#like we’d have to get over the social stigma but I don’t think it would be that hard

[darcytaylor]

Honestly, at this point I think a lot of people need to be stepping away from this fandom and thinking about themselves more for awhile. I’ve been absolutely horrified by the discourse around Jake’s sexuality that has started to break out on here and other platforms and it is NOT a respectful or appropriate discussion to be having to begin with, let alone the tone and word choices people are using. 

This whole situation is a bit… messy at this point. To your point, you can’t read into anything we see online all that much because we don’t really know the full story or what’s going on inside their minds. That said, sometimes actions speak louder than words and there comes a point where the appearance of things should at least be respected.

People longing to get direct declarations or statements from folks like we might have been used to in the past, I feel, are going to be left wanting I fear, because more and more celebs are choosing to let their actions and choices speak for themselves, especially in their private lives. Margot Robbie didn’t even announce her pregnancy, she just lived her life and let photos be taken, and that’s turning into a fairly typical move since social media/news cycle is so open to everyone to see.

All that said, a lot of really nasty comments and opinions and behaviors really do seem to be coming out lately, and it’s really just a disappointment.

A thing that always makes me roll my eyes is when people argue that since it’s okay to label someone as straight, it should be fine to speculate and label someone as gay or queer. It’s important to remember the historical context behind these labels. For much of history, being gay or queer carried stigma, discrimination, and harm. It’s not about the labels themselves but the weight they carry and the harm that speculation can cause.

Ideally, we’d reach a point where we no longer feel the need to label anyone’s sexuality. Sexuality is fluid; it’s not binary. But we’re not there yet. LGBTQ+ individuals still face challenges, and respecting someone’s autonomy over their identity - and what they choose to share - is key. How we talk about sexuality matters because words and speculation can have real consequences.

But achieving all of this requires continuous change, empathy, and respect for others privacy and identity. Ignoring that need for caution disregards the health and safety of people.

This situation feels messy, and honestly, the fandom is making it messier. It’s hard for people to grasp that we don’t truly know these individuals or what’s happening behind the scenes. When Nicola talked about false rumours about herself, she said, “But they don’t even know me. That's the key.” She was right. Even if she corrected the narrative, people would still cherry-pick moments from her life and pretend to know everything. The internet gives us a lot of information, but it’s just a snapshot. Nothing replaces the nuance of someone’s private thoughts and feelings.

While actions do speak loudly, we need to balance that with respect for what’s shown publicly and avoid making assumptions about someone’s personal life. We might interpret actions one way, but that doesn’t mean they reflect the full story. The rumours being turned into “truths” haven’t come from Nicola herself, and even if she did speak out, people would still believe what they want. Speaking out could even lead to more harm, including hate directed at people she cares about. Personally, I don’t think it’s worth it for her to inform fans or the general audience - at least not now, when it could do more damage than good.

We’re living in a completely different world than we were 20 years ago. Social media has given us access to celebrities lives, making it difficult for them to maintain any sense of privacy. In the past, we relied on traditional media outlets for glimpses of celebrities. Now, social media shows so much and often without control.

On top of that, almost everyone carries a camera in their pocket, making it far too easy to invade peoples privacy and turn their private moments into public spectacles without their consent. It’s no wonder many celebrities now choose to keep their personal lives more private and let their actions speak for themselves. By focusing on their actions, they avoid having their words twisted, and if their actions are kind and considerate, they don’t worsen situations, even if they don’t fully reveal what’s going on.

Unfortunately, the anonymity of the internet often brings out the worst in some, leading to nastiness and judgment. And even when we feel strongly about a topic, we should all strive to be more empathetic and mindful in how we engage. ❤️

[simonsezsewerrat]

Neurodivergent individual here. I don’t have (diagnosed) schizophrenia, but I’ve dealt with some mild psychosis in the past due to other mental health disorders. However, I’m not really here to talk about my personal mental health experience.

My best friend in high school had schizophrenia. I would hang out with them almost every day over the summer before my junior year, and it was some of the best times in my life to date. We didn’t know at the time that they had the disorder (because both of us were neurodivergent and didn’t really care that we weren’t “normal”) but in hindsight they definitely had some obvious symptoms. But it never bothered me. I always kinda knew something was going on, but it didn’t affect our relationship. I still enjoyed their company. I still went to them for emotional support like I would any other friend. They were a cool person to hang around and I was grateful to have them in my life. It wasn’t until the summer before senior year that things kinda fell apart. They lacked a supportive environment during their time of diagnosis and treatment, and they ended up closing themselves off. The last time we spoke was the last day of school. My first real best friend sort of just disappeared without a trace… To this day, no one I talked to knows what happened to them. Frankly, I don’t even know if they’re still alive... To say I miss them would be an understatement…

Had it not been for their lack of a supportive and accepting environment, I’d like to think that they would’ve been okay, and that we’d still be good friends. Sure, I did my best to be supportive in my own ways, but I’m only one person. Imagine having a whole family, a whole school, a whole sea of people on the internet who treat you like you’re a danger to society. It’s fucked up…

The point I’m trying to make is that there is a lot of hurtful stigma around the diagnosis. People with schizophrenia are just people, and they need a supporting environment just as much as everyone else. I know my story kinda makes it sound like I’m saying don’t get diagnosed or you’ll spiral, but that’s not it at all. I’m saying that our societal outlook on schizophrenia needs to change drastically.

For example, I’ve never understood why it’s currently socially okay to use schizophrenia as a joke/insult in the same way people used to use autism back in the 2010’s. I really don’t see how it’s any different…

I think we also need to start educating people on what schizophrenia actually is, instead of letting media, misinformation, and stereotypes falsely inform our perceptions. We really need to stop villainizing it and start celebrating it the same way the neurodivergent communities would celebrate something like autism.

To all the people who are anxious about being diagnosed with schizophrenia, and to the people who are already diagnosed and still anxious, please remember that there are people who will accept you and be supportive of you just the way you are. You guys are so chill and awesome, and I hope the rest of the world can learn to see and cherish you the way I and so many other people do.

Disability pride month PSA that schizophrenia and related disorders often starts to present in your mid 20s, so if things have been getting harder, life is less manageable, you feel less and less connected to reality, don't be afraid to get an assessment. It is not life ending, and living as someone with schizophrenia is worthwhile!!! It is a neurodivergence like any other, one that is disabling but doesn't make you less human. Getting early screenings and treatment is shown to give better outcomes for patients!!

[bedlamsbard]

💭 What is a headcanon you have about your own work?

this is one of those questions where I'm like, but what does it mean? I guess something about the background worldbuilding that was never explicitly stated in the story itself? Backbone has a lot of that -- I did a lot of base worldbuilding for the Rylothean Twi'lek culture that I made the conscious decision not to put into Backbone, though some of it is hinted at here and there. The two big ones, which are connected, are marriage/concubinage customs and inheritance law.

Rylothean Twi'leks are not expected to be monogamous and it's fairly common to have group marriages of various combinations. (I think Alecto's parents was one husband with two wives, but I'm not certain.) Especially among the curiate caste, but throughout the patrician castes, it's also extremely common to only have one, or sometimes two, legal marriages (I think I explicitly used the term cum manu in Backbone, but can't be certain; it's a Roman legal term for a certain type of marriage) but to have one or more semi/permanent legal relationships which we'd probably call concubinage today. These are legal relationships of a different status than marriage; the children of a concubinal relationship are not illegitimate, but they're a different form of legitimate than the child of a legal marriage. (This is something that actually comes up in the first chapter of Devil's Lair, the Backbone sequel.) Illegitimate children -- which in this sense means that legally they do not have two (or more) parents -- take their social/legal caste from their mother; neither Doriah Syndulla nor Ojeda Syndulla have acknowledged fathers, but Doriah's mother is a plebeian and Ojeda's mother is a curiate, so Doriah is a plebeian and Ojeda is a curiate. There is no social stigma for not having two parents, however a child can only be legitimized if both parents are still alive; Doriah can't be legitimized because his mother is dead. (So is Ojeda's, but because she is already a curiate, it isn't an issue; it's mostly an issue in cases of inheritance dispute and/or when the parents are of different castes and/or different clans.) It is suuuuuper common and socially accepted, if one spouse is of a higher caste and takes a spouse/concubine in the legal sense, to also take their siblings as lovers, whether as legal concubines or as casual lovers; after Cham married Alecto he also slept with her sister Clotho. Both sisters were fine with it, it was fairly common knowledge; the only issue is that he never legally acknowledged Doriah as his son and now because Clotho is dead, Doriah cannot be legitimized (assuming that Cham is his father or wanted to legitimize or acknowledge him; they're legally not the same thing). He could however be legally acknowledged, however Cham won't do this because that could have potential repercussions on Hera's ability to inherit (despite the fact that Hera does not want to inherit).

None of this is explicitly stated in Backbone, even though most of that was in the base worldbuilding from the beginning, for the very simple reason of: I got and still get so much shit about the social mores and morality of the OT3 in Gambit. I did not want to deal with that in Backbone even if none of that was going to be on the page (because Clotho is dead); I didn't want to give any of my readers an excuse to say "Cham and Alecto were never in love" by saying that Cham slept with Clotho or that he slept with other people in the ten years between the opening flashback and the present day. For the record, because this is a ~headcanon post, Cham and Alecto both had lovers in those ten years, Cham more than Alecto, but nothing serious. There was at one point going to be a scene where Alecto commented on it; I cut it because I didn't want the emotional arc to get derailed by a potential audience reaction of "they're both cheaters." If it's not clear, the reaction I got to the OT3 in Gambit scared the hell out of me. (And I've been in fandom for twenty years, it takes a lot to do that.) I don't think it's a coincidence that the main relationships in Backbone are all on-the-surface-straightforward m/f relationships, though I wasn't thinking that way about it at the time.

I was (I mean, am) going to deal with all of this in Devil's Lair, because I figured no one would read Lair without having first read Backbone, and being able to work all of that out on the page without having it tied up in Cham and Alecto's marriage is a safer way to do it. Here's a Cham POV snippet from Lair 1 about some of those technicalities:

More gently, Cham went on, “I was sorry to hear about your brother and stepmother.”

Khaaja waved that aside. “Half-brother. And she was not my stepmother; my mother was my father’s concubine, not his wife. You know that,” she added, scowling. “Or at least you used to.”

“Things might have changed since I’ve been gone,” Cham admitted. Lon Secura, like many curiates both male and female, had had a succession of concubines over the years as well as a legal spouse of his own caste. Khaaja had been his oldest born child, but until a few years ago the Secura prime heir had been his only surviving legitimate offspring, a boy about Hera’s age whose name Cham couldn’t recall. Rumor slowly carried to the fleet had told Cham that a slaver attack on one of the Secura estates had cost Lon both his wife and his heir, along with most of the inhabitants of that estate. He had finally designated Khaaja as his heir only recently, admitting that his son was gone for good. Cham had been in that situation himself recently enough that even thinking about it made him wince.

Khaaja snorted softly. “My father legitimized me, but he didn’t marry my mother to do it. Not that that’s going to matter,” she added pointedly, “since once the Empire hears about this we’ll lose our lands, our fortune, our position in the Curia, and probably all our lives along with it.”

“The Empire won’t hear of this,” Cham repeated firmly.

[diamondsableye]

“Depressed? Just be happy!!

ADHD? Just pay attention!!

Autism? Socializing isn’t that hard!!

Gender dysphoria? Just be happy in your body!!

Y’all do realize like... that’s not how things work right?”

Hi. You left the above comment on some anti-gender post and I just want to let you know that you’re fucking stupid and you have no clue what “TERFs” think if this is what you have to say. We’re not saying “be happy in ur body uwu self love” we’re telling you that a woman’s only criteria for being a woman is her femaleness. Mental illness sucks. Depression sucks. Anxiety sucks. OCD sucks. Gender dysphoria sucks. None of these are things guaranteed to be cured by just sheer force of will and 99.99% of (real) feminists agree. There’s no magic cure for any of these, not even altering genitals or taking HRT will cure gender dysphoria. The best we have is therapy and meds to help. But even if you’re taking ADHD meds, you’re still a person with ADHD. Even if you have gender dysphoria, you’re not magically the opposite sex, and gender is a sexist social construct. Maybe you should stick your head out the window every once and a while and see how not black and white the world is.

Listen I just found out that my cat has cancer so I really don’t want to have to deal with you more than I have to. I came back onto this app to quickly chat with a friend and I’ve got work to do so this response is gonna be very short.

First of all, stop treating medical transitioning with such disregard. Of course they don’t “cure” gender dysphoria but these procedures are a huge advancement in medical technology and they’re extremely effective at reducing gender dysphoria in a myriad of ways. So don’t phrase it as some nilly whilly thing.

Secondly, you do do realize that sex is measured through the observation of 5 different traits correct? Chromosomes, gonads, hormones, and internal and external reproductive anatomy/the primary and secondary sex characteristics. You can change your hormonal sex through HRT and you can get surgeries to alter your primary and secondary sex characteristics as well as modify or remove your internal reproductive organs. Really the only thing that can’t truly be changed in some way shape or form are your chromosomes. So like... unless you’re gonna argue metaphysics here along the lines of “once your birth sex always your birth sex”.... you’re kindof... incorrect here? Sure you can never be cis, but biological sex is modifiable to various degrees. Again, if you’re gonna challenge this you’re arguing metaphysics when we’re discussing biology.

Also you do realize that currently it’s impossible to determine accurately how intrinsic gender is to the human condition right? You’re kindof making an assertion here without any evidence. We live in an incredibly gendered society and unless we’d be willing to subjugate humans to little or no contact to the outside world or other people starting from birth, we’re unable to truly determine how much of gender is purely socially constructed, how much of it is internally produced, or how immutable it may be. Are gender roles sexist and should be done away with? Of course. Is gender identity completely created through society or is it more innate? We don’t know and we can’t tell for sure.

Anyhow all that aside, even if I was wrong on every single point here, my initial argument is still valid. If you recognize that gender dysphoria is harmful and can severely damper a person’s ability to pursue a meaningful existence in certain cases, but the only words of sympathy are “yeah well it sucks but you’ll never be a real woman/man” then...???? You’re just... leaving people to themselves and expecting them to get over it. Many if not all trans people have an irrepressible need to be the gender they identify with and internally are, that need demands that they be seen as their gender within social contexts, and causes great harm when that need is not met. It would be like if you told me, an autistic person, that “sure it sucks that you’re an aspie, but you’ll never be a neurotypical” and I’m saying yes! I know! And that fact does distress me because people on the spectrum often face great negative stigma in society, and that’s maybe 1/100th of what trans people go through! You’d still be doing absolutely nothing to actually help and if anything you’d be making me worse if you kept insisting that no matter what I’d never be mentally healthy! It might be true but it’s totally uncalled for and ignores a fuckload of broader needs!

If you’re doing absolutely nothing to help, and if the most prominent leaders of your movement are doing their best to revoke the rights of health and safety that trans people need, while also denying them their identity, a key component to their health and happiness, then how is that any different than telling them to “get over yourself, just be fine as your agab”??? Like I’m very baffled that you don’t see the demonstrable harm you guys are doing to trans people, either that or you just don’t care?? Either way, you’re not helping, you’re hurting people, and EVEN IF my analogy was flawed, maybe stop perpetuating ideology and supporting movements that demonstrably hurt trans people instead of focusing on a fucking reply I left on a goddamn post.

@terf-tips @reptile-lesbian

If you all would like to add anything feel free, I need to finish some last minute college assignments.

[boreothegoldfinch]

chapter 12 paragraph viii

Only here’s what I really, really want someone to explain to me. What if one happens to be possessed of a heart that can’t be trusted—? What if the heart, for its own unfathomable reasons, leads one willfully and in a cloud of unspeakable radiance away from health, domesticity, civic responsibility and strong social connections and all the blandly-held common virtues and instead straight towards a beautiful flare of ruin, self-immolation, disaster? Is Kitsey right? If your deepest self is singing and coaxing you straight toward the bonfire, is it better to turn away? Stop your ears with wax? Ignore all the perverse glory your heart is screaming at you? Set yourself on the course that will lead you dutifully towards the norm, reasonable hours and regular medical check-ups, stable relationships and steady career advancement, the New York Times and brunch on Sunday, all with the promise of being somehow a better person? Or—like Boris—is it better to throw yourself head first and laughing into the holy rage calling your name? It’s not about outward appearances but inward significance. A grandeur in the world, but not of the world, a grandeur that the world doesn’t understand. That first glimpse of pure otherness, in whose presence you bloom out and out and out. A self one does not want. A heart one cannot help. Though my engagement isn’t off, not officially anyway, I’ve been given to understand—gracefully, in the lighter-than-air manner of the Barbours—that no one is holding me to anything. Which is perfect. Nothing’s been said and nothing is said. When I’m invited for dinner (as I am, often, when I’m in town) it’s all very pleasant and light, voluble even, intimate and subtle while not at all personal; I’m treated like a family member (almost), welcome to turn up when I want; I’ve been able to coax Mrs. Barbour out of the apartment a bit, we’ve had some pleasant afternoons out, lunch at the Pierre and an auction or two; and Toddy, without being impolitic in the least, has even managed to let casually and almost accidentally drop the name of a very good doctor, with no suggestion whatever that I might possibly need such a thing.

[As for Pippa: though she took the Oz book, she left the necklace, along with a letter I opened so eagerly I literally ripped through the envelope and tore it in half. The gist—once I got on my knees and fit the pieces together— was this: she’d loved seeing me, our time in the city had meant a lot to her, who in the world could have picked such a beautiful necklace for her? it was perfect, more than perfect, only she couldn’t accept it, it was much too much, she was sorry, and—maybe she was speaking out of turn, and if so she hoped I forgave her, but I shouldn’t think she didn’t love me back, because she did, she did. (You do? I thought, bewildered.) Only it was complicated, she wasn’t thinking only of herself but me too, since we’d both been through so many of the same things, she and I, and we were an awful lot alike—too much. And because we’d both been hurt so badly, so early on, in violent and irremediable ways that most people didn’t, and couldn’t, understand, wasn’t it a bit… precarious? A matter of self-preservation? Two rickety and death-driven persons who would need to lean on each other quite so much? not to say she wasn’t doing well at the moment, because she was, but all that could change in a flash with either of us, couldn’t it? the reversal, the sharp downward slide, and wasn’t that the danger? since our flaws and weaknesses were so much the same, and one of us could bring the other down way too quick? and though this was left to float in the air a bit, I realized instantly, and with some considerable astonishment, what she was getting at. (Dumb of me not to have seen it earlier, after all the injuries, the crushed leg, the multiple surgeries; adorable drag in the voice, adorable drag in the step, the arm-hugging and the pallor, the scarves and sweaters and multiple layers of clothes, slow drowsy smile: she herself, the dreamy childhood her, was sublimity and disaster, the morphine lollipop I’d chased for all those years.)

But, as the reader of this will have ascertained (if there ever is a reader) the idea of being Dragged Down holds no terror for me. Not that I care to drag anyone else down with me, but—can’t I change? Can’t I be the strong one? Why not?] [You can have either of those girls you want, said Boris, sitting on the sofa with me in his loft in Antwerp, cracking pistachios between his rear molars as we were watching Kill Bill. No, I can’t. And why can’t you? I’d pick Snowflake myself. But if you want the other, why not? Because she has a boyfriend? So? said Boris. Who lives with her? So? And here’s what I’m thinking too: So? What if I go to London? So? And this is either a completely disastrous question or the most sensible one I’ve ever asked in all my life.] [That little guy, said Boris in the car on the way to Antwerp. You know the painter saw him—he wasn’t painting that bird from his mind, you know? That’s a real little guy, chained up on the wall, there. If I saw him mixed up with dozen other birds all the same kind, I could pick him out, no problem.] And he’s right. So could I. And if I could go back in time I’d clip the chain in a heartbeat and never care a minute that the picture was never painted. To try to make some meaning out of all this seems unbelievably quaint. Maybe I only see a pattern because I’ve been staring too long. But then again, to paraphrase Boris, maybe I see a pattern because it’s there. [Do you ever think about quitting? I asked, during the boring part of It’s a Wonderful Life, the moonlight walk with Donna Reed, when I was in Antwerp watching Boris with spoon and water from an eyedropper, mixing himself what he called a “pop.” Give me a break! My arm hurts! He’d already shown me the bloody skid mark—black at the edges—cutting deep into his bicep. You get shot at Christmas and see if you want to sit around swallowing aspirin! Yeah, but you’re crazy to do it like that. Well—believe it or not—for me not so much a problem. I only do it special occasions. I’ve heard that before. Well, is true! Still a chipper, for now. I’ve known of people chipped three-four years and been ok, long as they kept it down to two-three times a month? That said, Boris added somberly—blue movie light glinting off the teaspoon —I am alcoholic. Damage is done, there. I’m a drunk till I die. If anything kills me—nodding at the Russian Standard bottle on the coffee table—that’ll be it. Say you never shot before? Believe me, I had problems enough the other way. Well, big stigma and fear, I understand. Me—honest, I prefer to sniff most times—clubs, restaurants, out and about, quicker and easier just to duck in men’s room and do a quick bump. This way—always you crave it. On my death bed I will crave it. Better never to pick it up. Although—really very irritating to see some bone head sitting there smoking out of a crack pipe and make some pronouncement about how dirty and unsafe, they would never use a needle, you know? Like they are so much more sensible than you? Why did you start? Why does anyone? My girl left me! Girl at the time. Wanted to be all bad and self-destructive, hah. Got my wish. Jimmy Stewart in his varsity sweater. Silvery moon, quavery voices. Buffalo Gals won’t you come out tonight, come out tonight. So, why not stop then? I said. Why should I? Do I really have to say why? Yeah, but what if I don’t feel like it? If you can stop, why wouldn’t you? Live by the sword, die by the sword, said Boris briskly, hitting the button on his very professional-looking medical tourniquet with his chin as he was pushing up his sleeve.]

And as terrible as this is, I get it. We can’t choose what we want and don’t want and that’s the hard lonely truth. Sometimes we want what we want even if we know it’s going to kill us. We can’t escape who we are. (One thing I’ll have to say for my dad: at least he tried to want the sensible thing—my mother, the briefcase, me—before he completely went berserk and ran away from it.) And as much as I’d like to believe there’s a truth beyond illusion, I’ve come to believe that there’s no truth beyond illusion. Because, between ‘reality’ on the one hand, and the point where the mind strikes reality, there’s a middle zone, a rainbow edge where beauty comes into being, where two very different surfaces mingle and blur to provide what life does not: and this is the space where all art exists, and all magic. And—I would argue as well—all love. Or, perhaps more accurately, this middle zone illustrates the fundamental discrepancy of love. Viewed close: a freckled hand against a black coat, an origami frog tipped over on its side. Step away, and the illusion snaps in again: life-more-than-life, never-dying. Pippa herself is the play between those things, both love and not-love, there and not-there. Photographs on the wall, a balled-up sock under the sofa. The moment where I reached to brush a piece of fluff from her hair and she laughed and ducked at my touch. And just as music is the space between notes, just as the stars are beautiful because of the space between them, just as the sun strikes raindrops at a certain angle and throws a prism of color across the sky—so the space where I exist, and want to keep existing, and to be quite frank I hope I die in, is exactly this middle distance: where despair struck pure otherness and created something sublime.

And that’s why I’ve chosen to write these pages as I’ve written them. For only by stepping into the middle zone, the polychrome edge between truth and untruth, is it tolerable to be here and writing this at all. Whatever teaches us to talk to ourselves is important: whatever teaches us to sing ourselves out of despair. But the painting has also taught me that we can speak to each other across time. And I feel I have something very serious and urgent to say to you, my non-existent reader, and I feel I should say it as urgently as if I were standing in the room with you. That life—whatever else it is—is short. That fate is cruel but maybe not random. That Nature (meaning Death) always wins but that doesn’t mean we have to bow and grovel to it. That maybe even if we’re not always so glad to be here, it’s our task to immerse ourselves anyway: wade straight through it, right through the cesspool, while keeping eyes and hearts open. And in the midst of our dying, as we rise from the organic and sink back ignominiously into the organic, it is a glory and a privilege to love what Death doesn’t touch. For if disaster and oblivion have followed this painting down through time—so too has love. Insofar as it is immortal (and it is) I have a small, bright, immutable part in that immortality. It exists; and it keeps on existing. And I add my own love to the history of people who have loved beautiful things, and looked out for them, and pulled them from the fire, and sought them when they were lost, and tried to preserve them and save them while passing them along literally from hand to hand, singing out brilliantly from the wreck of time to the next generation of lovers, and the next.

[nerdygaymormon]

A Letter to Elder Holland

Elder Holland, I’m certain you receive many, many letters, so if you’re reading my note, thank you. I am a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and I am gay. That combination often doesn't fit well together. There is much about the gospel and the church that I love. This church connects me with the Divine. This church gave me the language to understand spiritual things. I’ve learned a lot about being a better person, to serve, and to be empathetic. It’s just that where church intersects with how I was made by our Creator, there is tension. In this letter I share some of the feelings I’ve had with that. I struggled to accept that I like boys. I made many pleas and bargains with God to change me. I tried so hard to be the most faithful, best member ever, but every imperfection and shortfall was proof that I wasn't good enough for God to change me. That was a stressful way to live.     There came a day when I knelt down and asked “God, do you love me? All of me? Who I am and what I am?” I immediately felt enveloped in immense love, and warmth radiated across my body as a voice in my ear said “You are not broken.” That answer to my prayer sustained me for a long time. It is sad that a person who grew up in church didn’t know if God could love me. What a relief to learn God loves me and doesn’t view being gay as defective. I was in the closet when I was a missionary and when I attended the church schools in Rexburg & Provo. It felt like I had this big secret I had to protect and a lot of mental energy went into remaining on guard and making sure no one would find out. It felt really lonely not being able to be open. The best friendships are where you can be vulnerable but I had to worry about being able to stay in school so honest friendships had to wait for another time. For a long time I didn’t come out as gay because it seemed like it would disrupt my life in really negative ways. Staying in the closet kept my world intact. Much of my family’s life revolves around church. Being a member of this church gives me a social network, a map of life goals, and an identity. Coming out meant I could lose all of it.

Squashing all my romantic and sexual feelings also shuts down most other feelings. I spent my 20’s & 30’s feeling numb, like I was watching life but not a part of it. I spent those years wishing a bus would hit me or a major disease would strike. Those kinds of deaths would end my suffering and also be okay for my family because they wouldn’t have to know I’m gay.  I finally reached the point where I was tired of going through the motions. What’s the point of having a life if I wasn’t going to live? As I was approaching my 40th birthday, I decided it’s time for a change. It was hard to share the secret I had spent my life guarding, so initially I came out one person at a time with no big announcement Coming out changed my life in ways I didn’t foresee. I think because I could let down my guard and there was less conflict between my public & private identities, I appeared more confident. People started to notice. I got higher positions at work, and I was pulled from the Primary, which is where I spent most of my adult life. My 40's have been spent in stake callings. I’m grateful my stake president views me as able to serve regardless that I'm attracted to men. 

Being gay complicates church for me. Questions that have simple answers for others are complex for me.    One thing about being open that I’m gay means I don’t pretend to be on the path for straight people. There’s no way for me to complete the covenant path, I can’t become a husband & father (at least not if I want to stay in the church), I can’t achieve the goals that our religion says should be the purpose of my life. It feels wobbly to be on an unmarked path. I understand the Church’s teachings on God’s Plan of Happiness. I wish there was some guidance about the purpose of my life and the path for me as a queer person. It feels like a void in our understanding and so the default answer to everything is “we don’t know,” and “no, that’s not for you.” Church can be a place of comfort & peace, but it’s also a place that can hurt. The November 2015 Policy of Exclusion felt like I'd been punched in the stomach and I nearly walked away from the Church. Only a clear message from God that there was a work for me to do kept me here. I reluctantly stayed and God has used me to bless other LGBTQIA members and that has been a surprising source of joy in my life. 

There’s been some recent conference talks that identify me as a distraction to the church because I can’t be complete the covenant path. That really stings. I’m doing the best I can but those words hit me hard, like the church doesn’t value or even want me. I think back to how I felt when I prayed to know if God loves me and how differently that felt. I don't think God views being gay as incompatible with the gospel.  I’ve had church leaders tell me that it will all be sorted out after I die. Some even say when I’m resurrected I won’t be gay and can marry & have the blessings of the gospel. I understand this is meant to comfort me, but saying I can be happy only when I’m dead isn’t a great message. I need hope in this life. Life can be lonely. I know this is true for many people. I look at my nieces and nephews, they're starting to serve missions and get married and become adults with their own lives. My life is getting significantly lonelier as they grow up.

Everyone has times they wonder if their parents will be disappointed in them for something they've said or done, but I don't think most non-queer children spend years wondering if their parents would still love them if they reveal something important about themselves.

Even though I have a temple recommend, my parents don’t like that I’m gay and my father asks if I were molested growing up or wishes I would go to reparative therapy. My mother wishes I would go back in the closet and that we’d never have to speak of this unpleasantness again. My siblings’ reaction is mixed, some offer unconditional love & want me in their lives and others make it clear that they only remain in touch as long as I make life choices they approve.    A few years ago I went to therapy because of suicidal thoughts. While meeting with the psychologist, I was diagnosed with social anxiety disorder and we also worked on my low self esteem. My life is much better for having received mental health treatment. Thank you for your 2013 talk about mental health. It’s an important subject around which there’s still a stigma. It was helpful I could point my family to an apostle’s words that it’s good to seek help from a mental health professional. When I was in the closet, my attraction to men brought me nothing but trouble and heartache. Being open about how I experience life has allowed my orientation to also become a source of happiness. I found other friends who are members of the Church & LGBTQ+ and it’s wonderful because we understand each other’s experiences in a way many others don’t. I am proud that this is the 8th year the youth of my stake have known a gay member of the church. I wish I’d had such a role model when I was growing up, someone who I thought could understand me or in whom I could confide and seek encouragement. I’ve come to learn that there are LGBTQ+ individuals in each ward of my stake and they often keep this a secret, afraid of how other members will react. Being both gay and a member of this church is challenging. I know some people hold me up as an example, telling their gay son or daughter they can remain in the church like I have. The thing is, the people who do this, I don’t think they understand the type of life they are wishing onto someone they love, it's living a half-life, a stunted life. They should get to know my story before wishing it on someone else. As I said above, God said there was a work for me to do in this church, and I've worked hard to make the little piece of the Church I interact with to be more kind and loving.

It feels like changes are on the horizon for me. Probably a release from my calling in the next few months, and I don't know what else. It's time to think about the future and my path in life.

Since the goals presented in church are not available to me, I have to figure out what a successful life looks like for me, what the purpose of my life is, how God wants me to partner with Him in the work He is doing in the world today. I suspect working all this out will take a lot of mental, emotional & spiritual work. I already feel a bit fatigued just thinking about it, but I also know the Lord has blessed and buoyed me over the years and believe He will continue to do so. 

I would appreciate if you would say a prayer on my behalf, and also for other LGBTQIA+ members that we can be open to the spirit and follow where God guides us. I don't know how we fit into God's Plan, but I'm certain the author of diversity has made provisions for us. 

David

[afoolforatook]

A RWBY V7 Ep12 rant.....When I say this is long..... Legit was fucking 37 pages double spaced at one point. Sorry....

Before this gets started I want to warn you, this is long (even longer than I thought it’d be going in). It’s probably too long ... actually it is definitely too long but if I agonize over editing it down again and again I won’t get it up before the finale. It’s probably repetitive at times, and most certainly not anything I’ll be showing off as an example of my top essay writing. And I want to be able to say that the length pays off because I have some grand hopeful insight at the end. I want to say I know things will be okay. But the fact that I can’t is exactly why I’m writing this, and why it’s so long. So if you need this to have a hopeful ending, I’m sorry, I don’t have one for you currently. I want to, so badly. But to me false hope would be even worse.  So if you can’t handle another long post that doesn’t end with a way to fix things, it’s okay, take care of yourself. But maybe the most hopeful thing I can tell you, and tell you up front, is that you aren’t alone in your pain. 

I want to preface this all with one more thing: I don’t hate CRWBY. I respect them, support them. I’ve wanted to give them the benefit of the doubt as much as I could.  That doesn’t mean I can’t criticize them or expect more from them or just be plain angry with them. I can be vocal about all of that without harassing them, without hating them. I don’t think they’re just plain evil or homophobic. I still want to believe that they can do things that will allow me to trust them again. Maybe it’s naive, but I want to, at the very least, still have hope that this wasn’t malicious, just very poorly conceived and executed. 

And I know that other people who are hurting like me are lashing out towards CRWBY. And while I don’t at all condone that kind of reaction, I can understand it to an extent. Because I’m very, very hurt and angry and it would be so easy to let loose and say all the awful stuff I want to in my anger. To yell and call people out and not care how I come across. It would definitely be a lot easier than spending all week writing this long thing and agonizing over making it perfect. There is nothing wrong with venting and being raw and open and angry, but just as we want CRWBY to be aware that their actions can truly hurt people, we need to be conscious of the fact that so can ours.  Many people are very hurt right now. And whether or not you think it was queerbaiting/BYG or not, or even whether or not you just think it was bad writing, no one has the right to invalidate the people who are hurting right now, many of whom are queer people dealing with personal traumas and mental illness. 

The few people who are attacking CRWBY and other fans (and there is a difference between being angry and vocal about that anger and just attacking them) do not invalidate the hurt people are feeling. If you are hurt or angry you have every right to be. You have every right to stop watching the show or leave the fandom, or communicate your hurt to CRWBY. But communicate means just that; communicate. Talk. You can be as angry as you are, you don’t have to temper your pain to be more tolerable to the people who caused that pain. But there is a difference between being harsh and honest about how hurt you are, and harassing real people. And I won’t say “harassing real people over a fictional character/show” because I know it’s more complicated than that. My hurt this past week isn’t over a fictional character or a ship. It’s about me and what I’ve been through and the fact that the very thing that gave me strength in hard times was turned into something that confirmed my biggest fears and hurt me immensely. 

The world always gets so sentimental when we see things about fictional stories giving people some comfort, and we celebrate that. But as soon as people say they can be hurt just as much by media, we lash out, say they’re overreacting, that they’re just getting upset over fictional characters. But you can’t have it both ways. We can’t want fiction to be important and inspiring to people and then belittle people who are negatively impacted by the same material, especially when often that vulnerability comes from a history of trauma and/or being neurodivergent. I am extremely hurt. I feel betrayed and abandoned and angry. And it will take time for me to process all of that and move past it. But I can be all of those things without attacking CRWBY or the people who might disagree with me. 

To me, this isn’t about disagreeing. We can argue forever about whether or not this was queerbaiting or bury your gays or poor writing (and I honestly at this moment don’t even know what I think about all of that because I’m not in that headspace currently) but the fact is that there are many, many people who feel it was, and who are hurting because of that, and whether you believe it was or not does not give you the right to invalidate the real pain that they are feeling.  Who is right is less important than the fact that people, people who were already vulnerable, have been hurt. So, please. Respect each other. Respect those who are hurting. Respect those who aren’t and don’t understand, and respect CRWBY. You can still be angry and speak out without attacking others. 

With that said, to fully understand why this has affected me so much, and why it’s going to take a long time for me to get back to where I was, regardless of how the volume ends, there are things you need to know about my history. It’s a lot of background and this is already going to be a longer post than I’d really like, but it’s important to understanding why RWBY is so important to me, and thus able to have such a negative effect on me. So please, bear with me. Also, fair warning, though at this point it’s probably obvious, but my story isn’t happy. I still haven’t found my own positive ending to it. If it’s too much for you to read right now, please, like I said before, take care of yourself. 

I guess I should introduce myself. My name is Farley. I’m 24, nonbinary (they/them), biromantic, demisexual. I have MDD, GAD, ADHD, Panic Disorder, OCD, Comorbid PTSD, and am trying to get an official autism diagnosis. I’m a full on alphabet soup. I struggle with imposter syndrome, intrusive thoughts, self-isolation, dermatillomania, and multiple trauma related phobias. My queer and neurodivergent identities are huge parts of my life and I try to be as open as possible about them, in the hopes of helping end the stigma around them. One of the main ways I cope with my mental health issues on a day to day basis is through hyperfixations. While it might not technically be the healthiest method, it’s what I’ve found to work for me when I’m in a really bad place and unable to practice more active coping skills. Through stories and characters that I relate to, I can separate my problems from myself a little and both escape from them for a while when needed, and view them a little more clearly from a new perspective.  

That’s some important info about me, but what really matters here is the past five years of my life and the trauma within them. 

In October of 2015, a few months into my sophomore year of college, I went into a deep depression, mostly brought on by multiple family deaths and stresses over the past summer that I had not properly had time to process and recover from. I quit my job as an RA and withdrew from school and moved back home with my parents.  While this was the right decision at the time, it wasn’t easy. I left a very close group of friends at school, and didn’t really have a strong support system at home aside from my parents. My friends from high school had all gone off to college themselves, and the few that still lived in town were often busy with work or school. And because I have an intense fear of driving and needed time to get myself in a better place before starting a job, I ended up spending most of my time home alone. I became more and more isolated, to the point of verging on agoraphobic, and my parents and I started thinking about ways I could basically get my life started again. 

 But isolation messes with your head, and makes you want to just isolate more and more. In mid February of 2016 I started to really work on being social again. Mostly because I started talking to my best friend from high school, Emma, regularly again. She knew I was struggling, and while I’ve always had a hard time keeping in touch with people, Emma has always been the person I never felt self conscious about going to. We talked everyday. After high school, Emma’s mom and younger brother had moved to Ohio (I live in NC) and Emma had gone to school in Oregon. Her father lives in Germany. So between visiting her family in Ohio and Germany she didn’t have a lot of time during breaks to come back to NC to visit friends. Since we graduated I’d only seen her once for about 12 hours during that awful summer. But now we were skyping and chatting everyday. And slowly I started to be less and less scared of being more social. I wanted to hang out with friends. I was excited about going back to school in the fall. 

Something important to understand about me and Emma is how close we’ve always been. We’d been best friends since 8th grade. We told each other we were soulmates, soulfriends, when we were 15. Nearly everyone in our small high school thought we were dating at one time or another. I always knew I loved her. I was fine with our relationship being “only” platonic. Because platonic wasn’t “only”. It was absolutely perfect. It was having her as one of the most important people in my life, and me in hers, and that’s all I wanted. But I also knew that if she ever wanted to try a romantic relationship, I’d be open. 

Around the time I left school Emma had been going through a lot herself. She was finally getting help for her own mental health issues and she was, for the first time, really thinking about her identity and sexuality. On May 4th 2016 she texted me like always, but this time she was nervous. She wanted to tell me something. She said she was still confused about her sexuality and didn’t know where she fell. But when she tried to think of being with someone, the only person she pictured was me. And I told her basically what I just told you. So we started talking about testing out us being a couple. She had already been planning to come to NC to visit after she went to Ohio later that month for her brother’s high school graduation. And my parents were going on a two week vacation around that time as well. So we decided that she would come and stay with me for two weeks. We would keep this to ourselves until then, so that we could see if this was really the best thing for us. And if so, then we’d tell people. We’d always talked about living together after school, but now we wanted to see exactly what we wanted our relationship to be. She bought a bus ticket for May 26th and would stay through June 10th or so, which would mean she’d be there for her 20th birthday on June 5th. We talked everyday about our plans for her visit. How excited we were, how we could cook dinner together and dance around the house in our underwear, and just get to be Us again. We talked to friends, planning to visit friends from high school and maybe even my friends from college.

On May 18th I texted Emma around 11 pm. I hadn’t heard from her all day which was unusual but she was in Ohio celebrating her mom’s birthday and getting ready for her brother’s graduation that weekend, so she was probably just busy. We’d told each other goodnight every night for months at that point. So I told her I loved her and was so excited to see her in just over a week.

The next morning it was a bit odd that she still hadn’t texted me back but again, I just assumed she was busy with family. And then the mail came, and the last part of a birthday present I was making for her arrived. So I got to work, giddy. 

Around 2 pm my other best friend from high school, Juli, called me. For some reason I decided I’d just call her back later, I was too engrossed in making Emma’s present. About 20 minutes later I heard a knock on my door and turned to see my parents standing in the doorway to my room. I vividly remember spinning around happily and saying “Hey! Everything okay?” even as I noticed the tears on my dad’s face and how pale my mom was. My stomach knotted and I stood as my mom said “N-no. Honey…..” and walked towards me. I took a deep breath, preparing myself for her to say that a grandparent or aunt or uncle had died. But as she got closer and put a shaking hand on my shoulder, I got a little more confused, a different kind of scared. One of my cousins? One of my baby cousins?  

Nothing could have prepared me for her telling me that there’d been an accident in Ohio. That Emma, and her mom, and her brother, and her aunt had been in a crash…. And that all four of them had been killed on impact. The only thing I remember about the rest of the night is the pain of continuously screaming, punching the wall until my dad stopped me, and calling my friends from college, trying to have someone to talk to, someone who I could call who wouldn’t also be mourning. I couldn’t handle my own grief, let alone anyone else’s at that moment. 

There’s a lot more to that story. There’s the memorial service in Ohio and meeting her dad and stepmom for the first time. There’s the service we put together at our high school and seeing our friend group all together again, except not. There’s the panic attacks every time I saw a garbage truck, or my parents drove off to work. 

But most importantly for what you need to know right now, is my sliding back into isolation. I barely ever saw my friends from home and every time I did for the next two years it had something to do with mourning Emma. I saw my college friends a few times; them coming to visit or me taking a bus to stay the weekend. But eventually they went back to school and I stayed at home. I drifted away from high school friends because I didn’t know how to handle being with them when everything we did together reminded me of what I’d lost. I didn’t know how to talk to them because I needed their support but knew I didn’t have it in me to be supportive of them, and that wasn’t fair. I drifted away from my college friends for the same reasons, and even more so as the group dynamic that I had left slowly changed and faded until I didn’t know who was talking to who anymore and I again felt bad for dumping my shit on them when I couldn’t do the same. I began to think that all I brought to any social interaction was my pain and hopelessness. I would just bring everyone else down. They shouldn’t have to deal with my pain. So a year after I left school I was even more alone. I’d lost or pushed away all the people in my life that I’d expected to be lifelong friends, family. And I didn’t know how to begin to fix that. I didn’t know if I wanted to. I didn’t know if I deserved to. 

The only reason I was even still alive was because anytime I even got close to thinking about hurting myself, I could just sense Emma glaring at me, yelling at me, telling me that I couldn’t let this stop me from living out all those dreams we’d talked about. And I knew that my life wasn’t just mine anymore, that all those dreams, that bond, the parts of my favorite person that only I knew, would be lost if I died. 

But I didn't have my friends to vent to, and as supportive as my parents were (I’d told them and a few close friends about me and Emma that first terrible week) I needed friends. But I didn’t know how to reconnect and I was too scared to go out and meet new people, especially knowing that at some point I’d have to drop the “dead girlfriend” bomb on them, and who’d want to stick around after that?  So I tried to use media and hyperfixations to pull myself out of spirals, like I always had. But it was hard. Because most of the things that had been comforting before were all things I’d shared with Emma, and so now they were just more reminders of her absence. And even new things I found soon turned rotten because I couldn’t help but think about how I wish I could show it to Emma. Everything that made me happy for even a moment would pretty soon make me sad. 

Eventually I found things that comforted me and helped me be creative again and that led me to starting school again, nearly three years after I’d left, at SCAD.  I loved the classes. I wanted to be there. I’ve always been a fiction writer but now there was so much in my head that I needed to get out, to process, and to share with people, especially people like me dealing with an unimaginable grief. Those past few years had been made even more difficult by the lack of representation I found in grief material. Everything was either about grieving the elderly, not someone who’d barely even gotten to live. Or if it was about someone young it was due to suicide or disease or violence; in other words things that at the very least, left the grieving with some cause to care about, or something to be angry at, some real world outlet. I didn’t have that. I didn’t relate to that. And even harder was finding anything I could relate to that included the complexities that my queer identity put on my grief; there were people I could and couldn’t tell about our relationship. Did I say I lost my best friend or my girlfriend? What if her family didn’t approve and wouldn’t talk to me, wouldn’t let me have any of her things, wouldn’t want me around? And one of the biggest things I kept thinking those first few months; why had my life become a ‘bury your gays’ soap opera plot line. Was Emma supposed to just be my tragic backstory now? Was I just supposed to use this as angsty fodder for the rest of my life? What about her? What about her dreams, her potential? What about her progress? She’d just gotten to a place where she was accepting herself. Where she was overcoming her mental health issues, where she was proud of who she was. Why was I allowed to keep going and she wasn’t?  I couldn’t find any support for these feelings. Not books or groups or forums. So I decided to make them myself. I started writing and drawing, putting together what I called my Grief Scrapbook. I was working towards the thing that mattered to me more than anything; telling our story. I was getting the chance to create the content I’d so desperately needed. 

But I was still alone, even at school. I was 23 living with mostly 18/19 year olds. And while there wasn’t anything wrong with them, I was struggling with a strong sense of dissociation. Everywhere I looked I saw Emma, forever 19. And there I was, continuing to age and getting further and further away from her. 

My first year at SCAD I made two friends, and while I love them, they didn’t fulfill the hole left by the large close knit groups of friends I’d lost. I tried to get back in touch with my best friend from college, only to find that she was no longer talking to me. And I don’t blame her really. Yes I’d been going through things, but so had she, and I hadn’t been able to be a good friend for her. So if she needed to move on for her own good, no matter how sad that made me, she had every right to do what was best for her, just as I had been trying to do. 

I’m now in my second year at SCAD and recently started hanging out with a new group. And they’re great and I’m slowly feeling more confident and secure around them, but I still struggle. I still miss the relationships I held so dear, the relationships I let dissolve. I still worry I’ll never have that kind of connection with people again, and that if I do somehow manage to find it, I’ll mess it up again.  Some days are particularly rough, when I sit with my thoughts too long, or see something that reminds me of any one of the many people I miss, and I ache for the happiness I had. And it’s those moments when I turn to hyperfixations (I do promise this is getting to RWBY). 

This past February the final How To Train Your Dragon movie came out. The HTTYD franchise holds a very dear place in my heart, as it was my main hyperfixation during high school, and something I shared with Emma and other friends. The second film came out the day of my graduation. It was the last movie Emma and I saw together before she moved to Ohio and then went to school in Oregon. It was the last movie we saw together at all. I knew it was going to be very emotional for me to see the final movie, alone now. But I had to see it opening night. And (spoilers for The Hidden World I guess) the movie ended up being about the reality of having to let go of the important people from your childhood as you grow up. About dealing with the fact that sometimes the people you expected to always be a part of your life, aren’t. I loved the movie, but it destroyed me. A few months later I had to get through May, the 3rd anniversary, away from home for the first time. And it was extremely difficult. I’d had to take a break from HTTYD and process things. 

So my main hyperfixations weren’t helping me get through a really difficult time. But around the time HTTYD 3 came out I happened to get back into RWBY. I’d watched the first season or so when it first came out, but then had just kind of forgotten about it. And so, in the absence of HTTYD, I got caught up. And I can’t say there weren’t things that hurt, that made me have to take a moment and collect myself.  Watching the end of volume three, watching Pyrrha and Jaune finally kiss, and then watch their relationship die with her before they even had a chance to be together, hit way too close to home. Logically I should have projected on Jaune more than I did but I think I couldn’t, because it wasn’t just similar, it felt like I was literally watching the worst moment of my life play out. He was too much like me to handle. But there was Qrow. And at first I just kind of latched onto him because I liked him. I like his characterization, his design, and I was a fan of V*c ( I hate to even mention him here for fear of causing a totally different discourse, but Emma and I were big fans of his and high school and met him and when everything happened with him it was just another thing that felt like a good memory of Emma had been tainted.)  

And so I was watching while the last half of volume six was airing. And I was watching Qrow slip further and further into his depression. I watched as he felt betrayed by Oz after grieving him and then getting him back. I thought more about how he’d basically lost his sister, about how he’d grieved for Summer (regardless of whether it was platonic or romantic), how he lost hope in having strong relationships ever again. How he felt cursed and how he pushed people away to protect them and himself from more pain. I saw how the Apathy affected him and how close he was to giving in before Ruby and Weiss snapped him out of it. I saw him struggle to get himself back together for Ruby and the rest of the kids, but not know how. I saw every single fear I’d struggled with those past few years in him. I related to Qrow more than I’d ever expected to. And so my hyperfixation on RWBY grew. His addiction was my isolation. His insecurities of hurting others and thus pushing them away was my fear that for the rest of my life, I would be alone because I was always going to be too broken to be worthy of friends and love. 

And then everything happened with V*c and for a bit everything hurt again and I had to get away from RWBY and the toxicity within parts of the fandom. And when I was able to come back I was excited but worried. I hoped that Qrow would continue to develop, continue to progress alongside me, that I would like his new actor enough to finish healing the sting I’d felt over V*c.  I just wanted Qrow back, I wanted this character to be there to help me again.

Because Qrow Branwen gave me hope. He gave me hope that I could get better. He gave me hope that even with my insecurities and trauma, something I’ll never be fully free from, I can deserve people who care about me, and that there are actually people who will care about me. He gave me hope that good things can still happen to broken people. And not just people who were once broken and have healed, but people who are still figuring out how to heal, who know they will never fully heal, but also know they still are worthy of support and care. And then volume 7 started and I got more than I’d ever dreamed. 

There was the hug with Ironwood. And even though I shipped Ironqrow, the idea of there being a romantic aspect to that hug wasn’t what made it important. It was the fact that we got Qrow connecting with an old ally (and an adult), finding that he even still had an old ally. That despite everything that had happened with Oz and Lionheart, despite all the trust he’d had broken, maybe he wasn’t actually alone yet. And then we got Clover. I’ll admit I was wary of him at first. I was worried about the traitor theories, the death theories, and then the theories that he’d negatively affect Qrow, making him feel worse about his semblance. But then he grew on me so quickly. Because he smiled at Qrow. He got him to talk about himself, called him out when he was putting himself down, told him how well he was doing. And while it’s wasn’t because of Clover, he was sober, and Clover had to at the very least help him stay that way. Qrow was hunching less when he walked, opening up, being more vulnerable and social. He was smiling, laughing, making jokes. He had a steady partner that he trusted and worked well with, likely for the first time since team STRQ. And yes, I shipped them, but honestly while I would have still been disappointed if it was never canon, given how blatant it really seemed like it could be, it would ultimately have been okay. Because again, it was less about Qrow finding love and more about him finding support.   And then I saw Qrow and Clover and Robyn team up, and whether it was canon or just fandom I felt represented. Not just in the way I had with Qrow about my mental health, but as a queer person struggling with complicated grief; the exact thing I had never been able to find and had taken upon myself to create for others. I saw Qrow being loved (again, whether platonic or romantic isn’t as important) and healing. Even if Fairgame never actually happened, I could still see them as queer characters helping each other process trauma. And maybe I set myself up in a bubble part of the fandom that fully convinced me that Fairgame was possible, but at the very least I truly, undoubtedly thought that Clover would side with Qrow. 

And as I watched episode 12, I could feel my stomach sinking. Okay Clover didn’t side with Qrow at first, but maybe he’ll come around. Okay maybe he won’t come around, but maybe he’ll take Qrow in and they’ll have time to talk, maybe even with Ironwood. But then Clover abandons the ship, abandons Qrow and I was scrambling even more for hope that things would be okay.  Maybe he’s trying to get away to diffuse things. But then “Never pegged you for the manipulative type” the first sign of Qrow doubting their entire relationship, of feeling betrayed again. And then Clover calls Qrow cynical? Maybe I’m forgetting something, cause I haven’t gone back and analyzed every scene with them, but I can’t remember Qrow ever being cynical around Clover this volume that we’ve seen. Self-deprecating yes, but this is legitimately the happiest and most secure we’ve ever seen Qrow. But okay maybe they’ll reason and Clover will come around. But then “We don’t have to fight, friend.” and it’s friend not Qrow. And then “You don’t know my friends. That’s how it always goes.” and I broke. I almost stopped there, a part of me wishes I had. Because it was already so broken, this thing that had even in the past few weeks, been a main pillar of hope for me. But maybe they’ll come together to fight Tyrian. And then Qrow goes after Tyrian and Clover keeps attacking Qrow. Well maybe he’s really trying to protect him, or has some plan. But then they continue to fight each other. And they don’t have even a moment of “who’s the bigger threat here? Us or the serial killer?” And then Qrow works with Tyrian?! Tyrian the serial killer? Tyrian the unstable maniac? Tyrian who tried to take Ruby? Tyrian who nearly killed Qrow? Tyrian who fucking worships Salem, who Qrow has spent most of his life fighting, has lost Summer to, and countless other traumas? (and I get the possible reasons, realizing that Clover won’t lay off of him so Tyrian is his best bet and then he can take care of Tyrian, but I still don’t like it. But this isn’t even about whether or not I think it’s good writing or characterization and it’s too long already to get into that.) And then Tyrian and Qrow fight so well together and I honestly felt sick. We haven’t seen Qrow work that well with anyone. Not RWBY, not Ironwood, not Clover.  And now we see it with fucking Tyrian? And maybe it’s a stretch but it honestly felt like another nail in the “Qrow attracts bad” coffin that is his insecurities. Qrow and Tyrian fight nearly perfectly together and it felt so damn wrong. Clover’s wrong here, Qrow’s wrong here, and it all feels so very very wrong based on the entire progression of their relationship throughout the volume. And then Qrow takes down Clover’s aura and I’m just empty.  There’s no hint of him trying to just beat Clover and not kill him. He has no reason to think that Tyrian won’t actually go for the kill during this fight. But they continue to have these snippets of “We don’t have to fight” or “I want to trust you” while showing no signs of holding back and still caring about the other’s well being. And then Qrow’s voice breaking during “Why couldn’t you just do the right thing…”. We’ve literally never seen Qrow this emotionally compromised, let alone during a fight. He’s crumbling because he finally had someone who made him think he could get better, that he could have close relationships, that he could be good for the people around him. And now he’s losing it. 

I was broken here, I was already spiraling. I knew Clover would get hit. I knew I would be struggling to deal with this episode because I had so fully expected a different course. But I thought there could still be hope. There had to still be hope. CRWBY wouldn’t give us all that development, wouldn’t show Qrow finally happy without leaving some hope for things turning around in the finale. He’d get hit by Tyrian’s stinger and Qrow would have to work to save him and they’d work things out. But then “I trust James with my life… and I wanted to trust you.” And I’m sobbing. Because I get it, Clover’s loyal, but when Qrow’s face hardens I know what he’s thinking. What he’s trying not to think but it’s so hard to fight: “Maybe it is me. Maybe I can’t be trusted. Maybe I’ve ruined things again”. Even though he knows what James is doing is wrong. But he trusted James, he trusted Clover. And he thought they trusted, cared for him. And now they’ve both turned against him and no matter how much he knows he’s doing the right thing, he can’t help but worry that he’s still the thing broken here, that he still messed up somewhere and ruined the relationships he needed so much. I was breaking more and more as I watched this source of my own hope lose all hope. 

And then Harbinger. The weapon Qrow built himself. That he modeled after his hero. The literal extension of his soul. And only moments before, Qrow destroyed the one thing that might have protected Clover. Clover’s emblem falls. Tyrian with “Like you killed Clover”. And yeah yeah Qrow being framed is heartbreaking. But it’s more that he’ll believe it. He did. He fucked everything up again. He tried so hard to do the right thing and still managed to hurt the person he cared about. And if Clover, the foil to his bad luck, could be destroyed by his semblance, how does anyone else stand a chance? And then blaming James. Swearing to make him pay (I honestly don’t remember if he says make him pay or kill him but I physically can’t rewatch that scene to see which it was). And yes he blames James. He hates James. It was the last straw breaking on someone he wanted to trust so much, wanted to have as a friend. But he still blames himself. He still knows he’s cursed and all the progress he’d made with Clover’s help is ripped away. 

And then “Good luck”. I’ve seen people saying it’s sweet, that it’s a moment of reconciliation, of Clover showing he still cares. And I don’t necessarily disagree. But I hate it. Because Qrow won’t take it that way. It’s just another reminder that good luck is out of his reach. And then the goddamn sky and the bi flag colors. And then we see Qrow cry for the first time. And then…. The scream…. I literally nearly vomited and that was the thing that sent me over the edge into full blown panic attack. Because I know that fucking scream. I know how it feels. I hear it ringing in my ears, I feel my throat getting raw. I could hear and see and feel myself in the same position. The nightmare I’d fought off for years; kneeling over Emma’s body and there being nothing I can do but scream and scream as the last of the hope I was clutching to faded with her… with Clover’s eyes.

It wasn’t that Clover died. It wasn’t that my ship won’t happen. It was how traumatizing it was. It was that Harbinger was now defiled. It was that Qrow set it up to happen. It was the sky. It was seeing the light go out of Clover’s eyes. It was Qrow’s scream. We’ve never seen a death like this on RWBY before. Yes we watched Pyrrha’s death. But there was no blood. We didn’t see her bleed out. We didn’t see the exact moment the light left her eyes. We saw Adam stabbed and some bleeding and then hitting the rocks, but we weren’t right there, seeing the exact moment of his death close up. If Clover had been stung by Tyrian and died I’d be upset still, and many of the issues I have would still be relevant. But using Harbinger like that, playing directly into Qrow’s own insecurities like that, after having him do things that felt extremely out of character in order to set things up for Tyrian to kill Clover like that and blame Qrow? It felt vile. 

It didn’t just feel like bad writing or different narrative choices. Hell, it didn’t even just feel OOC. It felt malicious. It felt like twisting established plot and characterisation completely in order to make it fit some tragic climax that was only chosen because it would have the biggest emotional impact, not because it was the best way to continue the plot. And they can’t say that they didn’t expect people to be so attached to Clover. Because if they didn’t expect that to be so emotional for viewers, then why do it like that in the first place? Why put in the climatic cinematic shot that mirrors when Yang lost her arm? Why have Qrow screaming over Clover’s body be the final shot?  If Clover was never meant to have significance to both Qrow and fans, why make his death so painful? They can’t say that they didn’t know fans would get so invested at the same time that they say that it was necessary to make it that traumatic. It’s not that you can’t kill off beloved characters, no matter how long they’ve been in the show. But if you do, it’s got to feel important, it’s got to feel necessary, and it’s got to make sense for those characters, or else it just feels like you’re playing with peoples’ emotions for no reason other than shock factor. 

I’ve seen a bunch of theories and discourse. Arguments over whether or not it’s queerbaiting or bury your gays. Over whether or not it’s bad writing or out of character. And I’m sure I’ll eventually have a stronger, more thought out opinion on that, but right now I can’t even get there. 

I’ve seen theories as to why CRWBY did this, why it’s important to the plot. And maybe I’m wrong, maybe I’ll be just as surprised in a good way next week as I was in a traumatic way this week. But it will take a lot, and I will still need time to recover and dig myself back out of my own intrusive thoughts that saw this episode and rejoiced because “See!? See, good things can’t happen! You’ll always lose whatever good you find. You’ll always ruin whatever good you find.” And none of the theories I’ve seen make that better. Maybe they’ll bring Clover back with the Staff of Creation or some other method: doesn’t matter, the damage is still done. Qrow still is betrayed and traumatized. And even if Clover came back and Ironwood realized he was wrong and stopped, even if everything went back to exactly what it was, Qrow still would have lost all the progress he made this season. Because even if everything was fixed, Qrow would still have to fight down the newly boosted fear that everything will fall apart again. And similarly even if I come back to RWBY and things are good, I will still have a hard time trusting the show, and will still have to climb my way out of a hole I had just gotten out of, except this time I won’t have the comfort of RWBY to help me. 

Or maybe Clover won’t come back and Qrow will relapse and try to kill Ironwood and lose his mind like the scarecrow he is. And what will that do but reinforce the fear and idea that “broken” people can’t escape their vices? That they’ll always come back to pain. Yes, it’s important to show that people can relapse and still get better, that relapse doesn’t mean all hope is lost. But there’s a difference between a relapse and new trauma that directly undercuts all the progress you’ve made. That’s not inspirational, it’s exhausting. Yes, you can come back again, but what about the next time and the next and the next? When will you just get to be secure in your happiness without worrying that at any moment you’ll thrown back to square one?

If it turns out there’s some great plot point this creates, some big revelation that fixes things, I still think it wasn’t done properly. Fine, have that, have that pain. But don’t end on that and leave people for a week. It’s not about it being a cliffhanger. It’s about people who are traumatized being abandoned. (Again, I’m not even getting into how, if this did happen, how episode 12 would still feel off from a characterization standpoint and whether or not it was poor writing. It’s an analysis I can’t currently do.)

And maybe my least favorite theory and the one that I might see as most likely; that Qrow won’t relapse. That he won’t completely lose it and instead Clover’s death and influence will be what keeps him going. Because yeah, that sounds great, that sounds heroic and strong and like the progress that came from knowing Clover did make a difference. But it feels wrong in this instance. Qrow’s had that. He’s had loss that hurt him but he kept going to finish something or honor them. He kept going after Summer died. He kept going for Ruby and Yang and Tai. If he didn’t have that, why would he have kept going when things were so bad? But Qrow doesn’t need that again. He doesn’t need another pain to spur him on. He needs support. He needs proof that his hard work, his struggle, has been worth it and that he still has allies. And not just the kids. Because as much as he respects them, as much as he believes in them and their abilities as hunters, he’s still protective of them, they still aren’t on an equal level. He still feels responsible for them. And that’s good for him, but he needs adults too. He needs people who aren’t his responsibility. He needs adults who can call him out on his shit. He needs adults he can lean on, who can take care of him. And now who does he have? Summer is gone. Raven is gone. Tai is back at home. Oz is gone. Lionheart betrayed him. James has now betrayed him. Winter has sided with James and might not be alive much longer? Robyn is there, but also hurt, and we haven’t seen anything to suggest that they are particularly close. And now Clover is dead. Clover, the only person we have ever seen Qrow let his guard down around like we did this season.

And it’s not that the “Staying alive for the person you’ve lost” is a bad plot line, and if I’d trust any show to do it I would’ve thought it’d be RWBY. But I can tell you from fucking experience, forcing yourself to keep going in honor of someone? Yeah, it might keep you alive. It might give you meaning and even lead you to do great things. But when it’s just you and your head? When you’re alone because you’ve lost everyone who kept you going and now you have to keep going without them, for them? It fucking sucks. It’s not poetic. It’s not this heroic strength that lifts you up. It’s a crushing weight of fear that you will fail again, that you’re the only one who can carry this burden, but this time you’ll let down the person most important to you.  And then not only will you have fucked up your life but you’d have made their suffering and loss meaningless. 

And I can see why CRWBY might take this route, what their message might be, and maybe for them and for some people it’s good, but personally it’s crushing. Because it can be a good thing to have the desire to honor someone spur you on, that’s literally why we still have RWBY. But if that’s the only thing you have? It’s toxic. You have to have other support and motivations of your own to keep you going without becoming hollow inside. And right now, Qrow doesn’t have that. Right now, if Qrow uses this to push him forward, it’s not recovery, it’s not avoiding a relapse; it’s falling into a new, much harder to spot, addiction.

Yes, shitty things happen regardless of whether or not you’ve recovered from previous shitty things. Yes, life isn’t fair and sometimes it feels like you just get hit down over and over. And yes, people die in war and it’s ruthless and unfair. But RWBY is still a show. It’s still a show about hope. It’s still fiction, an escape from the cruelty of reality. And to me there were multiple other options for the plot to create conflict and sacrifice without doing it in a way that seems so needlessly cruel.  

This is complicated and layered and I think there have been mistakes made on multiple sides, and in the end, we still don’t know what CRWBY has planned and how things will go from here and why they chose this. Because everything has a meaning in RWBY. At least I want to believe that. But right now it’s very hard to think that all the meaning that was what made this my favorite volume, was anything more than a trap to make the end that much more painful. And that hurts. I want to believe that’s not the case. But it’s very, very hard. And like I said before, even if they pull it off amazingly and everything makes sense after next week, damage has still been done. No matter what happens, there were ways things could have been handled either throughout the volume or in this episode that, while still having emotional significance and sacrifice, could have been less traumatizing to a large portion of the fandom who supports CRWBY specifically because they trust them not to do something like that to them. 

In the end I’m hurt because right now it feels like the entirety of this volume was just a build up for the shock value of tearing Qrow down again. And I’m just tired of it. I’m biased I know, and maybe for some people it’s an important narrative. But to me it just feels like angst just for the sake of being cruel to a character who can’t catch a break. Since Emma’s death I understandably haven’t been a big fan of really angsty fanfiction. At first seeing fics where a character lost their partner made me irrationally angry. Because why can’t good things happen in fictional worlds? Why do characters I care about have to suffer like I do just for the sake of being angsty? Why would someone do that to a character they love? Why inflict that absolute agony onto a character when you could just, let them be happy? Yes conflict and sacrifice are crucial to good storytelling, but you still have to leave a character some hope, or else what’s the point of just watching them linger in misery? This kind of pain isn’t just a plot point that gets addressed for one or two episodes and then is fully dealt with. It’s a part of who you are now and will be for the rest of your life. 

I’ve been sad over shows before. I’ve thought plot lines were bad and like I’d lost a character that deserved better. But I’ve never had something take me from a (relatively) stable mindset to a truly frightening spiral like I’ve been in this week. If this had happened when I was younger (granted if it had happened before Emma’s death it wouldn’t have had the same meaning), if it had been during that first year? It really might have been a breaking point for me. The final straw. The only reason I’m able to know that as truly devastating as this has been for me this week, I’m not in actual danger of getting to a critically low space, is because I’ve learned how to deal with those low places these past four years. I’m still in a dangerous headspace but I know how to handle it.  I know to reach out, to vent, to ask friends to keep an eye on me, to keep an eye out for critical signs that I’m getting worse and I need more professional help. But if I’d had this trauma as a teen and saw this, or if I’d seen it before I’d built up this method of keeping myself safe even when in the worst headspaces?  I don’t know that I would have been able to deal with it. 

There’s a loud part of my head that is berating me for letting this affect me so much. For letting a show and fictional characters be the catalyst for me having to actively ask my friends to keep sharp instruments away from me for the first time in years. I’ll have a moment of clarity of “It’s not that bad, you’ll get past it” before being swallowed back up by the hopelessness. I have moments of “How could you let a fictional character’s death put you in this place, but not Emma? How is he more important?” 

But it’s not about RWBY or Clover or Qrow. It’s about my brain, and how I as a neurodivergent person deal with things. It’s about this how thing that I use to filter parts of my life through so that I can handle them in more reasonable chunks, is now a trigger itself. I currently don’t have any other hyperfixations, which means every time I have a moment of silence, or start to get feeling down again, my brain goes to RWBY, because usually that’s how I pull myself out. But that just reminds me of the loss RWBY currently represents. Not just the trauma this has brought up, but the fact that I’ve lost this source of comfort. And then I’m left scrambling for anything as I spiral further and further. I’m at the point where unless I am having constant outside stimulus to keep my brain occupied I go right back into a nosedive. And there’s nothing I can do on my own to stop it. So I just have to ride it out, fight back dozens of overwhelming intrusive thoughts, and try to think that I won’t always be this miserable, even though the current thing that was helping me believe that has just shown me the opposite is true. 

And no, creators can’t be held responsible for the mental states of fans of their work. But when things are done that directly hurt so many people, that even if not intended to, feel so calculated and malicious, they have to acknowledge the part they played in that trauma. 

The point of whether there was queer baiting/byg, and mlm representation and how its handled, is very important, but it is also something I just can’t even begin to look at right now from an analytical viewpoint. I can’t begin to come at this from an activist place right now. And I know there are plenty of other people who can speak on it better than I could currently.  My queer identity is largely wrapped up in my grief and how it affects me, but that also means that when I’m spiraling, it is very hard to focus and make good points about things that are not issues I’ve directly experienced. The only reason I can write this at all is because these are really just emotions I’ve dealt with for years that were dragged back up.

RWBY has always been about finding hope when it feels impossible. But this feels like it’s becoming “keep finding new hope but know you’ll lose it too and have to start over”.

RWBY has been what gave me hope that even when bad thing after bad thing happened, there was a reason to keep going, that eventually something good would come your way and you don’t have to live in fear of losing it. That you can still be broken and be worthy of good things. But this episode ripped that all away and told me that sometimes a person is never meant to be happy no matter how hard they try. 

A big reason I have clung to RWBY so much, and admired CRWBY so much, and in turn been so forgiving of plotlines or details that I maybe wasn’t the biggest fan of, was because I see myself in them. They lost Monty so suddenly and tragically and I understand that as much as anyone who isn’t them can. I understand the drive of keeping the show going. When I’m working on my own writing and art about my story and my loss, they are a huge inspiration to me to keep going even when it feels impossible. I can barely listen to Indomitable because, much like Jaune losing Pyrrha, it is uncanny how close to home it hits. They have been through more than we as fans can or should ever expect to know. Because even as someone very open about their grief, who wants to get rid of the stigma of expressing grief, I know that everyone deserves to keep as much of their grief and pain private as they need. And I can't even begin to imagine how hard it is to work on a show that is literally a feat of love and honor to a person you’ve lost, and then have people attack it and you, and make huge accusations, even try to use your loved one’s memory against you. It’s my biggest fear in creating something so incredibly personal but so important. 

And I know that everyone handles grief differently, and no matter how many people you have to support you it can be an extremely isolating thing. I know that no one has the right to tell someone else they are grieving wrong, and I would never dare do that to them. Because I know that the ways I grieve and the things that piss me off about grief and people’s reactions to it, will not line up with everyone else’s, and that’s okay. So the exact things that hurt me so much may be the things that CRWBY find cathartic. 

But I still think it’s important to talk about something that hurts you. To help people understand a facet of grief that might not be what they’ve experienced. Because even people who want to help, who want to provide representation to those hurting, can never please everyone, and even can even hurt people. I want to trust CRWBY. I want to believe they care about the queer community (even if they don’t always succeed in providing good representation), I want to believe they wouldn’t purposefully try to hurt queer fans with queerbaiting or byg. I want to believe they don’t actually hate mlm. 

Narrative is complicated and sometimes things are done that will unknowingly cause harm, or that were topics that the writers didn’t understand enough to properly execute. Things that may seem so obvious to the people who were hurt could truly be things that hadn’t occurred to the writers. And that’s not to excuse those writers from acknowledging their mistake, but to give them a chance to learn and improve. I think a great example is The Adventure Zone (slight spoilers ahead), and how Griffin McElroy handled the fans’ reaction after Sloane and Hurley died in Petals to the Metal. He hadn’t wanted to hurt anyone but he made a decision that was very upsetting for many people and that wasn’t okay. But he listened and apologized and from there on not only tried to provide better representation, but asked about how he could do so, consulted the people he was trying to represent in order to do everything he could to not cause that kind of pain again. Creators are human and deserve second chances, as long as they show they are actively trying to improve.

Things will be learning experiences, but the people who are hurt in those learning experiences, and who are often the ones hurt in such things over and over, are still allowed to be hurt and upset. Intent is not effect. And for creators who want to be inclusive and supportive, it is their responsibility to accept criticism and work to avoid making the same mistakes. Like I said at the start of this, criticism is not harassment and harassment helps no one. Be as angry as you are, be as open as you need, but cruelty to people who are honestly trying to do good but will still make human mistakes just creates more pain and conflict. You don’t have to like it or forgive it but you can’t invalidate the people who are hurt, who do. 

I love RWBY. I want to love CRWBY. I want to keep watching. I want to keep supporting and trusting them. And maybe I’m letting a show have too much influence over me. Maybe it’s unhealthy to project so much on a character. Maybe things will prove to be necessary to tell the story they want to tell. But speaking as a neurodivergent, traumatized, grieving, queer person, I still feel betrayed and hurt by something that I trusted enough to be vulnerable about and I don’t want to sugarcoat or hide that. 

I can’t say I hate CRWBY or I’ve lost all hope in or respect for them, because I’ve related to them so much and know how complicated things like this can be. And because I don’t think I personally can write someone off while still in such an emotionally raw space. I’ll have to take some time to see if I’m able to watch the finale this weekend, but I will most likely watch it, if not just a bit later than I usually would. And RWBY has thrown big surprises at us before, and I can’t know what will happen in the finale and how it will feed into or try to heal some of the pain we’re feeling. But regardless of what the narrative intent is in Clover’s death, it needs to be acknowledged that episode 12 alone, ending on such an intense scene that wouldn’t be resolved for at least a week, hurt people. And CRWBY needs to acknowledge and take responsibility for it. I can’t say that I’m the most up to date on social media and what each person involved with volume 7 has said in the past few months. But I know that numerous official twitter accounts posted things that led people to put more credibility in Fairgame, myself included. And that even after seeing how big the ship had gotten, and knowing what the outcome was, some of CRWBY continued to seemingly feed into the excitement, even teasing about how hard episode 12 would hit us. 

That’s honestly one of the reasons I think this feels not just like bad writing or something, but betrayal. Of course RT can’t control everything everyone involved with RWBY posts, but for a company that has tried to seem so supportive of lgbt and mentally ill fans, they should have, at the very least, not have fed the flame and given people hope and supposed credibility that they knew would crumble after this episode. It feels like, even if they hadn’t intended this entire plot point to come across the way it has, they saw us going down this path and egged us on for added shock factor. 

And even if somehow the finale fixes everything, it doesn’t undo that hurt. It makes me think of the trailers for Insatiable when it first came out. How toxic and fat shaming they seemed and how people reacted poorly to it, but then all the people involved responded with how positive the show was, and that people shouldn’t judge it before they saw it. Or those “joke” videos or posts of kids coming out and the parents getting angry but then it’s about some stupid other thing. It’s meant to trigger a very sensitive issue, that people who have gone through traumas related to those issues are all too familiar with seeing over and over. So why would they have faith that this wasn’t just another one of those times when everything they see points to the opposite? Why trigger people who have already been hurt, for the sake of shock factor? It’s poor and callous writing. 

And that’s what this feels like. It feels like we were exploited in order to make this hurt more. And maybe that was a very unfortunate accident. But CRWBY still needs to acknowledge that they made mistakes, and do what they can to prove to the fans that they still deserve our trust. And that’s not going to be an easy one and done thing. For some it may never be enough, and that is completely valid. 

Of course everyone has different histories and issues that can lead them to be drawn to a certain show or character. And creators can’t ever know for sure that they won’t bring up painful things for any of their fans, and often trying to do so can make the content and message suffer. But even though everyone might not have a story that is as “obviously” traumatic as mine, might not have things they so directly relate to in Qrow and in Clover’s death,  they’re all still valid in the pain they’re feeling. One of my least favorite things about living with grief is people thinking that their traumas and struggles aren’t as big or important as my own. 

This week I’ve told people how hard a time I’m having, and why. And the people who know my backstory understood. The people who didn’t know though, brushed it off as crazy fangirl, tumblr discourse drivel. Even to my face after I told them how much I was hurting, they would groan about people getting so obsessed with fictional characters. You shouldn’t have to know why something negatively affects someone the way it does in order to respect the fact that it does. And I’m not more valid in my pain than people with “smaller” reasons. The fact is that a lot of people are hurting. A lot of queer and mentally ill people are reliving trauma. And like me, many of these people trusted CRWBY to be supportive, to be a comfort in a world where it’s hard to find sometimes. And that makes it hurt all the more.

I wasn’t in the fandom when Monty died, so I don’t know a lot about how CRWBY handled it, what they said publicly, what inevitable fandom discourse there was about how to navigate things. The only reason I bring him up at all, (because I’ve seen people mention him in discourse posts before and it’s usually hurtful and out of line and I truly hate it) is because he, and how CRWBY continues to honor him by keeping his creation going, is a huge part of why I feel so attached to it. My creative focus is on talking about Emma, about honoring her, telling her story, about sharing my grief with people. And while it’s extremely important to me, it’s also terrifying to think about people one day saying I let her down, or that because I made certain decisions I ruined the work or anything like that. And whether or not I am currently happy with every member of CRWBY doesn’t affect the fact that I will always keep in mind that RWBY is something directly tied to someone they’ve lost and it can be extremely difficult to have that kind of work criticized and not get defensive or angry (that’s not to say we can’t criticize things that are made in honor of someone, but that we need to remember there are still people dealing with grief on the other end of what we say). They’ll react poorly to certain things, they’ll say the wrong things, they’ll but heads with opinionated fans. And that’s not to excuse them for that, or to say we shouldn’t hold them accountable and communicate our problems with them and expect them to learn from past mistakes. But they aren’t faceless monsters in some big corporation who just make this for the money. They have real emotional investment in their work and I honestly believe they are well intentioned and want to support lgbt and mentally ill fans. But good intentions don’t ensure there won’t be negative impact, and if they truly want to keep, or regain fans’ trust and support they need to show they understand that. 

It may be naive and there may be things I don’t know that might have changed my view but until now, even with some writing choices I didn’t love, I've really liked CRWBY and trusted them. I personally can’t say I hate them and write them off right now. I understand if you can, if this was the last straw or just proving your view, and that’s all valid. But I want to, as much as possible, believe that they’re well intentioned. RWBY is far from perfect. CRWBY is far from perfect. But that’s ok. As long as there’s effort to improve and acknowledge mistakes and try to make amends

It’s possible that things I’ve said here may anger some people, and unfortunately, as much as I tried to avoid it, may hurt CRWBY. Because as hurt and angry with them as I might be right now, I don’t want to hate them or hurt them.  I’m human as well, and I’m very passionate about this and have a very personal attachment to it. So I acknowledge that it is totally possible that I have said something here that I could have handled better. If so, please, let me know. Constructively. If you need to, privately. Don’t attack me for it. I know when a conversation is toxic to me and I will not put myself in that position and will block people. But I want to be open to criticism, just as I want CRWBY to be. I want to know what I did wrong and how I can work to do better in the future. There are also certain things that I firmly believe that I know not everyone will like. And that’s okay. I have my own ways of dealing with grief and pain that will inevitably conflict with others. In those cases, while I won’t apologize for being honest about how I feel, I will understand and listen to how I may have hurt you. Different opinions and ways of coping will always be a part of grief conversations and it is less about making others agree with you and more about giving people a place to express their pain. 

This is ridiculously, stupidly, long and honestly I’m not sure there’s a clear point and if you read through it all the way, you’re a saint. But I just needed to get this out, and I hope that maybe, somehow, through the ranting, it might help someone feel less alone in their pain, or feel validated. I started writing this on Sunday and wanted to post it before the finale. It’s now Friday and who knows if there’s really any point to posting it now, but still. 

I don’t know what will happen tomorrow. I don’t know how I will handle it. I’ve seen discourse that made me anxious all over again all week. I’ve seen jokes or edits or trolls that made me sick. But there are people out here for you. There are people to talk to who will just listen. You aren’t alone. And while I can’t promise you that everything will be okay, I can promise you that there will be people here to help you get through it. There are ways to get through it. They’re not always fun or ideal, but they’re there. And eventually you’ll be able to feel okay again. The pain might not be gone for good, but you’ll have good moments again. You’ll learn how to create good moments. I still want to believe that “broken” people can be happy again, even though the world may try to show me otherwise over and over. It’s not easy, and sometimes I honestly just don’t see how it can possibly be true. But I keep trying to get back to those good places and appreciate them, for as long as I can. 

[rotationalsymmetry]

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/02/business/covid-economy-parents-kids-career-homeschooling.html?fbclid=IwAR08j8RwbP4SbSW3gY07NCYr_2-g5M61ps72nQi5CMmz1CYe0DCoO-MnJ0A So. On one level, there is a very pragmatic concern here and I don’t really want to take away from it: a lot of families are in really, really bad situations and aren’t sure what to do, and the individual solutions are not good ones. Parents need a massive financial bail-out and also it’d be kind of I guess nice to figure out a way to counter the fact that lots of women are going to have their careers and lifetime earning potential dramatically harmed by this. On another level, this is what happens when you try to make child-raising as cost-efficient as possible. (And an awful lot of what goes on with schools makes a lot more sense if you see it in terms of childcare being the primary goal, socialization* being the second goal, and actual imparting of knowledge and skills to be in third place at best.) We act as though it’s reasonable to have 15-30+ kids all the same age in a room with a single adult, rather than having mixed age groups with multiple adults, including seniors, and multiple children and teenagers of different ages. This is not normal in the sense that for most of human existence, people didn’t do things that way. Mass education is a modern phenomenon just a couple centuries old. And it doesn’t have to be this way (and it also doesn’t have to be this way for kids to get a decent education) -- things are this way so that adults can go off and work in the factory office and their kids will neither get in the way of them working nor be workers themselves. (The trend of children working in factories under appallingly unsafe conditions before the rise of mass education, was really, really bad. At the time, sending all children to school was a much better alternative to having poor kids work in factories under high-risk conditions.) Point is, his is a choice we’re making. Some different choices we could make while still having an industrialized society and a mass education system:

Have decent amounts of parental leave (for dads too) like most industrialized countries. So at least daycare wouldn’t have to start as young.

Also substantial vacation time, as vacation time can be important for parent-child bonding and creating positive memories and just general enrichment.

Normalize part time work, normalize having part time work with full benefits, replace the forty hour week with a shorter length of time. The forty hour week was seen as a reasonable length when it was normal to have one parent work and one stay home; now that it’s normal to have almost all adults working, and with dramatically increased efficiency due to automation, the default week should be much shorter.

Normalize work with flexible hours.

Raise minimum wage. By a lot. (This goes hand and hand with shortening the work week: as long as fewer hours = less pay, a lot of people are going to figure they can’t afford to work fewer hours.)

Reduce stigma against stay at home parents of all genders.

Universal health care (to make it easier to work part time jobs or to be an entrepreneur, and to make it easier to take time off from working entirely.)

Have better social services in general, and possibly a Universal Basic Income. (One way to deal with the lifetime earning hit of staying home with a young child for a couple years is to tell women to not do it (and assume men already know not to); another way is to make it less painful to be poor.)

Pay for this by taxing the rich at New Deal rates and reducing the military budget. This would be a good idea even if we did nothing with the money.

Have more adults in classrooms -- which might or might not mean more teachers. Have adults who are there for the kids’ emotional needs and not just their academic needs. Separate out the teacher role from the “classroom cop” role or ideally change school’s approach to discipline/classroom management entirely (we’d have far more teachers entering and staying in the profession if teaching didn’t require enforcing discipline; at minimum we could have public tutors who work one-on-one and in small groups with struggling (or gifted) kids be a common supplement to the primary classroom teacher, as an option for teachers who don’t want to eg supervise detentions) and allow opportunities for kids who just aren’t up for participating in class on a given day to not be in class without having to go home either. (That would probably dramatically improve behavior problems right there.) Have enough counselors that seeing your counselor isn’t a once a year experience for most kids. Sometimes these extra adults should be selected based on who the community thinks is qualified and who is from the same racial/cultural background as the students, not necessarily on education credentials, since there’s massive racial and class elements to who gets educated. And pay should not be based solely on education credentials either. Have enough adults that they can respond not only to kids who are causing problems but also look out for the wellbeing of the quiet well-behaved kids too.

Encourage ways for unrelated adults and children (and children of different ages) to interact outside of daycare/school, including structured Big Brother/Big Sister type things and less structured activities.

Many nuclear families don’t live anywhere near their extended family; I’m not sure what to do about that, but it’s not ideal for children. Close relationships with grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins can be very good for children’s health and development.

Pass laws restricting unpredictable shift work, which is known to be bad for worker’s health and is undoubtably terrible for parent-child bonding as well.

Fully support kids with special needs (in the sense of, kids who really do need one-on-one adult presence at all times, or perhaps more accurately situations where other people need the child to have one-on-one attention for them to be comfortable) including outside of school. Comprehensive age-appropriate education from pre-K through college about all disabilities, including developmental disabilities and mental illness, with a focus on how non-disabled kids/adults can treat disabled people respectfully.

I feel like there should be something here about how schools tend to suspend and expel black students at higher rates, but I don’t really know what to say about it.

Encourage kids to want to grow up to be well rounded human beings who are compassionate, responsible, and ethical, over being “successful” (ie having a high-status well-paying job.) Reduce the stigma of working lower status jobs for adults, and reduce the prestige of working higher status jobs. This starts with asking kids questions other than what do they want to be when they grow up, and asking adults questions other than “what do you do?” 

Kids need close personal relationships with adults, and there is a limit to how close a classroom teacher can get to a class of 15 kindergardeners or multiple classes of 30 highschoolers. But, if we had a reasonable adult:child ratio -- a ratio closer to what people would experience without institutions -- and some of the adults were their primarily to build those relationships? Kids could form meaningful bonds at school as well as at home.

But also, parents should have more time available to spend with their children. And other adults as well. “It takes a village to raise a child” and all that.

*When a group of schoolkids is on a field trip, they for the most part look at you while you’re speaking, raise their hands when they have a question, etc. Homeschool groups don’t. It’s not really that raising one’s hand is necessary behavior, but if it’s behavior that you’re expecting and you don’t get it, that creates problems. Socialization is also: learning to be punctual, learning to hold your pee, learning to accept authority, learning to tune out your personal desires when they’re incompatible with the environment you’re in, learning gender roles and classism and so on, learning to evaluate whether you got the right answer or not based on what your teacher says, learning to see sparkly stickers as a reasonable substitute for personal attention, learning to keep your feelings to yourself, etc. It’s not that socialization is bad; socialization is adapting yourself to the world that you live in. Socialization is also washing your hands after using the bathroom and complimenting people on their haircuts and (right now) wearing a fucking mask.

[bored-fan-bs-thoughts]

Tyrus Fic: Fake Dating

I know this has been done a thousand times, but I had this written and I didn’t want it to go to waste. T.J. and Cyrus “dating” to convince Cyrus’s Aunt Ruthie that he has a boyfriend. Enjoy!

Cyrus asks Aunt Ruthie if he can bring his friend Buffy to their annual family party, but she’s more interested in whether or not she’s his girlfriend. Cyrus sighs. Sometimes he wishes he could just have a giant sign across him that says ‘I’m gay,’ but he knows social stigmas would make that not very safe for someone with his considerable lack of physical strength.

“Why can’t you get a girlfriend already?” Aunt Ruthie asks.

Cyrus doesn’t know what compels him to respond in the way he does, but he’s just tired of hiding. He doesn’t question if she’ll respond negatively. He just says, “Maybe because I’m gay.” He immediately regrets saying it. His Aunt’s face morphs into a look of confusion…and Cyrus almost thinks there’s a little bit of disgust. Cyrus is mistaken though 

“Okay,” she says, “Why don’t you have a boyfriend?”

“I do, actually,” Cyrus lies.

“Oh, really?” she says, cocking an eyebrow. “What’s his name?”

“Uh, T.J.” Cyrus immediately regrets that answer. He knows it’s not smart. He knows T.J.’s not homophobic, but he assumes the guy is uncomfortable with acting gay, especially around Cyrus’s entire family. He’s bracing himself for the next statement he knows is sure to come out of his Aunt’s mouth.

“Are you bringing him to the family picnic next week?”

“I don’t know,” Cyrus says, “I haven’t asked him yet.” Meaning, I haven’t even asked him to be my boyfriend yet and he’s probably straight, like statistically speaking. She doesn’t need to know that part, though.

------------

A couple days later, Cyrus finds himself hanging out with T.J. in his own room. He needs to tell T.J. for him to pretend to be in a relationship with him for a day, but he can’t quite get the words out. His friendship with T.J. has seemed so effortless in the past couple weeks. He doesn’t need his weird request to make everything different between them. He decides that it’s now or never. He’s beginning to realize that this conversation is not really going to arise naturally out of their study hang-out, so he just decides to bring it up out of the blue.

“So I may have told my Aunt that I have a boyfriend,” Cyrus says interrupting T.J. from his math homework.

“Okay?” he responds, “You don’t, right?”

“Correct,” Cyrus responds. T.J. nods his head as if to tell him to go on with his explanation. “I just got annoyed with her constant questioning of when I was going to get a girlfriend and it just slipped out.”

“Well, I don’t really know what to say,” T.J. says.

“The thing is, she thinks his name is T.J. and wants to meet him,” Cyrus says cautiously. T.J. doesn’t know how to respond. “Sorry, you were the first boy that popped into my head!”

“I’m the first boy you think of when you think of a boyfriend?” T.J. says. He has a typical confident grin plastered on his face. Of course he’s using this as an opportunity to boost his own ego.

Cyrus freezes, and a blush makes its way onto his cheeks. He stutters to make a coherent excuse even though the truth is exactly what T.J. is hinting at.

“It was a joke,” T.J. assures him. “So do you need me to pretend to be your boyfriend or something?”

“Yeah. There’s a big family party next weekend. It’s totally cool if you don’t want to—“

“Cyrus, I’ll do it,” he says, cutting Cyrus off. Cyrus just smiles. “Do I just have to hold your hand and give you cheek kisses or something?”

“Oh, yeah,” Cyrus responds, a bit too quickly for his liking. “That’s good.” T.J. nods. “I mean it’s like neutral. I guess.”

“Don’t get too excited,” T.J. mumbles. It’s clearly meant to be a joke, but Cyrus can’t help but notice that T.J. looks genuinely hurt.

“No. I mean, at least I’ll have someone to hang out with,” Cyrus reasons. “We need a story, though. Like how we started dating, how long it’s been, et cetera.”

T.J. pulls an extra sheet of notebook paper out of his spiral and grabs his pencil. “Let’s get to work.”

“You have homework,” Cyrus says, gesturing to the textbook sitting between them.

“This is much better than homework,” T.J. says with a teasing grin.

Great, Cyrus thinks, I’ve opened myself up to a whole new world of teasing.

“What should I wear?” T.J. asks first, breaking him out of his thoughts.

“Well, it’s a picnic, but it’s sort of a fancy picnic,” Cyrus says. “Although, people usually dress pretty casually. No hoodies.”

“Hey,” T.J. says in mock offense, “I thought you liked my all hoodie wardrobe.”

“I do,” Cyrus says, “But it’s not the greatest way to make a good impression on my extended family. They can be somewhat traditional.”

T.J. laughs in understanding.

—————

Cyrus was on FaceTime with Andi and Buffy the entire morning leading up to the party. He knows it’s not real, but he’s afraid his true desires will be revealed tonight. He spent forever picking out the right shirt and styling his hair. His friends yelled at him to calm down many times, but it did nothing to ease his nerves. 

When T.J. arrives at his house with flowers, Cyrus knows he’s in a for a wild ride. There is a cheesy, seemingly lovesick look in his eyes as he leans forward to give him a kiss on his cheek.

“Hi, babe,” T.J. whispers to him. It crosses Cyrus’s mind that he really doesn’t have to do that when it’s just them and his parents can’t hear him, but he is not about to complain. Before he can respond, Cyrus hears steps from behind him signaling the arrival of his parents.

“Dad and Sharon,” Cyrus says, “You both know T.J.”

“It’s nice to see you again,” his dad says, extending his hand to shake T.J.’s. “You’re dating my son?”

T.J. nods as he grasps Cyrus’s hand. “Yeah, it’s been about three months.”

His parents nod. Smiles are plastered on their faces, but he can tell there’s something more quizzical. It’s as if they’re assessing whether or not to actually trust the tale they’ve created.

Nevertheless, They both nod and invite T.J. in, explaining that they’ll be leaving in about twenty minutes. T.J. hands Sharon the flowers which certainly seem to win her over a little bit. Cyrus makes a mental note to thank him for that later.

—————

T.J. seems surprisingly at ease with their dating scheme. He is amazing at being polite (when he wants to), and he keeps the PDA to a level that is believable but not overwhelming. Cyrus finds himself just going along with what T.J. does because he’s too nervous to initiate anything himself. Cyrus can’t lie. He very much likes “having a boyfriend,” especially when that boyfriend is T.J.

They are about an hour into socializing when they’re approached by his Aunt Ruthie. Cyrus instinctively grabs onto T.J.’s hand in a slight panic. Aunt Ruthie isn’t scary per se, but she often makes snap judgements about people and she holds onto grudges for far longer than anyone ever should. She looks T.J. up and down with a critical eye.

“Aunt Ruthie, this is my boyfriend, T.J.,” Cyrus says nervously.

T.J. gives his hand a reassuring squeeze before smiling and greeting his Aunt.

“He doesn’t look Jewish,” is the first thing that comes out of her mouth.

Cyrus freezes and attempts to speak, but he stumbles over his words.

“My family’s not really religious,” T.J. explains, “But I would be willing to convert for Cyrus.”

Cyrus’s heart flutters for a second before he reminds himself that this is not real. It’s all for the sake of their scheme. And T.J.’s statement seems to have served its purpose because his Aunt smiles and lets out a small laugh.

The rest of the party is easeful. Cyrus grows more comfortable with the casual touches between them and even begins to initiate his own. Getting the approval of his Aunt was truly an accomplishment, and Cyrus knows the comfortable swag of his best friend is enough to win anyone over when he’s not terrorizing people.

—————

When the party is dying down, T.J. and Cyrus find a quiet spot to get away from the crowd. They sit on a bench in a part of the backyard that isn’t infested with flies. When they sit down, T.J. rests his arm across the bench behind him. Cyrus doesn’t think it’s necessary when there’s no one around, but he is definitely not going to complain.

“You are a fantastic fake boyfriend,” Cyrus says. “You even won over Aunt Ruthie! She doesn’t like anyone.”

“What can I say?” T.J. says with a smug smile. “No one can resist my undeniable charm.”

Cyrus smiles, but he definitely agrees with the boy’s statement. A thick silence passes over them. T.J. shifts in his seat. He removes his hand from behind Cyrus, who tries not to be too disappointed by that, and begins to fumble with his hands.

“Cy,” T.J. says. His voice is soft and unsure. He can’t seem to look up from his hands in his lap. “Today was a really nice day.”

“I thought so, too,” Cyrus says with a smile. His heart flutters from T.J.’s vulnerability. T.J. removes his hand from behind Cyrus and places it in his lap. Cyrus notices a shift in his mood. He seems nervous. Unsettled. Cyrus is about to ask if he’s okay before T.J. speaks.

“Am I crazy to, maybe, want to do it for real?” T.J. whispers. Cyrus’s heart nearly stops. He looks over at T.J. who’s eyes are focused only on his hands. He smiles, frozen with surprise.

“No,” he says, “Because then we’d both be crazy.”

T.J.’s eyes slowly meet Cyrus’s to search for any sign of deception. When he finds sincerity, T.J.’s face breaks into a wide, bashful smile. His eyes full of love and joy.

“Can I kiss you?” T.J. asks.

Cyrus answers with a nod before leaning forward to connect his lips with T.J.’s. It’s a short kiss, but it’s already a hundred times better than the two he shared with Iris. His eyes meet T.J.’s, who looks like his whole life was made. Cyrus finds it intoxicating that he can have this effect on others, especially on T.J. His cheeks heat up and he ducks his head to burrow it into T.J.’s chest. He feels T.J.’s arm wrap around him.

“We have to leave soon,” Cyrus says, his voice muffled by T.J.’s shirt.

“I don’t want this night to end,” T.J. says, tightening his grip on Cyrus.

“Don’t worry, there’ll be plenty more nights like this,” Cyrus promises.

The smile that overtakes T.J.’s face is the most brilliant sight that Cyrus has ever seen, and Cyrus can’t believe he gets to kiss that face now.

[forkanna]

[AO3] [WATTPAD] [QUOTEV]

NOTE: I try not to get too serious in my notes, but I wanted to take this brief moment to say I hope everyone will give their time and efforts to a few petitions for racial justice in the USA. Donate if you have money, and attend peaceful protests if you have the time and access and are able. We all deserve peace and prosperity, not poverty and inequality. Thank you. Now on with our regularly scheduled smut.

CHAPTER FOUR

Breakfast at the Amagi Inn was a rare treat Chie had not enjoyed in a long time. They had stayed over at each other's houses when they were little quite often, but that had become a bit more rare the past few years. It just wasn't "adult" to have sleepovers. That seemed like a shame, because it was a wonderful way to ensure that you got more than a few passing hours with a friend, but social stigmas are more powerful than anyone wants to give them credit for.

Luckily, the group had gone into the TV to save Yukiko on a Saturday night, so they had all of Sunday to rest and recuperate. The two of them idly walked around the halls in their slippers, smiling and casting sheepishly delighted glances at each other. Conversations remained on light topics like the weather and upcoming exams, the inn, and Chie's dog, Muku. They knew they were in public so that was the best they could do.

They eventually returned to Yukiko's room for a nap. Mrs. Amagi was aware that she had been kidnapped, even if she withheld the truth of the details, so they were allowed to relax and recover. However…

"I can't sleep."

Chie rolled over to face her girlfriend. They had never bothered to get a second futon, so they were snug as two peas in a pod again. "Me, either. But I am tired and don't wanna get up and do anything yet."

"Yeah." Glancing over at her, Yukiko fiddled with her hands under the blanket; Chie could see the bump moving around. "Um… can we…"

"Can we what?" Chie asked.

"K-kiss."

"Oh." Her cheeks were already heating up, but she cleared her throat to give herself an excuse for it. "Y-you want to? Like, for real, not just because we're losing it and can't figure out how to deal with our emotions?"

"Yes, for real," she chuckled softly. "But it's alright, you don't have to if it's too strange."

"Wait! I didn't mean I… wh-what I'm saying is, I do. I want to."

Yukiko's small smile vanished amid her surprise. "Oh. Really? Wow… I'm… that still surprises me. But I'm happy."

"Yeah?" As if to suddenly prove she meant it, she leaned down and pecked her on the cheek. "Well, that one's just for starters."

"Oh, is it?" Another got her sighing and closing her eyes. "Chie…"

That opened the floodgates for a lot more. Though she never would have thought herself capable of such displays of romance, even with a boy much less another girl, Chie found she couldn't seem to stop now that they had pushed through all their reservations — including those thrust upon them by a homogenous, somewhat-conservative Japanese society. Fuck what anyone else thought; they needed to take care of themselves. Be true to their inner feelings.

Which, apparently… were a lot stronger than either of them realised. The next thing she knew, Yukiko was on top of her body, and Chie was clutching at her back as their tongues began to hesitantly search each other out, little half-heard hums accompanying the actions. This was crazy! Wasn't somebody going to stop them? Where was Yosuke with a lewd comment to shame them out of continuing? Where was Yu with a firehose?!

"O-oh," Yukiko groaned when they parted, leaning her forehead against the side of Chie's once she had turned aside to catch her own breath. "That was…"

"Amazing! I've never… God, I'm in shock!"

"That too! But I was going to say 'that was your tongue, wasn't it?'"

Somehow flushing even darker than she had been seconds before, Chie cleared her throat so she could say in a voice that was still hoarse, "I… um… sorry about that! Man, I just got so into this, I don't even know what I was-"

"I didn't say I disliked it," she whispered, kissing Chie's neck and making her shiver all over. "You did surprise me, but I liked it. A lot."

"Oh. Well, uh… that's great! Right?"

"Yeah."

"Can… I do it again?"

"Yeah. Please."

The next several minutes of kisses were a blur as they rolled over again, Chie pushing her down into the futon. She knew she was turned on; had been since the moment their lips met, and the heat only blazed stronger in the time since. What about Yukiko? They really did seem to be in sync so she had a feeling the answer would be "yes", but she still felt such overwhelming disbelief that they were doing any of this in the first place that making assumptions seemed like a one-way ticket to disaster.

"Chie, I…"

"Yes?" she gasped as she drew back from her neck, having left a red spot on her pale skin.

"I feel… like I want to… find out what it's like." When her friend's hazel eyes moved into position to look into hers, Yukiko's darker ones averted. "To f-feel what my shadow felt yours doing to her."

The bottom dropped out of her stomach. "Oh shit. I m-mean, you want me to… with my hand?"

"Is it disgusting? I thought I was a good girl, but I'm asking for something like-"

"No way! Hey, you are good — you're so good, okay?" Her hand drifted up to pet along the side of Yukiko's head, and she leaned into the touch as if starving for it. "I'm just… surprised! Like, I never thought we'd both… y'know?"

Her cheeks were still rosy, but at least she could smile now. "I know. Goodness, this is all so new, a-and I keep expecting you to react how I would have reacted to the same thing. Before… yesterday."

"Yeah. Me, too, even though I… th-the porn."

"You still have to show me some of it," she chuckled while petting down to Chie's ass. When its owner froze in place, she asked, "Is this too much?"

"NO! I m-mean, um, no, it's fine. Just new." She flexed the muscles under Yukiko's fingertips and earned a little gasp from her.

"It's so strong!"

Laughing, she whispered, "I work out."

"Well… y-yes, I know. And you train all the time." Another flex, and she wound up humming her obvious interest. "I think… I like that. Do it again." She did. "Ah!"

"Feels really good," Chie admitted, biting her lip as she shifted her hips under the touch. When the fingers moved down and then back up again, underneath the fabric this time, she shivered and closed her eyes. "Yuki-chan…"

For a few seconds, nothing was said. The words wouldn't have been good enough, anyway; they knew what they wanted to say but not how to say it. And the sentiment would have been redundant in a lot of areas. Gooseflesh sprang into being as she felt those delicate fingertips ghosting over the cheek, down to her thigh and back up again. Another few strokes, and they began to move around to her hip.

"I thought you wanted me to go first," Chie laughed breathily, both excited and terrified of Yukiko going further.

"I did. But then you acted so…" She shrugged her shoulder, unable to come up with an end to that thought. "Do you want me to stop?"

"N-nah. Crazy as it is… I really do want you to keep going. I-if you want."

Instead of responding with words, Yukiko moved her fingers further around, sliding through Chie's thatch of fur. Even just that prompted a gasp and a groan of need from her that she felt so beyond embarrassed at hearing that come from her own throat. She hadn't even been touched yet! This was just foreplay!

This was foreplay. All at once, the thought smacked her full force: she was about to lose her virginity. To a woman! Her best friend!

"O-okay," Yukiko warned her in a soft, anxious tone. Apparently, she was thinking along the same lines. "This is it, I'm… I'm going further if you're ready."

"Yes." Licking her lips, Chie widened her stance, and even though her pulse was thundering in her ears and her stomach was tied in knots, she smiled down at her friend and whispered, "I want it. Want you to be the one, I… can't imagine it being anybody else."

Nodding firmly, as if steeling her determination before riding into battle, Yukiko allowed her fingers to press a little further down…

And pleasure exploded within Chie. It was so blinding that for a few seconds, she couldn't fully connect it to the point of contact. Where was she, and what had she been doing up until now? As the moment slowly filtered back to her, she saw a concerned Yukiko gazing up at her, as if desperately hoping she wasn't making a huge mistake, wasn't hurting her best friend by trying something she had absolutely no experience with.

"Yuki-chan… mhhh…"

That seemed to reassure her somewhat. With a whispered "Chie", she started in a little more firmly, moving the fingers instead of just pressing them against damp flesh as she had been. Her first instinct was to pull away hard, but she fought that off and listened to the second one — which begged for more of this, to push her hips down into the waiting fingers as she gasped out in sheer ecstasy.

"Am I doing this right?" Yukiko asked a minute or two later, still teasing up and down.

"How should I know?! It feels pretty… oh GOD, nnhh! Yes!"

"Chie!" she gasped in mingling alarm and shock. "Th-that sounds so obscene!"

"What we're doing is obscene, so I th-think it's… it's fine!" Her lips pushed down against Yukiko's cheek as she rolled her hips into the contact over and over. "Oh shit… this was what I've been missing out on?"

The young innkeeper-in-training was flushed scarlet, and could barely whisper, "It's good? Really? You like it when I do this? Because… I like doing it for you."

"You do?!"

"Yes! If I can make you feel good, then there's nothing else I would rather be doing." Her fingers became even bolder, firmer, making sure to caress every last inch of Chie's aching need. "And the way you sound…"

A little worried, she asked, "God, is it weird? Do I sound stupid?"

"No. You sound really… hot."

"What?!" Taken aback, she covered her mouth with her hand for a moment, even as the rest of her body was concentrating on riding that beautifully punishing hand.

"Don't cover that up; I love hearing you." Chie lowered the hand, beginning to moan. Yukiko's smile was fragile but wide. "Wow… I can't believe I can help you feel like this…"

After that, Chie lost track of time again. Yukiko's hand only seemed to grow more and more sure of itself, to find new ways to pleasure her as she practiced. And she became aware of something else: the heat was beginning to build. Somehow, she had expected to simply enjoy this level until the activity stopped, but it was growing hotter and hotter with each passing second. And she knew eventually, if they didn't stop, according to everything she had heard…

"Yuki! I… nnhh, I'm gonna… oh my GOD!"

"You're gonna what?" Clearly afraid, her eyes jerked up to her friend's. "What's wrong?"

Laughing weakly, she slammed her hips down with more and more force to compensate for Yukiko's hand stilling as she told her, "Nothing! Mmhh… just d-don't stop! No matter what! Okay?!"

"O-okay!" she breathed, nodding fervently as if this was some kind of official battle command. And she seemed to take her actions just as seriously; the fingers pushed in almost too hard, but it only seemed to wring more pleasure from her already-tortured flesh.

And then Chie came. Which is to say, she knew that this blinding surge of pleasure that almost knocked her off her hands and knees had to be what she saw happen at the end of that video; it couldn't be anything else. Her entire frame shook hard from the sheer force of it, and she distantly felt tears stinging the corners of her eyes. It was an overwhelming religious experience for which she was ill-prepared.

Once she was desperately sucking in breath after breath, head braced against Yukiko's shoulder, the fingers stilled and simply held against her aching warmth. "I… know you said to keep going, n-no matter what, but… it felt like… sh-should I do more?"

"Nhhh… I…" Her throat was so dry now. Was that normal? After a few more tries, she coughed, swallowed, and managed to rasp, "Just… stay… here…"

Yukiko nodded and held her position. The other hand came up and hesitantly started to caress her best friend's back, and when she only got a hum of contentment in response the petting became more firm and certain, soothing up to her hair and then back down. They remained that way until Chie recovered enough to say more.

"Whoa. That was incredible!"

Yukiko's bashful smile was something she could hear rather than see at the moment. "Y-yeah? It was? Then I'm glad I could help you."

"You… mmm, it still feels good…" She shifted her hips against the hand, then sighed. "Don't, um, don't start going again, but like, just hold still? I wanna try something."

"Okay…" And she did as Chie ground against the fingers. "You're so wet… i-is this normal? And I've never touched one of these really, except when I'm washing, but it's… kind of nice. Soft and slick, and… they move more than… I expected…"

Chie shivered when she felt her lower lips being pushed from side to side. "O-ohhhhh, yeah… that's- Yukiko, you really never did this before? You swear?"

"I swear. Not even on myself."

"Wow…" She let out a shaky laugh as she shifted her hips in the opposite direction the fingers moved, to add more sensation. "We could have been doing this for years… can you imagine? Three or four years ago, just going crazy on each other?"

That seemed to alarm her friend. "But we were only children! They don't do these things!"

"Maybe not… at least a year ago, then. That would have been awesome!" Then she drew back, peering down into Yukiko's eyes. "Okay, your turn!"

"Huh?! Oh, but… I thought you were doing more, that you were still enjoying-"

"I am, yeah. But I wanna make you feel this good now; we can worry about taking care of me again some other time." Expression beyond eager, she grinned down at her and waited for her answer.

"Well, I…" She gulped hard and looked away. "I might not feel as good as… you did to me, I'm not… I don't know. But if you're sure you want to try…"

Chie wasted no time in nodding, then kissing her friend delicately on the lips. It didn't last long but was sweet enough that they both sighed afterward. "Yes. I totally want to. Even if you feel like a slimy slug down there-"

"HEY!"

"-I would still want to touch. Because it's Yukiko, y'know?"

Still pursing her lips at the slug comparison, she rolled her eyes before smiling reluctantly. "Well… I suppose that is almost sweet. But I don't know what you want me to… am I supposed to roll over on top of you? Or just stay down here?"

"Stay there. I think that will be easier on you, like, if you don't have to worry about holding yourself up like I just did."

"Oh, I'm sorry! I wasn't thinking about that when we got started — that must have been so difficult!" But then Chie was backing up, kneeling over Yukiko's thighs — and displaying a slight dark spot in the crotch of her own boy shorts. "Oh… oh, it's time, isn't it?"

"Yeah. If you want it to be. But if you don't-"

However, Yukiko was already shaking her head. "No, no, I do. I'm really scared, and nervous, and… I'm not sure if I'm ready. But I know I'm ready for it to be you."

Her best friend smiled softly as she leaned down to kiss her hip. "No wonder your shadow wanted to find her Prince Charming so bad. You're such a romantic. Like, how has nobody swept you off your feet before?"

"Maybe I was waiting for the right Prince. And now I have her." Then she whispered, "Was that romantic, too?"

"Definitely. And you're stalling."

"Maybe I…"

But the lips were moving to push into the center of the soft cotton panties a second later, cutting off further maybes. Red; they suited Yukiko perfectly. As did the vaguely sweet scent rolling outward from where Chie had kissed. She wanted so much more… and said scent seemed to at least suggest Yukiko wanted it, too. Even without her words.

"I was right. Red looks great on you."

The only response was a whimper, which got louder when Chie kissed again. She should have known; Yukiko was rather shy under most circumstances. Why should this one be any different — especially when it was much more anxiety-inducing? The junior hostess didn't even have the luxury of already having enjoyed an orgasm before opening herself up to letting someone else assist.

Every kiss made her writhe. Chie couldn't help kissing more in response, breathing in the intoxicating aroma. It didn't take her long to edge the pretty fabric aside and start kissing her directly — the little gasp of shock sending fresh need down between her own thighs. She had thought it might be disgusting, kissing another woman there… but it wasn't much different from normal kissing. Wetter, slicker… and the scent, of course. But not much different otherwise.

"Chie!" she finally panted as the hips began to roll up and against her mouth a little more. Seeking out the pleasure instead of merely letting it assail her. "Yes! Mmmhh… m-my prince…"

Oh. She was really going to call her that now? It definitely didn't do anything to reduce her own reviving urges. At least those made it easier to keep going, to push her tongue in harder with every pass up from the bottom of her perfectly-formed petals to the pink hood above them. Her hand drifted up to caress along them as she took a break to breathe. How they shifted so easily…

"You're beautiful."

"N-no, don't," she begged as she gasped for breath. "Don't look s-so much…"

"Why not? You're really hot."

"But it's dirty… I'm dirty, you shouldn't… shouldn't l-look!"

That embarrassment should have made her concerned for her friend. However… they both knew their feelings. Understood them very clearly after their shadows made delusions impossible to entertain. Now she knew Yukiko was just worried she would offend her with her body, not that she actually wanted her to look away; reassurance was in order, not surrender.

"I gotta look," she countered, kissing the petals again. "You're so pretty, so sweet… down here. So wet for me, huh?"

"Nhh! Don't!" Her thighs twitched as if to close, but stayed open in the end. "I didn't m-mean to be wet!"

Sliding her tongue over the folds, listening to the squeal of joy, Chie paused to lick her lips afterward before she responded. "I know. You can't help it; just like I can't help kissing you when I'm this close. It's okay that you're dripping for me to touch you."

This time, her best friend didn't respond right away. A quick glance upward showed a ruddy face full of lust, with just the tiniest hint of uncertainty. She knew why; she had become bolder. In the pit of her stomach, she was still terrified of making her upset, but being able to tell that she was turning Yukiko on made it possible for her to ignore that fear. To be the confident prince that made her princess a complete mess who needed her touch.

She had learned so much from her shadow. Even if she was an asshole.

"Yuki," she groaned before going back to work on her throbbing clit, tongue sliding around it over and over. Harder, faster — more with her fingers below. She didn't quite penetrate her, because they hadn't talked about that yet, but everything else seemed to be fair game. Her own hips were twitching in the air by now, as if hoping someone would slide in from behind and fulfil her desires a second time while she worked on her best friend.

Girlfriend?

"Chie! I… I think something is…"

"Hmmhh?"

"I think it's my turn! Y-you're going to make me… finish!"

"Is that what you want?" she asked as she finally pulled off, fingers doing all of the work now. "You want me to make you come?"

"Y-yes! Please?"

Chie had been about to do it. To just keep going, listen to this beautiful woman cry out in ecstasy. But hearing 'please' gave her pause. For a second, she couldn't figure out why… but then realised what she wanted. Purely because of what Other-Chie had done, she had a feeling she knew how to make this even better. For both of them.

"Please what?"

"Huh?"

"Say it. I want to hear you say what it is you want."

Eyes wide as dinner plates, Yukiko covered her face with her hands for a moment. Ashamed, trying to shield that feeling from view. "I… I want you to do it!"

"Do what?"

"Chie! Wh-what are you asking me? I want… you to finish me?" That much earned her a pussy-kiss, at least. "A-ah! Will you finish me?"

"Mmm, beg your prince for it," she purred, still kissing at least. But not quite going back to work.

"Beg?! Do you… a-am I not…" Swallowing, she looked away. "Do you… like hearing me beg?"

"It's what I want. To hear how bad you need me." Then she cleared her throat and hastily corrected, "It. How bad you need it."

Too late. Her slip-up made Yukiko smile briefly, eyes watery and chest heaving as her hips began to squirm, desperate to have something between them again. But when she spoke, she was all moans and desperation, just as her sporty girlfriend wanted. "Chie! My Prince, I need you to- nnhhh! -to touch me! I- I'm begging to feel your mouth on me, for you to make me… climax! Will you please?"

The "holy shit" slipped out before she could catch herself. She just hadn't been expecting Yukiko to be so good at it on the first try! Then she kissed her a little harder on the clit, hoping to sweep that under the rug.

It worked like a charm. Instead of teasing her, Yukiko fell deep into the throes of moaning and back arches, hands and feet clenching at the tatami in an attempt to anchor herself. She came with so much force she almost seemed to float above the floor, head thrown all the way back as she screamed Chie's name.

What Chie wasn't prepared for was the slight push of warm fluid against her mouth. She let out an "MM!" but managed to keep from jerking away or other overreactions. It was too thick, and almost made her sick, but she also knew this was the precious proof that her best friend had orgasmed; she couldn't let it go to waste in good conscience. Therefore, she didn't.

"Ohhhh," Yukiko was groaning while Chie still swallowed. "Oh, wow… you… you felt so amazing!"

"Mmmmhh…"

"Can you come up here? I… oh, now I feel empty… is that strange?"

Her prince obeyed. After only a few seconds to breathe, she climbed up along the futon until they were flopped down on their sides, facing each other and feeling their legs overlapping below. It was the closest to another human being Chie had ever felt in her life.

"Wow."

"Y-yeah. Yuki-chan… I, uh…"

Her contented smile didn't vanish, but there was a slight crease between her brow. "What is it?"

"Sorry. About, um… I kinda talked to you funny. At the end there. It seemed like you were into it, but like, I also felt weird telling you to tell me something, or… whatever…"

"Oh, that." She bit her lip for a moment, smiling shyly. "It was really hot."

"HUH?!"

"Shhh! D-don't make me say it again!"

Leaning up on her elbow slightly, she stared down at the embarrassed innkeeper. "You liked that? Really?! But I was acting like you were my… I dunno! Shadow-Yuki instead of Real-Yuki!"

"I can't explain it," she breathed, not meeting Chie's eyes. "It felt… right. The way you did it, anyway. And the way you said it was so you could know how much I need you… well, you already said your shadow was trying to convince you that I needed you to be confident, and you needed me to feel like you had purpose."

"R-right," Chie managed nervously. "Which was all bullshit." But her friend shook her head. "It wasn't?"

"We have to accept our inner selves, remember? I… might not be as bad as Other-Me, but I do crave that attention from you. That protection, a-and… I think…" A quick swallow, and her voice grew quieter, "When you confront the bullies and boys who won't take 'no' for an answer, say things like 'I'm gonna leave footprints all over your face', it gives me goosebumps!"

That made her chuckle, relaxing very slightly. "Why? You want it to be your face instead?"

"Um… no?"

But that didn't sound certain at all. She had only been joking around! Chie blinked a couple of times before asking, "Do you… want me to beat you up?"

"No, no, don't be silly. But… you standing over me… on me, telling me that I'm all yours… sort of like Other-Chie did…"

"Oh. Wow, I- th-that doesn't sound like it's okay…" On the other hand, the look Yukiko was giving her made her want to try. To satisfy both their curiosity. And it looked like her raven-haired companion wasn't quite through.

"Please, Chie-sama?" she begged, brows lifting as she pleaded. "Step on me?"

                                              To Be Continued…

[graduationemmasep]

'I like the way MDMA gives you a deep sense of connection to your friends'

I'm no fiend. Most nights I'd rather share a bottle of wine with some friends than stay up till 6am getting sweaty and boggle-eyed on a bender. But while I associate alcohol with talking about past experiences, I associate drugs with making new ones. Party drugs can often make a stranger feel like a confidant; a simple trip to a town centre feel like an Enid Blyton escapade.

I probably take class-A party drugs such as MDMA or cocaine once a fortnight, and have done since I was 16 (I'm 27 now). I like the way cocaine gives you a new lease of life, like a mushroom in Super Mario, to carry on with a night out. I like the way MDMA softens the edges of reality and gives you a deep sense of connection to your friends that you can never get when you meet them for dinner and they moan about their jobs. I like how when you're coming down from a pill another person's touch has a comforting, almost electric capacity. If you're suffering from exhaustion, anxiety or stress, recreational drugs can give you a bit of a leg-up.

Drugs can also be a total pain. Ecstasy can make you feel like you're floating in a cloud, but just as often it's an admin nightmare: you come up at different times from your friends; only half the people in a group remembered to get sorted and there's endless hassle at a party trying to get more. Even when you're having a great time, there's a self-doubting internal monologue running through the whole process: Have I done enough? Am I coming up? Do I look like a prick?

I would just like to have that conversation about drugs being sometimes brilliant and occasionally annoying. Yet I feel like there is no one who is willing to talk about drugs in those terms.

When children ask their parents where babies come from, they get a white lie – a stork delivers them, you find them in a cabbage patch, you order them from Ocado. That's the closest thing I can think of to explain the difference between the perception and the reality of drug use by young people in the UK. There is a societal stork myth that is propagated by the media and popular culture to hide a basic reality. Even users themselves are entirely unwilling to talk about drug-taking honestly. Everything in the drugs world tries to stifle this conversation. Take nightclubs. It doesn't take a genius to work out that staying up till 6am listening to dance music at an ear-splitting volume would not only be unenjoyable without some kind of mind-altering stimulant, but a painful test of endurance. Most people in big nightclubs are on drugs. The clubs know that: that's why they charge so much for entry and, often, for bottles of water. They know that not many people will be buying drinks. Most of them have in-house dealers too, so they can sort out their DJs. Bigger DJs put requests for drugs on their rider. "We just put it on expenses as 'fruit and flowers'," a promoter at a major nightclub told me this year. But there's still a stork charade, with the venue covered in posters promising to eject drug users and bouncers searching punters – but not too thoroughly. The pretence is that this could all be above board.

I suppose the reason for this false picture of drug-taking is that most people don't take drugs. The statistics show that only a small fraction of the UK population are regular drugs users, and a smaller fraction still do anything harder than weed. But drug use is not spread evenly across the country, nor across age groups. In my demographic – under 30, living in London, job in the creative industries, disposable income – almost everyone is a recreational drugs user.

Where I grew up in south London, it was pretty uncommon to find someone who didn't at least smoke weed. The children of more middle-class parents were taking cocaine, ecstasy, ketamine and mephedrone almost every weekend. These were not reprobates ruining their lives: they were intelligent, bright people who got three As at A-level and went to good universities.

We would go to raves in places such as Camberwell and Hackney Wick, to warehouse venues where almost no one was over 18. White powders flowed as freely as the Fanta Fruit Twist and Malibu we were drinking. Festivals played a big part, too. Parents, even quite strict ones who wouldn't dream of letting their kids out past midnight, were happy to send their kids to music festivals, perhaps because of the reverent music-focused coverage in the media.

If you go to somewhere like Reading or Benicàssim, almost everyone is under 20. Half of them barely leave the campsite. Festivals are drugs playgrounds where teenagers experiment with copious amounts of uppers in presumably quite dangerous combinations. Some of the best moments of my life took place going to festivals as a teenager. I remember one muddy year at Glastonbury, racing down the hill arm-in-arm with a bunch of people, all off our faces on MDMA, feeling happier than I had ever felt. Another year, I remember taking mephedrone with a girl I fancied during Blur's headline set, both weeping with joy at a band we'd grown up with our whole lives.

Again, everyone knows this; no one thinks the thousands who watch the sunrise at the stone circle in Glastonbury every year are just on a high from seeing Mumford and Sons. But the festivals keep up the pretence that they are drug-free zones. Even a recent BBC3 show, Festivals, Sex and Suspicious Parents, which was supposed to show parents what their kids really got up to at festivals, ignored the fact that as the cameras panned around the festival, many revellers were plainly as high as a kite, their jaws swinging back and forth like pendulums, a side-effect of taking ecstasy. The voiceover just kept talking about people being "drunk".

I am also part of the first generation of people whose parents are likely to have been drug users. Of course, some adults would be outraged, like the parents on BBC3, to see what their kids got up to. But many more knew only too well – plenty of people I know would smoke weed or share dealers with their parents. In some families drug use had less stigma than smoking.

I thought all this was normal, but at university I met, for the first time, young people who totally abstained from drugs. They mostly came from outside major cities, or outside the UK, and many shivered in horror when they saw the rest of us dabbing our gums with mysterious white powders. I thought there would be a rift in social lives, an us-and-them situation, but it was around that time that mephedrone happened. Known by literally no young person ever as "meow meow", mephedrone was a legal high that changed attitudes towards drug-taking. Polite do-right kids who would never dream of taking illegal drugs were happy to chow down on bombs (self-made wontons of mephedrone powder wrapped in Rizla) like they were no more risqué than chocolate liqueurs.

Mephedrone was incredibly cheap – about a tenner a gram – and incredibly available. You could order it with next-day delivery to your university PO box. Mephedrone was a drugs phenomenon of which I have never seen the likes before or since. Everyone started doing it. I remember visiting a friend at Leeds University during this period. We went to a club and the queue for the men's bogs was at least 70 people long. When I finally got inside the place stunk of mephedrone, you could hear everyone loudly sniffing.

On nights out during this time, everyone would be raging – making out with one another, dancing with total abandon. But the comedowns were immediate and severe, far worse than ecstasy. By 4am people would be lying on the floor sharing the most intimate and personal shames and secrets, as if the drug was somehow compelling them to be honest. Some people called it a truth serum. Friendships were forged in the hot irons of that emotional exposition, as were the most horrendous hangovers.

Mephedrone was banned within two years of it taking off. People talk a lot about one legal high being banned only for another to take its place, but the real legacy of mephedrone was to numb the stigma of harder drugs. By the time I left university, many of the drug abstainers who had tried mephedrone became relaxed about most illegal drugs, too.

Ecstasy and mephedrone make it pretty hard to get much done in the days after taking them. You can't regularly use them and be a successful, functioning adult, so they become a rarer treat once you leave student life. In their 20s most people are overworked: they have second jobs and work incredibly long hours. If they're going to go out on a Friday night they need a pick-me-up. And that is why cocaine remains the young professional's drug of choice.

I see cocaine usage almost every weekend wherever I go: clubs, pubs, people's houses, dinner parties. At fancy celebrity parties, the sort you see on Mail Online, cocaine is so prevalent that it's almost boring. Everyone does it – butter-wouldn't-melt TV presenters, wholesome pop stars adored by your mum, people who would immediately lose their job if anyone found out. Those tabloid stings where they catch someone doing cocaine are kind of hilarious in that respect. If you followed any celebrity around with a secret camera on a Friday night you'd be almost guaranteed to find them doing coke. But cocaine users are like hipsters in the way they will vehemently deny they are one, and cast aspersions on others. "It was just full of self-aggrandising wankers doing coke and talking about themselves," someone will say about a party where they did cocaine and talked about themselves. Most of my friends are cocaine users, but I've never heard them say one nice thing about cocaine.

No doubt some people will have read this piece and think that I am just a monstrous twat, that this has all been little more than infantile boasting in a vain attempt to try to sound cool. But that, too, is part of the cover-up, that any open discussion of using drugs or enjoying them is necessarily a boast. We can talk about great food, great films, great sex, but if we talk about great drugs we immediately sound like we're engaging in some teenage bravado. That's why the biggest taboo surrounding drugs today isn't taking drugs, but saying that they're fun.

I'm not saying that people are lying about the negative effects. I have, of course, seen lives ruined by drugs. Rarely has this been because of an overdose or because someone has ruined themselves financially because of addiction (although I am only 27 – that may yet come). Far more often I have just seen people become dulled through regular drug use: their youthful spark extinguished by a never-ceasing quest to get on it; brains frazzled by overheated synapses. There are friends I want to slap every time I see them doing another line, but I can't because that would be hypocritical.

I also appreciate that's it's easy to be blasé about drug use when you're a well-adjusted middle-class white guy who has never been stopped by the police and has a distant non-social relationship with their drug dealer. For many people, drugs aren't something they can dip in and out of and separate from their lives. People entangled in the economic and legal realities of drugs – dealers, those convicted of possession, addicts – don't have the luxury of my relaxed attitude.

But until we stop pretending that getting high is inherently bad – that drugs can never be brilliant, can never enhance human experience for the better – how can we properly deal with people whose lives have been made worse by drugs? At some point, kids grow up and learn the facts of life. I think it's time we all had the talk.

[margridarnauds]

Okay! This just came to mind BUT...fancast for Bres/Sreng, and your favorites of the Fomorians, TDD, and Fir Bolg, also, fan cast your favorite Ulster Cycle characters! :D

GOD I’ve thought of it a lot, and I’ve never quite come up with someone who FITS. 

Sreng-

He isn’t QUITE as beefy as Sreng should be, and I’d actually rather Sreng not be conventionally attractive. (Personally, my take on Bres/Sreng is Bres doing a Fleur Delacour and being like “I AM GOOD LOOKING ENOUGH FOR BOTH OF US, I THINK.” Personally, I’d LOVE to have it be more region-accurate, as far as getting actors from the relevant regions of Ireland to be them (so, someone from Munster for Sreng, possibly Northern Ireland for Bres, etc.) and I would genuinely love to see someone who’s not white as Sreng, provided it was done well. (Emphasis on ‘well.’) For centuries now, the Fir Bolg have been coded as POC, as writers used them and twisted them into a pro-colonization narrative (”The Tuatha dé were totally right to eradicate this primitive people”), and I would love to see a triumphant reclamation of that, especially since to this day, there’s this idea that Ireland is all white (Hint: It’s not.) But again. It’d have to be done well, and I’m not sure that would be MY take on it to tell because, as is well known and documented, I’m very, very white. 

But, Aidan Turner’s Black Irish, which fits some of the later descriptions of the Fir Bolg, I think he could do a really good job capturing the different dynamics of Sreng’s personality and his development. I think he could REALLY nail Sreng at the beginning, where he’s this young guy in a family that’s tearing itself apart but who is still devoted to his king as he develops into the king of a conquered people. 

Bres - 

I’ll be honest, I’ve NEVER seen anyone who quite fits into my image of Bres. Bres is just…TOO pretty. There’s no one who’s pretty enough to be him. Like, I’ll search for “Hollywood’s Prettiest Actors” and get “Hollywood’s handsomest actors” and see Chris Hemsworth’s face and I’m just like NO. DON’T YOU SEE? If you can picture him cutting wood outside a log cabin, that’s not BRES. 

Personally, I see Lee Pace MORE as Elatha (and again, I’d rather someone actually FROM Ireland play Bres), but he’s also the closest I can come to Bres. On one hand, he’s 40 while Bres is…young when everything begins, but I think he could really sell the snark factor, and come the actual time period for CMT…he would be about the right age, even though Tuatha dé…aging…it’s complicated. But still. Closest thing. And it wouldn’t be the first time we got someone playing a character half their age. 

Fomoire - 

Indech-

Look. I tried to resist it. I really did. Especially given that he looks next to nothing like the actress I’ve ALREADY cast as his daughter. But like. MADS MIKKELSEN AS INDECH. I REPEAT: MADS MIKKELSEN BEING PROBABLY THE MAJOR VILLAIN OF THE TEXT, NEXT TO BRES AND ELATHA.He was going to either HAVE to be either Balor or Indech, and Balor’s…actually not that bad a guy, all things taken into account. Indech, though? Holy SHIT. And he could be BONE-CHILLING. Imagine him saying Indech’s line about grinding the Tuatha dé’s bones to dust, while Bres kind of just looks at him like “This is what I signed up for.” Him killing Duirgen as in the Dindsenchas poem, but doing it almost casually, the same as him swatting a fly. 

Indech’s Daughter-

I will give you a hint to how MUCH I want Katie McGrath as Indech’s Daughter (who I have many, many feelings about at any time of the day despite her brief appearance): There have been times that the only reason I keep on with my WIP is JUST because I know she’s not getting any younger and I NEED to see her there. THE SNARK. THE SCHEMING. And, in my ideal adaption of CMT, we’d see more of her relationship with her brother(s), father, etc., and I think that she could sell it. Do I think her acting is always the best? …Not really, BUT at the same time…KATIE MCGRATH AS INDECH’S DAUGHTER. PLEASE. 

Ochtriallach - 

It is surprisingly hard to find a Scandinavian actor under 40. HOWEVER, I think he could do a good job, even if most of the Vikings style decisions make me want to pull my hair out. We KNOW he can play brutal characters, and Och is…brutal, though I would also want to show a softer side when it comes to his sister/Ruadan. I’m just going to have to accept that the Indechson family is one of those families where no one looks like each other (and where one of them is slightly more…Irish than the other two).

Tethra- Gerard Butler 

Tfw your sister wants to marry some random ass mortal from Ireland, aka the country that you tried to invade, like, two thousand years ago, and Bres is on his bullshit and all you want to do is go fishing. 

Balor - 

Because redheaded Balor IS a hill I’m willing to die on. Just give Kristofer Hivjuan eyepatch and we’re good to go. 

Cethlenn -  

Look, I KNOW “I think you’d do a good job playing a character named ‘Cethlenn of the Crooked Teeth’ who is also the grandmother of one of the main characters in the story” isn’t what EVERYONE would want to hear, especially when she’s not THAT much older than her prospective grandson, but…I think Myanna Buring could do it. (And anyway, aging is fucky with immortals, so)

Indusa - 

Can anyone ELSE play Bres’ only daughter? 

Ruadan - 

Because I’m almost out of young, ginger Irish actors. 

TDD - 

Eriu- 

Alyssa Sutherland. I could REALLY see her rocking it, just from what I’ve seen in Vikings. Eriu’s an interesting figure, and I don’t think she gets enough credit for being the equivalent of a single mother in a society that…while you have different types of marriage, so Bres STILL has inheritance rights with Elatha…there was definitely a stigma. Especially for raising a son who NO ONE knew the father to. (It’s left ambiguous, but my personal read on the text is that Bres was raised by all the women and that Bres was kept out of the loop as far as who his real father was, hence why he asks Eriu later on.) I also would LOVE to see her as the years go on, watching as Bres and Elatha’s relationship breaks down and being in the state of not being able to help her son, because it seems like any choice she makes just drags him closer to his doom, and I think she could really show that, and really give us an Eriu with spirit. 

Bríg-

Look, I’ll be honest here: Bríg is NOT my favorite character. It’s not that I HATE her per se, it’s just that I get rather sick of hearing about her all the time and about how she was SO OPPRESSED by her TERRIBLE ARRANGED MARRIAGE to Bres. (Note: We have NO IDEA why they married, when they married, or how long they were married. There’s a LOT of info you can fill in the blanks on. People take a lot for granted, not least being that Bríg would be the ONLY one who hated being married to someone she didn’t love and was vastly incompatible with.) Like, she has VERY LITTLE to do in terms of the actual myths, she’s not as well-documented as Bres, she doesn’t have as much of a PERSONALITY as Bres, and yet I have to hear about the self-insert version of her 24/7 while people trash my son. 

BUT MY BITTERNESS ASIDE: Bríg…we get very little on her, and so I’m not going to fill in more than needed, but she’s highly associated with the aristocracy of skill. Think of it: Doctors, poets, smiths, ALL of them are the top, top, top of the social ladder in terms of skills, and she’s patroness of all of them. It’s not said whether she dabbles in them herself or not, but she’s obviously interested, and I think Eleanor Tomlinson is very good at being upperclass when needed, even though people most know her as Demelza from Poldark. I also think that, judging from the rest of her career, she could do a very good job showing that kind of gut wrenching grief she shows at Ruadan’s death. (The way I picture that scene going down, it’s BRUTAL, with Bríg being devastated for this boy she’s never really known and furious at Bres for his role in it, furious at the Tuatha dé and the Fomoire alike for their role in bringing it about.) She wouldn’t be a passive Bríg, I think she’d play a Bríg with a little more agency and spark while hopefully not veering into anachronistic territory. 

I don’t necessarily like casting Bríg in particular with an English actress, but…well…she’s a good fit. 

Airmed - 

HELL YEAH SARAH BOLGER. Airmed is…a delicate figure. Like, think of it: She loses two brothers close together (Cian and Miach), the latter of whom she was prevented from even MOURNING because her father was still so insecure and bitter. She’s as brilliant as anyone in her family (keeping in mind that she’s the aunt of LUGH), but…realistically, you’d have to be TERRIFIED of being too smart, after seeing what happened to Miach. Like, the text itself doesn’t do much in terms of giving her a sense of interiority, but I like to imagine that, when her father says “And Airmed shall remain,” he leans over, gives her a fatherly kiss on the forehead, and she tries to repress a shudder. And Sarah Bolger is very, very good at playing aristocratic ladies with that sense of vulnerability while still being poised and elegant. 

Ogma - 

Doesn’t look QUITE as strong as Ogma needs to be, but I think he could sell it. He tends to do a really good job with the “second in command standing loyally by” type of roles, and I think that works really well with what we get of Ogma. 

Lugh - 

Look….Jamie Campbell Bower could rock it. I know, ANOTHER Brit, BUT…he could rock it. He has that kind of androgynous pretty boyness that’s kind of a main thing with Bres, Lugh, and Cú Chulainn, and I think he could portray Lugh as the bitch that he needs to be. Someone dedicated to the Tuatha dé, yes, but also brutally determined to do whatever it takes to make sure that he ends up on top. (Personally, I think he could be utterly terrifying during the scene at Carn úi Neit with Bres.) 

Nuada - 

I’ll be honest, my gut response was “Colin Farrell” but…I already called him for King Eochaid. And John Lynch is a good actor with a long filmography under his belt. And Nuada…he’s a tragic character, but there’s also a dark edge to him. A dark edge to all the TDD, really, and I think he could do it, as well as show Nuada’s vulnerabilities after losing the arm. (Though I’d also be willing to switch Nuada and Eochaid out.)

Uaithne, the Dagda’s harper- 

Look, it was only a matter of time before I cast Hozier as ONE of the immortals; I just thought it would be HILARIOUS if, after the battle, the Dagda is FREAKING OUT because his harpist has been stolen, and then we cut to fucking Hozier strumming out a song while even Bres looks to be having a good time, and then the Dagda, Ogma, and Lugh BURST in and there’s this “Oh shit” moment. I for one think Hozier would make a very good damsel in distress. 

Fir Bolg - 

On one hand, it would almost be a waste given how little he actually gets, but Colin Farrell would make a DEVASTATING King Eochaid. 

Tfw the TDD arrive out of nowhere and try to threaten you at swordpoint and you probably spent your younger days/your father DEFINITELY spent his younger days enslaved in Greece and so you’re sick to death of colonizers and their bullshit and then they kill you in a three on one battle but not before you leave the throne to your cousin whose brother you killed as part of a generations long feud and who is also disturbingly hot for the champion on the other side and OH MY GOD WHAT HAVE YOU DONE. 

Tailtiu- 

Actually had a devil of a time, coming down to Marie Doyle Kennedy or Elena Anaya (the latter of whom had a slight leg up for actually being Spanish), and then I remembered Ruth Negga’s existence and I was like “OH.” I’m not AS familiar with her work on other things, but from what I’ve seen, I think she could do a really dignified take on Tailtiu, where she mourns, but she has to pick herself up off the ground. Tailtiu is a survivor, she’s a woman who left Spain to be with the Fir Bolg (and Eochaid), and then was left a widow, yet managed to become a fixture by being the foster mother to Lugh. (And, ultimately, by marrying Bres’ grandson, which never ceases to be hilarious to me.) I think that we could get a multi-facetted side to her, dealing with her in issues of state as well as her personal life. (I would KILL for some Tailtiu VS Sreng arguments when they’re making the decision to leave or stay.) 

Ulster Cycle:

This will be considerably quicker given I’m not as attached to it as my mythological peeps. 

Blathnat - Evanna Lynch 

My girl. My angel who deserved so much better. Personally, I think Evanna has this…kind of distant, “out there” vibe, which is probably mostly because of knowing her as Luna, and I think that really suits Blathnat. 

Emer- Tamsin Egerton

And yes, ANOTHER English actress. For an Irish/distantly Scandinavian noblewoman. know. I know. But LOOK, she looks very…Emer-ish to me.  

Aiden Gillan - Bricrui or Forgal the Wily 

The man’s made a career being devious and cunning on TV. This is perfect. 

Uathach - Freya Mavor

Aífe - Eva Green

In all fairness, THIS time I didn’t cast an Irish character with a Brit. I just…cast a Scottish character with a French actress. But look, my girl deserves JUSTICE. And I believe Eva Green could give it to her. 

[waystobe]

Let’s start in the middle: my first disclosure.

It’s 1:30 AM. I’m supposed to be waking up in 4.5 hours for work, for the penultimate day of a job I’ve had for over three years.

Somehow this seems like the perfect time to write my first blog post.

It’s been a hell of a week. Fuck, it’s been a hell of a three months. Within the last three months, I left my partner of 9 years (and the man I thought I was going to marry), secured a new job, started dating again, and caught genital herpes. 

That last part is an exciting new development. Part of the problem with my ex was that he never made me feel attractive or desired, and it was thrilling to enter a world of dating where it felt like I was surrounded by men who wanted me. I loved seeing the desire in their eyes when they leaned in for the kiss. In my whole life, I’d never felt that way before.

And then, boom, herpes.

There’s a dark humor in this. I enter the dating scene, eyes wide like a kid in a candy store, enticed by all the possibilities at my fingertips, and immediately get herpes. And not even the HSV-1 that everyone has, but the naughty genital kind. Fabulous.

My diagnosis was a week ago. The story of my diagnosis and the week that followed is a story for another blog post, but let me sum it up by saying that it’s been the most tumultuous week of my life. No exaggeration. Being out of the dating scene for 9 years, I’ve been uneducated and inexperienced with herpes, and to me the word “herpes” was nearly equivocal to “HIV.” I had no idea what herpes actually was, but I knew that the social stigma was overwhelming, and I was certain that my diagnosis was a death blow to my love life. I’d spent my whole life looking forward to marriage and kids, and now I could kiss that good-bye. I couldn’t imagine why anybody would ever want to touch me again. Why take that risk?

Flash forward to a week (and many, many hours of research) later. I realize that herpes, as a disease, is actually just a skin condition and super manageable. I confide in a few close friends, who clue me in on the years of dating that I’ve missed out on - apparently by the time you reach your 30s, it’s common to have multiple encounters with the herp. It’s actually not a big deal. And as my friends pointed out, I’ll probably be surprised by the number of men who will shrug their shoulders at my diagnosis and still want to sleep with me. A week ago, that concept was unfathomable. A week ago, my body felt diseased and disgusting. And now here I am, feeling...normal again.

All of this is a preamble to the story I want to tell right now: my first disclosure. I’m currently dating two men. Let’s call them Amir and Dov. They’re both immigrants from the same part of the world. It might actually be a stretch to say I’m ‘dating’ Dov, since we’ve only known each other for a week and been on two dates, but it’s going well so far, and I really like him, so I’m going to give myself that latitude.

As for Amir - we’ve been seeing each other for a month and a half. I’m fairly certain I’m the only person he’s dating, and he checks in by text almost every morning with a brief “Good Morning!” or “Happy Friday!”, but the conversations don’t often go much further than that, and we’ve only actually had five dates. Just two of those dates included sex (which was unprotected--I know, I know). In a way, it still feels very casual. Which has been fine for me. He’s tall, dark and handsome, and the sex is good, we share common interests, and our in-person conversations are easy and pleasant. 

Amir hasn’t been to my place yet, and we arranged a date for him to come visit this Friday. I’d cook dinner, we’d hang out, have sex, and then he’d spend the night and we’d have Saturday together. This date has been a looming deadline in the wake of my diagnosis. I knew I needed to disclose to him before he came over, and although it terrified me I still desperately wanted to do it in person. We made tentative plans to meet up this week twice, and both times they fell through. And so today I decided to do it by phone.

I texted him around 4pm, “Can I give you a call, I want to check in with you about something!”

“Sure!” he replied. “You know what, I’m on my way from work. I’ll call you as soon as I get home.”

I had no idea how long it took him to get home from work, but just to be safe, I immediately went to my liquor cabinet and had two shots of the first bottle I could grab--tequila. It took him an hour to finally call me, during which I tried to distract/calm myself by focusing on a work project. And also more tequila shots. I had just enough booze to chase away the butterflies in my stomach, without actually feeling drunk.

Finally, he calls. The nerves I had so diligently tampered with tequila suddenly spring back up. I let it ring twice, take a breath, then answer.

“Hey, you! How’s it going?” 

I almost sound normal. Amazing.

We chit-chat a bit about our respective days, and after a few minutes he quiets down, clearly waiting for me to get on with whatever I have to say. I take another breath.

“So I wanted to share something with you. I took an STD test and I tested positive for herpes type 2. This was a surprise to me, since I haven’t had any outbreaks at all. Do you know anything about it?”

And it turns out, he did. He actually has HSV-1 and occasional cold sores, and he’s well aware of how commonplace herpes is. I ask how much he knows about type 2 specifically, and he says not much. I tell him 1 in 4 women carry it, and he doesn’t sound surprised. He does admit that he’s a little worried about having caught it from me, and that he plans to call his doctor tomorrow, but if it turns out that he has it now, “it’s not the end of the world.” All in all, he seems pretty chill about it. I tell him that it’s extremely possible he hasn’t caught it, since I haven’t had symptoms and the risk of transmission is already low. I also tell him that I’ve started suppressive medication, and we can use condoms moving forward. He says that that sounds like a good idea.

I can hear in his voice that he seems pretty calm, but obviously slightly concerned. 

“I wanted to tell you this in advance of our date, to make sure you’re comfortable with everything,” I tell him.

“I appreciate that,” he says.

There’s a part of me that wants to say, “If you want to cancel on Friday, then I’d totally understand” or “Are you sure you still want to do Friday?” Is that a people-pleasing thing? A need for reassurance? I’m not sure. But wherever it comes from, I tamp those impulses back into place, because giving him too easy of an out sends the wrong message. And so I start to talk about Friday. He likes pudding, right? I can make that for dessert. We talk about our plans for Saturday, and things we can possibly do with our time together, and end the call with a “see you soon.”

The whole phone call lasted 20 minutes. I hang up, feeling kind of like I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop. I’ve read too many stories on Reddit about disclosures that go well, only for the partner to back out later. I hold the phone in my hand and think, “Well, he might still cancel on me tomorrow, once he’s had time to think about it and freak out.”

But then I call my friends and tell them about the call, and they say, “Chill out. From what you said, the conversation actually went great. The likelihood that he’ll cancel, based on what you said, seems very, very low.” 

And at last, I breathe a sigh of relief.

And then I eat A LOT of chocolate.

That was it. My first disclosure. And it was calm, and mature, and we had a conversation, and it went well. He still wants to see me on Friday. I’m not untouchable. 

[semperreformanda]

Hi everyone

I've talked a lot about dealing with anxiety the past few days. I've actually been dealing with that for the past few weeks on and off, it just got really bad last week when I got back to work after taking sick days off.

I've been with the current company for only one month and I have decided to resign from the role, reason being that I don't think I fit/qualify for for it and that sort of pressure of trying to meet such expectations is affecting my mental health.

This is going to be long, but if you are keen to know a bit of a back story...

I work in a big engineering firm. Everything was going well at first, however this really started on my first week when I made a small mistake and my colleague (boss, technically) expressed his disappointment and even hinted at terminating me ("We'd have a difficult time finding a replacement"). I was honestly shocked that time, failed to defend myself because I was still processing the fact that he was hinting at possibly firing me over that. I was down about it for a while, but decided to forget the comment, and just do better next time. It worked.

The next few days it felt like I was on a roll, but then every little mistake here and there (common as I was new and also working in an industry that was very new to me) tore at my confidence, and every end of week when he would give his comments on what I need to work on, I started to feel worn down. I couldn't shake off the feeling that maybe I was incompetent for the job. The feeling persisted. With every single mistake, I started to overthink and fear that they would actually fire me. FYI, my colleague is great. Really, really great at his job--extroverted, charming, charismatic, quick on his feet. Working alongside him made me realize how much... I lacked. There was also a point he said I appear more like a "girl next door", and that I should be more like a career woman. I know it was meant to be encouraging and he said it in a nice way, but honestly, it put me off (I've never thought of myself as a career woman; I want to excel in my career, yes, but I hate the term and don’t want to be identified as that lol).

So there. The dread overtook me. Waking up felt hard. Even eating with my other coworkers during lunch felt difficult because I was starting to shut myself off. I really attempted to be like him in every way--extroverted, quick-witted, charming, chill, and not overthinking every single body movement or scrutinizing every word said to me. Sad thing is, I am normally like that, but the pressure he put on me and I put on myself was killing me. I could feel social anxiety rearing its ugly head once more. I started feeling alone at work; no real close colleague I can hang out with since we hung out in a big group and they were all friends with one another. I make attempts at conversation but they're all small talk, all short-lived, and I increasingly felt ashamed of how seemingly inept I was in every social interaction.

I'm a typically quiet person, introverted, I approach people in a way I'd say is calm and gentle. I don't know. That's just how I am. It just felt like when my colleague pointed this out it was like there was something wrong with me and I needed to be someone like him--which, to be quite frank, I did want to be like. Was it my social anxiety holding me back? Or was it just my personality? I've always been insecure about my gentleness and quietness. Normally when I am quiet it's because I am listening to people or processing my thoughts. Now when I am quiet, it's because I'm fretting. I just don't feel like myself anymore. It is exhausting having to wear a mask everyday at work.

You want to know what was the last straw for me? When we were in an important meeting, a candidate texted me saying he couldn’t finish the interview process that day and had to leave. I promptly composed a reply, but quickly got reprimanded for using my phone. I apologized and brushed it off, but at that point I was so overburdened already with everything I felt like that was the final push and honestly? A social anxiety sufferer’s worst nightmare was to be called out like that in front of everyone, so if to you it felt like a normal screw up, to me it felt like a giant screw up with our boss that I’d never recover from.

Unfortunately, I'm also the type of person who can be avoidant in the heat of conflict or problems, so when I started feeling the heavy unshakable dread, my instant response was to withdraw. After that, I didn't go to work for three days. Funny enough, my classmate from college working in the same field popped up again and offered me a role (same job, but much more similar to my expertise), and I bit. Took the interview last Friday, all went well, got offered the job.

So now it is Tuesday, I have emailed my HR my resignation letter, and I will be showing up there tomorrow for the exit interview.

Please pray for me. The thought of having to discuss this with them face to face is kind of terrifying. I have battled so much with myself if this was something I could control; maybe I just need to shut my thoughts off and take it one day at a time. Maybe I just need to relax myself. I need to focus on the tasks at hand and do my best and stop overwhelming myself. But...I could not get myself out of bed for two days and only ate one meal a day. I could feel the burning in my stomach but no hunger. I had my first panic attack after years of no having one. I battled with myself--am I this weak? Is my anxiety valid? Am I just lazy? Quitting a job after a month? I felt like a joke. While crossing the street I hoped for a car to hit me. I didn't want to die, but also, I wouldn't mind, because it would mean the thoughts would stop. I just wanted my head to quiet down. I had no energy to do anything... I am just not doing well.

The new job hopefully has a more welcoming team. The work itself I know wouldn't be too difficult for me since my first job was like that too.

So... I'm sorry for this long message. I guess I just wanted to write down my thoughts and kind of untangle the messy strings of thought that I have at the moment. Church has helped so much, my Father is always patient and kind, and my family has voiced their support and concern. I'm thankful for that. Social anxiety (or anxiety in general; heck, any mental health issue in general) has so much stigma and I get it--it's because you won't understand it unless you experience it for yourself.

But I am thankful for every concern, prayer, support, and listening ear. Please continue to pray for me--wisdom in my career, to seek my strength and hope in Christ, and guidance. I might also start pursuing professional help too.

Thanks for reading this. If you suffer from anxiety, depression, what have you--please know you are not alone. Open up to someone and don't ever ever ever isolate yourself. It is so scary to be in that place, and it is so lonely, and I want you to know that you don't have to carry it alone. In the Body of Christ, we are called to carry each other's burdens; when you hurt, I hurt. When you rejoice, I rejoice with you.

Above all, the Father is good, He is sovereign over every circumstance. That means you (or your circumstances) are not powerful enough to screw up your life. He is still in control of every single delicate detail and He is using every thing for your good and His glory. And He loves you. Remember that.

[polyrolemodels]

Mx Nillin

1. How long have you been polyamorous or been practicing polyamory?

Personally? Less than 5 years. I’ve been non-monogamous with my nesting partner, Falon, for about 4 years now, but neither of us explicitly identified as polyamorous until we started seeing our best friend Kate about a year ago. 

2. What does your relationship dynamic look like?

Falon and I are legally married and live together in a tiny apartment with a cat and two guinea pigs. We’re in a romantic, sexual, and emotional relationship with our best friend, Kate, who lives on her own a short drive across town.

Kate doesn’t want to ever get married or live with anybody else. She really values having her own place to herself and so do we, so, it just works out for everybody really well! We all see each other multiple times a week, binge watching Netflix shows, playing nerdy tabletop games, going on date nights, checking out local events, or trying out threesome positions for ourselves and then blogging about them [http://mxnillin.com/will-it-threesome-double-dip/] LOL

Though Fal, Kate, and I are in a closed polyamorous triad together, we’re all still non-monogamous to a degree. Each of us has a friend or two we sometimes share nudes and flirt with outside of our relationship, but the three of us are all romantically committed to each other.

3. What aspect of polyamory do you excel at?

Ugh, honestly, I wouldn’t say that I “excel” at anything so much as I’m just doing the best I can to look after my own health and wellness while also striving to be the best partner I can be to Kate and Falon.

I used to be REALLY bad at the whole self-care thing and it lead to a lot of fear, anxiety, insecurities, and jealousy in my past relationships. I almost exclusively relied on those who I was intimate with to just comfort me until I felt better. In some cases, I put the entire onus of my mental and emotional health onto my past partners. Unsurprisingly, that created some incredibly fucking unhealthy behaviors as I sought out a pretty constant supply of comfort, validation, and assurance from them in order for me to feel happy and secure in those relationships.

That’s not so much an issue for me anymore, and I’m really proud of that because it has taken a lot of hard work to unlearn those toxic behaviors, develop healthier personal habits, and overall better communicate with the people who I love. I’m also much more on top of taking my anti-depressant pills, and going in to see my counsellor, when necessary.

That’s not to say I’m some stoic, chill master of my emotions or anything. Insecurities still crop up, jealousy sometimes rears its head, and on occasion a little validation is appreciated, but I think all of that is pretty natural

4. What aspect of polyamory do you struggle with?

The stigma. Holy shit, the stigma

I‘ve never loved two people at the same time, and in the same ways, before. I’ve never been committed to two partners at once before. Like, it’s no exaggeration when I say that my relationship with Falon and Kate has shattered my entire perspective of life, love, family, the institution of marriage, identity, politics, and so much more.

And all for the better, I might add!

But polyamory isn’t something you see reflected back at you by society, especially not in any sort of positive, judgement-free way. It’s not a relationship structure that’s even sorta socially, politically, governmentally, or economically accepted, let alone widely acknowledged, talked about, written about, ore seen out in public. And it sure as shit isn’t represented in a lot in literature, or art, or media of any kind… at least not in ways that don’t tend to be fetishizing or tragic. 

I mean, when’s the last time you’ve seen any sort of show about an everyday non-binary queer navigating life with their poly family? Never? Yeah, me neither.

All of this has led to us having to pretty regularly endure super shitty, awkward situations of us having to be in the closet depending on who we’re interacting with at any given time. Trying to remember who you’re out to, and who is SAFE to be out to, is exhausting and stressful for us all.

And that fucking blows. Yet it’s oftentimes necessary for all our safety.

5. How do you address and/or overcome those struggles?

I talk about it with my partners. A lot. We check in with each other pretty often and we don’t let difficult discussions go undiscussed for long. 

And I write about it too! Maybe too much at times haha.

I find that by putting myself out there, speaking up about my experiences and relationships, it has helped me empower others in their poly relationships while offering me the opportunity to learn from them as well. Especially other sex bloggers, writers, and workers.

I’ve also surrounded myself with a pretty amazing little family of queer and trans folks who have been wonderful supports in my life.

6. In terms of risk-aware/safer sex, what do you and your partners do to protect one another?

Clear, concise, honest communication has been key. Fal, Kate, and I are all aware of each other’s past partners and we’ve all tested ourselves for STI’s. Currently, we’re all fluid-bonded together, so, condom usage isn’t really there like it used to be. However, we still make sure to boil any sex toys that are shared (between uses), keep our nails trimmed, use lube as needed, and generally make sure that we’re listening to and respecting each other’s boundaries.

7. What is the worst mistake you've ever made in your polyamorous history and how did you rebound from that? 

Not sure if this is really a polyamory mistake so much as it is a boundaries issue. A couple years ago, shortly after Falon and I were married, I had JUST started blogging about how non-monogamy worked for us when we became good friends with somebody we had met through our local LGBTQ+ community. Early on in the friendship, the three of us mutually masturbated together, but we were very explicit in expressing that we were not looking for a relationship of any kind and that the three-way ‘bating was just for fun and probably not a regular thing. 

End of story, right?

Not so much. While Fal and I felt that we were very clear, and that our friend had understood, he instead doubled down. Over the months that followed, he ended up inserting himself into our relationship in a lot of invasive ways that on their own looked innocent enough, but when considered all at once were actually quite manipulative. Then one day he tries to show up at our house to talk with Falon, and when they said they weren’t feeling comfortable taking right now (he was being very pushy) he just forced the conversation anyway by professing his love to them. Oh, and me too, but only as an afterthought when Falon made it clear they were NOT interested.

Things went downhill from there really fast as we started to realize the real degree of his intrusiveness, complete with finding out he had been self-sabotaging opportunities for himself because he had this thought in his head that we’d all live up living together.

Anyway, it’s a long story overall but Fal and I learned a lot about what we were and weren’t comfortable with and set even cleared boundaries with others. That whole thing was bad enough that it almost turned us off from non-monogamy and polyamory altogether though. Luckily, we worked through it because several months after that gong show things started up with Kate, which has been amazing!

8. What self-identities are important to you? How do you feel like polyamory intersects with or affects those identities?

I am a fat, queer, non-binary, loud, foul-mouthed sex blogger with hairy tits, a girl cock, and a full-on fetish for actively subverting social roles and expectations… so of course I’m also polyamorous haha. Seriously though, over the last several years I’ve radically transformed myself as a person, to better reflect who I’ve always been but didn’t feel safe or confident being until my late twenties. I had to, because if I didn’t I was on the fast track to self-destruction [but that’s another story entirely]. 

Now, for the first time ever, I feel empowered to live my life as my authentic self and it turns out that a big part of that has included being polyamorous. Monogamy, at least in how it exists in our culture, has always felt incredibly restrictive, uncomfortable, and toxic to me personally; whereas falling in love with Falon and Kate, opening myself up to them both and forming our queer little polycule, has felt like the most natural thing in the world to me since I came out as queer and trans.

(Bonus: Do you have any groups, projects, websites, blogs, etc. that you are involved with that you would like to promote?)

You can find the vast majority of my work on my blog at www.mxnillin.com. One of the most popular features there is "Mx Nillin Fucks", a blog post series in which I stick my girl cock in a wide variety of inanimate objects, mostly foods so far,  as makeshift masturbation sleeves and write about how good or bad it is. This year is themed "Back to Basics" and has focused on classic masturbation items (banana peels, socks, DIY penetrables, melons, etc.). Outside of this you can also find me regularly participating in #SexEdPornReviews tweets for The Crash Pad Series.

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Support Inclusive Polyamorous Representation at  https://www.patreon.com/PolyRoleModels

[oneweekoneband]

Today’s first guest post is by my friend and fellow The Singles Jukebox contributor Vikram Joseph.

Counting to 15, 20, 30… - Delayed Queer Adolescence and the Songs of Troye Sivan

- Vikram Joseph

On a humid early August evening a few weeks ago, in one of those converted warehouse bars endemic to inner north-east London, I was chatting over drinks with a guy I’d once dated and had last seen in 2014. There was a lot to catch up on, and the conversation ran unexpectedly, rewardingly deep. It became clear that, though we’re both well into our adult lives by any conventional measurement, we’d each changed and grown significantly in the intervening years in a way that films, books and the media seem to suggest happens in your late teens. The idea of delayed adolescence being a common trope for queer people came up, and I’ve been thinking about it a lot since then. Why do those formative years of growth and the exploration of self-identity seem to happen later for us? Is it a delayed phase of development, a prolonged phase, or both? And how is this reflected in the way we interact, the spaces we choose to spend time in, and the art we consume?

***

A recent viral tweet:

“Gay culture is your life being delayed by 10 years because you didn’t start being yourself until your mid-20s.”

At the time of writing, this tweet has 117,000 likes.  Clearly, this is a phenomenon which touches nerves across the spectrum.

To the extent that we can “know” a pop singer through their songs, it seems like Troye Sivan – still just 23, and releasing his second album – has done his growing fairly early on. In just a few years, we’ve heard him go from singing about tentative gay crushes to the fully-realised queer euphoria of his newer songs. And yet, the concept of protracted, stuttering adolescence is crisply, poignantly refracted through his music, and I feel that a lot of his immense appeal to queer people far older than himself can be attributed to this.

***

HEAVEN “The truth runs wild, like kids on concrete.”

“Heaven” deals with the internal struggle for self-acceptance – by no means unique to LGBTQ+ people, but one that everyone who’s grown up on that spectrum will understand intimately, in the form of coming out to yourself. “Without losing a piece of me, how do I get to heaven?” Religion is a useful allegory here, but ultimately a distractor – the duality Sivan is really concerned with here is about happiness. For a lot of us, coming out for the first time feels like a crossroads, where we have to make a choice between one kind of happiness and another, and “Heaven” captures this (false, but very powerful) dichotomy beautifully.

Sivan’s first album, Blue Neighbourhood, hangs heavy with the imagery of suburbia. It’s rich, relatable visual and psychological territory, exemplified in decades’ worth of teen TV dramas and coming-of-age films. Many of us will recognise it as the backdrop to the fraught intensity of that long, tangled conversation with ourselves; the feeling of being on the brink of everything and the precipice of nothing, the intoxicating, paralysing combination of anticipation and dread. Sivan deals with this at 15; for me, I was 20, during university Christmas holidays, back in the dull hum of suburbia. Maybe there’s something about it that gives us the emotional space to plumb the depths of those brave new ideas. “Heaven” conjures this musically as well as lyrically, with a tense two-chord shuffle, close, muffled production, and Betty Who’s guest turn evoking a better angel from the future, reassuring us, beckoning us towards the light. If I’d heard it at 20, or earlier, it would have destroyed me; it might even have accelerated my own journey.

Sivan sings about “counting to 15”, the age at which he came out to his family. There’s something that invariably surprises straight people, when I’ve tried to explain it to them, but will come as no surprise at all to anyone else, and it is this: coming out never stops. Every new environment presents a decision to make and a challenge to face; and while it gets easier (and can often be an incredibly liberating experience), it’s never a formality. The subtler aspect to this is that there is no end-point to coming out to yourself, either. Accepting yourself as a gay person is just the beginning; there follows years and years of figuring out what that means. And I think this lies at the heart of delayed queer adolescence. These are questions of identity that are near-impossible to figure out alone, and many of us aren’t surrounded by other people with the same questions until much later – either due to geography, or opportunity, or not realising how badly we need to be, or maybe all of the above. And so “counting to 15” (or however old we are when we get there) is a countdown to the real start of our lives, rather than to any sort of conclusion.

***

TALK ME DOWN

“You know that I can’t trust myself with my 3 a.m. shadow.”

Queer mental health remains poorly understood and inadequately talked about, both in the mainstream press and in medical circles. Working as a doctor, I’ve witnessed the stigma towards LGBTQ+ patients from other medical professionals – rarely overtly hostile, but often casual, unthinking and pernicious. The mental health charity Mind believe that 42% of gay men, 70% of lesbians and 80% of transgender people experience mental illness; the statistics for gay men are almost certainly an underrepresentation, as men in general are less likely to report symptoms.

Early on in his powerful book “Straight Jacket: Overcoming Society’s Legacy of Gay Shame”, the journalist Matthew Todd runs through an harrowing litany of case studies of young gay people who have lost their lives to suicide, violence and addiction. He then explores the factors behind this, both intrinsic and extrinsic to the gay community, and hones in particularly on the near-universal gay experience of shame (in its many forms) during our formative childhood and adolescent years as a key determinant of depression, anxiety, poor body image, low self-worth, and harmful patterns of behaviour.

On the gorgeous, shimmering ballad “Talk Me Down”, Blue Neighbourhood’s emotional centre of gravity, Sivan sings (possibly from a friend or partner’s perspective) about dark thoughts, struggling for self-acceptance, and, implicitly, ideas of suicide. The accompanying video is high melodrama, but then, so is coming to terms with your sexuality. “I know I like to draw the line when it starts to get too real / but the less time that I spend with you, the less you need to heal” cuts to the heart of the conundrum most young gay people face – desire, and a need to be open and liberated, versus deeply-ingrained feelings of guilt, fear and shame. In his book, Todd argues that these are socially determined but can be overcome, but it’s hardly surprising that it takes a long time to get there – and hence, “normal” emotional development is a protracted experience.

***

YOUTH

“What if we’re speeding through red lights into paradise?”

It’s easy to forget that there are very few conventional pop songs on Blue Neighbourhood. “Youth” (and “Wild”) are probably the closest, but while it might be tempting to read “Youth” purely as a love song, I think its real core lies in escapism, another trope prevalent among (although, clearly, not unique to) young gay people. The imagery is wild and fantastical – “trippin’ on skies, sippin’ waterfalls” – and I distinctly remember writing similar (albeit much worse) songs at 15 or 16, cosmic love songs to no one in particular about things I knew nothing about.

Todd’s “Straight Jacket” has an interesting chapter on how he believes escapism informs archetypal LGBTQ+ tastes in pop, musicals, science fiction, horror and drag. I don’t always agree with the specifics, as I think we’re a broader church than he implies. But it’s hard to argue with the queer impulse for escape, particularly in our years of self-discovery, into spheres where our possibilities are limitless, our own selves freer and more confident, and our fears diminished. It’s maybe a symptom of that delayed development, of more years spent in limbo.  When I listen to “Youth”, it gives me a clean hit of that feeling, particularly in the bridge, with “the lights start flashing like a photobooth” simulated by pulsing, strobe-light synths.

***

MY, MY, MY!

“Let’s stop running from love.”

Bloom, Sivan’s second album, finds him confident, assured and in love. It’s a big step, though not a quantum leap, from much of Blue Neighbourhood, and I’m interested in the in-between.  “Running from love” perhaps gives a little away. It’s hard for us to know how to approach dating, love and sex. Certainly, queer people might feel unconfined by traditional heteronormative conventions or ideals, but equally many of us crave what our straight friends and families have. (It’s important to note that, of course, it’s not one or the other.) I think “running from love” speaks to a queer (and perhaps more universal) anxiety – after what feels like forever waiting for opportunities that feel tantalisingly out of reach, embracing a singular, tangible thing at the expense of all other potential things is terrifying.

Still, this is a dizzy, ecstatic, seductive love song.  The expression “my, my, my” can seem trite in a pop song, but Sivan sells it as breathless disbelief.  Some things are hard-earned.

***

ANIMAL

“No angels could beckon me back.”

And so we come full circle. The religious imagery is no coincidence; on Bloom’s stunning closer, the gorgeous, hazy reverie of “Animal”, we understand the heaven the Troye Sivan managed to reach.

It takes some of us a long time to get there, and the destination is different for all of us. I’m currently reading Michael Cunningham’s classic queer novel “A Home at the End of the World”, in which the character of Jonathan, at 27, tries to navigate the differences between the sort of settled, faintly bleak domesticity of the kind his parents have lived (“the fluorescent aisles of a supermarket at two in the afternoon”) and the often lonely, unfulfilling search for a different kind of home and family in the city (gay literature is fascinatingly fixated on homes and families, albeit often unconventional ones). It resonates with me. As queer people, the usual rules don’t have to apply – the expectations of one milestone and then the next, the pragmatic retreat back into suburbia at 30 – and that presents a different set of challenges.

I believe it’s a double-edged sword. Queer adolescence might be delayed because of our differences in the world, but equally, we are different because of that delayed development.  It informs the way we experience life. Beautiful art is created because of those differences; hell, we might even be lucky enough to create some ourselves. And so, way beyond 15, most of us are still counting, still trying to understand, still discovering ourselves and each other, searching for logical families and people to grow with. No angels could beckon us back.