#letters opened and read { asks }

[bluerosefox]

GHOSTS WITH HEARTBEATS

When Jason had been going to Gotham Academy, he had (for a good reputation for the media and to help him catch up on his penmanship, remember he had been on the streets and dropped out of school before getting picked up by Bruce for a while) signed up for a penpal project for 'less privileged people' to write to.

(Although Jason was annoyed the penpal project stayed within the states and only selected a middle of nowhere town, he knew the Richie Rich Elites would never subjugate their 'Heirs' to actual kids in need of learning how to read and write)

But Jason didn't mind his penpal.

Danny Fenton was a riot to talk, err write to in all honestly.

From his dry punny humor (and boy can he give even Dick a run for his money in the pun department but hey using some of them actually got Dick to warm up to him a few missions ago) and death jokes so many death jokes, to his nerdy love for space Jason enjoyed writing to Danny.

Even the short stories he would write about a ghost kid protecting a small town from other ghosts was interesting to read. He really liked the different kinds of ghosts there could be. Granted some seemed very OP like that Clockwork dude.

Jason liked writing to Danny, and even after the penpal project was over they had plans to keep sending letters, maybe even exchange numbers soon...

But then he died by the hands of the Joker.

The letters leaving Wayne Manor may had decreased but the letters being sent never did or at least until a few years ago.

Then Jason somehow returned to the land of the living.

Got taken by the LoA, tossed in the green waters and turned into their Pit Raged weapon for a while before leaving them behind and setting out for his revenge against the Joker and to force B's hand.

And becoming a Crime Boss for a while too. Can't forget that.

Point being with all this going on, the old warm memories of exchanging letters with Danny Fenton was pushed into the back of his mind and forgotten about for a while.

It isn't until one afternoon at Wayne Manor that while roughhousing with Dick, who had Jason in a brotherly headlock as they walked down a hall to one of the sitting rooms, that while Jason had slipped out of Dick's hold had stumbled into a hallway desk that had a few things on the top of it, one of the things being a small box that tumbled off when Jason hit it.

The box lid opened and out of it spilled out a good number of letters.

"Shiii-p, dang it Dick!" Jason said when he looked at the mess he accidentally made and stopped himself from swearing, the place might be named Wayne Manor but everyone knew this was Alfie's domain and no swearing was a rule within his halls.

Dick only laughed and teased only in a way a sibling can do "Hey not my fault your as big as a tank Jaybird! We should get you some caution signals if you keep bumping into things!"

Jason flipped him his favorite finger, thankfully Alfred only knew when they swore thus it did not summon him, and bent down to the letters.

His hands froze when he recognized the hand writing and the address it was sent from.

"From: Danny Fent Nightingale

Amity Park, IL"

To: Jason Todd-Wayne

Gotham City, NJ.

Wayne Manor"

And when Jason opened the letter. He really wasn't expecting what was written inside.

"Jason.

I'm finally leaving Amity Park. I can't be there anymore, not after everything. I'm too tired, and emotionally hurt. Everything is just to much. And I can't keep doing this to myself. My parents still can’t understand there is nothing ‘wrong’ with me or why I refuse to let them take care of Ellie, I refuse to let her live the way Jazz and I did, Jazz has to much on her plate already with her own life and college but she’s been hounding me to reach out to mom and dad, Sam refuses to listen to me when I tell her I want to be more than ‘Phantom’ in Amity Park, and Tucker is so busy trying to get into a good college and job we barely have time to talk nowadays. And don’t get me started on Vlad, that fruitloop’s been breathing down my neck since Ellie’s deaging.

Despite how much of a hellhole you like to call it, I think Gotham might be my, no mine and Ellie’s best bet of living some kind of life, especially now since the whole deaging she had to go through, she needs an ectoplasm rich city as well and since she has no actual papers because she was my clone and I remember you saying Gotham has people who can create new identities and-

I’m rambling again, to letter you again. I really need to stop it.

I can’t keep pretending you’re going to read these.

I know you’ll never read these. You’re gone. I can’t even find you in the Realms no matter where I look.

I’m sorry. For using you as, well, a way to vent my life for last couple of years. I shouldn’t had done it but it helped me.

Believing my friend was still alive and getting my letters I mean.

Again I’m sorry.

This will be my last letter to your ghost, pun unintended.

Goodbye Jason. Wish us luck in your city.

-Danny Fen-Nightingale...."

The sent date on the letter was roughly eight years ago.

[aroaceleovaldez]

What is the PR disaster in question that made Rick announce TSATS? I wasn’t active in the online fandom at that point

Of course! This was awhile ago so it figures people don't remember it/aren't familiar:

Basically a couple years back (2020) the fandom had some posts circulate discussing the ways different characters in the Riordanverse were written poorly or offensively. There was a masterpost that went around tumblr but the two major points people were particularly focusing on were Piper and Samirah (particularly because Piper had featured prominently again in Trials of Apollo recently and the third MCGA book had further emphasized and discussed Samirah being Muslim, since it was supposed to take place during Ramadan). Basically each had multiple posts breaking down the ways they were depicted incorrectly or offensively. The entire fandom for a little bit was VERY intensely discussing this (and it's around this time the "RR crit" tag got very popularized on tumblr - it did exist before, but suddenly was being used VERY frequently - cause it was that wide-spread - though the discussion took over basically every side of Riordaverse social media on different platforms). People really wanted Rick to respond to these criticisms, so he did!

He made two blog posts, one about Piper and one about Samirah. He has since deleted both so the links are to archived versions. The short version: he essentially tried to justify his poor research and double-down that he hadn't written them offensively, actually, people were just being mean to him. The fandom, of course, reacted poorly to this.

[Further elaborated events under the cut since this got a bit lengthy]

(Fun fact, this all happened within a month or so of the time i posted an open letter on aphobic tropes in the Riordanverse that Rick replied to, and then he immediately followed with announcing that Reyna was intended to be ace-coded [which cause a LOT of fandom debate] before Rick dipped for a couple of weeks, and then came back to post the blog posts in response to Piper and Sam stuff. So I like to jokingly refer to this as "The time I imploded the fandom/drove Rick off of twitter." Twas I that set the house ablaze.)

Rick fully left social media after this and the LT Musical social media manager became Rick's social media manager for the time being.

So this all happened June/July of 2020. Tower of Nero would end up being published in October of 2020 and a few months after that Rick would state that he was done with the series and wouldn't be writing any more series installments involving Percy, and also that he wouldn't be writing a Nico quest following Tower of Nero as it "wasn't his place to" and encouraged the community to write their own versions of Nico's story.

The community continued to circulate the tumblr posts and discuss the topics of Rick's offensive character depictions, and this is also where we see the dramatic shift in how the fandom depicts Piper in fanwork (though in most cases it is admittedly not an improvement 😬) because of all this discussion. This is also around the time when the fandom brought Viria under scrutiny claiming that she was whitewashing Piper as part of the same discussions, through the justification that she was drawing Annabeth as having tan skin (which she does canonically), and if Annabeth has tanner skin then Piper then that's whitewashing Piper? Except they were using completely separate images of not fully rendered Piper art versus Annabeth in dramatic lighting, so it's all very awkward and poor logic, and did actually get kind of racist. A lot of people were calling it "Tannabeth Blackchase" (yeah, i know) or similar and a common sentiment you'd see repeated is "Don't draw Annabeth as having darker skin than Piper, because that's offensive/racist/whitewashing." (Note: it was not phrased "don't draw Piper as having lighter skin than Annabeth" - we also won't get into certain offensive depictions of Native Americans, but I digress). But yeah, the Annabeth stuff in all that did not age well at all.

Anyways, in October of 2021 however Rick would announce that he was co-writing The Sun And The Star - with a lot of heavy emphasis on how Mark Oshiro works as a sensitivity reader, and some false advertising from the official social media that Mark Oshiro was the first time a non-Riordan author would be collaborating on the series (disregarding the ghostwriters completely). One of the big criticisms in the breaking down of issues in Rick's writing was his lack of ever seeking a sensitivity reader, and fans claiming that a sensitivity reader could solve a lot of the problems. This was basically Rick's "look! I totally listened!!!!" (though it did little to actually improve things, based on the book) and in TSATS as well Piper gets a large cameo at the end where the text very directly addresses a lot of points made in criticism of Rick's writing of her.

We also then of course got the CoTG trilogy later, explicitly stated to be for advertising purposes for the show.

So basically, short version: Rick came under scrutiny for a lot of offensive writing within the span of two months, made some bad blog posts doubling down about it, left social media. TOA ends. Rick says he wasn't going to continue the series/write what would become TSATS. Community celebrates the end of of the franchise but also continues to discuss Rick's poor writing and the blog posts at length. Rick suddenly announces TSATS and Mark Oshiro's involvement. Everybody gets distracted from being mad. Show announcement stuff also happens and the discussions peter out.

[cleveradjacent]

I'm so super curious can you tell me more about your interpretation of Yuusaku as a character ^_^

oh thank you for asking! tbh i haven't given yuusaku all that much thought compared to other characters, but i tend to ramble when no one is there to stop me, so this will probably still end up lengthy. (edit from the future: it did)

because of my latest fic and a previous ask, one might get the impression that i dislike him, but i don't. i don't feel one way or the other about him, he's fun to me as a tool for writing ogata and that's about it (same for vasya but this ain't about him). but! ever since i've written 'all that loves you', i've been thinking about the juxtaposition of his good intentions and the more sinister undertones of his worldview, and that's a juicy contrast to sink my teeth into.

on the one hand, he's a naive sheltered kid, a victim of his father and his country. i cannot in good conscience prescribe him ill intent. i believe he suffered at the hands of his father as ogata has suffered -- he was raised an unquestioning lamb to the slaughter and sent off to charge head-first into said slaughter over and over and over until his inevitable end.

not his father, not tsurumi, not ogata, not any other soldier saw him as a person. being disdained for who you are and put on a pedestal for the very same thing are both a kind of dehumanization. he was never hanazawa yuusaku the man to anyone, only a symbol, either in life or in death. even to the story, he's nothing but ogata's plot device. he's barely there. hell, he's nothing but ogata's plot device to me. talk about tragedy.

he wasn't given much time or chance to break out of what he's been taught. all that bullshit about duty and purity and having to be a symbol of both -- when it's all you've ever known, it'll stick. maybe, the inevitability of all i'm about to describe makes him tragic all the more.

and yet!

he is not any naive sheltered kid. he is a japanese soldier in china in 1904. he is dying and leading others into death for a brutal imperialist landgrab. you could argue about how much agency he has over the fact and over his convictions (as a ukranian in russia and the child of an officer, i've had PLENTY of that argument), but i'm not gonna do that here. whatever your stance, the outcome is the same: he's an enthusiastic participant to something truly horrible.

and in the midst of it, his desire to preserve his "purity" comes off as absurd and self-delusional. i'm not arguing for murder; i'm arguing that his belief in this abstract purity, that he has one to maintain in the first place, and, by extension, that he's the only soldier around who should do it makes him extremely out of touch. i've written about this from ogata's perspective in 'this weapon wants' and 'all that loves you': while ogata doesn't think much of the war they're in, he does see a holier-than-thou attitude in the way yuusaku refuses to kill. it's as if he's the only one who can and should keep his hands clean in an inherently dirty ordeal. yuusaku may not himself be an arrogant man, but arrogance does follow from his worldview.

there's a different, more sinister side to this i've explored in 'all that loves you', which i remember you (the author of the ask) (god i hope you're still reading) have read! the world is complex. you cannot let black-and-white thinking dictate your actions without eventually stumbling into a whole lot of harm, whether to others or to yourself. murder is a terrible act, yes. but some people need to be stopped, and for some of them, murder is the only way to do it. if you (the person reading this) haven't read 'all that loves you', it puts yuusaku's views to the test in this exact scenario. and the result is. well. quite fucked up. and it follows pretty seamlessly from what we see of yuusaku in canon, so make of that what you will.

speaking of which, you know how he tells ogata that people like him shouldn't exist while embracing him? also fucked up. yuusaku has the best of intentions, and there's not a chance in the world he has the awareness to go "ok not feeling the emotion of guilt doesn't inherently make you Wrong", but the fact remains: he assumes ogata shares his presumably universal morals and ends up playing right into his insecurity.

there's also yuusaku lacking the self-awareness to know that he's imposing on ogata with his affection. i'm extrapolating here, but i feel like yuusaku's simplistic worldview only allows for affection=good! desirable! and he doesn't stop to question whether it's welcome.

to that: a friend of mine has pointed out once that this astounding inability to read the room could be due to autism. genius take in my opinion. seeing how strong, rigid morals are also an autism thing, i'm convinced now that autism runs in the family. diversity win?

so yeah, to sum this all up, yuusaku has been set up to fail, and fail he did. he's naive, kind, well-intentioned, he's as much of a victim as his brother, but all sorts of messed up things follow from his beliefs and his actions.

and i just think that's neat.

[anaalnathrakhs]

i feel it's so fucking stupid and ungrateful but it still hurts a little when someone gifts me something i just don't like. i don't know. i know it's dumb and inaccurate to astrain that much meaning to a simple gift, but it feels kinda like they don't know me. i guess it feels like people don't see me, like a reminder that the person i reflect and the person i feel like are incredibly different.

[the-travelling-witch]

How do your OCs react to someone hitting on their significant other O.O

𝐃𝐀����𝐓𝐀𝐋𝐈𝐎𝐍 just can’t help but smile as he sees some lower ranked demon fumble their way through a conversation with you; the designer is confident enough in both himself and your relationship to not fuss about this. He has no idea who this demon is or how they were even invited to this party Diavolo was hosting, but Dantalion has to commend their taste.

You look beautiful every day, yet, dressed by him, you outshine even the stars themselves. So he can’t fault the demon for trying. Still, he politely but quickly ends his conversation and makes his way over to you, looping his arm around your waist as he asks to be introduced to your new acquaintance. Though, as cordial as Talion is, this other demon better pray they aren’t making you uncomfortable…

(He may or may not glance over the rim of his glasses too; depending on how (dis)respectful the other demon’s thoughts are, his behaviour might flip)

𝐕𝐀𝐋𝐄𝐅𝐀�� is grinding his teeth as he watches some low-life trying to flirt their way into your pants. In his casino! His assistant is already preparing themselves to remind him of his reputation when the casino owner sets his glass down a little too forcefully.

Yet, Valefar is rather calm as he approaches the same poker table this demon was making his way over to. Surely they wouldn’t mind if he joined, right? Though behind his smile lies the resolve to not only impress you but also to bleed this demon dry of both money and confidence for daring to try and take what is his. Well, he is a greed demon after all…

𝐒𝐓𝐎𝐋𝐀𝐒 has always been a free-spirited guy, doing whatever he wants to do. And what he loves doing more than anything is spending time with you! So if you’re ever out and about together, his focus is still on you, which lessens the chances of someone walking up to you on your own.

But if it does happen and Stolas has to come back to someone trying to woo you, his reaction depends on yours. If you’re uncomfortable, he’s not entertaining this at all; if it’s a friend of yours confessing, he’s giving you the space to let them down easy. If it’s some random stranger, his attitude depends on whatever gets this over with the fastest and the least messy. All Stolas cares about is going back to spending time with you and keeping your attention on him!!

(If the situation does turn ugly though, he might be holding on to someone else’s car keys just to be petty.)

(No matter their reaction, please show your demon partner how much you appreciate them, they’ll adore it for sure~)

tag list: @the-guardian-kitsune (not sure if the others want to be tagged in hcs or only the main stories)

[fakezircon]

What color would your (current) bedroom walls be if you could change it- once- with a wave of your hand?

Sky blue like the walls of my childhood bedroom. If this hand waving power was slightly more powerful I would also add the half wooden paneling that was also in my childhood home, it looked kinda strange and my mother always hated it but I loved it anyway.

[dirt-str1der]

just wanna say im obsessed with your mind and i read your posts about kiryu like the morning paper. thank you for your service

(Sweats) e-even the ones about him laying eggs ?

[lexa-griffins]

Elaina is so 🤏🥹 she deserves all the sleepy cuddles from her mommies 🥰 how did she get her raccoon toy?

Isn't she? 🥺 oh she's gonna go and (very carefully) jump on to Lexa's arms for cuddles but not only is Lexa nearly out the door for a meeting, its also hard to hold her four year old for long when she's so far into her pregnancy so Elaina will pout but happily go into Clarke's arms who will wave bye to Lexa with her and then immediately fall into bed with her baby so they can cuddle 🥰

They saw it at the market when she was around two years old and she squealed when she saw it and kept yelling "Nomon! Nomon!" at it, very set on the fact it looked/exactly/ like Lexa. They got it for her because of how in love she was with it clearly but Lexa didn't appreciate Clarke trying not to laugh at Elaina putting the stuffed toy next to Lexa's face like she was trying to spot the differences (there are none 😌).

[goodfully]

hello! so ive never done this before and idk if this would really reach anyone, but i would love to have a penpal? but i kinda want to make it a rule that we wont ever direct message each other nor ever follow each others social media... i suppose what i want to do is: get to know someone purely from their handwritten words.

ahh unfortunately... dont expect anything cutely decorated from me if we're penpals. your letters will most likely only be a plain envelope. i think id be writing excessively in detail about my day/life and my thoughts/feelings about anything, and when i receive your letter, i hope to get a long letter about details from your life as well. so... if you would be open to something like that, please let me know hahaha

uhm! ig if you want to know what some of my interests are, you could scroll through my account? however, the point is that we dont know anything about each other and that everything we do learn about each other is purely through reading our handwritten letters. id prefer someone about my age (22) but any age is fine really. im currently in america, but id be happy to send letters internationally. altho do note that i can only write/read well in english and in little trad chinese.

anyway if anyone happens to see this and is interested... please! let me know! ill answer any questions if you have any. ive never done this before but i wish it to work out with someone somehow. its such a huge desire of mine to try learning about someone deeply without physically meeting and without any social media at all. its kinda a personal project/experiment to befriend someone this way, but i also am excited for whatever may come out of this! i know there isnt much appeal to this... however, if only one other person is excited about this idea, thats all i need. :)

[dravidious]

You're more amazing than cuts

I opened the mountain door in Tunic! And now I'm decoding the instruction manual's text! One thing that's disappointing but also a huge relief is that

the secret text is actually English, not a special made-up language. I was pacing back and forth wondering how I could possibly figure anything out, and I finally checked an online guide for hints and the hints were. really weird?? Like, "this is the word for sword, but why does it only have 2 characters?" Like what? Why SHOULDN'T it have only 2 characters? That's just the word for sword in this made-up language right? Then one of the hints made it clear that it was supposed to represent the English word "sword", just written in a weird gimmicky way. Once I realized it was all just English, it was smooth sailing.

Still, that's pretty mean to anyone playing the game in a different language. I was even like "well it can't possibly just be English because the text stays the same when you change the language setting" but uh. Nope. I guess just fuck you if you don't know English.

[jorvikzelda]

Everyone go write letters for your future self to open on not set dates but set occasions and (positive) milestones Right Now

[aroaceleovaldez]

hey! hope this isn't weird but i wanted to know why you think artemis wasn't up to standards even in the original pjo series. you reblogged from me and so i had front row to your tags on the post about zeus jaja i've not seen people talk a lot about her and it got me interested as i'm a classics student!

- @zoebelladona 🌙

HELLO OH BOY okay so I have half a rant already about Artemis in terms of Rick and general aphobic tropes in the series. see: that open letter on twitter. i still need to transfer that to tumblr. fun fact: Rick replied to that post but deleted his reply at some point. probably because two replies after he replied to my post and word-of-god confirmed Reyna to be ace-coded he left social media for a bit.

Fun times! Anyways.

The thing I dislike about Artemis as she's depicted in the series, besides her constantly appearing as a teenager and the aphobic tropes with that [see: open letter linked above] - which on some level is slightly more excusable than other examples given she's a goddess of young women, but given how he writes Athena, Hestia, and the Hunt instead leaves a bad taste in my mouth - and other similar aphobic tropes with her, is her whole weird anti-men thing (which is also, in itself, also an aphobic trope in this particular circumstance). I understand TTC was written in 2007 so that flavor of radical feminism that Artemis and the Hunt is clearly supposed to be was only just coming into major public awareness and the flaws in the ideology (and the inherent bigotry, particularly transphobia and racism that often comes with it) weren't as well recognized at the time. But in hindsight it leaves a really bad taste in my mouth for obvious reasons and is one of the things from the first series that severely aged poorly in my opinion, and I greatly dislike that in every subsequent retcon of the Hunt for other reasons Rick more or less retains that aspect.

Secondly... it doesn't make sense from a mythological standpoint? Because there are multiple examples of men being Hunters in Artemis' retinue. Even ignoring Orion, no matter how you go about shaking that stick (which for the record I really dislike how Rick retconned him in the series/wrote him in HoO), Hippolytus is a very notable example. Literally his big whole original shtick was he joined the Hunt because he didn't like romance and Aphrodite got so pissed about him not needing her (romance) that she killed him. And even when Aphrodite was trying to ruin his life he held on to his virtues and vow to Artemis (refusing advances even when his life was on the line). He is otherwise totally chill and devoted to Artemis. Some versions of his myth has Artemis have him resurrected after he dies (by Asclepius, which is why Asclepius is punished for reviving the dead). This also obviously doesn't address the major glaring logical flaw in Artemis hating all men which is... Apollo. Especially within the series he seems to be an exception for no reason, despite Artemis also very overtly having a "brothers are not an exception to the no-men rule." And from a modern queer standpoint, it obviously begs the question of stuff like gender identity within the Hunt and if you bring back the radfem stuff it gets real bad vibes real fast. Which also sucks when you particularly look at historical/mythological descriptions of Apollo and Artemis and how they very poignantly encompass defying gender roles and expectations particularly within their cultural contexts.

And every time Rick tries to retcon the Hunt, he somehow manages to make it kind of worse, particularly with the oath. I have a whole personal thing for how I think to best rectify all that nonsense in a way that isn't horrible and is related to some of Artemis' aspects in a more sensible way (buried somewhere in this monster of a post. Honestly i'd just recommend ctrl + f search "Hunters" on that post and it should be somewhere near the first ping there). In there I also go into some of my other thoughts for the general meh way the Hunt is written in the series, mostly being aphobic tropes and random death fodder.

So yeah. Basically, tl;dr: I am personally not a huge fan of how Artemis in the series is halfway to being a terf and chock-full of aphobic tropes. And I need Rick to stop retconning things into the ground.

[enrapture]

I wanna cry.

[asynca]

my parents never came to anything I did.

I have so many memories about this, but one in particular: when I was away at camp with 89 other teenagers, and at the one-month mark the post was collected distributed to all the dorms. 89 other children tore open their boxes and, shovelling handfuls of sweets their parents had sent them into their mouths, read pages-long letters and handed around photos of their brothers and sisters.

I didn't. I didn't get anything, I sat on my empty bed watching them. The teachers had to call my parents and ask if perhaps the post had gone missing...? but my parents were surprised they were required to interact with me while I was away.

Well, today, my 3-year-old daughter had a fun-run. The childcare centre invited parents to come but stressed that if we weren't able to, it was alright. There was no fucking way I wasn't going. My daughter wasn't going to be the only child there without a parent watching.

I got time off work and stood there in the beating sun and plastered in greasy sunscreen waiting to see my little girl emerge from inside the centre and stand on the track.

When she did, her little eyes searched through the crowd person-by-person for me, and absolutely lit up like the sun when she spotted me.

Mine filled with tears as I waved at her and cheered.

I'm breaking the cycle.

[lizardho]

When I came out, I was SO scared I was gonna get disowned. I wrote a letter to my parents, sent it to their emails, put a physical copy on the counter, and left the house for a few hours to give them time. In that time I tried coffee for the first time, which was a dreadful idea, and got all jittery. I kept waiting for a text or something but nothing happened.

After a few hours, I didn’t hear back from them so I went home. My parents were home and had stacked a bunch of groceries on top of the letter without opening it. They said “hi” and I said “hi” and went down stairs to the basement. I held my dog and panicked about what to do. My sister, who knew that I had written them a letter of great importance, told me they hadn’t read it yet. She also told me she could ask them to do so. I consented to this and stayed in the basement. A few minutes later my dad knocked on the door and poked his soft smooth little nerd head in and said “hey buddy” and I started crying so hard I almost vomited. He came over and gave me a BIG hug and said that it was gonna be OK, he was OK with this, he knew it must have been hard but he was here for me. He told me he and my mom had already talked years before they had me about how if they had to pick between their faith and their child they’d pick their child. It was a very sweet moment. I came out to my mom later that evening and we were both bawling the whole time.

The day after I came out to my parents, I came out to my brother @inbabylontheywept at a Mexican restaurant and he took it like a champ. That evening my mom took me for a walk and looked almost angry - she said she wanted to make sure that I didn’t use being a woman as an excuse to not go to grad school. I told her I wouldn’t and she instantly looked relieved and happier.

My dad, on the other hand, seemed to struggle with it. He kept asking me if I had a boyfriend, and I told him I did not. He kept asking me if I wanted to go clothes shopping with him and I did not. He kept asking me if I would let him go to some of my shows, and I had NO idea what he was talking about.

Finally, 6 months after coming out, of awkward misgendering and questions that didn’t make sense from my dad, he excitedly pokes his soft smooth little nerd head into my bedroom again and says “I found a movie about Your People.” My people. I was absolutely bewildered, but he was so excited and I knew he had been trying SO hard so I watched it with him. It was The Birdcage, and it was amazing. It also was revelatory in that I finally realized why my initially-supportive father seemed to be having such a hard time with my pronouns and stuff - he didn’t know what the difference between trans and doing drag was. After the movie he again asked if I would invite him to one of my shows, and I said, “Hey dad, you know how about half the world is women?” And he said “yeah,” and I said “Well, see, I’m on that half now. I’m not doing drag.” And it was like a switch flipped in his brain. He was like “omg that’s so easy? I was so confused about what to call you when?”

Anyway, my parents are charming and my family has been so kind and patient with me, I like sharing the stories of my little wins with them.

[n3xus-apparatus]

Hwhat