#my relationship to my gender is very complicated so i really have no problem choosing the “male” byleth

[jackienautism]

love how the game is like. makes it ABUNDANTLY clear that the goddess tower legend is between and MAN and a WOMAN and meanwhile my lesbian byleth isjust ............

i get this game takes place in the 1100s and straight is the norm blah blah blah but sometimes i just wanna play a game without being reminded of that you know? this game has magical swords and people who can turn into dragons for fucks sake, why can't i just talk to and dance with and marry the character i want?

[animentality]

Hiya. Little chance you'll see/respond to this, but I thought I'd throw it out there anyway. I'm kind of stuck, gender-wise. As a gender-fluid afab person, I kind of know where I want my transition to go, with both T and surgery. The problem is, my very lesbian partner has some squicks about the way I want my transition to go, (namely the clitoromegaly and metoidioplasty.) I haven't talked to her about this yet, because of the squicks. (I know I need to, it's just something I haven't built up to yet.) There's a lot of love in the community for the effects of going on T that I want, which makes me feel good, but knowing my partner would no longer find me attractive because of it is. distressing. This is complicated by the fact that I do sex work, so I'm putting off transition anyway to retain my audience. I know I need to stop letting other people's approval and attraction dictate what I'm doing with my body, but it's money to live off of and I desperately love my partner, (and I'm used to sublimating what I want for others.) I don't know if you have or care to give any advice or response, but even just typing this out and sending it is making me feel better, so thank you <3

I get it, friend.

I really do. You know it's what you want, but you're also afraid of how much it'll change things.

And I don't blame you. There's always comfort in stability and the status quo. holding on to things you've grown so used to having, that you worry you might not be able to survive without them.

But if you know it's what you want- and I think it must be, otherwise would it really be a difficult decision? - then you'll find some peace in knowing that things are never as stable as they seem anyway.

you have to pursue the things that will make you happy in this life. it's the most important thing. sometimes that means choosing something that's harder to do, in the short term, but will bring you peace in the long term.

and yeah, it will be uncomfortable and painful if, or when, your partner no longer finds you attractive because of the transition, but if she really loves you, and cares for you as a person, then she'll support you, even if it's only as a friend. she won't cut you out of her life, if she loves you as much as you love her.

And I know that sounds bad, but the truth is, people are attracted to what they're attracted to. Now that doesn't mean she definitely will lose interest in you, though. Because honestly, I think you definitely need to talk about it, and maybe you'll be surprised.

I have known lesbians who have a few exceptions, just as there are straight people with their own "gay exceptions."

And transition isn't exactly a new practice or anything, but transition surgeries sort of are, in the grand scheme of things. they can be kind of disturbing to people, even supportive people, at first, because surgeries in general are always disturbing.

something primal in us just doesn't like the idea of letting someone else cut into our flesh and rearrange all the parts inside. it's instinctive, i think. but just as you can grow and change, so can other people.

even if they never ever thought about it before.

life is kinda funny like that. you can think you'll never ever do something, but then someone else might come along, someone you desperately want to be with, and then you'll become more than you ever expected you would be. and you'd do it together.

but you definitely need to talk to her. she might surprise you. or she might surprise herself, actually, if you give her the time to consider how it'll change your relationship.

But if she's no longer attracted to you, and if you break up, well, relationships always fall apart when one person wants to stay the same, but the other desires growth, and change. It might seem terrifying, not to have her as a romantic partner, and maybe you're afraid you'll never find someone else, but these things are normal, these things are not as scary as they seem.

All human beings, trans, cis, het, gay, bi, have to deal with the fact that people change and some relationships end. Some people can adapt, and stay together. Some can't.

Some people lose interest in their partners over many, many years, and some people can't stay in relationships with people who become sick, or disfigured, who have horrible injuries that change who they are. Life doesn't go the way you plan, ever.

So you aren't alone in that feeling. And I hope that your community is there to support you too, so that you don't feel alone in this either.

You might consider joining groups, or finding people, who know what it's like to lose partners because of transition, by the way.

It's always good to have a network of support.

Now as for the sex work... listen, I don't know your financial situation. if it makes sense to not transition right now, to put it off so you can pay the bills, have a roof over your head, then you can always wait as long as you need to.

But I wouldn't let that hold you back either.

Financial stability is very important, and being able to pay for food is your first need and all that, but emotional and psychological fulfillment are important too.

so in the future, if you have the money, or maybe find other jobs, or other means of income, then don't let it stop you.

and also, if you enjoy sex work, and you don't want to stop doing it, or having it as an option...you can find another audience.

it might be smaller, and different, and you might have to start from the ground up, but if you already have an audience that makes you good money, then you're resourceful. you're creative.

you can do this. all of this.

but anyway.

my advice to you is...do what you need to do, to make money, but remember that life is primarily about being happy. it can't always be happy, but...the end goal is happiness.

you have to go looking for it, though.

even if it doesn't look the way it used to, that's the grand adventure called living.

thanks for the ask.

always feel free to vent to me, by the way, especially about this, because as a transmac, I get it.

I personally only would want top surgery, but I understand completely the afabs who want to fully transition.

I remember the first time I used my name, and not my deadname...I remember the joy I felt, when my friends started calling me by masculine pronouns...

I couldn't discourage you from seeking the self you were born to be. It's a wonderful feeling, being the person you dreamt of, on those lonely nights where you laid in bed and wondered why you feel so different and alone.

But you aren't alone now.

Good luck, anon.

Hope everything turns out ok, and then I hope the rest of your life is wonderful.

[rotationalsymmetry]

More serious response to last post:

boundaries aren't a multi tool. They are not an appropriate response to all problems. What they are useful for are situations of "if I don't get x/do keep getting y, I am going to want less closeness with this person or group."

In situations where you want a thing but not getting it would not be that big a deal, generally it's best to just ask for what you want. Actually, even in situations where it would be a big deal, just asking is often the best first step. There are some things that make people more likely to say yes to a request; one thing that can make it less likely is insisting the other person owes it to you if they do not see things that way. People like to see themselves as generous and reasonable and will often do a thing they perceive as voluntary when they would dig their heels in if they perceived it as forced. This pairs badly with the psychological need many people have to not ask for things unless they think they are entitled to them.

I think the approach of "boundaries are a thing you do" is mildly to extremely helpful most of the time, and harmful in a minority of circumstances. As an edge case: assault (physical or sexual) is a boundary violation. It's also not something the victim can reliably prevent by their own behaviors. Other examples include someone else reading your mail, a health professional breaking confidence about your medical information, a friend outing you as queer, or an ex distributing revenge porn.

Also, sometimes people cannot get less closeness, eg due to being a child, having to stay with a partner or roommate for financial reasons, having to interact with an ex for shared custody reasons, being in a prison or being in an institution against your will, etc.

But there really are a lot of situations where the "it's up to you to enforce your boundaries" is effective. And I'm partial to it, because there was one specific time where an ex tried to force me to act a particular way that, in retrospect, was a violation of my boundaries. And that doesn't mean his weren't valid, just, we couldn't keep being as close as we had been. (He wanted me to shut up about a new partner -- not just keep it to relevant information, but not talk about him at all. I was unwilling to act as though one of my relationships did not exist. And it did very much leave me worried that my ex only stayed friends because he was hoping we'd get back together. And this was complicated because a substantial chunk of my social circle were people I only saw when my ex was present, so not mentioning my partner around him meant not mentioning my partner to a substantial part of my social network.)

The "boundaries" framework is at odds with the way most of us were raised (much like how "people get to choose their gender" is at odds with how most of us were raised) -- most of us got some sort of "there's a set of social rules everyone should follow, what any individual person wants is more or less irrelevant." So people new to using the concept tend to be really bad at it at first.

Oh also... people use the word "boundaries" in different ways. I think it's best to have the attitude that it's just one of those words that has multiple similar meanings, and if it's not obvious from context you might have to ask.

[fierceawakening]

ceanothusspinosus Oh! I did not at all mean to imply that competing access needs are necessarily solvable. They really truly may not be, and when that clash prevents a good relationship, it sucks. It also takes skill and practice to sort out what your own needs _are_ and it sounds like she is… not good at that. Possibly not interested in becoming good at that. Possibly ashamed to look at it too closely and see where she can and can’t compromise. Who knows. At some point it doesn’t matter for your purposes. :/

ceanothusspinosus I think that the existence of ableism provides a lot of context and imposes a lot of constraints on the whole situation. I imagine that in a less ableist world she’d maybe have different expectations of you and tbh of herself. But it’s not ableist to notice that different people have different abilities, and in your situation it makes sense that you’re really sensitive to concepts like expectations around “ability” used without failsafes.

ceanothusspinosus And in ~abusive/very unbalanced situations “ability” and motivation is commonly, idk. Complicated. Unclear. It comes down to “even if the most generous reading is true, I don’t think it’s going to change and I don’t want to live like this.” I’m thinking of you wondering if she’s copying some of your own ND traits/habits - I certainly can’t know from here, that’s definitely not the sort of thing you’re likely to get a straight answer on if so, it _could_ just be her own stuff...

ceanothusspinosus …so where does that leave you? Looking at the situation more carefully while you do your best to be what you consider an ethical person with no obvious answers, unfortunately. :/ And it’s clear you are trying to be careful.

ceanothusspinosus Also btw, thanks for being clear about the kind of answer you wanted.

No problem! I think part of the issue is, like... social justice types of framework, where you taboo certain phrases, really don't port over well when someone is dealing with an abusive situation or a situation that's leaning that way. Like, it's useful when my therapist says something sounds narcissistic not because she can or should diagnose anyone who isn't me (and I don't take her to be doing that), but because we have a somewhat shared understanding of the word. She's telling me she thinks that behavior is unfair, and the sort of unfair that stays that way and you don't fix with a clarifying conversation, because the kind of person who is often unfair in that way is the kind of person who isn't psychologically ready to have that clarifying conversation and is going to lash out.

It's the same way (and the same situation, I think, painted different colors) I eventually decided I felt about gendered slurs. No, I don't technically HAVE to call my abusive ex a bitch, and I actually wouldn't see much use in calling her that now. But at the time, when I was angry and hurt? Trying to police my own ways of thinking about what was happening were what got me stuck in the being abused in the first place. It was only once I could trust that I wasn't revealing some deep evil going "fuck that bitch" that I could get the distance I needed to rethink whether that was a phrase I wanted to use once the experiences were sufficiently behind me.

Which is I think the problem with a lot of those posts, especially online, that exhort people not to use certain terms to analyze the behavior of someone mistreating them. What that comes across like to the person trying to understand what the fuck happened is "you're mean for processing this in your mind, and if you want to do that you need to choose from the approved tools."

Which I think is why those posts got my goat so much. (I hope they wouldn't as much now that I've thought through this, but they might still bug me, I can't promise the berserk button is totally deactivated.) Survivors need space to be mean and aggro and messy, and just because we feel it this second doesn't mean we endorse it forever. People who are injured scream. This does not mean screaming is appropriate behavior most of the time. It means that it's normal when someone is injured.

Like with my ex. Reading books on BPD actually helped a lot! Not because I came out of it thinking "all people who have that are abusive;" I can think of several friends current and former who I don't think are abusive and who I certainly don't think would ever do the things she did that traumatized me. But because a long careful description of behaviors and psychic distortions helped impose some order on what I experienced as a maelstrom of desire and need and rage and hate.

I'm not even sure I'm going to come out of this thinking narcissism is the problem. I might even decide I think she's neurotypical when all is said and done, I don't know. But I need to be able to shut the social justice framing down at least long enough to sort out what I need, why what I have is not that, and whether (as my therapist has also said) the right thing for me is no contact or less contact.

And in order to sort that out, I need to be able to try on ideas like "No one cares that you're disabled. I care that you don't stop, whether that's won't or can't."

I can sort out whether that's too harsh *later*, when I know my own decisions and their results better than now.

Does that make sense?

[gaykarstaagforever]

I watched Don't Worry, Darling, in one sitting even!, so I get my adult points for the week.

Ha, more like Fucking Straight People, Am I Right? The Movie. Sheesh.

Minor spoilers, I guess. But I think they gave away the ending in the lead up to this so I can't imagine most people don't know the basic premise at this point.

I mean, okay, it is an alright movie. Solid B, even B+. Well shot, generally well directed besides a few too many musical montages / interludes, because clearly that is easier than clunky dialogue and we have to choose between the two, right? Could be more of a stylistic choice, feels kind of amateur, but it's not terrible by any means. Beautifully shot movie, too, with really good design and costume work. The performances are all good, even Harry Styles, though everyone else is acting circles around him. He may have been miscast, because when he gets angry he is like 30 going on 19. Then again, given the story, maybe that's what they were going for?

That in general is one of the problems with this movie: I can't tell if awkward things are the result of wonky film-making or were intentional choices to serve the allegory. Because it is certainly an allegory, and a rather heavy-handed one, and any attempt to dig in to the rules of this universe immediately makes it crumble. As an allegory that is okay. As anything else it isn't. If you can accept the allegory, that won't bother you. If you can't, then it will. I went back and forth with it. I think overall it is okay as an allegory, but I certainly didn't stop having questions I knew the movie was never going to answer.

Now for the whole Straight People: The Movie joke. I am fairly confident I understand what point the allegory was trying to make, and I find that point rather icky. It seems to be saying that often,(straight, white, upper-middle-class) women are put-upon in their relationships, abusively so, by (straight, white, upper-middle-class) men who are basically selfish man-babies. Or at least, that can often happen, and that is bad. And yes, it is, and no, this isn't the icky part. The icky part is how the movie's commentary on that, through the behavior of Florence Pugh, is that, isn't that so sad?, because we girls just can't help but love 'em, if only they could be nicer to us, then everything could be wonderful! Can't live with them, can't live without them, am I right, ladies? Gotta have those manly snuggles and stereotypical date nights before babies are made with sex, after all, and isn't it a shame how we often must sacrifice so much dignity for hot guy kisses?

Look. I'm not a straight, or a straight woman. I don't labor under the unfortunate necessity of traditional gender stereotypes being glued to my sexuality, therefore making them an obnoxiously vital component of my relationships. I don't know and can't know how complicated and difficult navigating all that is. But the conclusion this movie seems to draw about it seems regressive and creepy. Men shouldn't be abusing women, and women shouldn't be forced to put up with that. All that happens and people get stuck. But sitting, if not comfortably in that, at least rather passively in that? Rubs me very much the wrong way.

I get that it is hard when you love someone who is taking advantage of you, and maybe "taking advantage of" is exactly how traditional straight relationship dynamics work a lot of the time. Maybe to be a straight woman dating a straight man means inherently that he is pulling shit on you and you have to just get over it. But that doesn't sound like "love" to me, or something anyone should be okay with. And to then say, "Well, the solution is, boys, just be nicer to the women who are willing to submit to your childish dickhead behavior..." No. That's weird.

Maybe I am misinterpreting this. But the movie spends far more time giving us the male perspective of this bizarre thing they are doing to women then it does the perspectives of the women trapped in it. It is almost like we are supposed to reflect deeply on the sad masculine brattiness that caused this whole mess to happen, as if that in and of itself is the "problem" the movie is concerned with. And it shouldn't be, because, again, the women here are the victims of this garbage, and shouldn't be obligated to understand or deal with how their husbands are mopey about who makes more money in the relationship. But that is exactly the arc Pugh's character goes through. And while she eventually murders her abusive husband and flees the situation, that doesn't feel like a resolution to any problem, other than her immediate one of wanting to be free from what amounts to slavery. She still loves her husband. The way he dies implies to me that the movie thinks that he is in fact A VICTIM of what is going on here, when...fuck you, movie. This shitty little weasel is a r*pist, at least. What an icky conclusion.

Maybe something was lost in editing that would have painted things differently. The suddenly heel-turn of a side-character at the end, like she was secretly the REAL villain the entire time, makes absolutely no sense whatsoever, like it was the resolution to an entire subplot they forgot they cut out. If they had left it in, maybe there would be a wider implication of how this system of abuse works in this world, like it is being used exclusively by men on women now, but that is just a test, there are plans to go bigger, etc. But none of that was in the movie, so...?

It is certainly a better movie than I was expecting. And while I still think no one will remember it in a year, and I have no reason to ever rewatch it, I think it is worth seeing. Especially if you're younger than me, and straighter than me. Maybe it will say something to you you might find profound or useful. Didn't really do it for me, but I appreciate that there was an attempt at something. I don't have to agree with a movie's perspective to appreciate that it has one and gets it across well enough.

Oh and yes, it is weird how Harry Styles and Florence Pugh keep doing heavy make-out stuff and one actual (very tame) sex scene, to the point that it gets uncomfortable for the audience. Director Olivia Wilde has gotten crap for that, like she only put it in because she was getting off to watching her then-boyfriend Styles fondle another woman. And maybe she was, I have no idea. But in the movie, these scenes are clearly SUPPOSED TO BE CREEPY. They are supposed to make us uncomfortable. By the end of the movie, we understand that all the sex going on here has been abusive the entire time. That is implied earlier, as it is going on, by being shot too intimately, with ominous sound and weird lighting. That was an intentional thing, at least.

[sirenalannysgreyjoy]

Alannys rolled her eyes good naturedly at her father’s teasing.  “Who doesn’t?  They’re usually all quite handsome,” Alannys pointed out.  “But really father, could you truly imagine me as a princess?” It wasn’t that Alannys was against the idea, but she couldn’t imagine the other lords and ladies of the realm being very accepting to the idea of a Greyjoy princess.  Perhaps if Alannys was regal and kind like the Queen, but she wasn’t.  “I don’t know.  A husband would have to get to his dragon before I got to him for it to really be a problem.  I’ve never lacked for speed.”  Alannys was mostly kidding, though she could see the reason behind her father’s concerns.  Dragons were dangerous, but Alannys and her family were dangerous too.  Besides, even gentle members of the Targaryen family like Princess Helaena and Prince Joffrey had dragons.  She’d always seen the youngest son of Rhaenyra and Laenor act with nothing but kindness and grace.  Having a dragon didn’t necessarily indicate violence, though of course the threat was always there.  Then again, wasn’t marrying a Greyjoy a similar situation?  

“I thought it could be a good match because Ser Arthor is from a seafaring house.  The Velaryons sail too, I suppose.  Prince Joffrey is kind.  I’ve never seen him leave someone on the sidelines at an event.” Alannys wasn’t quite sure why she had mentioned Joffrey specifically.  She had noticed the way he treated everyone with respect, no matter what family they were from.  In the brutal culture of the Iron Islands, it was an unfamiliar trait but one that still intrigued her.  How could one believe so much in kindness when people were so likely to stab you in the back?  “He’s terribly uptight though,” Alannys rushed to add, for some reason not wanting her father to think she was too interested.  

Alannys had spent a lot of time with her cousin Qarl Harlaw and though she knew her father was right about her potential inheritance, she didn’t want to imagine anything bad happening to her cousin.  “I’m fine with Qarl keeping Harlaw.  I wouldn’t want anything bad to happen to him, though if it did, you’re right that I might need someone strong to stand beside me.  Men would contest my claim.”  The Iron Islanders were old fashioned and while many had come around to women as captains in recent years, women as lords unless all other options were exhausted was still a heavily debated subject, even under the religion of the Drowned God.  Alannys’s personal view was that the Drowned God had better things to think about than gender, but many Drowned Priests didn’t see things the same way.  The situation had the potential to get ugly if Alannys intended to fight and well, she always intended to fight for things that were hers by right.  

“I’m glad you were able to choose partners who you wanted later in life.”  Alannys didn’t dare to comment on the complicated mess that was her father’s relationship with his first wife Tess.  They seemed to hate each other, but they also couldn’t live without each other.  Personally, Alannys had a feeling her great uncle had been too good of a matchmaker.  He’d found a copy of Dalton in Tess and that’s why they always clashed so violently.  But that was a situation she was more than willing to let Dalton and Tess work out on their own.  She was simply grateful that her parents had a simple love story of childhood friends falling in love.  It was a more comfortable situation than some of the other relationships aboard The Raven.  “Do Iron Islanders even pay dowries?” she asked.  She supposed they probably did, but it seemed like a silly practice.  Anyone would be lucky to marry her or any of her sisters.  Why should her father have to pay them for the privilege?  

“It would depend on who I married.”  To be completely truthful, Alannys had no idea how much money she would need to start her life as a married woman.  She had quite a bit of funds herself from her sailing aboard The Siren, but she knew what she considered wealth and what some of the older lordly houses considered wealth were two totally different things.  “My lord husband would probably get annoyed if I raided around his lands when I needed extra money.”  Not that Alannys would ever do such a thing.  She would sail to the next region over before she did any raiding.  “But you’re right, Grandmother will know.”  There were few, if any, people she respected more than her grandmother. 

Her Father's Daughter: with @daltongreyjoy-rp

Alannys dangled her legs over the side of the crow’s nest and waited for her father to arrive.  This was a conversation she didn’t want to have in the oppressive walls of the Red Keep.  So far, she had enjoyed her time in King’s Landing.  It was a new adventure and she loved the vibrancy of King’s Landing and the opportunities for fun it easily offered up throughout its various streets.  Still, she couldn’t imagine living like this for her entire life.  Even the short amount of time the Keep had been on lockdown had been suffocating.  Alannys had been forced to say her prayers on land, which felt almost as sacrilegious as not doing them at all.  She would never understand people who preferred the earth’s unyielding ground to the ocean’s comforting lull beneath their feet.  

It was something she had been contemplating more lately, especially after her latest conversation with Toron.  He seemed convinced their father was contemplating making betrothals for the eldest kids and securing them sooner rather than later.  She’d heard her father mention the subject before, but she wasn’t sure how she felt about it.  Alannys wasn’t opposed to marriage.  She had seen the love her father had surrounded himself with and often yearned for such closeness herself, though the idea of giving someone her heart seemed like an unattainable dream.  The last thing she wanted was to be given off to someone she could never care about, yet she also knew how important marriage alliances could be.  She wanted to please her father and help the Iron Islands, but she couldn’t imagine giving up her freedom to become some man’s wife just because her father ordered it of her.  

Far below, the sea gently lapped against the side of her father’s ship.  Please, give me guidance, she prayed.  She’d yet to have one of her prayers go completely unanswered and she could only hope the Drowned God would illuminate the correct path for her soon.  Only a few minutes later, she spotted her father making his way to The Raven.  She stood up and easily climbed down the rigging, the movements so practiced she didn’t need to think about them.  

She waited until her father had stepped out onto the deck before she dropped down behind him.  “Father, I do hope you don’t plan on selling me off to some green land boy.  Toron seems convinced you’ve been setting up betrothals and if you plan to give me to some man who will refuse to let me see the sea, I’ll cut out his heart and present it to you.”  Her words were a slight exaggeration, mostly because she valued her life.  Killing some lord or lord’s son would endanger her, but she was more than willing to threaten her betrothed and disappear into the night if she found whoever her father wanted her to marry unsuitable.

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

Hey, its the anon that sent you that trans ask a bit ago! I have another question if that's ok? This time I'm trying to understand pronouns. In your answer to my last ask, you were talking about how we need to respect the pronouns that people choose for themselves. I was wondering if pronouns are tied to gender? Like from my experience most cis males use he/him, but I've seen some stuff about he/him lesbians? What is that. I'm not trying to be rude or anything, I genuinely don't really get it. Are pronouns like favorite colors? The person just chooses whatever they vibe with regardless of their chosen gender (or ungender for those who are outside of the binary)

oh hey dude, welcome back! first off I would like to thank you for the phrase "ungender," which I will be peppering into my vocabulary starting immediately.

so, what's the deal with pronouns? starting at linguistics 101, a pronoun is just a word that can be substituted for a noun or group of nouns in a sentence. that includes words like "I," "you," "we," and "us," but the most commonly discussed and debated pronouns are those that are implicitly gendered.

the basic assumption in English is that he/him/his are pronouns used to refer to men, while she/her/hers are for women and they/them/theirs are for either groups of people or someone whose identity is unknown - for instance, saying "they all went running together" or "someone lost their wallet here, I hope they come back to get it."

as with many cultural norms that are often taken for granted, this rather simple binary approach to language becomes incredibly complicated as soon as you acknowledge that not everyone can be easily parceled off into male/man/he/him and female/woman/she/her boxes!

your comparison to favorite colors isn't a bad starting place, because - much like favorite colors - the seriousness with which people take their pronoun usage can vary wildly from person to person. and much like having a favorite color, none of those preferences are wrong!

for some trans folks, having people use the correct pronouns is a very big deal, because it indicates that the people talking to and about them recognize and respect their gender identity. also, it's just kind of shitty if, say, you're a trans woman who gets referred to as "he" all the time, even if some of those are by people making sincere mistakes, because every instance of misgendered puts the burden on a trans person to either speak up for themselves and potentially cause a scene or just sit quietly and take it, both of which are pretty depressing options. this is a big part of why including your pronouns when you introduce yourself and wearing nametags or pins with pronouns listed are such a big thing in so many queer spaces - it can seriously cut down on the hurt people experience when they get misgendered, and it helps normalize the idea that someone's appearance doesn't necessarily indicate their gender or the correct pronouns to use for them.

for other queer people, their relationship to their gender can be so nebulous and variable that they're comfortable using multiple sets of pronouns - he/they and she/they are both common - or not having any preference at all. I include myself in that category - while I have no problem with the pronouns that people generally default to when they talk about me, I also really don't have any beef with other pronouns getting thrown into the mix. every once in a while someone throws a he/him my way and I think that's simply delightful. it's hilarious, frankly, and you'll never catch me complaining about it, because it's not necessarily any more right or wrong than she/her or they/them or anything else people can think of.

speaking of other things people can think of - some folks prefer using what are known as "neopronouns" which are generally meant to be detached from gender. some sets of neopronouns include xe/xem/xer, ze/zem/zir, and e/em/eirs. I'll say right now: learning to incorporate neopronouns into your vocabulary can be difficult, and that's okay. making the effort to learn and use them if you meet someone who prefers them is what matters. the folks who use these pronouns are being super brave trying to create a space for themselves by inventing language where there previously was none, and I salute them.

to answer your question about he/him lesbians - they're great and I love them! there's a long and rich and BEAUTIFUL history of lesbian expressions of butchness and masculinity, and for some lesbians that extends to wanting to be called by pronouns that are traditionally used for men. some of those lesbians might also take testosterone or otherwise consider themselves transmasculine and/or nonbinary while still being lesbians while others will eventually find the most joy identifying fully as trans men; the world of lesbian gender expression is nuanced and lovely and holds space for a great deal of ambiguity. likewise there are gay men, especially those with particularly feminine or otherwise gender nonconforming presentations, who prefer to use she/her pronouns; bounce rapper Big Freedia is a notable example.

it's also worth noting that many people who are 100% cisgender sometimes dip into adding they/thems to their pronouns as a gesture of solidarity and support to normalize the use of gender neutral pronouns, which I think is cool and rad. this can sometimes cause confusion on the part of onlookers - most recently, actor Rahul Kohli became aware that some fans were under the incorrect impression that he's nonbinary after he changed the pronouns in his twitter bio to he/they - but honestly, I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing! uncertainty can be a great conversation starter and make space for a lot of learning.

in short: sure, pronouns can be a lot like favorite colors. some people pick one early on and stick with it forever, some people change it up every day. some people refuse to pick just one, and some people don't have a favorite at all. for some people their favorite color is an extremely serious matter, and for others it's all about the vibes. all that really matters is that when somebody tells you their favorite color(s), the polite thing to do is accept that and behave accordingly.

[star-anise]

I wanna reply to a reblog someone added to one of my posts, because I want to wrestle with the ideas in it without singling out the person, who I do not think deserves any kind of dogpile for being wrong. That said, I think this person is incorrect in a way that’s both common and dangerous.

TW: Domestic violence and abuse, sexual assault

This person says:

So  hear me out: I am too weak to abuse a woman.

I live a very sedentary lifestyle and  most of the women i’m interested in and who have shared interest could easily beat me in a fight. [...] so I would never raise a fist to them not just because it’s wrong but because i’m afraid of getting hurt back.

As a society, we are way, way too obsessed with punching people as the ultimate form of domestic violence. This is dangerous and wrong. It causes a lot of people to think, “My home life isn’t a boxing match, so I’m not being abused,” and/or “I’m not actually hitting them, so I’m not really abusive.”

I am a 5′1″/155cm disabled woman with weak and noodly arms who can’t perform a lot of basic household tasks like carrying a week’s groceries up a flight of stairs. And I could absolutely abuse someone. It isn’t about physical strength.

Abuse is not just a “man bad, woman victim” dynamic. It can happen to and by people of every gender. We need to focus on the realities of abuse and the many ways it can manifest.

In this post: What domestic violence can look like, other than hitting; how domestic violence can happen without huge explosive fights; what healthy relationships would look like instead; why it’s wrong to think of abusers as a different species from normal people.

Domestic violence might look like:

Criticizing or belittling someone’s interests or self. Making negative statements about who they are as a person. Treating them with contempt or derision. Calling them names.

Controlling everything about where a person goes, what they do, and who they talk to. Never allowing them privacy or outside relationships. Monitoring their emails or texts; listening in on their phone calls. Refusing to allow someone reasonable boundaries.

Breaking a person’s belongings. Damaging or wrecking their personal space. Throwing things at or near them.

Controlling their access to basic needs, eg. depriving them of access to money, transportation, food, medicine, or communication with the outside world.

Failing to respect someone’s personal and sexual boundaries. 

As well, these things count as abuse whether or not they happen as a Big Loud Scary Confrontation, or quietly, in the consequences afterwards. Like, it counts whether you say “You will never be allowed to leave this house without me!” or just quietly spend the money that was going to repair your partner’s car on something else. It counts whether you force a sexual act on someone who’s visibly resisting, or refuse to speak to or even acknowledge someone for several days after they’ve set a sexual boundary.

And it can be hard, in a relationship, to figure out what healthy and reasonable boundaries are. These are rules that abusers can use to their own ends, rhetorically maximizing the harm to themselves and minimizing their harm to others. “By being in the house when I’m on work phone calls, you’re denying my right to privacy,” they’ll say, ignoring that forcing their partner to be out of the house for eight hours a day is denying them access to basic shelter and they need a different solution, or, "By pointing out how scared and hurt you were by my violent behaviour, which I cannot possibly be expected to change, you’re criticizing me and belittling my feelings.”

At which point it can help to focus on what a healthy relationship would look like:

Consensual: Everyone involved is freely choosing to be there and can, if they want, leave the relationship without serious impairment of their ability to live an independent life

Surrounded by resources: Partners are able to turn outside the relationship, if they want, to express their emotions, achieve their goals, pursue their interests, connect with family and friends, receive support, or take time away from their partner. This is regarded as enriching each partner’s life and strengthening the health of the relationship.

Safe: No one feels threatened or in danger. People are able to assume that their partners will have their best interests and happiness at heart. Partners ensure that everyone in the relationship has what they need. Nobody has to worry that a disagreement or bad day with their partner will make other parts of their life unmanageable.

Respectful: Everyone’s emotions and values matter and are given equal weight. Everyone is seen as deserving the same basic rights to material security, safety, emotional validation, and physical space.

Fair: When there is a conflict, partners work together in a respectful and non-combative way to negotiate a solution that is acceptable to everyone.

Honest and accountable: People admit to the part they play in things and are willing to own their contributions to both success and conflict.

Mutually enriching: Each partner is committed to the goal of a relationship that leaves them all, collectively and individually, better off as people: receiving everything they need, capable of independence, supported and validated, and treated with respect.

Healthy relationships are complicated! They can be really difficult. They demand a lot of interpersonal and social skills that don’t come naturally, so if you haven’t been taught them, you can really struggle. I can really struggle. Anyone can really struggle.

It is really important to realize that abuse doesn’t result from someone waking up like, “I think I will be a Horrible Person to my partner today” and getting ready to rumble. It results from people with limited coping skills and particular attitudes about relationships and how to handle conflict trying to get what they want. Someone could be a really great partner, up until they encounter a problem they don’t feel able to solve any other way than overriding their partner’s feelings and using what force is available to achieve their goal.

But those are things we have the ability to address and improve, if we want to. A few starting places:

Positive ways to avoid toxic conflict

Signs of emotional abuse

Resources for domestic violence

If you want to support my work writing this kind of content, please consider supporting me through PayPal or Patreon.

[jessmalia]

Pevensie siblings sexuality headcanons

I know I’ve shared my headcanons about the Pevensies sexualities many times before, but I thought I’d actually write them down and go through why I headcanon them as I do, plus how I imagine their relationship with their sexuality is like. I’d also love to hear what you have to say about this! So don’t be shy to reply, wether you agree with me or not. All interpretations are valid. 

Also disclaimer, this isn’t very professionally written lol. It’s just the ramblings of a person who thinks way too much about fictional characters. 

Peter Pevensie – Pansexual

A lot of people say that Peter is really straight, which... like I get the line of thinking behind that but, no. Y’all should already know how much I ship him with Caspian. Just because he’s a classic, perfect hero, knight in shining armour type doesn’t mean he’s straight. I don’t even think he’s “the pinnacle of masculinity” like some people say he is. Sure, he inhabits a lot of traditionally masculine traits like strong will, leadership, protectiveness and so on but I think his soft feminine side gets overlooked. Like, he’s pretty in touch with his emotions and he doesn’t show any shame, forced stoic-ness or any other signs of toxic masculinity (unlike Edmund lol).

Therefor, I also don’t think he would have any problem accepting his sexuality. Ignoring the standards of 1940s England for a second, I think he’s just always known he feels attraction regardless of gender and has never felt any shame over it.

Susan Pevensie – Grayromantic

This one’s definitely the most underdog one, cause I haven’t seen anyone with the same headcanon, so I really wanna explain my line of thinking.

For those of you who don’t know, grayromantic is when you’re on the aromantic spectrum but not fully aro. So a grayromantic person may experience romantic attraction but more rarely (how much depending on the person) or only very specific traits/people do it for them. Graysexual is the same but with sexual attraction.

Firstly, I wrote grayromantic as a title just because I had to choose one pride flag for the picture, but I also think she’s graysexual, and when she does experience attraction I think it can be to any gender.

Susan being grayromantic really is just the vibe I got from her in the Prince Caspian movie. The scene with that boy in the beginning doesn’t just feel like she’s not interested, but has a distinct “you’re barking up the wrong tree, bro” vibe to it, which I think is a reason so many people headcanon her as a lesbian, which totally works too, but I see it more in an asexual/aromantic way.  

And then later with her romance with Caspian, I very much got the impression that she’s very surprised that she likes him so much. Like she did not expect to feel so attracted to him because she’s never been to anyone before. It’s strange and foreign too her but she welcomes it. It’s the same vibe I think a lot of people who interpret the Susan/Caspian romance as recognition the other is queer mistaken for attraction and/or queer platonic pick up on, because it really feels like you’re watching two lesbians fall in love for the first time lol. I think that is a perfectly valid interpretation, but I fully believe that Susan didn’t think she was capable of feeling romantic and sexual attraction, then when she liked Caspian she was confused at first because it was so new, but then when she realised what it was she welcomed it like “oh, I guess I do experience attraction sometimes”. And in a modern au I definitely see her liking the aspec label.

Edmund Pevensie – Bisexual

This one’s not that complicated. Edmund is my favourite, and I relate and project onto him a lot have talked about it before and I could go even more in depth about it forever but I don’t think anyone wants to hear that. Basically, I’m bisexual, therefor he is bisexual.

Plus, a lot of people also have this headcanon, so there’s definitely something more there than projection I think. I mean, we ARE very similar and since I’m bi, why wouldn’t he have the same vibes?

Edmund’s really the only one I think would have a problem accepting his sexuality at first again ignoring the standards of 1940s England. Like I hinted at in the Peter section, I think Edmund very much struggles with toxic masculinity when he’s young, specifically the LWW period. I think even back then he knew this about himself but wasn’t ready to accept it. I imagine that in Narnian culture they value softness and vulnerability way more, so they wouldn’t have the same dumb norms about masculinity, plus they definitely embrace same sex relationships. That coupled with how much he changed during the events of LWW I think made him totally ready to accept it. And of course his siblings would show nothing but love and support since they’re all queer too lol. 

Lucy Pevensie – Lesbian

I don’t even know how to describe it — she’s a lesbian what more do you want? It’s so obvious! Just look at the outfit she’s wearing in this picture! That’s a lesbian if I’ve ever seen one. It’s literally just the vibes, man. Picturing her with a guy feels so weird to me.

It’s also literally canon: “But as for Lucy, she was always gay and golden-haired” I know he meant gay as in happy but come on. 

As for her relationship with her sexuality, nothing describes it better than that she just loves being gay! She loves it! Wouldn’t trade it for the world! Modern AU Lucy definitely calls herself femme, and she makes gay jokes all the time. She’s definitely the sibling that talks about their sexuality most often. 

[sauntervaguelydown]

I guess I'm thinking about gender again. Philosophically speaking. I'm trying to get my head around this constant problem I have with it.

Gender is always so weird for me because like... fundamentally, conceptually, I'm more of a gender abolitionist... human beings are all just a grab bag of traits trending in two major directions based on hormones, but it's only our innate urge to categorize and build complex categorical schemas that gives gender any meaning... there is no gender in nature, there are just individuals with traits, and so in myself I don't feel like gender has any meaning other than the experiential

but on the other hand I very much perceive gender first when I look at a new person, because that categorization schema is so deep in my brain, and I don't know how to unlearn it. So I'm simultaneously experiencing the philosophical certainty that gender is fake and arbitrary, while ALSO experiencing this foundational bias to sort people into one category or the other based on their looks.

All this is further complicated by the fact that I have a very real preference towards women, in the sense that like... one, okay, I'm kind of afraid of men? Or, I distrust men? Or, I'm afraid of and distrustful of men in a way that I never am of women--unfamiliar men are potential enemies until they demonstrate to me that they are not the enemy. I feel a kinship with women that is instinctual. Even when women individually suck, they're still my people. Even when individual men are lovely and admirable, they're still something other. They're foreign to me, in a similar way that someone raised in China is foreign to me.

By the way I'm very much including transwomen in the kinship circle, I vibe very much with people who WANT to be here in the female kinship circle.

When I was younger I was very "whatever" about my own gender. When I was in elementary school I used to crossdress and I would be very excited when I passed as a boy (I had to stop this when my chest came in). I used to think a lot about being born as a boy, or being a boy in a past life. I craved (but never got) validation from my male peers. But I also was aggressively feminine outside of that--I refused to wear pants, I liked pink and purple and sparkles, you know, the whole 9 yards. Even a that time I think I perceived women as being my people, or at least the people I was most interested in when it came time to pick favorite characters or choose a historical person to do a report on. I feel like my relationship to "womanhood" changed a lot as I left high school and entered college--like when I was in high school I thought of myself as just being A Person, not a girl or a woman or a female; I was agender within my own mind, you know? But then as I got older, I got on the internet and I started seeing all this feminist discourse and seeing myself as part of a shared experience of oppression, and that was really the first time that I started to think of myself as a woman rather than an individual: in seeing myself through the eyes of strangers and understanding how their perception of me fundamentally changed their treatment of me

I'm 29 now and I still don't know jack shit, frankly. The way that gender is imposed on a person externally is important to me, because that's the main reason I even think of myself as having a gender. But on the other hand, some people obviously feel so strongly about their innate gender that they're willing to change their whole lives in order to migrate from one category to another, which is sort of inconceivable to me, but obviously very real for them.

I'm stuck in this ideological vs experiential paradox, where my own personal experience of gender is so inverted from most of my friends' experience that I cannot begin to reconcile it. I wasn't a woman until the world made me a woman. I don't understand why it doesn't work like that for everyone.

anyway this is a long ass post and if you read it then uhhhh thanks for listening

[atruththatyoudeny]

Happy 28th! Here are all the 14 fics I read and enjoyed this month. As always, all the love for all the amazing authors in this fandom! ♥

In The Still Of The Night | jacaranda_bloom | Dirty Dancing AU - a/b/o - prejudice - gender stereotyping - class divide - angst - pining - smut - 69k In a society where omegas are expected to follow a predetermined path, Louis strives for more; for his voice to be heard, for recognition, for true love. In a world where your past defines your future, Harry fights against the system; for equality, for a different life, for acceptance. When their two worlds collide, will they be beaten down by conformity or will they rise up and forge a new path together? OR the Dirty Dancing AU where Louis is a feisty omega who wants to change the world, Harry is an alpha from the wrong side of the tracks, and nobody puts Louis in a corner.

Plant New Seeds in the Melody | 28sunflowers | enemies to friends to lovers - miscommunication - misunderstandings - emotional hurt/comfort - Original Character Death - grief/mourning - slow build - smut - 58k After losing his husband in a tragic car accident, the last thing Louis needs is to keep running into popstar Harry Styles, who David was quite fond of. Obviously, that’s exactly what keeps happening. But as their unlikely friendship blossoms, Louis realizes that, maybe, having Harry in his life was the only good thing that came out of his adverse circumstances. Harry could be just the right person to help Louis find trust and intimacy in someone new.

take my hand, wreck my plans | amomentoflove | Cinderella AU - a/b/o - royalty - Minor Character Death - emotional abuse - magic - 38k Louis meets the man in the center of the room, feeling every eye on him. “Mr. H,” he whispers. The man smiles brightly and laughs as if he can’t believe his eyes. “It’s you,” he says breathlessly. “I didn’t think I would see you again.” “Nor I you, especially under these circumstances.” “Even so,” Mr H says, his eyes bouncing from Louis’ eyes to his lips. “Will you do me a great honor and join me in leading the first … um…” “Dance?” Mr. H laughs and nods. “Yes, that’s the one.” Louis bites his lips and doesn’t hesitate before whispering, “Yes.” Mr. H beams and reaches for Louis’ hand. Sparks fly at the touch and a zing of excitement shoots through Louis’ body. His face heats up as he’s afraid his scent would give away his feelings towards the other man.

One More Taste of Your Lips | Canadianlarrie & MsHydeStylinson | canon compliant - reunion tour - angst - internalized homophobia/biphobia - cheating - smut - Coming Out - 80k It had been eight years since the hiatus began, and Louis had spent that time writing and recording music, touring and making it safely through the pandemic. When the opportunity arose to go back on tour with One Direction, Louis knew he'd be a fool not to take it. Sure, life on the road would be different after all this time apart, but he was looking forward to experiencing that comradery again. What he hadn't realised was that living the better part of nine months in each other's pockets was bound to dredge up issues from his past. And when one of the pockets belonged to Harry, who he'd had a rather unconventional friendship with that drifted apart during their last tour, life on the road again would upend both their lives in irrevocable ways. * Harry wasn’t that sixteen year old boy anymore. Nor was he the young man in his late teens who was on the cusp of conquering the entire world. But some traits seemed to remain the same; his vibrant green eyes, the dimples set deeply in his cheeks whenever he laughed earnestly, or his curls that were the same shade of cocoa that Louis remembered fondly. And yet, Louis had absolutely no idea who this man that stood a mere twenty paces away was today.

Old Photographs & Times I'll Remember | jaerie | time travel - Eroda - period-typical homophobia - anxiety - depression - discussion about suicide - self-discovery - post-break up - 54k Carefully he set that negative down and lifted the paper to see there was another beneath. This one again was a young man, this time posed against an antique car. He lifted a few more negatives out one by one, each a portrait of the same man with various backdrops. The man in a meadow, in an office, leaning against a doorframe — even one in his underwear grinning at the camera. On the edge of each negative printed in slanted, handwritten characters were the initials and date. H.S. 1924. He quickly but carefully packed them back into the box and buzzed with excitement. He couldn’t wait to develop them to see exactly what had been captured in the images. It was a find that felt like a puzzle to piece together. H.S. was likely the man in the photographs as well as the owner of the suitcase. Who was he? Why had his suitcase found its way into Niall’s attic? Was he still alive and well somewhere in the world? A camera, a suitcase, and a relationship forged through time.

Know a Trick or Two | SadaVeniren | Harry Potter setting - mpreg - magic - kid fic - - genderfluid character - smut - intersex - 44k The night before Louis is scheduled for a Portkey to begin training with the Vratsa Vultures in Bulgaria he heads into Muggle London for one last night of fun. A few months later he finds out he’s having a child. Eleven years ago Harry had a one night stand and now there’s a strange man on his doorstep telling him his daughter is something called a wizard and she’s got a place at the British wizarding school Hogwarts. Aka the one where Muggle Harry and Wizard Louis have a one night stand and get more than they bargained out of it.

come away with me | suspendrs | Minor Character Death - friends to lovers - sexuality crisis - emotional hurt/comfort - anxiety - smut - 80k Louis had such big plans. He wanted so much out of life, and so did Amy. Now Bridget is going to grow up without a mother, and she’s always going to wonder what it would be like if this hadn’t happened. He wonders if she’ll blame him for her mother’s death as she gets older, or if she’ll understand that this is just as painful for Louis as it is for her. Louis doesn’t know how he’s going to raise her on his own, because he’s a fantastic father, yes, but he’s always been the fun parent, and Amy was in charge of the rules. He doesn’t know how to make sure Bridget has everything she needs all the time, doesn’t know how to make her favorite meal or how to do that one braid she loves to have in her hair or how to teach her to be the best person she can be. He doesn’t know how to live without Amy, he doesn’t know what he’s going to do. Or, Louis has to pick up the pieces of his and his daughter's life after his wife dies, and Harry is a beautiful stranger that just wants to help.

we made our promises (we said our vows) | millsx | Military AU - established relationship - kid fic - angst - hurt/comfort - mentions of PTSD - mentions of depressions - mentions of anxiety - injury - long-distance relationship - 21k Fairy tales always end with the Happily Ever After; the princess escapes her evil stepmother and gets married to the knight in shining armor. It turns out real life doesn’t care about Happily Ever Afters and sometimes problems appear when you don’t expect them to. Harry sure didn’t, not after years of being married.

Love, Ever After | jacaranda_bloom | a/b/o - farmers markets - soulmates - pining - miscommunication - fluff - banter - smut - 21k One would assume that the charismatic omega in charge of the local matchmaking service would have found a mate and settled down ages ago. His clients, in fact, are always a bit surprised when they come to learn that Louis is still single. But Louis doesn’t mind, not really. His standards are just high; he is happy holding out for his alpha, his soulmate, and chooses to not waste his time with anyone else, despite what his friends might think. That is, until his best mate from uni drags him out of bed far too early on a Saturday morning after a night of drinking to go to a farmers market, of all places. It’s there that he proceeds to make an utter fool of himself in front of the hottest alpha he has ever laid eyes on. There’s truly no coming back from that, is there? OR The one where omega Louis makes love matches, alpha Harry makes cheese, and meddling friends might finally make their dreams of finding their soulmate come true.

Hometown | allwaswell16 | High School - College/university - driving - heartbreak - memories - friendship - happy ending - angst - 2k On the day Harry gets his driver’s licence, he drives through the suburbs, heartbroken that he can’t drive home to Louis.

fever dream high | wildestdreams | friends to lovers - childhood friends - a/b/o - fluff - angst - smut - mutual pining - High School - 30k "Excuse me, what?" Harry licked his lips, carefully looking him in the eyes. "I will spend your heat with you so you're ready by Monday to play your game." "Harry," Louis began, suddenly at a loss for words. "I couldn't ask you to do that." "Why not? You just said you trust me." "You're my best friend. There's no one I trust more than you." "Then what's the problem?" "Well, friends don't usually help you through your heats or ruts, so excuse me for being a little skeptical." or A High School ABO AU where Harry and Louis are best friends and nothing more until things start getting a little complicated and they're faced with feelings they never wanted to confront.

We are the same, you run in my veins | 28sunflowers | a/b/o - non-traditional a/b/o- soulmates - wolves -pack dynamics - 4k When the time for Louis to become the Alpha leader of his pack comes, he can’t rise to the occasion for not being yet bonded. A series of trips to neighbouring packs in search of his soulmate is fruitless until he meets one of the other packs’ Alpha heir. Harry. The world seems to stop turning for a second and then it shifts, clicking into its axis. All the distress and wrongness he felt until that very moment suddenly disappears. Louis is finally whole. But two Alpha leaders from different tribes soulbonding is something unheard of before.

Divinely Blessed | thinlines | a/b/o - non-traditional a/b/o - established relationship - PWP - 17k “I heard you, Ni. But what do you mean?” “What do you mean what I mean?” Harry rolled his eyes as he shoved his alpha friend down onto a seat. “Did you mean you lick someone out or…?” “Nah, mate! It was me! I got licked out!” Harry could only stare at Niall in horror. Alpha Harry prides himself on having the bravest and most caring omega who might or might not just fulfill his sudden curiosity.

This chemistry like candy to me | CuckooTrooke | a/b/o - kink discovery - mpreg - male lactation - smut - 8k "It's just... Are you aware, that, uh... You're- You're kind of leaking." Harry feels his blood run cold. The heart that was thudding so loud and fast drops to his stomach, and his shoulders hunch in embarrassment. "Excuse me?" Harry asks once he manages to gather himself and recover from the shock. He automatically steps back but since he's already squeezed in the corner, it doesn't do much to put any distance between them, "Who the fuck do you think you are?" "Wha- No. Oh my god, I wouldn't- No," The man says as he realizes the misunderstanding, and wildly gestures to his chest, "I mean your- Your chest. Is leaking." OR Harry is 8 months pregnant with a poor balance and traitorous nipples. Unfortunately for him, that is precisely when he meets a beautiful alpha in a packed London Tube. Fortunately for him, the said alpha might just be the best thing he has ever come across.

[rason-rodd]

Do You Know Your Alphabet?

NSFW Edition feat Jason Todd

(I tried not to give a sexual orientation to Jason in this NSFW Alphabet and make his partner as gender neutral as possible to please all sorts of readers. Apologies if some part doesn’t include all genders. I honestly did my best and I will happily modify them if you tell me how.)

A – Anal:         When he is dating someone with a vagina, Jason rarely asks for anal sex. He prefers pussy to ass but if his partner wants him to use the back door he will happily do so.             However, his partner has to keep in mind that Jason always needs to be very testosterone-y and in full-dominant mode to fuck them in the ass.           In a relationship with someone with a penis, Jason will usually be the one who fucks in the ass rather than the one who is fucked in the ass though he can accept to swap roles from time to time.

B – BDSM:     That will be a non-negotiable “NO”. Even though he is fully aware that BDSM doesn’t only rhyme with pain but also with consent and pleasure, Jason is not a fan of it as hinted and stated many times in Red Hood and The Outlaws.             We can suppose that it is because BDSM can let some poorly buried trauma surface by reminding Jason of bad memories that includes ropes and a crowbar.    

C- Condom:   Only when needed. Like most men, Jason doesn’t like the lack of sensation that wearing a condom involves but he is smart and responsible enough to know there are moments when you need to wear one.       At a beginning of a relationship, he will always choose to wear one until he is sure that there are no risks to transmit any sort of STD. But once he knows everything is safe he will gladly ask his partner to either stop using protection and/or take contraception like a pill if said partner can get pregnant. Being a father is not in his plans and it actually scares him.            

D- Dominance:           Jason is a caring and highly protective boyfriend with fear of abandonment issues and those traits ultimately makes him a very possessive lover.         And it shows in bed. His possessiveness coupled with his passion and devotion to his SO makes him the type of man that permanently tries to assert his dominance. But this so-called dominance is not a way to show who’s the man in this relationship or who’s wearing the pants. It is just a clumsy way to show that he is a fully committed and devoted lover who is always struggling to please his partner out of fear of not being good enough and eventually abandoned. (Who said men were not complicated sometimes?)       Moreover, Jason fucks according to his mood and so his dominance always varies. Sometimes dominance can simply mean him on top and sometimes it can be synonymous of hard deep pounding from behind. Jason can indeed be a rough lover but he will never be the type to lay a hand on his SO. So you can forget any sort of slap or strangulation. He is a fighter in the streets but a lover under the sheets.       But submission is very rarely his thing. Sure he will adore making love with a partner as passionate as he is and will forever be turned on by someone who can match his strength and therefore who will not mind standing up to him. But if you think you can tame him forever you’re so wrong.         Jason will occasionally let you lead the way in the bedroom and he will be happy to let you do so as he will see your sudden dominance the same manner he sees his (meaning a symbol of love and devotion). But any relationship in which the place of alpha male is permanently refused to him will leave him unsatisfied and frustrated.

E- Ejaculation:             One thing is sure; Jason can’t cum in a condom. When wearing one, he will always make sure to remove it to spurt his semen on his partner. Most of the time it is on their ass, chest or pussy. He will generally never cum on someone’s face though but will see no problem in cumming in someone’s mouth for as long as they swallow that load.           But what he loves the most is to cum inside his partner (which is also another reason why he is not a fan of condoms). He finds a certain pleasure in doing so, finding the act rather intimate and weirdly romantic. He would never cum inside someone he doesn’t love or barely know.

F- Foreplay:     Jason never forgets foreplay even if his body begs him to just fuck his partner and get it over with. To him, foreplay is necessary when you do the deed. Without that Jason will feel like something is missing and view the sexual act as botched.         But to Jason Todd foreplay doesn’t only revolve around handjobs, fingering, oral sex or any other physical display. Of course he will happily do all of that but Jason is an intellectual and so he will definitely consider words as a form of foreplay. And sometimes they even arouse him more than the rest. Few naughty text messages telling him how much you miss him and his cock inside of you and the man will run back to you as fast as The Flash, his penis as hard as a stone pillar. And when that happens, you might get yourself prepared, as he won’t take much time to kiss or cuddle.

G- Gear and tool:       Mother Nature blessed Jason Todd and gave him one hell of a cock that matches his broad physique! It is veiny and circumcised, long, way longer than average actually, and its girth is going to stretch and fill any hole perfectly.           But this beautiful gear is not always a blessing. Indeed, you cannot take Jason’s whole cock in your mouth without gagging or chocking (though some people don’t mind that) and if you’re not lubed enough penetration can definitely hurt. So playing with that amazing tool demands patience and time.     His testicles are even and rather large when you think about it but they suit the P.  

H- Hairs:         Jason is a hard-worker but he is extremely lazy when it comes to taking care of himself. Plus, that laziness is also coupled with the fact that he doesn’t have much time to really mind his appearance. When he is monopolized by his vigilante work, he can spend days without shaving (and sometimes showering) and not really realise that he is in an urgent need of a razor. A chance that he is not a man that tends to be very hairy!           But to be honest, Jason doesn’t mind hairs in general and there are actually places he refuses to shave like his legs, his arms and the sexy line of dark hairs he has under his bellybutton.     But when he actually takes time to clean and shave, he always makes sure that his armpits are not bushy, that there are no hairs on his chest and his face and that his pubic hairs are nicely trimmed (He hates shaving them.)     When it comes to his partner, Jason can tolerate some hairs but he prefers when they are either fully-shaven or well-trimmed. He doesn’t like eating hairs when eating his SO out.

I- Intimacy:     Jason is very ambiguous and difficult to understand when it comes to intimacy.   As a possessive lover, he will always refuse to share his partner with another ‘alpha male’. He needs to be the centre of attention and the only person craved and praised in the bedroom. So when dating Jason you can forget any sort of threesome or orgy.           But if his partner is interested in welcoming a person that might not overshadow Jason and let him keep his dominant place between the sheets (for example a woman) then he may accept. Single, he will happily mingle with a couple but he will somewhat see this as a competition or an opportunity to show who’s the best.           But there’s definitely something that he will prefer to threesomes and that’s being watched or heard while having sex.           No, he won’t drag you to some swinger’s club and allow dozens of people watch you two having sex (he is a romantic) but you need to keep in mind that Jason is a man that doesn’t limit his sexual intercourses to his bedroom.             He actually loves fucking outside and/or in public places as the risks of getting caught or being heard have the tendency to get him highly turned on and have his juices flow. But he is not stupid enough to risk everything for a quick romp in front of others.             Weirdly, he prefers getting caught/ being heard by people he knows - and in that case he will not stop fucking his partner and show what an amazing lay he is – than by someone he doesn’t know. It boosts his ego and he can’t help it.       The only time getting caught traumatized him was when Alfred accidentally spotted him having sex in the manor. He didn’t dare catch his eye for days.    

J- Jerking off:   Jason can sometimes jerk off when he feels like he needs to release some stress and tension. But this solitary act requires a moment of intimacy he doesn’t often get because of his vigilantism that takes up all of his nights and energy. After a long night of patrol, given the choice, he will mostly choose sleeping over masturbation. But when he does jerk off, he always makes sure that no one is going to bother him (though he has fantasise about his crush watching him quite a few times) and he tends to think about situations rather than persons. The only times he will think about someone while masturbating will be when he has a crush on someone. Then he will imagine fucking this person and probably whisper their name.

K – Kink:         Jason can be kinky but he is not the kinkiest of the bat-family. There are things he will stubbornly never try or even consider (BDSM for example) but things he will gladly do on occasion (see Intimacy + Roleplay). As said before he won’t mix violence and love.   But the kinky side of Jason is just another way to spice up his relationship and show he is not a boring partner. Moreover, he is a boyfriend that takes consent and respect very seriously. He will never do anything that might hurt his SO in any way or anything they might not be confortable with.   That’s why he believes he and his partner have to talk about any sort of kinks before trying to experiment them. But he will prefer doing it through text messages than face to face. He is weirdly shy when talking about sex.

L - Love:           Jason has had a few one night stands but he will admit that sex is better when you’re in love. Plus, “sex gets better with time” would define Jason’s skills as a lover as he is the type of man that needs (and loves) taking his time to discover his partner’s body and desires. He is an enthusiastic learner that hasn’t yet discovered all the things he can know about sex. And that’s because he hasn’t had so many partners over the years.     Though don’t think that means your first time together is going to be bad. It won’t. On the contrary, it will be great but not as great as it can become.       Therefore we can jump to the conclusion that the persons that will only have Jason for one night will definitely miss something truly amazing.

M - Massage:     Jason has many qualities but giving massage is not a talent he can brag about. He is honestly not that bad at it but since he believes he sucks, he will not initiate in any sort of massage session. However, he loves getting one since he loves being touched and caressed especially on his chest and back. Actually, Jason believes that caresses and cuddles cannot be dissociated from the deed and views them as necessary before, during and after the act.         Also, he is the kind of men that will display his affection anytime he can though preferably in private. The rare PDA will occur if he feels jealous, threatened or worse, neglected (Don’t ever do that or the entire city will hear his wrath!).

N – Nudity:     When he is in a relationship Jason is not ashamed of his body but that doesn’t make him a body-confident man in general. Don’t expect seeing him walking around fully naked!     Indeed, Jason is modest and never sees his body as sexy. I mean, he knows he is muscular and well-built and all but as it is in his nature to focus on the negative, he will always be a bit hung up about the scars on his body and he will never let a one-night partner touch them or ask any sort of question about them. Only his SO will be allowed to do so and that shows how much trust and love Jason places in his relationships.

O – Oral sex:               To Jason, there’s nothing sexier than his partner sucking out his cock on their knees. It gives him satisfaction and boosts his ego like nothing else because he views this act as a symbol of submission and worship, two things he deeply cares about when having sex.           Fortunately he loves to reciprocate and he will not hesitate dropping on his knees to do the same. But don’t view it as him submitting to you. If that gorgeous man goes down, he goes down to make you scream his name, not to be your pet.           Also, it may be seen as an asshole move but if you refuse to suck his cock, do not expect him to give you oral sex. As terrible as it sounds and even though he puts his partner’s pleasure before his own, the man gives if only you give in return.

P – Position.   Jason is a romantic that craves touching and being touched and so he will always favours positions that allows him to feel his SO’s body against his or to roam their bodies with his strong hands or his lips. That’s why he will not appreciate being tied up and submitted.         Jason loves positions that allow him to go deep in his partner and to see himself do so. Plus, he likes sex to be a confortable experience for both his partner and himself. Therefore do not expect acrobatic positions that will leave you tired and aching for days. He doesn’t need that to make you feel that way. His top positions are: missionary, doggy, (reverse or not) cowgirl and spooning as they will all permit his hands and/or lips to wander your body.

Q – Quickie:   Jason is not really a fan of quickies as he want sex with him to be a memorable experience as well as a memento of his skills as a lover. Therefore, he strongly believes a 5 or 10 minutes sexual experience cannot show his partner what a good lay he is. And so, he will favour long nights of sweaty sex plus some good morning sex if the experience was highly pleasant.

R – Role Play: Jason is a good actor. He loves wearing disguise and impersonating different persons as we saw it quite regularly throughout RHATO. So if you want to role play, you bet he will be up for it and it will be a fun time. His favourite scenarios: the ones where he is in charge of course since they are the ones that allow him to display the little confidence he has without any sort of shyness or fear.     Do you like men with a moustache? Cause Malone Jr. is on his way.

S – Stamina:   Jason is kind, caring and generous out and under the sheets. He will always make sure to respect and please his partner, placing their pleasure before his own. But that doesn’t make him any less hungry than he is.           He is rather insatiable when having sex and that’s probably because he doesn’t have sex often even when in a relationship (damn patrols!). Therefore, that man can sometimes get carried away, be rather quick on the mount and become a bit of a jackhammer if his partner does not refrain him. And he won’t stop until he … you know.       Fortunately, his romantic side as well as his generosity will always remind him not to leave his partner unsatisfied at the end of the deed which miraculously doesn’t happen as quickly as one would expect given his frenetic pace.       Because he is athletic, Jason has a very good stamina. Plus, he is the kind of lover that can recuperate rather quickly and so he can go for a round two and even a round three if his partner is up for it.            

T – Talking:     Jason doesn’t consider himself a dirty-talker. Sure he will let out some naughty sentences while having sex but they will never be disrespectful. He won’t call his partner a whore or any other insulting words. On the contrary he will give compliments and make praises rain and he will happily accept the same from his partner in return.       He will also ask a lot of questions to reassure himself like “Do you like that?” or “Do you like my cock inside of you?” and he will also demand to be complimented (“Tell me how much you like it”) especially if his partner is silent (which is something he hates by the way).     He is not a very noisy lover. He never screams or moans loudly. He grunts and growls but those noises usually are very guttural as if he is fighting to keep them to himself. Don’t do the same though. Scream, talk and let the whole neighborhood he’s fucking you good!

U – Underwear:         Trunks or boxers but never briefs. Something that can hold his prominent package while he is running after criminals in Gotham City but that isn’t too tight around his thunder thighs. His underwear is generally unicolor and has no patterns. Dick bought him a pair of bat-briefs for fun once but he never wore them. Actually he probably threw them away. He likes his female partners to wear sexy fancy lingerie but he doesn’t see it as a necessary tool to be aroused. Simple underwear doesn’t turn him off but if there are some unicorns or rainbows on them … well … he might feel very uncomfortable and perplexed.          

V – Virginity:               He was around 16 or 17, living among the All-Caste and it was with Essence, Ducra’s daughter. Essence was Jason’s almost every first-times. Though she is not the first person he fell in love with, she was the first girl he kissed, the first girl he touched and the first girl he had sex with. Before that he had never really made out with anyone, as young Jason was the kind of boy more interested in books than in people. But Essence wasn’t just anyone. She was mysterious, fascinating and hard to get and those two traits are still something that Jason digs in a partner. If you ask Jason about his first time, he will tell you that even if he and Essence are not on best terms today, he doesn’t regret one bit of what happened with her. He truly loved her and she was here for him when no one else was.

W – Worship If you don’t know how to be complimentary then you might not be the right person for Jason. This man craves compliments and affection as much as one craves food and water.           Jason cannot thrive in a relationship with a selfish partner who doesn’t flatter him as he always feels the need to be worshipped. It’s not arrogance. It’s because he is permanently scared of not being good enough. See him as an unconfident little boy who needs recognition to be happy in a way.       But once you start demonstrating your admiration and affection for him, get ready to be showered with loving compliments. Worship goes in both ways in Jason’s mind. The more complimentary and loving you will be the more he will. And that works in the bedroom as well. Worship the man! Show him (and tell him!) how much you love him and how much you love what he is doing and you will be the most sexually satisfied person in the world. To make it short, worship is Jason’s fuel.   To finish, If he could worship one part of his lover’s body it would be their eyes. (Told you he was a romantic!). He loves to keep eye contact with his partner while having sex and see them sparkle with lust, pleasure and happiness.           

X- Xenophilia:             If you look at Jason’s list of love interests, you can spot some recurring characteristics. Physically, most of them have light hair. They are often blonds or red-heads and they often have got green or blue eyes. But that doesn’t mean he won’t be interested in brunettes (Talia, Donna) and reject anyone with dark eyes (Essence’s eyes were completely black!). Because what matters the most to him is chemistry. Jason wants someone he can trust, someone he can talk to and that will understand him but that also will call him on his bullshit and stand up to him when needed. In a word, be strong and be there for him.

Y – Yearn:       Unlike someone else in the bat-family (cough Dick cough), Jason will not drop his pants in a heartbeat and he doesn’t really fancy eager persons as well (Those persons are only good for one night). He loves the chase and he loves when the people he is interested in are playing hard to get. That will arouse him a lot and make him crave them even more.           When he wants to have sex, Jason will drop occasional hints to show his (potential) partner that he wants them. Usually, they will be caresses, kisses and/or languorous looks. He will never clearly say out loud that he wants to have sex. But he doesn’t mind when his partner drags him to the bedroom and initiate the deed. He finds that terribly sexy even, and super complimentary.

Z – Zzzzz:         Jason likes to sleep after sex with his naked partner huddled against him. Rest your head over his chest and hold him tight and he will be the happiest man in the world as, to him, it will mean ‘Stay. I feel safe with you’. But don’t expect to sleep all night especially if your relationship is brand new. You wanted Todd in your bed? You have him and he will not hesitate waking you up slowly if he wants to get in between your legs one more time. Hope you don’t mind.     Plus, Jason is not the “hump and go” type of man and he will always be there in the morning with his body probably pressed against yours. Though, if you’re a night stand there are risks he might never call you again.

[thedreadvampy]

Please stop describing aroace as not wanting or seeking out a romantic/sexual relationship. The terms describe attraction, not behavior, and this is something that has been discussed and explained to exhaustion by aroace communities. I have personally also pursued relationships because I thought I wanted that kind of relationship, and too many people try to say that means I’m not really aroace. I have aroace friends who are in sexual and/or romantic relationships.

I’m not angry at you, I know you don’t intend to cause harm, and I generally agree with your thoughts on how Martin is characterized, but I am so, so tired of people who aren’t aroace telling us who we are, how we feel, and how we behave. There are so many easily-accessible resources and explanations about asexuality and aromanticism with respect to relationships, and I urge you do some research if you feel the need to define us.

I don’t mind if you don’t reply to this. It’s the sort of conversation I would rather have privately, but I’ve seen and experienced too much harassment targeting asexual identities to feel safe going off anon.

No I'm not going to stop doing that because my feeling on this is based specifically on conversations raised by and led by my aroace friends and loved ones. as in this is a frustration that a lot of people in my life who are aroace have repeatedly expressed - that there's no space to express clearly and unambiguously that you're Not Wanting Sex And Relationships because the linguistic space is slipping for that. and they've talked a lot specifically about how that's led to them feeling more pressured to push themselves into sex or relationships, or having to constantly explain and defend their space even within aspec communities. and that's a problem. not that people who want or might want sex and romance but consider themselves broadly asexual or aromatic exist, but that with the semantic drift around aroace, there's not really a term which unambiguously expresses that that's not something they do want.

Action is not the same as desire - having had or wanted a relationship doesn't mean anything for whether you're "actually" aro or ace, any more than having dated men in the past means you're not "actually" a lesbian. comphet is a hell of a situation. I'm not splitting hairs about attraction vs behaviour - I'm talking about desire versus lack of desire.

Yes, fine, good, you can act for a lot of reasons, only some of which are genuinely held desire (trust me I know this). I'm not debating that. I'm saying that the space that's shrunk away in contemporary aspec language is a term which unambiguously means "a person who does not have a desire to have sex or relationships."

In this example, Martin spends much of the story expressing desire for a monogamous romantic relationship and nothing in his story arc, his actions, his dialogue or his fears seem to imply that that's motivated by anything other than a genuinely held desire to have a relationship with a man he is into. He's not aroace in the same way he's not a trans lesbian like. yes he could be being led by common drivers - compulsory sexuality, the desire for emotional closeness, the confusion of working out which feeling's what, only knowing how to navigate relationships through a certain lens, etc - and yes he absolutely could be either of those things, but ultimately there's nothing in the text to support that conclusion as is. He is not written as aroace, and in terms of material questions like 'what assumptions do people make about you and what's a justified assumption to make' the two things that matter when it comes to "X is/is not [identity]" are:

what do they outwardly identify as

how do they behave and what desires do they experience and express

like you are absolutely right that it's shitty for people to try and tell you you're not aroace if you are. people know their own identities best. I'm talking about group terminology that's sufficiently materialist to make sense.

like when someone says they're aroace what are appropriate assumptions to make? that this is someone who doesn't want sex or romantic relationships in and of itself, surely? that sex and romance are either low priority or actively not wanted? that they're not likely to be open to attempts to initiate sex or romance, and that their rejection of that isn't personal? that they may prefer long-term to not have a partner and that not having a partner isn't a source of great pain and loneliness and doesn't indicate an unmet need?

like that's what the term means. a term boundaries a set of basic assumptions. that doesn't mean nobody in that group can then turn around and say 'actually I am sad I don't have a partner' or 'actually I think I do want to try a relationship with you' or 'actually it's very validating when people flirt with me'.

similarly like an assumption it's reasonable to make about bisexual people, and an assumption that's embedded in the term, is 'is interested in sex or romance with people of multiple genders.' that doesn't mean I can't be bisexual and also have a complex relationship to what if any sexual or romantic desires I have and why. but it means that if I'm talking about bisexual people, I'm expecting you to join me in the assumption that yes we're talking about People Who Experience Multiple Gender Attraction. sexuality is messy and complicated let's not get it twisted. saying 'this is what the word means' doesn't remove the existence of complex experiences of self and of desire. but what the implied meaning of a word is matters and people were and are acting as if the implied meaning of 'aroace' has nothing to do with inherent desire for sex and romance which seems to me to leave a pretty substantial communication gap.

as I said in the tags - is there a more unambiguous word for 'people who are explicitly uninterested in romance and sex' than aroace? what is it? what is the word that's meant to go there? because THAT IS AN IMPORTANT THING TO BE ABLE TO EXPRESS UNAMBIGUOUSLY. and it doesn't mean I'm looking for a word that means 'has never for any reason pursued or experienced romance or sex' which I feel is how you're characterising what I'm saying (and I get that this is a triggering topic with a lot of baggage for a lot of people so I absolutely get why you're reacting as if that's what I'm saying). nor does it mean I'm looking for a word that means '100% gold star virgin who's never dated or had a sexy thought.' it means I'm looking for a word that means 'is uninterested in sex and romance' to describe a reason why somebody might choose to not have relationships, or to not have sex, or might have no sexual or romantic history through choice. key word might. but the fact is every time somebody uses aroace as a descriptor of 'reasons why people may choose not to have relationships' people end up 'correcting' them to say 'some aroace people have relationships' which is. kind of irrelevant to the point. some lesbians are married to men (comphet, changing sense of self, marriages of convenience, lavender marriages etc) but when I say 'she doesn't want to date him because she's a lesbian' we understand what the common understanding of lesbian is.

ultimately idk how to end this post. my point in the original post wasn't 'nobody who's aroace has experience of sex or relationships' but 'aroaceness is a reasonable reason why someone might not have had sex or relationships' and my point in the tags you're objecting to isn't 'aroace as a term should only include people who would never consent to sex or relationships,' it's 'a lack of inherent wish for sex and relationships used to be what we understood aroaceness to imply; now that no longer seems to be the implication and that leaves a gap where a lot of people, aroace and otherwise, struggle to express that experience'

[violeteyedmedium]

So, the penumbra podcast does a lot of amazing things for people and has some genuinely really good representation and complex, well written storylines that I think are just so, so important. I personally adore it, but it isn’t perfect because nothing is. I think we have a duty to be critical of the things we enjoy.

So like, how they handle distinguishing their trans characters as trans has really missed the mark a couple of times and I would just like to point that out. Deadnaming and misgendering are social faux pas yes, but they have actual traumatizing effects on trans people, so only utilizing those methods as defining factors of a character’s gender creates a viscerally unpleasant reaction for a lot of people in the community you’re trying to represent. I don’t think we necessarily need to include those kinds of trans experiences in media meant to empower us, if that makes any sense?

Trans people have characteristic experiences entirely separate from the unpleasantness we experience. I think Juno is a good example of a subtle trans character. He casually mixes the language he chooses for himself and he indulges in both masculine and feminine aesthetics. There was some vague conversation that could be read as misgendering from Tod in Midnight Fox, but it was innocuous enough to write off (at least imo). Overall, Juno’s gender is made clear to the audience while not being intrusive to the narrative of the story or dredging up trauma from transphobia.

However, for Vespa, she did not get the same courtesy. Any number of things could have indicated that she was a trans woman aside from memories of her father using her deadname. I personally didn’t have an issue with this particular instance because I have a complicated relationship with my deadname, but many other trans people have said that it made them uncomfortable. I am not a trans woman either so I can’t really elaborate on any transmisogyny. I think that’s very fair, because deadnaming has transphobic connotations outside the world of this podcast.

The other issue I have with it is that deadnaming as a device to identify a character as trans feels more like they’re trying to communicate to cis people that a character is trans. Trans people, generally, are aware of the experiences outside of negative interactions with cis people that define us as transgender. Examples I would use would be like indicating a character is a trans man by mentioning wearing a binder, doing a t shot, surgery scars, having a packer, choosing a name, etc. So many people choose to believe Peter Nureyev is trans because his experience with names and the importance of names to his story really resonates with trans people’s experiences. Cis people are more likely to understand a character is trans through misgendering and deadnaming, because they are more familiar with that (especially because mainstream trans media focuses a lot on traumatizing experiences).

I’d also like to just take the time here and say how Angelo’s bisexuality and Ale’s introduction to the story were handled was transphobic. If Angelo had simply misgendered him once and moved on, the problem would be smaller but because he insisted on misgendering Ale even more after being corrected to cope with his own sexuality crisis, that is what makes it transphobic. The purposeful misgendering. He’s allowed to grow from it, but we shouldn’t act like what he did was completely an honest mistake. It is actually super common for trans men to be treated like sexy in-between genders that let people experiment with their sexuality guilt free and it’s fetishizing and gross. It’s dehumanizing. Ale being introduced as a teaching tool for Angelo to learn that being bisexual is okay feels pretty nasty in the broader context of that stereotype. This may just be my feelings, but I’ve talked to many other trans mascs who feel the same way.

I’m sure that they never intended harm, and that they will include Ale in a bigger way that fleshes him out more than just a tool for another character, but that introduction was still super rough. I just think that maybe in the future they could try researching different trans experiences and incorporating certain things that don’t evoke the really shitty things that happen to us, and instead normalize the experiences that we do have that are completely separate from being misgendered and mistreated.

[sapphicambitions]

Rating Evermore Songs By The Homoerotic Subtext

Before i get into this please know that i do not give two shits about Taylor Swift’s personal life or sexuality. That is not what this is about. I’ve just gotten my grubby little gay hands on this album.

Willow:  While it fucking slaps and is genuinely  one of my favorite songs on the album i don’t really get a lot of homoerotic subtext from it. also the fact that im listening to it from a lesbian’s perspective and the line “that’s my man” is repeated a lot so i don’t connect to it on a homo level but it does slap. 2/10

Champagne Problems: ugh this song is so good. feels like it was written about happiest season, if im being honest. like the narrator is still closeted while her lover is out to her family. and like insert the plot of happiest seasons also the mention of flannel? come on. also like the narrator’s lover’s gender is never mentioned so im choosing to believe the narrator is singing about loving a woman while she’s in the closet. you can’t tell me that im wrong. impeccable homoerotic vibes 8/10

Gold Rush: this song is just overflowing in homoerotic subtext. “what must it be like to grow up that beautiful”????? “With your hair falling into place dominoes”????? “THE COSTAL TOWN WE WANDERED ‘ROUND HAD NEVER SEEN A LOVE AS PURE AS IT” ???? that’s me singing about my crush. The whole thing feels like im singing about my unattainable crush. That is what i chose to think this song is about. 9/10

’Tis the Damn Season: this song makes me go bonkers. yes yes its about going back home and reconnecting with an old flame. I get the homoerotic subtext out of this purely because i like it and there’s no reference to pronouns in it. Like i CAN make this about homoeroticism if I WANT to but it’s not like as inherent as some of the other songs. Pretty okay homo vibes. 5/10

Tolerate It - the homo vibes in this one hurt me. they hurt me!!! the line “I know my love should be celebrated but you tolerate it” hits HARD when you have family members who just Don’t Acknowledge your gayness. Like yes yes this is about a lover but god this song hits so hard in context of a queer person’s relationship with their less than enthusiastic family. Now I’m begging for footsteps in the story of your life? If it’s all in my head tell me now? Took this dagger in me and removed it? goddddddd it hits a little too hard. i can also related it to my love life of loving someone who only kind of cares about me so there’s homo subtext in that but jesus christ this song makes me think about my family. 7/10

No Body, No Crime: do you think that after the narrator killed ester’s husband she muttered to herself: “but no homo” ? 10/10 homoerotic subtext. I don’t need to explain it.

Happiness: i do not care about Miss Swift’s intentions, because there is little to no subtext in this one, tbh. to ME this song is about my relationship with my former self and how i’ve grown into my gayest self. I can’t make it go away by making her a villain. And she hasn’t me the new me yet. There will be happiness after her but there was happiness because of her. My relationship with my past self and my current self is complicated and messy and necessary 4/10

Dorothea: i mean, we know. we all know. it’s the betty of this album, but better. I firmly believe this will be the next song tiktok lesbians obsess over. interpret that as you will. 8/10.

Coney Island: references the long haul. like a Uhaul. lesbianism. anytime i hear a woman call her lover “baby” i automatically assume lesbianism. Also this song makes me think about One Last Stop by Casey McQuiston but y’all don’t know that yet. Unfortunately this song is a duet with a man. I don’t really connect to this song a lot, tbh. 2/10

Ivy: i mean like this song is about having an affair with someone who is not the narrator’s husband. The homoeroticism of this one JUMPED OUT. my GOD this just RADIATES secret lesbian love affair. like this is in the olden times when you couldn’t be gay and women had to be married to men in order to survive but the narrator is in love with a woman she can’t be with. the imagery of this song is so sapphic. 12/10. i love it so much,

Cowboy Like Me: Pack it up, Brokeback Mountain. 15/10.

Long Story Short: I can get nothing of my own out of this song because it is just so obviously taylor swift singing about her own life. those stronger than me might be able to get homoerotic subtext out of it but i can only hear Taylor Swift singing about Taylor Swift which is fine, it’s a good song, but it gets a 0/10 on the homoeroticism

Majorie - I know this is about her grandmother and i relate to this song a lot about someone in my life that i lost. it is a song about loss and loving someone you lost but how they never really leave you and its beautiful but unfortunately it is the song i think about when i think about my gay ships that got hit with the good old bury your gays trope. like this is a queliot song. it is. i don’t make the rules. but the song itself isn’t really homoerotic, more that i can just relate to it on many levels. 3/10 on the homoeroticism scale but a 10/10 for a well written song.

Closure: First of all, this song is a bop. It reminds me a lot of the ben platt song where eh says “did you read my letter? do you know me better than i know myself?” so therefore im already thinking in homo terms. I would say these are pretty solid homoerotic vibes. i relate to this song a lot because a lot of my “exes” i never officially dated and we broke up there was absolutely no closure and im just rubbing my grubby homosexual hands all over this song. 6/10

Evermore: i am completely erasing Miss Swiftie’s intentions behind a song, this song is about my struggle with finding my sexuality and my journey with coming out and how i felt suffocated by the closet and i was convinced that everything was going to terrible for forever and i felt very lost and i look back on this time very bittersweetly cause it sucked but it brought me to where i am today. 5.5/10 homoeroticism

[thewatsonbeekeepers]

Chapter 4 – It is always 1895 [TAB 1/1]

TAB is my favourite episode of Sherlock. It is a masterpiece that investigates queerness, the canon and the psyche all within an hour and a half. Huge amounts of work has been done on this episode, however, so I’m not going to do a line by line breakdown – that could fill a small book. A great starting point for understanding the myriad of references in TAB is Rebekah’s three part video series on the episode, of which the first instalment can be found here X. I broadly agree with this analysis; what I’m going to do here, though, is place that analysis within the framework of EMP theory. As a result, as much as it pains me, this chapter won’t give a breakdown of carnation wallpaper or glass houses or any of those quietly woven references – we’re simply going in to how it plays into EMP theory.

Before digging into the episode, I want to take a brief diversion to talk about one of my favourite films, Mulholland Drive (2001).

If you haven’t seen Mulholland Drive, I really recommend it – it’s often cited as the best film of the last 20 years, and watching it really helps to see where TAB came from and the genre it’s operating in. David Lynch is one of the only directors to do the dream-exploration-of-the-psyche well, and I maintain that a lot of the fuckiness in the fourth series draws on Lynch. However, what I actually want to point out about Mulholland Drive is the structure of it, because I think it will help us understand TAB a little better. [If you don’t want spoilers for Mulholland Drive, skip the next paragraph.]

The similarities between these two are pretty straightforward; the most common reading of Mulholland Drive is that an actress commits suicide by overdose after causing the death of her ex-girlfriend, who has left her for a man, and that the first two-thirds of the film are her dream of an alternate scenario in which her girlfriend is saved. The last third of the film zooms in and out of ‘real life’, but at the end we see a surreal version of the actual overdose which suggests that this ‘real life’, too, has just been in her psyche. Sherlock dying and recognising that this may kill John is an integral part of TAB, and the relationships have clear parallels, but what is most interesting here is the structural similarity; two-thirds of the way through TAB, give or take, we have the jolt into reality, zoom in and out of it for a while and then have a fucky scene to finish with that suggests that everything is, in fact, still in our dying protagonist’s brain. Mulholland Drive’s ending is a lot sadder than TAB’s – the fact that, unlike Sherlock, there is no sequel can lead us to assume that Diane dies – and it’s also a lot more confusing; it’s often cited as one of the most complicated films ever made even just in terms of surface level plot, before getting into anything else, and it certainly took me a huge amount of time on Google before I could approach anything like a resolution on it!

Mulholland Drive is the defining film in terms of the navigating-the-surreal-psyche subgenre, and so the structural parallels between the two are significant – and definitely point to the idea that Sherlock hasn’t woken up at the end of TAB, which is important. But we don’t need to take this parallel as evidence; there’s plenty of that in the episode itself. Let’s jump in.

Emelia as Eurus

When we first meet Eurus in TST, she calls herself E; this initialism is a link to Moriarty, but it’s also a convenient link to other ‘E’ names. Lots of people have already commented on the aural echo of ‘Eros’ in ‘Eurus’, which is undeniable; the idea that there is something sexual hidden inside her name chimes beautifully with her representation of a sexual repression. The other important character to begin with E, however, is Emelia Ricoletti. The name ‘Emelia’ doesn’t come from ACD canon, and it’s an unorthodox spelling (Amelia would be far more common), suggesting that starting with an ‘E’ is a considered choice.

When TAB aired, we were preoccupied with Emelia as a Sherlock mirror, and it’s easy to see why; the visual parallels (curly black hair, pale skin) plus the parallel faked death down to the replacement body, which Mofftiss explicitly acknowledge in the episode. However, I don’t think that this reading is complete; rather, she foreshadows the Eurus that we meet in s4. The theme of ghosts links TAB with s4 very cleanly; TAB is about Emelia, but there is also a suggestion of the ghosts of one’s past with Sir Eustace as well as Sherlock’s own claims (‘the shadows that define our every sunny day’). Compare this to s4 – ‘ghosts from the past’ appears on pretty much every promotional blurb, and the word is used several times in relation to Eurus. If Eurus is the ghost from Sherlock’s past, the repressive part of his psyche that keeps popping back, Emelia is a lovely metaphor for this; she is quite literally the ghost version of Sherlock who won’t die.

What does it mean, then, when Jim and Emelia become one and the same in the scene where Jim wears the bride’s dress? We initially read this as Jim being the foil to Sherlock, his dark side, but I think it’s more complicated than this. Sherlock’s brain is using Emelia as a means of understanding Jim, but when we watch the episode it seems that they’ve actually merged. Jim wearing the veil of the bride is a good example of this, but I also invite you to rewatch the moment when John is spooked by the bride the night that Eustace dies; the do not forget me song has an undeniable South Dublin accent.* This is quite possibly Yasmine Akram [Janine] rather than Andrew Scott, of course, but let’s not forget that these characters are resolutely similar, and hearing Jim’s accent in a genderless whisper is a pretty clear way of inflecting him into the image of the bride. In addition to this, Eustace then has ‘Miss Me?’ written on his corpse, cementing the link to Moriarty.

[*the South Dublin accent is my accent, so although we hear a half-whispered song for all of five seconds, I’m pretty certain about this]

Jim’s merging with Emelia calls to mind for me what I think might be the most important visual of all of series 4 – Eurus and Jim’s Christmas meeting, where they dance in circles with the glass between them and seem to merge into each other. I do talk about this in a later chapter, but TLDR – if Jim represents John being in danger and Eurus represents decades of repressed gay trauma, this merging is what draws the trauma to the surface just as Jim’s help is what suddenly makes Eurus a problem. It is John’s being in danger which makes Sherlock’s trauma suddenly spike and rise – he has to confront this for the first time – just like Emelia Ricoletti’s case from 1895 only needs solving for the first time now that Jim is back.

At some point I want to do a drag in Sherlock meta, because I think there’s a lot more to it than meets the eye, but Jim in a bride’s dress does draw one obvious drag parallel for me.

If you haven’t seen the music video for I Want to Break Free, it’s 3 minutes long and glorious – and also, I think, reaps dividends when seen in terms of Sherlock. You can watch it here: X

Not only is it a great video, but for British people of Mofftiss’s age, it’s culturally iconic and not something that would be forgotten when choosing that song for Jim. Queen were intending to lampoon Coronation Street, a British soap, and already on the wrong side of America for Freddie Mercury’s unapologetic queerness, found themselves under fire from the American censors. Brian May says that no matter how many times he tried to explain Coronation Street to the Americans, they just didn’t get it. This was huge controversy at the time, but the video and the controversy around it also managed to cement I Want to Break Free as Queen’s most iconic queer number – despite not even being one of Mercury’s songs. There is no way that Steven Moffat, and even more so Mark Gatiss would not have an awareness of this in choosing this song for Moriarty. Applying any visual to this song is going to invite comparisons to the video – and inflecting a sense of drag here is far from inappropriate. Moriarty has been subsumed into Eurus in Sherlock’s brain – the male and the female are fused into an androgynous and implicitly therefore all-encompassing being. I’m not necessarily comfortable with the gendered aspect of this – genderbending is something we really only see in our villains here – but given this is about queer trauma, deliberately queering its form in this way is making what we’re seeing much more explicit.

Nothing new under the sun

“The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun” (Ecclesiastes)

"Read it up -- you really should. There is nothing new under the sun. It has all been done before." (A Study in Scarlet, Sherlock Holmes)

“Hasn’t this all happened before? There’s nothing new under the sun.” (The Abominable Bride, Jim Moriarty)

This is arguably the key to spotting that TAB is a dream long before they tell us – when TAB’s case is early revealed to be a mixture between TRF (Emelia’s suicide) and TGG (the five pips), and we see the opening of ASiP repeated, we should be questioning what on earth is going on. This can also help us to recognise s4 as being EMP as well though – old motifs from the previous series keep repeating through the cases, like alarm bells ringing. Moriarty telling Sherlock that there is nothing new under the sun is his key to understanding that the Emelia case is meant to help him understand what happened to Jim, that it’s a mental allegory or mirror to help him parse it. This doesn’t go away when TAB ends! Moving into TST, one of the striking things is that cases are still repeating! The Six Thatchers appeared on John’s blog way back, before the fall – you can read it here: X. It’s about a gay love affair that ends in one participant killing the other. Take from that what you will, when John’s extramarital affection is making him suicidal and Sherlock comatose. Meanwhile, the title of The Final Problem refers to the story that was already covered in TRF and the phone situation with the girl on the plane references both ASiB and TGG, and the ending of TST is close to a rerun of HLV. It’s pretty much impossible to escape echoes of previous series in a way that is almost creepy, but we’ve already had this explained to us in TAB – none of this is real. It’s supposed to be explaining what is happening in the real world – and Mofftiss realised that this was going to be difficult to stomach, and so they included TAB as a kind of key to the rest of the EMP, which becomes much more complex.

However, if we want to go deeper we should look at where that quote comes from. I’ve given a few epigraphs to this section to show where the quote comes from – first the book of Ecclesiastes, then A Study in Scarlet. It’s one of the first things Holmes says and it is during his first deduction in Lauriston Gardens. This is where I’m going to dive pretty deep into the metatextual side of things, so bear with the weirdness.

[we’re going deeper]

Holmes’s first deduction from A Study in Scarlet shows that he’s no great innovator – he simply notices things and spots patterns from things he has seen before. This is highlighted by the fact that he even makes this claim by quoting someone before him. If our Sherlock also makes deductions based on patterns from the past, extensive dream sequences where he works through past cases as mirrors for present ones makes perfect sense and draws very cleverly on canon. However, I think his spotting of patterns goes deeper than that. Sherlock Holmes has been repressed since the publication of A Study in Scarlet, through countless adaptations in literature and film. Plenty of these adaptations as well as the original stories are referenced in the EMP, not least by going back to 1895, the year that symbolises the era in which most of these adaptations are set. (If you don’t already know it, check out the poem 221B by Vincent Starrett, one of the myriad of reasons why the year 1895 is so significant.) My feeling is that these adaptations, which have layered on top of each other in the public consciousness to cement the image of Sherlock Holmes the deductive machine [which he’s not, sorry Conan Doyle estate] come to symbolise the 100+ years of repression that Sherlock himself has to fight through to come out of the EMP as his queer self.

This is one of the reasons that the year 1895 is so important; it was the year of Oscar Wilde’s trial and imprisonment for gross indecency, and this is clearly a preoccupation of Sherlock’s consciousness in TFP with its constant Wilde references, suggesting that his MP’s choice of 1895 wasn’t coincidental. Much was made during TAB setlock of a newspaper that said ‘Heimish The Ideal Husband’, Hamish being John’s middle name and An Ideal Husband being one of Wilde’s plays. But the Vincent Starrett poem, although nostalgic and ostensibly lovely, for tjlcers and it seems for Sherlock himself symbolises something much more troubling. Do search up the full poem, but for now let’s look at the final couplet.

Here, though the world explode, these two survive

And it is always 1895

‘Though the world explode’ is a reference to WW1, which is coming in the final Sherlock Holmes story, and which is symbolised by Eurus – in other chapters, I explain why Eurus and WW1 are united under the concept of ‘winds of change’ in this show. Sherlock and John survive the winds of change – except they don’t move with them. Instead, they stay stuck in 1895, the year of ultimate repression. 2014!Sherlock going back in his head to 1895 and repeating how he met John suggests exactly that, that nothing has changed but the superficial, and that emotionally, he is still stuck in 1895.

Others have pulled out similar references to Holmes adaptations he has to push through in TAB – look at the way he talks in sign language to Wilder, which can only be a reference to Billy Wilder, director of TPLoSH, the only queer Holmes film, and a film which was forced to speak through coding because of the Conan Doyle estate. That film is also referenced by Eurus giving Sherlock a Stradivarius, which is a gift given to him in TPLoSH in exchange for feigning heterosexuality. Eurus is coded as Sherlock’s repression, and citing a repressive moment in a queer film as her first action when she meets Sherlock is another engagement by Sherlock’s psyche with his own cinematic history. My favourite metatextual moment of this nature, however, is the final scene of TFP which sees John and Sherlock running out of a building called Rathbone Place.

Basil Rathbone is one of the most iconic Sherlock Holmes actors on film, and Benedict’s costume in TAB and in particular the big overcoat look are very reminiscent of Rathbone.

Others have discussed (X) how the Victorian costume and the continued use of the deerstalker in the present day are images of Sherlock’s public façade and exclusion of queerness from his identity. It’s true that pretty much every Holmes adaptation has used the deerstalker, but the strong Rathbone vibes that come from Ben’s TAB costume ties the 1895 vibe very strongly into Rathbone. To have the final scene – and hopefully exit from the EMP – tie in with Sherlock and John running out of Rathbone Place tells us that, just as Sherlock cast off the deerstalker at the end of TAB (!), he has also cast off the iconic filmic Holmes persona which has never been true to his actual identity.

Waterfall scene

The symbol of water runs through TAB as well as s4 – others have written fantastic meta on why water represents Sherlock’s subconscious (X), but I want to give a brief outline. It first appears with the word ‘deeper’ which keeps reappearing, which then reaches a climax in the waterfall scene. The idea that Sherlock could drown in the waters of his mind is something that Moriarty explicitly references, suggesting that Sherlock could be ‘buried in his own Mind Palace’. The ‘deep waters’ line keeps repeating through series 4, and I just want to give the notorious promo photo from s4 which confirms the significance of the motif.

This is purely symbolic – it never happens in the show. Water increases in significance throughout – think of Sherlock thinking he’s going mad in his mind as he is suspended over the Thames, or the utterly nonsensical placement of Sherrinford in the middle of the ocean – the deepest waters of Sherlock’s mind. Much like the repetition of cases hinting that EMP continues, the use of water is something that appears in the MP, and it sticks around from TAB onwards, a real sign that we’re going deeper and deeper. I talk about this more in the bit on TFP, but the good news is that Sherrinford is the most remote place they could find in the ocean – that’s the deepest we’re going. After that, we’re coming out (of the mind).

Shortly after TAB aired, I wrote a meta about the waterfall scene, some of which I now disagree with, but the core framework still stands – it did not, of course, bank on EMP theory. You can find it here (X), but I want to reiterate the basic framework, because it still makes a lot of sense. Jim represents the fear of John’s suicide, and Jim can only be defeated by Sherlock and John together, not one alone – and crucially, calling each other by first names, which would have been very intimate in the Victorian era. After Jim is “killed”, we have Sherlock’s fall. The concept of a fall (as in IOU a fall) has long been linked with falling in love in tjlc. Sherlock tells John that it’s not the fall that kills you, it’s the landing, something that Jim has been suggesting to him for a while. What is the landing, then? Well, Sherlock Holmes fell in love back in the Victorian era, symbolised by the ultra repressive 1895, and that’s where he jumps from – but he lands in the 21st century. Falling in love won’t kill him in the modern day. What I missed that time around, of course, was that despite breaking through the initial Victorian layers of repression, he still dives into more water, and when the plane lands, it still lands in his MP, just in a mental state where the punishment his psyche deals him for homosexuality is less severe. This also sets up s4 as specifically dealing with the problem of the fall – Sherlock jumps to the 21st century specifically to deal with the consequences of his romantic and sexual feelings. There’s a parallel here with Mofftiss time jumping; back when they made A Study in Twink in 2009, there was a reason they made the time jump. Having Sherlock’s psyche have that touch of self-awareness helps to illustrate why they made a similar jump, also dealing with the weight of previous adaptations.

Women

I preface this by saying how incredibly uncomfortable I find the positioning of women as the KKK in TAB. It’s a parallel which is unforgivable; frankly, invoking the KKK without interrogating the whiteness of the show or even mentioning race is unacceptable. Steven Moffat’s ability to write women has consistently been proven to be nil, but this is a new low. However, the presence of women in TAB is vital, so on we go.

TAB specifically deals with the question of those excluded from a Victorian narrative. This is specifically tied into to those who are excluded from the stories, such as Jane and Mrs. Hudson. Mrs. Hudson’s complaint is in the same scene as John telling her and Sherlock to blame the problems on the illustrator. This ties back to the deerstalker metaphor which is so prevalent in this episode; something that’s not in the stories at all, but a façade by which Holmes is universally recognised and which as previously referenced masks his queerness. Women, then, are not the only people being excluded from the narrative. When Mycroft tells us that the women have to win, he’s also talking about queer people. This is a war that we must lose.

I don’t think the importance of Molly in particular here has been mentioned before, but forgive me if I’m retreading old ground. However, Molly always has importance in Sherlock as a John mirror, and just because she is dressed as a man here doesn’t mean we should disregard this. If anything, her ridiculous moustache is as silly as John’s here! Molly, although really a member of the resistance, is able to pass in the world she moves in in 1895, but only by masking her own identity. This is exactly what happens to John in the Victorian era – as a bisexual man married to a woman, he is able to pass, but it is not his true identity. More than that, Molly is a member of the resistance, suggesting not just that John is queer but that he’s aware of it and actively looking for it to change.

I know I was joking about Molly and John’s moustaches, but putting such a silly moustache on Molly links to the silliness of John’s moustaches, which only appear when he’s engaged to a woman and in the Victorian era. He has also grown the moustache just so the illustrator will recognise him, and Molly has grown her moustache so that she will be recognised as a man. In this case, Molly is here to demonstrate the fact that John is passing, but only ever passing. Furthermore, Molly, who is normally the kindest person in the whole show, is bitter and angry throughout TAB – it’s not difficult to see then how hiding one’s identity can affect one’s mental health. I really do think that John is a lot more abrasive in TAB than he is in the rest of the show, but that’s not the whole story. Showing how repression can completely impair one’s personality also points to the suicidal impulses that are lurking just out of sight throughout TAB – this is what Sherlock is terrified of, and again his brain is warning him just what it is that is causing John this much pain and uncharacteristic distress.

This is just about the loosest sketch of TAB that could exist! But TAB meta has been so extensive that going over it seems futile, or else too grand a project within a short chapter. Certain theories are still formulating, and may appear at a later date! But what this chapter (I hope) has achieved has set up the patterns that we’re going to see play out in s4 – between the metatextuality, the waters of the mind and the role of Moriarty in the psyche, we can use TAB as a key with which to read s4. I like to think of it as a gift from Mofftiss, knowing just how cryptic s4 would be – and these are the basic clues with which to solve it.

That’s it for TAB, at least in this series – next up we’re going ever deeper, to find out exactly who is Eurus. See you then?