#love Wen for Li Ming

[celestial-sapphicss]

i'm thinking about Moonlight Chicken again (because of course I am) and how the show surprisingly excels at writing teenagers. in particular Li Ming and Heart's journey towards their careers and future.

i've noticed this a lot around me, when I was 16-17 and now noticing the same in kids who are in the last years of school life and have to decide what they want to do going forward. it's that whenever kids try to show an interest in a career choice that is something other than what their parents think is acceptable or is the safest choice, the kids are always met with a certain level of harshness and scepticism.

and like for the most part, I don't blame them. we live in a fucking capitalistic hell scape. so parents wanting their kids to have a stable stable career is not an unrealistic hope. but when they impose that want on their kids (if not directly, but in subtle indirect way subconsciously) it fucks up with the mindset of the kid a lot.

for example, a kid would want to do economics or animation or whatever, but their parents have set their minds set on engineering degrees because thats apparently the best for them, so instead of what should be a discussion turns into an interrogation about how, what, when and why about the course and its career prospects. and it's really unfair to a kid who is just 16-17 to be grilled on the spot like that instead of being given an open ear and help to figure out the future possibilities.

it really discourages the kid, especially when they're not able to answer all the questions in all that tension and harshness and it sets somewhere in the mind. I've seen so many kids just give up on their interest and go with what their parents decided because its easier that way and sometimes kids are simply not strong enough to put their foot down and figure out everything on their own.

the same happens with Li Ming. when he was figuring out what he actually wanted to do in the future, going to America, and shares that with Jim after his insistence, Li Ming is faced with the same aggressive reaction by Jim where he expects Li Ming to have researched everything about it before even thinking about the possibility of going through with it. again i don't completely blame Jim because situations of course.

but thankfully, Li Ming finds that support in Wen who actually sits by his side and actually has a conversation with him about what he wants to do, even if briefly, and helps him figure out future possible options by talking to the work and travel agent and I am pretty sure it made such a huge impact on Li Ming's confidence and life

and when he had that kind of support, he obviously could extend that support to Heart as well. they searched everything about where they wanted to go, what school they wanted to go to, and what would be their courses, etc. and had the confidence to convince Heart's parents as well.

Wen's smallest contribution and involvement in Li Ming's life has such a huge impact, and even more so when we include his conversations with Jim about it. I am always thinking about how Wen is one of the most influential figures in Li Ming's life and I will die on this hill.

[bevioletskies]

gemini & fourth (in every universe) ↳ heart/li ming vs. tinn/gun vs. kongthap/atom + selfies

"Let’s take some photos to remind us of our first date."

[casualavocados]

When he saw me, he was startled and dropped the bottle. So I placed the food on the counter and left. That’s all there is to it. You should have told me about it first. What would I do that for? I did nothing wrong.

Fourth Nattawat as LI MING and Earth Pirapat as JIM in MOONLIGHT CHICKEN (2023) dir. Backaof Nopparnach Chaiwimol

[soujux]

jim to li ming: ik you're friends but you need to set Boundaries

wen: i didn't know where else to go 🥺

also jim:

[gunsatthaphan]

ngl when wen and jim are sitting in the car and wen wants to bring li ming to the shrine so jim says "you should ask him so he'll actually say yes" ... I was like *sobs* that's their SON just a peak parenting moment, and a tiny detail that I loved so much

ngl I'm highkey obsessed with the idea of jim and wen co-parenting lmao and wen has already adopted li ming and heart in his mind anyway so he's definitely ready to be a dad lmao.

xxx

[earthyorangeaid]

I think Moonlight Chicken is doing a really good job with their characterizations in general but SPECIFICALLY the relationship between Uncle Jim and Li Ming.

Uncle Jim is this nearly 40 year old parent/guardian who’s doing a terrible job, not for lack of trying, at being a part of his 17/18 year old sons/nephews life. Its the struggle between a child who thinks they’re an adult already, and an adult who knows they aren’t yet and doesn’t know how to balance letting them TRY being an adult, and when to treat them like the child they still are. It’s extremely realistic and awkward and sort of heart aching to watch.

On top of this, the way Uncle Jim and Li Ming act when other people are within THEIR bubble is also very realistic to their personalities. Uncle Jim seems sort of traditionally minded. Yes he has a strong support system with friends who are like family, but there’s a difference for him between that and FAMILY family. FAMILY is at home, family is Li Ming.

There’s a huge difference between people outside of the home (especially Wen) seeing Uncle Jim and Li Ming’s relationship, and people inside the home seeing it. I think Uncle Jim looks extremely uncomfortable at first having someone witness just how hard of a time he’s having with Li Ming. It’s in his private space, his family space, and he isn’t ready for Wen to be a part of that family yet. Luckily for Uncle Jim, Wen isn’t in a rush to make himself family, even though he’s pretty clearly showing that if that option were out on the table he wouldn’t say no.

Meanwhile Li Ming’s not afraid of sharing his frustration with his uncle with whoever asks about it. That being said he’s still picky about expressing how he struggles with school. I think he and Uncle Jim are both being overprotective about their most important problem at the moment. They’re not so dissimilar when you look at to that way, even in terms of their found family. Li Ming is picking and choosing who he likes and trusts with his personal life, and in a way building on top of the family his Uncle built before him by trusting Wen and Heart with his problems and affection respectively.

[essentiallykpopandbl]

Oh no, Moonlight Chicken is so good. I feel a lot of me yelling into the void coming with this show. It is so pretty. Like seriously, this show is really pretty to look at. Li Ming and Heart are going to own my heart. Wen is going to break my heart into so many pieces. Why does Mix's acting keep getting better each show? I'm super worried for how unhealthy Wen and Alan's relationship will be. Why is everyone so sad and lonely? I have a feeling I'm not going to survive this experience unharmed.

[killiru]

Brother, Brah, Brudi, Man, just watched the new episode of MLC and seriously, that blowjob (see below and no i dont know why i added the picutre.) must have meant a lot to Jim if he turned Gaipa down so harshly for Wen. (yes I know he technically didn't do it for him but…you know…. for the joke.)

On the other hand, the blowjob was probably not good enough to remind him that homophobia sucks.

[jolselin]

the thing about the main cast of moonlight chicken is that while the show is nominally centered around jim you could also make six different shows focused on each of the characters (so the hypothetical jim show would be even more about jim and a bit less about, for example, li ming) and they would all be great and interesting. i've just been thinking that if i had been given just one additional episode of mlc i would love to see a fuller picture of alan and wen's relationship and how wen fell out of love and then i thought i would watch a show told entirely through wen's perspective and with more of his background and then of course i thought i would even more gladly watch the alan show with both his backstory and the continuation of his storyline past the end of the original show (the alangaipa spinoff we deserve) and then i thought we saw even less of gaipa, in a way, so that would also deserve more spotlight, and finally there's so much to know about heart from the keyboard in his room to him learning sign language (we have to assume all by himself?) and to him finding community among deaf/hard of hearing people of pattaya and then of course to his university adventures in rochester. and as for li ming well one just has to check the tag to see that like half the audience either would rather watch the li ming show or treats the original as the li ming show.

so mlc could really be any of these shows but instead it's kind of like a little bit of everything with the focus on jim but not as much as if it were mainly a jim show. the trade-off is that you actually get so many wonderful characters and stories coming together in one show and isn't that great

[malepresentingleg]

Wen is seriously pissing me off with his hypocrisy. On the one hand, he's complaining about how he already told Alan off so why does he keep insisting? But on the other hand, he keeps insisting with Jim after Jim refused him!!!

And Alan does actually have grounds to want closure after a 5 year long relationship that Wen suddenly ended (there's nuance and Alan does seem aggressive so idk), whereas Jim and Wen had a one-night stand where Jim EXPLICITLY told him IN ADVANCE that nothing else will come of it.

[stuffnonsenseandotherthings]

I think something I love about Moonlight Chicken is that you get three different generations of LGBTQ characters sharing the same space and you can see, through the subtleties of their interactions and their outlooks, the events and perspectives that have shaped them and how much (and how little) the world has changed.

You have Jim, nearing 40 and clearly shaped by countless people (including his loved ones) not welcoming who he is and who he loves and who believed, to a certain extent, that it was "normal" for people to think that way, who accepts himself but still has difficulty with what it means to be gay in the wider world.

Then you have Wen, 10 years younger and proud and open and comfortable with who he is and his place in the world. He knows all the lingo, he seems like a little bit of an activist (if his taste in decor is to be believed) and he's used to having discussions around sexuality and social norms.

Finally, Li Ming, even younger still and so comfortable in himself that he doesn't particularly feel the need to explore or explain his sexuality and his attraction to Heart, he just embraces it as another part of what makes him him and leaves the nail biting and the questions to other people.

They literally show us the transition from "being LGBTQ is something I must live with" to "being LGBTQ is something I must fight for" to, finally "being LGBTQ is one of the many bits that is me" without ever saying it out loud.

It's genuinely such a beautiful piece of commentary and, in my eyes, it makes the show even more meaningful and beautiful.

[nemainofthewater]

Have you ever watched a love triangle and known with a bone deep certainty that no matter the final/offical pairing, they could solve so many problems by all getting together?

Alternately, has the drama got three protagonists and all of them have amazing chemistry with each other?

Do you just think it would be funny?

Instead of choosing between love interests, help to vote between OT3s!

Propaganda, examples, and write-ins are absolutely encouraged!

[blue-grama]

Aof Noppharnach, carelessness & living with yourself after the worst has happened

I'm doing a late-to-the-party catchup on Aof Noppharnach's work after falling in love with Moonlight Chicken, and this isn't a unique observation or anything, but I'm really in love with his preoccupation with how people pick up the pieces and move forward after the worst thing happens.

The conversation between Day and his dad about Night's guilt over putting Day in the position to get into his accident is in the same territory of what Tian is going through in A Tale of 1000 Stars. Neither Tian nor Night were directly responsible for what happened -- Aof doesn't seem to go in for cut-and-dried villians -- but they both feel culpable. And, most interestingly, both were simply careless. Neither meant for harm to come to anyone. If they'd been a little luckier, none would have. But they weren't and now they have to grapple with how to come back from that moment. For Jim, it's a little different. Jim wasn't careless, but he let Beam get on that ferry in the midst of a fight. Later, he regrets that choice, because if he'd insisted Beam stay and fight it out, Beam wouldn't have died -- another unfixable choice that, with better luck and more time, might have been fixed. (And another choice that lives in a gray area, because it wasn't fully Jim's choice. But in Beam's absence, who else can he blame?) Even Bad Buddy is about this in some ways - what Ming did to Pran's mom is the original wound that echoes down the generations. In that case, Ming doesn't make any attempt at amends, Dissaya can't let go, and the two families get stuck in a permanent feud. It takes a new generation to untwist that particular snarl.

And then there's the other theme that's pretty prominant in what I've seen of Aof's work so far, which is "I thought I had more time." Last Twilight's been deep into that theme, between Rung's suicide and Day's progressive loss of vision. It shows up in ATOTS with Tian granted new life after he stopped planning for the future, and it shows up in Moonlight Chicken's multiple stories of loss. In many ways, they're the same theme in different flavors. How do you move forward when something's unfixable? When the worst has happened and you can't erase it? When time is up? Ming and Dissaya dig in. Tian tries to live someone else's life. Jim walls himself off, becoming the person everyone leans on, but never becoming vulnerable to someone else. Day locks himself in his room. Night tries to be the big brother he should have been.

But life and Aof Nopparnach have a way of challenging those coping mechanisms. Tian has to make his own choices and find his own way forward. Jim has to open himself up to the possibility of happiness again because he can't actually be there for everyone without intimacy (see how Wen helps him understand Li Ming). Day has to come to terms with his new reality. As for Night, we'll see. Day is interpreting his efforts in the worst possible light, but that conversation with their Dad may have put a crack in the armor. Would getting Day's forgiveness help Night forgive himself? Can he forgive himself if Day never does?

It's never clear-cut and the struggle is always in both repairing connections to the community and reparing your own self-perception. In Aof's works, you've got to do the work to change, yes, but self-sacrifice isn't ever enough, nor is it effective: You've got to see yourself as forgivable, too.

[mikaela-the-slut-expert]

Hello,so i've been brainrotting about Pei ming genuinely falling in love with f!reader,but the reader always ignored him since he is known for using women for fun,but he just keeps trying so hard to win reader over and prove he's actually inlove with them. It would be great if you could write this in hcs,you can ignore this if you dont want to

I Have Standards

Pei Ming x F!reader

Do you know how long I had to search the gifs for him?

____________________________________

Pei Ming is a womanizer everyone knows that

But Pei Ming genuinely has found an interest in you. Truthfully!

You intrigue him, however you also ignore him

So he hasn't been able to get far in his affections

Most women don't ignore him like this you know?

Pei Ming has been chasing you around like a lost dog, trying to prove his love to you

He's tried to woo you, give you flowers, buy you expensive things, take you out

But no you ignore him gracefully as if he were your fan

This man is genuinely confused. Like??? Why is she ignoring me ugh I got to step up my game I guess

Doesn't realize it's because of his reputation until Ling Wen tells him

Which she only did, because he wouldn't stop bitching in her ear about how his lovely crush won't bat an eyelash at him.

She wishes you the best of luck

Now that he knows the problem lies within his reputation he doesn't know how to fix that. . .

How does one go back and fix the past?

Ling Wen tells him he's stupid and maybe he should try to clean up his act. Then you'll look at him.

So that's what he attempts to do.

He should've done that in the first place but like he's trying okay?

Pei Ming really isn't all that bad, he just needs to get you to actually talk to him now.

Asks Ling Wen how he's supposed to sit down with you and she sends him right to your door.

Ling Wen is probably the only reason you guys have a chance of being together because she paid you off to deal with him.

She's sick of it

You stay true to your word though and give him a chance to woo you.

You sit in your palace lounge with crossed legs.

You aren't expecting anything heart felt

However you sit with wide eyes when Pei Ming pours his heart out to you.

Pei Ming practiced this speech like several times.

"I know I don't have the best reputation with women, but if you could give me a chance I promise to treat you right and not throw you to the side like rumours say I would"

Etc, etc

Okay so you're woo'd

Do you know what time period it is? Especially as a women?

All men are too afraid of their feelings and some are too busy being gay with each other cough, cough Xie Lian.

It just doesn't leave a girl like you many options

But you do like Pei Ming you've just never told him because of the whole reputation thing

You've been quiet for a long time, Pei Ming almost thinks you're going to say no.

Very happy when you say yes!

Astounded when you say you'll castrate him if he does you wrong.

He'll accept that!

____________________________________

I hope I wasn't rambling 😞 but yip yip guys 🖤

[gege]

Hiii, how are you? I hope you are doing ok! <3 sending love and hugs. I wanted to ask you... i think i remember something about tgcf having live action adaptation. Was that real or was just a dream i had or something? If it's real do you know if we will have it or what happened to the project? Idk if my mind made that up! sorry and thanks :)

Hiii Anon!

No, it's not some mad collective fever dream we all had, they really did film it (6 months of shooting between July 2021 and January 2022). Native title is 吉星高照 (Ji Xing Gao Zhao) English title is Eternal Faith.

If we ever get to see it is another matter, i probably don't need to say the main reason is because it's a danmei adaptation - it'll have a harder time passing the censors than the average cdrama. Since the popularity of other dangais it seems the censors have become stricter in any case. Job one is always going to be passing the censors.

While checking chinese websites and articles I did find several sources of a rumour that the site security punched a girl who was visiting the set. I can't vouch for the reliability of this but anything that can potentially attract criticism can delay a cdrama release further. Other criticisms include the casting of the male leads, how cheap the set design and costuming look, and a cancelled actress who may have to remain uncredited.

So it will need to satisfy the censors in order to be relased, as well as satisfy the general public and tgcf fans to be worth releasing and I'm not sure if it can do it all. If all goes well and it does ever pass censorship, we won't get a release date in advance. I don't know if you've ever experienced waiting for a cdrama release but you will not get much warning when it airs. It will likey drop with a couple days warning in form of internet rumours, or just completely out of the blue.

HAVING SAID THAT - another rumour is that a full costume bl drama like the untamed will be released internationally in Sept 2024, bypassing a Chinese release. It's just a rumour but it does make this webpage very interesting! But please remember everything above and not get too excited just yet 😂.

I'm gonna share some set photos just because 😍

Zhai Xiaowen as Xie Lian

Zhang Linghe as Hua Cheng/San Lang/Crimson Rain Sought Flower

Chang Huasen as Shi Qingxuan/Wind Master & Tian Xuning as He Xuan/Ming Yi/Earth Master

Vin Zheng as Nan Feng & Li Fancheng as Fu Yao (+ bonus Wind Master)

Liu Lingzi as Xuan Ji

Liu Jinyan as Ling Wen & Wang Yueyi as Female Wind Master

Xiao Kaizhong as Feng Xin/Nan Yang & Cai Yao as Mu Qing/Xuan Zhen

Bian Tianyang as Qi Rong/Prince Xiao Jing/Green Ghost

Lu Yuxiao as Yushi Hung/Rain Master. She played Shangguan Qian in My Journey to You, but as she was fairly unknown at the time of filming jxgz so there are no photos to be found of her as Rain Master 😩.

Anyway, let's all quietly try to will this into existence with physic powers etc.

Thanks for sending me an ask, have a lovely day anon!

(∩^o^)⊃━☆

[wen-kexing-apologist]

Moonlight Chicken is For the Queers

Ok I started my rewatch of episode 8 and figured out what I want to talk about for this series' finale: intentions and resolutions. This post will be about intention, and how I truly feel that Moonlight Chicken is a gift for queer people. Why? Well, there are many reasons, but for the purposes of this post, I will simply present the following title card.

Moonlight Chicken, Chapter 8: The Self-made House and Home

(if you are expecting this post to be anything other than a jumbled mess of my personal experiences with no clear through-lines or relevant transitions between sentences, thoughts, etc. then turn back now)

Whatever we want to say boy loves started as, fetish or otherwise, queer people are still able to see themselves or get comfort and representation. But coming from watching literally 25 boy loves in the last four months, this show feels different from most (not all) of them, to me, because of how strongly this show centers around built community, rather than romance, as it's central theme.

And yeah while any standard friend group in BL could be considered community in the abstract, the idea that they are a community is never quite presented. It's Team taking food from Pharm and all three of the gang teasing each other, it's Kuea and Diao spending most of their time talking about their relationships, it's Porsche forgetting Pete exists because he's so caught up in Kinn. More often than not we are building towards and hoping for declarations of love between two characters. And do not get me wrong, that is all well and good, and always what I'm rooting for in those shows. And we get something akin to that in Moonlight Chicken too, which is when you finally have Li Ming and Jim calling Heart and Wen (respectively) their boyfriends.

But the "I love you" we get in Moonlight Chicken? That isn't between the couples, it's between Li Ming and Jim.

Because the thing that makes Moonlight Chicken different from other BLs is the emphasis it puts on queer elders raising queer youth. It's about queer youth learning from queer elders and queer elders learning from queer youth. It's about how home and birth families don't always fit quite right, and how you build families and homes despite. And it's applicable to many people, children in abusive homes, disabled people, etc. too. Which is why P'Aof adds strained parental relationships and deafness in to this piece. But because this is fundamentally a BL show, I'm viewing this more through a queer lens.

So naturally, this also means I am informing my analysis of this show through my feelings as the only (known/out/visible) queer person on either side of my family. When I was little, a decade or more before I realized I was queer, I asked my mother one night if I was adopted. I'm not, and I know that, but why did I ask? Because I never really felt like I fit. Not the way I was supposed to fit, not the way family was supposed to fit together. My house never felt like a home.

And it's why I love this exchange between Wen and Jim at the end of episode 2

"I want home," "Don't you already have one?" "I don't." "A person like me doesn't fit to be anyone's home,"

And technically we know this isn't true. Wen does have a home, he has a condo, he has a place to sleep. But emotionally is where the problem lies. Wen is living with his ex, the apartment is cold, he has work colleagues and a friend that he and his ex both know and that's it. And as he tells Jim in episode 7, all his friends are straight. And then he meets Jim, and there is a spark, and maybe it's possible for home to grow there.

Literally, physically, I have a home. I have a family. But the more I embrace my queerness, the more I understand and am comfortable with myself, the more isolating and cold that house and family feel. I'm such a different person now than I was, and there are homophobes and transphobes on both sides of my family, and that makes it hard for me to feel like I am loved. Even when logically I know I am. But it's hard, when your mother says she accepts you and has yet to use my pronouns properly despite me being out to her for over a year and having three separate conversations about it. When your uncle spends twenty minutes or more complaining about trans people, when your cousins don't think trans people should exist. That's my family...technically. That's my home...technically. But it hasn't felt like that in years. So I understand what Wen means here, Wen's definition of home is not a place it is a feeling.

And Jim? We know Jim is already everyone's home. He is home for Li Ming, he is the closest thing to a parent that Leng has in his life, he makes sure the community not only has food, but has as much as food as they could possibly eat. He is first and foremost a community caretaker. But he is so wrapped up in his grief about Beam, his self-hatred, his stubbornness, his exhaustion that he is not able to believe that about himself. Home is a place and not a feeling for Jim, because he can't allow it to be.

The key to Wen and Jim's relationship is finding and building that home.

Home, Family, Community. These are incredibly important themes to Moonlight Chicken and those themes are incredibly important aspects of being queer.

I don't know how Thailand is re: homophobia and transphobia, if kids risk the same chance of getting kicked out of their homes for being queer, etc. But that is a very real possibility for many queer people in the States. But I'm thinking of homelessness in queer youth, how 28% of queer youth have reported experiencing homelessness in their lives. I'm thinking of ballroom and ball culture and how participants in the Ballroom scene were parts of Houses with mothers and fathers at the head of them who acted as mentors to their queer children. When I think about queerness and what it means, I think about ballroom. I think about connection, I think about community.

But that community is often forged from necessity borne out of isolation. What do I mean by isolation? I mean the isolation that Li Ming feels in school, around his school friends. I mean the faces Li Ming makes when his friends are talking about girls:

I mean the physical barriers the show places between Li Ming and his school friends.

It is the isolation that comes with queerness, with poverty, with everything about Li Ming. Beyond the fact Wen is a little younger than Jim and thus better able to understand and see Li Ming's desires to be seen as an adult. I think it is this state of listlessness in Li Ming is also something Wen recognizes. I think at this point Li Ming is so desperate to get away, to go to America, to be listened to and respected by Jim.

Jim who is too caught up in constant stress to see the home he has built for himself, Li Ming who is too caught up in wanting to be understood to appreciate that he has a home to run from. Wen who is working as a go between for Li Ming and Jim because he wants them to be his home. Heart who has been trapped at home and found his freedom because Li Ming understands the frustration of misunderstanding, and the importance of community.

I'm thinking about how so much of the final episodes are dedicated to showing community, showing family, showing the audience that home lies in the collective.

We see it in how many people rush to help Mrs. Hong:

We see it in the people who help you carry your grief:

We see it in how deeply and broadly the pain is felt when community pillars are lost:

We see it in the end of and era:

We see it in the olive branches:

And in new beginnings:

Very few people in these shots are connected through blood, but they are a family. And when I look at these shots the only thing I can think about is how I felt the night I threw a party for all my trans friends. All I can think about when I see these shots of everyone sitting and eating together is how many times I would look over to my friends and see them beaming. How many times someone came up to me to excitedly say this is the first time they felt like they could fully be themselves. How everyone kept asking to do an event like this again. How everyone kept asking to be added to a group chat at the end of the night so they could keep in contact.

And I remember how it felt for me to realize that I had built a community for myself in a place that I have really been struggling to feel was home. Because I had spent so much time in school and work, barley able to scrape together enough money to cover expenses, exhausted and stressed and unable to see what I had sitting right in front of me.

And I think about other queer people I have met, who light up when they see someone else who is gay, who talk about how lonely they feel because they only have one other queer friend. How immediately the need to invite them out, to introduce them to people, to make sure they have community strikes.

I think about how I worked at a summer camp out of state, and got to try out my pronouns, and figure out who I was, and then a few months later, I had to return home. Where I wasn't out yet, where I was going to get misgendered, and how quickly I came out to all of my close friends about my gender identity to try to mitigate how much my mental health tanked when I had to be someone my parents thought I still was. How at the same camp, the queer kids flocked to all the queer staff, how desperate they were to bond. How much lighter they got to be when they were away from their parents and allowed to be themselves around people who also understood not only them as people with the identities they held, but also their struggles existing in a household that didn't see who they were.

I think about how, in the States at least, "are you family?" is/was used as code for "are you gay?"

It's why it is so important to me that Moonlight Chicken ends with the line: "I just built a home. I don't want to move anywhere."

Because Wen has finally built his home. Because he has found his family, his queer community, his home. And yeah, we get the romance, yeah we get Li Ming and Heart holding hands, and Jim and Wen making out, but the emphasis of the final episode is moving forward, being brave, allowing yourself to love, and allowing yourself to stop, look around, and realize that you've made a home for yourself that is built of the people you love who love you in return.

Community building is a huge part of life for literally everyone, but it vital to the survival of marginalized communities. And when I think about my own relationship to queerness, one of the most sacred and important aspects of being queer is building the family you need.