#knowing that you meant nothing to anyone

[dovewingkinnie]

Is big boss a dad?

nah

[lazylittledragon]

ok i swear i'm not going to talk about my breakup forever but the thing that just keeps bothering me:

i know that not getting what you need in a relationship is a COMPLETELY valid reason to end it but also. i feel like having a very vulnerable moment where i opened up about my struggles with intimacy and being relieved that i didn't have to keep doing things i wasn't comfortable with, then being dumped a YEAR later because of my lack of intimacy. is something i should be allowed to be very hurt by???

[sad-endings-suck]

“Why would you even ship that character with anybody?! He’s basically irredeemable to me—“

TO YOU!! He’s irredeemable to you. But some of us are silly geese that like our men to be the sexy, sad, feral, pathetic wet cats that they really are deep down, because we aren’t allergic to joy.

Is that okay with you??!? Is that permissible in the eyes of the Chronically Online Board of Hypothetical Ethics and Human Resources for Fictional Characters That Are Not Real™️®️.

You can go enjoy your curated selection of stale two dimensional wonderbread men in the corner, like the misguided pitiful lost soul that you are. the rest of us will be enjoying ourselves as our pathetic wet rag himbos and twinks kneel on the ground and beg to taste pussy/cock so hard they nearly come, like real men. just as god herself intended.

[bumblebi713]

pretending both my faves were in s3.....

[sunsetzer]

On one hand, I want a final fantasy 6 remake, because the game is criminally underrated and the amount of fan content (which is all absolutely fantastic btw) is Not Enough for my neurodivergent, hyperfixating brain.

On the other hand, that would inevitably encourage more people to join the fandom, which would be great, except it seems these days the bigger a fandom gets the more toxic it becomes, and I really like what we have going on over here in our little corner. We all just love the game and its characters and nobody fights about who should and shouldn't date who or who you shouldn't like because they're ~problematique~. Nobody's trying to make one ship morally better than another, nobody's calling anyone names or threatening to doxx people who don't agree with their opinions. It's so peaceful and I love that for us. We're just vibing. Moisturized. Unbothered. In our lane. Flourishing.

[auquaticmoonlight]

ughhhh why is gender so hard to figure out. my body is like boom gender dsyorphia but won’t tell me noone about my identity

(I accidentally made an entire vent in the tags lmao)

[plugnuts]

The Red String of Failure

[quietwingsinthesky]

thinking about rose and the master meeting and i have decided that it would be a constant flip-flop between ‘intense hatred/disgust that has (mostly) (well.) (sometimes.) been corralled into petty bickering that doesn’t end in anyone getting hurt (fatally)’ and ‘two girls at a party making out to see if their boyfriend will get jealous and do something about it (he won’t) (he wasn’t paying attention) (they’re still going at it out of sheer stubbornness at this point) (unfortunately discovering they’re both good kissers. this is not going according to plan at all.)’

[stizzysupremacy]

they didn’t work anything out. he went from one extreme to another, just running away in a different direction this time. And the other gave up his dream that he just finally achieved competence and success at. They left what family they had to pursue a lifestyle neither of them actually had the desire, skills, or resources for. It didn’t feel like a romantic happily-ever-after at all.

[mamorigami]

i think its so inevitable for the team to take up a 100 yr quest at SOME point in time so i might keep the idea that they're doing it, but i won't involve the story & plotlines in the current series. do u get me.

[thefrogdalorian]

Having of those moments where I wish to yeet the like button into the sun or maybe make it so there was setting you could turn on so that people can only reblog posts (even better with the minimum requirement of adding at least one tag)!!

It's kind of absurd that one of my fics is getting close to 500 notes while simultaneously being one I've had the least actual human interactions come from. Like...... come on, that's now how it should be AT ALL!

Don't get me wrong, I'm so thrilled people are clearly finding it and I guess enjoying it(??) but just having endless likes without people letting me know what they enjoyed about it or even if they liked it kind of makes me sad. That's not why I want to share my writing here!

I love having those little human connections with others. I don't ever want my writing to feel transactional. I would love to talk to more people about things I've written. It's truly one of the best feelings and I would hate to lose that, the more I write or the more notes my fics get. Please don't be shy!! I get the social anxiety, but there is no reason to be. I am truly just a Din Djarin obsessed loser.

Anyway, whine over. I don't want to focus on the negatives here and I appreciate every single person who has ever left a positive interaction with something I've written. You are truly a light!

[dwtdog]

I do think we should all start to move on here

I understand it's been a large discussion that needs to be had but its starting to become miserable in dtblr because it's the only thing people are talking about- if that makes sense

Agreed, I totally understand that being able to talk things out on anon is very helpful and that's absolutely why Tumblr has had an overall better reaction than Twitter, but we can't do it forever ❤️

[tathrin]

Okay but ever since reading this post I have been utterly consumed by the thought that on one hand, this knowledge changes absolutely nothing because the text is exactly as queer (read: very) as it always was, and yet at the same time it sort of recontextualizes everything enormously because if Tolkien had a gay friend, if Tolkien was actively down with gay fiction, then the fact that he wrote the absolute most perfect example of a Queer Happily Ever After ever was no accident.

This was not some oblivious Old British Fellow writing about Those Deep Platonic Bonds Between Men with no clue or awareness that there could be other types of love bonds between men. This was not "Oh lol, look how gay these characters turned out! completely unintended on the author's part obvs, but still wow super gay!" This was not Tolkien being Too Straight(TM) to realize that life beyond the cisheteronormative default existed. He knew. He knew, which means there is no way this was not purposeful.

And of course it’s not explicitly stated that they’re wedded partners in the sense that Éowyn marrying Faramir was, or Sam and Rosie, or Aragorn and Arwen, or any of the other het-couples married in the books. Nobody in England in the forties was talking about gay marriage, not as any sort of legally recognized possibility. “Legal recognition“ then still meant jail and disgrace. (He knew what they did to Turing. He knew what they did to Wilde.) Tolkien knew that, and honestly his own feelings about whether or not it was "moral" by the standards of his religion and society are irrelevant; he accepted it enough to accept and praise those stories, those writers. To be friends with W. H. Auden to the extent that the two of them wrote birthday poems for each other!

And Tolkien turned around and wrote Legolas and Gimli sailing away from Middle-earth to go to Valinor and live happily ever after together.

Think about that in the framing of the time it was written, in the context of Tolkien having a gay friend; in the context of Tolkien respecting and praising stories with gay lovers. Nobody in the forties expected marriage equality, or even a separate-but-equal civil union stand-in. Nothing like that, not even close. But Tolkien wrote “Then Legolas built a grey ship in Ithilien, and sailed down Anduin and so over Sea; and with him, it is said, went Gimli the Dwarf. And when that ship passed an end was come in the Middle-earth of the Fellowship of the Ring.”

He didn't write "and then Legolas and Gimli were wed," because that wasn't something he likely would have been able to get either his head or his society around. Likewise he didn't write "Boromir was ace" because he wouldn't have know what that meant, even if he’d meant it (and it’s hard to read the line "taking no wife and delighting chiefly in arms” and not see it as some form of asexuality, tbh) just like he didn’t use that sort of language when he talked about the Dwarves who preferred their crafts to marriages, etc. (There are a lot of aro/ace-coded and otherwise queer-coded folks in these books aside from just our most obvious Hobbits, Elf, and Dwarf, if you’ve never noticed.) We have to remember to take the time period into consideration, and understand what he would have known how to write and what he wouldn’t have. I’m not asking anyone to pretend that this story was somehow written with prescient knowledge of the modern world; I’m asking people to actually look at the text as it was written, in the time it was written, and interpret it that way, rather than by our modern standards.

Because here’s what he did write:

We have heard tell that Legolas took Gimli Glóin’s son with him because of their great friendship, greater than any that has been between Elf and Dwarf. If this is true, then it is strange indeed: that a Dwarf should be willing to leave Middle-earth for any love, or that the Eldar should receive him, or that the Lords of the West should permit it. But it is said that Gimli went also out of desire to see again the beauty of Galadriel; and it may be that she, being mighty among the Eldar, obtained this grace for him. More cannot be said of this matter.

Tell me that is not the absolute epitome of a Queer Happy Ending? Tell me that it isn’t making you cry, thinking about Tolkien coming up with the closet thing he could conceive of to an “and then they were married and lived happily together to the end of their days” ending for two male characters who loved each other. They literally break the rules to go to magical heaven together; there is nothing more queer than that. NOTHING. Especially when you add “more cannot be said of this matter.” Why can’t more be said? Because that’s how you wrote queer stories back then, isn’t it? Certainly it’s how Tolkien would have, medievalist that he was, writing an (invented) epic legend.

Tolkien lived in a world where two men could never be married either legally or in the eyes of any established church, and he knew this. He may or may not have even thought it was right that they should want to be; it doesn’t matter. Because he still gave us the closest thing to a Happy Gay Ending—to a Happy Gay Wedding—that he could have imagined. He still thought that that was what was right and good and deserved for these two characters. They broke all the rules of both their people, and went to the Undying Lands together. That is absolute PEAK queer love, tbh. We love each other so much that the rules don’t matter. We love each other so much that the disapproval of gods don’t matter. We love each other so much that we don’t care if other people think it’s strange or wrong, we’re going to do it anyway and you can’t stop us because we love each other THAT MUCH. Tolkien wrote them that way, and then he wrote them sailing to heaven together in the end.

How many times in history—including in the time period in which Tolkien was living—did you have “confirmed bachelors or spinsters” putting their lives together, traveling together, living together, without any hope of a legal union (or any religious ceremony officiated by an established organization for that matter, although some of them had ceremonies of their own to be sure) to recognize their love, or even any surety that their families would allow their graves to lie alongside one another once they were dead and unable to protect themselves, but refusing to be parted anyway?

Tell me that doesn’t resonate when you think of Legolas and Gimli. Legolas and Gimli, who should have been as sundered after Gimli’s death as any other elf and mortal, and yet were not. And yet found a way to be together against all the rules of their world and the forces that should have governed their fates. “You are a Wood-elf, anyway, though Elves of any kind are strange folk. Yet you comfort me. Where you go, I will go. Strange it may seem...” and “Strange it may seem, but while Gimli lives I shall not come to Fangorn alone...” and “You shall come with me and keep your word; and thus we will journey on together to our own lands in Mirkwood and beyond.” Read those lines and tell me that doesn’t read that way, if you can.

When you look at Legolas and Gimli in the context of queer relationships of Tolkien’s era, in fact, the text reads as even more queer rather than less, I think. Often modern readers are accused of projecting the views of today onto stories written in the past when we claim to see deliberate queerness in the subtext, but in this case looking at the text from the position of the past, it does very much the opposite. And I don’t know why I never looked at it that way before, because I know my queer history well enough to have seen this sooner—save that I suppose I’m so used to looking at queer subtext in older fiction under the premise of “unintended queerness” rather than thinking the author might have done it with full knowledge and deliberation—but oh, this time I think it was deliberate. This time I think it had to have been.

Tolkien gave them not just a but rather the best Queer Happy Ending.

And we’ve allowed cisheteronormative revisionist interpretations of the text to blind us to that reality. To be read as the “natural default” of all books, even when they aren’t. And frankly, if you actually read the text as it is written rather than letting all the homophobic drivel we’ve been inundated with all our lives to obscure what’s actually there, then it’s clear enough that I posit that from now on, it’s anyone trying to take a heteronormative view on Legolas and Gimli’s relationship that has to find evidence in the text to support their position, rather than the other way around. Because we have no reason to take straightness as the automatic default here, and every reason in the world to look at this relationship and take it as written instead. And frankly my friends, it is written extremely queer.

Now, is there any way to actually "know" what Tolkien was specifically thinking or intending here? No, obviously, not unless someone finds a note or letter somewhere stating it in clear and unambiguous terms that somehow escaped being burned in any of the intervening years, of course not. Not without time travel and telepathy. I’m not saying that. No one (contrary to the many tests you probably took in high school lit classes to the contrary) can know that about someone else's book, not unless the author tells you and even then you may have to ask how much you trust their word after the fact, but—but.

But Tolkien was a very careful writer, and a very intelligent and well-read man. He was a medievalist, a craftsman of language and legend. He knew his references, his allusions, his myth and his history. And if he knew queerness too, which he did...well then I'm sorry, but there is no way that I am ever going to believe that he wrote the perfect Queer Happily Ever After by accident.

He was too good of a writer for that.

[oifaaa]

Hey, so I could get in so much trouble for this, because the guy who told me this BROKE AN NDA on accident, but I was at a conference today on comic writing, and one of our speakers is a major Damian Wayne writer, and he informed us that HE WAS CALLED IN TO CONSULT ON THE NEW SUPERMAN MOVIE BECAUSE DAMIAN IS ABOUT TO BE CAST FOR THAT MOVIE

I swear to fucking god that this is true, the only reason I'm not posting it myself if because I have no followers and no one would see. The staff at the conference actually had to go around and confiscated our phones to delete the video footage of his talk to try and stop this from leaking.

Please spread the word! I know this sound like spam or a lie, but its real!!!!

God I know I'm gonna sound really rude rn which I really am sorry about i don't mean anything mean about it I just man is this not really interesting to me I've not been keeping up with casting at all for the new superman or the new dcu bc like I just can't bring myself to care and we already knew damian was gonna be the robin in these movies which not hyped about (who's ready to see talia get bastardised on the big screen with a white damian) but also yeah we know damian was coming so obvious they'd be casting him

[hauntingblue]

Justice for jolyne wdym emporio defeated pucci

[squarebracketsmileyface]

BE SAPPY AND WEIRD ABOUT YOUR PROJECT!!! YOU DO DESERVE A HAPPY ENDING!!! AND YOU DESERVE TO TALK ABOUT THE WAYS YOU REALIZED THAT YOU DESERVE IT!!! ARRRARARA YOURE MY FRIEND AND I LOVE SEEING MY FRIENDS HAPPY

I will CRY /threat

Also I took this as an excuse to ramble, because actually thinking about it, damn this fic has done a lot for me. Like this is dramatic as shit but genuinely writing this fic has changed my life in such a good way. You don't have to read all this lol, it's a mess and weird and ended up extremely long, it was just nice to put it down in writing cos it's been meandering around in my head for a while but I haven't spent much time thinking about it in a coherent way and it was nice to get all my ducks in a row with it all

God though, this fic has helped me figure out so many things, and it's so important to me. Like half of what it helped me figure out isn't even things I could put into words properly, like I can't bullet point most of those things, they're just weird emotional things that are just there.

Anyway, back to my dramatic ass "this fic changed my life." Like just for one I've made friends because of it which is amazing, but also like, just the things this fic has helped me process and understand? Like idk they feel like they shouldn't mean that much and should be fairly inconsequential, but they just aren't? Like the whole "hey maybe I can allow Lark to have a happy ending in an "everybody lives" au of this AU" kinda came about at the same time as I started to really settle mentally into my relationship with my boyfriend and stopped feeling that vague threatening feeling of "this is going to hurt like a bitch when something goes disastrously wrong and ruins our relationship, whether platonic or queerplatonic, forever". Like I started really properly feeling and believing "hey maybe it won't go disastrously wrong and he is just a very lovely guy who absolutely won't turn around and be evil and purposefully hurt me at some later date" instead at around the same time I was like "hey maybe Lark's relationship with Tim wouldn't fall all the way the fuck apart and maybe she'd actually get to raise her kid and be a good mum with a good partner and live a nice life where everything would turn out fine in the end."

And also like, another thing this fic helped me figure out a bit is like, just people mentioning how much the way I write Jay makes them think he'd have bpd in this au? Like I think you were one of the first people to mention that and honestly it's put so many things in perspective for me about just, the way my brain works that I didn't have an explanation for before? Or I did, I tried to explain it with Autism but it didn't quite fit perfectly. And like, I still don't know if I have bpd and I probably won't for a long while, but I write all my characters as me in some way, and Jay especially started out as basically just a self insert wearing a terrible wig and those mustache glasses. But from what I've looked into about bpd now it does seem to fit pretty well, especially the parts people have talked about with like, "very intense but unstable relationships with others"? Thankfully I'm better about that now than I was a few years ago? Tho sometimes I still get scared I'm about to become obsessed with my boyfriend in that way that ruins my relationships with people 💀💀 And the thing with like acting really impulsively? Though I've gotten better at stamping down every rage fuelled "hey you should throw this water bottle at that person's broken arm because they hurt you" type impulse since I was a kid. I now know how not to just lash out and harm people way more than they've hurt me, even when it's all my brain can think to do. So like?

Sorry anyway 💀💀💀 that was such a weird ramble to go on. But speaking of obsessions that ruin relationships

I haven't really talked about it much on here, but when I was 16 I was in a sort of similar place to Jay with Alex, not the friends with benefits bit (though yeah there were a few Very Interesting sexual things going on there that I'm definitely not gonna talk about in anything but the broadest strokes 💀) but definitely the "I'm going to string you along because I like you back but you like me way more than I like you and i dont know how to deal with you, so ill have my fun then ignore you the rest of the time," kinda stuff. And like, I was still pretty angry about that when I started writing this fic and it actually kinda helped me feel less angry at the guy? Because at first Alex was at least loosely based on him and the feelings I had about all that (and then later on Alex became a bit more Also Based On Me like Jay is lol). Like, in my case it was apparently a lot more that guys fault than it ended up being with Jay and Alex? I just kinda assumed it was entirely my fault for not texting him first enough cos I was terrified of annoying him by acting as clingy as I felt 💀 but apparently my guy was just actually a little shitty? (again, not gonna go into that here, it's a mess 💀), but like, for at least some of the less Actually Pretty Fucked Up things he did I kinda got to understand where he was coming from through thinking about Jay and Alex and thinking about Alex's pov. Like, he wasn't trying to be cruel, he just didn't like me as much as I liked him. I got obsessed with him and he was just there for some casual sexting and flirting etc lol

But like, yeah. This fic is so important to me, especially Jay and Tim's relationship. I haven't been thinking about that quite as much recently because I've been focussing on If It Ain't Broken and Jaylex, and I might not even get to focus on it in exactly the way I want to for the next Jam fics in the series, but like. Jay's hang ups over Alex and feeling scared that "what if Tim is just the same" is loosely something I've struggled with too. I'm better with it now than I was a year ago, but even so, every now and again not getting a reply to a message pretty much straight away can send me careening down "oh my god I've annoyed him, oh my god he's not going to talk to me for two weeks straight" street lol. Plus other weird hang ups that Jay most certainly doesn't have 💀

My boyfriend puts up with so much, he's wonderful, ily Vin if you're reading this.

Hell, even the way Jay and Alex end up leaving things at the very end of If It Ain't Broken is actually kinda similar to how stuff ended with me and my guy, I didn't even think about that till now. Alex is just gonna go off with Amy out of the blue and Jay isn't going to know what to do, even though he sort of saw it coming? Like he could kinda tell something was up but he doesn't want to accept it because like "oh well it's probably nothing maybe Alex is just busy. And my guy just texted me one day to say "How do you feel about me? Hmm? Oh yeah? Cool I no longer like you, actually, yeah sorry, I know you think you're in love but. Yeah I've been talking to someone else for a couple weeks now so I think this is the end of our little thing. Bye" lmao. I didn't even realise I've planned the Jaylex 'break up' to parallel that 'break up' 💀 tho honestly Jaylex's 'break up' will probably be slightly nicer on them coa Alex is going to move uni's and they're not going to see each other. So no panic attacks on sight for those two, lucky fucks.