#lovely people in my inbox

[boy-gender]

To any USAmerican queer and trans person right now, I don't know if this will help, but please try to remember that there are queer and trans people living, surviving, and even thriving in countries where they have NEVER had rights. I live in a very religious and very conservative country and progress is slow, but it is happening. Same sex marriage has never been legal here in a way that the government will accept, but we have local governments who are at least starting to legalize medical and property rights for same sex partners. We have local governments supporting trans rights protections. We have more and more local celebrities and influencers who have braved the barrage of potential hate to live their truth and have found communities that support and uplift them.

People here have been fighting for a long time and are continuing to fight and celebrating any small progress that we achieve, even if the tides are against us. And do you know why? Because we have seen that it can be done! American media is so prolific here and we see people like us on our TV shows and movies and even news channels. Conservatives here love to blame "the Americans" for introducing "these types of thoughts" (aka just letting people fucking exist as they are) to our country. You guys did that. None of what you guys have now (as little as it is) would have happened if people in the past just laid down and gave up.

I have nothing to add. Thank you for caring about us enough to send this. It's the first and only thing that's comforted me this morning.

[spring-sage]

Are you still here ?what a pity !!!

Yep! Still here… :)

[glorious-spoon]

surprise self-rec time! pick 3 of your favorite things you’ve written and share them here, then put this in the inbox (anonymously or not) of your fellow writers to spread the positivity and help celebrate already written fics 🖤

ahhh thank you!! I've mostly been writing 9-1-1 lately, but I'll do a couple of different fandoms here just for fun.

For 9-1-1, I'll go with 'Ace of Hearts', which was a fic that was marinating for several months before I actually wrote it. I'm usually not that into misunderstandings as drama, but the poker date haunted me, and it was so fun to play with the different characters' perspectives on the same event.

Link: Ace of Hearts [9.6K words | Teen | Buddie] Summary: The poker game was a date. It takes Buck a while to catch on, though.

-

For Stranger Things, 'Star of the Masquerade', which is by far the most ambitious fic project I've ever attempted. I don't usually write long fic, and this one was logistically complicated for a variety of reasons - mostly because it's a time loop from the perspective of the person who's not aware of the loop. It took a long time to write and turned out almost exactly how I wanted it to.

Link: Star of the Masquerade [64.8K words | Mature | Steddie] Summary: Steve keeps living the day they fought Vecna over and over again, and Eddie keeps dying.

-

For IT, 'the sound of your feet upon the ground', which was one of the first things I wrote in that fandom. It's a mix of book-verse and movie-verse canon, and I had a lot of fun incorporating the horror and mythological elements here.

Link: the sound of your feet upon the ground [16.9K words | Teen | Reddie] Summary: After everything, Richie goes back into the tunnels to bring Eddie home.

[daniclaytcn]

re: your tags. I hope you dont really regret putting creative energy into 911 even though it let you down!!! even though it doesnt bring you joy now it did bring you joy at some point (presumably) so its always worth it even if it didnt end the way you wanted, I think. and even though you dont engage anymore there are still lots of people out there who will enjoy your gifs/fics/posts that you already made (me included. Your other ask was right time loop fic is still beautiful!!) anyway hope you are having a great day and school is going well etc ❤️✨

thank you so much, this is incredibly kind of you to say ��💖💖 i hope you have a great day as well!! 💖💖

[gaveyouigaveyoui]

received an amazing ask from @friendship-bracelets-anon on my main acct and wanted to share my response here to tag besties!

what if you got to go on your dream trip, literally anywhere in the world? what mutuals would you take with you?

so basically my dream trip with my mutuals would be one where each of us gets to pick somewhere we've always dreamed of going and we get to do it together like a whole big thing i hope that makes sense and is allowed lol and i want to take all of my beautiful mutuals.. i'll go with my loves @thingsiwishyousaid @somebodyelsescar @sruos @robinsparkles @margaetyrell @aslowmotionlovepotion @ilostyou @janesbennet @yourbarelytolerabledancepartner @stood-onthecliffside @actual-sleeping-beauty @tisthedamnseasns @butimnotseventeen

[mayangelsleadyouin]

(it’s question time with Julie!) Was math created or discovered? butterflies, bumble bees or dragon flies? Is fate a real thing?

i think.... both? we made it greater and pushed its boundaries but it was already there? idk i hate math so this question is hard for me lol. DRAGONFLIES!!!!!! yes, fate is real

[canonkiller]

asking for help can be done at any time, and it is free. you just have to let yourself accept it.

[ofwhitewolvesswansxpirates]

💐🌷spread the love to the people you’re glad you’ve found in this corner of the internet 💐

[hensunrik]

hey happy birthday!! you seem super cool and chill, hope you have a great day :)

thank you so much for the wishes anon!!! that's very sweet and thoughtful of you to send I hope you similarly go on to have an fantastic day 💞🥺

[mogwaei]

That missing Trespasser epilogue slide we never got from Solas' pov

[boy-gender]

How do you deal with guilt around being a man, and like generally feeling like you're "betraying women" or choosing to be something bad by transitioning? It's something I've really been struggling with..

I sort of have two answers for you.

The first is a bit glib, but I think you've got some bioessentialism to unlearn, anon. I know that it's probably not a belief you arrived at yourself- rather, a bunch of hateful radfem douschebags have so often repeatedly said shit like that, that you're a traitor, you're failing feminism, youre just trying to escape the patriarchy, you're mocking what women are, men are evil and youll become evil especially with testosterone. That kind of crap.

Genuinely I do not give it any thought. It's ridiculous on the surface, so I write it off as misguided and inane. There is no logical way to justify grouping an entire half of the population together, deciding that the one thing they have in common (being men) is somehow the defining trait about them (because nothing else is being taken into account, like their sexuality, ethnicity, trans or intersex status, poverty level, where they live, whatever) and then also deciding that one common trait is the root of all evil. I've personally had a lot of experience with people doing this with certain mental illnesses- particularly cluster B personality disorders- and deciding like "yes this one thing about you makes you evil. You have Evil Person Disorder," and seeing how stupid that was, I just applied it elsewhere. Humans are far too diverse, nuanced, and contradictory for any flat rule like "all X people are bad" to ever be accurate. If it's not accurate, it's not useful, so I don't judge myself by it. I literally just block the people spewing that shit and let it slide off like water on a duck. I have enough warped internalized beliefs from my upbringing- I'm not adding more when I can immediately and obviously see their flaws.

So my advice is to block anyone you see saying that shit. You might be beginning to internalize it because of just how often you see it- so you need to cut that off at the source. Radfems are not and never will be allies; they do not have "some good points." Their movement was specifically designed by conservatives to uphold white supremacist capitalism, and nothing that comes from that is ethically correct. I'd suggest picking up Mothers of Conservatism by Michelle Nickerson. A lot about the origins of the radfem/female separatism movements are detailed there, created by fundamentally conservative women. With this new 4B movement shit on the rise, it's helpful to understand how fucked up and wrong they've always been from the beginning. My second answer to you is to look at what manhood means to you. If you don't think you can be objective about this, ask a friend to help. List the traits you associate with what *you* personally want to be as a man, what you hope you transition towards. Do you want to be a financial provider? Do you want to defend your community? Do you want to be generous? Brave? Do you want to be an expert in a special interest? Do you want to make lots of friends?

Make a list of those traits. Then look at them, divorced from the idea of gender. Is being a financial provider "bad?" Is being generous bad? Or brave? Or having lots of friends? Are any of these things bad in isolation, or does your guilt about them come from their association with manhood? Is that /your/ association, or did other people cause you to think there is an association?

For me, I had two formative male relationships as a child. My father, and my maternal grandfather. My father was an abusive piece of shit who liked to pick me up by the throat and slam me into walls, threaten our pet cats, scream at me until I dissociated, called me slurs, hated my opinions on anything, belittled me, believed only in capitalism, is a social darwinist capitalist schill, hates my mom, treated me like a servant and punching bag, and is a miserable fuck with no friends.

My grandpa was an old man who loved scotland and tartan and scottish terriers even though he never had one, loved each of his cats which he had all the time. He collected coins and read about history, he made model planes. He watched judge judy with me and talked about the cases and if we agreed with her rulings; he watched the news from multiple different outlets a day and taught me to weigh them against one another. He loved sitting on the porch and watching neighborhood kids play, and he drank a lot of lemonade. He was a brilliant chemist, provider, raised 4 kids in near poverty, then raised 8 grandkids after that. He would sneak me chocolate malt balls as a "vitamin" and he would tease my grandma by pretending to pick up and lick his plate after dinner. He taught my uncle to garden who then taught my cousin, so all my life gardening has been "mens work" to me. He was soft spoken, curious, patient, and mischevious. He loved my grandma for 60 years until he died.

These men have nothing in common except that they were men. Being a man didnt make my grandpa evil because he chose not to be. Being a man didnt make my dad evil either; he's an evil fuck because he made that choice. They are both sentient beings, who can use logic and emotions alike. One chose poorly. It never made sense to me as a child to assume all men would be like my dad or like my grandpa, because they were both men and they weren't at all like each other. Some categories are just so broadly diverse that they aren't really helpful- if I ask you to picture a mammal, do I mean a monkey or a mouse? Does "sea creature" mean a giant ass blue whale or a tiny piece of plankton? "Man" as a category is too broad to make assumptions about. I know it sounds circular and reductive, but the only thing that makes someone a man is...being a man. Nothing else.

I find it helps to look at a diverse array of men, to see all that men can be, especially men not like myself or the men I know. What does it mean to be a man in rural Yunnan farm country? What did it mean to be a man in medieval europe? What is it like being a gay black man from california, or a hunter living off the grid in appalachia? What does it mean to be a man in a culture where long hair is masculine, or where harvesting plants is masculine, where being a doctor is masculine? What about cultures where adornment is masculine? Hell, what about animals? What's it like to be a male lion vs a male house cat? What do I think about male cardinals, who are the bright lovely red ones, whose color is meant to draw a predators eye to them and away from the female cardinals and their nests?

To me, gender is an all you can eat buffet. It's customizeable. You can pick up or ignore or throw away any traits you want or don't want. Grab things that are feminine in your culture and incorporate them into your manhood in a subversive, gender nonconforming way. Take things that are masculine that make you happy, that you're reclaiming in a way because you may not have been allowed to do/be them before. Fill your gender with the ideals and aesthetics you like. You are fundamentally changing manhood by being a man, by being a different kind of man than any other man. If there are 4 billion men on the planet, there are 4 billion different 'microgenders' of man.

Seems silly to write off an entire 4 billion people as inherently evil and incapable of either goodness or change. It's just illogical. For me, that's enough to discard the idea wholecloth. If it doesn't make sense, I'm not wasting my time with it. That's not an ability everyone else has easily though, so you take the time you need. Try to look at yourself as objectively as possible, as an outsider. As you transition, have your actions become more evil? Are you committing sexist acts? Have you literally betrayed all the women you know somehow? Do you feel yourself becoming less kind, less patient, less interested in equality or the preservation of life? I'm betting, since you're nervous about it enough to ask, that none of those things are happening to you. Do not let yourself be gaslit into believing you are becoming something you're not. Look at your actions, your words. Look at your values and how you live up to them. If you don't see any sudden discrepancy, then you know anyone who tells you you're becoming evil by becoming a man is straight up lying to you. They're projecting an idea onto you that doesnt fit reality; trying to put a round peg in the square hole. Be curious, be objective. Do not be misled, and for those who try to mislead you, hit them with a chunky block button.

[mightysen]

I call this one "The Corporate Sponsored Gyjo Christmas Special". Enjoy!

(bonus comic below the cut)

Fun fact: $20 USD in 1890's money would adjust to somewhere in the ballpark of $653 USD at the time of posting this (2024).

[glorious-spoon]

has anyone told you lately that you are a bright spot in the world? 'cause you are! ✨💚

AHHHH thank you, anon!! this made my day <3

[daniclaytcn]

can i just say your edits/gifs? immaculate your opinions? always correct your mind? chef's kiss your personality? 10/10 you? amazing

oh 🥺🥺 i don't know where this is coming from but this is so incredibly sweet, thank you 🤧🥰

[gaveyouigaveyoui]

Hey! I’ve had tumblr since 2012 and I only made a Taylor Swift blog in 2019, so there’s nothing wrong with that and it doesn’t make you less of a fan. 🩵

hi alana oh my gosh thank you for this, i really have looked up to you and your edits for a long time now and it means the world to me. thank you so much xo

[mayangelsleadyouin]

I LOVE YOUR NEW ICON PHOTO 😭😭😭😭

THANK YOU I LOVE YOU SO MUCH 😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭