#just A LOT YEAH

[inbabylontheywept]

i did wrestling in middle school. on one hand, i was actually quite good at it, which was nice. being good at any sport was a new achievement for me. on the other hand, i was bi, and i was trying very hard not to notice that i was bi, and getting folded into knots by very kind, very muscular dorks made that task somewhat difficult.

adding fire to the problem was that my parents and my grandparents wanted to watch my matches, because they were very proud that their Gangly Nerd Son was actually Sporting, and they wanted to cheer me on. which would've been sweet and all, but if there are four people you do not want there during a key part of your Burgeoning Sexual Awakening, it is your mom and your dad and your grandma and your grandpa.

right? i mean, imagine some guy's got your head in his armpit, and you're going you know, old sweat smells bad, but fresh sweat has a sort of and then you make eye contact with your grandpa in the stands and you remember you're swearing spandex so if you pop a boner people aren't just going to be able to see the outline, they're going to be able to count the veins, and the only way you will be able to restore your family's honor after that would be by moving to siberia and renouncing joy, forever. that, or lift your entire body up by your kneck then twist 180 degrees without paralyzing yourself.

it’s a lot of pressure, is what i’m saying.

still it did motivate me to win my matches really fast. because i was so tall and skinny, i was stupidly good at the double leg takedown, and then once someone was knocked down, i'd just do the half nelson and kind of flip em over for the pin. then the ref would count to three and i’d win. EZPZ.

i had one match where that went great. won in the first ten seconds, sat back down, and prepared myself for a good hour or two of doing fuck all. didn't even feel bad the parents/grandparents were gonna be bored. the matches went up from me in 5 pound increments (i was in the 115 lbs division) and it was going great until we got to the 145 lbs division. the other school's wrestler stepped onto the mat, and she turned out to be a girl so our guy flipped, because for straight guys, wrestling a girl is not a pleasant experience.

i'm not entirely unsympathetic. my experience wrestling dudes was definitely a little traumatic. but also, i dealt. guy could've dealt too. instead, he refused to wrestle, and the coach went - fine. not even worth fighting over.

so he went to the 140 pounder, and that guy said, nosir, my mom said mormons can't wrestle girls. next guy down, 135 pounder, now he knew he could pull the same card and thus did. 130 pounder, 125, both tapped out. he got to the 120 guy, and that guy was catholic, but he said he was considering being mormon, and thus would have to pass. as a precaution.

coach blew up a little at that. he said "is there anyone - anyone - on this entire goddamn team that is willing to wrestle a girl?" and then he pointed at me and said "YOU. MAT. GO."

and i'll be real, if i'd been paying more attention, i'd have pulled the mormon card too, but i'd just been putting all that audio into a buffer file because i was reading, so i was halfway across the mat before i even processed what had been said and by then it was too late to turn back.

still i had a plan. and my plan - my beautiful, perfect plan - was to do what i'd always done. tackle, flip, pin, win. sit down. read. bore my family to death. move on.

i got the first part right. she was bigger than me, but she wasn't taller. just an incredibly stout woman. god built me like a snake with glasses, just as he built her like a combat cube. the problem was the half nelson. soon as she was down, i tried hooking my arm under hers from behind and for both genders, the defense for this move is just clamping your arms really fucking tight against your sides. if you're a guy, that's whatever, but if you're a girl - especially if you're god's chosen combat cube - that pins your opponents hand right against your boob.

so, i got the hook in, she clamped, my whole arm pressed against something soft, my coach was yelling THE HALF NELSON. BABYLON! JUST FINISH IT! FINISH THE HALF NELSON! and i was just trying to press hard enough to finish, when then my brain went

...oh.

and i flipped out. of course i flipped out. i like girls, and touching a boob is an elemental experience, and i was not ready. i was not prepared. i had not committed the sacred rites. i recoiled like i'd just brushed my arm against the surface of the sun, stood up, and backed away. nobody in the room knew why i'd given up. all they saw was me, right about to win, suddenly flailing around and scrambling. so everyone started screaming at me to just get the half nelson again, and i couldn't really yell back there's a fuckin' boob in the way and it was very distressing, and the only way i could think of to make them stop was just doing it over again the right way.

so i did.

i hunkered down and prepared myself for Wrasslin' Attempt #2: The Sequel.

i knocked her down again, EZPZ. i went for the half nelson again, but she knew what i was about to do so she super clamped, and i knew she was gonna super clamp, so i wound my arm back like a pop-eye cartoon punch before swinging my arm through the gap between her bicep and her side, but the amount of time i spent winding back super signalled what i was about to to do, which gave her time to clamp even harder, which somehow redirected the entire force of the popeye punch to the bottom of her bra.

it spat out a single boob the same way an action hero might spit out one single tooth after getting a solid crack across the jaw. as if to say:

*ptooie.* "that all you got?"

i did not actually see this. my experience was that first there was an arm, then there was a bit of boob, but i was braced, i was ready, forward at all costs, tatakae motherfuckers, and then the boob went away, and i didn't know where it went but my team, and the audience, and everyone who was in front of me, they all gasped like i just kicked them in the stomach. except for my coach. he was behind me, and thus one of the four people in the room who did not see the boob. now my mom, my dad, my grandma, and my grandpa, they all got flashed but nooooooo, coach thunderbutt was behind me, and he didn't see shit so he was still yelling NOOOOOO BABYLON WHAT ARE YOU DOING JUST FINISH THE NELSON! GO FOR THE KILL! BABYLON! BABYLON!

but i did not go for the kill. i stood up and she stuffed her boob back real fast, and we just kind of circled each other awkwardly until time ran out and i won on points. that's not technically allowed, but the ref had some mercy on me.

my coach did not.

i barely had time to sit down before he strode over to the bench to chew me out.

"babylon," he said, in that very calm way people get when they're too pissed to yell. "why didn't you pin?"

and i didn't know how to say well coach, i tried, but there was a boob, and it kept getting in the way, and my mom was watching, and so was my dad, and so was his dad, and his mom, and god (like bible god) and that's a can of worms because i'm pretty sure he was already mad at me, and i'm wearing spandex, and i think i might have to move to siberia, so instead i said

"i uh. i forgot how to do the half nelson."

which is actually impossible. forgetting how to do the half nelson is like forgetting how to swallow your spit.

and he looked at me, like i was the dumbest person in the entire world, and i looked through him like i'd just survived my 250th day in a trench at verdun, and he said: fine.

fine.

but we're all going to practice it for an hour tomorrow because you forgot.

and then he left.

and my buddies had the gall to be salty about it. i got so many comments saying "dude, why didn't you just tell him the truth?" and i said "you can if you care so damn much. you could've wrestled the girl too. maybe someone else should do the hard thing today."

but they didn't. so the next day, we did an hour of half nelson drills, and i spent a decent amount of time getting thrown around the mat, and it was pleasant in exactly the way that i hated and the year after that, to the surprise of everyone but myself, i quit wrestling and joined the trivia team.

and if you want more reasons to love my mom, my grandpa joked after the match that i might have to talk to my bishop about it, and my mom told him he would be allowed to make jokes after he stood in front of a crowd of 110 people in spandex underpants while wrestling a woman that was not his wife.

he paused for almost five seconds after that. then he said: aw. hell. sorry babylon.

and i'd have preferred my apology from god, but getting it from him was pretty good too.

[nyxi-pixie]

'wah wah everywhere is falling to the right wing the whole world is doomed' literally like 6 months ago we were talking about how there was a trend in countries getting rid of their right wing governments. poland at the end of last year, france voted in a unified centre left/left alliance, even the UK finally got rid of the tories after 15 years (right wing splitting be damned, it still happened). outside of europe, bangladesh removed a dictator in like 2 seconds, india may have reelected their Evil Guy but on a DISTINCTLY reduced majority, theres been queer rights successes in thailand, with gay marriage set to be legal by 2025, and thereve been positive court cases on it in japan. and this is just stuff i vaguely remember hearing about. im sure theres more if you care to look for anything aside from more reasons to make yourself miserable

the US has a distinct effect on everyone, so this won't be fun for anyone (least of all its population. sorry guys), and there ARE a lot of people sliding into right wing extremism, but presenting this like its an unchallenged worldwide phenomenon is inaccurate, its damagingly bleak, and all it does is encourage despair and apathy. you DO have political power, and you shouldnt forget that just because of bad election results and the media's desperation to make you lose hope

[wanologic]

sorry danny, sam will never think you’re cool

[colorstrike624]

No but seriously the things turtles can do are unhinged.

[katblazeparttwo]

listening to season five shenanigans

Inspired by (and og pics at) this post !

[mroddmod]

one of the very few to show the batch kindness back on kamino

[hinamie]

in spite of everything, I had fun <3

[tavina-writes]

I want to zoom in on these tags from @amokslime because they're just! really great!

I think the thing to keep in mind about a lot of scholar gentry hobbies, and indeed why the ink wash paintings we have today look Like That (tm) is because the scholar gentry prided themselves on being "amateurs" in SO many ways, they weren't professionals (people who had to sell their art to live) they did art because they could afford to do art that purposefully looked a certain way that wasn't popular with the masses. As in, they prided themselves on doing paintings that captured the "spirit" of a thing rather than the "true look" of the thing and also in their kind of esoteric requirements of say, no color, or painting trees all a certain way or however, is a form of humblebragging.

One of the things that is really boggling when you first get into the art history of Chinese painting is that most of the paintings produced in historical China were NOT actually those black and white ink wash mountain and tree paintings with maaaaaybe a few tiny figures in the background. The scholar gentry were allergic to color for the longest time (this changed over the centuries but remained a prevalent scholar gentry thought pattern) bc it was "garish" and "vulgar" but most people weren't! most people loved colors! we have a few extant examples of new years prints people would put in their houses for decoration and they were FULL of color and people and were often quite lifelike! (not in the way of western paintings but you know differences.

The reason we have such a plethora of scholar gentry paintings that survive (black and white, ink wash, mountains and trees etc) is because those were the people who were rich enough to collect and preserve artwork. (I have a whole essay about how a lot of paintings we have today are specifically bc Emperor Qianlong fancied himself a fine arts collector but that is NEITHER HERE NOR THERE.)

But yes, basically tldr what this means is that as a scholar gentry guy liking any one hobby too much and being too good at it was a bit vulgar and bad taste actually. People will kind of side eye you for loving painting too much and being too good at it or caring too much about it. You're supposed to purposefully just be so so at it because you're a gentleman of leisure (who doesn't need to sell art for a living) you shouldn't care this much because you won't be god forbid selling the thing.

ps. this also leads to people who DO sell art for a living (opera singers, theatre people, professional painters, professional calligraphers etc) being considered a very uh, looked down upon social class by the scholar gentry because they DO have to sell art for a living to make ends meet and that's lowbrow entertainment business etc etc.

pps I DO headcanon nhs' rings as at least one archer's thumb ring yeah bc it's SO funny and hysterical and also the "bragging about my archery skills with a bejeweled ring that I can't even shoot with" was the equivalent of "bragging about how big my hands are bc that's equivalent to some other part of my anatomy."

I started writing an essay in the tags of a post that was not strictly related to this topic but started getting me thinking and realized I should just. Make my own post about this because I have kind of been sitting on this frustration for a while? And mmmm idk how to feel about this.

(For the record, the post that inspired this is this one.)

I want to make it clear UPFRONT that I am not knocking on ANYONE's interpretations of NHS or about having gender headcanons about a character in general. I think people can headcanon NHS as whichever gender they like because those interpretations are fun and exciting and I like to read about those too.

What I have been getting progressively iffy on, and am not entirely clear on how to express until I came across the above post is the idea that 'NHS is femme-coded because he has femme-coded hobbies' or 'NHS is very gender/gender nonconforming because he likes to paint and doesn't like exercise/practice his saber' or 'NHS is not very masc in comparison to his brother and people in his society put him down/are irritated with him/react to him differently because his gender presentation is more femme.'

And I think what's always kind of boggled me about interpretations like these that I've mentioned above is because...

Hobbies like keeping birds* and painting and calligraphy and poetry** and being well dressed and fashionable*** were strongly masculine coded scholar gentry hobbies for bored rich men**** in historical China. People react to NHS they way they do in text (at least from what I can understand of the social norms of the MDZS jianghu) because NHS is determined to be a particularly foppish dandy and also yknow, actively wailing about his many problems.

So, I think the tldr of this is that: NHS can be interpreted as whatever gender people would like! But his society and his peers and the other characters are not reacting to him in a certain way because he's femme-coded, they're reacting to him that way because he's an irritating asshole and kind of foppish (affectionate)

*keeping birds (as pets and not like, just raptors for hunting) was a rich man's hobby in Ancient China from at least the Zhou dynasty, though which birds were popular as pets (everything from parrots to orioles) differed depending on the dynasty, but the Ming and Qing dynasties were extremely big on pet birds in rich people's houses in particular.

**it is unclear if NHS is particularly good at say, painting or calligraphy OR poetry but the point is that he appears to like these things

***men's fashion has been a wild beast throughout the ages both in the east and the west, and men have done things for fashion like wearing gaudy archer's rings to show off archery skills they didn't have, high heels, Song dynasty men wore flowers in their hair, and my own personal unfavorite: the Qing Dynasty queue.

****the four gentlemanly arts were for example: qin qi shu hua -- playing the qin (music), weiqi (Go if you want to use the Japanese name for the game), shu (calligraphy), and hua (painting). See brief wikipedia summary about the four arts here. There were different things also included in the education of an aristocratic gentleman in pre-imperial China but we have no time to delve into that in this post. HMU for more info if you want it because I love to talk about historical things.

[chloesimaginationthings]

FNAF Into the pit? More like into the daddy issues

[bacchuschucklefuck]

no more fan-ta-sizing about it! everything's already changed~

[inkskinned]

you're in the habit of denying yourself things.

if someone asked you directly, you would say that you love a little treat. you like iced coffee and getting the cookie. you drink juice out of a fancy cup sometimes, and often do use your candles until they gutter out helplessly.

but you hesitate about buying the 20 dollar hand mixer because, like. you could just use your arms. you weren't raised rich. you don't get to just spend the 20 dollars (remember when that could cover lunch?), at least - you don't spend that without agonizing over it first, trying to figure out the cost-benefits like you are defending yourself in front of a jury. yes, this rice cooker could seriously help you. but you do know how to make stovetop rice and it really isn't that hard. how many pies or brownies would you actually make, in order to make that hand mixer worthwhile?

what's wild is that if the money was for a friend, it would already be spent. you'd fork over 40 without blinking an eye, just to make them happy. the difference is that it's for you, so you need to justify it.

and it sneaks in. you ration yourself without meaning to - you don't finish the pint of ice cream, even though you want to. the next time you go to the store, you say ah, i really shouldn't, and then you walk away. you save little bits of your precious things - just in case. sometimes you even go so far as putting that one thing in your shopping cart. and then just leaving it there, because maybe-one-day, but not right now, there's other stuff going on.

you do self-care, of course. but you don't do it more than like, 3 days in a row. after that it just feels a little bit over-the-edge. like. you can't live in decadence, the economy is so bad right now, kid.

so you don't buy the rice cooker. you can-and-will spend the time over the stove. you can withstand the little sorrows. denial and discipline are practically synonyms. and you're not spoiled.

it's just - it's not always a rice cooker. sometimes it is a person or a job or a hug. sometimes it is asking for help. sometimes it is the summer and your college degree. sometimes it is looking down at scabbed knees and feeling a strange kind of falling, like you can't even recognize the girl you used to be. sometimes it is your handprint looking unsteady.

sometimes it is tuesday, and you didn't get fired, and you want to celebrate. but what is it you like, even? you search around your little heart and come up empty. you're so used to denying that all your desires draw a blank.

oh fuck. see, this is the perfect opportunity. if you had a mixer, you'd make a cake.

[akanemnon]

Chara knows something that we don't, methinks...

BONUS COMIC

FIRST - PREVIOUS - NEXT

MASTERPOST (for the full series / FAQ / reference sheets)

[lelianaslefthand]

im not exaggerating when i say i've thought about this dialogue at least once a day since the veilguard trailer dropped

[fumifooms]

Omg guys he just genuinely likes bugs and mollusks and critters 😭💘💔 Forced to noble when he just wanna crouch and watch things skitter in the dirt…

[araneapeixes]

happy dragon age month, i miss my homies so I doodled them in some simple camp clothes (bc im bg3pilled)

[aarchimedes]

for context: I read the hobbit first over the course of two years when I was like 13, but I'm only now starting to read lotr. having a blast tho!

anyways, reblog if you feel like it 🙌🏻