#if they are kind to her. gender irrelevant. expression irrelevant. all that matters is the love

[eyepatchdate]

tbh finding so much validation in this velvet icon. vtm vampires are ace and velvet still has so much love to offer, and such a sweet caring heart

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Andrew Doyle

Published: Feb 17, 2024

This is how it begins. “Why not add your pronouns to your email signature?” “Why not announce your pronouns at the beginning of meetings?” “Why not encourage your staff members to ask for pronouns in day-to-day conversation?” After all, it’s just about being compassionate and creating a more “inclusive” work environment. Only a bigot would object to that…

It’s this kind of skewed reasoning that has led to the firing of Fran Itkoff, a 90-year-old volunteer for the National Multiple Sclerosis Society, who simply expressed confusion when faced with a request that she add pronouns to her emails. “I had seen it on a couple of letters that had come in after the person’s name”, Itkoff said in an interview, “but I didn’t know what it meant”.

We can hardly be surprised when a nonagenarian is befuddled by this strange new quasi-religious ritual, so rapidly has the practice taken hold. This didn’t stop the National MS Society from turning its back on Itkoff, a volunteer whose commitment to the charity dated back for six decades. For committing heresy against the Holy Creed of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, Itkoff was immediately sacrificed. The statement issued by the National MS Society claimed that her query about pronouns was “viewed as not aligning with our policy of inclusion”.

Declaring pronouns makes little sense in any case, given that they are used in place of a name when talking about someone, not to someone. And besides, human beings are perfectly capable of determining someone’s sex without being told, usually instantaneously. Of course, according to activists, all of this is irrelevant. We are assured that sex has been superseded by “gender identity”, that mysterious sense of self that few of us believe even exists. It would be like being told to announce the colour of your aura every time you began a conversation. 

Like the vast majority of the population, I use pronouns to denote the biological sex of the person to whom I’m referring. And I certainly would not comply if commanded to declare my own due to my innate aversion to any form of compelled speech. The lessons of history are clear: when those in authority begin to demand the use of certain phrases, they have taken the first step on the pathway to tyranny. I do not wish to see a future in which we are forced to stand in lockstep and chant the approved slogans of the ruling class. 

Of course, the declaration of pronouns is far removed from any such scenario, but the principle to me is sacrosanct. I will not be told what to say by anyone, least of all those who claim to know what is best for the good of society. Authoritarians have always couched their demands in faux-benevolence, and we have seen how gender ideologues have a particular tendency to viciousness and bullying. “Be kind… or else” is not a maxim to which I am willing to capitulate. 

To ask for pronouns in the workplace is the equivalent of suggesting that employees pledge fealty to a deity they do not worship. It is a kind of test, a way to ensure that the tenets of Critical Social Justice – otherwise known as “wokeness” – are being observed. Spinoza argued that for any man to “be compelled to speak only according to the dictates of the supreme power” is a violation of his “indefeasible natural right” to be “the master of his own thoughts”. Once you agree to make statements in favour of a belief-system you do not hold, you are surrendering your agency to those who will exploit it. 

While the declaration of pronouns remains a purely voluntary matter, it is fair to say that no-one’s free speech is being violated. But the consequences for non-compliance in the workplace are becoming increasingly severe. Members of staff are passed over for promotion, they are smeared as unreconstructed bigots and “transphobes”, and eventually shunned and isolated. I have written before about friends of mine in the acting profession who feel uncomfortable in stating pronouns at the beginning of rehearsals, but know that they are unlikely to be recast if they refuse. This may not be compulsion, but it is coercion.

We see the same phenomenon on social media, where trans rights activists routinely denounce and defame those guilty of the crime of “misgendering”. They report users in the hope of seeing them banned, contact employers and claim to feel “unsafe”, and even occasionally call the police. This is the essence of cancel culture. They are, of course, free to criticise, even in a robust and rude manner. But to seek to destroy someone’s livelihood for their choice of language is fundamentally authoritarian. 

In the same vein, we have seen a handful of gender-critical feminists attacking people online for choosing to use “preferred pronouns” in certain cases. Again, the criticism is valid, but once it strays into the realm of libel, misrepresentation and character assassination, these critics are merely borrowing from the playbook of trans activists. In the tenor of some of these online free-for-alls, it has been difficult to tell one faction from the other. 

When it comes to the declaration of pronouns, I have often wondered how long it would take before requests transformed into demands. The sacking of Fran Itkoff by the National Multiple Sclerosis Society has the ring of inevitability about it. Many of us saw this coming. This is why we need to be vigilant against anyone who attempts to compel the speech of others, for whatever reason, and in whatever context. If we tolerate this inchmeal erosion of our liberties, we will doubtless live to regret it. 

--

If you haven't been following it, Fran Itkoff is a 90 year old woman who volunteered for the MS Society for sixty years after her husband had MS (multiple sclerosis). She didn't understand what all this talk about pronouns was about, asked, and was then told her volunteering services were no longer required.

Some of you may well go, "ew, LibsOfTikTok, ew, ew." Okay, but hear me out: shut up and read the screenshots. They tell the story.

Kali Kumor is the stupid little girl who removed a woman who had dedicated her life, and worked longer than this vacuous apparatchik has been alive, to helping others.

One supposes that all the MS in the world has been cured, given how eager they are to tell dedicated volunteers that they're no longer needed.

--

A few years ago, there was a fuss about atheists being turned away from volunteering activities.

This is the same principle: adherence to their dogmatic ideology supersedes what is supposed to be their organization's mission and purpose: their "telos". This is why you cannot have two "teloi." One will always win over the other.

This is what I mean by ideological capture. The telos of the MS Society is no longer services and support for those with MS, it's "Diversity, Equity and Inclusion." That's their number one objective. And that means pronoun-policing and excommunicating those who aren't part of the cult.

It would seem both humorous, being so petty and stupid, and sad, given Fran's long service to the organization, but as Andrew Doyle points out, it's more insidious than that. It's compelled speech. It's about punishing those who will decline to be part of - or even simply don't understand - the fundamentalist, puritan religious ideology these fanatics have adopted and imbued throughout the organization.

Just as you must testify to Jesus as your lord and savior in order to volunteer at a soup kitchen or to raise money for cancer, they will demand you adhere to the belief in gender thetans in mismatched meat prisons in order to volunteer for the MS Society. In the name of "Inclusion,"

As Fran mentions, the MS Society has always been inclusive, but what she doesn't understand is that it's now Inclusive™, a brand name which doesn't mean including as many people as possible but including as many members of their cult as possible.

They're not looking for behaviors - e.g. respect, tolerance, etc - they're looking for beliefs. Enforcing a particular ideological belief system. They don't care that you might be an atheist who subscribes to secular humanism, or you could be a Xian who believes we're all children of God, they want to make you believe what they believe.

Resist it. They'll try to act like you're just being unreasonable for a small accommodation, but they know that it's how they get you to start complying with their demands. Like Islam, it's one little thing at a time. Don't draw pictures of Muhammad, that's not a big ask is it? Then it's respecting the Quran, then it's not blaspheming Muhammad or Allah, and so on.

[getvalentined]

Has anyone asked about Seem for the character ask game?

HIGH PRIEST SEEM OF THE GOLDEN ORDER

🎟️ SEXUALITY HEADCANON: Seem is completely and totally pansexual. Sex and gender don't matter to her at all.

⚧️ GENDER HEADCANON: This depends on which version of her I'm working with, but generally I read Seem as some flavor of nonbinary. The devs refer to her with she/her pronouns, while the only pronoun ever used for her in-game is they, which is pretty distinct—particularly for a game that came out in 2004.

💕 A SHIP: Jak/Seem is my #1 top favorite pairing in the entire series. The progression of their canonical relationship is one of my favorite things, because it takes the entire game to get to the point where they admit any kind of reliance on one another, and at that point they're so comfortable with each other that neither of them question the other—I don't think it's much of a jump to assume that could develop into something other than a platonic relationship with more time.

🖇️ A BROTP: In canon, Seem+Daxter for sure. The idea of the two of them taking turns dragging Jak away from his more self-destructive behaviors, conspiring with each other to make sure he eats and sleeps and slows down is one of my favorite things. In a different world, I love love love the idea of Seem and Gol Acheron getting to know each other. I've RP'd and plotted out multiple AUs with this concept, generally resulting in Gol referring to Seem as "the little Light Sage." She's studied his research for her entire life, so she has a healthy dose of respect for him, megalomania notwithstanding.

🚫 A NOTP: Would you believe people used to ship Seem with Veger? Not like...a lot. But it happened. That one gets a yikes from me.

💭 A RANDOM HEADCANON: Seem is Onin's granddaughter; Onin was the leader of the Order when Praxis had the Precursor monks banished from Haven following the fall of the holy district, but she apostatized in order to be allowed to stay and continue to provide guidance to city leadership—because that's what she was supposed to do, Onin is omnipresent in time due to overexposure to light eco in early adulthood, so this wasn't an act of selfishness but an acceptance of fate. (Y'know Everything Everywhere All At Once? Onin is kinda like that, but it's less of a constant jumble.) Seem was obviously very young at the time, but given that her mother died in the aforementioned destruction of the Sacred Site, that made her the next in line to become High Priest; regardless of her age and inexperience, not to mention the fresh trauma of her mother's death, Onin allowed Seem to be thrown into the wasteland to die along with everyone else. The fact that she not only survived but thrived, reuniting with Damas and reclaiming the Order's oldest temple, is irrelevant to Seem with regard to her feelings on the situation. She's never forgiven Onin for this, and she never will.

🗣️GENERAL OPINION: Favorite character in the whole series. I named a cat after her. I love her more than I can express.

[nicklloydnow]

“The phrase toxic masculinity was coined in the 1980s by a psychologist named Shepherd Bliss. He was a central figure in what he named the “mythopoetic” manhood movement. Bliss had grown up in a punishing military household with a domineering father, and he meant the new term to connote “behavior that diminishes women, children, other men,” a way “to describe that part of the male psyche that is abusive.”

It was a potent phrase, one that expressed something that had never had a name—that there is a particular poison that runs in the blood of some men and poses a deep threat to women, children, and the weak. The phrase didn’t break into the common culture until relatively recently, when the crimes of Harvey Weinstein and his ilk needed to be understood with some kind of shared language. They were men, but they were the kind of men who are filled with poison.

As it is with most new terms that roar quickly and powerfully into the culture, toxic masculinity was a rocket ship to the moon that quickly ran out of fuel and fell back to Earth.

(…)

Why don’t these qualify as toxic masculinity? One suspects it is because murder, rape, and kidnapping are serious, and “toxic masculinity”—as we now use the term—is trivial. Still, I use it in this essay, because in its grammar we find something instructive. If the noun masculinity can be modified by the adjective toxic, then there must exist its opposite, which can be revealed by a different adjective. What is it?

The opposite of toxic masculinity is heroic masculinity. It’s all around us; you depend on it for your safety, as I do. It is almost entirely taken for granted, even reviled, until trouble comes and it is ungratefully demanded by the very people who usually decry it.

Neither toxic nor heroic masculinity has anything to do with our current ideas about the mutability of gender, or “gender essentialism.” They have to do only with one obdurate fact that exists far beyond the shores of theory and stands on the bedrock of rude truth: Men (as a group and to a significant extent) are larger, faster, and stronger than women. This cannot be disputed, and it cannot be understood as some irrelevancy, because it comes with an obvious moral question that each man must answer for himself: Will he use his strength to dominate the weak, or to protect them?

Heroic masculinity is the understanding that someone has to climb the endless staircases in the towers. On 9/11, 343 New York City firefighters died at Ground Zero, and there wasn’t one of them who didn’t know, or at least suspect, that he was climbing to his death. They didn’t do it because of a union contract or an employee handbook. They climbed those towers because they knew that it must be written into the American record that heroes were there that day, and that the desperate people inside those buildings had never—not once—been abandoned.

(…)

These examples are about heroic masculinity at its most extreme. Heroism is usually much less dramatic. You can see it every time a high-school kid puts himself between a girl and some boy who’s hassling her, and every time a man steps up to another man who is screaming—or worse—at a woman. Girls and women do this, too. But the kind of men who harass women don’t tend to listen to them.

Toxic and heroic masculinity can easily exist in the same man. There are plenty of examples of a bad man who sees something unjust and who suddenly—if only for the minutes it takes to stop another man from harming someone—puts a stop to it. For that tiny stretch of time, he is connected to greatness.

(…)

We know from experience, if we have lived long enough—and from thrillers if we have not—that there can be something deeply attractive in a man who is strong enough to hurt but also to protect. It is the knife’s edge of masculinity that women negotiate. No matter how far women have come in the modern world, the fact of male power remains a deep and, I would imagine, primal attraction for many women. How could it not be?

The next question involves the police, the overwhelming majority of whom are male, and the fact that so much corruption and malevolence exist within the ranks. There are many jobs, usually those that involve the possibility of danger and the conferring of power—that are appealing to both kinds of men. The bad cops reveal how malevolent a force manhood can be if exerted against the innocent. The good ones remind us that in the moment of violence, laws won’t protect us, and norms won’t protect us. In the moment of male violence, the best luck you’ll ever have is for a good cop to be nearby.

(…)

What if we understood that boys are born into a destiny, not a pathology?”

[lilacerull0]

I don't like Amy and I don't like her ending up with Laurie guy. I mean, they're not really in love, she's just a replacement. But this is not a sassy thing, can I ask what you like about her/them? I see you talk a very lot about her/them and I'm a curious man!!!!!!!!!

Am I being annoying or a burden if I ask you to let me see your point? Maybe I just must look at things on another pov.

I'm anonymous cause you could think ew, a man liking Little Women concept...

Hey!!!!! I actually recognize my own way of thinking here, not when it comes to your opinion on the matter, but the approach taken. I tend to consider all the options before "closing the case" too so the answer is no. You are definitely not being annoying! And before I start rambling, I need to address the last paragraph of your ask aka 🧙‍♀️I NEED TO YELL AT YOU🧙‍♀️!!!!!! Because!!!!! Little Women is a lot about gender and how it's perceived, I spend most of my time here talking (💫screaming💫) about that particular aspect of the story hence there's no reason at all to judge you or anything like that? In case you're saying that in wish to manipulate me into liking you despite disagreeing with your initial statement: smart move.

If you know anything about my blog you'd know that I'm not that attached to the romance of shipping. I appreciate the beauty of a fictional dynamic regardless of the label anybody might put on it. The concepts of endgame and shipping in a classic sense are pretty irrelevant to me, I just need "my ships" to be a hundred bus stops away from boring and I'm hooked. That's how I feel about Amy and Laurie, I just don't care about romance of it that much. What does fascinate me about their relationship is how perfectly balanced it is? I always say that Jo, Amy and Laurie, at their centre, are incredibly similar people who aren't too fond of... well, being similar to each other. (which has a lot to do with the ambitious streak each of them has, though it manifests in a different way with all of them) Jo and Laurie shared similarities that led them to finding comfort and understanding in another human being which is such a big and important thing that meant an insane amount to both of them in an otherwise much darker adolescence. Jo and Amy share similarities that make them clash and Amy and Laurie... they aren't afraid to call each other out on their nonsense and are just as ready to point out the other's strong suits. They inspired each other!!!! Like... look at how open this conversation is:

Amy doesn't want the facade Laurie puts up for the world, she wants Laurie as chaotic and messy as he is! They've both seen the raw, unfiltered version of the other and loved each other in the face of all that messiness + both changed for the better. That's love! It also helps that they're such hopeless romantics at heart which allows them to be all extravagant and bubbly about it and not feel like they're "too much". (look at this they are. so gross.) As for Amy, I LOVE her. The funny bit with Jo is, she thinks she's a realist but she's actually a cynic, while Amy understands and sees the world for what it is (Jo is more focused on what it could be and what it isn't), faults and all and loves it. Here are some posts and writings I posted that express my thoughts on Amy more clearly because I think I'll lose my train of thought if I go any further with this:

Jo March & Amy March parallels

Amy March & Rory Gilmore parallels + magic from my side blog (I think this really captures the central reason why I gravitate towards this character trope (Rory Gilmore, Amy March and Lisa Cuddy come to mind immediately)"the world is hard on ambitious girls" summarises it quite well, to quote Amy herself)

my writing that's more of an analysis than a fanfic:

quick to see and feel beauty of any kind (a little exploration of Amy/Laurie, Amy centric with flickers of Jo/Laurie and Amy/Laurie, it's how Laurie's hopeful and dream-like notions inspire Amy's more grounded ones and vice versa)

flickers of light (in which I tackle Amy's artistic struggles in detail)

[snowlikeash]

When I was young, I danced.

When I was young, I danced. I credit it for giving me an advantage later in life when I began to scale rooftops and cross laundry wires, death a mere misstep away. But I was not thinking of learning to sneak like a thief when I was a boy. I was excited for the pagentry, the bright swaths of color and shimmer, a visual delight for any child. I began at the tender age when gender is irrelevant, lest your parents enforce it: I did not understand that ballet could be a "sissy" sport, that dance was some kind of portal to femininity. My father and mother were nothing but encouraging, as it got me out of the house and among other people, a mix as colorful as our sequin-studded costumes.

I was a decent performer, though I had to take a season off for my broken leg. I was stiff when I returned, but did well enough to portray Puck in our child-friendly production of Midsummer's Night. My costume was pale green, gold and brass sparkling in stripes, and on my head was a saytr's crown, leaves and twigs forming horns above my ears. My mother had dug up one of her old fur coats from her childhood as anything tighter would catch and unthread the faux jeweling. I pranced down the street, androgynous as a Greek muse, warm in the vintage mink, my fingers pink with cold.

I forget who suggested we cut through Park Row. In earlier years, I blamed myself. But I realize that no adult would be that indulgent, and I feel there had to be something else I'd missed, something that we were avoiding to take such a detour. Perhaps the press, or for my mother's nerves, or for my father's persistence on getting us home at a decent time on a Sunday night.

Whatever the cause, we took the cut. The dingy puddles seeped into my soft shoes. My father was complimenting me; my mother was ruffling my hair. I cannot remember what they said. The man stepped out from the shadows, his gun shaking, his face drained of color, waxy with withdrawal.

My mother's hand went in front of me. She stepped in front of my father, her heels clicking in the mud.

"I'll give you my pearls," she said, taking off her necklace. "And my purse, and you should go."

"Pearls're worth shit," he said. He took my mother's purse, though. My father dug out his wallet.

"We don't want trouble," my father said. He handed it to my mother, who handed it to the man. Her hands were shaking as badly as his. She still held her pearls.

"The fur's worth something," the man said. He went for me, reaching for my wrist. My father pulled me back, instinctively. My mother leaned in, grabbing for the man's arm. She pulled him up.

The gun went off. I saw my mother slump before me, her pearls scattering on the ground. My father shouted, shoved me behind him, "Run, Bruce," he said. He went for the gun and was shot twice. He fell, gasping.

The man towered over me, spittle on his mouth.

"Look what you made me do," he said to me.

He ripped off my coat. I spun around in a pirouette as he did, like we were on the ballroom floor. He stumbled away. The night's cold bit through me. I went to my mother, and gently shook her shoulder.

"Mom?" I asked. Her head tipped back, limp. I saw the shot had gone through her eye and out the back of her skull. I pushed myself back on my hands, and my father grasped at my hand.

He could not talk. He was drowning in his own blood, and it bubbled out of his mouth. His eyes, the same color as mine, were trying to focus. He reached his hand up to touch my cheek, but never got that far. I sat, dumb and still, as I watched his eyes unfocus.

When they found me, I had screamed my throat raw. They took pictures of me for evidence. Years later, I forced myself to look at them: I was showered in my mother's brain matter, and my father's blood all over my pale green costume. I was looking at the camera, my expression strange. It was not empty, as I'd imagined. I was pleading in that picture. Pleading without words, without understanding of what I needed.

Help me, I said, in those pictures, look what I made him do.

[misswenndy]

Submissive Men

I think it’s time someone cleared the air around what it means to be a submissive man.  The public perception of a submissive man is not a good one.  There is a huge taboo on it, and many misperceptions on what a submissive man actually is. This is really sad, because many women are missing out on some fantastic men, that just might meet them on all the levels they always wished a man could meet her on.  But since he admits he’s submissive, he is often dismissed as a potential partner in her eyes, due to these misunderstandings.

First of all, the biggest misperception  is that being submissive is weak.  Now lets take a look at this from a few angles.  Being submissive can simply mean, he likes to be led, and he likes to put others before himself.  That he is less aggressive, but more compassionate and thoughtful and selfless.

Now many women, like chivalry, and being courted.  For chivalry to exist, men must put aside their own needs and put hers first, for “regular men” this usually comes with the ulterior motive to get into her pants.  For a submissive man, this comes naturally and his desire to make her happy, and putting her first, makes him happy. So, does a man that wants to please, and wants to make her happy, does that make him weak? In what way?  

Now if you turn it around and look at a “regular man” who is courting and being chivalrous simply to get into her pants for his own selfish needs what do you see?  I see a man that simply wants to use her, and once he’s “conquered” her, he will likely move onto the next woman that he deems worthy of chasing.  Her happiness is often a non issue to him as long as he gets laid.  This is what we see in night clubs and bars all over the world. This isn’t uncommon.  We live in a world where we actually have to explain the definition of consent, lets not forget that.

So, how is a submissive man weak, compared to a “ regular man”?  If you really have a good look, the “regular man” has no commitment, he has no burdens, no sacrifices, therefore, where is the strength?  When you look at the submissive man, he has to put aside his own needs, that takes strength.

He has a willingness to learn who she is, and what she needs, and strive to make her happy, that takes a lot of mental strength and self control.  And, all of that, is before she is even interested in dominating him, he must show and prove his strength of character to her, long before she even considers the idea.  

So he must be strong on the emotional level as well as mental.  Now physically, “regular men” and submissive men, is quite irrelevant. There are submissive men of all forms and “regular men” of all forms, so this isn’t about who is physically stronger. So that’s a non issue.

Physically however, submissive men, tend to be more diplomatic, and try to resolve problems without resorting to violence whenever possible.  “Regular men” on the other hand, tend to be more aggressive, and lack empathy to greater degrees, and tend to resort to violence before proper communication. This is seen all the time in road rage and so on, and lets not even get into rape and all that…

Another misconception about submissive men, is that, they’re gay.  This one is huge, and makes many submissive men hide in the closet afraid to express their submissive tendencies because of the strong taboo.  Being submissive, and being gay, are extremely different things.  That includes submissive’s that gravitate toward cross dressing.  Submissive men, may be a little more gentle, and sometimes a little less masculine. At the same time, we do have a huge issue of toxic masculinity in the world.  So submissive men kind of bring a bit of a balance to what it means to be masculine.  Men are brought up into a world, that teaches them that showing emotions as a man is gay or weak.  

Submissive men, want to show their emotions, because they understand that suppressing these emotions isn’t healthy for anyone in their lives.  Allowing emotion to flow freely through them, enables them to be vulnerable with the women in their lives, who are no strangers to vulnerability, with toxic masculinity always chasing her.

When you take a good look at vulnerability in this way, you can begin to see it as a strength and not a weakness.  A submissive man allowing himself to be vulnerable means he must open up in all the ways he fears the most.

In other words, he must face his deepest fears, and allow himself to be naked, emotionally with his partner.  This is something many men, never, ever, experience.  They’re not strong enough to let go that much.  They’re too busy believing that being macho and unfeeling is somehow the only way to be strong in this world, and as a result we have a world at war, which is nothing more than a big dick contest.

So submissive men, actually bring a balance to masculinity, that can meet the feminine on the levels most men never can. So instead of seeing submissive men as being gay, perhaps we can change the perception to having the balls to be emotional.

Even if a submissive is a cross dresser, or a sissy, it does not mean he is gay.  It means, he wants to understand the feminine, that the raw power felt exploring what it means to be feminine, humbles him as a man.  It actually helps him become a better man, because he is balancing his masculine and feminine sides within him, which will give him a stronger intuition, bring him more in touch with his body, and the natural world.  

It will make him feel more alive, more in tune, and give him heightened senses.  So exploring the feminine side isn’t necessarily a bad thing for a man to do, and I would recommend that all men be open minded enough, and dare I say, strong enough to actually explore it a little.  

Now many men, especially if not submissive, reading this, would be offended by that.  If you’re not comfortable enough to explore the feminine side, how can you call yourself a macho man? There’s a weakness there, inhibitions, fear of vulnerability. It has nothing to do with being gay, that’s the excuse that you come up with to rationalize your decision to never explore it.  The ego in full force.

There is only one thing that makes anything gay, and there is nothing wrong with being gay either. But lets at least get our definitions straight.  The only time anything is gay, is if it’s being done, or desired to be done, with the same gender.  That’s it, nothing more.  

A girl can take a man up the ass with a strap on, and it’s not gay. It’s anal sex. It’s not gay sex.  He can desire to be taken up the ass by his girlfriend, or even on his own, with a butt plug.  Again, not gay.  If he desires a man to be doing it, then yes, that’s gay.  A man wearing panties is not gay either. A man being feminine isn’t gay. A man being with another man, masculine or feminine, that’s gay.  I think you’re getting the point I’m making?

I hope you are, because, the stigma is ridiculous, and the misperception needs to rectified. There are so many submissive men in this world that deserve a chance.

Submissive men must be so strong, to face the extreme levels of vulnerability to submit to a woman in a relationship, that strength and value is often not given credit.  So much of what we see on the internet portrays submissive men as weak, and worthless, to be degraded and humiliated and treated like a dog.  Now, the idea of the things above, in fantasy, can be a turn on, because it caters to a submissive’s desire to submit, no matter how hardcore.

But in reality, it’s a very different picture. In reality it can be a whole lot more romantic and intimate, passionate and charming.  A submissive can be cherished by a woman, and make a fantastic partner that can really meet her on all the right levels and satisfy her needs, not just sexually, but around the house, and in life in general.  He wants to. He needs to.  

It’s a part of who he is, to make her happy is to make him happy.  He’s a man with the ulterior motive of making her happy to make him happy. It’s a very different approach than simply getting laid and moving on to the next.  

A relationship with one partner dedicated to making the other partner happy, is difficult to fail.  It sets a foundation from the start and it has the ability to evolve, because communication is open.  Trust is inherent.  Where there’s trust, there’s always going to be passion and intimacy.  Without trust, there are always insecurity issues, cheating issues, masturbation issues…. etc… With a submissive man, all of those issues are non existent.  It helps her to fully relax knowing he’s there for her, without any doubt of his intentions.  How many women and men, could benefit from this kind of relationship?

And that, is precisely why I wrote a book dedicated to introducing this kind of relationship in a gentle way that doesn’t scare people away with intense fetishes or erotica. A practical approach to a relationship that can set you both free in ways you can’t even imagine yet.  The human body is designed to love, to feel, to be vulnerable, to let go of inhibitions and be accepted for who you really are, with another, down to the deepest level of your soul.

[hellomynameisbisexual]

As a nonbinary bisexual, I’m no stranger to people erasing me and telling me that I’m something I’m not. With the rise of terms like “pansexuality” and “omnisexuality,” many people unfamiliar with the true nature of bisexuality now think that it’s transphobic or otherwise binary — some go so far as to claim bisexuals only believe in two genders.

People assert that, while bisexuality allegedly means “attraction to two genders,” pansexuality and omnisexuality, unlike bisexuality, denote “attraction to all genders.” It’s easy to think this way if only examining the terms at face value, but this comparison is an outright lie. Some others say that new labels were a response to transphobic exclusion from the bisexual community — this is similarly not the case. (I’ll be compiling a piece on the history of the “pansexual” label at a later date.) Using this “reasoning” to separate bisexuality from these other terms is woefully inaccurate and disrespectful to bisexual and transgender people.

While there are cissexist definitions of bisexuality, that holds true for “gay” and “straight,” too. Bisexuals have also described our orientation as attraction regardless of gender¹ for decades — at least fifty years or so — and we still do. Before words like “transgender” and “nonbinary” came about, bisexuals still often saw themselves as attracted to people beyond gender.

Androgyny and gender-nonconformity are also a staple in bisexual culture. Major bisexual icons throughout history explored and embraced it. Look at bisexual chic, especially the glam rock era. Some bisexual activists and organizations have historically included and allied with transgender and nonbinary people, and many of us are transgender or nonbinary ourselves.

Below are just a few examples of the hidden secret of our gender-expansiveness. (Including a quote here does not equal my approval of what was said. Keep in mind the times during which they were recorded as well as the footnotes.)

Sources without links can be downloaded for free from ZLibrary, borrowed from the Open Library, or found wherever you purchase or borrow physical books. Sources without a year next to them are those for which I could not find the publish date.

“…the very wealth and humanity of bisexuality itself: for to exclude from one’s love any entire group of human beings because of class, age, or race or religion, or sex, is surely to be poorer — deeply and systematically poorer.”

— Kate Miller (1974)

“It’s easier, I believe, for exclusive heterosexuals to tolerate (and that’s the word) exclusive homosexuals than [bisexuals] who, rejecting exclusivity, sleep with people not genders…”

— Martin Duberman (1974)

“Margaret Mead in her Redbook magazine column wrote an article titled ‘Bisexuality: What’s It All About?’ in which she cited examples of bisexuality from the distant past as well as recent times, commenting that writers, artists, and musicians especially ‘cultivated bisexuality out of a delight with personality, regardless of race or class or sex.’”

— Janet Bode, “From Myth to Maturation,” View From Another Closet: Exploring Bisexuality in Women (1976)

“Being bisexual does not mean they have sexual relations with both sexes but that they are capable of meaningful and intimate involvement with a person regardless of gender.”

— Janet Bode, “The Pressure Cooker,” View From Another Closet (1976)

“A sex-change night club queen has claimed she had a bizarre love affair with rock superstar David Bowie. Drag artiste Ronny Haag said she lived with the bisexual singer while he was making his new film, “Just a Gigolo,” in Berlin. […] Ronny says: ‘I am a real woman.’”

— Kenelm Jenour, “I Was Bowie’s She-Man!”, Daily Mirror (1978)²

“[John] reacted emotionally to both sexes with equal intensity. ‘I love people, regardless of their gender,’ he told me.”

— Charlotte Wolff, “Early Influences,” Bisexuality, a Study (1979)

“On Saturday, February 9, San Francisco’s Bisexual Center will conduct a Gender/Sexuality Workshop. ‘We will explore the interrelationships of gender feelings and sexual preference… We will discuss sexuality and whether we choose to play out the gender role assigned to us by society or whether we can shift to attitudes supposedly held by the opposite gender, if those feel good to us. We will deal with the issue of the TV/TS [transvestite/transsexual] in transition and how sexuality evolves as gender role changes. We will attempt to present a summary of the fragmented and confusing information on gender and sexuality.’”

— The Gateway (1980)

“J: Are we ever going to be able to define what bisexuality is?

S: Never completely. That’s just it — the variety of lifestyles that we see between us defies definition.”

— “Conversations,” Bi Women: The Newsletter of the Boston Bisexual Women’s Network (1984)

“Bisexuality, however, is a valid sexual experience. While many gays have experienced bisexuality as a stage in reaching their present identity, this should not invalidate the experience of people for whom sexual & affectional desire is not limited by gender. For in fact many bisexuals experience lesbianism or homosexuality as a stage in reaching their sexual identification.

— Megan Morrison, “What We Are Doing,” Bi Women (1984)

“In the midst of whatever hardships we [bisexuals] had encountered, this day we worked with each other to preserve our gift of loving people for who they are regardless of gender.”

— Elissa M., “Bi Conference,” Bi Women (1985)

“I believe that people fall in love with individuals, not with a sex… I believe most of us will end up acknowledging that we love certain people or, perhaps, certain kinds of people, and that gender need not be a significant category, though for some of us it may be.”

— Ruth Hubbard, “There Is No ‘Natural’ Human Sexuality, Bi Women (1986)

“I am bisexual because I am drawn to particular people regardless of gender. It doesn’t make me wishy-washy, confused, untrustworthy, or more sexually liberated. It makes me a bisexual.”

— Lani Ka’ahumanu, “The Bisexual Community: Are We Visible Yet?” (1987)

“To be bisexual is to have the potential to be open emotionally and sexually to people as people, regardless of their gender.”

— Office Pink Publishing, “Introduction,” Bisexual Lives (1988)

“We made signs and slashes. My favorite read, ‘When it’s love in all its splendor, it doesn’t matter what the gender.’”

— Beth Reba Weise, “Being There and Being Bi: The National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights,” Bi Women (1988)

“…bisexual usually also implies that relations with gender minorities are possible.”

— Thomas Geller, Bisexuality: a Reader and Sourcebook (1990)

“Many objections have been raised to the use of [“bisexual”], the most common being that it emphasizes two things that, paradoxically, bisexuals are the least likely to be involved with: the dualistic separation of male and female in society, and the physical implications of the suffix ‘-sexual’.”

— Thomas Geller, Bisexuality: a Reader and Sourcebook (1990)

“Bisexuality is a whole, fluid identity. Do not assume that bisexuality is binary or duogamous in nature: that we 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.”

— The Bay Area Bisexual Network, “The 1990 Bisexual Manifesto,” Anything That Moves (1990)

“Bisexuality works to subvert the gender system and everything it upholds because it is not based on gender… Bisexuality subverts gender; bisexual liberation also depends on the subversion of gender categories.”

— Karin Baker and Helen Harrison, “Letters,” Bi Women (1990)

“I tell them, whether or not I use the word ‘bisexual,’ that I am proud of being able to express my feelings toward a person, regardless of gender, in whatever way I desire.”

— Naomi Tucker, “What’s in a Name?”, Bi Any Other Name (1991)³

“Some women who call themselves ‘bisexual’ insist that the gender of their lover is irrelevant to them, that they do not choose lovers on the basis of gender.”

— Marilyn Murphy, “Thinking About Bisexuality,” Bi Women (1991)

“Results supported the hypothesis that gender is not a critical variable in sexual attraction in bisexual individuals. Personality or physical dimensions not related to gender and interaction style were the salient characteristics on which preferred sexual partners were chosen, and there was minimal grid distance between preferred male and preferred female partners. These data support the argument that, for some bisexual individuals, sexual attraction is not gender-linked. […] …the dimensions which maximally separate most preferred sexual partners are not gender-based in seven of the nine grids.”

— M W Ross, J P Paul, “Beyond Gender: The Basis of Sexual Attraction in Bisexual Men and Women” (1992)

“[S]ome bisexuals say they are blind to the gender of their potential lovers and that they love people as people… For the first group, a dichotomy of genders between which to choose doesn’t seem to exist[.]”

— Kathleen Bennett, “Feminist Bisexuality, a Both/And Option for an Either/Or World,” Closer to Home: Bisexuality and Feminism (1992)

“The expressed desires of [female bisexual] respondents differed in many cases from their experience. 37 respondents preferred women as sexual partners; 9 preferred men. 21 women had no preference, and 35 said they preferred sex with particular individuals, regardless of gender.”

— Sue George, “Living as bisexual,” Women and Bisexuality (1993)

“Who is this group for exactly? Anyone who identifies as bisexual or thinks they are attracted to or interested in all genders… This newly formed [support] group is to create a supportive, safe environment for people who are questioning their sexual orientation and think they may be bisexual.”

— “Coming Out as Bisexual,” Bi Women (1994)

“It is logical and necessary for bisexuals to recognize the importance of gender politics — not just because transsexuals, cross-dressers, and other transgender people are often assumed to be bisexual… […] I have talked to the bisexual practicers of pre-op transsexuals who feel they have the best of both worlds because their lover embodies woman and man together.² Is that not a connection between bisexuality and transgenderism? […] Some of us are bisexual because we do not pay much attention to the gender of our attractions; some of us are bisexual because we do see tremendous gender differences and want to experience them all. […] With respect to our integrity as bisexuals, it is our responsibility to include transgendered people in our language, in our communities, in our politics, and in our lives.”

— Naomi Tucker, “The Natural Next Step,” Bisexual Politics: Theories, Queries, and Visions (1995)

“The first wave of people who started the Bi Center were political radicals and highly motivated people. The group was based on inclusivity… for example, in the women’s groups, anybody who identified as a woman had the right to be there, so a lot of transgender people started coming to the Bi Center.”

— Naomi Tucker, “Bay Area Bisexual History: An Interview with David Lourea,” Bisexual Politics (1995)

“[B]isexual consciousness, because of its amorphous quality and inclusionary nature, posed a fundamental threat to the dualistic and exclusionary thought patterns which were — and still are — tenaciously held by both the gay liberation leadership and its enemies.”

— Stephen Donaldson, “The Bisexual Movement’s Beginnings in the 70s,” Bisexual Politics (1995)

“If anything, being bi has made me hyper-aware of the sexual differences between [men and women]. And I still get hot for both. But I do experience something that is similar to gender blindness. It’s this: being bisexual means I could potentially find myself sexually attracted to anybody. Therefore, as a bisexual, I don’t make the distinction that monosexuals do between the gender you fuck and the gender you don’t.”

— Greta Christina, “Bi Sexuality,” Bisexual Politics (1995)

“[A]nd too / I am bisexual / in my history / in my capacity / in my fantasies / in my abilities / in my love for beautiful people / regardless of gender.”

— Dajenya, “Bisexual Lesbian,” Bisexual Politics (1995)

“The bisexual community should be a place where lines are erased. Bisexuality dismisses, disproves, and defies dichotomies. It connotes a loss of rigidity and absolutes. It is an inclusive term. […] Despite how we choose to identify ourselves, the bisexual community still seems a logical place for transsexuals to find a home and a voice. Bisexuals need to educate themselves on transgender issues. At the same time, bisexuals should be doing education and outreach to the transsexual community, offering transsexuals an arena to further explore their sexualities and choices. Such outreach would also help break down gender barriers and misconceptions within the bisexual community itself. […] If the bisexual community turns its back on transsexuals, it is essentially turning its back on itself.”

— K. Martin-Damon, “Essay for the Inclusion of Transsexuals,” Bisexual Politics (1995)

“As bisexuals, we are necessarily prompted to come up with non-binary ways of thinking about sexual orientation. For many of us, this has also prompted a move toward non-binary ways of thinking about sex and gender.”

— Rebecca Kaplan, “Your Fence Is Sitting on Me: The Hazards of Binary Thinking,” Bisexual Politics (1995)

“And so we love each other and wish love for each other, regardless (to the extent possible) of gender and sex.”

— Oma Izakson, “If Half of You Dodges a Bullet, All of You Ends Up Dead,” Bisexual Politics (1995)

“Similarly, the modern bisexual movement has dissolved the strict dichotomy between ‘gay’ and ‘straight’ (without invalidating our homosexual or heterosexual friends and lovers.) We have insisted on our desire and freedom to love people of all genders.”

— Sunfrog, “Pansies Against Patriarchy,” Bisexual Politics (1995)

“In the bisexual movement as a whole, transgendered individuals are celebrated not only as an aspect of the diversity of the bisexual community, but because, like bisexuals, they do not fit neatly into dichotomous categories. Jim Frazin wrote that ‘the construction and destruction of gender’ is a subject of mutual interest to bisexuals and transsexuals who are, therefore, natural allies.”

— Paula C. Rust, Bisexuality and the Challenge to Lesbian Politics: Sex, Loyalty, and Revolution (1995)

“Is bisexuality even about gender at all? ‘I don’t desire a gender,’ 25[-]year-old Matthew Ehrlich says.”

— Deborah Block-Schwenk, “Newsweek Comes Out as Supportive,” Bi Women (1995)

“One woman expressed the desire to elide categorical differences by reporting that she finds ‘relationships with men and women to be quite similar — the differences are in the individuals, not in their sex.’ Others expressed their ideal as choosing partners ‘regardless of gender…’”

— Amber Ault, Ambiguous Identity in an Unambiguous Sex/Gender Structure: The Case of Bisexual Women (1996)

“Most conceptual models of bisexuality explain it in terms of conflictual or confused identity development, [r-slur] sexual development, or a defence against ‘true’ heterosexuality or homosexuality. It has been suggested, however, that some individuals can eroticize more than one love object regardless of gender, that sexual patterns could be more variable and fluid than theoretical notions tend to allow, and that sexual desire may not be as fixed and static in individuals as is assumed by ‘essential’ sexual categories and identities.”

— E.Antonio de Moya and Rafael García, “AIDS and the Enigma of Bisexuality in the Dominican Republic,” Bisexualities and AIDS: International Perspectives (1996)

“I’m bi. That simply means I can be attracted to a person without consideration of their gender.”

— E. Grace Noonan, “Out on the Job: DEC Open to Bi Concerns,” Bi Women (1996)

“BiCon should accept transgender people as being on their chosen gender, this includes any single gender events.”

— BiCon Guidelines (1998)⁴

“The probability is that your relationship is based on, or has nestled itself into something based more on the relationship between two identities than on the relationship between two people. That’s what we’re taught: man/man, woman/woman, woman/man, top/bottom, butch/femme, man/woman/man, etc. We’re never taught person/person. That’s what the bisexual movement has been trying to teach us. We’re never taught that, so we fall into the trap of ‘you don’t love me, you love my identity.’”

— Kate Bornstein, My Gender Workbook (1998)

“Transsexuality and bisexuality both occupy heretical thresholds of human experience. We confound, illuminate and explore border regions. We challenge because we appear to break inviolable laws. Laws that feel ‘natural.’ And quite possibly, since we are not the norm or even average, it is likely that one function we have is to subvert those norms or laws; to break down the sleepy and unimaginative law of averages.”

— Max Wolf Valerio, “The Joker Is Wild: Changing Sex + Other Crimes of Passion,” Anything That Moves (1998)

“From the earliest years of the bi community, significant numbers of TV/TS and transgender people have always been involved with it. The bi community served as a kind of refuge for people who felt excluded from the established gay and lesbian communities.”

— Kevin Lano, “Bisexuality and Transgenderism,” Anything That Moves (1998)

“A large group of bisexual women reported in a Ms. magazine article that when they fell in love it was with a person rather than a gender…”

— Betty Fairchild and Nancy Hayward, “What is Gay?”, Now that You Know: A Parents’ Guide to Understanding Their Gay and Lesbian Children (1998)

“Over the past fifteen years, however, [one Caucasian man] has realized that he is ‘attracted to people — not their sexual identity’ and no longer cares whether his partners are male or female. He has kept his Bi identity and now uses it to refer to his attraction to people regardless of their gender.”

— Paula C. Rust, “Sexual Identity and Bisexual Identities,” Queer Studies: A Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Anthology (1998)

“Bisexual — being emotionally and physically attracted to all genders.”

— The Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network, “Out of the Past: Teacher’s Guide” (1999)

“There were a lot of transvestites and transsexuals who came to [the San Francisco Bisexual Center in the 1970s], because they were not going to be turned away because of the way they dressed.”

— David Lourea, “Bisexual Histories in San Francisco in the 1970s and Early 1980s,” 2000 Journal of Bisexuality

“Respondent #658 said that both are irrelevant; ‘who I am sexually attracted to has nothing to do with their sex/gender,’ whereas Respondent #418 focuses specifically on the irrelevance of sex: I find myself attracted to either men or women. The outside appendages are rather immaterial, as it is the inner being I am attracted to. […] Respondent #495 recalled that “the best definition I’ve ever heard is someone who is attracted to people & gender/sex is not an issue or factor in that attraction.” […] As Respondent #269 put it, “I do not exclude a person from consideration as a possible love interest on the basis of sex/gender.” […] For most individuals who call themselves bisexual, bisexual identity reflects feelings of attraction, sexual and otherwise, toward women and men or toward other people regardless of their gender.”

— Paula C. Rust, “Two Many and Not Enough: The Meanings of Bisexual Identities,” 2000 Journal of Bisexuality

“Giovanni’s distinction between what he wants and who he wants resonates with the language of many of today’s bisexuals, who insist that they fall in love with a person, not a gender.”

— Marjorie Garber, Bisexuality and the Eroticism of Everyday Life (2000)

“The message of bisexuality — that people are more than their gender; that we accept all people, regardless of Kinsey scale rating; that we embrace people regardless of age, weight, clothing, hair style, gender expression, race, religion and actually celebrate our diversity — that message is my gospel. I travel, write, do web sites — all to let people know that the bisexual community will accept you, will let you be who you are, and will not expect you to fit in a neat little gender/sexuality box.”

— Wendy Curry, “Celebrating Bisexuality,” Bi Women (2000)

“But really, just like I can’t believe in the heterosexist binary gender system, I have difficulty accepting wholeheartedly any one spiritual tradition.”

— Anonymous, “A Methodical Awakening,” Bi Women (2002)

“But there are also many bis, such as myself, for whom gender has no place in the list of things that attract them to a person. For instance, I like people who are good listeners, who understand me and have interests similar to mine, and I am attracted to people with a little padding here and there, who have fair skin and dark hair (although I’m pretty flexible when it comes to looks). ‘Male’ or ‘female’ are not anywhere to be found in the list of qualities I find attractive.”

— Karin Baker, “Bisexual Basics,” Solidarity-us.org (2002)

“Bisexual: A person who is attracted to people regardless of gender (a person does not have to have a relationship to be bisexual!)”

— Bowling Green State University, “Queer Glossary” (2003)

“The bisexual community seems to be disappearing. Not that there won’t always be people around who like to have sex with people of all genders, the community, as I’ve discussed in this book, is a different matter altogether.”

— William Burleson, Bi America: Myths, Truths, and Struggles of an Invisible Community (2005)

“Although bisexuals in general may or may not be more enlightened about gender issues, there has been, and continues to be, in most places around the country a strong connection between the transgender and the bisexual communities. Indeed, the two communities have been strong allies. Why is this? One reason certainly is, as I mentioned earlier, the significant number of people who are both bisexual and transgender.”

— William Burleson, Bi America: Myths, Truths, and Struggles of an Invisible Community (2005)

“Amy: […] But my friend’s question got me thinking: given the fact that so many bisexual friends and community members reject the idea that gender has to have a relation to attraction and behavior, why should I reject the bi label? Why did her question even come up? How relevant is gender to the concept of bisexuality? If bisexuals like me don’t care about gender the way monosexuals do, why would my identity label exclude my lovers’ gender variations?

Kim: …Like you, I’m a bi person who sees gender as fluid rather than fixed or dichotomous… I’ve also felt outside pressure to reject my bi identity based on the idea that it perpetuates the gender binary: woman/man. However, this idea reduces bisexual to ‘bi’ and ‘sexual’ and disregards the fact that it represents a history, a community, a substantial body of writing, and the right of the bisexual community to define ‘bisexuality’ on its own terms. Most importantly, this idea disregards how vital these things are for countless bi people. Identifying as bi doesn’t inherently mean anything, and it definitely doesn’t mean a person only recognizes two genders. However, to assume that bi-identified people exclude transgender, gender nonconforming (GNC), and genderqueer people also assumes they are not trans, GNC, or genderqueer themselves, when in fact, many are.”

— Kim Westrick and Amy Andre, “Semantic Wars,” Bi Women (2009)

“The [intracommunity biphobia] problem is very serious, because bisexuals, along with trans folks, are the rejects among rejects, that is to say, those who suffer from discrimination (gays and lesbians) discriminate against bis and trans folks. It is for this reason, at least here in Mexico City, that Opción Bi allies itself with transsexuals, transgender people and transvestites, and works together with them whenever possible. It seems to me we are closer to the trans communities than to the lesbian and gay ones.”

— Robyn Ochs, “Bis Around the World: Myriam Brito, Mexican City,” Bi Women (2009)

“I introduce myself as bisexual, because I am attracted to people, across gender lines, and ‘bisexual’ comes closest to explaining that.”

— B.J. Epstein, “Bye Bi Labels,” Bi Women (2009)

“Bisexuality is not some kind of middle-ground between heterosexuality and homosexuality; rather I imagine it as a way to erode the fixed systems of gender and sexual identity which always result in guilt, fear, lies[,] and discrimination.”

— Carlos Iván Suárez García, “What Is Bisexuality?”, Getting Bi: Voices of Bisexuals Around the World, Second Edition (2009)⁵

“To me, bisexuality is a matter of loving and accepting everyone equally — seeing the beauty in the human soul, rather than in the shell that houses it. Being transgender, I know firsthand that love between two people can transcend — even embrace — what society regards as taboo. Bisexuality is a mindset of revolution, a mindset of change. We’re creating a brave new world of acceptance and love for all people, of all the myriad genders and methods of sexual expression that this world contains.

— Jessica, “What Is Bisexuality?”, Getting Bi: Voices of Bisexuals Around the World, Second Edition (2009)

“Bisexuality (whatever that means) for me is about the ability to relate to all people at a deep emotional level. It is an openness of the heart. It is the absence of limits, especially those that are defined by the other person’s sex.”

— Andrea Toselli, “Coming Out Bisexual,” Getting Bi: Voices of Bisexuals Around the World, Second Edition (2009)

“Considering my personal preferences, calling myself ‘bisexual’ covers a wider territory regarding my capacity to fall in love and to share the life of a couple with another person without taking into consideration questions of gender.”

— Aida, “Why Bi?”, Getting Bi: Voices of Bisexuals Around the World, Second Edition (2009)

“I’m sure I’m bisexual because I can’t ignore the allure and loveliness of a wide spectrum of people — differentiating by gender never seemed attractive or even logical to me. […] For me bisexuality means I don’t stop attraction, caring or relationship potential based on gender; I can have sex, flirtation or warm ongoing love with anyone (not everyone, okay? That part’s a myth). […] And we have enough trouble splitting the human race into two halves, assigning mandatory characteristics, and then torturing people to fill arbitrary roles — I consider that a wrong and inaccurate way to understand human potential, and that’s also why I’m bi. Men and women are different? Honey, everyone I’ve ever met has been different. I think being bisexual lets me see each person as an individual.”

— Carol Queen, “Why Bi?”, Getting Bi: Voices of Bisexuals Around the World, Second Edition (2009)

“But to hell with respectability: the real point about being bisexual, a friend pointed out, is that you’re asking someone other than ‘What sex is this person?’”

— Tom Robinson, “Bisexual Community,” Getting Bi: Voices of Bisexuals Around the World, Second Edition (2009)

“Being bisexual… allows us to love each other regardless of our gender…”

— Jorge Pérez Castiñeira, “Bisexual Community,” Getting Bi: Voices of Bisexuals Around the World, Second Edition (2009)

“‘Hello, my name is Jaqueline Applebee… if you want to see me later, or just want a kiss, let me know as I’m bisexual, and you’re all gorgeous!’ […] I have loved men, women, and those who don’t identify with any gender.”

— Jaqueline Applebee, “Bisexual Community,” Getting Bi: Voices of Bisexuals Around the World, Second Edition (2009)

“[T]here’s nothing binary about bisexuals. Bi is just a provisional term reminding us, however awkwardly, that when it comes to loving, family and tribe, margins and middle intertwine.”

— Loraine Hutchins, “Bisexual Politics,” Getting Bi: Voices of Bisexuals Around the World, Second Edition (2009)

“My bi identity is not about who I am having sex with; it is not about the genitals of my past, current, or future lovers; it is not about choosing potential partners or excluding partners based on what is between their legs. It is about potential — the potential to love, to be attracted to, to be intimate with, share a life with a person because of who they are. I see a person, not a gender… I demand to be free to legally marry anyone without regard to their gender.”

— Rifka Reichler, “Bisexual Politics,” Getting Bi: Voices of Bisexuals Around the World, Second Edition (2009)

“To me, being bisexual means having a sexuality that isn’t limited by the sex or gender of the people you are attracted to. You just recognize that you can be attracted to a person for very individual reasons.”

— Deb Morley, “Bi of the Month: An Interview with Ellyn Ruthstorm,” Bi Women (2010)

“Q: Which gender person does a bisexual love? A: Any gender she wants.”

— Marcia Deihl, “Do Clothes Make the Woman?”, Bi Women (2010)

“While the bisexual manifesto being written following a workshop at London BiCon is still being worked on, the tweeters set to work on a shorter, snappier alternative… ‘Love is about what’s in your hearts, not your underwear.’ […] ‘We aren’t more confused, greedy, indecisive or lustful than anyone else. We like people based on personality not gender.’ ‘[W]e believe that lust is more important than anatomy.’ ‘What you have between your legs doesn’t matter. What you have between your ears does[.]’”

— Jen Yockney, “#bisexualmanifesto,” Bi Community News (2010)

“As briefly mentioned above and interlinked with the notion of ‘importance of individuality’, the binary concepts of gender and the stereotypes surrounding these is a notion which each of the [bisexual] women interviewed fundamentally reject. The participants here were keen to distance themselves and their experiences of romantic relationships from any notion of hetero-normative gender boundaries, although they did agree that unfortunately these gender boundaries still exist in contemporary society. Most participants do not link gender boundaries with concepts of romantic love; it was stated that although sometimes gender boundaries can be seen in romantic relationships this is primarily down to socialisation and the unnecessary importance that hetero-normative society places on gender roles. Therefore, gender boundaries seen in romantic relationships are not constrained by gender but instead are a product of gendered socialisation. For these women, claiming their bisexual identity and their romantic relationships illustrates the futility of binary concepts of gender as it is about individual preference or style rather than gendered norms values and expectations.”

— Emma Smith, “Bisexuality, Gender & Romantic Relationships,” Bi Community News (2012)

“And anyway, I’m generally not sexually attracted to men or women. I’m into all sorts of things, but a person being a man or a woman isn’t a turn-on. Certainly not in the same way it’s a turn off to a gay or straight person. I’m never going to think “Wow, Zie is really sexy, shame they’re a ____” because what turns me off isn’t gender.”

— Marcus, “What makes a bisexual?”, Bi Community News (2012)

“I am bisexual. That does not depend on my dating experience or my attraction specifications. It is not affected by my dislike for genitals (of any shape). All it describes is how gender affects attraction for me: it doesn’t. I am attracted to people regardless of gender, and I am bisexual.”

— Emma Jones, “Not Like the Others,” Bi Women (2013)

“I’m generally okay with ‘attraction to more than one gender’ [as a definition of ‘bisexuality’]. I think that the ‘more than’ part is important because there are definitely more than two genders. Some people like the definition ‘attraction regardless of gender’ and I like that too because it suggests that things other than gender can be equally, or more, important in who we are attracted to. I like to question why our idea of sexuality is so bound up with gender of partners. Why not encompass other aspects such as the roles we like to take sexually, or how active or passive we like to be, or what practices we enjoy? Why is our gender, and the gender of our partners, seen as such a vital part of who we are?”

— Robyn Ochs, “Around the World: Meg Barker,” Bi Women (2013)

“It may sound crazy but I’d never thought that carefully about the ‘bi’ part of the word meaning ‘two’. I’d always understood bisexuality to mean what Bobbie Petford reports as the preferred definition from within the UK bi communities: changeable ‘sexual and emotional attraction to people of any sex, where gender may not be a defining factor’. […] Participants in the BiCon discussion rejected the ‘you are a boy or you are a girl…binary’ (Lanei), all arguing that they were not straightforwardly ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’.

[…] Because they discarded the dichotomous understanding of gender, participants rejected the ideas that they were attracted to ‘both’ men and women, arguing that they did not perceive gender as the defining feature in their attraction. Kim said: I don’t think actually gender is that relevant…gender is like eye colour, and I notice it sometimes, and sometimes it can be a bit of a feature it’s like “oo, that’s nice” and I have some sorts of gender types, but it’s about as important as something like eye colour.

[…] As I came to realise that you can actually be bisexual…your desires and your attractions can wax and wane as time goes on, I realised that there was a parallel to gender: you don’t have to clearly define, you don’t have to cast off the male to be female and vice versa. Despite the fact that the conventional definition of the word ‘bisexual’ could be seen as perpetuating a dichotomous concept of gender, being attracted to both sexes, Georgina concluded that it could challenge conventional understandings of gender…”

— “Bisexuality & Gender,” Bi Community News (2014)

“My fellow bisexuals… I stand before you as an unapologetic, outspoken, bisexual activist who has intimately loved women, men and transgender persons throughout my life span of 72 years…”

— ABilly S. Jones-Hennin, “If Loving You is Wrong, Then I Don’t Want to be Right,” Bisexual Organizing Project (2014)

“Coming out as bisexual in the late 80s, when I first came across the label pansexual it didn’t involve any kind of gender nuance: it was how someone explained their bisexuality feeling interwoven with their Pagan beliefs. Back then the ‘bi’ in bisexual didn’t get talked about as having some great limiting weight of ‘two’, it was an “and” in a world that saw things as strictly either/or. As I was pushing at boundaries of discussion around gender and sexuality with people in the 90s I’d sometimes quip that I was ‘bisexual, I just haven’t decided which two genders yet’. When I started to come across people saying that bi was limiting because it meant two, a bit of me did think: oh lord, were they taking me seriously?”

— Jen, “Bi or Pan?”, Bi Community News (2015)

“Pansexuality is sometimes defined as attraction to people of all genders, which is also the experience of many bisexual people. More often than not, however, people define their pansexuality in relation to bisexuality. In response to the question: ‘What does pansexual mean?’ I’ve seen countless people reply: ‘I’m attracted to people of more than two genders. Not bisexual.’ The implication is that bisexual means binary attraction: men and women only.

Since I came out in the late 90s, I haven’t seen one bi activist organisation define bisexuality as attraction solely to men and women. Bi and trans* issues began to grow in recognition at the same time. When I use ‘bi’ to refer to two types of attraction, I mean attraction to people of my gender and attraction to people of other genders. […] …it’s so upsetting to see internalised biphobia leading many pansexuals, many of whom until recently identified as bisexual, telling us we’re still not queer enough. Gay and straight people aren’t being pressurised into giving up the language they use to describe their attractions and neither should they be. As usual it’s only bisexuals being shamed into erasing our identities and our history.

The most frustrating thing to me about the current bi vs pan discourse is that it’s framed as a cisgender vs genderqueer debate. This has never been the case. In reality, many genderqueer people identify as bisexual… To say bisexuality is binary erases the identities of these revolutionary bisexual genderqueer activists, and it erases the identity of every marginalised genderqueer bisexual they’re fighting for.”

— Sali, “Bi or Pan?”, Bi Community News (2015)

“Currently some pansexual people argue that bi is ‘too binary’ and that bisexuals are focused on conventional male/female gender expressions only. This is then taken to mean that bisexuals are more transphobic, whereas pansexuals aren’t locked into a binary so they are open to all gender expressions. However we believe this is not the case since bisexuals: ‘… do not comply with our society’s imposed framework of attraction, we must consciously construct our own framework and examine how and why we are attracted (or not) to others. This process automatically acknowledges the artificiality of the gender binary and gendered norms and expectations for behavior. Indeed, the mere act of explaining our definition of bisexual to a nonbisexual person requires us to address the falsity of the gender binary head on.’

We do not deny that in actuality some bisexuals are too bound by traditional binary gender assumptions, just as many gay, lesbian, and heterosexual, and some trans people are too. Bisexuals, however, have been in the forefront of exploring desire and connection beyond sex and gender. When anyone accuses bisexuals, uniquely, as more binary and more transphobic than other identity groups, such targeting is not only inappropriate but is also rooted in biphobia — a fear and hatred of bi people for who we are and how we love.

Confusing the issue are the definitions in resource glossaries defining bisexual, most surprisingly in newly released books including textbooks. [...] These definitions arbitrarily define bisexual in a binary way and then present pansexual as a non-binary alternative. This opens the doorway to a judgment that pansexual identity is superior to bisexual identity because it ‘opens possibilities’ and is a ‘more fluid and much broader form of sexual orientation’. This judgmental conclusion is unacceptable and dangerous as it lends itself to perpetuating bisexual erasure. The actual lived non-binary history of the bisexual community and movement and the inclusive nature and community spirit of bisexuals are eradicated when a binary interpretation of our name for ourselves is arbitrarily assumed.”

— Lani Ka’ahumanu and Loraine Hutchins, “Bi Organizing Since 1991,” Bi Any Other Name (New 25th Anniversary Edition) (2015)

“Herself a bisexual woman, [Nan Goldin] found that drag queens, to her a third gender, were perfect companions. By transgressing the bounds of the binary, they had created identities that were infinitely more meaningful.”

— Alicia Diane Ridout, “Gender Euphoria: Photography, Fashion, and Gender Nonconformity in The East Village” (2015)

“It is the job of those of us with links to children to continue to promote the language of bisexuality and validity of attraction to all genders — especially when that attraction changes over time.”

— Bethan, “Practical Bi Awareness: Teaching and LGBT,” Bi Community News (2016)

“The persistent use of the Kinsey Scale is another issue. Originally asking about the genders of people you have had sex with, more recently it gets deployed in more sophisticated ways which distinguish between sexual attraction, romantic attraction, and sexual activity. Nonetheless it is woefully inadequate in accounting for attraction to genders other than male and female — a key part of many bisexual people’s experience.”

— Milena Popova, “Scrap the Kinsey Scale!”, Bi Community News (2016)

“Robyn Ochs states where the EuroBiCon also stands for: bisexuality goes beyond the binary gender thinking. There are more genders than the obsolete idea of two: male and female.”

— Erwin, “Robyn Ochs: ‘Bisexuality goes beyond the binary gender thinking’,” European Bisexual Conference (2016)

“I call myself bisexual because it includes attraction to all genders (same as mine; different from mine).”

— Rev. Francesca Bongiorno Fortunato, “Label Me With a B,” Bi Women Quarterly (2016)

“Loving a person rather than a man or a woman: this is Runa Wehrli’s philosophy. At 18, she defines herself as bisexual and speaks about it openly. […] She believes that love should not be confined by the barriers put up by society. ‘I fall in love with a person and not a gender,’ she says. […] Now single and just out of high school, she is leaving the door open to love, while still refusing to give it a gender.”

— Katy Romy, “‘I fall in love with a person and not a gender’,” Swissinfo (2017)

“I’m bisexual so I can’t really come out as gay. When I’m gay I’m very gay. And when I’m with men then, you know, I’m with men. I don’t fall in love with people because of their gender.”

— Nan Goldin for Sleek Magazine (2017)

“I use the word bisexual — a lot / I’ve marched in the Pride parade with the Toronto Bisexual Network / I post Bi pride & Bi awareness articles all over social media / I’m seeking out dates of any and all genders / (not to prove anything to anyone, but simply because I want to)

— D’Arcy L. J. White, “Coming Out as Bisexual,” Bi Women Quarterly (2017)

“BISEXUAL — Someone who is attracted to more than one gender, someone who is attracted to two or more genders, someone who is attracted to the same and other genders, or someone who is attracted to people regardless of their gender. […] Other words with the same definition of bisexual, though they have different connotations, are ‘pansexual,’ ‘polysexual,’ and ‘omnisexual.’”

— Morgan Lev Edward Holleb, The A-Z of Gender and Sexuality: From Ace to Ze (2018)

“In the heat of July [2009], and finally equipped with a word for “attracted to people regardless of gender”, I bounded out of Brighton station with that same best friend. At the time, I didn’t know that we bisexuals have our own flag…”

— Lois Shearing, “Why London Pride’s first bi pride float was so important,” The Queerness (2018)

“Being bisexual does not assume people are only attracted to just two genders. Bisexuality can be limitless for many and pay no regard to the sex or gender of a person.”

— “The Bi+ Manifesto” (2018)

“I realized I was bisexual at age fifteen, but although I am attracted to folks of any gender, I’ve always had a preference for men.”

— Mark Mulligan, “Fight and Flight: ‘Butch Flight,’ Trans Men, and the Elusive Question of Authenticity,” Nursing Clio (2018)

“Bisexuality just became, to me, about that openness — that openness to anything, and any potential to any type of relationship, regardless of gender. Gender is no longer a disqualifier for me. It’s about the person.”

— Rob Cohen, “Where Are All the Bi Guys?,” Two Bi Guys (2019)

“Oh no, Mom. I’m not a lesbian. Actually, I’m bisexual. That means that gender doesn’t determine whom I’m attracted to.”

— Annie Bliss, “Older and Younger,” Bi Women Quarterly (2019)

“A bisexual woman, for example, may have sex with, date or marry another woman, a man or someone who is non-binary. […] If you think you might be bisexual, try asking yourself these questions: …Can I picture myself dating, having sex with, or being married to any gender/sex?”

— “I Think I Might Be Bisexual,” Advocates for Youth

“Although it’s true that people have all kinds of different attractions to different kinds of people, assuming that all bisexuals are never attracted to trans or genderqueer folk is harmful, not only to bi individuals, but to trans and genderqueer individuals who choose to label themselves as bi.”

— “Labels,” Bisexual Resource Center

“My own understanding of bisexuality has changed dramatically over the years. I used to define bisexuality as ‘the potential to be attracted to people regardless of their gender.’ […] Alberto is attracted to the poles, to super-masculine guys and super-feminine girls. Others are attracted to masculinity and/or femininity, regardless of a person’s sex. Some of us who identify as bisexual are in fact ‘gender-blind.’ For others — in fact for me — it’s androgyny or the blending of genders that compels.”

— Robin Ochs, “What Does It Mean to Be Bi+?”, Bisexual Resource Center

“… bisexual people are those for whom gender is not the first criteria in determining attraction.”

— Illinois Department of Public Health, “Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity and Youth Suicide”

“Bisexuality is sexual/romantic attraction to people regardless of sex or gender.”

— “Bisexual FAQ,” Kvartir

“Please also note that attraction to both same and different means attraction to all. Bisexuality is inherently inclusive of everyone, regardless of sex or gender.

In everyday language, depending on the speaker’s culture, background, and politics, that translates into a variety of everyday definitions such as:

Attraction to men and women

Attraction to all sexes or genders

Attraction to same and other genders

Love beyond gender

Attraction regardless of sex or gender”

— American Institute of Bisexuality, “What Is Bisexuality?,” Bi.org

“This idea [that bisexuality reinforces a false gender binary] has its roots in the anti-science, anti-Enlightenment philosophy that has ironically found a home within many Queer Studies departments at universities across the Anglophone world. […] Bisexuality is an orientation for which sex and gender are not a boundary to attraction… Over time, our society’s concept of human sex and gender may well change. For bis, people for whom sex/gender is already not a boundary, any such change would have little effect.”

— American Institute of Bisexuality, “Questions,” Bi.org

Gender-expansive (or -fluid, or -blind) descriptions of bisexuality are nothing new — and with the exception of the Getting Bi quotes, the above compilation is just what I was able to find online. Arguably, the concept of excluding genders never even crossed the mind of many twentieth-century bisexuals — not just because “nonbinary genders hadn’t entered the mainstream” — but simply because many bisexuals understand bisexuality itself as “beyond” gender. Go to any bisexual organization and they’ll tell you bisexuality is broad and can include anyone.

Of course, the above quotes do not reflect the beliefs of every bisexual — no single quote can do that. These quotes were certainly not the only variation of bisexual-given definitions of bisexuality. I’m only pointing out that the “both” descriptions are similarly not the only ones that exist.

Even then, before wider knowledge of and language for nonbinary identities, attraction to “both” men and women was attraction regardless of gender. “Both” does not purposefully keep anyone out; it only (mistakenly) assumes how many groups there are. Gender not being a make-or-break, or not caring about gender in general, doesn’t depend on how many genders there are.⁶

Not to mention, all sexualities automatically include some nonbinary people — “nonbinary” isn’t merely a third gender. The mere notion that someone could just “not be attracted” to nonbinary people as a group completely misunderstands nonbinary identity.

Some bisexuals “see a person, not a gender,” while others, like me, see a person with a gender (that doesn’t stop us from finding them attractive), if they have one. Being bisexual has made me see people in more gender-neutral ways. Our experiences are far too vast to pin down, and there’s immense beauty in that vagueness.

Also, while bisexual activism and transgender activism have frequently overlapped, plenty of cisgender bisexuals are transphobic. But this is because all sexualities have transphobes. Even if we coined a sexual identity that only transgender people could use, some identifying with it would still likely be transphobes. Why allow transphobic bisexuals to erase the attitudes of all the bisexuals before and after them?

I find it incredibly odd that people now task bisexuals with proving our inclusivity considering that, for decades, we never had to. We had always (i.e., consistently throughout history, not as in every bisexual) been warping gender norms, but it was never to debunk a myth or make ourselves look good; it was just how we were. That hasn’t changed.

One of the predominant stereotypes is still that we’re indiscriminate sluts willing to sleep with anyone, but somehow there’s a new wave of folks insisting that we require our partners to obey the gender binary. I have a severely hard time believing this conclusion is based on reality. Almost all attempts to redefine bisexuality as binary come from people who don’t identify as such.

Imagine if we performed this revisionism with the word “gay.” For this example, I’ll use “gay” to describe gay men in particular.

“Gay” only means exclusive attraction to men, so the people who use that word only like cisgender men. I’m androsexual, which means I like cisgender, transgender, and nonbinary men.

Doesn’t that sound ridiculous? So why do we only apply this rhetoric to bisexuals? (It couldn’t possibly be because of biphobia, could it?)

While it’s obviously unrealistic to say that no bisexual person has ever been transphobic, bisexual orientation is not, and never has been, about exclusion. Considering that bisexual activists were seldom (if ever) focused on the prefix in the word “bisexual,” this recent fixation people have on trying to find a way to use “two” in its definition is misguided.

Begging to differ is ignorant and arrogant, contradicting not only history but many current bisexuals who understand bisexuality as all-encompassing. Acting like it’s uniquely binary or inherently limited in any way is indisputably false and biphobic. Please stop speaking over us and erasing our history. It, like the bisexual community itself, is bountiful, beautiful, and never going away.

Here’s one final quote that, while a bit unrelated to the rest, I particularly enjoy:

“I understand bisexuality not as a mixture of homosexuality and heterosexuality as Kinsey did, nor as a particular sexuality on an equal footing with homosexuality and heterosexuality, but as a holistic view of human sexuality, in which all aspects related to human sexuality are taken into account.”

— Miguel Obradors-Campos, “Deconstructing Biphobia” (2011)

[notthatiwilleverwriteit]

I always enjoyed seeing the contrast between tianshan and zhanyi. for example the christmas special and the spa, the couples are so different In their dynamic yet they are so lovable, what do you hope to see happening in the future for the boys?

Good evening, dear anon-san!

Future-related questions have probably been the most asked ones, so I’ve already talked about my visions and headcanons for both Tianshan and Zhanyi a few times. You might want to check out the following asks:

Tianshan being physical in the future

What if HT disappeared?

Could HT fall in love with someone else in the future?

Future Tianshan from MGS’s perspective

Will there ever be a Tianshan confession?

Will Tianshan be long-distance?

My take on future Zhanyi

Will HT be able to keep MGS safe in the future?

My Tianshan “timeline”

But I feel like your question was still slightly different from the ones I’ve already answered, so I browsed through the comic again. I picked character and relationship traits that I wish will keep developing or stay the same in the future. But for more comprehensive takes, I recommend checking out the asks listed above. 

Let’s begin!

In the future of Tianshan, I wish...

...MSG will tell his mother about his relationship with HT (ch. 177):

I feel like Mrs. Mo would be shocked at first, perhaps even conflicted but ultimately she would come to be happy for her son. She knows it’s not easy to get close to him, so if someone has slipped under the rope, they’re probably someone she could approve of and trust her child to. If her son has let someone get close enough to develop feelings for them, the gender is irrelevant. Also, their relationship strikes me as the kind that MGS would be able to tell her if such time ever comes.

...MGS’s quiet “idiot” will keep occurring (ch. 185, 243):

MGS is the kind of a tsundere that will patch you up or keep you from killing yourself while scolding you softly. In his mind, HT can’t be all right in the head if he’s so eager to fight and get hurt for MGS. It’s not something MGS is used to. A part of MGS is scared of such devotion and, even more worryingly, scared for HT but it also feels kind of nice and safe. It makes him feel complicated feelings, and all the conflict and concern comes out in a softly uttered “idiot” as he watches HT standing up for someone like him.

Also, if HT thinks MGS will just listen to him and run like a coward from his own damn fight, he’s sorely mistaken. Fuck that damsel in distress crap, they’re going to run together.

..MGS will come to trust that he’s not fending for himself (ch. 188):

It’s good that he wants to be independent, but there are pretty impressive people around him if he ever needs someone to rely on. Despite how little MGS thinks of himself, they’re ready to raise hell for him.

...when HT looks at MGS like that and says that, it will one day send good kind of shivers down MGS’s back (ch. 200):

Not that MGS will comply, of course. He won’t just bend over when HT snaps his fingers. But that look in HT’s eyes will give MGS something to look forward to.

...HT will keep looking at MGS with admiration and pride (ch. 210, 263, 305):

I doubt not many people have ever looked at MGS like that. When others see a good-for-nothing delinquent, HT sees someone who will never give in or back down. He won’t sneak behind your back. He’s strong. There is so much good in the angry red ball of fluff, but people mistakenly judge him solely based on his looks and reputation. HT and others could stand to become more like MGS.

...MGS will get more compliments (ch. 210, 290):

...HT will always come back (ch. 224, 254):

I believe Tianshan will be a long-distance whatever-you-wanna-call-it in the future. They will be separated most of the time, but their connection is stronger than ever before. HT will always come back, and MGS will always wear the black studs.

I recently read a beautifully written KiriBaku fic (X) that had an interesting paragraph:

The line. They serenaded it like fools with nothing to lose. As Kirishima puts it, the whole world and you. The whole world and Bakugou. Every damn thing that could matter to Kirishima on one side, and Bakugou on the other. 

I was kind of taken aback by the idea of putting a line between the world and this one person. “The whole world and you”. In the fic, the meaning was a bit different, but I feel like that would also apply to future Tianshan.

HT is the line, the barrier, between everyone and everything else and MGS. It’s his way of protecting and keeping MGS safe. But it also marks the duality of HT’s life, especially if he ends up working with his family in the future. MGS has to be kept separate from everything else, and HT is a different person when he’s in MGS’s side of the line. 

“The whole world and you” is both beautiful and sad.

...MGS will always be there (ch. 228)

I don’t know what would happen if HT ever lost MGS for good. 

...HT will always have a “safe place” with MGS (ch. 255, 291, 313):

Tired and weary. Starving for contact and closeness. Recharging after being away. It doesn’t matter what HT is needing, he will feel secure and safe enough with MGS to ask for them. He won’t necessarily get what he’s asking for but at least he can show those sides and needs.

...MGS will keep earning HT’s trust (ch.259):

Not that it would be in MGS’s nature to turn his back on others when they’re in need of serious help. But I want him to keep being his caring self especially for HT. I want MGS to awkwardly and a bit clumsily hold HT’s balled fists and grumpily say he better not die on him because that would result in a shitton of unnecessary paperwork.

...MGS will keep showing his confused face (ch. 273, 307, 313):

When he doesn’t quite know what to say or how to act. When he’s debating admitting something to HT or to himself. I want him to keep having conflicted feelings because it means the way he’s seeing his relationship with HT is developing. When MGS doesn’t have a curse launched on the tip of his tongue or it suddenly gets stuck somewhere, it’s a good sign. He’s at a crossroads.

...MGS will keep surprising HT (ch. 273, 284, 309):

...MGS will show confidence again (ch. 283):

I will never get tired of MGS’s calm and confident expression. He had thought something over and made his decision. And those decisions carry infinitely more weight than his grumblings and curses. I really hope we’ll get to see such resolve in the future, too.

...HT will keep getting better at communicating (ch. 295, 297):

I firmly believe that communication will be one of the biggest problems in their relationship in the future. It’s difficult for both of them but in HT’s case, its downside is often physical roughness or going overboard otherwise.

Don’t get me wrong, though. I still want those kinds of troubles to always be a part of their relationship because it makes them more complex and realistic. I don’t want them to be a perfect couple but actually prefer a twirl of darkness to always be there. But that doesn’t mean they can’t get better at it.

...HT will learn to say “I’m sorry” (ch. 303):

Again, I don’t wish HT to lose his edge. I want him to remain dark, pushy and mischevious but also be able to recognize when he’s overstepped. It doesn’t have to be “I’m sorry” necessary but some kind of sign he’s feeling bad. I think HT apologizing with some affection is also a way for him to show MGS his softer side.

...they will have these kinds of conversations (ch. 305):

No screaming, no cursing. Just them in a dim room and talking, getting to know each other. No emotional heart-to-hearts but rather HT showing genuine interest and MGS feeling like someone is taking his words seriously. I want MGS to say something and HT to be taken aback by what an amazing, outstanding person MGS truly is. 

...HT will keep looking at MGS’s ass like that (ch. 206)

Not that I think he wouldn’t keep appreciating MGS’s fine behind but I want to see him appreciating it. I want to see MGS’s butt make HT grin.

...MGS will keep believing in himself (ch. 313):

I’ve talked about that panel before. MGS had been looked down not only by other students but the teachers as well. And that’s pretty damn heartbreaking. It doesn’t have to be school and studying, but I want MGS to do something that shows all the teachers were wrong about him.

In the future of Zhanyi, I wish... 

...JY will never stop standing up for his friends (ch. 179, 185):

JY has the kind of explosive, oblivious courage that I can’t help but admire. Physically he’s the weakest of the four but not any less fierce. He’s the kind of friend who forgets to think things through when he’s stepping in. A brave idiot all of us should have on our side.

...JY and ZZX will always be together (ch. 198, 258, 297, 313):

We already JY will be gone when he’s kidnapped, and I already dread how badly they will handle the separation despite knowing they will be reunited. Compared to Tianshan, Zhanyi isn’t a long-distance relationship because these two need to have each other close. Being apart just isn’t an option because it will feel like a part of your very soul is missing.

...this will happen (ch. 207):

One day they’re laying in bed and ZZX looks at JY. He’s in the middle of babbling about something that happened that day. A bit confused by the intense stare, JY quiets down and smiles.

“What?” he says, and ZZX can hear the familiar sunshine in his voice.

JY’s fair skin looks soft to touch, and his eyes are so in love with ZZX it’s overwhelming. Without even realizing he’s moving, ZZX reaches to brush the unruly wisps of hair and tuck them behind JY’s ear. JY’s almost non-existent eyebrows shot up, and he freezes under the touch. ZZX thinks he even stops breathing for a while.

“Nothing.”

That. I want that to happen one day.

...ZZX will get more jealous (ch. 224):

JY gets even more touchy-feely than usual when he’s drunk. And it’s annoying to the max when JY drunkenly clings to ZZX but for some reason, it’s even more annoying when JY is like that with other people.

I want to see more of ZZX silently pouting in the background.

...JY will have surges of sudden happiness (ch. 224):

I don’t know how to explain that feeling exactly but I’ve always called them “surges of sudden happiness”. When you’re doing something completely ordinary but suddenly, you’re interrupted by this feeling of...”damn, I’m really happy right now, right in this moment”. It doesn’t last long but it doesn’t have to.

I want JY to look at ZZX and have that moment. When you’re looking at the person you’re in love with and think “damn, that person makes me so happy and I want to cherish them for the rest of my life”. He’s overcome by sappiness and affection and nothing else than showing it to ZZX matters at that moment.

As much as I love Tianshan, I need the fluffy cotton candy of Zhanyi to take my sappiness out on something.

...JY will become strong (ch. 280, 313, 314):

It’s not that I don’t want ZZX to protect him. I want JY to become strong for his own sake. He’s always felt inferior when it comes to physical strength and standing up for himself, and I want him to become better at it. I want him to start putting in the work and not feel like a weakling anymore. Even if it meant he can run away faster.

...JY will never stop being like this (ch. 259, 296):

And I always want ZZX to stand in the background, doing a facepalm and thinking “God, I love him so much”.

...JY can keep looking at ZZX like this (ch. 297):

JY is so stupidly straightforward when he’s happy, it makes my heart into soft, pink goo. He gives some of the softest, most loving and adoring looks in the comic, and I never want him to stop.

Overall, I most definitely agree that Tianshan and Zhanyi are vastly different kinds of relationships. That’s why I don’t expect them to end up the same way either. I believe they will both be happy in the way that suits their respective dynamics; Zhanyi being fluffy and gentle, Tianshan being more angsty and less conventional meaning of “happy”.

Thank you for your question, dear anon-san!

[theskyexists]

The book was good but....I mean - it was well-written, every word, I really really enjoyed it. It was rich with details. but....it didn't make much sense by the end - didn't really end in any twist or coming together.

Are we going to somehow address the fact that there were at least five Mandates? Prince of radiance, the emperor, Zhu, Zhang AND Wang.

What about the prince of radiance? Why was he such a lil weirdo? Oh he remembers all his past lives? So he's totally ok with everybody dying and getting murdered and he himself getting murdered?? Why was he such a lil creep while nobody else who had a mandate was? I thought the mandate came from Will - but he was the least willful person ever.

Anyway all the cultural bits were very very good. The geography, the customs, the embedded history. Zhu just got more and more. Unlikeable. Tho. Lol. Because it simply became completely impossible to count the cost of what she was doing. I don't even understand how they kept all their damn soldiers fed in the rebellion.

This book also taught me that you can skip any sequence of events that seems too unlikely. Just skip it. I.e. the trek to the monastery on roads full of bandits? Skip it. The destruction of the monastery and Zhu's deeply improbable escape from the epicentre? Skip it. Zhu somehow getting away from the bridge and the lowland before her summoned landslide tsunami hits? Skip it. Zhu entering the GOVERNOR'S house and SOMEHOW finding a way to disguise herself as a maid without getting instantly noticed by other servants? Skip it. Somehow getting into the enemy camp unseen and somehow getting into the GENERALS TENT UNSEEN? skip it.

That's actually very educational.

The ending though - that just got entirely confusing I mean..why did Oujang take the city, killing red turbans, who could ostensibly have been his allies in attacking the khan? and THEN betray Esen and presumably THE WHOLE ENTIRE PART OF THE ARMY THAT WAS MONGOL??? how many nan'ren even served?? Couldn't he have assassinated them all before taking the damn city? Couldn't he have told the red turbans to help him and be helped in turn? He was an interesting character esp when it comes to his gender shit and the dynamics between him and Wang and Esen but in the end I didn't really care about him. Could have done with Esen's pov for that last scene.

What about Yuchun, the thief? Irrelevant apparently. Where did the martial artist monk come from? One mention and then he's gone. Yuchun's martial ability never becomes relevant again.

What about the theme. Adult Zhu always seemed just a bit - off - in her casual way of accepting and dismissing the suffering of others. it seemed to me that hardening herself to her own suffering shouldn't necessarily have made her harden herself to others' suffering. Ma is supposed to be her compass after she burns the monk's precepts but she never thinks of her when making her decisions. I thought it was interesting to take a look at the kind of people aspiring to power. They're all terrible - no matter the side. But Zhu? She really does believe (even if it became unnecessary for survival) that her wanting 'greatness' gives her the right to kill thousands. Nice....? If I'd been Ma by the end of that I'd have wanted to hurt Zhu - because Zhu basically said: I don't care about you, your principles, the things I say I value and respect in you, and I'm not gonna take the third way. Well. A tyrant is born. Nothing about that made anything come together though.

Ma has not transcended sexism through getting married to Zhu and having great sex. It did not become at all clear why the fortune teller said that shit if all along it wasn't true. It didn't become clear what Zhu was doing then - cosmologically - if it was not stealing her brother's fate. She'd had that fated fire in her all along ? So fortune teller was just wrong. Except - it's an expression of will - supposedly. Wang seems to have acquired it for example. Zhu acquired it by her fam's grave. So really all that shit about hiding the switcheroo was just nonsense and actually the opposite was true: she became self-actualised through casting that identity off. Flameo hotman. What about whether wanting something is good enough to hurt the people you love and kill thousands? First it was justified by survival - then she just wanted. Ok. And that gave her power. And it will cause her suffering. Only Ma gave a satisfactory answer reflective of the shitty times: if pursuing what you want and not doing so will cause you suffering both - then isn't the superior option to pursue what you want? But Zhu never got to that point. She just wanted power and thought causing suffering was a sacrifice SHE was willing to make. Lol.

Is this gonna be a series??? I mean, yeah the coming events are implied. The north lies for the taking. The khan will be killed or weakened by the suicidal nan'ren of oujang's army. Then the somehow loyal 'people' of Zhu's will sweep in to claim the throne. Wang may yet play some sort of role. Zhang has a mandate to rule a small and rich state to the side.

This makes me think - are the distances in this book really correct?????

[waterrunstogether]

Rites of Passage in the Fifth World

I’ve been thinking lately about the absence of real rites of passage in modern “western culture”. A rite of passage is a sort of ritualized event (that may or may not be endorsed/organized by a community) in which a person is believed to exit from one stage of life and enter the next, usually from childhood to adulthood. Other than the humiliation of high school proms/frat hazing, or getting your driver’s license, or turning 21 and getting shitfaced, my culture in the United States has little to offer in the way of true rites of passage. 

The result is a population of confused, somewhat disillusioned children driving around and going to work or university and pretending to be adults while hopelessly stuck in the liminal space between youth and adulthood.

~ 20 year old me pretending to know what’s going on ~

I have thought about quinceañeras and baptisms, religious rites of passage commonly practiced still, but considering the traumatic experience that my parents’ organized religion was for me, I don’t believe now that my baptism was a helpful event facilitating my transition into maturity. I think it was a blindingly painful event whose toxicity I needed to overcome in what I now believe was the true rite of passage. 

I first dropped acid when I was traveling in Bulgaria. My partner was in her hometown across the country and I was visiting Plovdiv with a friend. We had just finished traveling the world, or at least Eurasia, meeting new faces and trying new things and taking wild risks in Thailand and Turkey and India and Malaysia, to name a few. I had also just escaped the cult I was born and raised in which had hammered into me from birth that my sexual and romantic orientation was an abomination, as a woman I was to obey men, God loved me and wanted me to fear him (that is to say, love = fear), the leaders of the church were to be obeyed and respected all the time (even if they were obviously wrong) and so on and so forth. It was an insane transition between being trapped in these religious handcuffs and learning that I could break free all along. In fact, I carried so much self hatred and internalized homophobia with me into my supposed new life that I didn’t know what to do with myself. Despite being outwardly happier than I had ever been before with a wonderful partner and community who truly loved and supported me for who I was, inwardly I was constantly on the verge of a mental breakdown due to all of the conflicting thoughts and beliefs I was carrying and creating within myself.

The experience of that first trip was an interesting one. Every step of the way my body seemed to pull me towards the letting go of all of the toxicity that was so thick and had built up like plaque in the arteries of my energetic being--yet, I remained me throughout the trip, at the end feeling somewhat empowered but not yet finished with the transformation.

A few months later I took psilocybin, AKA magic mushrooms, with my little brother on a rainy Summer day in D.C. The whole come up of the trip was talking to trees and observing the movements of leaves, running my fingers over the moss growing on the exposed, knotty roots of tree in front of our house. But at the end of the trip, something changed. Once again my body requested, begged me, to let go of the still-prevalent toxicity inside of me. My health was in rough shape, mentally and physically, and my body knew the culprit. But once more I felt I couldn’t let go just yet, it would be too much for me, I wasn’t ready. So I spent the entire come down and then some, maybe four hours, weeping uncontrollably on the basement floor.

The second time I dropped acid was yesterday, with my partner, here in Berlin. It changed everything.

During the come up I was taken aback by how strong the effect it had on me was. My partner, bless her heart, had taken a larger dose than me, yet felt no effect the entire time. Her tolerance has always been naturally higher than mine for every kind of intoxicating substance, and LSD was no exception. 

As time went on I came to realize that her high tolerance was incredibly fortunate for me and my trip. The initial come up was amusing, as flashes of white light began to fill up my eyes, closed and open; but very quickly I began to get paranoid, strange little thoughts about being set up and targeted running through my mind as my sense of self slowly began to dissipate, just nonsense that the ego conjures up to protect itself. But my partner’s calming reassurances that she loved me and that I was safe effectively calmed me down.

Once I began to enjoy the ride up, holding a half of a pomegranate and appreciating its beauty, touching a slice of orange and loving how soft it felt in my hands, admiring the fractals of color creating all kinds of geometric shapes on the walls and snow outside the window, I became comfortable with my loss of identity. At some point I realized that I didn’t even know my name, and I didn’t care, because it was irrelevant. All that was relevant was experience. 

Imagine experiencing and interacting with the world around you without the barrier of the thing that we are so used to that it’s difficult to think of it as a barrier at all: your concept of self. Ideas about names and races and gender and desire and anger and malice and hatred just made absolutely no sense whatsoever. In this state, all that made sense was goodness and beauty and love. All that I understood was harmony and mutually beneficial behavior. My preconceived notions about who I was and what that meant were being shattered and shredded before my very eyes, exposed for what they were: nonsense.

Once I plateaued and began to slowly come down after about four or five hours I was able to contemplate what these things meant, what they would mean for me going forward. I went into the bathroom around hour 7 and decided that it was time to look into the mirror.

Many people will tell you not to look into the mirror during an acid trip, that it’ll give you the dreaded “bad trip” and you’ll have a shit time. I completely disagree. If you are like me and need to come to terms with yourself through the wonderful, horrific, beautiful, terrifying experience that is an “ego death”, I’m afraid that you’ll have no choice but to look into the mirror at some point. 

So, I stared myself down in the mirror and admitted what I couldn’t admit for so long, due to being taught that I was essentially evil since the day I was born. I’d called myself a sinner, wicked, worthless, ugly, an abomination and just about every other mean word in the evangelical dictionary. But as I stood there looking at my body in the mirror, egoless and impartial, I said, “You have done and thought some cruel things to yourself for some time now. But you know what? You are a kind person. You are a wonderful person. You treat people with respect and love, you treat everyone you’ve ever met with so much empathy, so much caring. You love the truth, you love to be generous, you love to be a good friend. You must begin to treat yourself the same way. I know you’ve had so much hatred in your heart contaminating your energy for so long, but that is enough. That is enough. No more. I am a kind person. I am a kind person. I love you. Remember that night so long ago? Beneath the stars, where they submerged you in the baptismal water and tried to destroy you, saying these sacred waters would wash all your sins away, along with your fragile, meaningless identity? Well, they simply added more to your ego, a darker side. You built up so much negativity for so long. Well, look at you now. Your identity, all of the ideas and concepts that you’ve built up around who you really are to protect you from the hurt of Life, it’s all gone. Now you’re going to baptize yourself again. You’ll be truly reborn, this time dedicated not to destroying yourself for the sake of a religion, but dedicated to renewing and becoming and becoming and becoming.” As I looking into the mirror my silhouette became filled in with the velvet black of the night sky, full of bright stars.

I turned on the water and was baptized once again, by my own hands.

When I returned to the room I felt happier than I had ever felt in my life, light as air, free. I told several people about how much I love them and described my love for them in detail, not as this thing that’s an extension of my own ego, but my love for them was a little bit of energy that I had the honor of holding in me, in this body, and sharing between us for a time, for the wonderful events that we call our lives. I could actually see love. I understood that I was not all of the concepts I’ve built around myself, but an expression of energy in this space and time, connected to every other expression of energy in all of history, from the beginning and until the end. My matter, my body, was simply a vehicle for the energy, and would be recycled into new vehicles after I die. My energy would be transferred into new vehicles as well. That’s what we perceive as death: just a simple transfer of energy and recycling of matter. My ego would not live on, thankfully. My consciousness as conflated with ego would cease to exist with me. But the underlying animating force behind all things in the universe, the true source of consciousness, would never be destroyed or created, simply recycled again and again and again and again. Becoming and becoming and becoming and becoming.

The hilarious and bizarre world of reality is hilarious and bizarre. It’s so beautiful and mystical and wonderful and honestly, nothing I write here could ever explain how I experienced being alive in that sixteen hour trip. Words don’t convey it, words can’t convey it. Reality is visceral, experiential, impartial and impossible to quantify in something as crude as human language. 

All I know is that, today, I am a fundamentally changed person. I’d feared ego death for so long, feared that it would be too much, too painful. And it was so, so painful--but it was so worth it. I am happy and proud to exist, grateful for everything I have accomplished and can accomplish in this miraculous, tiny little vessel during this ephemeral event that is my life. I can’t wait to wake up tomorrow if tomorrow exists, and unleash all of my love on everyone who’ll have it. Love is the energy that unites us with our own bodies and the entire world around us. How lucky and strange it is to be anything at all.

May you have a peaceful day. The universe smiles upon you.

[whitehotharlots]

Andrea Long Chu is the sad embodiment of the contemporary left

Andrea Long Chu’s Females was published about a year ago. It was heavily hyped but landed with mostly not-so-great reviews, and while I was going to try and pitch my own review I figured there was no need. Going through my notes from that period, however, I see how much Chu’s work—and its pre-release hype—presaged the sad state of the post-Bernie, post-hope, COVID-era left. I figured they’d be worth expanding upon here, even if I’m not getting paid to do so.

Chu isn’t even 30 years old, and Females is her debut book, and yet critics were already providing her with the sort of charitable soft-handedness typically reserved for literary masters or failed female political candidates. This is striking due to the purported intensity of the book: a love letter to would-be assassin Valerie Solanas, the thesis of which is that all humans are female, and that such is true because female-ness is a sort of terminal disease stemming not from biology but from one’s inevitable subjugation in larger social contexts. Everyone is a woman because everyone suffers. Big brain shit.

But, of course, not everyone is a female. Of course. Females are females only some of the time. But, also, everyone is a female. Femaleness is just a title, see. Which means it can be selectively applied whenever and however the author chooses to apply it. The concept of “female” lies outside the realm of verifiability. Suggesting to subject it to any form of logic or other means of adjudication means you’re missing the point. Femaleness simply exists, but only sometimes, and those sometimes just so happen to be identifiable only to someone possessed with as a large a brain as Ms. Chu. We are past the need for coherence, let alone truth or honesty. And if you don’t agree that’s a sign that you are broken—fragile, illiterate, hateful, humorless.

Chu’s writing—most famously, her breakthrough essay “On Liking Women”—establishes her prose style: long, schizophrenic paragraphs crammed with unsustainable metaphors meant to prove various fuzzy theses simultaneously. Her prose seems kinda sorta provocative but only when read on a sentence-by-sentence level, with the reader disregarding any usual expectations of cohesion or connection.

This emancipation from typical writerly expectations allows Chu to wallow proudly in self-contradiction and meaninglessness. As she notes herself, explicitly, meaning isn’t the point. Meaning doesn’t even exist. It’s just, like, a feeling:

I mean, I don’t like pissing people off per se. Yes, there is a pleasure to that sometimes, sure. I think that my biggest takeaway from graduate school is that people don’t say things or believe things—they say them because it makes them feel a particular way or believing them makes them feel a particular way. I’ve become hyper aware of that, and the sense in which I’m pissing people off is more about bringing that to consciousness for the reader. The reason you’re reacting against this is not because it contradicts what you think is true, it’s because it prevents you from having the feeling that the thing you think is the truth lets you feel.

And so she can get away with saying that of course she doesn’t actually believe that everyone is a female, the same as her idol Valerie Solanas didn’t actually want to kill all men. The writers, Chu and Valerie, are just sketching out a dumb idea as a fun little larf, to see how far they can push a manifestly absurd thought. If they just so happen to shoot a gay man at point blank range and/or make broader left movements so repulsive that decent people get driven away, so be it. And if any snowflakes complain about their tactics, well that’s just proof of how right they are. Provocation is justification—the ends and the means. The fact that this makes for disastrous and harmful politics is beside the point. All that matters is that Chu gets to say what she wants to say.

This blunt rhetorical move—which is difficult to describe without sounding like I’m exaggerating or making stuff up, since it’s so insane—papers over Chu’s revanchist and violent beliefs. Her work is soaked with approving portrayals of Solanas’ eliminationist rhetoric—of course, Chu doesn’t’ actually mean it, even though she does. Men are evil, even as they don’t really fully exist since everyone is a woman, ergo eliminating men improves the world. Chu goes so far as to suggest that being a trans woman makes her a bigger feminist than Solanas or any actual woman could ever be, because the act of her transitioning led to the world containing fewer men. Again: big brain shit.

I’ll leave it to a woman to comment on the imperiousness of a trans woman insisting that she is bestest and realest kind of woman, that biological women are somehow flawed imposters. I will stress, however, that such a claim comes as a means of justifying a politically disastrous assertion that more or less fully justifies the most reactionary gender critical arguments, which regard all trans women as simply mentally ill men (this line of reasoning is so incredibly stupid that even a dullard like Rod Drehar can rebut it with ease). Trans activists have spent years establishing an understanding of transsexualism as a matter of inherent identity—whether or not you agree with that assertion, you have to admit that it has political propriety and has gone a long way in normalizing transness. Chu rejects this out of hand, embracing instead the revanchist belief that transness is attributable to taking sexual joy in finding oneself embarrassed and/or feminized—an understanding of womanhood that is simultaneously essentialist and tokenizing. When asked about the materially negative potential in expressing such a belief, Chu reacts with a usual word salad of smug self-contradiction: 

EN: You say in the book that sissy porn was formative of your coming to consciousness as a trans woman. If you hadn’t found sissy porn, do you think it’s possible that you might have just continued to suffer in the not-knowing?

ALC: That’s a really good question. It’s plausible to me that I never would have figured it out, that it would have taken longer.

EN: How does that make you feel? Is that idea scary?

ALC: It isn’t really. Maybe it should be a little bit more, but it isn’t really. One of the things about desire is that you can not want something for the first 30 years of your life and wake up one day and suddenly want it—want it as if you might as well have always wanted it. That’s the tricky thing about how desire works. When you want something, there’s a way in which you engage in a kind of revisionism, the inability to believe that you could have ever wanted anything else.

EN: People often talk about the ubiquity of online porn as a bad thing—I’ve heard from lots of girlfriends that men getting educated about sex by watching porn leads to bad sex—but there seems to me a way in which this ubiquity is helping people to understand themselves, their sexuality and their gender identity.

ALC: While I don’t have the research to back this up, I would certainly anecdotally say that sissy porn has done something in terms of modern trans identity, culture, and awareness. Of course, it’s in the long line of sexual practices like crossdressing in which cross-gender identification becomes a key factor. It’s not that all of the sudden, in 2013, there was this thing and now there are trans people. However, it is undoubted that the Internet has done something in terms of either the sudden existence of more trans people or the sudden revelation that there are more trans people than anyone knew there were. Whether it’s creation or revelation, I think everyone would agree that the internet has had an enormous impact there.

One of the things I find so fascinating about sissy porn is that it’s not just that I can hear about these trans people who live 20 states away from me and that their experiences sound like mine. There is a component of it that’s just sheer mass communication and its transformative effect, but another part of it is that the internet itself can exert a feminizing force. That is the implicit claim of sissy porn, the idea that sissy porn made me trans is also the idea that Tumblr made me trans. So, the question there is whether or not the erotic experience that became possible with the Internet actually could exert an historically unique feminizing force. I like, at least as a speculative claim, to think about how the Internet itself is feminizing.

Politics, like, don’t matter. So, like, okay, nothing I say matters? So it’s okay if I say dumb and harmful shit because, like, they’re just words, man.

Chu can’t fully embrace this sort of gradeschool nihilism, though, because if communication was truly as meaningless as she claims then any old critic could come along and tell her to shut the fuck up. Even as she claims to eschew all previously existing means of adjudicating morality and coherence, she nonetheless relies on the cheapest means of making sure she maintains a platform: validation via accreditation. This is all simple victimhood hierarchy. Anyone who does not defer all of their own perceptions to someone higher up the hierarchy is inherently incorrect, their trepidations serving to validate the beliefs of the oppressed:

I like to joke that, as someone who is always right, the last thing I want is to be agreed with. [Laughs] I think the true narcissist probably wants to be hated in order to know that she’s superior. I absolutely do court disagreement in that sense. But what I like even better are arguments that bring about a shift in terms along an axis that wasn’t previously evident. So it’s not just that other people are wrong; it’s that their wrongness exists within a system of evaluation which itself is irrelevant.

Chu has summoned the most cynical possible interpretation of Walter Ong’s suggestion that “Writing is an act of violence disguised as an act of charity.” Of course, any effective piece of communication requires some degree of persuasion, convincing a reader, listener, viewer, or user to subjugate their perceptions to those of the communicator. Chu creates—not just leans on or benefits from, but actively posits and demands fealty to—the suggestion that her voice is the only one deserving of attention by virtue of it being her own. That’s it. That’s what all her blathering and bluster amount to. Political outcomes do not matter. Honesty does not matter. What matters is her, because she is her. 

This is the inevitable result of a discourse that prizes a communicator’s embodied identity markers more than anything those communicators are attempting to communicate, and in which a statement is rendered moral or true based only upon the presence or absence of certain identity markers. Lived experience trumps all else. A large, non-passing trans woman is therefore more correct than pretty much anyone else, no matter how harmful or absurd her statements may be. She is also better than them. And smarter. And gooder.

Designating lived experience and subjective feelings of safety as the only acceptable forms of adjudication has caused the left to prize individualism to a degree that would have made Ronald Reagan blush. And this may explain the lukewarm reception of Chu’s book.

While they heaped praise upon her before the books’ release, critics backed off once they realized that Females is an embarrassingly apt reflection of intersectional leftism—a muddling, incoherent mess, utterly disconnected from any attempt toward persuasion or consensus, the product of a movement that has come to regard neurosis as insight. The deranged mewlings of a grotesque halfwit are only digestable a few pages at a time. Any more than that, and we begin to see within them far too much of the things that define our awful movement and our terrifying moment.

[softnaruto]

Overthinking*

Overthinking* (AU)

(REPOST BC MY DUMBASS DELETED THE POST BY ACCIDENT)

author: THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR REQUESTING THIS! This is my favorite piece of literature I have ever written for this blog specifically. I literately felt so alive while writing this! I hope you like it! It’s pretty long so I do hope you like it! I also know you specifically requested headcanons, but it was easier to write as a scenario! I am sorry about that! I also failed to mention this is an AU!

pairings: AU Shisui x female! reader (It could be gender-neutral too)

words: 1813

genre: angst & fluffy

warnings: jealousy, angst, and too much fluff

Black Lives Matter Petitions

Black Lives Matter Donations

(it is really long so it’s continued below the cut)

The cold wind made the shivers up your spine mutate into creatures of the night, scratching and roughly cutting into your skin as you ran through the streets, tightly holding two bags full of the appetizing junk food you had shockingly found at your local corner store. You allowed your scarf to blow through the wind as you looked ahead of you, capturing the gate of his apartment.

You slowed down, typing in the numbers to the small pin-pad laying on the gate before entering the apartment complex, rushing through the halls, and into the nearest elevator. You pushed the button to his floor, your finger clicking the button in careless desperation. The elevator closed in a seemingly ignorant manner, earning a disgruntled sigh from you.

Upon reaching his floor, you began running again, almost bumping into a couple that was entering the elevator. You squeaked an apology before turning your attention back to your whereabouts, finally reaching your destination. You knocked on his door, almost wanting to claw at the rundown paint as every second felt like an eternity.

The door opened with a loud groan and you were greeted with darkness. Your eyes searched for another pair in the darkness and you finally let out the breath of air you were unconsciously holding in. The eyes that stared back at you, once warm and inviting, were emotionless and cruel. You felt the air spill out of your lungs with desperation and you opened your mouth to speak, but to no avail. Nothing was appropriate for this type of meeting.

You walked into his apartment, shrugging off the heavy feeling that had accumulated in your chest, before turning on one of the lights in his kitchen. You let the bags fall on the counter, removing the items carelessly.

“I brought you vanilla, chocolate, cookie dough, and cookies and cream ice cream,” Your voice was turning into mush as you began to name the countless things you had bought in a rush. You were met with silence.

You turned around to look at your best friend, eyes widening as you noticed his disheveled state. His eyes were surrounded by red, swollen skin, his shirt covered in smudges, and his sickly pale skin made his brokenness obvious. It wasn’t only emotionally painful, you had noticed, his pain had also manifested itself physically.  

You stopped removing the items from the bag, stepping away from the counter until you were in front of him. He had always been taller than you, fitter than you, and always had this well-put-together aura about him that always bothered you. He seemed much smaller now; his shoulders were hunched over, arms hanging down as if gravity were to pull them apart from his body at any minute, and his eyes that were once windows to a kind soul, were dull.

You pursed your lips, knowing that the jokes that were patiently sitting on your tongue weren’t appropriate. You reached for his hand, taking it in yours as you led him through his small apartment and onto the couch you had both found sitting at the corner of a street with a “Free” sign attached to it.

You let him sit down before sitting down next to him, leaning back and pulling him onto your chest. You held onto his lifeless body in hopes of comforting him, drawing random shapes onto his back. There was nothing to say and nothing to feel except for the pain that was radiating from him as he began to cry onto your shirt.

You had never seen him like this. Your best friend that you were hopelessly in love with was always a happy, go-lucky person. He was the one to lift others up, he was the one to appear with countless tubs of ice cream and nerdy jokes when someone was emotionally broken. It was never the other way around. Except this time, it was.

“Shisui—” You began saying, your voice barely above a whisper. You had no idea what you were going to say next and you hesitated, allowing your voice to drown in his tears.

“It’ll be okay.” You whispered, the soft hum of the television drowning out your hesitant words. For once you were thankful that the television was loud enough to drown the noise in the living room.

You had once wished for his television to be shut off. Back then his apartment was full of people, full of classmates and coworkers, full of… her. You were sitting on the same couch, with a soda in hand, observing him from afar. His arm was around her shoulders as he happily talked to someone irrelevant. That night, her hand held his with a love that was now confirmed to be a lie and all of the words you’d direct at him would submerge in the noise of the television, never to be heard of again.

Back then you hated his television, his apartment, his friends, and… his girlfriend. Ex-girlfriend.

“It’ll be okay, Shisui,” You whispered, running one of your hands through his messy hair, “Everything will be back to normal before you know it.”

“What’s normal?” The silence you had now grown accustomed to was disrupted by his voice, which had been beaten down to a frail whisper. Your eyes looked ahead and began noticing a frame holding a picture of his broken relationship. That was his normal, not yours. You had somehow forgotten that his normal was a life with her and her only.

“You’ll have your friends to rely on. You’ll hang out with Itachi and Kakashi,” Your voice wavered as your eyes fell upon another picture, one that had the both of you together. Your eyes traced the way his arm wrapped around your shoulder, just like it was on hers the one night you refused to remember. “You’ll have me.”

Why was it coming to you now? Why was the jealousy and pain you felt that night coming back to you?

Why did you feel like blurting out your feelings to him, confessing in a state of panic? Why did you want to take the pain away and comfort him in ways he never expected of you?

A kiss would be sufficient. The idea of kissing him was irresistible and yet you did not want to take advantage of his pain. You decided that you would never confess your feelings to him, as you bit your lip, trying to figure out your next move. Your next… lie.

Should you say that he would find someone else? Someone that wasn’t you?

“Y/N, it will never be the same.” Shisui lifted his head up, tears streaming down his cheeks as his eyes met yours. “She will never be the same to me. You know I could have forgiven her—I tried to forgive her for weeks—but every day I would wake up to the thought that maybe she was with him again. Am I not good enough? Am I really that shitty for her to want to be with other people?”

“No tou’re not, Shisui! She’s the shitty one.” You answered, becoming angry with the thought that Shisui would even feel as conflicted as he did before you. “You’re so thoughtful. You always do nice things for everyone and always prioritize others before yourself and…”

Why would he feel that way? Was he really so in love with her that he had become blind to his own kindness?

“Maybe I prioritized everyone but her.” Shisui’s words felt like poison as you tasted his hatred, and tears began filling your eyes as you couldn’t handle seeing him in pain any longer. Shisui’s eyes, his expression, had been crumbled into nothing but hatred. A hatred you had never experienced. “Maybe she just realized—"

“No, Shisui! You did not do that. In fact, you put her above everyone else! Honestly if I were her, I would have—” The words had slipped out. The words had slipped out of you as if someone had held a knife against your neck and forced you to confess. You stopped yourself from talking, wanting to swallow the childish words you had just blurted out.

“If you were her what, Y/N? If you were her what would you have done?” It was as if he was egging you on, trying to see what your next move would be. His dark eyes almost seemed a blood-red as he demanded an answer from you, his eyes slightly becoming soft as he realized that he was almost yelling at you, his face inches away from yours.

“I would have been with you forever.” Your voice was above a whisper, but for once, the television hadn’t swallowed your words. For once, he was in front of you, looking at you in a way he had never seen you before. In the way you had always seen him.

“Then prove it.” His voice had dropped to a whisper, a playful tint to his pain inflicted voice.

You couldn’t hold back anymore. As painful as it was to make a move under the circumstance, you felt yourself being pulled to him like a magnet. Your lips crashed against his with desperation at first, the salty taste bringing you back to your senses. You tried to lean back, immediately regretting your decisions, but was pulled back by a hand that had begun to caress your cheek. His lips met yours with a much softer greeting as his movements aligned with yours in a synchronized dance. His soft touch felt like fire against your skin and the pit of your stomach began to overflow with butterflies; his touch wasn’t the same anymore.

Shisui leaned back, his eyes wide in realization as he looked into your shocked ones. You felt your heart drop at the thought of Shisui not feeling the exact same way. You felt yourself wanting to throw up as thoughts of him disappearing from your life began to flood your mind. You didn’t want to lose him—not even as a friend.

“I—I’m,” You stumbled over your words, not knowing whether to apologize or to leave. You looked around you; you had no way out. He was encircling you, his hands on your cheeks, warmth so hot it could burn your skin.

“No, don’t say anything,” Shisui answered, his voice much stronger than it had been that entire day; much stronger than it had been that entire month. As he looked into your eyes, the eyes that he always looked at with such adoration, he came upon a realization.

It wasn’t her. It never was and never would be.

“Y/N.” Shisui breathed, trying to find the right words to say without pushing you away.

He wasn’t sure if it was in the moment, if your kiss and advances were in the moment, but he didn’t care. He had come upon a realization too important to be disregarded.  

“I love you.”

[firstpuffin]

Misunderstanding the message

Modern television could learn a lot from the Discworld series, and apparently so could the upcoming Discworld series from BBC America. How so? Well it will probably be in the title that I haven’t written yet, but they could learn about how to effectively introduce social topics with subtlety.

 I’m currently re-listening to Feet of Clay, the third book following the City Watch and more specifically, Samuel Vimes (of ever increasing rank) and I’m reminded of how I always intended to write something on how Discworld and Sir Pratchett deal with social issues. In the previous book he explores racial issues, with Trolls and Dwarves (who are hated enemies) and even the undead; Detritus the troll is teamed up with Cuddy the dwarf during an investigation and they develop a mutual respect; Angua is a werewolf who is obviously hiding it and has to deal with her crush who, despite otherwise being 100% accepting of everything, has an unexpected dislike of undead.

  The best part of all this is how it’s never the main point. Somebody is running around with a dangerous weapon and the Watch are trying to find him before Vimes leaves the Watch to get married (or really just before the weapon kills again). Exploration of relationships and tensions between the races is simply a natural occurrence when they are put together and very little emphasis is put on it. This is in stark contrast to, say, Dr Who where they sit behind a dumpster and chat about it.

 In Feet of Clay we have some more racism: Angua the undead turns out to be prejudiced against the lifeless Golems. We also get a new character in the dwarf Cheery Littlebottom and yes, go ahead and laugh, she expects you to. Cheery is- not transgender, no matter what BBC America tries to tell you.

  She’s a dwarf and she’s a female, and that’s it.

  And that’s the problem.

  Now I love this little bit of dwarfish sociology, but while there is obviously the two sexes, there is only one gender: male (or dwarf? it’s kind of irrelevant at that point). On a side note, this is why it’s so useful to have a distinction between sex and gender; Sir Pratchett could never have so easily explored this side of Dwarf society if the concepts were one and the same.

  Dwarves are all short, muscular, bearded and gruff; they fight, they quaff and they sing about gold, and they all go by “he”. Dwarvish courting is a confusing mess where they have to cautiously figure out if their partner has the desired genitals.

    Cheery Littlebottom is not transgender, she is just openly female. Well, she’s trying to be. The trouble is that the Dwarves are conservative as all hell so she’s struggling to express herself. Obviously this feels a lot like an exploration of gender dysphoria, but she’s not actually transgender and by our definitions she’s CIS gendered. When in Making Steam, the Low King of the dwarves, or Low Queen as it is revealed, makes steps to allow female dwarves to be openly female, any social commentary kind of dies out as Cheery is no longer fighting accepted social rules.

  The fact that BBC America has apparently tried to make her this beardless drag queen (and I mean that in an descriptive sense rather than derogatory) just shows a complete dumbing down of the message.

 I’m really bemused by what BBC America are trying to do here and I’m eager to watch the series when it comes out in January; in part because it may just be a break-out success, but more likely because I do enjoy watching a good train wreck.

[lucahqs-blog]

❛ ✶  —  did you see LUCA MARTÍNEZ walking around campus earlier ? i hear a lot of people talking about the TWENTY-ONE year old JUNIOR . from what i know , they are studying HUMAN PHYSIOLOGY while minoring in ILLUSTRATION and are a part of PHI KAPPA DELTA . they come across as + DIPLOMATIC but also - NON-CONFRONTATIONAL , which makes since because on their instagram ( LMHQS ) it says they are a LIBRA . when i see them , i think of LONG 2AM ROOFTOP CHATS, 100% GREEK & DEAD POETS SOCIETY CHAOTIC ENERGY, MESSY ROOM COVERED IN ART & PROJECTS, DOG-EARED TEXTBOOKS, CIGARETTE SMOKE. the most interesting thing i’ve heard about them though , is the fact that [  REDACTED ] , but don’t tell anyone i told you that .

hello, loves !! this bean goes by rue ( she / her pronouns ), and i’ll be playing this Mess™, luca ( with fc by froy gutierrez ). below you can find his bio, enjoy ! + disclaimer: there are mentions of mental health and cancer, so please read at your own discretion.

biography

When someone hears the name Martínez, they automatically think of words like prestigious, wealthy, and perfect. And who wouldn’t? With the father being a State’s Attorney and mother owning her own real estate business, you had to think like that. In the public eye the Martínez family was flawless. Diana was the always supporting wife who thrived in raising money for fundraisers and showing off her cooking skills and David was being a husband who brought home piles of money and was devoted to his family. Everyone wanted what they had. Luca Martínez was born into a world where perfection was of the utmost importance. The Martínez family are one of those prestigious families that has always been full of wealthy and high-class snobs, and Luca’s parents were no exception. He grew up learning how to be charming and handsome, and aware of his superiority over those of inferior to him. Luca’s childhood years consisted of him sitting restless at various fancy parties and dinners, while his father kept him from all the treats so that he would grow up to be fit and strong. Luca’s father was always cold and emotionally isolated from him; only after a perfect son to show off to the world.

He has brother, who is three years younger than him, named Nathaniel. His relationship with his brother, however, is a bit estranged just like with their father. As much as he loves his brother and wishes they could see eye-to-eye, sometimes they tend to butt heads often. Whether that might mean your typical sibling arguments or full-on blown out fights, they just cannot seem to see get along.

As a young, restless little child, Luca sought escape from his shallow, chilly life in the form of a friend. His friend taught him that there was such thing as warmth and friendliness, told him lots of stories of Greek mythology, and he learned that his father had been lying about “tactless individuals” being horrible people. However, when his father found out about his associations with his friend, within a week, the boy mysteriously disappeared. Since then, Luca kept all his unapproved-of friends to himself. Unfortunately, as time went on, Luca grew up to become a lot colder and more isolated like his father—leaving the feeling of pure joy of meeting that friend he met long ago, had vanished. With his family situation being completely dysfunctional and rottenly horrible, he never experienced what being happy was all about.

Sometimes calling someone selfish is a gross exaggeration, but in Luca’s case its right on-point. Eventually in his early teens he became distracted, always preoccupied with his own affairs and matters of interest. Whether it was schoolwork, his multiple and usually explosive relationships, or his many existential crises, Luca was one for waving people away and turning the conversation back on himself. This was not necessary out of narcissism or some hidden agenda: Luca genuinely does not know who he is. Perpetually fidgeting and restless, it is not uncommon to see him rapidly flicking a cigarette lighter, or playing with his hair, or bouncing on the balls of his feet. In high school he was brilliant: it was that simple. He was the golden boy. Prone to spilling into intellectual spiels - and labelled a know-it-all - he internalized everything, memorizing tiny details, eyes skipping here and there. His intelligence is among his most useful traits and is by far the thing he values most about himself. Much of his ego is built around the confidence that he is effortlessly smarter than almost anybody he encounters. Knowledge is power, and he weaponizes his superior intellect, using his brains more than brawn to protect himself and intimidate the people he does not care for.

Although his parents were the bane of his experience 100% of the time, his mother was not all that insufferable when she had her moments away from his father and not trying to be this pristine ‘perfect’ woman beside her husband. In fact, throughout his childhood she often encouraged Luca’s belief in extraordinary things and hoped he had carried it throughout his life growing up. His mother had always made him promise to have courage and be kind to others, for—as she explained to him—kindness has power, and that she would see him through all the trials that life could offer, in life and death.

Cancer/mental illness TW—when he was thirteen, his mother had been diagnosed with cervical cancer. Upon hearing the news, Luca’s whole world clasped. Not only was he at a pivotal stage in his life where everything was changing and becoming more stressful ( becoming a teenager, starting high school, going through puberty ), the only important person who had actually showed him any kind of love in his life had be claimed by the deadly disease altogether. So many thoughts and feelings were going through his mind at the time, that he ran himself physically sick and had experienced his first panic attack. He has since been medically diagnosed with panic disorder. Thankfully, the cells on his mother’s cervix were diagnosed at precancerous stage and the doctors were able to treat it because it developed and spread. However, that didn’t and doesn’t stop Luca from being in a constantly state of panic every time his mother so much as feels pain or coughs due to irrelevant reasons. The entire year had changed him and his family for a while.

He is now attending Beaumont University currently in his Junior year studying Human Physiology and minoring in Illustration. The university is his parents’ alma mater and he joined his father’s former fraternity after he was convinced it would be a ‘father-son bonding experience’ to have shared the same Greek house. Not to mention, his family has pretty decent ties at Beaumont, making Luca pretty well known become his parents. Sure, his family is wealthy, well known in the socialite community, and has basically grown up with this sort of life from an exceedingly small age, but to say he actually cares about all that crap is an overstatement. He is nothing like some of the spoiled and entitled students at his school and rather vibe with himself than gossip about the latest trend.

Despite issues with his own family, Luca has a lot of personal of his own he deals with. He is capable of enduing tremendous hardship. Though he may not handle difficulty in the healthiest or best way, often repressing emotion, he mostly like emerges on the other side. He does not know how to express his emotions in a put together way, but rather fumbles it all up and starts to ramble. Rarely opens up because of this. He usually distracts himself from his insufferable emotions with hobbies such as playing the piano, painting, and reading some of his favorite classics. After he moved out the house at eighteen to pursue college and became more independent, he started to come into his own style with his wardrobe. To put it simple, he is like a hippie dippy child of the universe.

No joke. No seriously, his place at home and his dorm is full of sensual shit and art. It is getting out of hand and somebody needs stop him soon. Catch him rocking the Greek philosopher and Dead Poets Society aesthetic around campus. He strongly believes that art is an umbrella term that relates to expressing of oneself—not just through photography and painting—and that everyone has the freedom to express themselves however they please. Because of his beliefs, he chooses to break gender roles like bread and wears whatever the fuck he wants because yolo. His appearance pretty much represents his hippie dippy lifestyle with him wearing all sorts of hipster shit. His clothes can be very flowy like, but don’t let that fool you. He doesn’t miss the opportunity to represent his upper class within his style, so he does dress to impress, let me tell you. His hair color changes sometimes too depending on his mood but it’s generally never too eccentric.

[courage-a-word-of-justice]

Misfit of Demon King Academy 1 | Healin’ Good PreCure 13 - 14 | Lapis Re:Lights 1 | God of High School 1 | Muhyo and Roji’s BSI s2 1

Misfit of Demon King Academy 1

This originally had the ecchi tag on its anime entry on AniList…or, at least, that’s how it was in my memory…but now that I see it doesn’t have that, it’s just another reincarnation isekai-type series. Let’s dig into it!

I…think this guy is meant to be portrayed as “hot” because he has the piercing eyes and he’s tall (against the girls in what will presumedly be his harem), but he kind of looks like your standard Potato-kun in a white outfit…so, uh…*shrugs*

Uh…is that guy meant to be Indian? You can’t get more obvious than the “Indu” family. Update: You see his brother later and Leorg has fairer skin, so maybe not.

LOL, “Flame of Darkness” makes someone nothing but a chuunibyou.

Uh…this is called The Misfit of Demon King Academy, y’know? Anos (Anoth?) is gonna get in, you bet your butts.

The owl is cute.

…guy, that 3 second rule thing was actually funny, but the more you think about the joke, the less funny it gets. Show: 1. Me: Infinity -1

Just from appearances, I wanna guess Misha is an ice or light magic user, or whatever equivalent the show has.

Is this what Assassin’s Pride could have been…?

How did the mother (Anoth’s) think her kid maturing that fast wasn’t weird?

Mushroom gratin? Is that an actual dish?...Yep, seems so. Sounds nice. I like mushrooms.

What’s up with young mothers in anime these days? Then again, the only other point of reference I have is Masamune-kun’s Revenge…

I thought it was the other Indu guy we saw earlier. This guy’s…not that bad-looking, though (LOL, my preferences ring out loud and clear…)…welp, spoke too soon. There he is. Update: Leorg kinda looks like Hakuto Kunai from Demon Lord, Retry!, come to think of it.

If Zepes died several times over the course of this episode…would one more death actually matter? (Not really, to be honest. Zepes is a scumbag.)

Come to think of it, this anime got postponed due to COVID, yeah? Was that why there was a sakuga spot earlier…?

Was that Sasha (Misha’s sister)? I found her name while checking if the anime was postponed.

I like the colour choices in this show, at least.

I don’t think this show has the best sense of comedic timing. Let your jokes breathe, dammit! That’s what comedic beats are for!

In a season with more offerings, I might get rid of this or pause it, but the season’s fairly sparse as it stands (darn virus!) so it stays.

Update: I didn’t notice, but an Anime News Network staff member wrote that Anoth’s surname is familiar…if you read Harry Potter.

Healin’ Good PreCure 13

Gotta start in the middle for this and work our way back. Note I did watch the 1st 2 eps without subs earlier this year when they were on the official PreCure YouTube, so I’m ahead of most people.

(From wandering the wiki and the news) I’ve seen nothing but pink/blue/yellow Cures these days, so I kind miss the more adventurous colours like green and orange…but then again, I never really liked green. It’s the colour of envy and…as petty as it sounds, I think I developed that bias because green is stereotypically the colour of rot, vomit (aside from anime’s rainbow vomit) and stinky things.

I didn’t notice this, but there’s a faint highlight on the Cures’ eyes (red for Grace, purple for Fontaine and blue for Sparkle).

It’s a drone! In PreCure! Yay! (It finally hit me exactly how much of a distant dream it’s been – from watching Suite and episodes of most of the other PreCure ‘til now – watching PreCure legally as a simulcast is! It’s crazy and it only took, what…5 years between Suite and this? 16 if you count from Futari wa to Healin’ Good.)

Is it that drone?

Hah? This is almost like the electricity-themed PreCure I came up with on the fan wiki. It’s not like I could sue Toei for it, though…they own that stuff, I only own what came out of my own imagination.

The subs say “Rate”, but “rate” has a meaning in English. No wonder the initial wiki translations say “Latte”, especially because the queen is “Teatine” to match.

Okay, so Mei is the sis and Yota is the brother. Got it.

Hey! What if there was a PreCure where the villains had devastated another world before? That would really raise the stakes.

“[T]hunders” (sic)? Thunder is the sound, lightning is the flash. Which one is it?

I see. As soon as they identified it as the Element of Lightning, I sort of guessed they could add it to their repertoire later, and I was right.

Its’s nice to see they put a woman in the moving company as well. Proves that girls can do anything they set their minds to, even what are supposedly “men’s jobs”.

I guess from the face I should’ve expected the element to talk, like the Fairy Tones from Suite, but I didn’t really figure that out until I saw it talk,

I feel like Hinata should’ve gone to see how Mei made her juice. That way, the two might be able to make similar-tasting juice…but that’s just an idea.

Healin’ Good PreCure 14

I feel like Byogens were responsible for Nodoka’s sickness, much like they are for Latte.

“Energy Source” seems to refer to a place where energy appears…I know that sounds a bit dumb if you don’t realise genki hakken means something like “appearance of energy (for a person)”, but…yeah, the PreCure series is like this. Unfortunately, that’s what you have to deal with.

I feel like this “teamwork overcomes all hardships” message is important in this time of COVID-19.

Guaiwaru = “condition is bad”, or ill health (guai ga warui).

Is that the element of air? I thought the PreCure would’ve used their element of lightning to fix the steamer, but hey, teamwork works too.

I’m a weeny bit peevy they translate minna to “girls”. It’s correct in context when it’s been translated that way, but minna means “everybody”.

I imagined Hinata saying “Watashi no smartphone ga!” instead of “Atarashii sumaho ga hoshii!”

Lapis Re:Lights 1

Eh…COVID-19 means I gotta sample things I’m not so crazy about.

Why is one of the first lines in this show “My behind hurts!”?

Bristol? Is this England?...Nope, it’s a place called “Mamkestell”.

I was thinking this girl…I think the reviews said her name was Tiara…was going to sing to the flower to make it perk up again, but nup, she whistled to it. That seems a bit irrelevant, to be honest. (I would prefer an all or nothing approach to a wish-washy approach like this…as in, if this is an idol show, then either go all in with the singing and dancing, or do something else that’ll catch my attention.)

Tiara’s face looks hella generic.

For some reason, I get this ominous feeling when the word “witch” is mentioned…must be the instinct from Madoka popping up again.

Lemme guess. Lynette is the bookworm?...*sigh* Just another method of showing a character is a bookworm without actually showing their reading a book, which I think is counterintuitive.

Get some protective gear, girls!

Rosetta keeps saying “Yes” (in English).

Lemme guess…people ship the dumb one and the smart one? They’re like a gender-flipped Dice and Gentaro, only the smart one is more uppity and the stupid one is more sporty.

The word appears to be noumei, but that exact word doesn’t seem to exist. Lavie seems to say the word is the opposite to something else, but I can’t tell what that is either…

Albino rabbit, eh?

…people probably ship Rosetta and Tiara too, right? *sigh*

So there’s…no singing in this fantasy/idol show. Whistling is how you invoke magic…so how is someone who can’t whistle supposed to invoke magic?!

Whose idea was it to put the OP in the middle of the episode?

It was “Neechan, daikirai!” “Forget you” is a fairly loose translation…

Little Miss Rosetta = Rosetta-chan.

I think Tiara called Rosetta “sensei” when the former wanted the latter to take care of her (i.e. take her to their dorm).

Titi = Tiara. I didn’t actually figure that out because I thought it referred to the rabbits.

Gah! These almost-real-world names (or real world names, in regards to “Bristol”) are gonna drive me NUTS!

*sigh* Boob jiggle.

*sighhhhhhhhh…* Lemme guess, there’s a potential expulsion on the horizon? Update: Yep. Dropped.

God of High School 1

First Webtoon series I’m covering here.

Oh, I checked out the first chapter of the webtoon because CR linked it to their anime page. The only difference I’ve seen from that, aside from fleshing out the backgrounds, is…that creepy skull (?) on the wall.

You can tell it’s Korean when I don’t understand what the text says. (I don’t know Korean, but I do know some Chinese and Japanese.) Update: This is Japanese-dubbed, but they left the Korean text in.

That intro is much more powerful now that the backgrounds are fleshed out.

Ooh, the colours in the OP are very nice!

Hmm? They’re starting with the grandpa, rather than starting with “I’m Mori Jin, 17 years old”? Good choice.

The expressions in this show are funny. I like them already.

Waittttttttt…I dunno how Korean names work. Is Mori Jin’s first name “Mori” or “Jin”? Update: I checked it up, and I got even more confused!

KORG Arena seems to be…from Marvel? Like BnHA references Star Wars???

*sigh* Moonbucks? Again?...and of course the girls only talk about “hotties”. We need a Bechdel test in this thing.

The comments on ch. 1 said “A new Luffy is born”, so now I agree with it…but they’re not going to show how Mori Jin was enlisted for GOH (as they seem to abbreviate it)?

There’s Japanese, English and Korean in the afro dude’s comments.

I’m amazed that tall dude with the spiky hair wasn’t more surprised about Mori Jin and the girl passing by…

Would those glasses on Mori Jin’s head be any help? Update: Turns out those aren’t “glasses”…they’re a sleeping mask.

Kamina glasses!

They put CR and Webtoon advertising over everything in this anime…geesh.

These red parts of people’s noses are gonna bug me, aren’t they…?

It should be battle royale, right? Update: Okay, so I checked and both are correct spellings.

This seems like the sort of thing that would never get funded because you need to pull off every battle scene right.

They cut the initial fight with “Blondie” out, but that actually makes things more interesting! Good choice.

Lemme guess – Mori Jin is going to have to fight this Kang Manseouk guy at full power one day? *shrugs* (Can I stop referring to people by their full names already??? I can’t stop until I know which is the first name and which is the last.) Update: So the wiki finally helped me out and Mori is the first name and Jin the last, meaning I can call him “Mori”. Got it.

*Mori suddenly pulls the prisoner’s pants down* - That was…random.

I liked it more than I thought I would! (Just for reference, the other protag dude is called Han Dae-wi and the girl is Yoo Mira.)

Muhyo and Roji’s BSI s2 1

(Update for the Tumblr fans: I finished s1 outside the seasonal format.) 

Kokkuri-san never goes well in anime…

Where does Nana work again…?

I don’t think Muhyo and Roji are legally (magically legally?) obligated to tell Nana anything about what they do.

Yay! Goryo is animted for the first time! He has such a beautiful voice~!

Notably, Roji wouldn’t have had a smartphone in 2004 (or whatever year close to that when the manga put this bit out).

Goryo (5) vs Muhyo (6). Didn’t figure this out at the time I read the manga.

I think the subbers misgendered Goryo. Goryo is a dude, as can be gathered from the name “Daranimaru”.

“Waka”? Does that stand for “young head [of the office]” or something?

Okay, whose bright idea was it to pair Now on Air (female vocalists) with Muhyo and Roji’s (a series dominated with dudes)…?

Ah, Funimation is on the production team of this anime. That would explain the dub rights.