly stopping as roses bloomed in his cheeks. He stammered and stammered and stammered a whole lot of nonsense until Katsumi's giggles interrupted him. “Sumi!” he cried.

“Just show him, Daddy! You don't have to be nervous!”

“Oh, yes I do!” Izuku argued back, “He could say no!”

Katsumi waved away his concern. “He's not gonna say no.”

“He might! I think I might know him just a little more after knowing him longer than you have!”

“Not in the last five years! I know him the best. He's gonna say yes.”

“How about you let 'him' decide for himself since he's sitting right here,” Katsuki interjected before the banter could continue any further, “Just spill it, Deku. My head's all fuzzy and my throat hurts, and I'm annoyed that my daughter knows more about whatever this is than I do.” Oh. Oh, he was going to regret all that talking later. He already was.

Izuku's eyes flickered between Sumi and Katsuki until he finally swallowed thickly. “Don't try to kill me. The doctors only stitched up the hole in your side a few hours ago.” He closed his eyes tightly.

Katsuki blinked rapidly at his alpha, those words sticking on repeat in his head. There had been a hole in his side? Just how much had the villains fucked him up? Well, clearly enough to land him in the hospital with some very good drugs running through his veins. Drugs that were clearly impairing his thought process.

'Not the point right now, dumbass,' Katsuki silently reprimanded himself.

'Alpha offer. Alpha wants. Give to alpha. Care for alpha,' his omega chanted, nearly prancing from one side to the other, 'Alpha offer family. Alpha offer commitment. Take. Agree.'

Izuku hadn't even opened his hand yet, so Katsuki turned a snarl inward, 'Shut the fuck up, and stop jumping to conclusions.'

'Omega conclusions. Our conclusions. Want. Take. Mate. Alpha. Family.'

Mentally rolling his eyes, Katsuki tried to ignore his omega's constant stream of consciousness in exchange for watching Izuku closely. Slowly, his fingers uncurled, and Katsuki's brain completely shut off. The monitor over his shoulder picked up its pace. His omega began to leap for joy in his chest, each jump punctuated by a beat of his heart.

When Katsuki just continued to stare, Izuku cautiously opened his eyes and with his mouth set in an uncertain line, opened the box. In a cushion of black velvet, a gold ring with two diamonds and a single emerald sat unobtrusively. “I've had it for awhile, but I was trying to get up the courage to actually ask you. I've never really thought about it, but after you came back, I couldn't stop thinking about it. And after the attack, I realized that I don't have the luxury of being afraid.” Inhaling deeply, Izuku finally met Katsuki's eyes. “I want to spend my entire life with you and Katsumi. I want to be your husband, your mate, a father to our daughter and everything in between. If you weren't in a hospital bed right now, I'd get down on one knee, but since you are, I'll just ask. Katsuki Bakugou, will you marry me?”

Completely speechless, Katsuki just continued to stare down at the ring in Izuku's hands. He realized Izuku's hands were shaking about the same time he realized that his eyes were filling with tears.

“K-Kacchan?”

“Papa! Answer Daddy!” Sumi cried, bouncing excitedly beside him on the bed, grinning from ear to ear. “Come on! Come on! Come on!”

Instead of answering aloud, Katsuki just stuck out his hand.

A sigh exploded from Izuku's chest. “Thank god,” he whispered, setting the box off to the side as he took Katsuki's hand in his mangled ones to slip the ring on his finger.

Katsuki dragged him forward, pressing their mouths together while Sumi cheered loud enough that a nurse peaked into the room. “One condition. You stop running headlong into situations that will get you killed,” he said.

“Okay, but only as long as you don't end up in situations that land you in a hospital bed. My heart can't handle it,” Izuku whispered against his lips, eyes still closed even though Katsuki's eyes were open again, “I can't go through this again. I don't want Katsumi to go through it again. You two have been through enough.”

“All three of us, but now you know how I felt every time I saw you in a hospital bed.” Izuku didn't need to open his eyes for Katsuki to see him roll them.

Sumi wiggled her way between them. “Does that mean Daddy is going to come live with us from now on?”

“I wasn't aware that he wasn't already,” Katsuki said snarkily.

“Yay!” Sumi swung around on the bed to face the nurse and Best Jeanist who was now beside her. “My Daddy and Papa are going to get married! And when Papa gets pregnant again, I'm going to have a little brother and maybe even a little sister! And Uncle Eiji is going to be Best Man, and oh! Uncle Tsu! You can be ring bearer! Wait, no! I'm going to be ring bearer, but you can walk with me!”

A thin blonde eyebrow rose, but Best Jeanist didn't say anything as Izuku and Katsuki began to splutter.

“Woah!” Katsuki croaked, pain thrumming through his neck, but he couldn't stop, “Who said I was gonna give you a brother, little monster? You're already enough. Just be happy with your cousins.”

As their banter continued between the three of them around and around, Katsuki couldn't find it in himself to be embarrassed with Best Jeanist and the nurse's eyes on them. This was his family. This was his mate and his daughter. When their wedding day came, he was going to scream that truth from the rooftops.

He'd never been happier in his life.

[ashes-to-asher]

I do not belong

This is a vent.

It will likely make people uncomfortable.

No one is by any means obligated to read it, nor is anyone obligated to respond; just let me scream into the abyss.

TW for aphobia, erasure, gatekeeping, etc.

...

When I was 15, I tried to join the LGBT club at my high school. I had known for years that I wasn’t sexually attracted to anyone, but I wouldn’t hear the term “asexual” until I was 16. Evidently, no one at the club had ever heard the term, either.

I began to describe my experiences, but one of the people in the club, a senior (so, probably 17 or 18 years old), cut me off. She told me that I was just a closeted lesbian, and that one night with her would “fix” that. I left the meeting early, and never went back.

(It’s probably worth noting that the adult facilitator freaked out, and told her the comment was inappropriate; however, his freak out was over the fact that I was underage, not over the blatant aphobia, nor the sheer hypocrisy of a lesbian using that kind of “logic.”)

When I was 19, I tried to join a different LGBT group at a local university. That group accepted that I was asexual, but they had other issues. I am biologically female, but I evidently present very masculine. I do not know if I am a woman or not, but I know I am not a man.

This group assumed that I was trans. When I tried to explain my experiences with gender, and how I don’t feel very strongly about it one way or the other, I was again cut off. I was told that I was trans, and I just needed to come out of the closet.

Again, someone else tried to tell me what I am, and tried to force me out of a closet that I was never in to begin with. And, again, I never went back.

I do not know what I am in terms of gender. I know I am not a man, but I don’t exactly feel like a woman, either. I don’t mind she/her pronouns, but I don’t like being called “lady” or “miss” (I actually kind of like being called “sir”). I am likely some form of nonbinary, but I have been left afraid to explore further.

When I was 21, I was called transphobic for not embracing a past abuser who happens to be trans.

My brother, who has left me scarred in more ways than one, is trans (ftm). When he came out, he got involved with some of the LGBT organizations in our city. He got to them first, and he told them his version of events. He told them that he is a saint who has never done anyone any harm, and that his evil family cut him out because of his gender identity.

They took him at his word.

I have been told that I should be ashamed for not “supporting” my brother. I have been told that I am a traitor to the LGBT community. I was harassed and attacked when I reached out to those organizations to learn about myself. In their minds, they already knew everything they needed to know about me.

I was not allowed to speak in my own defense. I was not allowed to tell my side of the story. In their minds, the conversation was already over.

My voice was stolen from me by the very people who swore to give a voice to the marginalized.

And, again, I never went back.

My experience with the LGBT community has been fraught with toxicity.

While I consciously understand that these people are a minority among the community, I cannot escape the fear that has wormed its way into my subconscious.

And I don’t mean phobia.

I mean a fear of expressing myself. I mean a fear of exploring aspects of my own identity. I mean a fear of not meeting others’ expectations.

For years, I have been taught that I do not belong in the very community that professes acceptance.

It’s kind of funny, actually.

All the people I’ve described thought they were being accepting.

They thought they were helping me (at least in the first two instances).

But none of them actually listened to me.

And I’ve grown so used to this that I no longer need others to silence me; I silence myself.

I am so afraid of having a false identity imposed upon me, or being accused of being phobic, or being told that I don’t belong, that I end up stealing my own voice.

I remove myself from the conversation. I delete my words. I retract my statements.

I have effectively exiled myself.

And I can’t help but laugh at the irony of it all.

[not-oscar-wilde]

Revived

The apocalypse has been averted, the timeline fixed, and the Hargreeves siblings returned to 2019. Herb decides to do them one more favour and save the life of one Dave Katz.

I wrote a new fic! read it below the cut or on AO3.

The pain in Dave’s chest was unbearable. Klaus was above him and he was speaking, but he couldn’t make out what he was saying. He wanted to comfort him, to stop him from panicking and tell him he loved him, but he couldn’t get the words out. He could only try and keep his eyes open, to keep his eyes on Klaus and try to psychically tell him everything he needed him to know, before the pain won out and everything turned black.

And then he woke up.

Though the room around him smelled sterile, it wasn’t like any hospital or medical tent he had ever been in before. He was lying in a crisp, white bed, with a myriad of wires attached to his body. Some of them he recognised, the IV drips were standard, but the majority were completely alien to him, from those puncturing his skin to those seemingly just stuck to it.

“Good afternoon, Mr Katz,” a smooth, female voice said in an accent that reminded him vaguely of movie stars. But when Dave looked around the room, he was completely alone, accompanied only by strangely flat screens he couldn’t see properly from his position on the bed. “Please remain calm. I have notified our Medical Team that you are awake and someone will be with you shortly.” There was something wrong about that voice, some kind indescribable, minute wrongness that unsettled him.

“Where am I?” he asked.

“You are in the Intensive Care Unit of the Temps Commission Infirmary, Room 9,” the voice said.

The Temps Commission Infirmary? He’d never heard of that hospital, and it definitely didn’t look American or Vietnamese. “The what? What happened? And who are you?”

“The Temps Commission Infirmary, attached to the headquarters of the Temps Commission. You were shot through the chest in A Shau Valley, Vietnam, February 21, 1968. I am VINA, your Virtual Infirmary Nursing Assistant.”

He’d been shot. He remembered it, remembered the pain, remembered the way Klaus had screamed and held him and how he hadn’t managed to say anything before the world had gone dark. What had happened to Klaus? To everyone? “How long have I been here?”

“You have been in the TCICU for three days, six hours, and thirty seven minutes.”

But when he brought his hand up to his chest, there were no dressings, just bare, unmarked skin. If he had been there for six days, if he’d been shot… He should be dead, or at the very least, heavily bandaged. Before he could think too much about that, a door slid open like something out of a sci-fi movie, and a tall, dark skinned woman with a serious face walked in. “Good afternoon, Mr Katz. My name is Doctor Onyeka Nwoye. How are you feeling?” she asked as she approached his bed, examining the screens. If there hadn’t been much stranger things going on, he would have been mildly surprised by a black lady doctor being sent in to treat him. He forgot, sometimes, that not everywhere was like Texas. But he was immensely glad of that fact, particularly if she’d been the one to fix him up.

“I’m good,” he said, and as confusing as it was, that was true. He shouldn’t be feeling good. He’d been shot, and he felt fine. That shouldn’t be happening.

“Any pain?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Good, that’s good. VINA, anything to report?”

“Mr Katz has not experienced any physical complications during the healing process. His body has responded well to the treatment and brain scans indicate that no neurological damage has occurred,” the disembodied voice said. The voice that didn’t belong to a person at all, if Dave had understood correctly. VINA had to be some kind of automaton, a computer that could speak. He didn’t much like that.

Doctor Nwoye nodded, a faint smile tugging at her lips. “A complete success, then. I would like to keep you under supervision for another twenty-four hours, but if I have no concerns at the end of this period, I see no need to keep you here any longer.” With that, she set about detaching the various wires from his body.

“Where is here? I know we’re in some kinda hospital, the… Commission?”

“Yes. We are an organisation dedicated to fixing, monitoring, and eliminating timeline anomalies,” she said, as if that made any kind of sense. “And, in exceptional circumstances, minimising potential disruptions.”

Dave frowned, trying to translate her words into something close to regular English. He knew he wasn’t that stupid, but he sure felt it. “So I’m a- what was it? A timeline anomaly?”

“I am a doctor, not an analyst. I cannot tell you who or what the timeline anomalies are.”

“Were you there, when I got shot?” he asked instead.

Dr Nwoye laughed and shook her head. “Oh Lord, no. I do not have the disposition for time travel, and I think my wife would have my head if I were ever to set foot in the field. I work solely from inside the TCI.”

“Your wife ?” he repeated, his heart leaping. This was a woman with a wife. A woman in a world where she could not only love another woman, but marry her and be able to mention it so casually to a complete stranger?

“Do you have a problem with the fact your life was saved by a lesbian, Mr Katz?” she asked calmly, and his stomach sank.

“No, ma’am! I just… Where I come from, people can’t… I didn’t know there was anywhere you could have that kinda marriage.” Was this the future? The place that Klaus had talked about, had said he couldn’t ever go back to? Had Dave somehow ended up there in his place, leaving Klaus in the middle of a war he’d never even signed up for? But that world was ending. Klaus had told him that. So how was he here? “I was just surprised is all. I’m… you know, the same typa way.”

The slight smile returned to the doctor’s face, and Dave relaxed. “It was 1968 you came from, yes?” So that pretty much confirmed his ‘future’ theory. Dave nodded mutely. “I cannot say I know why your survival matters so much yet your injury could not have been prevented, negating the need to bring you here at all, but I will say I am glad you are more… progressive than some of your contemporaries. It does make my job easier.”

“Doctor Nwoye, you are needed urgently in Room 14,” the disembodied voice said before Dave could formulate an answer, and the doctor sighed.

“I am on my way. Mr Katz, if you need anything, just ask VINA.” And with that, the bizarre door slid open again and Dr Nwoye was striding away.

The room was silent for a few minutes as Dave thought about this whole situation. He’d think it a fever dream, but he wasn’t sure he was creative enough to come up with all of this. “VINA?” he said eventually, feeling more than a little silly speaking to an empty room.

But the disembodied voice responded immediately. “Do you require assistance, Mr Katz?”

“I…What the hell is going on?”

“I’m afraid I don’t know what you mean. Please elaborate or rephrase to receive appropriate support.”

“I got shot . But I don’t even have a scar.”

“You are correct. Do you have any questions about your treatment?”

Dave exhaled shakily and touched his chest again. Even that should have hurt, and though he was incredibly grateful that it didn’t, that fact was in itself unsettling.  “What kinda doctor can just make a bullet wound… vanish?”

“Dr Nwoye is an expert in bioregeneration and biotemporal manipulation.”

“Bio… Jeez.” He could guess at what those words meant, but truthfully, he had no idea. It may as well have been another language. Was this the world Klaus had come from? This strange world filled with people and words he didn’t know, where gunshots through the chest were not just survivable but left no mark, where unseen people watched and spoke with you, where a black woman with a wife could be a white man’s doctor. It wasn’t a bad world. It was simply so far from the one he knew.

Some things would always be the same, though: hospitals were boring. Dave was half out of his mind with it, staring up at the ceiling and wishing he had something to do. Talking to VINA was just a little too weird, with her uncannily smooth voice and questionable existence. So he got out of bed, deciding to explore. There were no windows, only artificial lights built into the ceiling. He couldn’t even tell what time of day it was. The room was neither warm nor cold, despite the fact he was wearing only white cotton shorts.

The door that the doctor had come in through didn’t have a handle. Instead, he found a panel of buttons on the wall beside it and pushed one hopefully. With a hydraulic hiss, the door opened and he stepped out into the hallway. “Please remain in your room. If you require assistance, this can be provided. If you are searching for the bathroom, this can be located through the other door within your room.”

It was strange, being scolded by someone - or something - he couldn’t see, and in such a calm manner. But Dave obeyed and stepped back inside the confines of his room. He may as well check out the bathroom if he wasn’t allowed anywhere else.

There were clothes folded up on top of a cabinet next to the shower, accompanied by a ziplock bag of toiletries and a towel. He figured those must be for him. He was about to strip off, out of the plain white shorts he’d been left in, when a wave of self-consciousness overtook him. “VINA?” he said hesitantly.

“Do you need assistance, Mr Katz?”

“I, uh… Are you watching me in here?”

“I am tasked with monitoring all rooms of the Temps Commission Infirmary.”

He’d spent enough time in the military to be comfortable enough getting undressed in front of other men. But in front of a woman? Even if she might be a machine and not a real woman, it still felt wrong, somehow. “Could I get a little privacy?”

“To ensure your safety and the safety of other patients, I am required to observe at all times. Surveillance footage is wiped from my systems after two weeks and is not accessible without appropriate justification from Temps Commission staff.”

That still wasn’t exactly reassuring. Dave couldn’t even see where VINA was watching from, couldn’t work out where to position himself to turn his back. He’d been changed out of his fatigues, so someone had surely seen his naked body here before and there was no guarantee that they were all male, but the irrationality of his desire for modesty didn’t change anything.

She’s seen it all before , he told himself. There must’ve been hundreds of naked people in this hospital. And maybe this is just how things are in the future .

His shoulders dropped under the warmth and the strength of the water. It had been so long since he’d had a really good shower. He wasn’t sure he’d ever had one so good. Perhaps Klaus had had a point, waxing lyrical about the joys of a hot bath.

But then he touched his chest, touched the unblemished skin, and the touch stole the air from his lungs. He could feel it, feel himself being torn apart by the most agonising pain he had ever felt. What was the difference between warm water and hot blood? It all felt the same, running down his skin. Hands shaking, he switched the shower off and sank down to sit on the floor, his knees pulled up to his chest as if they could shield him somehow. He wanted his mom. He wanted Klaus. He wanted to be held and told that it was okay, that he was safe.

Eventually, he slowed his breathing enough to realise he was getting cold, the water having cooled on his naked body. He got shakily to his feet and dried himself off before busying himself with getting redressed. He could do this. It was systematic, routine, a way to feel just a fraction more normal, even if the clothes weren’t quite right either.

It wasn’t that he was ungrateful, but he did feel slightly strange in them. The pants seemed too fitted around the legs and a little too short, with rips across both knees. He supposed even in the future, free clothes couldn’t always be new or in best condition. But he’d be able to fix them up easily enough. He’d never been as well-taught as his sister, but he’d been so eager to copy her in whatever she was doing that his mother had decided it was easier to just teach them both.

He wondered what had happened to Marie. How long ago had it been for her since they’d last seen each other?

“Mr Katz, you have a visitor.” VINA’s voice was still startling, with no clear source and no warning.

“A visitor?” he repeated. Who was here, visiting him? Who even knew he was here?

“Would you like to allow them access to your room?”

Dave looked himself over in the mirror. His hair was still damp and the clothes may be strange, but at least he looked decent. He looked normal. He didn’t look like a man who had just been shot.

But he pushed those feelings down, squared his shoulders and kept his head high as he stepped out of the bathroom and back into the bare room. “Yeah, let ‘em in,” he agreed.

He didn’t know what he’d been expecting, but it wasn’t this. A very short man in a suit and a pair of glasses stepped into the room with an air of someone who didn’t feel quite certain how much space they were able or willing to take up.

“Hi, Mr Katz, right? I’m Herb, I’m, uh, Acting Chair here at the Commission,” the small man said with an awkward wave. “It’s good to see you up and about! And- and the timeline should be safe from any, uh, any attempts at rescue, so that’s a big bonus.”

Dave had resigned himself to the fact that everyone here was crazy. But there was something warm about Herb, something he liked. “Can you explain what’s going on? The doctor, she said something about anomalies?”

“Ah, well, in this case, we’re, uh, preventing a potential anomaly. I’ve seen firsthand what a determined Hargreeves can do, and I figured if we make sure none of them have a reason to go messing up a timeline again, it makes our jobs here easier!”

Dave’s breath caught in his throat. “You know Klaus?”

Herb giggled. “Do I know Klaus? Everyone here knows Klaus, he’s a Hargreeves . But I met him! I mean, I’m basically friends with his brother Diego, so you could say I know him better than most people here.”

Dave could barely hear what Herb was saying. His mind was racing faster than his heart, the use of ‘know’ rather than ‘knew’ enough to sustain him. He was still alive. And even if he was old now, stuck on the slow path through time, Dave knew he would still love him. He would love him until the end of the Earth. That had been a silent promise, as unspeakable as everything that they were, but as real and constant as the sun rising every morning. Forever was too much to vow in a war zone, but the intent had always been there. “Can I see him?”

“Well, that’s the plan!” Herb said brightly. “If you’re willing, we drop you off with him in 2019, there’s no need for any more time travelling shenanigans from the Hargreeveses, and we can all get back to normal!”

Fifty one years had passed. Would Klaus even still love him, after all that time? He almost couldn’t picture Klaus as an old man, not when he was full of so much energy, when he was so childlike sometimes. Was he an old man? Or had he somehow found a way back home before he had the chance to grow old? Back home... “People back home, my family… What happens to them?” he asked.

“Ah. Well, they think you’re dead. And unfortunately, they kind of had to. I’m afraid even if you turn down our offer to join Mr Hargreeves, you can’t go back to 1968. We made sure of that. And ooh, boy, that was a tricky one, but you’re not our first faked death and you sure won’t be our last!” Herb laughed, as if this was normal. As if this was simply how the world worked. And maybe it was. Maybe the world was bigger and stranger than anything Dave had ever seen. Anything but Klaus, of course. He was the maddest, strangest, most beautiful world all of his own.

In his mind, it had been just over a day since he’d seen him. But he missed him as if it had been weeks, months even. Maybe years. Did the ache dull over time? Would Klaus still be missing him as badly as he missed Klaus?

“If you’re, uh, amenable, we’ll drop you off in 2019 as soon as you’re discharged.”

It was a leap of faith into an unknown future, a new world. “I am.”

[elecman108]

Man, I forgot to post 90% of my art here for the past while. I’m gonna do an art dump in this post under the cut. Enjoy the bonk emoji if you don’t click the read more, and man am I dumb and forgetful lmao.

Includes: OCs getting names, a Sonic impression, a D&D map, homosexual energies, a sheep floating in the astral sea, a birthday drawing I already posted, Hex Maniac Ender, D&D Characters, D&D Characters as Miis in Miitopia, Little Hater Axel, local Demon in the consciousness of my D&D character yelling at him, illegal plants, a necromancer being cute, an actual event that happened in a D&D game two days ago, and Mermay drawing.

That’s everything in here as a TL;DR, I guess. Enjoy your day!

I’m gonna try and sort of have them in chronological order, oldest first, but I may end up putting them in the wrong order. If I do... Whoops, I guess?

[04/14/21] - This isn’t really new art, but I started to work on giving the four OCs of mine without a full name full names... I have not finished this bit, though. So Hunter and Akira have full names, and Warlock and Assassin only have temporary names. This may end up like Seven where I put in their names as a temporary name (7th OC I’d made at that time) and it just kind of... sticks. Lmao.

[04/20/21] - Alone on a Friday Night? God, you’re pathetic. I didn’t colour this one because it was a half-attempt at a meme image I still like it, though, so I might end up colouring it. It’s gonna appear again whenever I do my “unfinished drawings art dump” at some point probably in... June? I know I said I’d post them last month but forget it, lmao, it’ll happen eventually.

[04/20/21] - A D&D Map! This was to help me visualize the layout of my D&D character’s ship he used to be on. Also for my DM if they ever put us aboard the ship. The little fella in the corner is just there to vibe. This map is made of free to use assets from This Website, so while I’m gonna say DONT USE MY MAP WITHOUT PERMISSION, feel free to make your own!

[04/26/21] - Lesbian Day of Visibility drawing of yours truly, the disapointment! That’s... really all I have to say about this, honestly. It was just for that one day and that was it, lmao. I mean, I accidentally lined it in dark pink, so.. .That’s different, I guess?

[04/30/21] - Do Astral Seas dream of Ensorcled Sheep? Does the City know what Sheepleb is going to do? What crimes he may commit? Who knows! This was fan art of Critical Role ep. 134 if I remember correctly, right at the end when they jumped into the portal into the astral sea and Caleb was a sheep. Using my knowledge of the German language, I knew the word for “shit”, and had to use it.

[05/07/21] - This was already posted, but it’s going in here to dilinuate that it was drawn at this point. Also, aside from playing Miitopia, this is all I have to show for myself until the 12th.

[05/12/21] - Hex Maniac Ender challenges you to a Pokemon Battle! WIll you win against my team? My sis, who loves fairy types, pointed out to me that there’s a fairy girl and hex maniac duo, so I’d be the hex maniac. I spent... Over a week drawing this, because I basically had to redraw the Hex Maniac art from scratch in a higher quality size, and then draw myself over it. So... You can excuse the low-effort background for once. It was basically this, and then my birthday doodle from May 1st to May 12th, and then I took a break to draw up several D&D characters quickly for fullbody references.

[05/12/21] - Remember this art I made several months ago? I finally added my other two completed characters! I have three more named but without character sheet D&D characters, so for now this is just Kara, Axel, Golden Shadow, Kau, Cecillia, and Miri. Kress, Tempest, and Melia will have to wait until I make character sheets for them to be posted, and... For when I probably make more D&D characters. I have at least 9 additional, incomplete character ideas floating around, so... I’m never gonna be done this art, huh?

[05/12/21] - Speaking of D&D characters, did you know I’ve been making them as Miis in Miitopia? So here is their finished full body art next to their Miitopia self! Some of them look a little off (Golden Shadow, Cecillia) because of limitations of the editor and shading issues, some of them look a little off (Kau, Kress) because this is a human face canvas that I’m using to make a non-human face, and some of them (Melia, Axel) look REALLY GOOD. Common traits among my D&D characters include green eyes and tall. You wanna know why? Because I am tall and... despite having red eyes, I do have green eyes under the coloured contacts.

[05/15/21] - More D&D stuff! This is based around my D&D group’s current Rime of the Frostmaiden campaign where our Goliath Fighter, Nioh, ends up getting a little bit of hate for being cocky, and our little (well over 6′) hater, Axel, is just a man full of irritation. These are the tallest two characters of the group at the moment. Someone send help. Nioh belongs to one of the other D&D players, Axel (and his stupid additude) belongs to me.

[05/15/21] - This is what me playing D&D feels like. Me, the demon entity trapped inside the head of my D&D character, yelling at them to do things while the dice decide that they’re gonna get bopped a hundred times by a yeti and somehow still survive. This is also a reference to our first or second game where I just ran off like sixty feet to one side of the battle map to fight a Crag Cat and was just in Gay Baby Jail until like two turns later when I could run back to the others. I also drew him not in his winter gear even though this is a bit from when we were atop Kelvin’s Carin in an icy cave, so maybe that’s why he’s at low HP.

[05/15/21] - Melia has good gardening tips, such as Use A Mars Mii Trap To Hide A Body Because They Are Endangered And It Is Illegal To Dig Them Up. I love her a lot, because she’s the youngest of four, all four sisters based around the different seasons. She’s based around Autumn, so she’s all orange and yellow and brown and is so cute. Also she’s Chaotic Neutral, as if she didn’t need to be mildly more threatening.

[05/15/21] - Cecillia is my Tiefling gal who lived in a very northern town plagued by cold weather and snow, and Axel is my Pirate guy who spent most of his time further south on the high seas and warmer weather. So, naturally... I’ll use the guy more acclimatized to the hotter weather in the campaign where we spend 99% of it in the snow. She uses Tarot Cards as her spell focus, and I decided to sneak my other D&D characters onto her Tarot cards so naturally, Axel is The Hanged Man, given his backstory and personality. She’s a very cheerful and friendly Tiefling Necromancer of the Hexblade, so she’d for sure take care of those around her to ensure their success. Especially if they’re on her Tarot Cards, and their spirit comes to her aid when she asks for them.

[05/16/21] - Content Warning; Ryma thinks too much into local stupid moron’s lack of knowing how to answer a question and thinks too much into the reputation of Pirates. Poor Axel, man doesn’t know how to socialize with people who aren’t pirates and is used to being hostile towards everyone, so when he’s asked a question that his answer to is “uhh... no?”, he panics and ends up making a mistake that leads him to think that Ryma can read his mind. Ryma belongs to another of the D&D players. I guess me drawing all those spicy Cow Costumed OCs earlier just brought me to drawing Axel being a bottom in this, huh?

[05/16/21] - It’s Mermay, which means more OC drawings! Here’s Theo after drinking some potion that turned him into a mermaid, and Seven, tiredly, collecting his stupid boyfriend so that Lailah can fix the fact he’s turned into a mermaid. Mer!Theo is based around his sword’s colours of indigo-purple with red accents, which looks a little weird since Theo is the Blue one of the group, but... it looks cool, I guess. Seven’s just the same outfit as always, just no gloves this time.

--

And that’s it for the art dump! This was, frankly, MASSIVE. I’ll try and remember to upload both on Twitter and Tumblr at the same time, but... Ah... I have been drawing a fair bit. Just mostly sketches and linework that I haven’t finished and may not actually finish. If they’re not completed, I’ll dump them all into something at the end of the month or whatever. Maybe you’ll get the old sketch of the Axel face in panel 3 because in the sketch phase it was an Ahegao face, in the clean sketch it was a lip bite, and in the linework and final it’s just horny face. lmao.

Top ten things I have to remember for drawing: AXEL HAS A SCAR AND GREEN EYES. I remember his eye colour now, but if you look at his fullbody ref, he’s got brown eyes. And, naturally, I keep forgetting to put in his scar. He has more, but most of them are located in areas covered by his clothes. So if I ever draw him shirtless I guess I’ll have to place them somewhere.

Also maybe finish the reference sheets I have left to finish so I can post more of them, since I have two “Pets” completed (Roko and Mona’s nameless pet), but I have to do up Hunter, Warlock, Assassin, Akira, Myuut, and Stella. I’m betting when I do complete two more, it’ll be Hunter and Akira. Those two are the most fun to draw, at least.