#is the kind that I can only describe as being written by straight women for straight women.

[spiritshaydra]

Ngl one of these days I kinda wanna try making a comic about space lesbians out of spite, just because I’m sick and tired of all the gay space comics being just,,, two twinks. And there’s a severe lack of science-fiction yuri in general 😭 (I can think of like. One off the top of my head. But it’s dimensional travel yuri not space yuri)

The gays got that Bravern anime but us girls need something too!!

I’m specifically talking about a story that’s got delicate care put into it and how the characters are written, with the focus being entirely on their dynamic and not the [CENSORED FOR SAFE READING] and [REDACTED] along with [CARTOON SOUND EFFECTS] that runs rampant in most of the stories I’ve seen on AO3.

[pocket-deer-boy]

at a certain point, someone's bigotry towards trans people becomes some kind of science denialism where they have to pretend trans people aren't real for their idea of the world to work. like, have a gander at this infographic

Beyond having no idea who the target audience of this infographic is (this reads as a bit too toony and colorful for the more serious sex ed tone of high school biology classes but is far too textually dense and visually noisy and cluttered for younger kids, so really it just feels like it's made or adults to pass around and nod along to work that tells them exactly what they already believe) It's also full of blatant medical misinformation, and states facts in a way that feels completely angry and bitter towards anyone who believes anything else. Like, no, transphobic lion gender infographic. Men CAN lectate even without any hormonal treatments or being trans. I've seen it personally.

It's also interesting to me how it explains sexuality (among other things) as being these incredibly rigid and inflexible categories. Like oh really, asexuals can't have sex? We can't go into nuances of sexual desire, sexual attraction, sexual pleasure and social expectations to perform sex. Like if you're ace and you did sex and weren't enthusiastic about it and never tried it again i guess you're not ace. The harry potter houses model of sexuality: you are one thing, you fit into this one thing, it prescribes how you're supposed to act instead of using it to describe how you actually exist.

This rigidity also becomes obvious when it talks about intersex people as being these exceptions to the rule that don't have to be counted for how gender and sexuality works. And of course, we have to force intersex people into these binary categories instead of, you know, letting them decide for themselves? And of course it ignores any kind of intersex person with any kind of features that can't be written off as an anomaly and an aberration from the norm. Here we start doing science denialism. Here we start pretending certain people's body features aren't worth discussing for the sake of public knowledge. They're only worth bringing up as anomalies, and not as like, people.

I can't fucking get over how jarring the whole image is actually. Like, the really cheerful cartoon furry lions next to this piece of text prescribing the rigidity of existence. Yeah baby, I love being a strong cool lion boy, I love being told everything I'm not allowed to do or be for the sanctity of my gender!

yeah roar!!!

Here's a little section i wanna do more of a deep dive on

Women have two eggs?? what??? the egg-shapd things in the uterus are not the eggs!!!!! what the fuck are you talking about

This particular part stands out to me. Like, obviously the purpose of this infographic is not to tell you how bodies work, but to insist that there's a correct and an incorrect way for bodies to work, and that people outside of what it describes do not exist. It's obvious because it won't even show you what a uterus, what a vagina, or what boobs usually look like, like any decent diagram whose purpose is science education would. It's obvious because it straight up lies to you about how periods work, and tells you that having a period is somehow intrinsically tied to being a woman.

Like, no. Obviously. Trans can men experience menstruation at any point in transition, and trans women can experience other common parts of periods if they've been on hrt for long enough. Periods are not some kind of woman exclusive thing, it's not purely reliant on having a uterus or having certain hormones. It's not gender dependent. It depends on multiple features of one's body. It's a very basic fact of transition, hormones change how your biology works no matter what features you have. To imply none of this is true is denying very very basic facts about how a lot of people's bodies work, simply based on some insistence that those people aren't real and if we simply look away we can all pretend trans women aren't real. It's digging your head in the sand, it's having lived looking at the shadows on the wall your whole life, being told something new, and going right back into your cave and angrily shouting at everyone that the shadows are real, the shadows are ALL that is real, and though I may have glimpsed things that lie outside of it, those things aren't real because I personally can safely ignore facts about how the world works and go about my day.

[fishing-lesbian-catgirl]

There are times I think about playing Arknights just to see if it's as gay as your posting makes it seem.

Actually it's probably better just to ask it here. How gay is Arknights?

Well. The answer depends on how willing you are to read into subtext. If you’re the type who only cares about extremely explicit gayness to the degree of them literally saying it out loud or to have their relationship with another woman described in text as a relationship, then I guess the answer would be not that gay. There’s Tomimi who professes her love to Gavial in The Great Chief Returns event, and there’s Scavenger whose operator file describes how she was in love with a woman but they got separated, and by the time she was able to return to her her partner was dead. I think that might actually be it from the “turn to the camera and say ‘I’m gay’” level of gayness.

The reality of Arknights is that, despite all the things it does well (and there are seriously a lot of those, that’s why I’ve become kind of obsessed with it for better or worse), it is still a gacha game. And when the profitability of a game is tied directly to how much you can convince your audience to spend money to get the characters they want, it unfortunately makes them make so frustrating decisions to avoid any potential loss of profits. Specifically I’m referring to how characters are not allowed to be in relationships in text, as self-shippers are a potential revenue source (despite the fact that a character having a girlfriend vs a character being single is a much smaller roadblock to dating then the fact that they’re not real). Also it suffers from the very common problem of lack of body diversity and skin colors, fanart that you see that seems otherwise is likely fanon.

But if you like queer subtext, there’s quite a lot to work with. Especially since so many characters and their relationships with each other lend really well to lesbian readings with fascinating dynamics. Women will straight up flirt with each other in text somewhat frequently depending on the characters. Some women have relationships that are really really hard to read as anything other than lesbian (but people will always find a way, usually by not reading in the first place). It very often turns into a “there is no heterosexual explanation for this” situation. And the important thing to know is that ~80% of the characters are women, a lot of whom are very real characters with stories and everything that is well written and respecting of them (with a few exceptions). The majority of their interactions are with other female characters. If you’re picky about it any only want heavy subtext with minimal reading into it, you’ll have a number of good options of characters and relationships to enjoy, like Margaret Nearl and her two very obviously girlfriends/wives (depending on your interpretation), or Skadi and Specter, or Franka and Liskarm who got an official manhua dedicated to their relationship as mercenary partners that was so gay that the scanlators who put it on mangadex tagged it “Girls’ Love” only for the official translation to make it gayer.

It really is a your mileage may vary situation. If you’re like me and can read into the potential yuri in even the slightest interaction, it’s an unending feast. But if you’re only in it for the explicit canon then you might want to look for something else. Regardless, it is a gacha game but also it is a game with a majority female cast of usually well written characters in stories where they are the focus. Seriously, the first like 6 chapters of the main story only have a few men, most of whom are nameless npcs or antagonists, and even the main antagonists get to be fascinating women a large portion of the time. I know it might sound like I’m scraping the bottom of the barrel here but misogyny is an extremely present force in storytelling and the bar is really low. I can elaborate more if you want me to, but as you can probably tell I’m not good at being succinct, and any further elaboration would be as long and rambly as this

[entropicbias]

Last couple asks has me wondering what kind of johndave rep DO you like to read/see? Any examples you can think of in fanworks? And just your own interpretation. Thank you

i have got to reiterate that this is just a me thing. i'm not saying this to police anyone on their writing! i'm just really specific about the way i see these two get portrayed.

this is gonna suck and i'm gonna ramble about it for a while cause i'm mentally challenged. i have a hard time explaining my own thoughts with accuracy. sorry i can't keep this short and sweet. i am the type of person to just know when something is done right. i can't tell you why, but i'll try for you, anon. if you don't want to read all this here, i summarized it.

even more simplified

this is so crude. canon dave is really hard to nail for writers for some reason let alone the specific way i see him. i like a more chillaxed dave. some of the things that really throw me off with dave writing is missing the mark on how annoying he is and dumbing his character down to either angst, obama and apple juice jokes, or him being gay. i think john also encounters this issue. not enough research goes into their interests so writers can only represent them with the bare minimum. nicholas cage, con air, and 'dave i'm not a homosexual'. john and dave are assholes. they tease each other and aren't shy of doing that to other people. not that they're bad people! they care about each other and their friends a lot! but they're not afraid of being really honest about their thoughts or overexaggerating something that doesn't really bother them to poke fun at someone. they can make mendacious remarks to be polite, it just doesn't occur to them as often as just blatantly stating their thoughts on something or someone. i also like seeing them have more naturalistic dialogue. for some reason, when i think of that i think of zach from oneyplays or his character charlie from smiling friends. which is dumb even if it gives you an idea. i feel like a lot of this kind of banter is missing from these fanfics i read. at least, in the way i want it to go. think powerup comics.

gay part upcoming. i think the john and dave's relationship is best portrayed as a childhood crush that is unspoken of. a term i recently learned was "demiromantic", and i think that very perfectly describes how i think john's homosexuality would work. i mean, he doesn't really have a problem admiring dudes, which in itself could be called gay but that's not why i think he would be attracted to dave. i think it's kind of hilarious when people attribute john's homosexuality to him being "romantically interested in cage". john's idols are more like heroic figures to him. i don't like it when that is used as evidence that he's gay unless someone is making fun of him. this is the part where i talk about how john insists on the fact that he's straight. i'm not doubting that at all i think john still likes women and it's easier for him to do so. but he can also develop feelings for someone like dave. hence why i think he's demiromantic in that regard. this is exactly what my sexuality is like, so maybe i am projecting. i like to imagine i'm not projecting incorrectly, though. i think he'd only be able to develop feelings for dave in a setting where he is really a prominent figure in his life. earlier acts of homestuck were like this, but unfortunately the johndave relationship wouldn't work out on john's end with the way homestuck went. their friendship was kind of forgotten after a while, which sucks. in an ideal world, they would have remained in contact and then gotten close again in earth c. but dave was written to be with karkat and jade, which either nulls his feelings for john or opens up a whole new avenue of internalizing it. which is dumb and convoluted and i don't care about postcanon.

dave on the other hand would think about his feelings towards john a little more. i like to think that homestuck dave definitely had feelings towards john. i like to imagine they both developed a crush on each other around the same time, but unlike john who doesn't give it the time of day or even considers it as a crush, dave would. and he'd know that but he wouldn't want to act on it because of a plethora of reasons. probably to retain their friendship and his self image. i guess that could give them some 'angst'.

but you know what? i don't even care for romance all that much! they're bros before they're anything else! and that's all that matters to me! just nailing their friendship in itself is gold. john and dave mean a lot to each other in a platonic sense. even if they pursue other romantic avenues or don't, i don't care! i just like people putting them in a similar setting and showcasing their awesome bromance!

fig. 3, i also like davejade. thinking of iterations of him and john in fanworks that i like is really hard cause i don't read much in that department. what comes to mind is mr. tambourine man and some of deacon_blues's comics. kgtac has a really good dave and karkat too. cole is a spectacular writer. but i've finished neither of those comics so i'm just basing it off the very little i've read. also, none of these examples are particularly johndave related. i just wanted to note down examples of john egbert and dave strider writing i enjoyed. i read like, one comic faygos made but that was also pretty good. pinballhazard is also a phenomenal writer and artist. especially for john! you guys should check all these guys out. anyways, thanks for reading all that!

[docholligay]

A relevant question was asked by @tallangrycockatiel about my love of Interview With the Vampire: "Um, why are you into something that is all about dudes, all the time? Is this us not being a bitch's bitch?" Only, she is English so she said it in a more polite, suggested sort of way.

A very fair question! It is extremely true that, by and large, a thing with men only is less interesting to me by far and it takes a lot more for me to get into it. But she was not put off by this, for she had developed a theory:

My two initial theories are that either it hit you early enough that that hadn't become such a strong preference, or that it has something to do with the fact that despite being 95% men the entire cast seems to be having what I can only describe as dyke drama the entire time.

She both knows me and is smart, so there we are. The answer is basically: YES.

I started reading the Vampire Chronicles when I was something around 13, and so I didn't really have an idea that it was kind of fucked up that men we treated as the only default interesting people on earth. I pretty much took it as an implicit truth, where I never would have SAID that, but, I was very much in what can only be described as a 'masculinity k-hole' where of course I wanted to be a 'tomboy' and the only way for a girl to be tough and cool was if she was 'just like a boy' and this whole idea that men and masculinity were superior vomit vomit vomit whatever I am perfectly capable of beating someone's ass in red lipstick but that line of thinking did not occur to me at the time.

So I had NO sensitivity to the idea that stories whose ENTIRE UNIVERSES centered around men might be even, annoying. Anne Rice straight up does not care about or like women, and it is absolutely reflected in the way she writes her female characters. I cannot IMAGINE someone reading these as a fully grown adult who thinks women are neat, actually, and not coming away going, "My god, what is happening in these books?" But when you grow up with something, it changes with you, and the ways you think of it aren't COMING from adult you, they are, at least in part, coming from YOUNG you. And, in much the same way A Song of Ice and Fire, which I read at a similar time, gave me what I wanted from fantasy and wasn't getting, this did as well. I did not know that it would have been what is now called urban fantasy, and I didn't know that was a thing I liked (I very much know that now) all I knew was, I liked it. It was batshit and felt dangerous and it was unhinged and very gothic, though, again, not a way I could have expressed it.

So I'm carrying all that --I'll say baggage even though that has a negative connotation--when I come to the work. I already pre-like it.

This can of course backfire, but it didn't, so, I'm not gonna get into that.

NUMBER TWO: The 'all dudes' thing is not insurmountable. It's a quality issue. I love Dan Simmons' work and his women are basically nonexistent. There are plenty of things I like that don't center women. But, the bar to entry is MUCH higher. I would never in my life willingly watch something like "sailor moon but boys though."

What Interview has, that I love, is a very rare thing: Well written, EXPLICITLY gay, and everyone is fucking terrible. It is an adult show for grown-ass adults where people fuck and murder and abuse each other. Armand is the physical manifestation of gaslight gatekeep girlboss. Louis rewrites an entire personal history to make himself look better and emotionally manipulates everyone he comes into contact with. Lestat is a hot tempered, vain dilettante who does shit without thinking and then has the audacity to go, "Oh no, the quencies!" Everyone sucks, everyone is abusive in one way or another, all the fucking exes overlap, and I LOVE IT. Anyone looking for a hero or victim is watching the wrong fucking show and I am SO HAPPY ABOUT IT.

I'll close with my response when we were talking about how fucking great Sarah Waters is, in relation to the above:

it took me forever to realize that I didn't actually want recommendations for lesbian fic, what I was actually asking is: So who is doing it like Sarah Waters? Which unfortunately is no one. The woman is my own personal oasis in the desert.

And God, it has taken me YEARS to convince people that I care so much less about whether or not something is gay than if it is GOOD. Does it say something TRUE, you know? Is it messy? Is it sometimes uncomfortable? I would fucking LOVE if it could be gay on top of these things, but I'll real here:

l'll read a good straight thing versus a bad and especially a fluffy gay thing

I LOVE that shit like REd, White and Royal Blue or coffee shop Aus or whatever exist for people who want them, but I am out for blood ahaha

I have a happy, boring, domestic gay life, i do not need to imagine what a life where your biggest argument is about the quantity and variety of fucking breakfast cereal (We have EIGHT. BOXES.)

[a-dinosaur-a-day]

Round Two: Berthasaura vs Ceratosuchops

Berthasaura leopoldinae

Artwork by @i-draws-dinosaurs, written by @i-draws-dinosaurs

Name meaning: Bertha and Leopoldina’s reptile (in honour of naturalist and women’s rights activist Bertha Maria Júlia Lutz, and first Empress of Brazil and advocate for Brazilian independence Maria Leopoldina)

Time: Uncertain, likely ~121 to 75 million years ago (Aptian to Albian stages of the Early Creataceous) but may be younger

Location: Goio-Erê Formation, Brazil

Theropods are famously carnivorous dinosaurs, but many, many groups of theropods have decided “actually but what if I didn’t” and gone vegetarian, and yet it’s still wild when another one of those pops up every now and then. Even among them though, Berthasaura is special for being the only theropod that seems to have tried to just straight up turn itself into an ornithopod. The long spindly legs, the teeny little arms, and a big head with a toothless beak all come together to create an utterly bizarre little theropod that honestly nobody could have predicted.

Berthasaura is a noasaur, and those of you familiar will at this moment be saying “oh of course it’s a noasaur” because those guys were small ceratosaurs that were basically Theropod Wacky Experimental Phase 1.0. Within this group you’ve got wild sticky-outy teeth, a single weight-bearing toe on each foot in our fellow competitor Vespersaurus, and now multiple instances of beaks evolving independently. Theropods just love to evolve a beak, what can I say? Whatever the hell Berthasaura had going on, it must have been successful because as the basalmost noasaurid currently known its direct lineage has been surviving since at least the Late Jurassic!

Ceratosuchops inferodios

Artwork by @i-draws-dinosaurs, written by @zygodactylus

Name Meaning: Horned Crocodile Faced Hell Heron

Time: ~128 million years ago (Barremian stage of the Early Cretaceous) 

Location: Wessex Formation, Isle of Wight, England 

Say hello to the Hell Heron! Ceratosuchops is one of many new Spinosaurs described recently, showcasing the sheer diversity of this group as well as their much larger spread than previously believed. Ceratosuchops, previously thought to be just Baryonyx, is one of such new taxa that point to the entire group originating in Europe, a piece of their evolutionary puzzle not previously well known. Ceratosuchops was about 8.5 meters long, and had a long crocodile-like skull, with a horn on the top of it (hence its name). As a spinosaur, it would have probably been an aquatic stalker (you know, like a heron) - waiting near bodies of water for food, and snatching it up before it could swim away. Just, the difference between Ceratosuchops and actual herons, well, this was a big heron. It probably wouldn’t have had a sail, though it is possible it may have had a ridge like its close relative Suchomimus. It lived in a heavily river-filled environment, giving it a wide variety of locations to choose from for hunting. Besides a vast diversity of invertebrates, sharks, ray-finned fish, salamanders, lizards, turtles, many kinds of Neosuchians, Plesiosaurs, mammals, and pterosaurs, Ceratosuchops lived alongside other dinosaurs such as Hypsilophodon, Brighstoneus, Iguanodon, Mantellisaurus, Valdosaurus, Polacanthus, Eucamerotus, Oplosaurus, Ornithopsis, Aristosuchus, Calamosaurus, Calamospondylus, Eotyrannus, Neovenator, Ornithodesmus, Yaverlandia, Vectiraptor, Thecocoelurus, and even another spinosaur, Riparovenator!

[ginaluvr]

virals thoughts after recent reread

spent the last few weeks doing my yearly virals reread and here are my thoughts

the older i get the crazier it is to me that tory is 13-16 throughout the series. a literal baby

it's quite strange to me how ben is written as kind of ambiguous racially (and as a whole how tory's perspective on his heritage is written but that's another issue). like, it's stated that he's only 'part' indigenous in the first book, and the rest is left unsaid, but is generally described as being visibly not white like at all. in my head he has always been fully native anyway

(also it is completely skimmed over how terribly ben in particular is treated by virtually every adult and official they encounter. are we supposed to believe there's no bias against him for bigoted reasons)

the virals all being variously neurodivergent is both coded throughout the series and, in my head, very real

i wonder how tall shelton is really. we know ben is 5'10 and hi is not much shorter than him but i wonder if shelton is actually shorter even than tory, who are both described as the 'smallest' on separate occasions. maybe he is like 5'7, just short for a guy

i get that she's 14 and immature in several ways but i wish tory didn't harbor such resentment for most women she encounters

chance is so irredeemable oh my god. covering up a murder and threatening people's lives, then stalking and essentially preying on a girl 3+ years younger than him, then everything he caused in book 5. i'm sorry i just hate him

ella ending up with chance was so unfair on her, anyway she's a lesbian and her friendship with tory has been a situationship

whitney's character development is truly wonderful

i'd love to know more about the boys backstories. when did they each move to morris? have they always been outcasts together?

it's so funny to me that tory's perspective never holds back from gritty details like she'll say 'i can smell the boys sweating' a LOT

shelton thinks tory is pretty and more than pretty when she smiles :)

it's just a little bit unrealistic to me to suggest that ben had no friends at all outside of the virals at bolton, or at least no company. he was older, consistently described as very handsome, and sometimes notably absent from the others' company. i feel like he must have attracted at least a little attention just for being good looking and athletic

why were hi and shelton so gay from the very jump

why was shelton's japanese heritage not really acknowledged at all!!!! at the most basic level, you're telling me he speaks no japanese? understands none? he didn't even recognise the 'himitsu-bako' phrase as being japanese i mean cmon

tory refusing to forgive ben has always made exposure the least enjoyable read for me. he was completely a victim who was completely exploited and it breaks my heart. but it occurs to me that maybe tory only took his betrayal so hard because she trusted him so much, and a part of her maybe already had deeper feelings?

the morris island residents count makes 0 sense and really shouldn't be any more than 20 or 25 at the absolute most

it's funny that the villains in this series will always explain their entire plans and motives to the virals. feels like scooby doo

tory and ben being bonded by loss and forcibly growing up too fast. while hi and shelton are the friends they can count on to make those loads a little lighter

ben actually being a calming and stabilising presence to tory is so important. he gets her head on straight. this also parallels how tory describes her mother in shock

jason is such a good guy truly. even at his worst (fighting with ben) it was at least semi justified and he was never ever one to flex his wealth and privilege on any of the virals. unlike chance even when he was an ally

literally when and how does swipe take place

last thing. i believe that hi and shelton were each other's first kisses

[spongebobafettywap]

I can't begin to describe how badly Mystique and Destiny got woobified during the past 5 years, Maz. It was straight out of fanfiction in the levels of cringe because the writers and characters were as close to babying these two grown-ass women at every turn as it gets (this is the worst trope anyone can pull when writing flawed/evil LGBT characters seriously).

I guess an example speaks louder than any essay analysing the intricacies of this character bias : They had Hope Summers, the teenager who was nearly killed as a baby by Mystique under the orders of Destiny's diaries to save Rogue while risking dooming mutants post-M day, give a PEP TALK to Destiny during her "my wife is gone" filler phase of the plot, saying stuff about how strong Destiny was and all kinds of other adjectives she couldn't possibly know about this woman she barely had any canonical interactions with.

The writers used Hope, a character as unrelated to any of this family feud as Xavier was before Spurrier's origins retcon, as a cheerleader for the reveal of Nightcrawler's new parents : She was backing up Destiny the second she heard this new thing about actually being Nightcrawler's mother this whole time and straight up said she was so happy for him, even though Hope was in the front row seats to see how little fucks Destiny has given about Kurt not only since she met him, as the dude literally died to save her in 616 and nothing was done to prevent that avoidable death, but also since she became a member of the same mutant government Destiny, Mystique and Nightcrawler were a part of. She was in the front row seats to see Mystique publicly belittling and insulting him for any of his opinions and ideas while Destiny didn't stop Mystique, ignored his ass while he suffered from his horn illness then went totally MIA and was useless and passive for anything that wasn't about Mystique including her now new son's fate.

Tell me the character (Destiny and Mystique) is the writer's pet without telling me it was the writer's pet

Yes it's pretty well established that this retcon is pretty fanficcy, doing the usual tropes of making the story and other characters bend to make the couple look better and have it revolve around them. Honestly with how similar these stories end up being to the point where it's a stereotype of fanfics why do people even bother being fans of different couples? It seems it's less the characters they're drawn to rather it's just like an outfit for their ideal romantic characters to dress up as.

I also feel like you came to the wrong person when looking for sympathy for Hope Summers. To me she's always just been a plot device and for a long time I resented her because of that and the fact that Nightcrawler was sacrificed for her sake and then she basically doesn't even care about him dying and mind you he was actually dead for a few years which is forever in comic book time lol. She was also the reason why they decided to make Bishop an evil guy willing to kill a child for a while because well we can't make Cable a villain let's just villainise one of our few recurring Black X-Men! That's surely not gonna bite us in the ass when we have to start talking about how diverse our books are!

Had Bishop been her adoptive father and wanting to protect her against a deranged and evil Cable would have been far more unique and interesting because now it was someone who isn't a Summers trying to protect the Phoenix imbued person and the Summers is trying to be the force that actively wants to destroy that person.

So yeah Hope and Destiny are both these leech characters to me who absorb all the good aspects of other characters and have to have everyone else be written ooc to make them look good or compelling and I do not have any time for characters like that. Hope especially because she's just a regurgitated form of Rachel Summers but made to look like Jean but connected to Cable who himself is also a regurgitated version of Rachel's story only this time being a Rob Liefeld version of Terminator.

The only decent future Summers relatives to me were Rachel Summers and Nate Grey, Rachel had that storyline first and Nate Grey felt like an improved and unique version of the concept of Cable.

I don't want to sound too harsh because maybe she is being written ooc but to me it's hard to say if she is because I never got a hint of a personality from her and this type of writing seems par for the course.

[horizon-verizon]

Would you describe aegon as a ‘good/deep/complex’ (and more along those lines) type of character in the book? I’m curious to know your opinion as this is how so many Aegon fans describe him.

"Good" as in morally good? Obviously no. As in "well-written"? Eh, so-so.

A)

I may have written a long meta about him HERE, but I thought this was so that it could make clear that he still is a spoiled raping prince who feels entitled to having power--even with him saying Rhaenyra should have--by the principle of him being male. As in "heart of hearts". As one Tiktoker I-recently-listened-to-but-can't-remember-the-name-of said, Aegon II is Rhaenyra's literary foil in that he is the result of how a patriarchal society creates its own enemies in men, creates a rapist, etc. Therefore, he's "complex" in his representational value more than as a person himself.

I see him refusing to be king at first and deferring to Rhaenyra being older/sister/chosen heir as him not really wanting the actual responsibilities and commitment of being a leader and wanting to live in a male-privileged state of ennui forever.

B)

I also think that when some people use the word "good", they want to say they find that character emotionally compelling or "relatable" but do not want or know how to explain what they find so emotionally compelling. Or what they relate to. "Emotionally compelling" vs "relatable" is sometimes kind of the same, bc the reader is matching with traits, behaviors, and motives they experience(d). But sometimes "emotionally compelling" is recognizing a character's core desire, how it developed, understanding how they could be so passionate, desperate, etc., and admiring their determination, endurance, etc. Others say "good" to say "was this character's development logical from their experiences and does it, therefore, seem natural and emotionally realistic". And others say "good" as in "was there a fair distribution and relations of social dynamics between these sort of characters and those sort of characters"--for example, how writers write their men vs. their women comparatively to their other men and women; some claim Rhaenyra is the least well-written female Targ bc she doesn't do the strategizing as they wished she does or because she herself was not as forward-thinking or compassionate as they want a leader/a female leader to be.

C)

I think GRRM could & should have made Rhaenyra at least come up with parts of the dragonseeds or capture of KL's with Daemon and her son even with Luke's death [scroll down to section B] (the black council advised her and deliberated on the message vs outright violence with her only saying that she forbade her kids to fight in a confrontation with the greens while said greens were in KL).

I say "parts" bc I wouldn't have believed, personally, that without a POV showing me how she did it, Rhaenyra (or ANYONE) could have pushed aside her grief at Lucerys' death to think very straight to come up with a sophisticated plan without advisers.

GRRM does have a habit of making debilitating grief the means of disallowing women/potential female leaders from addressing certain critical problems in his writing [scroll down to section B],

BUT I also think (if he left Aelora and enough of other women alone simultaneously) it's unfair to expect a person, man or woman or enby--to "pick themselves up" and be the perfect leader and push away all their grief and STILL come up with plans that will "save the day" without that taking a toll on their psyches. Again, parents can and have maimed/killed to preserve their kids' lives with little to no compunction. It's a visceral/sometimes strongly reflexive bond some people will never get or have because some are infertile, dislike kids/babies and were not paternal (this word is used for the general inclination towards nurturing and parenthood), or simply do not want children (which is fine, it'd be weirder if everyone did). But they don't have to "get" it to know that it's not wise to not antagonize a caring and protective parent.

D)

In view of Aegon having raped many women who he has a lot of sociopolitical power over, and rape being a crime/act so heinous that I think that it merits death, exile, or castration, I find it hard to understand why people wish to relate positively to the emotions and motivations of him in particular when the evidence in the show is clear AND in the book, with a personality and position as his, rape is never going to be far from his "fondling". We know this from our own stories of rape culture and overly-privileged rich boys and fraternities. We know mothers can snd do often cover for their sons. Why would it be different for Aegon & Alicent, esp when we've seen that Alicent is all for usurping Rhaenyra and endangering her & her kids' lives?! (book & show). Well, it can only be the persons have misogynist ideas of women:

cannot stand women being actual people with flaws and searching for power without having been rape victims to "make up" for that loss of control

want women to exist to "calm" men down from their naturally violent tendencies so those men can rule "empathetically" or not become tyrants

So they naturally go to stan a rapist over a woman who had consensual sex with all of 3-4 men in the show and 2-3 men in the book for all of her life AND was the one actually usurped and lost children due to the other sides' plots and ambitions.

[galsinspace]

Has there ever been a discussion about how Bethesda games have this weird tendency to make black male NPCs who are kind of annoying and then the fandom gets INCREDIBLY into hating them so much that it becomes one of the main memes about the game? I'm thinking about Nazeem and Preston, and I think it's weird that it happened twice!

(This is just me rambling about something that's bothered me for years.)

They're super different characters of course, Nazeem is an absolute parody and was clearly designed to be a hateable asshole which makes me pretty uncomfortable in general, especially in the context of this "viking-esque" fantasy game with both an in-universe racism plot and an uncomfortable connection to real world racism that no one ever mentions - really guys, did you have to call them the Nord? Nordic is not a neutral word in the context of ethnicity. The Nazis did not just use the word Aryan to describe their made-up race categories, they used Nordic to describe the "highest" category of Aryan: blond blue-eyed people. In German, the use of the word Nordic is often a huge red flag. This is not a neutral word and I think it's insane that they actually used it for their fantasy worldbuilding.

(Fun tidbit: my part-Jewish German grandma used to refer to bleaching your hair blond as "nording it up")

Anyway. Black characters are rare in Skyrim, and Nazeem is usually one of the first black characters you'll meet. The game also barely has black hairstyles, all of the black women just have the same straight hair as the white women, men have like one cornrow style I think. So Nazeem, who is bald, is among the most realistic looking black characters in this presumably pre-straightening iron world, AND he has one of the darkest skin tones available, AND he's explicitly a foreigner, AND he's an unlikeable asshole who mocks the player and was clearly created to be hated. It just doesn't sit right with me. The only town NPC I can think of who's a similarly one-dimensional asshole is the guy in Windhelm whom you can challenge to a fist fight for being racist against dark elves (another can of worms), and even he at least serves the purpose of illustrating the problems in town. Nazeem is just there to be a hateable asshole.

Preston of course was not designed to be hated. I think he actually suffers from being written as too good of a guy, he's just brave and noble and selflessly caring and it makes him pretty boring imo.

(He does also pretty much immediately hand over his position of authority to the player character which I think is pretty uncomfortable as well, it makes no sense, but it fits in the Bethesda way of game design where apparently you just have to become the leader of every faction in the game. It makes no sense for the Institute storyline either, and there was a cut path where you become the Elder of the BoS as well.)

But of course it's a badly designed game and Preston hands out endless radiant quests that get super annoying, so players just HATE him. And I think it gets pretty uncomfortable how much people in the fandom vocally hate Preston! Why is this such a trend! He's an NPC, the problem is bad game design, why do people focus their hatred on a fictional black man?

Funny enough this is actually also a problem with another character in Fallout 4: Marcy Long. Marcy is a female character whose crime is that she's angry and complains, and hating her is also a huge meme in the fandom. There are mods to build prisons/stocks/whatever in your settlements for her and it really feels like a gross power fantasy about putting women in their place.

(It feels worth mentioning that she might be Asian? Her husband's name is Jun Long and his voice actor is Asian, but hers is white. Marcy Long has dark hair and dark eyes and looks ambiguous to me.)

So like, I think it's just a bad trend in the fandoms of these games for people to make a huge joke out of how much they hate these black characters and that woman. Gamers are bad and Bethesda is bad. A failure all around.

[sapphos-darlings]

I've heard a lot about how straight/gay people who have had one exception are actually bisexual. I had one (female) crush 7 years ago, but haven't been attracted to anyone since. For the past 5 years, I've called myself asexual, but have been questioning whether that exception makes me lesbian. I was only romantically attracted to her due to our age so can't say for sure whether I would hypothetically want to have sex with her. Because I've only been attracted to that one girl, I don't know if it was because she was a girl, or if she just was incidentally. I feel wary about calling myself lesbian because even though I've only ever had same sex romantic attraction, I don't know if I would be attracted to men, or even other women in the future. Do you think either label fits me?

Hello, Anon!

Well... I'd say that correcting "the gay person with one exception" myth is less about any real person, and more about combatting bi erasure and lesbophobia. Bisexual people can have strong preferences, and lesbians are not waiting for the right man, this sort of a thing. But life is complicated and people have all kinds of experiences, and it's not like me or likely anyone else is going to streetfight someone using that expression in all seriousness.

But you, my dear Anon! You don't say how old you are, so just to cover my bases I'd like to remind you that it can take much longer than pop culture has led you to believe to clear these things up. People go well into their twenties without being sure how their attraction actually works, and sexual desires and how to act on them can also take their time. People are never too old to be questioning.

That said, asexuality is a totally normal and natural sexual orientation! There's also variaton within that, like do you want romantic relationships and with whom. "Only ever been interested in a girl" sure sounds like a lesbian, but with the rest of what you've written I think you're getting ahead of yourself. The "one exception" really only works on the spectrum of mutually exclusive sexual orientations, not with asexuality. There are people who are romantically either straight, gay or bi but also asexual. Some are also aromantic, or at least generally mostly uninterested in romantic relationships as well as asexual.

So I wouldn't hurry to adopt a label out of some sort of obligation if you don't really believe it best describes you or your orientation. Your one crush from seven years ago doesn't "make" you anything except a person who had that crush, and it certainly doesn't undo everything else you know about yourself now. It is possible you are a lesbian, but if you don't know, then you don't know. Maybe, maybe you're not. Maybe you're not interested in sex or romance at all. That is also completely fine and you will find happiness like that. It's alright to be questioning, and it's alright to wait and see.

You don't need a label to tell about yourself and your life, or what you look for. Sure you could say you're interested in women and not give that an orientation label, but if you are not interested in sex or romance with women, then I don't see why you would say that.

Best of luck on your journey!

-Lavender

[uncloseted]

"I think that because of the purity culture that's developed in the past 5-10 years, there's a desire for media to reflect the "right" thing to do," you said this and I really felt that it described a huge phenomenon that I've seen lately in a lot of analysis of characters as well as pathologizing characters as "narcs", but why do you think we are experiencing this"purity culture" among young people in our media who should, in theory, be less judgmental and open-minded? i feel like more than ever people are demonizing any sign of being a bad person and seeing it as a sign of their character as a whole rather than a bad choice or moment.

Initially when I saw this message I only saw that you were quoting me back to myself, and I was like, "oh fuck, what am I being yelled at about?" but then I saw the rest of the message and have been thinking about it for three days straight. So A+, this is a great question. The other thing I'll say before I jump into my response is that I'm sure there's a PhD student somewhere who's written their dissertation on this, but when I was trying to find an answer, all I was getting was weird stuff on abstinence-only sex education and how cancel culture is the new McCarthyism, so these are just my semi-informed ramblings on the topic. If anyone has found good books or articles on this topic, please send them in, because I think this is fascinating.

All that said, to answer your question, I think it's complicated. To a certain extent, I think the cycle of moral authoritarianism vs moral relativism is normal. I think humans by our nature are reactionary, and so when something isn't working, we're drawn to trying the opposite. Younger generations will often be in opposition to whatever their parents were doing, whether that's the perfect nuclear family culture of the 50s or the hippie culture of the 60s and 70s. So I think part of this is just a cultural swing towards authoritarianism (on all sides of the political spectrum) as a reaction to a perceived failing of liberalism, and particularly neo-liberalism (again, on all sides of the political spectrum). I think especially in times when the world feels chaotic and when people feel like their communities aren't being protected, strict rules are enticing, because there's a belief that if we just follow the rules, we can protect our community, and things will improve.

One era in particular that our current media landscape reminds me of is the 1920s, when the Hays Code was active in Hollywood. This was basically a set of industry guidelines for what you could and couldn't show in movies that incentivized movie studios to self-censor in order to avoid having to release different versions of their films based on differing morality laws from state to state and city to city. The ultimate goal of the Hays Code was to prevent content from "lowering the moral standards" of women, children, the lower-class, and other people of "susceptible" minds. I think we're seeing something really similar today- there's a pressure to self-censor in order to appease the algorithm, lest your content be shadow-banned because it might displease advertisers, and there's a belief that people of "susceptible minds" will view any depiction of an activity as an endorsement of that activity. Again, to a degree, I think this is a concern that's been around for a while - I can remember when there was a big conversation about whether violent video games were causing school shootings, or whether the Twilight books were normalizing abusive relationships - but I think in recent years, this concern has become more intense and, to a degree, more warranted.

What I mean by this is that the issue of "susceptible minds" is kind of a vicious cycle. Our brains aren't very good at distinguishing fiction from reality, and so the more we see something in media that we consume, the more it's normalized, and the more likely we are to engage in it or expect it to be true. Especially for young people, this can be a real issue, since often they don't yet have the tools to be able to critically engage with media and so as a result, they may take what they see at face value. But at the same time, things like the Hays Code and algorithmic self-censorship prevent important conversations from being had and can further marginalize already oppressed groups. Think about, for example, how conversations on TikTok about lesbianism have to use the word "le$bean" or conversations about suicide have to use the word "unalived". It's important that queer people and people struggling with mental illness can find supportive communities online, and it's important that they can see their experience reflected in the media they consume. But, on the flip side, suicide contagion is a real phenomenon, and there is a real concern that comes with how we discuss these topics. A free for all internet a la 4chan certainly isn't the answer, either - at worst, those kinds of communities can accidentally get Donald Trump elected president and inadvertently destabilize American democracy.

Coupled with all of that, I do think that there's a legitimate concern about declining media literacy rates, especially in the US. As I've mentioned on here before, in the US, about 54% of adults lack literacy proficiency, meaning that they can’t reliably evaluate sources or infer sophisticated meaning and complex ideas from written sources. This means that a whole lot of people do genuinely believe that the depiction of something is an endorsement of that thing. They don't have the toolkit that they need to be able to infer the point of view a piece of media has, or to identify something as satire or as criticism. And so I think a lot of those people are pushing towards a more moralistic media landscape, as they view anything with controversial content as objectionable imagery that people will copy and that, as a result of those copycats, will lead our society down a degenerate path. There's a lot to say about the decline of media literacy in the US (it's a big concern), what caused it (The No Child Left Behind Act), and how we might fix it (mandatory media literacy classes in schools), but I want to take a little detour and talk about how the internet has changed our relationship to morality.

I think that one of the biggest things that has defined the current relationship between morality and the internet is the #MeToo movement. Going back to what I was saying earlier, when people feel like their communities aren't being protected, strict rules are enticing, because there's a belief that if we just follow the rules, we can protect our community, and things will improve. This can often be a really good thing - in the case of the #MeToo movement, several big name celebrities were held accountable for the crimes they had committed. But at the same time, it introduced the mainstream internet to "your fave is problematic" style cancelling, where a person's social media indiscretions from fifteen years ago could be pulled up to point to why they're a bad person. And it legitimized the idea that even if you do nothing else, if you cancel people, you're an activist, and you're doing morally good work. For a lot of people, I think this is really enticing. You can feel like you're contributing some moral good to the world without actually having to put yourself an uncomfortable real-world situation that real-life organizing often requires. And so people start digging into other people's pasts because they want to be good activists. They want to be accepted by their community - a community which oftentimes is their main source of social interaction. We can talk about where this comes from, but my (not backed by any facts) hot take is that I think a lot of the people engaging in this type of expectation of moral purity and ostracization of those who aren't are just people who grew up in religious traditions where that's commonplace. I think after leaving that kind of environment, people often maintain those ways of interacting with the world, even if the content they're interacting with has changed.

So, a person who maybe was raised evangelical but left the church gets really into leftist Twitter or whatever and starts cancelling people for every minor transgression they can find because it feels good to think that you're better or more moral than other people. But then they realize that if they're cancelling people for the Tweets that they made ten years ago or their Facebook status from middle school or a mutual follower that they have, they can also be cancelled for those things. And so there's kind of this desperate race to publicly comment on everything so that you're on record as being on the "right side of history", lest you be cancelled yourself. So then you get people who are publishing hot takes like, "Noora from Skam isn't a girl's girl" or whatever so that they're on the record that they know what she did was wrong and they would never ever ever do that themselves.

I dunno. I feel like this post is an even more rambling mess than what I usually put together, but I think it's some combination of all of those influences. I think an increase in media literacy skills and a push towards "calling people in" instead of "calling people out" would probably help, but it's hard to implement that kind of thing on a large enough scale.

[syncopein3d]

I used to do a lot of novella style text rp, first on Skype and then Discord, with people I picked up from mostly reddit, rarely here, and occasionally on Barbermonger. It wasn't because of ghosting that I quit looking. Ghosting is a frustrating inevitability of the process. It was mostly because of conflicting expectations. You see, to me there are two primary groups of rpers: storytellers and fuckers.

Storytellers want there to be a plot with a planned ending and for the characters to, if not change over it, do some interesting stuff during it.

Fuckers want to get their character laid.

There are a lot more fuckers. Sometimes they overlap. I would rp with both despite being largely in the story category because I'm aegosexual and I don't care if the characters bang or not, or in what combo of genders/sexualities. I would be looking for a good writer first, and if that meant I would be writing sex scenes, fine, sometimes those are hot. I've always loved writing dialogue and relationships, and romance and sex is a subtype of that.

The fact that I'm indifferent to my character's sex, gender, and orientation means I've written men and women both. (I always said that I'd happily play third genders, but no one asked.) I would ask partners up front what they preferred, they usually wouldn't admit it, and then I would pick the opposite gender to their stated irl one because most were straight people. People wanting queer relationships were more likely to write or respond to queer prompts, so that usually worked out. Playing gay women with a straight man was my least favorite, but in their defense, a lot of straight women wanted to play absolutely the worst yaoi twinks imaginable, and I didn't love that either.

To be clear, I love bottoms and subs; I'm a top who will reluctantly switch occasionally. My problem with these specific situations was that they ended up with me topping for characters who wouldn't exercise any agency in the story. They would want to be dragged everywhere. They wouldn't introduce lore. They wouldn't describe a room, let alone an interesting conflict or antagonist. What happens next? My character is the bottom, so it's not my problem! I asked someone to help me write a conflict once and they wrote, "then they fought some bandits, killed them, and moved on." Great. Thanks. I'll write with the bitchiest high maintenance brat in the universe before I'll write with a dead fish.

So you're probably wondering what's wrong with me that I haven't mentioned yet, like a perfect rp ad with suspicous adjectives in the partner description (open-minded towards what??). I'm a monsterfucker, kind of. I didn't care what species the other person was. I wanted to play nonhumans or humans that are altered. The closest I've come to playing a regular human was a woman with a red mutant eye she hid under a patch, and a human man with some severe scars from surviving a plague.

Basically picture a woman whose characters are never regular hot humans, who doesn't care which genitals they have, but does care intensely about story and grammar. I also wrote OC only, meaning we'd both make up characters rather than, say, the other writer playing Guilliman and me playing Yvraine or vice versa. I preferred original universes, but would write in Warhammer 40k, Fallout, and Elder Scrolls, all settings with broad, deep, relatively complicated lore.

Already you can see why it usually took me a while to find partners. I was about ninety degrees off from what most rpers wanted or were interested in, and I was picky as Hell. Frankly it's amazing I found as many partners as I did. I would end up talking at cross purposes a lot, because the other writer was focused on how to get the characters rubbing their bits together while I was trying to figure out how we get to the city where the big multispecies council happens. Eventually I found people who could do both, but I had to take the attitude toward rp ads that some men take toward dating, where you fire something off a hundred times to get one reply. Except I had it easier than straight men trying to date, because I would get at least one reply of some kind to most ads. Oh, and I'm also absolutely insufferable, if this essay so far has failed to make that clear. Like just a huge fucking twit. This has been less of an obstacle than you might suppose.

The sock puppet people were pretty funny when they were obvious. OC Only in an ad weeds out the people who want you to be Loki or Widowmaker so their horrible self-insert can knock boots, but I would still run across prompts that were very obviously someone looking for dubcon daddies and trying not to admit that directly. Originally I didn't understand why they wouldn't just say what they wanted. I eventually learned it was because actual erotic rp sites are revolting, and they were hoping to recruit someone without a lot of existing gross fetishes who would service their fetishes instead. They definitely wouldn't think of it this way. I think they probably were thinking something more like "can't we just have fun without it having to be about (X thing I'm super not into)?"

Normalcy is a shaky concept on the internet, my friends.

In the end, it ended up being easier and more fun to write and publish my own stories most of the time, whether as a novel no one reads on Kindle or a series of erotic and non erotic stories several people read on AO3. (The erotic ones get more views. By like, a lot.) I still write with a couple of friends, but I can't see myself doing public rp ads again. It's not just that I'm too old, although I really am at this point. I think the fact is that roleplay is different from writing, and I've never been very good at it.

[chicagosfinest2021]

I don't like sitting around waiting for my followers to put questions in my inbox (cuz if you wanted to, you would 😜) so I'm just going to steal this from @wolf-of-wakanda and answer these myself.

~ 💖 ASK GAME 💖 ~

📷 What’s set as your phone’s lockscreen?

My niece!! 😍😍

🍫 Cheese or chocolate?

Cheese all day

✨ Do you have any nicknames?

My sister calls me "Unnie" (which is Korean for 'Big Sis', we're big into K-dramas 🇰🇷 haha) She calls me 'Sissy' sometimes too. My niece calls me "Titi" 💖

🎵 Last song you listened to?

For some reason I haven't listened to music all day. . .too much on my mind. . .

✏️ Have you ever written fanfiction?

I actually published a L&O:SVU fanfic sometime ago. It's very dark but got a lot of positive feedback! Feel free to read/comment if you think you can stomach it. It takes place during the William Lewis Saga.

😏 Are you on discord?

Nah

 💛 Do you have any piercings?

Just my ears, might do my navel in the future. I thought hip dermals were actually cool for a minute. . .

🐰 What do you think says the most about a person?

Whether or not they watch their movies and TV series with subtitles on.

🍪 If you were a cookie, what kind would you be?

A stuffed cookie! Them things changed my life 🤤

🐶 Are you more of a dog person or a cat person?

I honestly love both but if I *have* to pick, definitely kitties.

🎧 Headphones or earbuds?

Earbuds definitely

🌼 What’s the last thing you said out loud?

I was reading these questions out loud a minute ago LOL

🙃 What’s a weird fact that you know?

Although it is considered part of the North American continent, Greenland is technically part of Europe (Denmark specifically)

🦉 Are you a morning person or a night owl?

It is exactly 1:00AM as I type this answer 🦉

🧸 Favorite place to nap?

My bed, duh!!

🏳️‍🌈 Are you a member of the LGBTQIA+ community?

I think so, still working out the details though. . .I definitely know I'm not 100% straight

🦋 Describe yourself in three words.

Crazy, sexy, cool

👖 Jeans or sweatpants?

Neither, who actually enjoys wearing pants?

🥤 What’s your go-to Starbucks order?

I don't order Starbucks much because I don't like coffee, but their vanilla bean frappuccino is actually really good. They have other seasonal drinks that aren't bad either.

🧡 A color you can’t stand?

I'm not very fond of orange and I JUST got into pink in the last couple of years.

💎 What’s your most prized possession?

Me

☕ Coffee or tea?

Tea

🦖 Favorite extinct animal?

Sabretooth tiger

🌙 How long have you been on tumblr?

I thought it's only been about 6-7 years but I remember being on Tumblr back in college, and I've been out of college exactly 10 years this year, so it's actually been a decade and some change!

🌴 Desert island item?

I don't understand the question. . .😐

🐸 Describe your aesthetic.

Neo-soul and slow jams, cityscape at night, high rise apartment overlooking a busy street, rainy days, jazz music, lofi/chill music vibes, vanilla and coconut, thick books, hoodies and bulky sweaters, hot tea

🔮 What’s your dream job?

I actually don't dream of working LOL BUT if I had to choose I'd like to either be a food/travel blogger or a historian (I'm a certified nerd deluxe).

💙 Relationship status?

Perpetually single, not looking to mingle

🌿 Describe your favorite outfit.

T-shirt and panties, although when I'm home I usually don't wear anything on my top half

🎤 Is there a song you know all the lyrics to?

Most nursey rhymes(?) LOL

🤎 What color is your hair?

Black/dark brown

💌 Do you talk to yourself?

Consistently

💄 Do you wear makeup?

Not more than once or twice a week, I'm not trying to impress anyone

🌸 Best compliment you ever received?

I love it when other women tell me I have a nice ass. I also love it when people tell me I look like one or both of my parents.

💞 @ your favorite blog.

@chicagosfinest2021

Reblogs are appreciated!

[gatheringbones]

["A Little Local Color in a Grey Landscape Watching the two of us become lovers, a frightened heterosexual friend accused us bitterly, "It's all those damn books you guys read that's ruining you." But though we both read voraciously, we disappointingly could not find books with which to "ruin" ourselves. The words associated with being Gay, (including Gay) were not written down so that we could find and decipher them. Words describing us as lovers and as people with unique characteristics were oral history we heard in a line passed from our first lover's first lover's first lover. Some of the words were so secret they seemed never to be used by the not-Gay, and we did not speak these words in their presence (closet or straight, for instance).

As my first lover, the woman who "brought me out," Vonnie taught me a potently alive underground vocabulary. We were not living in a center of urban sophistication, where she might have been expected to learn it, but in a sparsely populated, rural portion of the world, in an economically poor and spiritually depressed late 1950's New Mexico desert town near the hellish border of West Texas. There, it seemed to me, virtually everything was prohibited except low-level wage slavery and mandatory, joyless marriage. "How do you drive through West Texas?" we joked. "As fast as you can." We didn't even try to make the joke entertaining.

At eighteen, I had "eloped" to be with my exciting raven-haired Yvonne, having fallen in love with her in three days and gone to stay illicitly and ecstatically on the small campus where she was patiently putting herself through college to become what she most admired: a teacher, one of the dedicated kind. The town was arid and alkaline and grey, tightlipped and guilt-ridden, the (mostly) white Protestant town people appearing to view all life forces as a hellfire to be stamped out whenever possible. To my hot-for-life sensibilities, they seemed to value only what beat them down and made them old before their time. Pleasure was forbidden, intellectual ideas were suspect (as was music), and outsiders were seen as subversive. Anything that made the juices flow was "off-color." Any color at all seemed to be "off-color" in that grey, grey world. Life was seen as something to suffer. All dancing was prohibited, even when the high school students modestly requested special permission from the town council to hold a senior prom.

The college cafeteria stuffed the milk and bread with great gobs of gummy white saltpeter in a vain and hideous attempt to suppress the sexual feelings of the students. Alcohol was prohibited, the entire county being dry. Sex of any kind was never mentioned out loud. Men had little money and women none. People worked desolately and women married without love; everyone looked out for their own and no one else, bitterly stressing a "survival of the fittest" doctrine. The citizens believed they were being punished for something. And so they were; they punished each other for the slightest infraction of "God-given" regulations.

Though the campus was a little more lenient than the town, Vonnie and I had no difficulty being bohemians in such a place. I was considered an outright juvenile delinquent merely for being an eighteen-year-old female on the loose, unattached to husband or father or institution.

Even in that wasteland of human relationships and social rigidity, where we had to be so utterly secretive about so much and where Yvonne's territory consisted of half a closet and the top bunk in an open dormitory room shared with three innocently heterosexual roommates, even in that walk-on-eggs place we knew at least five other "out" Lesbians. We had a secret Gay culture. We knew about the color purple.

We had our fun and flirtations and arguments. We had our philosophical discussions and our parties and jokes and special signals and Lesbian clowning. We had heated love affairs, where we locked burning eyes and made love all over the floor because the bed suddenly seemed too far to go, and we had our serious long-term relationships. We admired each other's (forbidden to women) minds. We had found the local bootlegger, a Spanish-speaking gypsylike woman who was probably Gay herself, with wonderful humor, a big family, a mouthful of gleaming gold teeth.

We had our cigar-smoking sessions using Monopoly money and our horsey, beer-drinking Saturday nights ending with someone taking care of someone else who was sick on liquor. We played competitive sports. We admired each other's (forbidden to women) muscles. We had our cultural in-group expressions and gestures. "Never go straight, always go forward," we joked inevitably when anyone was giving directions in a car full of Lesbians or Gay men. We had our little finger jokes. On Halloween, we brazenly wore mustaches all over campus and fell down laughing at each other's funny faces. We shared danger— both physical and social— together. We stood watch for each other as lovers do in jail. We admired each other's (forbidden to women) courage. We knew about cunnilingus, though only the boldest among us practiced it. We knew about the Mound of Venus. We knew about tribadism and about butch and femme. We admired each other's (forbidden to women) sexual appetites. We knew that Gay was our generic name, that people who were not Gay were "straight" and that many of them called us "queer" with unfathomable hatred and fear, that Sappho had written love poems to women in 600 B.C., that Oscar Wilde, a faggot, had gone to jail for his Gayness, that little finger rings were a secret means of Gay identification though heaven would not help you if you were wrong.

We knew that purple was our special color, though we did not know what this meant. We did not wear purple or collect purple objects or dye our curtains purple. We did not use lavender soap or sew with mauve material or have magenta bedspreads or carry bunches of violets, we had no purple flags. We simply repeated what our lovers had told us their lovers had told them: purple or lavender is the Gay color."]

judy grahn, from another mother tongue: gay words, gay worlds, 1984

[star-anise]

Ok, I'll bite. What *is* the difference between Bridgerton and Jane Austen in relationship to their skirts?

Oh! Not in their costuming, just in their general *waves hands* everything. It's a comment I see a lot about Bridgerton: "Well, it's not much like Austen, is it?"

That's because there are 200 years of literary history between the two, and they have not been empty!

This ended up being 1.5k words, but when I put stuff under a readmore, people don't actually read it and then just yell at me because of a misread of the 1/10th of the post they did read. Press j to skip or get ready to do a lot of scrolling (It takes four generous flicks to get past on my iPhone).

First I'll say my perspective on this is hugely shaped by Sherwood Smith, who has done a lot of research on silver fork novels and the way the Regency has been remembered in the romance genre.

The Regency and Napoleonic eras stretch from basically the 1790s to 1820, and after that, it was hard to ignore the amount of social change happening in Britain and Europe. The real watershed moment is the 1819 Peterloo Massacre, where 60,000 working-class people protesting for political change were attacked by a militia. The issues of poverty, class, industrialization, and social change are inescapable, and we end up with things like the 1832 Reform Act and 1834 Poor Law.

This is why later novelists, like Charles Dickens and Elizabeth Gaskell, are so concerned with the experiences of the urban poor. Gaskell's North and South has been accurately described as "Pride and Prejudice for socialists."

So almost as soon as it ended, people started to look back and mythologize the Regency as a halcyon era, back when rich people could just live their rich lives and fret about "only" having three hundred pounds a year to live on. Back when London society was the domain of hereditary landowners, when you weren't constantly meeting with jumped-up industrialists and colonials.

Jane Austen is kind of perfect for this because she comes at the very end of the long eighteenth century, and her novels show hints of the tremors that are about to completely reshape England, but still comfortably sit in the old world. ("The Musgroves, like their houses, were in a state of alteration, perhaps of improvement. The father and mother were in the old English style, and the young people in the new. Mr and Mrs Musgrove were a very good sort of people; friendly and hospitable, not much educated, and not at all elegant. Their children had more modern minds and manners.")

Sherwood Smith covers the writers who birthed the Silver Fork genre in detail, but there's one name that stands out in its history more than any other: Georgette Heyer.

Georgette Heyer basically single-handedly established the Regency Romance as we know it today. Between 1935 and 1972, she published 26 novels set in a meticulously researched version of London of the late 18th and early 19th century. She took Silver Fork settings and characters and turned them into a highly recognizable set of tropes, conventions, and types. (As Sherwood points out, her fictional Regency England isn't actually very similar to the period as it really happened; it's like Arthurian Camelot, a mythical confection with a dash of truth for zest.)

Regency Romance is an escapist genre in which a happy, prosperous married life is an attainable prize that will solve everything for you. Georgette Heyer's novels are bright, sparkling, delightful romps through a beautiful and exotic world. Her female characters have spirit and vivacity, and are allowed to have flaws and make mistakes without being puritanically punished for them. Her romances have real unique sparks to them. She's able to write a formula over and over without it becoming dull.

And.... well. The essay that introduced me to Heyer still, in my opinion, says it best:

Here's the thing about Georgette Heyer: she hates you. Or, okay, she doesn't hate you, exactly. It's just that unless you are white, English, and upper class (and hale, and hearty, and straight, and and and), she thinks you are a lesser being. [...W]ith Heyer, I knew where I stood: somewhere way below the bottom rung of humanity. Along with everyone else in the world except Prince William and four of his friends from Eton, which really took away the sting. But my point is: if you are not that white British upper-class person of good stock and hearty bluffness and a large country estate, the only question for you is which book will contain a grimly bigoted caricature of you featuring every single stereotyped trait ever associated with your particular group. (You have to decide for yourself if really wonderful female characters and great writing are worth the rest of it.)

So Heyer created the genre, but she exacerbated the flaw that was always at the heart of fiction about the Regency, was that its appeal was not having to deal with the inherent rot of the British aristocracy. I think part of why it's such a popular genre in North America specifically is that we often don't know much British history, so we can focus more on the perfume and less on the dank odor it's hiding.

And like, escapism is not a bad thing. Romance writers as a community have sat down and said: We are an escapist genre. The Romance Writers of America, one of the biggest author associations out there, back when they were good, have foundationally said: "Two basic elements comprise every romance novel: a central love story and an emotionally satisfying and optimistic ending." A strong part of the community argue that publishing in the genre is a "contract" between author and reader: If it's marketed as a romance book, there's a Happily Ever After. If there's no Happily Ever After, it's not romance.

It's important for people to be able to take a break from the stresses of their lives and do things that are enjoyable. But the big question the romance genre in particular has to deal with is, who should be allowed to escape? Is it really "escapist" if only white, straight, upper class, able-bodied thin cis people get to escape into it? In historical romance, this is especially an issue for POC and LGBTQ+ people. It's taken a lot of work, in a genre dominated by the Georgette Heyers of the world, to try to hew out the space for optimistic romances for people of colour or LGBTQ+ people. These are minority groups that deal with a literally damaging amount of stress in real lives; they are in especial need of sources of comfort, refuge, community, and encouragement. For brief introductions to the issue, I can give you Talia Hibbert on race, and KJ Charles on LGBTQ+ issues.

Up until the 1990s, the romance genre evolved slowly. It did evolve; Sarah Wendell and Candy Tan's Beyond Heaving Bosoms charts the demise of the "bodice-ripper" genre as it became more acceptable for women to have and enjoy sex. The historical romance genre became more accommodating to non-aristocratic heroines, or ones that weren't thin or conventionally pretty. The first Bridgerton book, The Duke and I, was published in 2000, and has that kind of vibe: Its characters are all white but not all of them are aristocrats, its heroines are frequently not conventionally beautiful and occasionally plump, and its cultivation to modern sensibility is reflected in its titles, which reference popular media of today.

This is just my impression, but I think that while traditional mainstream publishing was beginning to diversify in the 1990s, the Internet was what really made diverse romance take off. Readers, reviewers, and authors could talk more freely on the internet, which allowed books to become unlikely successes even if their publishers didn't promote them very much. Then e-publishing meant that authors could market directly to their readers without the filter of a publishing house, and things exploded. Indie ebooks proved that there was a huge untapped market.

One of my favourite books, Zen Cho's Sorcerer to the Crown, is an example of what historical romance is like today; it's a direct callback and reclamation of Georgette Heyer, with a dash of "Fuck you and all your prejudices" on top of it. It fearlessly weaves magic into a classic Heyer plot, maintaining the essential structure while putting power into the hands of people of colour and non-Western cultures, enjoying the delights of London society while pointing out and dodging around the rot. It doesn't erase the ugliness, but imagines a Britain that is made better because its poor, its immigrants, its people of colour, and the foreign countries it interacts with have more power to make their voices heard and to enforce their wills. Another book I've loved that does the same thing is Courtney Milan's The Duke Who Didn't.

So then... Bridgerton the TV show is trying to take a book series with a very middle-of-the-road approach to diversity, differing from Heyer but not really critiquing her, and giving it a facelift to bring it up to date.

So to be honest, although it's set in the same time period as Austen, it's not in the least her literary successor. It's infinitely more "about" the past 30 years of conversation and art in the romance genre than it is about books written 200 years ago.