#little bits of a dude. which are sometimes varying amounts of present

[springcatalyst]

5, 11, 14, 17, and 19 for julian pleaseee =) <3

OMGG THANK U QUEEN

5 - What's one hill your oc will die on?

This might sound like a stretch but he has a very transactional worldview. People do favors if they're owed, or seek retribution if they're wronged. He doesn't really conceptualize about doing good for the sake of helping people, or doing harm for no reason (to an extent. he's a hypocrite in some ways). So if he thinks he owes someone something, he'll repay that debt- if someone does him dirty, he'll get what he's owed. This causes problems when he doesn't want to be indebted to people, actually. Or when other people don't abide by the same rules and he's like dude. you owe me. It's one of the very few consistent rules he follows, arbitrary as it is. So yeah, he'll die on that hill, kinda.

11 - How are they seen by people around them?

HA. Well, depends on who u ask. As far as first impressions and strangers go,,, earlier on in life and also the storyline he's just kind of a weird little freak. There's somethin not quite right about him but most people are just like 'there goes the Kil child again, up to some weird bullshit.' The weird bullshit he gets up to changes slightly as he ages but he still doesn't quite mesh with the world he inhabits. LATER tho, he's still an outsider, but in a different way? It's more on purpose now. He doesn't exactly have a friendly face, he makes an active effort to ward people away from him. He looks like trouble no matter which side of trouble you're on, he looks like a guy you might give a wider berth than usual.

Colleagues are functionally closer to strangers than to friends with him. They see what he wants them to, and while they're at a point where they can work together and socialize casually, he's still got a shorter than average fuse, and this becomes apparent pretty quickly. Most crewmates fall somewhere between slight distrust and annoyance, some get the idea that he's not actually as dangerous as he acts, and some end up actively despising him. It's a grab bag. At the very least, he avoids physical fights with crewmates. Usually.

And he's got, like, a pathetically small amount of close friends. Liliana gets him pretty easily, to her dismay, sometimes, because they are incredibly similar. But then sometimes he does shit and she just. Does not get the logic. It seems like there's no in-between for her. She thinks he's selfish (she's right). Diana knows more about him (they grew up together), but gets him less. She frequently oversteps or misses the plot because she can't really update her image of him to the present once they reunite years later- he's changed a lot, but she hasn't really, and doesn't know what to do with this new, hostile Julian. She's figuring it out.

14 - How comfortable are they relying on others?

NOT EVEN A LITTLE BIT. God he hates it sooooo much. Relying on other people means things are out of your hands and he has GOT to have total control of himself at all times or he dies. The times when he has to depend on someone else for something, even someone he objectively trusts, just do not sit right with him. It feels like a debt to repay, it feels like someone else making decisions for you, it feels like not being capable of doing it yourself. It feels like helplessness and it feels like autonomal paralysis. And he can't trust anyone but him to not fuck it up (at least if he fucks it up, he fucks it up). He cannot STAND it. He is independent to his detriment.

17 - What are three moments in their life that impacted them the most?

wellthethingsaboutthatis

one - ever wonder why he walks with a cane? When he was a kid (teenager? whatever) he had a nasty fall as a result of, surprise, doing some stupid reckless bullshit for no reason. Frankly he was lucky to survive, but it didn't quite heal right and he's got a fucked up leg and varying degrees of chronic pain as a fun little remnant. That in of itself would make the list but also the thing about the fall is that he knew exactly what he was doing. He wasn't trying to get hurt but he knew damn well it was likely, and figured 'if i die i die, or i survive and i'll have survived something that should've killed me.' Obviously he lives, and so gets a sense of invincibility that never really goes away. Kind of a 'well nothing's killed me YET' kind of a situation. This is not the beginning of reckless behavior, but it is the centerpiece, and the one that scared him enough to flip all the way back around and make him immune to that healthy fear.

two - sorry about this. so i have some stupid ass lore but long story short humans A: marry eldest to youngest amidst siblings (particularly daughters) and B: cannot be married until their elder sister is. On account of the transgender, this does some things. Julian's younger sister is just as impatient and narrow-minded as he is, and so when he puts off (and puts off and puts off) being married, she gets mad. as does their mother (do what you're told), as does their eldest sister Naomi (you're being childish). So eventually the choice is no longer his. and it just doesn't exactly take well and eventually leads to his leaving and not coming back, and drives a sort of frigidity and resentment that he takes out on the general public for the rest of ever. and gives him those control issues. as a treat.

THREE - There's a few i could go with here but they're similar so I'll go with the later one cause it's more solid: he kind of gets mutinied? But not really because he wasn't the one in charge, but he does stick with her against the rest of the crew. The crew he's a part of decide they've had enough with Liliana's quest that they have no stake in, puts them in danger, and gives them nothing, and so get rid of her. Except they include Julian in those plans because why wouldnt they? He's a member of the crew. But by now he has a sort of understanding with her, trusts her, and also just resents mutiny because loyalty is the one thing he believes in. (this is also slightly hypocritical but that's DIFFERENT he would NEVER (lie)). so he warns her, they end up just killing both of them, but also not really because obviously they don't die. So now it's him and Liliana just out on their own and she's still trying to kill the bitch she's been after for years and he's just along for the ride because he can't leave her behind (not that he'd admit it) and he gets to be her first mate when they get a new ship, new crew. This is a positive change, actually, because it's when they go from colleagues with an understanding to friends, when they know they can really rely on each other, and when he finally gets a crew that he's not as on edge around. He's been with shitheads for a while.

19 - How do they connect with the people around them?

He doesn't? There's exceptions I GUESS but for the vast majority he simply doesn't. He doesn't feel the need, he doesn't extend the hand, doesn't choose to trust people, he avoids meaningful connection because that means he has to stop lying. The moments he is genuine with people are few and far between, usually in extraneous circumstance in which he is forced to stop performing. People seeing through the falsity is more a threat than an olive branch- he doesn't want to be seen.

But he does (reluctantly) care about people SOMETIMES, and that is definitely more an actions over words situation. Because the words WILL be cruel. Doesn't matter how much he cares about someone, he will be saying some bullshit eventually out of frustration, defensiveness, inability to stop being a cunt, etc. Liliana is only his friend because she does the same thing, Diana is only his friend because she doesn't know when to save herself (only kind of kidding). But he will defend them both with his life and has, will follow them across seas and has, will kill the people that wrong them and has, you know. He's met them in sheepyards to hide from consequences and pierced ears as a declaration of loyalty. It's easy to forget, sometimes, but it's there. The most genuine connection even they will get out of him is the sort of chilly contemplation that happens late at night, that sort of stargazing-and-not-looking-at-you conversation that he will still cut off if it gets too close to something he's not touching. But they're kind of stuck together by now, you know?

THANK U again u know i love my stupid fucked up guy <3

[hahanoiwont]

@candy-cryptid yes! That's another bit of evidence that I forgot to add--"man" implies that his gender is known, which can't necessarily be said of the player; so we know (or can assume) that there is a man from another world, and we know that Sans refers to wanting to go "back" somewhere, but being unable to, and instead accepting the underground as his home.

Also, "beware" makes sense in this context, too--since Sans is able and in some cases willing to deliver a whooping for the ages. I think by raw power alone, Sans is worth a "beware" or two. So that line could refer to him!

I want more of your Undertale headcannons. SPILL!!!!

Alright! Any specific kind? no? here's a thing:

I think Sans Undertale is from an alternate dimension. I do not think he is from the Underground at all.

This is for a variety of reasons, mostly hints: the riverperson's "beware the man from the other world" line, Sans's lines concerning the Surface ("we call that the sun, my friend"--who's we? presumably people who experience the sun and therefore have a reason to call it anything), and most of all Sans's frequent references to wanting to "go back"/accepting he can't "go back."

Now, going back could refer to time (ie my "what if Sans used to be able to reset" post), but I believe he means going to a physically different place. The vagueness of "going back" could be an attempt to make his experiences more understandable from a time-travel perspective, or just because he's mostly speaking to himself, but the most obvious interpretation is that he was in one place, ended up in another, and has since been unable to return. Occam's razor.

Similarly, the restaurant conversation could be interpreted as personal experience--his argument is basically that the Underground might not be what Frisk is used to, and it might not have everything, but it may not be worth it to try to return from the world they're from. Sometimes you have to learn to settle. Which seems more like an argument that comes from a place of experience/empathy than something he sat down and though would be the most convincing logical argument to use for them, especially given what he knows about their determination. They absolutely can kill Asgore and cross the Barrier, or perhaps find another way...but maybe, like him, they'll find that they're happier just accepting where they are and building a better life Underground, rather than struggle to reach their old home, only to realize that the cost is too great. Especially because he doesn't know why Frisk came to Ebott in the first place.

There's also the issue where no one seems to know where Sans and Papyrus come from. The people of Snowdin say they just appeared one day. Papyrus similarly just appeared outside of Undyne's door one night. Sans has science stuff and pictures of him with several mysterious figures in his secret lab basement thing--could be a connection with Gaster and the Gaster Followers, and/or items he has left over from another life in another world.

Anyway, it's not proof positive that he's from an AU (Deltarune...?), but it's a fun idea to play with! And, ultimately, it makes a lot of things about Sans make sense. Now the real question becomes, where did Papyrus come from...

[haworthiaace]

Magic Misfits AU

Ok so basically we made an au based off of the fact that Scar kept calling his village the village for magical misfits. Scar finds out that he somehow ended up on a server for magical misfits, and now he’s created a sort of safe haven within the server, so naturally they flock to it. Some hermits don’t surprise him, the ones that don’t really bother making an effort to hide their magic, or the ones who can’t hide it. But some hermits deeply confuse him. Chaos ensues. 

TLDR Scar becomes a magical therapist for the hermits

Scar is a wizard, he doesn’t really specialize in anything besides his crystals, which is why he’s able to help with a variety of magical issues. He ends up becoming the one entrusted with everyone’s secrets and problems, which makes him Stressed, but he enjoys helping his friends.

Both Xisuma and Evil Xisuma are shapeshifters, with the ability to change their appearance, but not their size. X keeps his appearance hidden from the hermits, which of course inspires wild theories ranging from eldritch abomination to biblical angels, but X won’t reveal if any theories are true. The only ones that know are Hypno (explained later) and Scar. Scar found out when Xisuma showed up hurt at his doorstep, without enough energy to keep another form. Scar was sworn to secrecy afterwards, and he deeply enjoys listening to other hermits pester him for answers. X actually just looks startlingly average, to the point that he’s unwilling to reveal himself solely because people expect him to be something a little more intimidating, and especially now with the ridiculous rumours the hermits have started.

EX doesn’t hide his true form (which is identical to X’s), but of course the hermits don’t believe him, thinking that it’s just another disguise, and EX won’t confirm or deny because he thinks it makes them more afraid of him. (It doesn’t) He’ll also frequently try to impersonate hermits to destroy the server from the inside out, but he is a terrible actor (so is X) and rarely gets far in his plans.

Mumbo and Grian are fairies, but they’re originally from different communities (courts? I really don’t know much about fairies) so they don’t know the other is a fairy until Grian’s hermit challenges initiation. They can shrink into a smaller form that has wings, but it takes quite a bit of effort to switch between forms. (also fun fact: if mumbo is a fairy that means hermit challenges is a magically binding contract)

Iskall is just. Completely human. His prosthetic eye is powered by magic, (and maintained by Scar!) but other than that he’s just a dude. However, he has very strange things happen to him all the time because he’s befriended not one, but two fairies, and he hasn’t noticed either one. He finds that he often has abnormally good luck, and his lost objects will mysteriously turn up as soon as he complains to his best friends about it. He asks Scar if he knows anything, but Scar, not wanting to break Mumbo or Grian’s trust, has to play dumb while also helping Iskall with his ‘problem’.

Now this might come as a shock but. Ren is a werewolf. It may not be unique but it is fitting. One full moon near the beginning of season 7, Ren showed up at the village around sunset, and frantically insisted that Scar let him stay the night in an unoccupied house. So Scar let him stay, and the next morning Ren explained his Situation. So now Scar helps Ren be as comfortable as possible on the night of his transformation and the day after they just chill together.

Stress has her potion brewery, and she’s the first one on the list to fall into the category of Not Having Frequent Magical Emergencies; she just goes to the village to hang out because hey why not? It’s cozy, plus Scar helps her brainstorm potion recipes over cookies and hot chocolate. Scar comes to her often needing a potion (usually of the healing variety) because someone Fucked Up.

Tango is also human, but at some point he was cursed, and his vision started to literally turn red until it was all he could see. The curse was halted thanks to Zed and Impulse, but the red eyes still remain. (Though thankfully his vision returned) They aren’t sure what the curse would have done if it wasn’t stopped, and they’d be happy to never find out.

Zed is an elf, and while he does have a little bit of magic, it wasn’t enough to stop whatever was afflicting Tango, so he turned to more demonic methods. When Tango’s sight got really bad, he summoned a demon (Impulse) and offered his soul in exchange for a cure to the curse. Impulse did the best he could, restoring Tango’s vision but leaving the red eyes, and then left with his price. Zed’s health slowly started declining: he had basically no energy or life due to the separation from his soul. So Tango summoned Impulse back and asked for Zed’s soul back, but it couldn’t be returned without reversing the deal, and Zed wasn’t willing to do that. So Tango ‘asked’ Impulse to stay with them for a while so Tango could convince Zed to back out of the deal. It turns out that being near his soul (kept by Impulse) returned Zed’s energy, and Impulse decided he liked these two so they became a trio, and joined hermitcraft soon after.

Quite often 2 members of team ZIT will wake up Scar in the middle of the night because they accidentally did something to the missing member (banished Impulse, sent Tango to the shadow realm, etc.) and they don’t know what to do. Scar has a ZIT protocol. It’s used far too often. They also constantly try to figure out what the more human looking hermits are. They do not often succeed.

At night, Bdubs turns into a sleep paralysis demon looking creature, and he (unwillingly) curses people to sleep for a completely random amount of time. After an Incident with Wels in season 6, (that’s the reason for his ‘nap’) he makes sure to sleep as early as possible every night. He thankfully isn’t affected by this while in the End or Nether.

Alright lads here’s the angsty one. Beef has the midas touch, meaning everything he touches turns to gold. It works much slower on living creatures than on inanimate objects, but it still works on living things so that’s Not Good. He makes sure to wear special enchanted gloves that block his curse while wearing them. At some point he goes to Scar in a panic because he accidentally touched Etho with his bare hands, (Etho handles this surprisingly well) and Scar helps him fix Etho. (It’s minecraft rules. They just cut his arm off and it comes back.) After that they put a curse of binding enchantment on Beef’s gloves.

Cleo is still a zombie, and she sometimes gets Scar to help her with Zombie Problems when Joe isn’t available. The first time she showed up outside Larry with her (severed) arm held in one hand Scar nearly jumped out of his robes, but he’s pretty used to it by now and will just go inside to grab a needle and thread.

Joe certainly is something! Nobody is quite sure, even Scar. All Scar knows is that Joe knows way too much about everything, and yet he keeps asking Scar to help him translate Galactic. (Joe is secretly trying to teach Scar the language because he feels that it’s important for magic users to know, especially ones so versatile like Scar) Joe is some kind of oracle who receives visions of the past, present, and future, which is why he knows so much, and he’s also at least dabbled in almost every kind of magic there is. He’s a bit of a cryptid.

The local mad scientist is Cub, who does all sorts of weird experiments, and makes inventions that combine magic and technology in disturbing yet wonderful ways. He also got cursed by his pyramid, so now he has comically bad luck. It doesn’t usually cause any serious harm, just shenanigans. He of course embraces this and finds it funny as hell.

On top of Doc’s regular strangeness, (creeper hybrid, cyborg, goat whisperer?) he also for some reason attracts a frankly unreasonable amount of kitsunes. Nobody knows why, but he can be seen in the shopping district being trailed by no less than two foxes with varying amounts of tails. It’s really very cute, and the mystery of it infuriates the more investigative hermits. (Cub and team ZIT mostly)

Etho is a demigod, although nobody knows what god he’s descended from. (including Etho) He has the fun ability to grant others’ wishes, but because of his personality he chooses to twist these wishes and turn them into fun little pranks that technically give the person what they want, but not without annoying them first. He also doesn’t reveal this ability to the others, leaving them even more confused whenever he uses it, which isn’t often because it does drain him quite a bit.

False, being the badass she is, is a valkyrie. She towers over most of the hermits, and between her height, wings, and blazing sword she’s quite intimidating. Despite this, she’s still very sweet, and would never seriously hurt her friends on purpose, but enemies are a whole different story.

Hypno at first seems totally human, but he actually comes from a world full of magic, each person having their own individual ability. Hypno’s ability is to absorb/ cancel out magic, which means that no magic can affect him, and he can also choose to stop any magic by touching the target of the magic. This got him exiled from his world, but he found a new family in the hermits. Because he isn’t affected by magic, he can see through Xisuma’s disguise, but he just assumes that he sees the same thing as everyone else. He hangs out with Beef when he needs comfort because he knows Beef can’t accidentally hurt him.

Jevin is,, slime. Not a minecraft slime, he’s just a pile of sentient slime held together by magic. (Necromancy? probably) Hypno likes to mess with him by touching small parts of him and disrupting the magic so a chunk of his arm falls off. Scar then has to fix it, but it’s still funny.

Keralis has the power of hypnotizing people by looking into his eyes. (Nothing but his eyes) He of course uses this power for mischief, although nothing actually bad. Usually uses it to ‘convince’ people to buy a book or seven. He also sometimes does it on accident, in which case he drops them off at Scar’s until they snap out of it. Team ZIT keeps asking him to hypnotize X so he’ll reveal his true form, but Keralis doesn’t want to force him to reveal that, plus he finds their attempts at figuring it out entertaining.

XB is an unfortunately forgetful selkie, and most of his visits to Scar are because he lost his coat in one of his shulker boxes again. On one memorable occasion he arrived in a panic after losing his coat again, and Scar had to spend about 5 minutes trying to suppress his laughter enough to tell XB that it was on him.

TFC doesn’t have magical crises, much to Scar’s relief. He’s just a humble earthbender living in the mines, occasionally coming out to the village to ask Scar for a crystal to help his back pain, or to give the poor man an afternoon of peace. In fact, Scar turns the tables by asking TFC for magical help with terraforming, which he’s glad to offer in exchange for all that Scar does for everyone.

Wels is a bard, which makes his sea shanties even more powerful than they already are. When Hermitgang came out, a hole was blown in the G team base, much to the surprise of everyone inside at that moment. Hels is also a bard, but he prefers rock music over sea shanties. Diabolical was an actual magical duel, and it probably looked sick as hell.

Bonus: Jellie is secretly a powerful eldritch being, and is the only one with magic that can affect Hypno. It’s a good thing she’s interested in getting pets and treats rather than destroying the server, because she probably could. She casually hops between worlds whenever Scar isn’t around, going on delightful little adventures. Scar takes quite a while to figure this out, and loses his shit when he does. When she got struck by lightning, she just turned up totally fine the next day and Scar didn’t question it too much.

I’d like to thank the discord for helping with ideas, ya’ll are so creative and i appreciate you all <3 ( @skywillsometimeswrite @bigbadantianti @justletmeplayminecraft @badtimeswithscar @aceacebaby12345 @litabattoir @icewolfstar @burntmagicc @dicerxll @dioritegang @cut-the-string @anntonka @shadeswift99

[femmefoxbeast]

I’ve been thinking a lot about body positivity and self-image and how to deal with that as a trans man.

This is a long post. The rest is under a read more because of this. It’s a bit rambling too. I’m just working through my thoughts.

CW: surgery mention, abuse mention, unhealthy eating/thoughts about eating mention, lots of discussion of social beauty ideals and how people are treated poorly for not meeting them. Nothing graphic though.

The pressure to transition into an ‘ideal man’

So - in September I had top surgery. It was definitely the right decision and (combined with starting testosterone in July 2019) it’s had a huge positive impact on my mental health. I look at myself in the mirror and finally see myself looking back. I feel like life is full of possibility at the moment. It’s pretty great honestly.

Here’s the thing - I’m chubby - I was in an abusive family situation for a while and ended up with some food issues which resulted in me losing a fair bit of weight and then putting a bunch back on.

Because I’m a bigger guy I’ve got dog-ears (excess skin and fat) at the ends of my top surgery scars. I feel mostly okay about them and am not planning to get a surgical revision. But I feel weirdly guilty about being okay with them.

I feel like there’s this pressure and expectation that if I want to look like a man (and I do because that’s what I am) then I should look like society’s ideal of a man. People seem to think I should want to be thin and muscular and to have a sharp jawline and just the right amount of body hair.

But to be honest I don’t want that. And I feel guilty about not wanting that.

I have a lot of conflicting feelings about this - on one hand, I have this feeling that I’m doing something wrong or wasting my transition somehow? Logically I know those thoughts aren’t mine - I know that this external pressure I’ve experienced has put these thoughts into my head. But the idea has bedded itself surprisingly deep into my brain so I haven’t been able to get rid of the nagging voice going ‘you’re doing it wrong’.

On the other hand, I’m pretty repulsed by this expectation that I should conform even more strictly to societal beauty standards because I’m trans. I shouldn’t have to thin, I shouldn’t have to work out unless I feel like it, I shouldn’t have to try and look cis. I want to look like a man yes. But I want to look like a queer trans man because that’s what I am and if I look like a cis dude then I’ll start seeing a stranger when I look in the mirror again.

It doesn’t help that the pressure to conform isn’t just interpersonal but structural - for example, trans people often have to be below a certain BMI to access surgery on the NHS and even in some private hospitals. Because of this, every time I’ve had to interact with the clinic that prescribes my hormones they’ve made some pretty yikes remarks about my weight.

I still remember, in our first meeting, how the person assessing me commented that if I could lose some weight then I’d be very handsome due to being fairly tall and broad-shouldered for a trans guy. It made me feel like they saw me as an object that could be shaped and moulded into whatever they wanted - into a symbol of their mastery over medicine.

It was dehumanising as hell.

Femininity, fatness and autism

Being overweight and a man who is slowly starting to present in a more authentically femme manner is interesting.

It makes me feel like some kind of horrible pervert a lot of the time.

I think we’ve got this image of a fat, effeminate, creepy dude so embedded in our collective consciousness that it’s poisoning my self-image a little. It doesn’t help that this collective caricature has a lot of autistic traits and well - I’m autistic.

It sucks because I try very hard to be respectful and non-creepy. I don’t think other people perceive me that way, from what I can tell.

But my brain keeps insisting that if I wore a dress or lipstick or high heels then I’ll transform into some Silence of the Lambs-type figure.

So I’ve been restricting myself to just painting my nails and wearing necklaces sometimes.

But I don’t want to do that any more. I want to be myself as hard and joyfully and authentically as I can all of the time. I feel like I’ve spent so long repressing myself - first because I was in the closet about being queer and trans and then because I was trying my hardest to pass due to not being about to handle social and physical dysphoria at the same time.

I guess it’s something I need to work through... but I’m not going to give up and hide away again. I won’t do that.

Transandrophobia

The other thing I’ve been thinking a lot about is how the sex characteristics primarily associated with men - for example, facial and body hair - are seen in a negative light. Largely in social justice spaces and communities but in the wider world to some extent also.

In social justice spaces, there is a lot of fear and dislike of maleness and masculinity. I can understand why but it doesn’t make it any easier to deal with as a man who is marginalised due to his gender. I don’t feel very safe or comfortable outside of these spaces but it’s often a pretty tough experience to exist in them too.

This dislike of male things extends to physical traits that are seen as male also. Even in supposedly trans-inclusive spaces, I’ve seen this vocal repulsion to things like body hair and facial hair. Disgust towards traits like this is harmful to pretty much everyone who doesn’t fit cis, perisex, white beauty standards.

People who express this disgust in trans inclusive spaces often seem to think that their words will only hurt white, straight, able-bodied, perisex cis men and that it’s therefore fine.

However, I don’t think it’s okay to talk about cis guy’s bodies like that - for one because it’s just a mean thing to do and for two because even if you want to go out of your way to hurt cis men’s feelings then there’s still no way for you to prevent unintended collateral damage if you say horrible things about someone else’s body in a public place.

So if it’s wrong to make comments like that towards relatively privileged people then it’s very, very wrong to say such things about the bodies of trans people, intersex people and people of colour.

Another factor that harms trans men and other transmasculine people specifically is how people tend to react towards our bodies at varying times during medical transitioning. People (especially cis women) tend to react very positively towards us having feminine physical features - being soft and hairless and pretty-looking. Then we receive backlash if we choose to transition - we run into this idea that we’re “ruining” our “precious, sacred, feminine bodies”.

This nasty, entitled rhetoric tends to crop up strongest among TERFs but I’ve come across less explicit, less obviously transphobic variations in trans inclusive communities also.

This demonisation of “male” traits messed with my head when my hormones started to take effect. I was really happy to feel my dysphoria decreasing but at the same time, I had to come to terms with looking well, ugly. At least - ugly according to the spaces and communities I am a part of.

[purplesurveys]

924

Do you have a taste in your mouth right now? What of? Just the faint taste of coffee since I have a cup at the moment but haven’t drunk from it in the last few minutes. Which is your least favourite day of the week? I’ve lost the concept of the days of the week for a few months now, man. Back when we used to do things, though, I hated Sundays as I felt loneliest on that day. It was always an automatic thing too so I had little control over it. If told to clean the house, would you be more inclined to clean one room really well or clean all of the rooms with hardly any effort? Clean all rooms with maximum effort. I’d be really bugged if I didn’t strive to be perfect with the whole place lol. Do you put glue on the object you're sticking down or on the paper? Object, so that the amount of glue I’m putting would be accurate. What was your last dream about? I don’t remember the details anymore but at the very least, I know it was very vivid since I remembered it throughout the morning. I’ve been having very detailed dreams lately – it’s the depression for sure. 

What is your favourite part of the last movie you watched? Haven’t seen a movie in a while but the last thing I watched in full was The Crown; Vanessa Kirby as Princess Margaret really shone through in the last episode I saw. Have you stuck any stickers to the computer you're using? I put all my stickers onto my laptop case but not the laptop itself. I haven’t had the case on for a while now though, since I’m always just at home now. Do you ever write or talk to yourself in your head when you're bored? Yes or when I’m feeling upset, as long as I’m alone. I’ve found that talking to myself is a healthy way to address and deal with my emotions. What interests you the most about other people? What I find interesting always varies. I have friends who I find interesting for their music tastes; some others for their knowledge of random trivia; some for their jobs, etc. It’s always different. Do you ever take random pictures out of boredom? What of? Not really. If I take photos it’s because I want to remember a moment or because I find something cute or funny. Basically anything that elicits a strong emotion out of me, I’m bound to take a picture of. Do you prefer listening to things through headphones or speakers? Headphones. How many siblings do you have? Do you get on with them? I have two siblings. I only get along with my sister; I have not talked to my brother since last year and have no desire to again. Would you rather live in a log cabin or a brick house? Mmm I’d take the brick house. Log cabin would be nice for a quick getaway, but I wouldn’t want it to be my permanent home. There’s a psychological factor in there and I just think that staying in a log cabin would make me feel suffocated eventually, haha. Do you have a calendar up for this year? I have a ‘Job Applications’ calendar that I’m currently monitoring, and it tracks the applications I’ve sent out to different companies and how long I’ve been waiting for a response from each of them. Really needing some positive vibes and energy since I actually just got my first rejection notice today. Other than that this year has been pretty fucking boring and there’s been little need to keep an active calendar. What was the very first CD you bought? The first CD I remember asking my parents to buy for me was like the High School Musical official soundtrack. I was big on Disney as a kid and wasn’t a big fan of any solo acts or bands up until I was around 10. Do you keep things like old train tickets, etc? Yessssssss. Do you like your smile? Why (not)? I like it; I find my smile friendly and warm. I just hate smiling with my teeth at the present since one of my front teeth protrudes. Can’t wait to get braces again. Would you rather be able to sing or dance? Why? Dance. Dancers are super hot, lmao. What was your favourite colour when you were a kid? Do you still like it? It was purple/violet and it was mostly influenced by my great-grandma who lovedddd the color and had it everywhere in her home. When she passed away, my love for the color slowly faded away and I don’t think too much of it now. Have you ever said 'lol' in real life? Haha yeah sometimes. I pronounce it as ‘lohl’ and never ‘el oh el’ though. Do you like your friend's parents? I like most of their parents, though I’m aware that some have abusive tendencies. Most of the parents are super nice, though. JM’s mom cooked a big lunch for us once and his dad buys like four party-sized boxes of pizza every time we come over, Angela’s parents treat me like their own kid, Gab’s mom constantly tells me she loves me...it’s in the little things. How many times have you moved? I can remember just the two times, but I know that we moved several times more when I was an infant. Have you ever refused to try a certain food? Which? Most stuff with fruits, hah. Sometimes it’s unavoidable, like when a sushi roll has mango or if I’m having banoffee pie, but I almost always refuse a meal with some kind of fruit in it. What's your favourite type of soup? Not really big on soup. I just like miso. Very occasionally I’ll have mushroom soup too. What is your favourite candle scent? I don’t buy candles nor do I know people who regularly get them, so I’m not very familiar with the different scents. Does the sight of blood make you feel ill? In real life, it would. I always have to look away whenever Gabie gets a nosebleed ha. But I have no problem watching bloody wrestling matches and I actually enjoy the bloodier ones. Super weird quirk of mine. What do you call it when you're sick anyways? (Sick, ill, not well, etc) If I’m referring to a fever I call it sick/ill/not feeling well. If I feel like throwing up I say I’m getting dizzy/need to vomit. I’ve never referred to puking as ‘getting sick,’ and it took me a very long time to realize that it was a common American saying, haha. Did you ever really believe in the tooth fairy? I did, and I felt super betrayed when I put my tooth under my pillow only to see it again the next morning. If you had to appear in a movie, which genre would you choose? Coming of age. What do you do with unwanted gifts? I keep them, since I still appreciate the effort of the gift-giver. Are there any clothes you haven't worn in ages, that you've suddenly started wearing again? HAHA yes. There will be rare instances where I get to go out and I always take the time to look stylish as all fuck, even though I’m only running an errand and wearing flashier pieces would be so unnecessary. I just miss dressing up and looking cute, man. Do any keys on your keyboard stick? Like, if they’re sticky? No. Would you rather own a laptop or a computer? Laptop. Love it when things are portable. Do you think you'll look at old photos of yourself and be embarrassed? My teenage years are definitely bad especially with regard to my fashion choices lol, but so are everyone else’s so I’m not super embarrassed. I cringe at the photos but I wouldn’t mind if my friends poked fun at them because chances are I’d join in too. What was the worst hairstyle you ever had? I always hated it whenever my mom took me to the salon to have my hair rebonded. That kind of look has never worked with my face shape and so I usually did everything for my hair to start curling up quicker and go back to its original form. Do you like t-shirts with sayings on them? Why (not)? Not really. It’s just not a personal preference. I like plain or slightly printed pieces. Do you click on the adverts at the side of the screen? No. Have you ever coughed and sneezed at the same time? I’m sure it’s happened before. Are you embarrassed to show people your ID photo? Nah. Whatever dude. Have / would you ever become a cheerleader? I haven’t, but I would have loved to. We don’t have a cheerleading club or varsity in my old school though so I was never able to hone my skills, if ever. What's the longest you've gone without eating? Maybe a little more than 24 hours. What is one of your biggest irrational fears? Commercials airing at night. I find jingles and graphic effects unsettling by a certain hour lol. What comes up when you press Ctrl + V? “I reeeeally miss seeing you and your purple things and seeing you give glares to people who deserve it. what a lodi <333” omg aw. It’s Jane’s birthday today and I copied that bit of my greeting to move it to another paragraph so that my message would flow better. Out of the bands you listen to, were most of them around before or after you were born? After. When did you last jump out of fright? I don’t remember. Are you currently waiting on something? What? For a company to take me in. Does time pass slowly or quickly when you're on the internet? Usually it’s quickly, but now that I feel more and more useless around the house, time’s been more slow and for the first time the distractions of the internet haven’t been working. What about when you're at school / work? Depended on the amount of stuff I had to do and whether I’m enthusiastic about them or not. Does the thought of being pregnant gross you out? The thought of giving birth does, but not pregnancy. What was the last thing you made with your hands? I mean I made myself a cup of coffee tonight, but the coffee mix itself was already pre-packaged. I just mixed it with hot water. Are you good at making shadow puppets? I’d say no. Are you more hungry or thirsty right now? Neither. I’ve been so anxious and depressed these days I’m actually skipping every single meal except dinner, and even then I eat very little. I don’t even do it on purpose; my anxiety has simply stopped me from feeling hungry. No idea what the weighing scale’s gonna tell me the next time I check, sigh. Someone hire me plz. God it really sucks being a fresh grad in this current state of the world. Are you prone to headaches? No. They only come out during hectic schedules and stressful weeks. Do you forget things easily? The little and everyday things, like forgetting my school ID at home or where I placed my keys. But I don’t forget things that are more bigger-picture, like birthdays or faces or memories. Do you enjoy going out to dinner? I enjoy it and I terribly miss being able to do it. Would you ever go on a cruise ship holiday? I would and I have. Lots of fun. Would do again and again. What's your favourite sea animal? Dolphins and whales. Do you get coughs or colds more? Coughs.

[direquail]

An NB reading of Grace in Terminator: Dark Fate

Disclaimer:

Before I start, just want to get this out here: I’m in no way insisting that Grace *has* to be non-binary, that we’re *supposed* to read her as non-binary, or that that’s in any way what she’s “meant to be”. This is just some stuff I’ve noticed that, as someone who sits on the genderqueer/non-binary/transmasc side of things, really resonated with me. Again--read her as entirely woman-identified if that’s what you want to do or feels right to you. I am ecstatic that lesbians and wlw-identified folks have someone that they feel represented in, too. I wish I’d had more characters like her when I was growing up and felt so out of place because of my gender non-conformity. 


But I, for one, would love a non-binary or even trans reading of Grace.

So what I’d like to do instead is just lay out a couple ways someone who is NB-identified *might* connect with Grace as a nonbinary character. Starting with the obvious.

Androgyny Now, I do want to be clear that I know that gender presentation =\= gender identity. And again, obviously, people will latch onto things that they relate to in characters, and I really do believe that there’s no “one right way” to read a character. The character of Grace isn’t a real person; she’s part of a story, told by people, who had something specific to say, and her character reflects that. But from the perspective of the people who watch her, who internalize and connect with her character, there can be points of connection that have nothing to do with the author’s/creator’s intent, and so, Grace-the-character can be many things to many people. The only real way to know how a person IDs is to ask them. That’s it, that’s all. You can’t assume. But also, sometimes, people do “ping” a certain way. They give off a sort of “energy”, and for me, Grace’s energy isn’t the sort of “diaphanous femininity” that even visibly-gender-nonconforming AFAB characters are often framed to exude. Grace’s energy isn’t masculine, either. Her mannerisms don’t seem intended to read that way; rather, they seem intended to read as soldier. I’m not very skilled at breaking down movements, especially when it comes to how actors move and what it all means. It’s totally possible that a lot of what’s unique about how Grace moves is because Mackenzie Davis is, self-admittedly, not the most athletically-inclined person. Grace is long-limbed and rangy and sometimes very stiff/poised, but never stiff through the hips like a Straight Dude(TM), or heavy through the shoulders like a musclebound meathead. She takes up space, too; she’s taller than Dani and Sarah both, and the only recurring characters who are “bigger” than her throughout most of the film are Carl and the Rev-9.

To be clear: Women can be tall, and rangy, and androgynous, and take up space, and that doesn’t make them less women--unless they don’t identify that way. My point with all of the above is just observing that Grace doesn’t move like a “male action hero”—but she also doesn’t seem over-the-top feminine in the way that mainstream-y media will “compensate” for perceived unfemininity, and that’s kind of wonderful. Her stature, her physique, all of that, seem to be chosen and calibrated towards an end goal that isn’t gendered: Combat, efficacy as a warrior. Whether you want to read her as a woman or as nonbinary is largely going to be about your personal preference. This also has the effect of giving the impression that Grace is absolutely unselfconscious about her body and how it looks—and she has no reason to be, not because she looks good or bad, but because what she can do with her body is just so vastly more important, and because she’s so willing to put her body and everything it can do on the line in order to fulfill her mission (and protect Dani). If Grace has a gender, it’d be “Protector” or “Warrior”. And in a way, what makes Grace so appealing to female-identified lesbians is the same thing that makes her appealing to NB people—Her character was explicitly designed not to cater to “the male gaze”, and therefore, she also exists outside the typical gendered confines reserved for “female characters” in media. The emphasis is just slightly different: Instead of a different way of being female, NB!Grace has little to no use for those categories at all. Again, it’s all in how you want to read her. Grace comes from a future where survival and fighting take first priority, and you could project the same tired “Gender isn’t a ~problem~ in the future/after the world ends” approach that a lot of cis and hetero men take to sci-fi--but also, why? It’s tired. Give me a Grace who is preoccupied with survival, yes, who maybe doesn’t have time to think too much about this gender shit--but also, a Grace who finds that this “androgyny” (although she might not call it that) suits her, who takes to this way of moving and being in the world, this way of using her body, and identifies more with that than with being a “man” or a “woman”. 


(Sidenote: as someone who took a fair amount of Queer Studies classes, it does irk me a bit that discussions of mainstream-y speculative media seem permanently suspended between this sort of “genderblind” futurism where “identities” just don’t exist because they’re apparently not needed anymore, or copy-pasting our contemporary discourses about identity into a future that is materially very different than ours. The point of these identities is, in part, to describe our experiences, the good as well as the bad, and those experiences of gender and sexuality don’t exist in a vacuum. So, the words we use will necessarily change to accommodate that—especially in the post-apocalypse. BUT, everything that comes after us will also bear the stamp of what came before it; it’s just a matter of what the creator means to emphasize.) Augments & Body Mods This is a little dicey, because there’s some clear tension in the movie between the idea of robots = inhuman/unfeeling = bad, and humans = good/feeling. And in that light, it’s potentially problematic to (even incidentally) imply that nonbinary/gender-nonconforming = not human.

But I’d like to point out that the film does deliberately challenge any neat separation of “human” and “machine” with Carl’s evolution as a person. 
And based on what I’ve read from James Cameron and Tim Miller interviews, there is some “blurring” intended between human and machine in the franchise.

In fact, Carl and Grace are foils for each other, somewhat, in the sense that they’re on opposite ends of a spectrum where human and machine become blurred, and I love that. As a genderqueer person with a very fluid experience, it appeals to me on a deep level because you could spend literally forever breaking down where does one “gender” end and another begin--emotionally, socially, spiritually, and physically.  


So the fact that there’s (1) no hard binary between human and machine (it’s explicitly subverted), and (2) we’re given multiple points of inflection, especially if you count Sarah and the Rev-9--alleviates a lot of the tension I’d feel otherwise in mentioning this. But I don’t think this is something that should be allegorical or a direct comparison; I think that it operates best on a metaphorical or theoretical level. 


And just, it’s the whole vaguely-cyberpunk idea of modifying your own body, not in a mass-produced or manufactured sense, but in this organic and highly individual sense, born out of contingency and necessity, that makes Grace’s Augments so meaningful. It’s one of the things that makes her read as human, too, because it feels more in line with our tendency to stick ink, steel, bone, what have you, through our skins whenever we get the chance--as opposed to some kind of symbolic dehumanization by “becoming a machine”.

Grace routinely refuses to categorize herself in anything other than the most general terms, or explain the details of her Augments, and she seems very protective of them. Rather than seeming ashamed, this refusal reads a lot like the popular queer identity explanation “not gay as in happy, but queer as in “fuck you’”. Her Augments are part of her, and part of her humanity; she volunteered for them, she owns them, and is even protective of them, viewing CBP’s invasive examination of her Augments as a kind of violation of her bodily autonomy. They’re clearly complicated for her, but they’re anything but depersonalized.

And going even further, the reason why she volunteered for them is so that she can defend humanity--and also someone she loves (Dani). They’re an extension of her sense of family, loyalty, love, and willingness to sacrifice.

And I don’t know for sure, but I imagine that Grace is basically one-of-a-kind, even among other Augments, if only because those Augmentations seem to be performed with the tech that’s on hand--salvaged Legion tech, by the sound of it, at least to start with. So the outcome depends on the parts available, the complexity and maturity of the Augmentation technology and process, and the skill & experience of the surgeons, all of which would vary over time. 


And honestly? If that doesn’t qualify as “beyond the binary”, I don’t know what does.

Some other general observations:

- Grace’s short hair is a constant throughout the post-Judgement Day scenes. As someone who started wearing their hair short as a preteen and hasn’t had hair to my shoulders since age 12, that does seem significant.

- Grace only introduces herself by name after Diego shouts “HEY LADY” in the factory before dropping an engine block on the Rev-9. Granted, most women don’t like to be addressed as “HEY LADY”, either, but it stood out to me, especially because she refused to give her name only a couple of minutes before that. Either way you read it, the line feels like it expresses some level of discomfort with or objection to that gendered statement. Maybe she finds that particular reference annoying or even offensive, but also, maybe she doesn’t really identify as a woman. She’s just... Grace.

- there were multiple times I mistook the back of her tank top for the back of a binder, even though she clearly was not binding.

- she constantly steals mens’ clothes--partly because she’s too tall for a lot of womens’ clothes around her, partly out of utility (like at the factory and CBP, where a lot of the guards are men). But also, it pleases the genderfucking queer in me quite a bit. And, I should note, when she had the option to take a female guard’s clothes at the CBP facility... she didn’t.

But ultimately, when I look at Grace, I see someone whose gender is “Warrior” or “Soldier”. And it’s so wonderful to see that so purely represented on a character we’re meant to perceive as female. So, please believe me when I say I don’t want to “take away” what Grace means for other people. 
And, for the record, I do mostly default to using she/her pronouns for Grace, because that’s how she’s canonically referred to. But just for fun--try this on for size: Using “they/them” pronouns for Grace. They (Grace) came back in time to protect Dani. It rolls off the tongue, right? It feels nice. Let’s re-try a couple of sentences from above: 


- “multiple times I mistook the back of their tank top for the back of a binder, even though they clearly weren’t binding” 


- “Grace’s Augments are about their ability to be a soldier. They were Augmented in order to hunt Terminators... Everything else is secondary to that, and their mission to protect Dani”

- “Grace only introduces themself by name after Diego shouts “HEY LADY” in the factory before dropping an engine block on the Rev-9 ... Maybe they find that particular reference annoying or even offensive, but also, maybe they don’t really identify as a woman. They’re just... Grace.”

And finally: 


Can you imagine the poor sod who tried to make fun of Grace for having a “girly” name? lmao rip

[rockindragonz]

Theory and Practice

Words: 4554

Summary: Indrid draws a future that forces him to confront the feelings he's been slowly developing for everyone's favorite regular ass dude.  AKA 5 times Indrid saw the future vs the 1 time he didn't

Ao3

Time is funny for people who can see the future.  Even if Indrid couldn’t see exactly what was going to happen, he could still see the possible outcomes of any given situation.  This always put him one step ahead in theory, but two steps behind in reality.  While everyone else was living in the present, he was living 3 seconds ahead, so he missed out on the spontaneous things people would sometimes do.  It was probably that spontaneity that drew him so magnetically to Duck Newton.

The man was peculiar in more ways than one.  His face was soft, but aged beyond his years.  His eyes were bright, but constantly exhausted.  His body was strong, but his bones cracked and popped with nearly every movement.  Most importantly though, despite the destiny Minerva had nicely laid out in front of him, Duck refused it and fought against it as much as he could.  He purposely tried to do the unexpected things, the spontaneous things, that made Indrid have to scrap all of his drawings and start over.  Normally, this would have been a nuisance, but he found himself drawn to the chaos that Duck created.  Whenever Duck was in the room, Indrid found himself anticipating the things he would say, the paths he would take, the new ones he would create.  Sometimes, of course, Duck did the expected thing.  Sometimes he did his “chosen duty” of saving people, but he and his companions always found a different way of making things interesting.

That is why Indrid finds himself where he is: with a single lonely drawing of an odd future.  A drawing of him kissing Duck Newton.

“Indrid, man, are you still there?” Duck said, and he sounded worried. It was their usual chatting time right now.  Indrid knew that whenever he went quiet for too long, Duck would grow concerned over the possible futures running through his head.  “Hey, uh, listen, I can call back later if now's a bad time.”

Indrid coughed in what he hoped was a convincing way.  “I'm okay, sorry Duck, just, um, choking on air, a possible future caught me off guard,” he said as smoothly as he could, “Nothing to worry about.”

“You sure?  You freaked me out for a sec there.”  Duck's voice was concerned, almost afraid in a weird way.  Indrid was certain his mind was conjuring up all sorts of possible reasons one of Indrid's visions would cause him to choke briefly.

“Yes I'm sure, it's not a big deal, just a… surprising future is all.”

“Oooookay man… I trust you.  Just let me know ASAP if anything changes,” Duck said.  

There was a brief lull in the conversation as Indrid carefully considered his next action.  These visions weren’t completely new; there were a few futures where Indrid and Duck kissed at their first meeting, and even a miniscule amount where more happened. But those visions were usually so insignificant that Indrid paid them no mind. The mere fact that he drew that timeline meant that there were enough iterations of it that he might have to plan for it.  Indrid shook his head as he suddenly realized that he was still on the phone, and laughed quietly.

“You are full of surprises, Duck Newton, absolutely full of surprises,” Indrid said into the phone.

Duck shuffled around on the other end. “Well, uh, is that uh, a good thing?”

“Yes, it brings variety to my life, so thank you,” Indrid smiled, “It gets rather boring knowing everything that will happen.  You frequently send us down unlikely paths and force me to rethink everything, and to be honest I thoroughly enjoy it.”

“You’re, uh, you’re welcome, I guess?  I don’t know, Indrid, I just don’t wanna be stuck in a box, you know?  I— I’m multidimensional man!  I have feelings and shit!” Duck said, his voice raising in pitch slightly.  Indrid chuckled as he looked down at the paper with an unfamiliar fondness.  As Duck rambled, the future in front of Indrid became slightly more likely, and Indrid found himself wanting this vision to come true.  And as soon as that clicked, Indrid knew he was irrevocably fucked.

*

The drawing had taken up permanent residence on the wall, even if that specific moment had passed.  It was odd for Indrid to keep such a drawing; usually he threw them out as soon as they were no longer relevant, but something kept him attached to this one.  He wasn’t sure if it was the nature of the drawing, or if it was because of who it was with, or even if it was because it was simply such an odd future that Indrid just couldn’t seem to let go of it.

Duck was set to come by the Winnebago later to talk about the most recent developments regarding Billy and the abomination— sorry, bom-bom. The drawing was carefully stowed away in one of Indrid’s many journals and stashed under his bed.  He understood the underside of a bed to be where all humans kept their more private items.  That or a bedside table, but this drawing wasn’t something Indrid would need offhand.

Usually, Duck didn’t get the chance to knock, but Indrid was distracted with drawing other possible futures, so he simply let Duck knock and told him that the door was open.  As Duck pushed the door open, new and rather… interesting futures appeared with varying levels of appropriateness.  Indrid cleared his throat and forced himself not to focus on one of the more explicit ones.

“Hey man, thanks for letting me come over, I just needed to, I dunno, talk through some shit with you without the other two cracking jokes about it,” Duck said, rubbing the back of his neck.

“That’s quite alright, Duck, please sit down, would you like some nog?”

“Uh, yeah, sure, fuck it,” Duck laughed nervously.

 As soon as those words left Duck’s mouth, more of the futures Indrid was enjoying popped up, and he smiled a little bit.

“You never cease to surprise me, Duck,” Indrid said. “So what is it you wished to ask me?”  

He placed a cup of eggnog in front of Duck and sat opposite him at the small table in his camper.  It was nothing special, just a typical plastic table with a bench that was just a little bit too small.  Indrid smiled as he watched Duck fiddle with the cup. He seemed to be trying to find the right words.

“How do you - how do you deal with seeing the future?  How do you know which ones’ll come true?” Duck said.  Ah, so they were in this timeline then.

Indrid leaned casually on the table. “Well, you’ve seen my drawings, obviously, and you’ve seen me at work.  Typically, it starts with an event that creates ripples.  A person will say or do something seemingly insignificant, but it will affect every single future to come.  That being said, sometimes there are multiple futures that can branch off of one incident, but those futures are whittled down by other factors.  Things as small as the temperature outside, the wind levels, whether someone sneezes or doesn’t.”  He paused.  “My best outlet is my drawings and my knowledge that worst-case scenarios are just that— worst case.  Disaster scenarios are always present— floods, earthquakes, tornadoes, even something as dramatic as a meteor but these futures are so unlikely that—”

“Sorry, did you say meteor?” Duck interrupted.

“I did, but even as you asked that, that situation became less likely,” Indrid said with a knowing smile.  Duck’s cheeks grew red as he continued to listen and he took a small sip of his eggnog.  “But those futures are already so unlikely to happen that I try not to worry too much about them.  It isn’t worth concerning myself over an almost impossible future, doing that would be maddening.  And there are some less dramatic examples, like ones where I have relations with others that I have to ignore so that I don’t affect those outcomes.”

“But what if one of those situations were to become more likely?  What would you do then?” Duck asked.

“I would have to warn my friends and family that already know of my abilities to avoid another… incident.”

“Shit, man, I’m sorry, that was real rude of me,” Duck said, face burning crimson again.

“Pay it no mind,” Indrid said with a dismissive wave. “What’s done is done.  I may be able to see the future, but I cannot change the past.”  

There was silence for a moment as Duck considered his next words carefully.  Indrid smiled patiently, but he reached for a pencil and sketchbook he kept handy if a future popped up that demanded recording.  He drew idly as he waited for Duck to speak.

Duck finally spoke, “Hey so, this is gonna - this’ll sound awful strange Indrid, but I, uh, I’m… Chosen.  I get these visions where I see— I see disasters and I see issues I need to fix and it has been drivin’ me insane.”  

Indrid ceased drawing as Duck started talking.  Suddenly, he was flooded with an array of new futures.  In simply telling Indrid of his status as a Chosen, Duck created new timelines, many of which featured the two of them together.

“I see,” Indrid said simply, “Er, my apologies for my short response, many futures have just been deleted from existence and many new ones just popped up.  It’s rather… overwhelming.  That doesn’t happen often, Duck.”

“Oh shit, man, I’m sorry, shit,” Duck said, reaching out to Indrid almost reflexively.

“As I said before, pay it no mind.  These things happen,” Indrid said.  The wave of futures was calming down, and his mind was once again a dull roar of possible outcomes.  He scrapped the drawing he had been working on, and pushed the pad and pencil aside.  There were too many variables in the upcoming futures for him to truly see which ones he needed to record.  “Duck, being Chosen is something very...special.  I have known since we met what you are, but I have very little details on it due to you not truly understanding it either, am I correct?”

“Yeah, yeah, I ain’t got shit,” Duck said.  A small laugh bubbled up through Indrid as Duck spoke.

“I figured as much.  Being Chosen isn’t easy - it is never easy to be special, but you are doing a wonderful job, Duck.  You do what must be done and you truly care for the wellbeing of others. Even for someone such as myself, who could have been a temporary aid.”

“Indrid, man, you know you’re more than just a tool, right?”  Duck said, “As useful as havin’ you around has been, that's not all you’re good for.  You’re funny, and clever, and altogether a really great guy.  Despite how you act, you care about Earth.  For fuck’s sake, you called us to warn us about Leo.  And the runaway train!”

For a moment, Indrid was in shock.  No one in all the years he had lived had ever said anything so kind to him.  And this man, this ridiculous Chosen man, who had known him for less than a month, was shouting his praises.  It was… unusual, to say the least.

“Look, Indrid, I… I should go, but I meant what I said.  You aren’t just a fuckin’ pawn or some shit, you’re our - well, you’re our friend.”  And then Duck stood up from the table and left.  And Indrid was left staring at his wall of drawings.  And he was left with a decision.

*

It wasn’t often that Indrid put himself in harm’s way on purpose.  He usually tried his damndest to avoid conflict in any situation, but this was different for him.  He allowed the goat man to take him hostage and beat him within an inch of his life.  Mainly because he knew that the Pine Guard would save him eventually, but also because he knew that Duck needed to see that he would only get in the way.  Since Duck had visited him last, Indrid had reflected on the visions he’d been having.

He realized that he was affecting the future, changing it to better fit his own desires.  If there were two paths, one leading to Duck and the other leading away from him, Indrid would take the path that led to Duck.  At first, he didn’t even notice it.  He would see himself tapping three times instead of four and would stop himself at three without paying it any mind.  When he finally realized what he had been doing, he forced himself to stop. But going against a future already set in motion was an insurmountable task, even for him.  There was no telling how his new choices could affect the future. So Indrid simply tried to stop caring.

That’s why he was telling himself that getting captured was important.  He was positive that if Duck were to see him weak and afraid and in pain, he would turn away, run even, like everyone always had.  Then there was, of course, the added variable of Duck probably being forced to see Indrid’s true form and be horrified once again.

And, while Indrid would never admit it, there were far too many futures where Duck was horribly injured when Indrid wasn’t there versus the few when Indrid was.

So when Indrid saw Duck burst through the clearing, wielding his sword and positively terrified, he was positive that this would be the last straw for him.

But it wasn’t.

Duck freed him from the chains, or he tried to at least, and in doing so he damaged his Chosen weapon, a feat that Indrid knew was difficult unless the Chosen really wanted to.  When Duck punched him to get the glasses off, Indrid didn’t see fear of him in his eyes as he became “The Mothman”, he saw fear for him as Duck urged him to run.  So, like Indrid did best, like he always had, he ran.

*

Indrid couldn’t bring himself to leave Kepler, despite that being the best option for everyone involved.  There were many futures where he left and went somewhere far away where none of them would be able to find him, but he once again ignored those futures and stayed put in his greasy Winnebago.

When Duck and the Pine Guard finally defeated the Bom-Bom, it was already dark out.  Indrid had enchanted another item for him to wear - an old necklace he kept hidden away - and was waiting with baited breath for Duck to arrive.  Indrid knew he would come and insist on giving him the glasses back, but Indrid couldn’t take them, or else it could lead to some of the more serious futures.  It was frustrating having to avoid a future he wanted, but he needed Duck to make the decision.

“Hey, Indrid, I’m-I’m here.  I brought your glasses back, but the gang doesn’t know I’m doing this, so let’s keep it on the DL?”  Duck pushed the door to the Winnebago open slowly and looked around the small camper.  Indrid was sitting on his couch, head in his hands, as he saw the futures swimming through his mind.  The punch Duck had delivered had been solid, but the time he had spent unconscious when the goat-man had taken him was the time that was only just now flooding back to him.

“Shit, Indrid, are you okay?”  Duck rushed over, seemingly forgetting the reason he had come, and he knelt in front of Indrid.  Indrid peeked at Duck, and saw a look of concern he was unfamiliar with.

“Too much.  Just a moment,” he spoke.  Duck simply nodded and made himself more comfortable beside Indrid on the small couch.  He bounced his leg anxiously as Indrid attempted to collect himself.  His whole body seemed to be vibrating with… something neither of them could quite put their finger on.  “Alright.”

“You feel better now?”

“Yes, I am fine now.  My apologies, I saw that you were coming and had to rush to enchant this new item so I may not look exactly as you remember.”  It was true.  Indrid’s form was similar, but there were certain things about him that were different. He was slightly closer to Duck’s height now, and his hair was quite a bit cleaner and shorter than it was before.  The most noticeable difference, however, was that he was much broader than before, so the camper felt a little smaller.

“It’s fine, I’m just glad you’re okay.  You know,” Duck started, and then paused to bite his lip as if he were contemplating his next words, “you know, I was… worried you would be gone by the time I got here.  I practically flew here, I ran so goddamn fast, never run that fast in my life.”

“I appreciate your concern, Duck, but I am quite alright.  I… figured you’d be coming by so I stayed put to see what you had to say,” he said.  The lie slipped so easily across his tongue, but it tasted like poison.  Indrid knew that he’d only stayed because he was selfish and wanted one last chance to see one of those futures through.

“I’m glad you stayed,” Duck said.  His face lit up and he sat up a little straighter.  “I-I-I mean the Pine Guard is glad, you were real helpful and, uh, yeah you’re a good dude and shit.”  Indrid laughed.  Duck had no idea how wrong he was.

“I put myself in harm’s way,” he said, “How is that helpful?”

“You kept them distracted.  You must have known what would happen with the goat-man and how it would change shit for us.  Because of you, they were distracted.”

“Yes, I make a good distraction, don’t I?”

“That’s not what I meant and you know it,” Duck said.  His voice was deep and loud, and his eyes narrowed at Indrid.  “What I meant to say was thank you.  I’m sorry I punched you, but I’m glad you are okay.  Sorry I yelled, but you have a thick skull for someone who knows what'll happen.”

“I can't help it,” Indrid said with a small, satisfied smile, “I like seeing you all riled up.”  He was teasing, of course he was teasing, but his words held some truth.  Seeing Duck so fiercely protective made something inside Indrid just kind of smile.

*

A couple days after the bom-bom was beaten, the door to Indrid's Winnebago slammed against the wall as Duck burst inside.  Indrid had been expecting the action, but it caused him to jump nonetheless.

“Duck?  Is everyone alright?”

“Indrid, man, I-I'm - I think I'm broken,” Duck said, voice wavering, “I'm not - 'm not tough!  I'm not fast or special, I'm just Duck fuckin’ Newton now.  I'm helpless, for fuck's sake I asked a gigantic fuckin’ magical cat for a fuckin’ helmet because I am scared shitless.  I have never felt so fuckin’ vulnerable in my life, Indrid.  What the hell am I supposed to do?”  He was pacing about the camper with his hands running through his hair.

Indrid was unsure of what to do at this point, so he took a breath and considered his words carefully. “Duck, I am sorry this has happened to you.  This is far more than even I could have predicted.  This is a path that seemed so unlikely I gave it no thought.”  

It was the truth, not the whole truth, but the truth.  Indrid hadn't paid it much mind because it seemed like a disaster scenario, but he'd dwelled on this event longer than the others because of his personal feelings for Duck.  

“I am sorry, Duck Newton, I am truly sorry.  What you do now is entirely up to you.  I see… futures where you are injured and I see futures where you prevail without a scratch, but Duck?”  Indrid paused, looking at Duck and biting his lip, unsure of if he should say what he was about to say, but he took a deep breath and spoke, “You are still Chosen. Losing your powers doesn't change that you were Chosen out of billions of people to protect Kepler.  You will have to be more careful now, so you don't wind up dead, but so long as you aren’t careless, you’re going to be amazing.”  

Indrid felt his heart pull painfully as he took in Duck's full appearance.  There were purple bags under his eyes, new wrinkles had formed on his forehead, his shirt was half untucked. Really, he just looked like absolute hell.

“Indrid?  You really think all that?” Duck looked up at him.

“Oh Duck, of course I do,” Indrid said, voice betraying something slightly softer than what he’d meant to say.  Duck smiled at him and Indrid felt his heart soar.  Life was difficult knowing everything that could happen, but Duck made things a little easier to bear.

The two of them talked for hours about life, the universe, and everything.  Duck ranted about the expectations that came with being Chosen, Indrid reminded him that he was the one holding himself to those impossible standards.  Indrid talked briefly about the more explicit futures he would see, and Duck laughed. The sound was music to Indrid’s ears.  Duck talked softly about his sister, June.  Indrid said that he’d love to meet her someday, to which Duck responded that it might be hard to explain his whole ‘Winnebago eggnog weirdness’ (Duck’s words, not his).

It was the happiest Indrid had ever been.

*

Indrid was exhausted.  The futures where Duck confessed to him had gotten more and more likely as the weeks went on.  They’d begun speaking more frequently, Duck came to the Winnebago more often, and Indrid had even visited Duck’s apartment once; he had the cutest cat that liked to curl up on Indrid’s lap.  His life was becoming more involved with the Pine Guard.  They’d tried to get him to come with them to the lodge a few times, but he refused, citing that he didn’t really fit in with the rest of the Sylphs.

Today was one of the days where Indrid was staring at the many drawings he’d made of the two of them, debating on whether he should act or not.  He’d honestly been waiting to see if Duck even wanted something like that in this timeline, but he was growing impatient.  Duck was a hard man to read.  He’d say one thing, but his eyes would say another.  He’d do one thing with certain motivations, but his actual motivations would be vastly different.  As always, Duck Newton was an enigma.

Lost in thought, Indrid almost ignored the ringing of his phone.

“Hello, Duck, how are you?”

“Good, good, I’m all good here.  Hey, listen, I’m headed over right now, I needa talk to you about some— some shit, is now good for you?  Or should I come later?  I can come later if that’s better, I ain’t got anything else to do.”

“Right now is fine, I’ll be busy drawing, so just come in when you arrive.”

“Gotcha, I’ll, uh, see you in a bit man.”  Before Indrid could say anything, Duck hung up the phone.  As he looked to the future, Indrid was surprised to see almost no futures where Duck ‘made a move’ as it were.  There was one, but it was highly unlikely, and would only be determined moments before it happened.  With a frown, Indrid studied the futures, looking as far ahead as his vision would allow, and he drew out various likely events and pinned them to his wall.  He didn’t know how much time had passed by the time Duck got there, but the door swung open slowly as Duck peered into the Winnebago.

“Ah, Duck, good to see you,” Indrid said, “please, take a set, feel free to get yourself some eggnog from the fridge.”

“Uh, yeah, nah, I’m good man, just uh— I’m good.”  He stood awkwardly near the door and bounced from one foot to the other, looking around the small home.  It had gotten significantly cleaner since Duck had started visiting, but it was a still barely organized.  The awkwardness Duck felt was coming off him in waves.

Indrid set his pencil down and turned to him with, what he hoped, was a reassuring smile. “What’s on your mind, Duck Newton?”

Duck fidgeted for a moment before looking up at Indrid, his eyebrows knitted.  “I, uh, I needed to ask about some stuff, like the next Abomination, ‘cause we’re gettin’ real close to the time frame, and we’re all gettin’ super nervous ‘n’ everything and so we just wanna, ya know, know?”

“Well, uh, that is still a little outside of my vision, but I will be sure to let you know what’s happening as soon as I know what’s happening.”

“Yeah, sure, I mean, of course,” Duck said.  He stood there, bouncing from foot to foot faster than before.

“Was there… something else you needed?”  Indrid stood up, trying to look as non-threatening as he possibly could in his tall, lanky, not-quite-human form.

“Well, yeah, shit— I-I— shit, ‘Drid, this is fuckin’ weird,” Duck laughed, rubbing the back of his neck and looking at the ground, “I just, well I just wanted to say thank you for everything in the last little while here.  It’s been— it’s been real rough without Minerva and without, you know, havin’ all my powers.  I’m just a regular ass dude now, and I have pains I never knew I had everywhere.  Shit, dude, I feel so much older.  But yeah, um, thank you for helpin’ me out and for listenin’ to me all the time.”

Indrid nodded, “Of course, Duck.  I know what you went through, maybe better than others on account of my own abilities, but I can never truly understand.  I try, Duck, and I’m glad I’ve helped, if even a little bit.”

“You’ve done more than a little bit,” Duck said, stepping closer, “you’ve— you’ve listened and you’ve cared— or at least acted like it— and you’re literally always home and willing to let me come over, even at two in the fuckin’ morning.”

Before he could stop himself, Indrid’s face softened as he looked at Duck and said, “I would do anything for you, Duck Newton.”  

As soon as the words left Indrid’s mouth, his eyes opened in slight shock.  He was not meant to say that out loud, not in any of the likely timelines anyways, and that could only mean—

Duck surged forward and pressed his lips to Indrid’s.  It was forceful, but soft at the same time.  Finally, finally, Indrid was experiencing what his visions had shown him, and it was much more overwhelming to feel everything rather than see it from an outsider’s view.  But it was so, so nice, and it just felt right.

Duck pulled back, suddenly all nerves and aware of himself, and held up his hands between them.  Indrid only laughed and shook his head, and then he pulled Duck back in.  This wonderful, perfect, strange enigma of a man was finally within his grasp and Indrid was never letting go.

And he knew he was fucked.

But he didn’t honestly give a shit.

[extemporaneousmusings]

ok first off you're object canyon post was really interesting!!! secondly it got me thinking about sappho and her fragments!! all those gaps + mis/interpretations and there is this thing anne carson has said about the fragments and the spaces they make + cultivate almost that is so beautiful and interesting, like the way the poem breaks &leads to a questioning, enticing lack: "There is the space where a thought would be, but which you can’t get hold of." [also i feel this way thru my whole life]

Thanks for this ask, Anna! Sorry I’m responding a bit late, Iwanted to do it justice. I also apologize in advance for how long this got.

I’m really glad, and also unsurprised that you thought ofSappho/Anne Carson’s treatment of her fragments. Sappho is the postergirl for fragments in a lot of ways, and Anne Carson’sflexible and creative treatment of them engenders this spotlight of attentionto the idea of a Fragment. That’s the eternal appeal of Sappho in some ways,that her work can resonate so deeply, while being so achingly, visiblyincomplete.

I think that this idea of fragments, especially as they mapon to our own attempts to understand humans in the past, extends way furtherthan people often recognize. Sticking with literature for a moment (before Imove to material culture, bc I’m me…) we can consider manuscript traditions asan entity in and of themselves. Sappho is glaring and obvious, in the gaps. Butevery ancient text that we inherit has holes, or has been miscopied ortranslated at some point in time. They’re cobbled together from scraps ofpapyrus, manuscript pages, quotations inside other works of literature, etc. I’mcertainly no lit. scholar, but every text that we get has been altered in someway, even if it appears more-or-less whole in its presentation. When you readancient texts in in their original language, sometimes you’ll have theadditional suggestions/words listed in the footnotes, so the text itself seemssmooth but belies its patchwork reality. Other time you’ll have a pair of thesedaggers ( † ) which indicate that despite theeditor’s best efforts, the words/phrase they surround are nonsensical orextremely fraught, with no obvious solution. (In my undergrad Latin courses we’dcall them the Daggers of Despair/Doom).

But beyond manuscript traditions, everyone’s understandingof words and language is individually contextual. You build up your personalunderstanding of words and language through the ways that you see words andphrases used, and the ways they make you feel. The connotations of individual wordscan be so deeply personal, and dependent on where and how you’veread/heard/seen them. This is all even further complicated when you are workingwith something in translation, or trying to translate something yourself! SometimesI’m truly surprised that humans are even able to communicate with each other atall. This is all fragmentary in a way, in the sense that even if a piece ofwriting is completely unaltered from its conception, to publishing, toconsumption, different people can and will conceive of it in different ways.

I’m sure at this point, that I’ve made my own inherentbiases and opinions clear, regarding the deep subjectivity of language andliterature. I think that, because of the place that language holds in society,people can often and easily forget how flexible and fragmentary it is. Whentrying to understand things about humans who lived in the Classical world, Ioften find my colleagues who work on literary and historical problems (thatdraw heavily from literature) stating, whether explicitly or implicitly, thattheir evidence is more whole, more clear to understand or interpret than mine,because somehow their understanding of language provides them with more, ordeeper knowledge than what can be derived from material culture.

Obviously I think this is bullshit. In my Object Canyon postI say at the end that we can never recover the full depth and extent of the visualimagery that the die cutters (people who made the coin designs) drew upon andutilized in their compositional processes. That’s true! I don’t think I’ll everbe able to understand the full context and connotations that shapes, images,and objects meant to people in the ancient world. But I also think that I can tryto approach an understanding.

To give an example, I am working on an assemblage right now froma cave that was probably used as a votive deposit for several centuries. Of the several hundred sherds of pottery from it, I will show you just one.

What the fuck is that, you may ask. Great question. What I’mabout to tell you is knowledge I’ve accumulated over years of touching, lookingat, and thinking about fragments. It’s a small piece of a specific type of drinkingcup, called a kylix. It was made in Athens, probably during the 6thcentury BC. (Honestly I can probably narrow it down to a couple of decades butthat’s kind of irrelevant).

The black pattern you see ‘painted’ on it is the splayedhand of a figure, most likely either a human or a satyr. The little bit of black glaze at the bottom left is probably the tip of a beard. I’ve included aparallel from the Met’s collection that isn’t perfect, but is the right shape(a mid 6th century band cup) with a processional scene. 

Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rogers Fund, 1917, 17.230.5

Here is a zoomed in detail of one of the figure’s hands, which is similar, although not exactly the same as on mine. (note my dude’s ithyphallic genitals, pls. it’s irrelevant to this conversation, I just love dicks on pots.)

Usually youget this splayed, outstretched hand motion when dealing with either drunken satyrs in a Dionysianprocession, or drunken humans in what’s called a “komos”. Even though thecomparanda I’ve provided is an intact vessel, it can still be considered a fragment, inthat I don’t know where it was found, how it was used, and other pieces ofinformation that compose the reality of an object’s existence.

Beyond what my fragment shows,which is in all likelihood an extremely common scene for Attic vase painting ofthe time period, what does it represent beyond that?

Well, it’s extremely high quality, in terms of clay andproduction. You obviously can’t tell this from the photograph, but it’s verythin, which is an indication of skill on the potter’s part. It was found in acave that lies on the outskirts of the traditional extent of Athenianterritory. Therefore, it had to travel, probably 2-3 days walk from where it wasmade to where it was ultimately found, and up a mountain as well, whichindicates further effort on the part of whomever deposited it. There’s evenfurther information about the sorts of people who had access to this sort ofpottery, etc. but I’m not gonna go it to that here bc this is getting reallylong…

Aside from being totally self-serving and gratuitous, what evenis the point in talking about this tiny sherd of pottery? As an archaeologist,pretty much everything I deal with is unquestionably fragmentary. The degreesto which things are broken, and their original identity is obscured variesgreatly, but regardless of the medium or material, the passage of time hasfragmented the past in some way, and that is reflected in what comes onto mystudy table in the summer, or the readings I do for class. But we can still derive remarkable amounts of information from those fragments, and string that information together to form comprehensive, compelling, and consuming narratives. 

We will never be able to fully reconstruct the past, andhonestly, we can never have a completely whole understanding of the presenteither, given the individual nature of the human experience. So, everythingthat we touch, see, or hear is in one way or another a fragment. Once you acknowledge, truly and deeply, thateverything you’re ever going to work with, or look at, is a fragment in someway, the better you will be able to analyze it, on its own terms, as well asour own.

That can be difficult and uncomfortable, for sure. But italso opens the scope for creativity, interpretation, and ingenuity as well. And that’s definitely the space and mindset that I try to apply, always, even though it is a constant struggle. 

[femslashrevolution]

Towards A Darker Femslash by holyfant

This post is part of Femslash Revolution’s I Am Femslash series, sharing voices of F/F creators from all walks of life. The views represented within are those of the author only.

Hello everyone! I hope your Femslash February is going great so far. I was stoked to be asked to write a little something for I Am Femslash, particularly because while I’ve written bits and pieces about my experience as a young, queer, multishipping and writing young woman in fandom, I’ve never really tried to put any of my thoughts together in a truly coherent way. So, here I go, attempting to write about a topic that is dear to me. Feel free to engage me on any of the points I make in this little essay!

So, hi. I’m holyfant, a 26-year-old ESL fanfic and (aspiring) original fiction writer. I’ve been active in fandom for nearly fifteen years, and have written fic for a lot of that time, picking up English and fannishness along the way. Writing fic gave me a way to connect with other people who had to same interests I did – and only later did I realise it also paved the way to more self-knowledge. At some point during my teens, the question of my own sexual and romantic identity became pressing; maybe paradoxically this first drew me to male slash, and only later to femslash – perhaps because the former was and is more visibly present in fandom than the latter, and perhaps also because reading and writing femslash was still too direct a way to engage with my own identity at that point. I still don’t fully understand this; I remember that when I was first playing with the idea that I might not be straight, it felt safer to read about men in love than women in love. Maybe seeing male characters discover their non-straightness was close enough to my own experience to stir up emotion and feeling, but far enough removed from it that it didn’t stir up panic. Who knows?

Either way, when I was more comfortable with who I was, I returned to f/f and found it infinitely rewarding. I read a metric ton of femslash fic and wrote lots myself – for a fairly long stretch of time I enjoyed deep obscurity in the Harry Potter and Greek mythology fandoms as a niche femslash writer with two or three loyal readers, and it was truly a lovely time. I engaged with femslash in a curious, non-discriminatory way – I shipped everyone. I’d take two minor female characters who perhaps had never even interacted in canon and found a way to put them together. I took prompts for characters that were only featured in throw-away lines, and wrote a lot of fic for the now sadly defunct LJ community hp_rarestpairest, which encouraged the nichest of pairings. Basically I was honing my writing skills, while also representing my questions, hopes and fears about my own sexuality at the same time. In my fics I dealt with women falling in love, being rejected, having sex with each other, coming out to their families and friends, dealing with heartbreak – all of these were things that I was thinking about, was experiencing or wanted to experience, or was scared of. I think it will surprise few queer femslash writers to hear that reading and writing femslash taught me a lot about my own identity and sexuality and gave me a community of queer women that I would otherwise never have found.

Despite the fact that I was mostly a femslash writer in my early times in fandom and the fact that I write f/f in my current fandoms today, it remains a curious truth that my growth as a writer from someone who wrote 1,000-word oneshots in one go to someone who wrote novel-length fanfic over several months coincided with going into a different fandom where my main focus was a m/m ship (BBC Sherlock, where I was sucked into the black hole that was Sherlock/John). I said I “shipped everyone” earlier – it would be just as correct to say I shipped no one, because I had no deep emotional investment in the ships I wrote about, and often wrote only one fic per ship. (Perhaps the only exception was Lavender/Parvati, which I wrote often and regularly gave me the warm fuzzies to think about.) It wasn’t until Sherlock happened that I started to understand what people meant when they said a ship was their OTP, or how people could get so intense about their reading of a relationship. As a result of this increased feeling of investment I read and wrote so much fic that I became a much better writer for it, by pushing myself to write more and more complex stories. This was all fine in itself, but even as it happened I was aware that it was curious that this sudden spur of feeling and craft was because of a juggernaut white dude ship, something that had never held much interest for me before. I felt – even at that heady time when you’re in a new fandom and it’s like being in love – like I wanted to continue to write smaller pairings and explore female characters, too. And I did, but the point remains that when I look at my story stats now, it’s clear that my f/f stories are shorter in word count and are less varied in their plot and execution than my m/m stories.

All this to show that I am 100% part of what I am about to describe: not a problem, per se, but an observation that I think is useful to be aware of and think about. The fact is that femslash, across fandoms, remains a niche category, and that while there are great amounts of people who read and write almost exclusively m/m this is barely ever the case for f/f. A lot of the f/f writers I know have talked at some point about the realisation that f/f in general seems to lack novel-length stories and stories that have the diversity of plotting and thematic exploration that we easily find for m/m ships. Most f/f stories are shorter stories or oneshots that focus on meet-cutes, sex and domestic bliss. Longer fics are rare. Darker themes, such as character death and grief, trauma, relationship issues, adultery, abuse and so on are also rare. I am not the first to notice this and not the first to theorise on it, but I would still like to identify why I think f/f fandom has developed in this direction, and to formulate some ideas as how to diversify our creative experiences a little.

I think there are a lot of possible reasons that f/f writers are in general less motivated to write long stories that explore complex themes, and these will surely differ for everyone. For me, I’ve identified three causes, in increasing order of importance: 1. a small audience, and therefore a smaller possibility of extensive feedback, 2. a lack of variation and complexity in female characters and their relationships in a lot of canon materials, and 3. the awareness that f/f is often rooted in a deeply lived experience for many of its readers and writers, and that it’s therefore necessary to be wary of representing “bad” female characters or negative tropes about lesbian and bisexual relationships. The most complex of these is certainly no. 3, which is why that’s the one I will be writing about a bit more.

Statistically f/f is most likely to be written and read by cis queer women, which of course influences our relationship with the characters we portray, because they refer to our own lived existence. This makes f/f different from m/m – m/m is also mostly written by cis women (straight and otherwise), which creates a certain leeway for “true” realism. Anecdotally I can share what happened when my housemate and my best friend, both cis gay men, delved into the world of m/m fanfic on some of my recommendations. While they enjoyed a lot of the stories I told them I’d liked, they also talked about many of the things they felt were inaccurate about gay sex and romance – for instance, they could name several often-described sexual acts that they said didn’t quite “work that way”, and they were generally uncomfortable with the fannish (certainly often problematic) tendency to label characters as strictly tops or bottoms, especially if this was based on stereotypical characteristics outside of the bedroom. If gay men were to write these stories (which they do, of course, only in much smaller numbers), they might look different – they might be less fictionalised, less genre-specific; the language developed to talk about men in love might be different, there might be different focuses. It’s hard to definitively say what it would be like. Either way, it would seem logical that it follows, from the fact that lesbian and bisexual women overwhelmingly write the fannish stories that we have about lesbian and bisexual women, that we should find it easy to access their spaces and write about many different aspects of their lives. In reality this doesn’t necessarily seem to be so. Perhaps the scrutiny, both internal and external, is larger – perhaps because we are writing about ourselves we put more pressure on ourselves to “get it right”, and perhaps our audience, who is looking to see itself represented, does the same at times. Or maybe we simply perceive our audience as being more critical than it truly is.

What is a “bad” female character? Most people will agree that women often get the short stick of characterisation in most media – to such an extent that there are tropey names for them, like the Girl Next Door, the Femme Fatale, the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, and so on. Women are still often used as crutches for men; their stories are supporting stories, their pain is used to further a male character’s pain. Writing about women in fanfic is often already a rebellious act in itself, one that reverses harsh or flippant treatment by canon writers. While this is fine in se, and sometimes even lends a pleasant sheen of fannish disobedience to writing female-centric fic, I do believe it has the unintended and unsavoury result of effectively also policing the sort of woman that can be written about. This may seem like a paradox, but in reacting to the one-dimensional representations of women in fiction it can become important to “fix” those wrongs, and this makes it hard to write about women who don’t overtly challenge assumptions about womanhood: unsympathetic women, women who are perhaps weak-willed, petty, bigoted, jealous, aggressive, criminal, highly sexual, or abusive. Considering that, at least in a Western vision on literature, stories derive meaning at their base from conflict, removing the option to write “bad” women removes a lot of possibility for thematic conflict. This might be part of the reason why there are significantly less plot-driven f/f stories than there plot-driven m/m stories; plot usually requires conflict, and conflict often requires flawed characters and flawed relationships.

I know that when I write about women I’m conscious of the fact that I have internalised societal ideas about what it “should” mean to be a woman, but I’m also aware that in trying to combat those ideas it’s easy to get mired in different ones. I know that I sometimes interrogate myself about what it is that I’m saying about women when I write about this particular woman cheating on her partner or being generally secretive and untruthful – doesn’t that reproduce a societal prejudice that women are untrustworthy? It’s very hard to separate a single performance of fictional womanhood from the general performance of womanhood – this is not usually a problem with (white) men, who are allowed to represent only themselves, and not their entire gender.

The above paragraphs talk about “women” – clearly the problem of treatment that I write about becomes many times more pressing when dealing with women who are on other intersections of oppression. Women who love women are more vulnerable to prejudice and abuse than straight women, and wlw of colour are again many times more vulnerable than their white sisters. And when these wlw or woc are not cisgender, again their situation becomes many times more dire. These societal realities are often reproduced in media – 2016 was the year in which no lesbian or bisexual woman on tv seemed to be safe, and their pain and deaths hurt all the more because we are confronted with this pain in real life, too. I remember my tumblr dash around the time that The 100’s Lexa died; the pain there for many queer women who watched the show was very real, because – I think – it echoed a feeling of being unsafe, of being cruelly treated in society. I remember fans writing about how hurtful it was to see a brave female character who loved another woman killed off like this; in their pain many people stated that it was unacceptable that lesbian or bisexual female characters should be killed in fiction at all. Of course, this was understandable considering how hurt fans were, and how often they had been disappointed – still, the typical fannish tendency towards lack of nuance frustrated me. In capable writers’ hands, tragedy can be performed very meaningfully. I wrote a little about this on my blog at the time, because I was starting to feel insecure about my own tendency to prefer darker thematic material – was I complicit in my own oppression, and was I hurting other queer women by writing what I enjoyed? Clearly my own privilege was also part of this question: I am a wlw, but I’m white and cisgender, and I hail from a country where legal equality has been realised for the entirety of my adult life. Obviously homophobia is still a problem, but my close environment has been nothing but supportive and accepting from the moment I first came out as lesbian at 16, and again as bisexual at 24. So I haven’t experienced much of the tension and fear that other wlw might have experienced. Does this make me a part of the oppressive machine that performs queer women’s pain for shock value? I seriously thought about this question before tentatively concluding that I had to have faith that I was a thoughtful enough writer to avoid these pitfalls.

It might seem from this essay that I find writing femslash to be an exhausting trial of constantly having to think about what prejudices I’m reproducing – this is not the case. I love writing femslash and I love my femslash-writing friends. I’ve learned heaps about myself and others by reading some of the stellar f/f stories out there, and with every f/f story I write I become more aware of how much I love to write about queer women – and I remind myself that I should certainly do it more often, and more ambitiously. As I stated above, this is something that I’ve noticed in my own writing practice, so it’s not an accusation leveled at anyone else. It’s simply something that I find worthwhile to examine. Judging by some of the conversation that periodically does the rounds in my f/f-loving circles, I’m definitely not alone in that.

Now how to deal with this in our f/f-writing community? There’s no singular answer to that, and whatever we can do is both blindingly obvious and hard to actually do. One of the possible answers is, as it is with so many complex questions that have complex roots, to simply push through and do it anyway, to try to ignore some of the fear and uncomfortable associations we might feel in writing unsympathetic f/f narratives and write them anyway. Diversifying the stories we write will automatically diversify the stories we feel we’re allowed to write. Audience response is probably important too; I think that there must be plenty of people who feel, like me, that it’s a shame that so much of femslash is short and that a lot of it focuses on narrative happiness rather than also exploring narrative unhappiness and conflict, which (in my opinion, at least) yields more fertile literature. And if we feel that way, then we have to try to reward people who write the things we like to read, through our attention, our comments, our kudos, our podcasts, our recs, et cetera.

I write this mere days before the beginning of Femslash February, and I’m certainly planning to walk the walk that I’ve talked in this talk; I’m absolutely sure that the strong core of people who love to read about women loving women will continue to keep this community vibrant and alive and that there are plenty of new directions our stories can go in. I’m looking forward to seeing what the other voices who are participating in I Am Femslash have to say, and I’m looking forward to all of the new content that will be produced. I’m grateful that as a young teen I stumbled upon fandom and that I found my way towards femslash a few years later; I’m pretty sure my own journey of discovery and creativity would have been very different, and probably more difficult, if I hadn’t found this community. So, to all of us: We Are Femslash! <3

About the author

holyfant is a 26-year-old bisexual woman from Belgium, who’s been writing about women and their relationships since she was a budding young wlw. She loves to think about literature and how it relates to the core of our human experiences: the only thing she really wants to be, in the end, is a storyteller.

Tumblr: http://holyant.tumblr.com

AO3: http://archiveofourown.org/users/holyfant

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PLAZA Interview

Your latest single Origami was initially featured on 2015 Mixtape, what made you pick that song to be released as a single and video?

Origami is a song that we felt had strong foundations to build upon when it came to recording new music. Although the song is a lil elderly, the reason behind re-recording and re-releasing the track was a subconscious reflection on progressing with our sound, it's one of the first songs we ever wrote as PLAZA but it was a song that we felt comfortable with altering and giving back to people in a newer form. Like an ugly little caterpillar that become a spooky butterfly.

The videos you've released so far definitely match the songs, weirdly intense affairs, Totem and Youth have strong nostalgic vibes to them - who are some of your inspirations for videos and the other visual content you guys put out there?

I'd love to tell you that we try to apply ourselves to notable directors and film makers but it would be a big fat smelly lie. The outcome of the videos we make, tends to be what ever vibe the song gives off and whatever pops into our head with the feel of the song in mind. (sounds lazy and "stoner-ish" I know) but primarily our visuals arise from our partnership with media guru and art extraordinaire Joe Spence, a good friend of ours from Hartlepool.

One thing everyone I've showed your music has said is that all the songs sound massive, there's definite hits - which song gets the best response from crowds?

Ha! That's lovely to hear man. Youth is always a firm favourite for people (I'm assuming) it's always a bit surreal hearing people you've never seen screaming the lyrics back at you. Older ones like "Fickle" usually seem to get a few people knocking out the funky chicken dance. I'm sure I seen a few people doing the macerena to Blood Orange the other week aswell.

What's been your favourite gig so far?

We played a massive sold out show at the Albert Hall in Manchester last year supporting RATBOY which was absolutely crazy. We all came off stage that night with not a clue what had just happened it was all very dream like. Shows closer to home are always a little hectic but there are too many of those too chose from.

I was giving a presentation on yourselves in December and my lecturers had a fun time with the genre description I gave - while creeping social media before that I think I saw a Tyler, The Creator 'Wolf' poster on someone's wall, would you say you guys grew up in quite varied households in terms of the music that gets played?

Haha! The Tyler poster is in our rehearsal room. We all love him!

Growing up I think we all had pretty similar musical upbringings. Myself, I grew up with parents that worshipped music, religiously bought new music weekly, I was practically bottle fed the likes of Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye by my Mam, my Dad got me into guitar music I think, probably by showing me Oasis or something, luckily I grew out of them! Swinnys Mam is a piano teacher and is probably the best player I've ever seen, his Dad is also a very gifted singer, which has resulted in Swinny being good at every instrument ever (even sitar). Brad and Matty, as far as I'm aware had quite positive musical relationships with their parents too. Neither have them have ever turned up to practice suggesting we cover All Rise by BLUE so I think we're safe.

What kind of stuff gets played in the van before you play live/run naked through the nearest Next?

Depends who's got the aux man!!! which can sometimes determine the mood we're all in before we arrive at our destination.

If I've got the aux you can expect smooth sailing, we've got Hall and Oates coming up next on 102.4 Will FM.

If Brad has it, you know you're in for a rough one, expect dark clouds and Joy Division.

If Matty has it you've got Queen on repeat.

And if Swinny gets hold of it, expect us to turn up baggy eyed and severely drained by any amount of drum and bass.

What's the most noticeable thing that's changed for the band since you started releasing songs?

Visually noticeable, we got more hair and less fashion sense.

In our sound, I think we've upped the intensity, make people say "woaaaaaah" instead of "ooooooo".

As a collective, (not to blow our own trumpet, but) I think transiting from being that weird band from Hartlepool to that band from Hartlepool who are actually doing alright was a significant change for us.

I got to go to Jamaica a couple years ago finding myself one day at the bar, then suddenly we were at the point that it was in everyone's best interests for a hotel receptionist to pitch up in a golf caddie to get me back to the room safely. Legend (the bartender called Face Net) has it I fell out after we caddied on past some women and the member of staff holding my carcass in place became distracted, leaving me at the feet of Dutch children. After reading about Bradley and William's rugby fun, when was the last time someone in the band had to be carried in similar circumstances?

Once again, I'd love to lie to you and say we all eat our broccoli and brush our teeth. But just like most 19/20 year olds we get painfully intoxicated and turn into spooky dudes (always AFTER we've played to any promoters reading this!!) We all get a little "turnt" after shows but nobody does it like Swinny. After a little run of dates this year we found ourselves a bit drunk in Manchester and he somehow took on the persona of a gameshow host, I only made to the second round of his allotted challenges. God help the person who ever makes it to the final.

Is there anyone you're dying to meet aside from Bradley getting Chris Brown sorted out once and for all?

Aye his beef with breezy is getting a little out of hand, brads very protective over Rihanna. It's said that "rude boi" is actually written about brad. between the 4 of us I'm gunna make a collective decision and say that David Attenborough is the man we all want to meet, he is the most amazing human and I want him to be my grandad.

When can the people start to look out for a full length release?

We have an EP out in April. The material for the debut LP is there, we're just waiting till we feel the world is ready. (deep)

Answers by Will Hamilton, bassist in PLAZA.

The band have a tour in April, buy tickets here.