#lyla trivia hour

[lylahammar]

today's fun birb is the violet green swallow! such pretty iridescence :D

YESSSSS I LOVE SWALLOWS they're so so so agile I love to watch them hunting over my local pond 🥰 they move so fast and turn on a dime it's awesome

[lylahammar]

(Feel the need to state this up front: I'm bisexual, afab, kinda cis but also kinda trans, nonbinary isn't the word I'd use for myself but... alas, it's the only one people recognize as a general consensus)

I've started to understand why the term sapphic is more appealing to some people, but it still really bothers me as a descriptor/category. When talking to a friend about it (she strongly prefers Sapphic as a term), I started to sus out why:

The vast majority of my initial exposure to the term was always attached to something... aesthetic? Stories or art or music, but of a specific *type*. To the point where it gained a hyperspecific meaning of a period or historical setting, "gay woman trapped in comphet marriage and needs to be saved by bold lesbian", young girls fooling around with girls with no need for commitment because everything is fleeting and nothing is permanent and choices dont matter... on their own, these are perfectly fine narrative choices and are fun to play in sometimes, but they sure start to just seem... repetitive and restrictive and borderline fetishizing. To me, it reads as a term specifying that the love women feel for other women is the only kind allowed, that it's true and pure in a way the love a woman feels for a man isnt, and that her true self can never be realized without admitting she was in love with women since the beginning and was always supposed to be. Achillean gives me the exact same vibe.

On the other hand, my friend feels the term is *less* specific, and to her it allows *more* room for people who don't identify strictly as feminine or as a lesbian, for her it just is a broad umbrella term that allows for any variation of girl-identifying-person who likes girl-identifying-people.

Ultimately, I don't think she's wrong, and I don't know that my interpretation is right. But I think I've been exposed to a.... imma call it a "hyper-aggressive romanticization" of a particular way of existing that just puts me on edge in a way that's hard to explain to people who don't feel the same way about it. I don't think there's anything wrong with romanticizing something like that it's just that... for me, who still identifies as a woman despite being om T, who is married to a cis woman, etc... it feels ironically exclusionary and fetishizing, and mostly feels fantastical and escapist, rather than grounded in anything real.

TL:DR, it feels like a book genre, not a usable term/identifier

Ohhhhh okay I see I wasn't sure if there was something actually problematic about the term that I wasn't aware of, that sounds like it's just a preference based off of the vibes of the way some people use it

honestly I prefer sapphic and achillean because the terms "wlw" and "mlm" are so clunky and hard to say and sound goofy in my brain lmao not to mention the fact that mlm has a separate negative meaning that gets mixed up a lot

and the term "lesbian" is very specific and doesn't apply to all women who are attracted to women

so like....... idk I guess it sucks that some people have given the term sapphic a bad association for some but I'm gonna keep usin it if that's the only reason why bc I don't really care about all that and if ppl know me then they'll be able to tell that I'm not being a weirdo about it lol

[lylahammar]

boop

[lylahammar]

I sometimes see you reblog cute birds (which, thank you for brightening my dash with them) and I thought you'd like to know about the existence of booted racket-tails - in case you haven't heard of them before, they're hummingbirds that look like they're wearing little pantaloons!

UR SO RIGHT I LITERALLY JUST SHARED A PICTURE OF ONE OF THEM ON BLUESKY THIS MORNING

I'M ALWAYS OPEN TO HEAR ABOUT MORE COOL AND FUN AND CUTE BIRDS

[lylahammar]

DRAW MITHRUN PLEASE ALSO I LOVE YOU THANKS

wife gets first dibs on requests :3 I LOVE YOU TOO 💕💗💖

[lylahammar]

holy SHIT you werent kidding marcille’s got it BAD

twas this thursday of march 21st 2024 that the anime onlys finally learned the true meaning of yurimas

[lylahammar]

Hey! I saw your fat liberation month post and wanted to ask you a question. I hope this doesn’t come off as rude or anything, I just figured you might be knowledgeable on the subject. I hear a lot from fat liberation activists that being fat doesn’t mean you’re unhealthy, which I agree with to an extent, but I don’t know if it’s that simple. I mean, I’ve heard that obesity causes more strain on your heart/lungs/joints, causes elevated blood pressure/cholesterol, can mess with your hormones, the list goes on. I believe that fat people should be respected, accommodated, and treated as people no matter what their health status is - I mean, I’m fat myself - but I just don’t know if I believe that being fat is without negative health effects. I don’t think fat people should have to change anything about their bodies to be treated with respect, but it doesn’t make sense to me that being fat would have no effects on your body. Again, I’m not trying to be rude, this all comes from a place of genuine curiosity. Thank you for taking the time to read this!

Hi! So I don't really have the emotional bandwidth to educate you on this issue, but I can at least throw some resources at you to hopefully educate yourself 😅 I hope this helps!

This is a really great video that is long but very thorough and it answers a lot of questions you might have:

And here's a great post with a whole lot of links to different sources

Also frankly just @fatliberation's whole resources tag has a hell of a lot of information for you

Edit: forgot to add @fatphobiabusters' really great FAQ/resources google doc!

[lylahammar]

I have a cute bird for you! the cuban tody! I love their coloration :D

OMGGGG WHAT A LIL GUMDROP OF A BIRDIE IT WOULD FIT RIGHT IN ON A GINGERBREAD HOUSE

[lylahammar]

cool bird time, rainbow edition: himalayan monal, ocellated turkey, common bronzewing :D

HOORAYYYY I LOVE RAINBOWS AND BIRDS THANK YOU 🦜🌈

Himayalan Monal:

these guys are so extra shinyyyyy some of the pictures make them look like they're made of aluminum 🥰

Ocellated Turkey:

FANCYYYYY that feather pattern is just gorgeous

Common Bronzewing:

GASP this one is my favorite of the three 😍 what a sweet little face and an elegant pop of color!!! I love pigeons 🥰

[lylahammar]

What's unbirth? I'm scared to internet search it...

climb back inside 🏊 the water's warm

[lylahammar]

Your Rosolite is the most beautiful dwarf this dwarf enthusiast has ever seen. My life has been enriched by seeing your work for the first time.

AH THANK YOU SO MUCH she's my precious girl 🥰 I first designed her in 2017 when I was just like "hm I'll bet it would be fun to style a beard to look really feminine" and then she ended up becoming an amalgam of my own gender identity over time 😂 also game recognize game!! dwarf enthusiasts 🔛🔝👏‼️

[lylahammar]

if it's not too much trouble, I was looking for a dungeon meshi post comparing how each party member saw each other in the shapeshifter scene, I thought you'd reblogged it at some point but I can't seem to find it?

Hmmmm I'm sure the post is completely buried in my dunmeshi tag, but here's the official chart for it from the dunmeshi world bible!

[lylahammar]

Hi! I'm the one who sent the ask to dunmeshistash about Thistle, and I have BPD! Thistle is absolutely BPD coded and I'm glad other people agree. He's a kid who desperately latches onto a family who he's clearly not on even ground with, one who bought him and dressed him in a funny clown costume, trying desperately to be entertaining and useful because he has nothing else. He has intense mood swings, has a deep devotion to a specific person, he's defensive and a bit territorial about losing people, and hurts himself when things are too much to handle. It also adds a lot that the Touden party are willing to talk things out with him at every turn. People with BPD are often labeled as unreasonable or dangerous by the people around them, so the fact the party try to help him even when he's shown his worst traits is nice to see

YES THANK YOU VALIDATION FOR MY HEADCANON 🙏 I don’t have BPD personally but I’ve known a good amount of people with it and it fits Thistle so perfectly! They’ve also got their Favorite Person who is Delgal :P I really really really gotta draw my farcille adopts Thistle as their own kid headcanon at some point bc I’ve been turning it around in my brain for so long

[lylahammar]

Do you (or your followers) have any book recs with good fat characters

Really good question actually, I read a lot of books but I frankly only ever encounter the exact opposite (fatphobia) 😬 I feel like I've heard of some romance novels with fat protagonists but that's not really my genre of choice so I wouldn't be able to recommend any myself

Does anyone have any suggestions? I would be interested to hear them as well 🙏

[lylahammar]

thoughts on Laios using it/its pronouns?

FANTASTIC LOVE IT

I still subscribe to the "that guy doesn't think deeply enough about his gender identity to ever identify as anything other than a cis man despite probably not being cis bc he would rather just think about monsters" headcanon, but I still fully support every other laios genderqueer headcanon 👌👌👌

[lylahammar]

i really liked your falin body transformation/hc piece! the note about her retaining a penis/some more masculine features from fusing with a male dragon was interesting to me; do you think that she would struggle with any kind of body dysphoria from that?

Thank you!! 😊🙏💖 No, I don’t think she would have dysphoria about it because the Touden siblings both give me “agender on account of having more important things to think about than gender identity or presentation” vibes 😂 but also! At the end of the manga, it’s shown that Falin doesn’t remember her time as a chimera. Along with that, she thinks her feathers are cool!

So I think more likely, she considers her feathers (and penis lol) to be a neat souvenir of an adventure her brother told her about that she has no memory of. And she doesn’t have to worry about periods anymore either :P