#not a bad thing inherently since obviously their gender impacts their life

[vonkarma2]

ultimately my enjoyment is hampered because it is low key sexist bc it takes place in an alternate universe where Sigmund Freud is real. though I did still like it for the most part but I hate Sigmund Freudddd Utena better

[tarobytez]

disability in the Six Of Crows Duology; an analysis of Kaz Brekker, Wylan Van Eck, and the fandom’s treatment of them.

****Note: I originally wrote this for a tiktok series, which im still going to do, but i wanted to post here as well bc tumblr is major contributor to what im going to talk about

CW: ableism, filicide, abuse

In the Six of Crows duology, Leigh Bardugo delicately subverts and melds harmful disability tropes into her narrative, unpacking them in a way that I, as a disabled person, found immensely refreshing and…. just brilliant. 

But what did you all do with that? Well, you fucked it up. Instead of critically looking at the characters, y’all just chose to be ableist. 

For the next few videos paragraphs im going to unpack disability theory (largely the stuff surrounding media, for obvious reasons) and how it relates to Six Of Crows and the characterization of Kaz Brekker and Wylan Van Eck, then how, despite their brilliant writing, y’all completely overlooked the actual text and continuously revert them to ableist cariactures.

Disclaimer: 1. Shocker - i am disabled. I have also extensively researched disability theory and am very active in the disabled community. Basically, I know my shit. 2. im going to be mad in these videos this analysis. Because the way y’all have been acting has been going on for a long ass time and im fuckin sick of it. I don’t give a shit about non-disabled feelings, die mad

Firstly, I’m going to discuss Kaz, his play on the stereotypical “mean cripple” trope and how Bardugo subverts it, his cane, and disabled rage. Then, I am going to discuss Wylan, the “inspiration porn” stereotype, caregivers / parents, and the social model of disability. Finally, I will then explain the problems in the fandom from my perspective as a disabled person, largely when it comes to wylan, bc yall cant leave that boy tf alone.

Kaz Brekker

Think of a character who uses a cane (obviously not Kaz). Now, are they evil, dubiously moral, or just an asshole in general? Because nearly example I can think of is: whether it be Lots’O from Toy Story, Lucius Malfoy, or even Scrooge and Mr.Gold from Once Upon A Time all have canes (the last two even having their canes appear less and less as they become better people)

The mean/evil cripple trope is far more common than you would think. Villains with different bodies are confined to the role of “evil”. To quote TV Tropes, who I think did a brilliant job on explaining it “The first is rooted in eugenics-based ideas linking disability or other physical deformities with a "natural" predisposition towards madness, criminality, vice, etc. The Rule of Symbolism is often at work here, since a "crippled" body can be used to represent a "crippled" soul — and indeed, a disabled villain is usually put in contrast to a morally upright and physically "perfect" hero. Whether consciously on the part of the writer or not, this can reinforce cultural ideas of disability making a person inherently inferior or negative, much in the same way the Sissy Villain or Depraved Homosexual trope associate sexual and gender nonconformity with evil. ”

Our introduction to Kaz affirms this notion of him being bad or morally bankrupt, with “Kaz Brekker didn’t need a reason”, etc. This mythologized version of himself, the “bastard of the barrel” actively fed into this misconception. But, as we the audience are privy to his inner thoughts, know that he is just a teenager like every other Crow. He is complex, his disability isn’t this tragic backstory, he just fell off a roof. It’s not his main motivation, nor does he curse revenge for making him a cripple - it is just another part of who he is. 

His cane (though the shows version fills me with rage but-) is an extension of Kaz - he fights with it, but it has a purpose. Another common thing in media is for canes to be simply accessories, but while Kaz’ cane is fashionable, it has purpose.

The quote “There was no part of him that was not broken, that had not healed wrong and there was no part of him that was not stronger for having been broken.” is so fucking powerful. Kaz does not want nor need a cure - its said in Crooked Kingdom that his leg could most likely be healed, but he chooses not to. Abled-bodied people tend to dismiss this thought as Kaz being stubborn but it shows a reality of acceptance of his disability that is just, so refreshing.

In chapter 22 of SOC, we see disabled rage done right - when he is called a cripple by the Fjerdan inmate, Kaz is pissed - the important detail being that he is pissed at the Fjerdan, at society for ableism, not blaming it on being disabled or wishing he could be normal. He takes action, dislocating the asshole’s shoulder and proving to him, and to a lesser extent, himself, that he is just as capable as anyone else, not in spite of, but because he is disabled. And that is the point of Kaz, harking back to the line that “there was no part of him that was not stronger for having been broken”. 

I cried on numerous occasions while reading the SOC duology, but the parts I highlighted in this section especially so. I, as many other disabled people do, have had a long and tumultuous relationship with our disability/es, and for many still struggle. But Kaz Brekker gave me an empowered disabled character who accepts themselves, and that means the world to me. 

Keeping that in mind, I hope you can understand why it hurts so much to disabled people when you either erase Kaz’s disability (whether through cosplay or fanfiction), or portray him as a “broken boy uwu”, especially implying that he would want a cure. That flies in the face of canon and is inherently fucking ableist. (if u think im mad wait until the next section)

Next, we have Wylan.  

Oh fucking boy. 

I love Wylan so fucking much, and y’all just do not seem to understand his character? Like at all? Since this is disability-centric, I’m not going to discuss how the intersection of his queerness also contributes to these issues, but trust me when I say it’s a contributing factor to what i'm going to say.

Wylan, motherfucking Van Eck. If you ableist pricks don’t take ur fucking hands off him right now im going to fight you. I see Wylan as a subversion another, and in my opinion more insidious stereotype pf disabled people - inspiration porn.

Cara Liebowitz in a 2015 article on the blog The Body Is Not An Apology explains in greater detail how inspiration porn is impactful in real life, but media is a major contributing factor to this reality. The technical definition is “the portrayal of people with disabilities as inspirational solely or in part on the basis of their disability” - but that does not cover it fully. 

Inspiration porn does lasting damage on the disabled community as it implies that disability is a negative that you need to “overcome” or “triumph” instead of something one can feel proud of. It exploits disabled people for the development of non-disabled people, and in media often the white male protagonist. Framing disability as inherently negative perpetuates ideals of eugenics and cures - see Autism $peaks’ “I Am Autism” ad. Inspiration porn is also incredibly patronizing as it implies that we cannot take care of ourselves, or do things like non-disabled people do. Because i stg some of you tend to think that we just sit around all day wishing we weren’t disabled. 

Another important theory ideal that is necessary when thinking about Wylan is the experience of feeling like a burden simply for needing help or accommodations. This is especially true when it comes to familial relationships, and internalized ableism.

The rhetoric that Wylan’s father drilled into his head, that he is “defective”, “a mistake”, and “needs to be corrected”, that he (Jan) was “cursed with a moron for a child” is a long held belief that disabled people hear relentlessly. And while many see Van Eck’s attempted murder of Wylan as “preposturous” and overall something that you would never think happens today - filicide (a parent murdering their child) is more common than you would like to believe. Without even mentioning the countless and often unreported deaths of disabled people due to lack of / insufficient / neglectful medical care, in a study on children who died from the result of household abuse, 40 of 42 of them (95%) were diagnosed with disabilities. Van Eck is not some caricature of ableist ideals - he is a real reflection on how many people and family members view disability. 

Circling back to how Wylan unpacks the inspiration porn trope - he is 3 dimensional, he is not only used to develop the other characters, he is just *chefs kiss* Leigh, imo, put so much love and care into the creation of Wylan and his story and character growth that is representative of a larger feeling in the disabled community. 

That being said, what you non-disabled motherfuckers have done to him.

The “haha Wylan can’t read” jokes aren’t and were not funny. Y’all literally boiled down everything Wylan is to him being dyslexic. And it’s like,,,, the only thing you can say about him. You ignore every other part of him other than his disability, and then mock him for it. There’s so much you can say about Wylan - simping for Jesper, being band kid and playing the fuckin flute, literally anything else. But no, you just chose to mock his disability, excellent fucking job!

Next up on “ableds stfu” - infantilization! y’all are so fucking condescending to Wylan, and treat him like a fucking toddler. And while partly it is due to his sexuality i think a larger portion is him being disabled. Its in the same vein of people who think that Wylan and Jesper are romantically one sided, and that Jesper only kind of liked Wylan, despite the canon evidence of him loving Wylan just as much. You all view him as a “smol bean”, who needs protecting, and care, when Wylan is the opposite of that. He is a fucking demolitions expert who suggested waking up sleeping men to kill them - what about that says “uwu”. You are treating Wylan as a burden to Jesper and the other Crows when he is an immensely valuable, fully autonomous disabled person - you all just view him as damaged. 

And before I get a comment saying that “uhhh Wylan isn’t real why do you care” while Wylan may not be real, how you all view him and treat him has real fucking impacts and informs how you treat people like me. If someone called me an “uwu baby boy” they’d get a fist square in the fucking jaw. Fiction informs how we perceive the world and y’all are making it super fucking clear how you see disabled people. 

Finally, I wanted to talk about how the social model of disability is portrayed through Wylan. For those who are unaware, the social model of disability contrasts the medical model, that views the disability itself as the problem, that needs to be cured, whereas the social model essentially boils down to creating an accommodating society, where disability acceptance and pride is the goal. And we see this with Wylan - he is able to manage his father’s estate, with Jesper’s assistance to help him read documents. And this is not out of pity or charity, but an act of love. It is not portrayed as this almighty act for Jesper to play saviour, just a given, which is incredibly important to show, especially for someone who has been abused by family for his disability like Wylan, that he is accepted. 

Yet, I still see people hold up Jesper on a pedestal for “putting up with” Wylan, as if loving a disabled person deserves a fucking pat on the back. It’s genuinely exhausting trying to engage with a work I love so much with a fandom that thinks so little of me and my community. It fucking shows. 

Overall, Leigh Bardugo as a disabled person wrote two incredibly meticulous and empowered disabled characters, and due to either lack of reading comprehension, ableism, or a quirky mix of both, the fandom has ignored canon and the experiences of disabled people for…. shits and giggles i guess. And yes, there are issues with the Grishaverse and disability representation - while I haven’t finished them yet so I do not have an opinion on it, people have been discussing issues in the KOS duology with ableist ideals. This mini series was no way indicative of the entire disabled experience, nor does it represent my entire view on the representation as a whole. These things need to be met critically in our community, and talked about with disabled voices at the forefront. For example, the limited perspective we get of Wylan and Kaz being both white men, does not account for a large portion of the disabled community and the intersection of multiple identities.

All-in-all, Critique media, but do not forget to also critique fandom spaces. Alternatively, just shut the fuck up :)

happy fucking disability pride month, ig

[heymacy]

Is it bad to enjoy smut between two gay characters? I’m a bisexual woman and people on twitter always talk badly about people who aren’t mlm reading it. I’ve always read smut with any characters I’ve shipped so it doesn’t feel like fetishizing, but people seem to think it is

okay yes let’s talk about this because i have thoughts

*cracks knuckles*

i know there’s a fuck ton of discourse surrounding fandom, slash writers, and the fetishization of queer characters. people’s concerns about this are completely valid and i never want to invalidate anyone’s opinion.

i’m a queer woman. i identify as a lesbian, and my pronouns are she/her. i’m married to an AFAB non-binary person who uses she/they pronouns. i’ve been in relationships with men in the past, before accepting my sexuality and coming out, but i don’t personally find men sexually attractive/want to have sex with men, though i have in the past (comp het is a bitch okay?). however, i enjoy reading and writing smut, even if it does involve men, because it’s fiction. but, i can only speak to my own experience here.

do i want a penis near me in real life? absolutely not. keep that shit as far away from me as humanly possible. like, put-that-thing-back-where-it-came-from-or-so-help-me vibes, okay? but does the concept of penis-adjacent sex make me ill? no. because sex is sex, whether it’s between two men, two women, a man and a woman, or any combination therein. sex is beautiful and exciting, especially when it takes place within the confines of love and passion (i don’t personally enjoy reading about graphic, emotionless sex unless i know it’s a slow burn or like, a fwb to lovers situation). idk, i’m a slut for those late-night whispered confessions of “god, i love you” while the characters are fucking under the covers, like inject that shit into my veins please and thank you 😇💕

twitter is uhhhhhhhhhhhhh something. definitely something. i’ve only ever engaged with fandom on tumblr or instagram, never twitter, because of how fucking insane it can get. my mental health is too fragile for that, which is why i don’t have a twitter account anymore 😬 i understand criticisms of people that aren’t mlm writing and reading mlm smut, just like i understand criticisms of people that aren’t wlw writing and reading wlw smut. the fetishization and commodification of queer sex for consumption by the masses is a huge issue, one i’ve felt the impact of in my own life (i get invasive questions about my sex life from straight and gay people, regularly, when they find out i’m a lesbian - how do two women have sex anyway? do you use sex toys? are you a top or a bottom? on and on, like uhhhhh babe it’s none of your business?)

however. i must reiterate. we’re talking about fiction here. sexy shit is sexy shit, regardless of the pairing. i’ve written and read wlw smut, mlm smut, and straight smut in the past. for me, sex is this universally applied concept that’s entirely genderless. yes, the functions are different depending on the parts and the pairing, but sex is sex is sex is sex, and reading about someone fucking someone else into the mattress, preferably someone they love, is hot regardless of who/what/why.

i don’t think there’s anything wrong with reading and enjoying smut that doesn’t align with you as an individual - that is to say that i don’t think it’s wrong for women to read mlm smut or men to read wlw smut. as long as you’re not actively dehumanizing or infantilizing the characters for your own sexual needs, like reducing them to nothing but the sex acts they engage in and refusing to see them as a whole person, i don’t personally think there’s anything wrong with consuming smut of any kind, regardless of your personal gender expression and sexuality.

also, bad smut is pretty easy to sniff out. like, it’s pretty easy to tell if someone is writing from a fetish-based viewpoint rather than a character-driven one. like when men write lesbian sex scenes and it’s like 90% aggressive fingering. like, excuse me? my good sir, that’s...not how that works. idk what to tell you. you don’t just jam your fingers up there and hope for the best, okay? like, it’s easy to tell if someone’s knowledge about wlw or mlm sex acts comes solely from overproduced, performative p0rn or if it comes from a long history of reading and writing smut or talking about sex with wlw and mlm themselves (i enjoy talking about sex with my wlw and mlm friends and a lot of my knowledge of mlm sex obviously isn’t first-hand since i’m a queer woman, but is largely shaped by my mlm friends themselves and the stories we’ve shared with each other - i’d trust them to write wlw smut as gay men because of the open, honest, and respectful conversations we’ve had and what i’ve shared with them about how wlw sex works)

all in all, i don’t think it’s fetishization to read mlm smut as a queer, bisexual, or straight woman. i don’t think it’s inherently bad, or shameful, or dirty. like, are asexual people not allowed to read smut if they enjoy it? they may not want to jump on a dick themselves, but if they enjoy reading about their favorite character jumping on a dick, they should be allowed to do that. fiction is fiction, stories are stories, and the great part about existing as an autonomous being is the ability to pick and choose the content you consume and create based on your own personal preferences, and extend the same right to everyone else. 💛

[murasaki-murasame]

Thoughts on Fruits Basket 2019 2nd Season Ep25 [”I’m Different Now”]:

For the season finale [but not series finale, because they’ve already announced a third and final season for next year], we get a huge plot twist that completely changes our perspective on one of the characters, and their various relationships, in a way that has major implications about the future of the story and how things will progress.

Aside from all that, we also get the world’s worst gender reveal party.

Thoughts under the cut.

Just to start off, this episode adapted chapters 96 and 97 like I figured it would, to wrap up this season with a big cliffhanger to hype people up for the final season. And for better or worse, this was a pretty much 1:1 adaptation of these chapters, so there’s not really any differences to talk about that I noticed.

Anyway, I may as well just cut right to the chase and talk about the whole Shocking Gender Reveal Plot Twist[tm], now that that’s out in the open and everyone can stop tiptoeing around it.

It’s not like I’ve really tried to hide it or how I feel about it as a plot point before this, but I really do dislike it on basically every level. There’s a whole lot to unpack about it, but really at the end of the day it’s just one of those old-fashioned plot devices where we’re meant to think that someone being a different gender to what you thought they were is inherently something scandalous and shocking. They could have at least immediately started talking about the idea of her being raised as a man against her will, since that’d at least give it some actual meaning and value, but they don’t, which really says a lot about how that’s actually kinda just a foot-note that the story doesn’t dwell on much, and in practice we’re just meant to be surprised that she’s a girl.

It doesn’t really help that the season just ends right there, when in the manga this whole sequence keeps going in the next chapter, and I think they start touching upon that part of Akito’s backstory then, but the anime won’t get into that until next year at this point, so I think it’s fair to take it as it’s presented right now.

The idea of Akito being a girl is surprising in basically the exact same way that it’d be surprising if we found out that Haru was a Sanrio fan, or something. That is to say, it’d be vaguely surprising, but then we’d all just go on with our lives.

Even at this point you can definitely guess that there’s probably something going on with her being forced to present as a man, but it hasn’t really been explained or touched upon yet, so it’s all pretty nebulous, at least from the perspective of someone like Tohru who barely knows Akitto at all and doesn’t know all the stuff about her past that Kureno does.

In general I’ve never been a fan of this entire trope to begin with, but I think it’s made a lot worse by the fact that, as you get further into the rest of the story, it becomes clear that it’s not even that important, and the majority of what’s going on with Akito’s character has much more to do with the curse situation and how it impacts her relationship with the zodiac members. The whole deal with her character is how being the god of the zodiac from birth forced her to be pretty much raised in seclusion, with her only frame of reference for human relationships being abusive cult behavior. She’s miserable and twisted because she isn’t allowed to live a normal life due to her status, and her possessiveness gets enabled by the people that she clings onto, putting her into a loop of arrested development and mental instability.

And literally none of that has anything to do with her gender, lol. None of it would be different if she was a cis man, or if she had been raised as a woman. Because that whole deal isn’t actually all that relevant to why she is the way she is, why she has the attitude and world-view that she does, and why her relationships are so fucked up. Even if you decided to write out her romantic/sexual relationships with people like Kureno and Shigure by having her be a man, that’d barely change anything about the story as a whole, because even if it was entirely for platonic reasons Kureno would have still decided to stay with Akito and ultimately enable her actions, and Shigure would most likely still more or less do all the same things he’s already done. And obviously to begin with, if Akito was actually a dude that wouldn’t even necessarily mean you couldn’t still have some of these relationships play out this way, so you can’t even really act like the story required her to be a girl for that reason, lol.

And for better or worse, if Akito was written as a gay dude, it could still totally have lead to all the same stuff with her possessiveness over the male zodiac members, and her irrational hatred of the female zodiac members. It’d just be a different, more homophobic sort of trope than what actually happens, in a way that plays out in basically the exact same way. It wouldn’t be the first time we’ve gotten a villain who’s a gay dude that irrationally hates women for Reasons [tm], and who has ominous and sinful relationships with men.

Which is also the reason why I don’t exactly think the story would be ‘better’ if she had been written as a gay dude, or as a trans woman, or anything like that. With her whole role in the story to begin with, it’d play out in an obnoxious way no matter what. Mostly I just kinda wish they had completely avoided this sort of outdated, schlocky storytelling to begin with, and just focused entirely on the more interesting stuff about her character.

And in terms of outdated tropes, we haven’t even gotten properly introduced to Ren yet, lol.

I’m also assuming that they’re not exactly planning to change anything about this in the anime, so I’m just going with my existing thoughts about how the manga handled it, since that should still carry over to the anime.

I know that this is all just beating a dead horse with a stick because of how long the series has been out for, but I still just can’t help but be irritated by this whole mess.

I don’t want to spoil it too much, but I think a good comparison to make is the recent Banana Fish adaptation, and how from what I gathered, most people’s reactions to that series’ ending was ‘I know it’s just a product of it’s time, but this is just kinda unironically shitty’.

Ultimately, I think a big part of why this annoys me so much is because I actually really like Akito’s whole character and what the story does with her after this point. I just dislike how it’s shackled to this unnecessary plot twist that ends up dominating the conversation surrounding her even though it’s barely relevant to anything after this in the story.

The stuff with her being the god of the zodiac and how much it fucks up her entire life and all of her relationships is genuinely really compelling, and represents an integral part of the story’s overall message about the nature of abusive families and cults, and the various ways they end up hurting everyone inside them. Her whole arc is about learning how to embrace a life that’s not based around being a god surrounded by their followers, and I think that aspect of it works really well, especially with how it ties into all the stuff with Tohru later on.

I also think that all the stuff with Kureno that gets revealed in this episode is genuinely really interesting, and is ACTUALLY a plot twist that meaningfully shakes things up, and people actually have a reason to be surprised by it. Especially Tohru, since her whole goal at this point is to break the curse, and now she’s literally found someone who’s already had their curse get broken. It’s basically the first major lead she’s found in her whole search for answers, but in the end it kinda just, y’know, gets overshadowed by the gender reveal and her being shocked about that instead.

It’s also still really interesting to me how the Kureno situation is basically the only time where the story seriously talks about the implications of the animal transformation part of the curse, and how someone in the zodiac might internalize that part of themselves. Most of the time, the animal transformation part of the curse is kinda irrelevant, and the series could work in 99% the same way without it. I think Takaya’s literally said before that she didn’t even plan to include that whole aspect of the story until her editor suggested it fairly late into the process, and I think that shows with how it’s kinda just there for some wacky hijinks early on, and then it just gets benched in favor of the actual stuff Takaya wanted to write about.

But with Kureno we actually get a look into what it meant for him to be able to literally turn into a bird, and how losing that ability affected his sense of identity and how he engaged with the world. It’s still ultimately just metaphorical in it’s own way, but it still feels like more of an acknowledgement of the fact that they literally turn into animals than basically any other part of the story, lol. And in general I just think it’s at least compelling on paper that he ends up shackling himself of his own free will, because that sense of freedom and disconnect made him feel obligated to stay with Akito to ‘make up for it’.

I just wish that Kureno as a whole was interesting enough for me to actually care that much about all of this, lol. In the end he’s just kinda intentionally boring, and it’s more interesting to write about his role in the story than it is to actually, like, watch him do stuff as a character. Which I guess is all just part of how much it bugs me that all of the interesting stuff in this episode, and this whole part of the story, feels like it gets overshadowed and drowned out by a dumb shock value plot twist.

There’s also all the thematic stuff with how he’s basically Tohru if she was taken advantage of and had all of her own bad habits enabled until she ended up barely being a functioning adult. He even has his whole personal conflict about feeling like moving on with his life and developing new relationships is an act of betrayal towards someone that he really needs to let go of at this point. But then you just get into the whole Uo thing and how their whole relationship is about as compelling as the whole Cinderella plot that it’s clearly a reference to, and aaaaaaah why is this series so frustrating, lol.

Really, the fact that I can gripe so much about stuff like this just goes to show how much I like the series in general, since I can’t muster up any strong feelings about stuff like this if I just straight up dislike it as a whole. At least for me, stuff like this is much more frustrating when it’s one part of a larger story that I really love. Thankfully there’s more good than bad when it comes to this series, so I can still hold onto it as a personal fave that I just happen to have complaints about.

I’m genuinely really excited for the final season, in spite of all this, since there’s a whole lot I love about the final third of the manga, and in a funny way, the fact that Akito being a girl isn’t actually that big of a deal in the long run, and what actually happens with her as a character after this is more about her status as the god of the zodiac, actually means that I’ll [mostly] enjoy a lot of it. It’s mostly just this specific part where we get the Big Reveal [tm] itself, and the immediate lead-up to it, that bugs me.

Anyway, as a whole, I still think this is a good episode that serves as a fitting cliffhanger for the season. The actual plot twist that most of the episode focuses on is really good, and serves a really meaningful role in progressing the story, and it gives a pretty clear picture of how we’re entering the final act of the story.

Hopefully the final season will start in April next year like the first two seasons did, but it’s entirely possible it might get delayed because of the whole pandemic situation. But I could live with them holding off on starting the final season until it’s ready to come out.

Also, before I forget, they haven’t said anything about it, I’m pretty sure the final season will also be around 25 episodes long. With how many chapters they have left, if they stick to the same two chapters per episode pace that the anime’s had on average thus far, they could easily cover the rest of the story in 22 episodes, which would be a lot easier to expand by an extra two or three episodes, than it’d be to condense it all the way down to 13 or so episodes.

[thealpacalypse-archive]

A handy guide to avoid accidental transphobia

For cis people in the Druck fandom who write fic, headcanons or meta and don’t wanna mess up 

Including questions like: Is David trans? Is he beautiful? Is he wearing a binder this whole damn time?? What’s his story?

hey everybody, I’ve debated making this post for a while now because I don’t want to seem ungrateful to the people who are already trying, and I know that there are other trans people in this fandom who are already doing a pretty good job educating people, but then again, why not share my thoughts as well. 

In this post, I’ll collect a few headcanons, meta, and other discussions that i’ve seen around here and that made me personally uncomfortable - now be aware that i’m only one trans person and that other people can have other opinions on this, but also i’ve done trans activism for a few years now and i’m a gender studies major, so I definitely know what i’m talking about. also, a fair warning: this is gonna get long as heck. okay, let’s go.

Is David trans? The truth is: We don’t know yet. We only know that the actor who plays him, Lukas Alexander, is a trans guy. Now I’ve seen various people speculate if that automatically has to mean that David is trans as well, and obviously, no. David could be cis for all we know, and yes, casting trans actors in cis roles can be a pretty cool thing. However, if you’re cis, it would be cool if you reblog trans people’s opinions on this instead of shouting loudly about your own opinion, especially if it is that David should be cis for whatever reason. Why is that problematic? Trans activists are currently fighting for representation in media. There aren’t many trans characters we can look up to, especially not such young characters in a show that has such a big impact on a generation of young people. Many trans teenagers have never seen themselves represented in media, and many trans adults like myself are still craving for that good, good representation. Most of the time when we get trans characters, they’re played by cis actors - and because it’s mostly cis men who play trans women and cis women who play trans men, it perpetuates the idea that trans people are just especially well dressed up men and women who trick people into believing they’re ‘the other sex’. (ugh) Even though that’s a different problem, it links to this one as well, because trans stories in media are rare, and it’s even rarer to have them portrayed by trans actors. Yes, it would be revolutionary and gender-redefining if trans actors could play cis characters (or just characters whose cis or trans status is never brought up in the first place), but that’s one step ahead of the game in my opinion and tbh, cis people saying that they want David to be cis for whatever reason is just... suspicious.

Is David beautiful? Well, I’m sure we can all agree that this boy is a sight for sore eyes, and i’m pretty proud of this fandom for weeding out the transphobic assholes who called him ugly at the beginning of the season. I’m sure by now they’ve all seen the error of their ways because HECK, in levels of attractiveness, David is a king. Though it might not be the best to call him ‘beautiful’, ‘pretty’ or other usually female-gendered words when you’re cis and describing him. Why is that problematic? Listen, there’s absolutely nothing inherently bad about calling boys pretty or beautiful or whatever - I personally am an absolute goner when it comes to soft boys™ and their aesthetics, and I also think that denying boys to be soft and pretty is misogyny in a way, because it’s implying that female-coded things are bad. However, there are many trans boys (and other trans and nonbinary folks who were assigned female at birth) who feel uncomfortable when these words are used for them because it can be linked to misgendering or remind them of times before they were out. Trans people are often highly aware of their body and looks, because the way we look is heavily observed, judged and policed by society, and most of the time, being seen the (gendered) way we identify is the only way we get respect and basic decency. We don’t know yet if David personally has a problem with being called beautiful or whatever, but we also don’t know how the actor who plays him feels about that, and there are a couple of trans boys in this fandom who’ve already expressed their discomfort with these words. So in order to protect them and make this fandom safe for them, it seems like a small price to pay to consider our choice of words more carefully when we describe David, and try to avoid female-coded words.

What about David’s chest? Now this one is tricky. I’ve seen discussions about it a lot: Does David wear a binder, did he wear it the whole time he was with Matteo, does he maybe not even bind, did he have a mastectomy? The underlying tone of these discussions is worry - we all want David to be safe and comfortable, and seriously, let me tell you once and for all: a binder shouldn’t be worn longer than 8 hours a day, it shouldn’t be worn when sleeping, and it shouldn’t be worn when doing sports (also relevant for our jock boy). It’s not safe and it can heavily damage the breast tissue, ribs, and lungs - it can be literally life-threatening. It’s perfectly fine to worry about this, but it still feels uncomfortable to watch cis people debate the state of a trans boy’s body in such detail. Why is that problematic? Trans people’s bodies have always been scrutinized and judged - by medicine, by the state, by society as a whole. We always have to prove ourselves and our bodies, and convince people that we’re not just tricking them into believing we’re someone we are not. A lot of ‘true womanhood’ or ‘true manhood’ apparently revolves around genitalia, at least cis people seem to think so. Which is why so many trans people (and let’s be real here, especially trans women) have to deal with the question: “Have you had the surgery yet?” - meaning, did they already undergo the one surgery among the various ones trans people might consider, that reshapes their genitalia in a way that is acceptable to society. Cis people often use these questions about our bodies and the way we change them to delegitimatize us and take away our status as a ‘real’ man or woman. Other than that, trans people’s bodies often get portrayed as something freakishly exotic by cis people; there’s a certain voyeurism about it, and it often gets sexualized - just look at the way trans women are treated in mainstream porn. Cis people examining our bodies, theorizing about what kind of operations we’ve had or haven’t had yet, and possibly sexualizing or belittling/dehumanizing us for it, that will always be very thin ice, because it comes with a lot of emotional baggage for trans people individually and as a community.

What’s David’s backstory? We’re all wondering that, especially since Druck is mixing up the whole Skam setting so much and we really don’t know what they have in store for us. Obviously I’m just as thirsty for theories as the rest of the fandom, but I’ve also read a few things that kinda irked me.  Here’s what to avoid: Referring to David as a girl or female in any way, speaking about him in the past with “she/her”-pronouns or coming up with a deadname for him. Oh lord please don’t. It’s nothing but misgendering and it’s so, so wrong. If you’re cis, also please reconsider posting headcanons for his backstory that contain heavy transphobia. Not only can that trigger trans people in the fandom (please use trigger warnings for that stuff, okay?), but there’s also a long history of cis people taking trans narratives away from us and making them only about suffering and pain. Sure, dysphoria sucks, the discrimination sucks, but me, a trans person, complaining about these things is WAY different from a cis person fantasizing about a really painful, possibly violent life for a trans character. Sure I want realism and I want a platform where we can discuss the truly awful experiences many of us have because we’re trans, but I wish that cis people would boost trans voices for that instead of coming up with their own fucked up fantasies about how badly a trans character might have been treated. If you’re writing fic or meta and you want to find an explanation why David changed schools so close to the end of the school year, you don’t have to dig deep into the trans pain to explain it. It’s not that uncommon for trans people to change schools, work places, etc. once they’ve transitioned far enough to feel comfortable - a new start makes the stuff like name changes, new gender presentation, etc. easier. And even if David’d move is related to transphobic experiences, I don’t really need to read detailed descriptions of it. You wouldn’t want to obsess over someone else’s trauma in vivid detail in front of them, so please be cautious when writing about something that’s seen as traumatic by many trans people.

Other useful pointers: There are trans people in this fandom who voice their opinions - seek them out, listen to them, boost their voices, don’t speak over them when they talk about trans experiences. Don’t focus too much on the fact that David is (or might be) trans. Like sure, include that in your writing, but make sure you know that it’s not the only and not the most interesting thing about him. In most regards, he’s just a boy, and he has a lot of character traits that tell us just as much about him, like the fact that he’s really closed-off, competitive af, artistic, a music lover and a complete emo dork, seems to have an active flight-or-fight response,... you see what i’m getting at. Let’s obsess about David on these terms, and I’m sure we’ll get a whole lot of new and interesting meta and fic about him that all of us can enjoy. 

[raichukfm]

To a confused anon: I’m here to offer my assistance, as best I can. As a fair warning, I have a bad habit of shoving my foot right in my mouth and coming off as an ass, but I promise that’s not what’s intended here. Also, I spent a lot of words on all this. If you don’t want to read a lot of words, scroll down past the break a bit and read the bolded bit, because that’s the most important part, I think. Also, anybody seeing this because they’re following me, this is here to show somebody else, so you can read it if you want but keep that in mind I guess.

Step one, as I am a real trans woman who happens to be gay, I can speak pretty authoritatively that this is gay. Because I’m a woman, and I like women. So it’s gay when I like cis women, and equally as gay as when I like trans women. If I hypothetically liked a cis man or a trans man, that wouldn’t be gay, and also I’d find out I was bi I suppose. If I liked someone that wasn’t a man or a woman I’m not really sure what word I’d use for that, but that’s not really the point. Sexuality, sexual orientation, and sexuality are complicated things. But, generally, what you are attracted to is someone’s gender. You may also be attracted to their sex, or you might not. It’s possible to be attracted to someone’s sex and not their gender. It’s possible to be attracted to someone because of an incorrect perception of their gender. It can be messy; real life is messy. Generally, people will define their own sexual identity in regards to their gender, because that’s what most people care more about in their identity. Usually, that aligns with sex, which is pretty cool, but when it doesn’t for someone, the person generally thinks of themselves as that gender that they are. That’s... kinda the point. So, if you were exclusively attracted to women, you would think yourself straight if you’re a man, and lesbian if you’re a woman, regardless of if you were cis or trans. Similarly, most people are attracted to gender; specifically, gender presentation. It’s by definition more visible than gender identity or sex, and also coincides with both, most of the time, though it can coincide with only one or neither, in other cases. You sort of have to learn or infer those. However, people don’t only care about gender presentation. (Okay, some people probably do.) Which has two major components: 1. People almost always care about a potential partner’s gender identity. It’s just a basic interpersonal thing, even if it doesn’t impact one’s preferences. And if there is a preference, it’s not necessarily a dealbreaker, but... If you like men, then finding out someone you find attractive is actually a woman would probably tamp that down a bit. For one, they are likely (although not necessarily) going to adapt their presentation to be less masculine in the future, but even beyond that... They’re a woman. That in itself can put you off. It’s also possible for that to interface with romantic attraction more than sexual attraction. And that’s okay. A good thing to keep in mind is that your feelings are just feelings. It’s possible for them to go against your self-concept, or have unfortunate implications. Feelings aren’t conscious beliefs. So if you’re attracted to someone for their sex, but aren’t attracted to their gender identity, that’s just an awkward coincidence. No more, no less. Don’t let it get to you, and don’t be a creep or jerk about it. If someone’s gender identity changes, or they come out to you as a different identity than you had previously thought, and that’s not congruent with your sexual or romantic orientation, that’s okay. It can definitely be worthwhile to stick together and see if it works out, because it genuinely might. But it’s also entirely legitimate to split up because of it. The thing is, if this was someone who you cared about, that shouldn’t go away even if your attraction does, so be kind and supportive. They might need distance, or you might, I’m no relationship expert, but do your best to help both of you through something like that. 2. People often care about a potential partner’s sex. This is not a controversy-free take, but it is entirely legitimate to be attracted or not attracted to a sex regardless of gender. That’s fine. Feelings are feelings. There is however, as in all things, an onus not to be a jackass about it. If you are attracted to cis women, but not attracted to trans women, just treat them decently, and turn them down nicely when you must. If you’re attracted to cis men, but not attracted to trans men, just treat them decently and turn them down nicely when you must. If you have a strong preference for or against a certain kind of genitalia or other sexual characteristic, that’s legitimate. But if you’re together with someone and then find out they’re not what you’re attracted to in some respect, you still have to be a good person about it. You don’t owe anybody affection, romance, or sex, but you have to be decent. That goes for physical features the same way it goes for habits, beliefs, anything else. I think what leaf brought up with the fetishizing thing is that a lot of the time the people who (loudly) care about a trans person’s sex treat this as, well, a fetish. And while I think it’s fine to fetishize whatever, a lot of the time that fetishization of a concept involves treating real, actual people shittily, reducing them to objects or . It’s not an inherent quality to caring about someone’s sex I use “care about” a bit broadly there, such that it doesn’t necessarily mean “have a preference about”, because some people genuinely don’t have preferences about gender identity, or about sex, or about either, but still wouldn’t really disregard those. This is maybe muddying the water a tad, but oh well. This is mostly focused on binary gender identities, because the whole straight/gay etc. terminology is mostly focused on those, but the general principles also include nonbinary people. I’d elaborate, but I think it’s pretty straightforward how they fit in. The short of it: If you’re attracted to someone, whether that attraction would be classified as “straight” or “gay” is most respectfully contingent on your respective gender identities. It may be useful to understand your own sexual attraction as contingent on the other person’s gender presentation or sex instead, when it’s not congruent with their gender identity, but I’d stress that’s only for understanding your own feelings. Whatever horny part of your brain might not get the relevant nuance, but you’re a whole intellect, so you don’t get that excuse. If you’re romantically/sexually attracted to somebody you intellectually wouldn’t consider a romantic/sexual partner, that doesn’t invalidate your orientation, but it doesn’t invalidate their identity, either. That’s a bit long for something I’m calling “the short of it” but brevity has never been among my skills. As for another point that apparently came up in asks, about the very nature of gender identity as a thing, I’m going to do my best to crack that nut. I think there is a very simple case to be made: Gender identities exist. If you ask someone, there’s a likely chance they’ll feel pretty strongly that they have one. They might tell you they’re a man, or a woman, or something else. People who don’t believe they have a gender will probably feel fairly strongly that they don’t have one. Even people who don’t believe in transgender or nonbinary people almost always believe in this, even if they want to call it something else. Your gender identity is the gender, if any, that you identify as. We’re just defining the term as that. It turns out, people generally tend to identify with genders (or at least sexes), so we have a term that refers to an idea and correlates with observed reality, so... We have a real thing! Score! I belabored the point a bit, but that’s just the thing. The argument against transgender or nonbinary people tends to be that gender identity isn’t a real thing, that it’s denying reality, or that it’s . But... You can verify it exists. It has to. And it doesn’t obey any restriction to only being two genders, because you can see a sizeable amount of people whose stated identities don’t obey that restriction. I mean, you can disbelieve this, you can think essentially everyone is lying, but that’s a bit of a reality denial position. So the question isn’t “Does gender identity exist?”, because that question has an answer you can’t actually reasonably deny. The question is “Does gender identity matter?” and, um... Again, I’ll invoke the argument that most people care about it. Cisgender people usually care about their gender identity, including those that think it inextricably linked to their sex. Transgender people certainly care about it. What grounds is there to think it doesn’t matter? The arguments I see all tend to rest on this assumption that this is a made up thing, but... It’s not, as earlier stated. It’s based on thinking gender identity must necessarily align with sex, but; you have to just arbitrarily assume that; there’s no justification for this other than it appears to be obviously true to some people. But “It’s obvious, duh” isn’t really an argument. “It’s basic biology” also isn’t an argument. Sex is a fairly basic biological idea, although it’s itself considerably more complicated than just XX chromosomes = biologically female and XY chromosomes = biologically male. But gender identity is a thing to do with your mind. Ergo, it’s your brain, and as it happens, that’s considerably more advanced biology. There’s no obvious reason why a mental self-conception should necessarily correlate with biological sex, and the observable evidence doesn’t point to such a necessary correlation, since transgender and nonbinary people exist. Given that gender identity exists and people care about it, I think there’s a pretty clear case to make that you should respect other people’s gender identities: They want you to. It’s kind. It’s at best rude not to do it, and being rude is one of those things generally agreed to be bad. It’s a whole archetypical way for things to be considered bad, in fact. Any argument in good faith based on psychology will pretty easily come to the conclusion that it should be respected, because that’s the field consensus. The studies show it helps people deal with gender dysphoria to be treated as the gender they identify as. All the anecdotal evidence in the world is there to show you people overwhelming prefer to be treated as the gender they identify as. And the utilitarian counterarguments are... that it poses logistical issues? That’s okay, those can be addressed. That it makes some people uncomfortable or annoyed? It’ll probably be easier for them to get over that and adjust to the way things are. That accepting it will lead to some disastrous consequences? Well that’s... I mean it’s already largely accepted. Last I heard, there hasn’t been any disastrous wave of disastrous consequences here to foreshadow the coming storm. So, to put this aside, if you don’t understand gender identity: That’s okay. It’s messy, but relatively simple. People feel like they are a certain gender, and want to be accepted and treated as that gender. (Or feel they have no gender and want to be accepted and treated accordingly.) That’s the same for cis and trans people. Whether or not that gender correlates to any physical or biological feature in them isn’t really the point of it, because it’s a mental thing. No physical part of you directly correlates to what your name is, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t important to you, for instance. (And, as a last note, if you’ve seen a statistic that the rate of suicide attempts don’t fall after one transitions, it’s being grossly misrepresented. Every time I have seen that with its actual source given, if you follow said source, you find the statistic is from a question being asked about whether the person ever attempted suicide in their life. So, someone who was suicidal pre-transition who lost those suicidal tendencies after transitioning would still answer “yes”, and thus be marked down as such and post-transition. Therefore, the fact that the percentage was roughly the same for pre- and post-transition people says exactly jack shit about the effectiveness or lackthereof of transitioning for suicidal ideation. Every other piece of evidence I’ve seen points to transitioning, and more generally affirming someone’s gender, helps with the negative effects of gender dysphoria. Of course, don’t listen to me. Look it up. But I implore you, basically never trust someone’s summary of the research, at least not totally; the media all too often sucks at summarizing science, and average people are often worse, and that’s without an ideological axe to grind. Find the source if you can. You don’t necessarily have to read the whole thing, but check the abstract or such. As an example, I had a college textbook claim that “Women use their whole brain during conversations, while men use only half”, with a citation to an I think Wired article that restated a BBC website article that incredibly poorly reported on a paper that was actually about putting people in MRI machines listen to books on tape. Women had more activity across both hemispheres of the brain while men had activity more centered around one. It was about strokes and how signals travel across the brain, not communication. Professionals can cock stuff up bad. I’m not saying “Don’t trust the news” or “Don’t trust anybody”, but it doesn’t hurt to check into things as much as you can, and that goes doubly so for research and science.) 

[nunonabun]

If you don't mind answer (Since I'm loving you digging into other answers you give!) What do you think about the show's seemingly Anti-Adoption standpoint? Even when it's for the best interest of the child, or the mother's insistent on it, they seem to do everything they can to convince the mother otherwise. Even when the mother couldn't afford the child at all, and had a home lined up for them, they talked her out of it.

Thank you for the question! Sorry it’s taken me so long to reply to, I wanted to attempt a thorough answer but I had a lot going on, so it got a tad forgotten in the drafts.

Your ask is quite a toughie. I don’t know that I’d actually characterize the show as having an anti-adoption viewpoint, I think the show is often trying to be conscious of the way class and other social structures interacted with the adoption system at the time, while also trying to deal with other issues adoption raises. I think sometimes they do well with that, but sometimes, while trying to shine a light on one thing, they manage to fall into other biases. I’ll put the rest under a ‘read more’ as this did get a biiiit long.

Class had (and has, really) a big role in adoption, and views of who “deserved” to be a parent often had harmful impacts. It’s a complicated and difficult subject, and there are lots of factors that can come into play in each case, but shame and other pressures were often usedto essentially force poor and/or single mothers to give up children. Some children were outright taken from the biological mother (or couple, in some cases, though overwhelmingly judgement landed on single women) that wanted them and were trying to keep them. The choice wasn’t really a free choice as they often weren’t given the support they would need in order to make keeping the child a viable option for them, nor were they given support in thoroughly thinking through all of their options and deciding what they truly want. Also, young, single, working-class women were generally condemned for becoming pregnant and were often pressured to give the child up so that they could be given to a ‘better’ family (i.e. middle-class straight couple. Having a British background & being Christian did also come into it).  

Another aspect of portraying adoption is contending with the bias that a ‘real’ family is biological; that there’s some kind of innate bond between people who are biologically linked that is not present between those who aren’t (I’m going to call this the ‘biology bias’ for convenience’s sake). The elements of classism and biology bias (and bias against single parents, homophobia, racism, etc.) can interact in complex ways. Trying to realistically portray negative aspects of the adoption system that aren’t often talked about can result inseemingly playing into the ‘child should stay with their real family’ prejudice. Or it can both critique the class bias and buy into the biology bias. The latter case often takes the form of ‘well I guess the adoptive couple is providing a promising future for the child, it’s just a shame that it comes at the cost of a deeper/truer love, as the child would have had with the bio family’ in media portrayals. Or sometimes the inverse can happen (undercutting the biology bias but accepting the class bias) and you get an attribution of blame instead of an examination of how people are constrained by their situations in a way that couldbe resolved with good social supports, à la ‘those (lower-income) people were just bad parents who don’t deserve a child, the child should be given to a good (middle-class) couple.’ And plenty of other complex issues arise when the axes of race & nationality, physical & mental differences, gender, etc. come into play. It’s really a hard thing to navigate and communicate all of the elements that are wrapped up in adoption, and I’d say portrayals are often in the grey zone.

To disentangle the elements in CtM’s portrayals of adoption, I’m going togo ahead and take a little look at all of the examples of adoption in the show and try to examine what they’re aiming for and what I think they convey. Please feel free to point out if I’ve missed one or if you think I’ve missed elements of one portrayal or have misconstrued things. Strap in guys, this is hecking long. Or jump down to the Tl;dr, that’s fine too.

First, in 1x02, we have Mary, the Irish girl who came to London, was taken advantage of and pressured into prostitution and became pregnant. Jenny tries to help her, but as she is single, poor, still a child herself, and a prostitute, the child is removed from Mary (and in episode 4 we discover that that has seriously mentally scarred her, resulting in her taking someone else’s child in an attempt to regain what was taken from her.) Here we see pretty much exactly what I was talking about above. Society saw Mary as morally unfit (as being poor, a prostitute, and single & pregnant were judged to be personal failures/sins, and there was additional prejudice against Irish people), so there was no safety net for her, no public services provided so that she, even as poor and young as she was, could realistically raise the child if she wanted to. You could say it might be unjust to leave the child with Mary, given her circumstances, but I think CtM is showing that her circumstances didn’t have to be what they were. If she wasn’t judged so on a moral basis, she wouldn’t be condemned to continue in those circumstances and she wouldn’t have had her child taken from her against her will. If she had been given a free choice and support in making it and carrying it out, she may have kept the child or she may have given it up, but either way, the outcome for Mary wouldn’t have been as terrible as it was.  

The second case we see is Doris Aston, in 3x02. Doris is married and has a few children already, and reveals that her current pregnancy is likely the result of an affair with a black man. Obviously, her husband (who is white) will know she was unfaithful when the child is born, and she and the child will be at risk as her husband is abusive (it’s revealed throughout the episode that he is controlling and aggressive, even prior to learning of his wife’s infidelity.) In the end, the child (who Doris names Carole) is taken out of the house, with the husband threatening to kill Carole if she remains. Carole is taken to the Turners’ to foster and then sent on to her middle-class adoptive family.This episode is meant to shine a light on another pressure that results in women not having a free choice in life, particularly around sexuality and children. Divorce was heavily stigmatizedat the time, and it wasn’t easy for a woman to get a divorce from her husband if he didn’t agree to it, especially if the couple already had children together. Therefore, if a woman was unhappy in a marriage, or even suffering abuse, there wasn’t much recourse for her. Yes, in this situation Doris did cheat, but the circumstances of that are complicated. What’s more, as a result of it, she doesn’t really have a free choice in whether to keep her daughter (and sons) and leave her husband (which she wanted) or stay and work it out either with or without Carole. The only real choice she has is to give the child up and hope her husband a) doesn’t find and hurt the baby, b) isn’t violent towards her as a result of him learning about her infidelity, and c) that she can bury her emotions around Carole and essentially pretend she never existed/died at birth. So the episode is seeking to portray the way women, especially working-class women, were unjustly constrained; forced into choices they would not freely have made. Race is touched on only briefly, in that it’s the element that renders Doris’ infidelity evident, and also a mixed-race child is more difficult to place within the adoption system. This isn’t really explored much, as Carole is quickly adopted and we don’t actually really see how her being mixed affects this.An element of this episode that I think they mishandled was buying into the ‘true family is bio family’ prejudice via their attempt to portray the injustice Doris faced and sympathize with her. This mainly comes in near the end of the episode, where they reinforce the idea that Doris is Carole’s ‘real’ mother. Doris herself worries that Carole “won’t know I’m her mother,” and Sister Julienne says “If Carole searches for her mother one day, hopefully records will bring her to us,” Here I think the norm of just saying “mother” as though the adoptive mother Carole will have isn’t really her mother, is partially just because they’re showing that Doris does feel she is Carole’s mother and doesn’t actually want to give her up, however it does play into the biology bias. This is deeply reinforced when Vanessa Redgrave chimes in with a “[Doris] trusted in God that Carole would have a good life with good people who would give her the future she couldn’t. More than anything, she wished she could have kept her because whatever anyone else might feel, it couldn’t be what Doris felt. Her daughter was of and from her. They were a part of each other and always would be.” That could generously be interpreted as Mature Jenny just conveying what Doris believed, but even so, there’s a heavy narrative buy-in to that message, and the message is clearly ‘Doris wanted to keep her daughter and ought not to have been forced to give her up. Biology and gestation result in an inherent, unbreakable bond that cannot be replicated and it is therefore regrettable that Carole had to be given to a family that - though financially secure, potentially kind, and distant from the threat of violence - lack that bond.’ That message again seeks to convey the injustice of Doris’s situation and sympathize with her pain, but in doing so, it implies that adoptive families lack this deep, automatic bond forged via biology and are therefore inherently weaker. They may provide a more materially promising future for the child, but unfortunately, they aren’t as ‘true’ a family as a biologically linked one.Furthermore, Jenny says “[The adoption agency worker] spoke as though Doris had no link at all with her baby,” and notes that the adoptive parents requested no ongoing contact. These elements reinforce the portrayal of the adoption as cold and insufficiently recognizant of how the baby is ‘actually’ the biological mother’s. This bit is difficult, as Carole is not not Doris’s, and it’s totally fair for Doris to grieve for the loss of her daughter. Also, cutting off contact, not allowing any connection at all to the child’s birth family was commonly done and can be a very harmful practice. The adoption agency (and society at large) certainly thought Doris had no moral right to see Carole, as she chose to have an affair and is therefore a Bad Woman and a Bad Mother, and that is justly critiqued by the show. But I think, in this episode, the show is rather clumsy in its portrayal of this complex situation, and manages to imply that the adoptive family (and mother in particular) are kind of interlopers who are only a solution to a problem as opposed to being a potentially very loving family that is just as true of a family as a biological one. Where this reading is a bit shaken is that this is the start of the foreshadowing that the Turners will end up adopting a child, and their fostering of Carole for the night before she is adopted is shown in a very positive light. The whole scene is loving and sweet, and positive comments are made about Carole’s adoption (though sympathy is also extended to Doris.) So it’s a bit of a mixed bag, this episode. Overall I think that it does a good job with the class and sexism elements, but a poor job with handling the biology bias.

The third time adoption is portrayed (3x06), it’s more of a subplot that serves to introduce Shelagh and Patrick to the idea that adoption could be the answer to their desire to expand their family. Colin Monk, Tim’s friend, is revealed to be adopted. Learning this immediately prompts Shelagh to propose that she & Patrick pursue adoption to continue building their family. She comments: “I really don’t believe I’d have to carry a child inside my body for it to feel like ours. If I felt that, it would mean that loving Timothy has taught me nothing.” This is a firm rebuttal of the biology bias and it nicely links step and adoptive families, explicitly espousing a positive perspective on both.The episode does touch on the class & religious aspects too. Shelagh says that the adoption charity she went to was the Church of England Childrens’ Society, and notes: “I think they quite like the idea of us, a GP and a retired midwife. (…) As the lady [at the adoption agency] said, the children have already got off to a sorry start in life, they need the very best parents the agency can find them.” So, again, the show is bringing up the normative judgements around parenting, and the idea that a (straight) professional couple where the mother stays home is deemed morally deserving of children.The end of this episode also sees Patrick getting antsy about the conditions of adoption, correctly foreseeing that (in 3x07) his mental health struggles will cause the agency to deem him less deserving of a child (so here’s ableism coming in to play too.)Overall, I think these episodes did a good job with the adoption plot. They push back against the biology bias while also subtly highlighting who is deemed socially worthy of children in terms of class and health.

Fourth there’s 3x08, wherein the Turners adopt Angela. Here, the portrayal is overwhelmingly positive, with pretty much all of our excitement and sympathies going to the Turners, who are meeting their daughter for the first time. They’re excited about the news that they’re going to become parents in much the same way we see people on the show excited about an impending birth. Holding Angela for the first time (particularly with respect to Shelagh) is treated as having as much weight and love as any parent being handed their biological baby. Particularly, In The Mirror plays, a musical theme that has been used to score previous momentous transformations in Shelagh’s life (and Patrick’s, as those changes are often linked), Patrick says “here’s your mummy,” and Shelagh says “we have a daughter.” For me, that is slightly undercut by Shelagh saying “This is the closest I’m ever going to get to giving birth.” This implies that the experience is kind of a consolation prize, as close as they can get to what they’d ideally want; for Shelagh to carry and give birth to a child that is biologically theirs. I don’t think that’s necessarily what they meant to imply - especially given all the talk before and in later episodes about loving Angela as much as if she were biologically theirs - but that’s how that line read to me. But again, that is largely overwhelmed by the positive tone and emotions portrayed in that scene.Switching into the consideration of the other end of the equation, the biological mother, we have a very interesting choice to comment on the deeply uncomfortable situation that led to Angela becoming a Turner. When Patrick asks what she knows about the situation, Shelagh says: “Hardly anything, just that the mother is only 16 and she was meant to be taking the baby home with her, but at the last minute her parents changed their minds.” Timothy, always involved in the family building (another strong element of the portrayal) says “That’s terrible,” and Patrick reprimands him with a slightly curt “Tim.” Shelagh says, “That’s why they want a speedy settlement, to spare further trauma for those involved.” We, the viewers, are excited and happy about the Turners adopting, and then we’re hit with this slight insight into the other side of the equation. Though “our” family is getting its happy outcome, that results from a terrible thing having happened to a young, single girl (‘Miss Jones’.) We don’t know the class differential here, so there’s not much to work with, analysis-wise, on that front. Here, it’s more that Miss Jones doesn’t really have the option to contradict her parents in this society, which results in her being forced to give up the child she wanted to keep. So again the show highlights the lack of choice women (and girls) had, and hints at the moral judgements around who is worthy of being supported in their parenting project. Interestingly, this actually puts Shelagh (and Patrick, to some degree, though the whole plot really focusses more on Shelagh’s motherhood, which is a whole other discussion) a bit in the moral grey, as her (their) desire to have a child causes them to kind of callously brush past the injustice their daughter’s biological mother faced. Though that is slightly tempered by Shelagh noting that it’s felt that doing this all quickly is the least traumatic option, having her convey this information as they’re all rushing to pick up Angela really gets across how the injustices on the bio mother’s side of the picture just kind of get glossed over in the focus on joy of the adoptive family. We don’t take that bit more time to consider what actually results in the best outcome for all involved. That’s an interesting counterpoint to 3x02, where the adoptive family’s love and joy is glossed over by our focus on the sorrow and pain of Doris Aston. I would say though that 3x08 does a bit better at integrating all these elements, as the hurried discussion of the bio mother is, I think, clearly meant to bring us up short and make us consider that there are elements of injustice in this situation, whereas 3x02 doesn’t really give us much positive about the adoptive family. The following episode does give us some balance too, showing the Turners worrying about Angela’s biological mother while still clearly maintaining that Angela is as loved as she would be if she was biologically theirs. Shelagh and Patrick reflect on this together and with Timothy, and the ensemble decision is to send a letter to Angela’s biological mother (though administrative structures make it uncertain that the letter will reach her), giving her some closure as to what happened to the child she gave up. This serves to send the message that communication in the process of family-building is important, while also remaining grounded in a time where it was generally held that the best thing to do in an emotionally difficult situation was to not talk about it.

In the following episode, the Christmas special, we get the mother and baby home, which switches gear firmly into focussing on the judgement placed on unmarried women who become pregnant (especially young women) and the abuses these women (and girls) faced in the institutions they were sent to. First, there’s the fact that these institutions existed, largely tucked away to reinforce that falling pregnant outside of marriage is shameful and needs to be hidden. Then there’s the medical neglect within the home, the only staff being the Nonnatus volunteers and the drunken matron who runs the place. We see one case briefly where a baby is basically ripped from a young woman/girl who was not yet ready to say goodbye. Of our two main cases, we have one woman who decided to keep the baby though she was initially aloof and uncaring, and one who was totally comfortable giving the baby up and does so. I think a strong point of the episode was pointing out that whole Mother & Baby Home system is a result of and in many ways a reinforcement of the shaming and punishment of young, often poor, unmarried mothers for what was deemed a personal failing. We see this explicitly with Tim’s comment about “moral contagion,” wherein he’s voicing/testing out/subtly criticizing the mainstream view of the time. In England at the time, society operated on the idea that treating these women like any other pregnant women would be endorsing their sin/personal failing, and that would lead to a whole epidemic of this sort of thing, which would obviously be bad. So the episode as a whole is bringing that to light and critiquing it and the actions that resulted from it.On to the two main cases. One is a young woman/girl who decides to give her bio son up for adoption, saying that she’s happy to think that he’ll have a good life with people who love and want him and it’s the right choice for both of them. She is shown to have a supportive mother, indicating that sometimes, the choice was freer. The narrative is telling us that there were cases where - in spite of wider social prejudice against unmarried mothers - keeping the child would have been a viable option, but the bio mother decided that wasn’t what she wanted/what she judged to be the best outcome of the situation, and this is a perfectly fine choice to make.My feelings on the portrayal of the other young woman/girl are a bit more mixed. On the one hand, yes sometimes someone is totally set on giving up a child but their mind changes when confronted by the reality of the newborn. However, this storyline is a bit of an iffy trope and I think using it requires some delicacy. It’s very easy to fall into the ‘it’s your child and you will and ought to have a unique, automatic bond with it,’ which places a judgement on women who don’t automatically feel that bond, whether or not they want that child and whether or not they ultimately decide to keep that child. That normative view of bonding downplays the work that goes into bonding with a child and implicitly judges those whose bond is not automatic, as well as implying that there is a sort of bond that is exclusive to the person who gives birth to the child. On the plus side, that storyline directly contradicts the idea that these young women/girls don’t deserve to be mothers, and that is a point in its favour.On the whole, though I disagree with the ‘automatic bond’ portion of the one storyline, the episode benefits from having multiple storylines highlighting different elements within the overall focus on pregnant, unmarried young women/girls and the injustices they suffered as a result of sexism.

Sixth, we get the case of Marnie Wallace and Dot (and Eugene) Spenlow. Marnie and Dot are cousins, the former is poor, the latter is more middle-class. Marnie is pregnant and her husband has died fairly recently. She’s struggling with how she’s going to provide for this child as well as the children she already has. The main option is to give the child to Dot and her husband, who very much want a child but cannot have one biologically. This gets uncomfortable as Dot offers Marnie financial support on the condition that Marnie gives them the baby when it’s born. Marnie does this but is clearly unhappy about it. When we see Dot and Eugene with the baby, they seem fairly uncomfortable with caring for it/aren’t going about it as Marnie would, though they are happy. Marnie decides she can’t live with this and takes the baby back, and though Dot and Eugene are upset, they come to accept this and give her all the stuff they bought for the baby. I’m not entirely sure what the episode was going for. There’s the theme of poor women being forced to give up children out of financial necessity (lack of resources & support made available to them), and there’s the theme of family pressuring a woman to make certain decisions about her children. I think they were trying to highlight class dynamics, and that resulted in the episode portraying a more middle-class part of a family directly preying on a poorer family member and taking her child. My discomfort with that (and I think it’s a discomfort that many viewers had) is not around Marnie not deserving to have the support she needs to raise a child that she truly wants. Portraying class struggles has always been an important element of this show and a praiseworthy one. The reason this episode drew some criticism (at least, on tumblr), I think, is that the portrayal of the couple who cannot biologically have children feels malicious. It feels like the message being sent is that there’s something virtuous about being able to have children even when you “have nothing but love,” whereas the barren couple is materialistic, not naturally good at parenting like someone who can bear children and inherently unable to provide the love that the bio mum could give the baby. That Dot practically bribes Marnie to give her the baby borders on a caricature and makes me question why it was written this way, as opposed to, say, having Dot and Eugene being portrayed more sympathetically (i.e. not bribing Marnie, offering her help) and perhaps having Marnie struggle to communicate with them that she feels pressured into a choice that she’s not comfortable with. While the situation that was portrayed isn’t wildly out there in terms of things that could and probably do happen within families, the predatory portrayal of the Spenlows seems to condemn them for being unable to have children that are biologically theirs. And that’s not a super great message to send.Oh yeah, and Tom has some feelings about the fact that he was adopted. That part of the episode felt quite tacked on. I think they were trying to communicate that a person who was adopted may have complicated feelings about the circumstances leading to their adoption when they grow up. How do you process a situation in which your biological mother was forced to give you up, but you love and were & are very happy with your adoptive family? What if you just don’t know the circumstances in which you were given up but fear they were traumatic for your biological mother/family? I think those are all very good questions to explore and I would love to see the show do a good job of exploring them. This episode wasn’t it. Putting Tom questioning those things against the backdrop of Marnie and Dot, the negative message of their story casts a shadow over those questions such that, instead of really exploring them, you’re left with the feeling that the show is saying ‘yeah, that was probably a bad thing that you weren’t raised in your biological family.’ I think they tried to provide balance to this by having Tom maintain that he loved his family and had a very normal childhood and he didn’t even think about the fact of his adoption, but I don’t think it worked. I also think that positioning ‘I didn’t even question that I was adopted and never thought about the circumstances of my birth & bio parents’ as the sign of a positive outcome of adoption is problematic. A person can be curious about and care about their bio family and the circumstances that led to their adoption without that being a slap in the face of their adoptive family or a sign that they were/are unhappy/unsatisfied with their adoptive family. Overall, though there were a few good elements to this episode… it was a bit of a trainwreck.

Seventh, there’s the 2018 Christmas Special. In this episode, we get the case of Anthea (Tillerson) Sweeting, who was abused by her father throughout her life and was then turned out by her family when she became pregnant as a result of the abuse. She subsequently formed a family of her own composed of some children who are biologically hers, as well as some who are adopted and some who she (and her husband) are fostering. There is also the case of Linda & Selwyn, a couple living in a caravan who are preparing for the birth of a baby who is not biologically Selwyn’s. Their arc largely involves Linda escaping the cycle of self-blame and accepting that the man she loves and who loves her is fully committed accepting the child as his and continuing forward as a family. With both of these cases, the biology bias is directly contradicted. With the Tillerson/Sweeting situations, we compare a family where the biological father was abusive and the biological family as a whole failed to protect the children (though there are nuances as to the mother’s responsibility in a situation where she too was suffering abuse) to a strong, loving family where the degree of biological relatedness varies. Then with Linda & Selwyn, you have a family where the biological father is not in the picture and the non-biological father is shown to be loving and supportive and very likely a good father. The episode as a whole strongly communicates that it is the choice to love and the continued commitment to one another that makes a healthy family.  

Eighth and finally, we have the 2018 Christmas Special. I’m not going to go into the whole of May’s situation and its portrayal because there’s much to go into about fostering and, while fostering is related to adoption, it’s really a whole topic of its own. There’s also a discussion that could be had about religious institutions and their role in adoption, but that would really go into the role they have in childbirth as well and that is just a whole big other conversation we could have about the show. Also, frankly this reply is long as heck already and a million high fives to you if you’ve stuck with me this far. In this episode, we go to the Nonnatus Mother Ship House and learn that apparently, they run an orphanage. Sister Winifred has a nice storyline with a boy who has disabilities and is therefore unlikely to be adopted. It is shown that children like this were often pushed to the sides and not given the care they needed to flourish. They were also far less likely to be adopted because they have different needs from children without disabilities, so they’re not what people seek when adopting (or hope for when giving birth.) This was a strong point of the episode, as it highlights the ableism in society more generally and specifically within family-building and childcare. Then we have May, who is part of a group of orphans from Hong Kong whose adoptive parents do not show up to pick her up because the prospective father gets TB, so the Turners decide to take her to live with them as a foster child. We learn that May’s biological mother was a prostitute and struggled with addiction and that though she tried to keep May, in the end she couldn’t manage to care for her in the situation she was in. There’s lots going on here in terms of class, addiction, sex work, and international adoption (especially, in this case, the power differential between Hong Kong (a British colony) and the UK (the colonial power in this equation.)) Later in the episode (or possibly in the series), it’s mentioned that May isn’t fluently anglophone and the Turners will have to work on her English with her, but other than that, questions of race, culture, etc… aren’t really touched on. I hold out some hope that these will come up in the upcoming series but I think they could have been introduced a bit in this episode/series. Also on the subject of international adoption, we have the sad (and sadly mishandled) story of the Australian home children. These children were sent to Australia (and other Commonwealth countries) for adoption, but were actually treated more as a source of free labour on farms. We actually did see this mentioned at the end of a much earlier episode (4x01), where four children were left mostly alone in conditions of abject squalor due to a neglectful mother (that was pretty much played straight, we don’t really gain much insight as to what her story was) and after Nonnatus helps them, they’re sent off to Australia where they suffer further abuse. And this is repeated here, the pregnant woman in question loitering around the Mother House trying to gain the courage to enter the last place she was happy as a child and talk about the abuse she suffered when she was sent out from the orphanage within this program. I think there’s a positive to this, in that it’s shedding light on a dark aspect of history, but it seems like there may have been a larger point/concern they were trying to make about international adoption programs and the positives and negatives therein that just didn’t land.So overall, there was a lot going on in this episode, some positive elements around tackling ableism in adoption and orphanage care, and some missed elements in relation to international adoption programs.

Tl;dr (and it’s perfectly fine if you jump down here bctbh I wrote a whole freaking tome up there): Dismantling the notion that someone isn’t a “true” parent or isn’t “truly” a person’s child because there’s no biological link is massively important, as is dismantling the notion that you have this instant “natural” connection with your biological child (in terms of what that implies about non-genetic families, the judgement it holds about people who don’t bond instantly with their biological child, and that it erases the work of bonding.) Dismantling the biases about biological connections is helpful in pushing back against a variety of harmful views both within the context of families and family-building, and more broadly. (I’ve actually done some research into essentialist biases around genetics/”blood” and have some interesting papers on it, so please message me if you’re curious and would maybe like to nerd out about it.)

That being said, it’s also important to remember that not all of the choices around adoption are made freely. As with any form of family building, the social structures surrounding it shouldn’t be ignored. At the time, and even now, class, what is considered morally acceptable in a society, and family structure ideals all play into why children are removed from birth families, and which adoptive families they are placed with. They play a large role in who is given support in making, growing and sustaining a family, and who isn’t. Those structures largely favour(ed) straight, Christian, middle-class couples of British backgrounds and judged as worse or less deserving (or completely undeserving) gay, single, non-Christian and/or working-class people of non-British backgrounds.

It’s a really tricky subject, and trying to communicate that biology isn’t what makes you a parent while also showing how harmful the adoption process could be and how rooted it was (is) in unjust social norms & structures is important. I don’t think CtM always nails it, but I think the show benefits from tackling the subject multiple times, from some variety of perspectives, and with efforts at nuance.

[theorynexus]

59:  The Continuing Adventures of Dave and Roxy, as well as the concerns assailing them.

Yay, the Charleston!   (Boo the fact that if Jake’s targeted by a sniper, Dave can’t so easily react by slowing down time and tackling him out of the way, or whatever!)

***sagenods, despite never having had anything like his own experience, myself***

It’s good to see that in quantifiable terms, there. Also good to see Dave’s awkward insecurity on the matter never faded away during those recognition stages. It makes it at least 1000% funnier. Ask Colonel Sassacre.

HA!   Also:  I love to see that paranoia in action, ramping up the comedy value even more and legitimizing my previous statement that this was funny, which some people would consider incredibly rude, probably! It is also interesting to think of the fact that the 30-70% enumeration suggests he goes back and forth as far as which of the two sexes he is apparently considering legitimate “targets” of his interest (troll biology/sexuality didn’t cease to be probably quite different from human reproductive systems, or anything, and Calliope/cherubs in general may very well be hermaphroditic either in a simultaneous or sequential manner, so I obviously have to recognize them here).  Obviously, there’s also the possibility he’s just not thinking of such other sexes due to is human upbringing on earth, were intersex members of society are relatively rare, and thus the idea that there are only two sexes tends to widely be embraced by (most, but increasingly not all) members of the Western society/civilization he dwelt in. I don’t blame him for his upbringing: everyone brings their own baggage into their later life.

Yeah... the Stralondes bring some interesting genetic factors to the table. I am not sure how much that actually directly influences things. Part of the issue is probably Bro’s impact on his life, which exposed Dave to a great deal of sexual material and almost undeniably stunted his growth in weird ways.   (Note: I do not suggest that his apparent self-labeled bisexuality is a result of his growth being stunted, regardless of the fact that one’s early life does indeed have an impact on one’s later identity; rather, I am merely suggesting that Bro’s influences, while dramatically increasing his capacity for survival in SBURB, and thus technically being instrumental to everything that followed, gave him psychological issues which everyone must admit made him struggle quite a bit over the years.   It may be likely that he would have developed the same sexual dispositions regardless of the scars Bro inflicted on him [both emotional and physical], but we can never truly know, for Time is weird: issues are entangled.)

Dirk, you named yourself after a Platonic work!   How can you not understand how great and important relationships which reach to the point of bonds between souls and transcend the physicality of sexual relations can be?!?!?!

GAH, I just... sometimes, you really can’t expect reasonable thoughts from this guy, can you?

On the other hand, let’s just all take a moment to celebrate the irony of “... even my harshest critics would never accuse me of such cruelty” from Dirk Strider. Best. Fricking. bundle of words that ever emerged from his mouth, probably.

I would argue that even without the opposition, displays of gender are by no means culturally vestigial in the same way that fashion generally is not. It’s a direct reflection of the soul, projected outward.  (Like a person’s hat, or shirt. [Dirk having a hat on his shirt was not just a reflection of the fact that he was “kid bro,” or whatever, but was actually an early suggestion of his Heart aspect.]) Obviously, this is limited by the resources, imagination, and environment/occupation of the individual involved, and there are in fact numerous things which are more important for a person in reality, but that doesn’t mean that it’s something to be dismissed like that altogether.

***cough projected future dramatic irony, cough***   Also ironic insofar as I am not 100% sure he actually cares about Roxy’s identity/gender issues so much as he might find them annoying and boring to be dragged through. Somewhat ironic+hilarious for a fellow Heart player to find this kind of thing unbearable, if so.   Maybe it’s just the Prince in him.

It is good of you to be concerned for her well-being, I suppose. Considering it is your own identity that is at issue, here, I would suggest you hold a little more weight, but regardless, this is good.  As for the matter of your transformation and dissatisfaction with your hair as it is now:  I suppose Dave’s step by step relation of his own journey as made quite an impression on you.   Hopefully, you do not feel jealous, but rather, patiently continue to contemplate your own path and, as Alt!Calliope suggests you might think, head toward a more potent and firm+real understanding of your own identity+self.  It is okay to be uncertain and questioning, for now.  I’m sure the shakiness of first steps will give way to confidence naturally in due time. These things are not easy, obviously, but reaching out to someone who’s had similar struggles is a good choice: it will likely make things easier, especially since he’s someone you can dependably put your trust in, despite his flippant, awkward attitude in general. (Also: on a more abstract note, it is interesting to see Roxy ascribing meaninglessness to her hair choice, and expressing lack of understanding on her identity issues. Very tight writing, on Hussie’s part, making the kids reflect their aspects and struggle so keenly with things relating to them.)

Given the fact that Cherubs naturally have very violent sex and spend eons before their first (and only?) sexual encounter, that’s not really much of an insult, if “virgin” should ever be considered one to begin with.  Pompous is definitely more accurate and applicable, though. Also:  Hooray, actually saying things, and getting the size of his text back again! (I am not actually really cheering for Dirk so much as I am finding it interesting for the sake of the ongoing conflict acting as an undercurrent to the storytelling, right now. It’s truly fascinating to see two narrators fighting amongst themselves like this! )

Everything about this (especially Alt!Calliope’s confidence and her “’human tanties’” line) is incredibly amusing. I love it.

Lil Cal might beg to differ. But that is a complicated tangent which does not deal with this version of Dirk directly.     (Preemptive Edit:  Also funny because of the fact that Doc Scratch is literally a walking, talking puppet with a Dirk inside.)

Yes, justifying toying with your friends because you know them and have investment in their lives therefore is indeed very logical, reasonable, and highly rational of you to do. Thank you for this brilliant insight into the human condition.

Oh, so this is now a reference to the Charles Whitman shootings at the University of Texas?   That is a very interesting and curious choice to portray Dirk’s derangement with, especially considering the earlier statement about Dirk knowing solitude in a similar manner to Alt!Calliope’s own knowledge of it.    (Almost appropriate, considering she basically destroyed the fabric of Paradox Space to kill her brother in cold blood [the way revenge and Eternity are best served], but I guess this is a digression~)

I wonder if he really intends this, or if it is in fact a ruse in order to time things perfectly such that he can in fact shoot Alt!Calliope in Jade’s body without her initially expecting it. Particularly since, if I am thinking of the correct gun, it actually shoots portals that allow for ridiculously long range shots that would normally be impossible.

Wow, that is cold, Alt!Calliope, throwing Rose under the bus like that.   Also:  I suddenly have “ Do the impossible, see the invisible. Row! Row! Fight the power! Touch the untouchable, break the unbreakable. Row! Row! Fight the power!” playing in my head, as if this were a flash animation. That thought process really puts things in perspective, if this is supposed to be  (at least to him) a tale of Dirk fighting against causality and the will of Paradox Space to make things become irrelevant and to fade out of perception.

Guaranteed to blow [somebody’s] mind.

She warned you about---

History repeating itself.

Such anime. Such wonders.  Man, this is really fricking interesting, seeing Dirk and Calliope actually going at it on a twinned physical and metaphysical battlefield!   It’s like we’re finally being shown a cherub predomination contest in action!    (I wonder if Alt!Calliope will eventually fall into caliginous attraction for him. This would be quite amusing.)

Wow, that was probably a bad move taken at an inopportune time. The question is: Is she forced to make that by laws of narrative relevance, or is it a purposeful decision on her part to spitefully turn away from him, despite the likely imminent consequences. On the other hand: This could be a very powerful and shrewd tactic on her part to recruit Dave to serve her purposes. Given his presence at the event, he could either intercept Dirk (I almost called him Bro-- gah!) or save Jake, if led properly. If she is particularly spiteful, she could use him as a sacrificial piece and have him take the bullet instead of Jake, which could be very, very painful to Dirk.

Huh. Despite Terezi’s comment about onions not making people cry, Trolls are inherently averse to them in the same way that dogs are to chocolate, huh? Also, people are Ogres, and Homestuck is Shrek. This is definitely the unadulterated truth. Additionally:   Pffft.  It seems that the idea that the Green Sun Black Hole’s presence making Roxy’s own void less effective for everyone might be true!   Or, alternatively, Dave just knows enough to make the guess. Or both, possibly.

Pffft. She’s oblivious to her own inscrutability!   Perfect. XD That said: YES!   HECK YES!  HECK FRICKING YES, ROXY SHADES!!!   :’D (Oh, and shades are a symbol of the Void [not just because they keep out light, but because they block the eyes, which are symbolic of Light and Heart, but more importantly for this, Light], the same way that alcohol and oceans are. Somewhat surprising that she didn’t have a pair of them already, at this point, if we’re being totally honest.)

Yeah, if it was not obvious that the method of Alt!Calliope informing Dave of this threat would be subtle like that rather than a direct statement/command, then I don’t know what is obvious to you guys.

This, psychologically+sociologically, makes a great deal of sense, considering humans seem to have a natural propensity for feeling distasteful towards some sort of “other,” regardless of what it is. Thus, there’s a double-edged sword involved, quite logically, and somewhat saddeningly, to the otherwise open and accepting mentality that humans seem to have socially adopted in their new environment.       At the same time, the way that this is delivered is horribly hilarious (tragi-comically so), and I’m barely sorry that I find that to be the case.

Yes. Yes, it was cute, indeed. Sad to see it go, somewhat.  But his question is incredibly silly and very awkward, just as is natural for Dave. Thus, I find it acceptable and in-character, not insulting or narrow-minded, as some might.

***laughs alongside them, for indeed, this has all become quite funny, despite the fact that it is a “distaction [sic.]” from the seriousness at hand***

FRICKING...  DANGIT, ALT!CALLIOPE, IF THIS TURNS OUT THE WAY YOUR WORDING IMPLIES IT WILL, I SWEAR...!!!

Okay, so you seem to have just used it as a convenient threat, and worded things such that he had time that he didn’t necessarily clearly have in order to basically take two actions instead of one.   (His jump to save Karkat could have cost Jake his life, or Dave his.)

As I was going to say, but was prevented from doing due to a belief that it would be better to include these lines too:   His statement about her being right about many things clearly, while initially making it seem that he was indeed going to take the shot, heroic death chance or no, almost certainly ensures that this is actually a subterfuge on his part (similar to but a reversal of Caliborn replacing the hats on the king and queen: in this case, he is switching his OPPONENT’s chess pieces’ appearances, making her think he’s targeting one, but is actually going for the other, more crucial target [as should be obvious, given the thematic similarities between Dirk and Caliborn, and the tendency of events in Paradox Space to rhyme with one another]).

Check.

Indeed, indeed. Alt!Calliope senses a similar pattern, quite sensibly, which is fitting with her role as Muse, and her understanding of it. Unfortunately, while she picked up correctly one one such similarity/resonance, it seems she’s missed some others.   I do appreciate this comment on immortality, though. I had not actually thought about that, and this makes his potential actions somewhat more benign. (Not that it would render his later actions as such.)

I really fricking appreciate the “no guts no glory” comment coming right before this extremely gutsy reveal on his part. By saying as such, he could easily be ruining his plan, but he just goes ahead and says it anyway. XD BEAUTIFUL writing, right there.

It was less intelligent of him to narrate his own action so long-windedly, but completely in-character.  It gave her the time required to interject like that. That said: I bet he’s going to fire via voice command or something like that.

And THAT, my friends, is why you don’t underestimate your opponents, and you should not announce your belief in the futility of their actions to their faces like a stereotypical villain would!   Also:  WILLPOWER!!!

...   Yet this does not end the page, and despite the fact that it would be a magnificent point to end the post, I will not do so.  I will first say that I was almost certain Dirk was actually in fact successfully hiding something from her when he was messing with his equipment/tech there [and great foresight on his part, to think this far ahead, by the way], and secondly, shall end the post with the actual page’s ending:

I appreciate his continued devotion to realism in sound effects and whatnot.

To be fair, he could be using that term technically and literally, here, but I also very much do believe that he was not, which is unfortunate. v.v Thus, Alt!Calliope’s question is quite valid.   Though my guess is that Dirk’s response will be something along the lines of, “She chose death and you over life with me.”  This might make her a “bitch” in the same way that men in prison who are raped are reported to be one, rather than the typical insulting-particularly-to-women version of the phrase. Regardless, this is uncalled for. ~~~ It is nice to see the fact that Alt!Calliope’s text is getting smaller, now, by the way.

I don’t appreciate this mockery/show boating. It’s quite abrasive and distasteful. I do see it as being rather in-line with what I’d imagine his character would do, given the frustrating situation he was previously put in, though. Also:  This very much resembles what happened when he was first suppressed. There is much hilarity to be found in that, all things considered. Alt!Calliope was definitely a bit more benign in some ways and objective (most of the time), but that doesn’t mean that there weren’t some major similarities between narrators. Additionally:   I do quite love this example of narrative vs. physical action.  I only remember Caliborn/LE and Hussie ever engaging in that sort of contest before.  Well... you could say that there were a few examples of it with the Exiles and Kids/Trolls (like what Bec did to PM’s station, or Sollux’s defense against CD), but they don’t really feel like they were quiiitee substantive enough to count. Regardless!: Very refreshing and interesting, this style of conflict is! Thanks, AH! ... Buuuut there is just a liiitttle tiny bit left over on the page to comment on, so I’ll get to that.  (Oh, also, I totally imagine Jade falling asleep in the classic manner she used to before entering the session, just slumping over with her hands splayed out under her~)

Okaaayyy... if you say so. The fact that tranquilizers can be lethal in doses that are too high does not jive well with your uncertainty, though.   Oh, and also:  WHAAAAT?!  You’re going to leave?!  This is a completely unexpected---   Okay, I can’t and won’t keep up that charade when admittedly the couple of pages I read of Homestuck^2 before freaking out and stopping showed a weird-shaped ship that looked vaguely like a flying fish.    I had tried to forget about that, but the memory suddenly rushed back to me as I read that bit of narration.

Ehh?   Is this suggesting that the Candy epilogue is chiefly narrated by Alt!Calliope?   I mean... it would sortof work out logically, given her very pro-Free Will stance, and the association of Calliope with preferring Candy as food... .

Hmm. This further supports that notion. Iiiif that is the case, Dirk stands as the proxy for LE/Caliborn even moreso than otherwise was clearly the case.  In retrospect, this makes it pretty gosh darned funny that his head got chopped off along with Jack English and Jack Noir (who, holding English’s “lordly sceptre,” and holding reign over the Felt, was OBVIOUSLY an English stand-in, as well  [I still giggle at his sudden use of it like a horse {hitcher} in the middle of the fight]).       Very, veeeeerrry interesting. ~~~ I wonder if Dirk was testing the idea of interjecting himself back into the narrative when he said, “Jake’s ass is mine,” twice, earlier. Oh, and credit to Forgotten Homestuck Facts for the pic compilation, earlier. 

[eeveelutionsforequality]

Have you always been an inclusionist (regarding the wil Wheaton post)

Yeah, if I remember correctly, I have. At least, I believe that I have been regarding asexual and/or aromantic people - but bear in mind that I, personally, don't extend that to the "asexual spectrum" (which, I believe, is a misnomer since you're either asexual, completely unattracted, or allosexual, attracted on some level, no matter how small or infrequent - it's more like the "allosexual qualifier spectrum"). Things like demisexual do not describe the sexes/genders that you're attracted to (you can be a heterosexual demisexual, or a bisexual demisexual, or a gay demisexual, since it only describes the necessity for a preexisting emotional connection and not the genders/sexes of the individuals who you can feel attraction to once that emotional connection is there), and so the qualifier of demisexual is not inherently LGBT+ (just as the qualifier of only liking blondes isn't), as you can be a heterosexual heteroromantic cisgender demisexual, but one can be LGBT+ and demisexual.

I have been involved in real world LGBT+ activism and communities, I've been involved in safeguarding, volunteering, parades, youth groups, older groups, and so on. Most of the LGBT+ groups and people that I've encountered did include asexual and/or aromantic people under the LGBT+ label (and many included allies within the community and/or groups, although the allies obviously were not classed as LGBT+ themselves). Those groups and individuals that I've encountered who didn't explicitly include asexuals and/or aromantics have usually been those with more of a focus on same sex/gender attraction as the core of the group and/or as what they believed to be the core of the LGBT+ community (or as some, but not all, put it, the LGB, GLB, LGB+T, or gay community; some of them, not due to malice but due to understandable ignorance, this was years ago, were somewhat biphobic and transphobic - but that's a ramble for another day, and not something that is inherent to people who don't agree with the inclusion of asexual and/or aromantic people).

That isn't to say that I think that this reasoning represents every individual who doesn't agree with the inclusion of asexual and/or aromantic people, everyone has their own reasoning and isn't accountable for other people's beliefs, actions, or words - I'm just expressing that the main (possibly only) argument that I've really seen in real life for the exclusion of asexual and/or aromantic people has been "they're not inherently same sex/gender attracted, and some of them can be attracted to the opposite sex/gender". Online, I see a couple of other arguments, like "they're not as oppressed" and "they're cishets" and "it's not real".

I, thus far, have not seen any reason to exclude asexuals and aromantics from the label as a whole that I can agree with (although individual groups are more than welcome to have their own specific focus).

An asexual or aromantic person is not a cisgender heterosexual heteroromantic person, by definition (and I believe that the best way to describe what constitutes being LGBT+ is that you're not at least one of those things - ie the only people who aren't LGBT+, in my opinion, are people who are all three of those things at once). If you wouldn't call a bisexual heteroromantic person or biromantic heterosexual person a "cishet", then don't call asexual and/or aromantic people "cishets" - if somebody is not both heterosexual and heteroromantic, I don't think it's fair to label them a "cishet" (although I don't like the word anyway, it has derogatory connotations that I don't think are at all helpful, as there's nothing wrong or bad about being a cisgender heterosexual heteroromantic person).

Being LGBT+ does not necessitate being same sex/gender attracted, nor does it necessitate being unable to be attracted to the opposite sex/gender (trans people can be straight, and bisexual or biromantic people can be attracted to the opposite sex/gender).

Being LGBT+ does not necessitate a certain level of discrimination (if, hypothetically, homophobia completely stopped tomorrow, gay and lesbian people would still be LGBT+), and suffering is neither quantifiable nor consistent across the group (different people will experience different levels of disadvantage based on other life factors - wealth, class, how accepting your school and family are, where you live, and other circumstances and factors can affect how much homophobia you experience, as well as the level of impact and damage that said homophobia can do).

People have been expressing the experience of being asexual and/or aromantic for years and years, and I haven't seen any evidence to suggest that it's impossible for an individual to be born without sexual and/or romantic attraction. That said, while I do understand the concerns that not everyone who identifies that way will be correct (there have been cases where people have said that their "internalised homophobia" lead to an incorrect assumption about their identity, and hyposexuality or other libido issues could be mistaken for it), the potential for some people to be wrong does not mean that the thing itself doesn't exist - for example, one can mistake a thyroid issue for major depressive disorder, but that doesn't mean that depression doesn't exist or that everybody diagnosed with major depression actually has a thyroid issue. I see no reason to disbelieve every single person who identifies that way, simply because some people are wrong - I see it as reason to spread information and promote caution with one's identity, as well as the fortitude to be open to the possibility that in the future you may realise that you were wrong.

So, in conclusion, I think that I have always been an inclusionist to some degree.

Note: Just to clarify, I'm not saying that you have to be a "gold star asexual", for lack of a better term, to be asexual - attraction can be confusing, there are straight guys who want to bang Johnny Depp but are otherwise straighter than a ruler, there are asexual people who aren't sex repulsed, and so on. What I'm saying is that if you're capable of attraction to one or multiple genders/sexes once an emotional connection is there, that shouldn't be lumped under asexual as it is not the lack of attraction to any gender/sex, but rather selective attraction (comparable to only experiencing attraction to blondes, for example).

~ Vape

[elliesrandomessays-blog]

Let's talk about Bowsette as a trans icon.

This post/essay/think-piece/idological-wankery (delete where appropriate) is going to assume you know who Bowsette is. The Bowsette hype train has already come and gone in less than a month so I'm late to the party by this point; if you're reading this some time in the far future for some reason you may want to go do some quick googling as a refresher (might want to keep safe-search on).

Laying my own context on the table: I'm a Trans woman.

The sudden and widespread proliferation of Bowsette has been nothing short of inexplicable. Off the top of my head her rise to temporary dominance in the Mario fanbase is unlike anything before her. The closest two examples that come to mind are Coldsteel the Hedgehog from the Sonic fanbase and Doctor Whooves of My Little Pony fame. But those two characters don't posses the same invisible origins. Coldsteel was a meme, an intentional parody of the fan-creation phenomenon that has lead to the "_____ the hedgehog" game being the most fun you can have with google, and Doctor Whooves (while his personality and backstory are a fan construction) was still based on a background extra who was originally conceived by the show, not its fans. Bowsette's original was in no way directly provoked. The Super Crown was revealed as a tool that can turn Toadette in to Peach, some random twitter user made a standard fan comic where the crown was given to Bowser, and people took to it.

And because we live in 2018, it naturally got sexual very fast. A friend of mine once said "I like Bowsette, but I'm not a fan of the male-gazey-ness" (not quoted verbatim) and that sums it up nicely. There is a lot of porn of Bowsette out there, and now that her icon as a fun novelty character has passed her time as the champion of fan-created erotic pin-ups has begun. Bowsette has become one of the most notable times where a fictional character who is arguably transgender has entered the male gaze as an icon of sexuality whilst not having an undercurrent of fetishism to it. There's no great calling for Bowsette porn where she has a penis. The only ever reference to her Bowser-based past is for some occasional gags which aren't constructed to shame the contrast between Bowser and Bowsette. And the wide variety of the feminine traits and masculine traits in her various portrayals show a very neutral pallet of preconceptions her the artists and fans are going in with. I say arguably because we're only talking symbolically, not literally. Unless we ever got an explanation of the mechanics of Toadette's Super Crown then there's no literal grounding for this analysis. Keep all that in mind, we're talking symbolically.

The fact that no one in Bowsette's fanbase really seems to care about this fact is actually kind of fantastic news for Trans folk out there. The inherent problem with attempting to get Trans representation is one that is hard to talk about seriously thanks to the fact it's the same argument people use for why there shouldn't be representation: it's hard to naturally include it in backstory without making it feel either too-defining or tacked-on. The longterm goal of Trans representation is paradoxically to make our own representation invisible; to try and reach a point where the fact a character could be Trans is textually irrelevant to what the audience is expected to think about them. For example: were there a blockbuster film released tomorrow where a character who presented male is the protagonist, then in a flashback scene the same character were to be presenting as female pretransition and that fact never brought up again, we'd all throw up our hands and applause the representation that we have a Trans lead character, since that is bringing us closer to a world where the exact same setup just makes us go "yeah, I guess".

Bowsette's symbolic transition is a part of who she is, and there'll always been that little pink crown on her head as a reminder of that, but it's not a *defining* part of who she is, and that's what's so important. It's the logical middle step between the seemingly contradictory states of "They're trans, hurrah!" and "They're trans, K." And the fact she's been taken too with both hands (or one hand, with the other heading pants-ward) shows it's working. Nuance often requires we remember that a group is in reality multiple uniquely operating consciousnesses but it's often helpful when wanting to gauge direction to imagine communities as a single person. And in this case the 'person' of society is happy to ignore the whole 'used to be Bowser' thing and just enjoy Bowsette for who she is. This has done wonders for my own self-esteem and I can't imagine I'm alone. Often times I've had trouble thinking of myself as a sexual being thanks to being Trans. Times where I've felt it have always felt *against* that fact, or when I'm lucky *in spite* of being Trans. Even though my partner has been good at reassuring me that they really don't care when it comes to getting freaky and she doesn't think like that; it doesn't stop the fact that media has taught me to think that she can only think of me sexually in the context of being Trans. Bowsette's reputation has been one of the first concrete pieces of evidence that maybe my partner is right and it is perfectly okay for me to be proud of my sexuality without that risk of inherent fetishism.

Of course this doesn't come problem free. Whilst the case for the Super Crown being read as a substitute for transition is one worth considering, it's still an oversimplification of the process to an unhelpful degree. It views the difference between Bowser and Bowsette as a binary state, the whole character shifts from the Bowser body to the Bowsette body with a simple operation. Trans persons in media have always had this concept floating around them that once the decision is made it's a single procedure and you're rockin' an hourglass physique. In reality it's a lifelong arduous grind towards some non-existence idea of what we need to be. Moving from one end of the gender spectrum to the other is not a linear progression but asymptotic, I have to spend the rest of my life with constant injection, pills, procedures and therapies that will forever bring me 'closer' but will never get me 'there'. Embracing Bowsette as-is as a great example of what a symbolically Trans character should be is going to come with a further perpetuation of the simplicity, and I know there will be people out there who won't want to include her because they feel the simplicity problem is bad enough without us accepting a character who's feeding in to it. But as we all know, the capacity for nuance goes down as the size of the group gets bigger and we need to take Bowsette with a grain of salt much like how we need to think of everything more critically than we tend to. That debate is more than worth having.

Obviously I'm not begrudging the existence of Bowsette directly because of this. We're talking about an extrapolation of an extrapolation, we're so far removed from the original intention of the Super Crown that trying to pin any of the negative consequences of Bowsette on the Crown is like blaming the Cow because your White-Chocolate Mocha tastes funny, but it's worthy context to consider when looking at what Bowsette means in the grander scale of where society considers Trans persons.

Bowsette hasn't magically removed all preconceptions of the life of a Transgender person: her sexuality not being considered a Transgender fetish isn't stopping the fact she's still in the 'fetish' category for other reasons, her non-canon nature means that the impact is only indicative of societal conceptions rather than corporate ones where much more of the battle still needs to be fought, and I've somewhat oversimplified how much of the fanbase truly *is* on board with Bowsette (it pains me greatly that the Waluigi fanbase is one of the notable ones with the conservative attitude towards her). But god damn she's interesting, and more than enough for now.

[midnight-circus]

alphabetical OC meme

filled this out for Lord Asshole bc i cant write anything so i may as well fill in questionnaires instead

also numerous numbers and at least one section were missing when i copied it so idk what happened there

under the cut bc its Long As Hell

A: Aptitude 1. what are your oc’s natural abilities, things they’ve been doing since young? // Independence lmao. He could get through his whole life relying entirely on himself if need be. He wouldn’t be happy, but he’d survive. He’s also naturally intellectual and has never had to try very hard in academia.

2. what activities have they participated in? // literally what does this mean. Safe to say he’s not exactly playing team sports.

3. what abilities do they have that they’ve worked for? // He’s had to work extremely hard to shed the bad habits learnt whilst growing up in a white aristocratic dysfunctional family. Other than that, he’s a talented pianist – the only thing his mother was ever proud of. Also sending work-emails that don’t make him sound like a total dick. still working on that tbh

4. what things are they bad at? // Honestly, anything creative. He’s very intelligent but has absolutely no artistic talent, and he’s not at all imaginative – creating something out of nothing when it doesn’t have a logical or scientific basis is pretty beyond him.

5. what is their most impressive talent? // In his original AU, and any fantasy AUs I force him kicking and screaming into, swordsmanship. He’s pretty untouchable with a blade.

B: Basics 1. what is their hair color?// Dark brown, close to black.

2. what is their eye color? // Also dark brown.

3. how tall are they? // 6’2

4. how old are they? // He fluctuates depending on the AU, but his default base-age is 34.

5. how much do they weigh? // Generally between 150-180lbs, depending on his age, eating habits and mental state. When he’s going through stress, his eating and sleeping patterns are the first to nosedive.

C: Comfort 1. how do they sit in a chair? // His posture leaves a lot to be desired. He slouches pretty badly, and to be honest his height makes it difficult to get comfortable in most regular chairs. He also manspreads, though to be fair his legs are about 3 miles long and it’s hard to know where to put them honestly

2. in what position do they sleep? // Either on his side or his front. Never on his back.

4. what is their major comfort food? why? // oh man sugar. His eating habits aren’t good at the best of times, but when he’s feeling Mentally Ill he’s prone to 4am binges of as much sugar as conceivably possible in one sitting. He then goes for a 5am run until he throws up, so yknow. all nice and healthy.

5. who is the best at comforting them when down? // Elrick. Gross. Also Kat, to be fair.

D: Decoration 1. how would they decorate a house if they had one under their name? // He’s very fond of Nordic design and tries to keep vibrancy to a minimum, because he’s a boring bitch. Light walls, dark woods, pretty stylish furniture but no chrome Thank You Very Much; accent colours would probably be dark blues or greens. Plants, but only if he doesn’t have to water them because he Will forget and they Will all die. He’s also anal as fuck and despises mess and disorder, which makes living with Elrick fuckin interesting to say the least.

2. how would they decorate their child’s room? // however they wanted as long as it wasn’t pastels bc a man has to draw the line somewhere

3. how do they decorate their own room? // muted, calm, maybe a little regency – he accessorises more in the bedroom than he does in the rest of the house, gold accents here and there, that sort of thing. Less austere, more opulent. At the end of the day, he’s from an aristocratic background, however unhealthy his upbringing was – he can never quite shed the appreciation for luxe.

4. what type of clothes and accessories do they wear? // He dresses well – very put-together, if very monochrome. He doesn’t do casual very well and will avoid jeans unless he has no other choice. He would quite literally rather die than wear shorts. As for colours, generally blacks, greys, dark jewel-tones (maroons, dark greens, dark purples, etc). Very rarely light colours, and if he does wear light tones he layers them – a white shirt under a dark leather jacket, for example. As for accessories, he stays simple with a decent watch (Patek Phillipe, thanks, none of this Rolex bullshit) and two rings (wedding ring and onyx signet ring – family heirloom, the only one he has). He knows how to dress to suit himself.

5. do they like makeup/nail/beauty trends? // >:[  

E: External Personality 1. does the way they do things portray their internal personality? // For the most part. How he behaves has been moulded over many years by how he thinks and feels, and it’s hard to shed the habits of a lifetime. EG, he’s very neurotic and it does have an impact on his organisation – if his mental state slips into decline, so too does his command over his surroundings and his ability to keep things on track.

2. do they do things that conform to the norm? // Again, for the most part. A key element of his upbringing was the overbearing sense of being watched, being judged, being on display; one behaves the way one is expected to behave, and one never deviates from that path. Obviously he fucked that one right up when he started putting dicks in his mouth, but it still remains something of a mantra.

3. do they follow trends or do their own thing? // Neither, really. He doesn’t follow trends because he’s actually 70 years old and doesn’t know what they are, but nor is he particularly unconventional. He does his own thing because he has no idea what anybody else is currently doing.

4. are they up-to-date on the internet fads? // oh god no. he has a twitter account but the last time he used it he got drunk and tweeted at jeremy paxman that he was a cunt so he doesn’t really engage with it very much

5. do they portray their personality intentionally or let people figure it out on their own? // People are left to figure it out. He doesn’t go out of his way to make friends or advertise his personality – he’s friendly when he needs to be, but is not the sort of person to go out actively socialising.

G: Gorgeous 1. what is their most attractive external feature? // His height makes him pretty popular and he knows how to dress well. He also has that particular ‘tall, thin, dark hair, pale skin, heroin-addict-esque’ chic that some people tend to go for. He doesn’t really get it, himself.

2. what is the most attractive part of their personality? // He’s witty in a very dry way – a little sharper than run-of-the-mill sarcasm.

3. what benefits come with being their friend? // Ok honestly? Money lmao. idk man you’d have to ask Kat bc she’s the only one who’s lasted this long

4. what parts of them do they like and dislike? // Though he projects an aura of self-assurance, he really doesn’t like very much about himself; his upbringing and unhealthy relationship with Catholicism did a number of his self-esteem. He’s proud of his intellect and knows he is smarter than the average person, but other than that, not a great deal.

5. what parts of others do they envy? // General happiness. He’s a melancholy person by nature and doesn’t tend to feel a swell of positive emotions for no reason – he can’t help but feel there’s something inherently wrong in his brain.

H: Heat 1. do they rather a hot or cold room? // n e i t h e r bitch his internal temperature must remain on an even keel at all times. Probably cold, if he was forced to pick.

2. do they prefer summer or winter? // Winter because it means he can wear layers

3. do they like the snow? // yes but he’ll never admit it. he finds it romantic. that must never be repeated.

4. do they have a favorite summer activity? // lying in front of the fridge cursing God

5. do they have a favorite winter activity? // coffee dates. Independent coffee shops, mind you – fuck Sbux.

I: In-the-closet 1. what is their sexuality? // Gay

2. have they ever questioned their sexuality? // he spent more than half his teen years wishing he was straight

3. have they ever questioned their gender? // No

4. would/was their family be okay with them being LGBT? // mother denies it completely, father kicked him out, brother doesn’t give a shit bc he’s bi as hell himself

5. how long would/did it take for them to come out? // He was forced out at 16 when he was caught with a boyfriend in the boathouse of Darlington estate – it marked the end of an already abusive parental relationship. To be honest, it’s hard to say if he would have ever had the courage to come out himself.

J: Joy 1. what makes them happy? // Feeling loved. He got very little of that in his youth.

2. who makes them happy? // Elrick has an uncanny ability. Who’d have thought it.

3. are there any songs that bring them joy? // He particularly loves Dancing in the Dark by Springsteen, and All Along the Watchtower by Hendrix. Neither are very joyful songs, granted, but they’re two of his favourites.

4. are they happy often? // He’s contented often, and he enjoys his life. ‘Happy’, though? Not sure.

K: Kill 1. have they ever thought about suicide? // More than once.

2. have they ever thought about homicide? // Not with any real intent. In a modern AU, anyway – can’t say the same for any of his other incarnations.

3. if they could kill anyone without punishment, would they? who? // Way deep down somewhere, he’d be tempted to say his father.

4. who would miss them if they died? // More people than he knows.

5. who would be happy they died, anyone? // lmao the tax agency probably. His father wouldn’t be happy, per se, but perhaps it would solve a problem.

L: Lemons 1. what is their favorite fruit? // Black cherries.

2. what is their least favorite fruit? // fuck bananas, honestly

3. are there any foods they hate? // Peanut butter can die, and also asparagus can also die.

4. do they have any food intolerances?  // Not that he knows of.

5. what is their favorite food? // Probably Thai or Korean.

M: Maternal 1. would they want a daughter or a son? // He technically has a son already. Kat wanted a child and she trusted Logan above an anonymous donor, so one stressful jack-off session, a weird experience with a baster and eight months later, Rowan showed up early.  Logan technically has no parental responsibilities or rights, but he’s involved in Rowan’s life nonetheless. And then there’s Bastian, whose own father leaves a Little To Be Desired in the emotional department, let’s say, so ultimately he winds up taking on that role as well.

2. how many children do they want? // One’s enough, ta, and that one doesn’t even live with him. In seriousness, he’s always idly thought about children in his life, but not with any real seriousness – he plays his role with Rowan well and he’s a great uncle to Bastian, but kids wouldn’t suit his and Elrick’s lifestyle.  

3. would they be a good parent? // Yeah, he probably would.

4. what would they name a son? what would they name a daughter? // Demetrius or Victor for a boy, Ophelia for a girl. How else will people know he’s a pretentious bitch?

5. would they adopt? // Nah

O: Optimism 1. are they optimistic or pessimistic? // Total pessimist.

2. are they openly optimistic, throwing it on others? // No and he cannot stand it when other people force optimism into entirely inappropriate situations.

3. are they good at giving advice? // lmao not unless it’s legal advice. Then yes, absolutely. Just don’t cry on his kitchen floor.

4. is there anyone in their life that throws optimism on them? fukkin Katherine. She’s the only one allowed to get away with it.  

5. were they always optimistic/pessimistic? // Yeah, he was a pretty dour, anxious little kid from the start.

P: Personality 1. what is their best personality trait? // From a professional perspective, he’s extremely clear-headed and analytical, and it serves him very well as a criminal prosecution lawyer – there’s not much that slips by him, and he can spot a loophole coming a mile away.

2. what is their worst personality trait? // He’s … difficult to get along with, for a lot of people. Not nasty as such, but he’s sharp-tongued and quite quick to anger in situations outside of his job, particularly when stressed. He also has a tendency to look down on people (particularly people who aren’t considered ‘smart’ by his standards) and let’s be real, he’s pretty classist – it takes him a long time to come to terms with Bastian’s relationship with Fabian. Elrick is more than happy to call him out on this.

3. what of their personality do others love? // Didn’t we already do this?

5. do they hate anything about their personality/about other’s personalities? // god he cannot abide people who aren’t punctual oh GOD he hates people who aren’t punctual

Q: Questions 1. do they ask for help? // Not unless he’s literally dying

2. do they ask questions in class? // to be honest, he generally didn’t need to

3. do they answer questions that make them a little uncomfortable? // Depends on the context, but he generally tries to avoid giving out personal information.

4. do they ask weird questions? // He keeps his weird questions to himself and Googles them later.

5. are they curious? // By nature. It was curiosity that got him into the godawful mess he ended up in re: his source material.

R: Rules 1. do they follow rules? // Generally yeah, aside from the occasionally joint now and then. Although saying that, he does run very much on his own moral code, so I suppose he follows rules as long as he agrees with the sense and logic behind them.

2. would they be a strict or laid-back parent? // It’s odd, his instinct is to be strict but he would also loathe the thought of being anything like his father, so he might swing entirely the other way in an attempt to avoid that. Hard to say. He definitely wouldn’t be like … a fun, playful parent because that’s just not in his nature, but it’s possible he’d relax his own rules significantly. Although he is fairly strict with Rowan, it’s for Rowan’s benefit - he needs rules and boundaries to be comfortable, and Logan’s not a traditional ‘father’ in that case anyway.

3. have they ever been consequenced for breaking a rule? // he was ‘consequenced’ pretty fuckin badly for daring to kiss a boy

4. have they broken any rules they now regret breaking? // oh god probably, he has more regrets than he can count

5. do they find any rules they/others follow absolutely ridiculous? // He’s not got a lot of time nor respect for people who follow rules totally blindly without having some sense of self-critique.

S: Streets 1. are they street-smart? // Depends on the AU, but for the most part he’s too privileged.

2. would they give money to someone on the streets? // no because he’s actually horrible

3. have they ever gotten in a fight on the streets? // No, but he has gotten in a fight in a bar. Kat will not let him forget it.

5. are they cautious when out? // A little paranoid, perhaps, but it doesn’t stop him.

T: Truth 1. are they honest? // define ‘honest’

2. can they tell if someone is lying? // Yes, it’s literally his job.

3. is it obvious when they’re lying? // Nope. He’s a consummate liar.

4. have they lied about anything they regret lying about? // he lied and told Elrick that yes, he’d had sex before their first time, and then regretted it twenty minutes later when they were forced to stop because he almost died. it's fine. they worked it out

5. have they told truths that have been spread against their will? // not really – he plays his cards very close to his chest. Nothing gets out if he doesn’t want it to.

U: Underdog 1. have they been bullied? // Only by his parents.

2. have they bullied anyone? // Not directly to anyone’s face, but he’s definitely made some unpleasant comments.

3. have they been physically attacked by a bully? // If his father counts, yes.

4. have they ever been doubted? // Only from ages 2 to 34.

5. have they surprised people with being good at something? People don’t tend to expect the piano-playing, somehow.

V: Vomit 1. do they vomit often? // what is this question set. Incidentally, yes – he has a problem with running until he’s exhausted and tends to vomit after that.

2. do they get lots of stomach aches? // no?? I guess not???

3. are they good at comforting someone ill? // lol he could be better. His levels of sympathy leave a little to be desired.

4. what do they like as far as comfort goes? // he doesn’t, really. He generally dislikes being fussed over too much and denies he is sick until he’s unable to stand up, at which point he’s forced to accept it whether he likes it or not.

5. do they burp, cough, or hiccup most when nauseous? when vomiting? // what is this question ASKING

W: Water 1. do they drink enough water? // Actually probably yes – it’s one of the few healthy habits he has.

2. have they learned to swim? // yes

3. do they like to swim? // ehhhhh he can take it or leave it

4. can they dive? // he went to an expensive private school of course he can dive

5. can they swim without holding their nose? // yes

X: Xylophone 1. what is their favorite genre of music? // Classic rock – nothing after 1989, thanks.

2. do they have a favorite song? // Hendrix’s Watchtower is up there, as mentioned, along with Don’t Fear the Reaper by Blue Oyster Cult. He has favourite playlists, rather than favourite songs.

3. do they have a favorite band/artist/singer? Blue Oyster Cult in general is a favourite, as is Black Sabbath and Springsteen.

4. can they sing well? He does ok. His voice isn’t fuckin Grammy material or anything, but he can hold a note.

5. can they rap? lmao

Y: You 1. how old were you when you created them? // lol

2. what inspired you to create them? // LOL

3. were they different when they were first created? // oh god yeah. Prototype!Logan was a fucking mess, he’s undergone some serious reworking since the early days.

4. do you enjoy writing them more than other characters? // he’s my comfort-zone, honestly.

5. what’s your favorite thing about them? // his internal monologue of disdain suddenly being interrupted by Oppressively Gay Thoughts

Z: Zebra 1. what’s their favorite animal? // He likes watching birds, but only from a distance.

2. do they like animals? // Nah, he’s really not much of an animal person. Loud and messy, for the most part.

3. cats or dogs? // Cats, if he has to pick.

4. what’s their dream pet? // A taxidermised one.

5. do they have any pets at the moment? // A Birman cat named Saskia. It’s the only animal in the entire world that he loves. He doesn’t like cats – he likes his cat.

[lohveandfilm]

Pariah and the Ecstasy of Being a Queer Black Woman

On the day we were supposed to talk about Pariah in class, I found myself on the bus asking one of my fellow classmates what they thought of the film. I was shocked when I heard the word they used to describe it: “melodramatic.” I was honestly very confused; obviously the film was a drama, but when I think of things that are “melodramatic,” I think of TV shows like Pretty Little Liars or Riverdale. The only aspect of Pariah I could think of that was even close to melodramatic was the reaction of Audrey to her daughter’s coming out, but even that seemed utterly realistic to me. I’ve heard plenty of stories of kids who’d been kicked out of the house after coming out, and many of them had been unable to stay connected to any family member in the way Alike was with her father. When I looked up the film later, I noticed it was released in 2011, almost a decade ago at this point. I began to wonder if films like Pariah were starting to lose their impact because of something I often think of as sort of the “Obama effect.” I conceptualize this effect as the response some people have to hearing about racism in a post-Obama world, which is that things aren’t perfect, but we had a black president so they can’t be that bad. Abdur-Rahman acknowledges this phenomenon in The Black Ecstatic: “In the post-civil rights era, we who are black currently find ourselves simultaneously postfree and not yet free.” The same effect, I propose, has infiltrated our thinking since the legalization of gay marriage in America. I don’t find this is something people often express consciously or that people are even aware they have this kind of mindset. I think, rather, that once we pass such a momentous and highly publicized milestone, it can be hard for people not living within those communities to visualize what the next step is. This is not to shame my classmate or anyone else who shares their opinion; we all have so much learning we could do on social issues that do not directly affect us, and I don’t in any way think I have a perfect perspective even on the subject of queerness. Instead, I am trying to use this experience to look at Pariah both for how it was relevant in 2011 and how it continues to be relevant today and in the future.

To ignore the racial and gender complexities in Pariah would be a disservice to the story. Dee Rees wasn’t just making a queer film; she was making a black butch lesbian film. While I think there are strong messages about familial love, queer romantic love, and friendship running throughout Pariah, I see the most powerful message as being about self-love and self-acceptance. Alike knows she’s gay; that’s not a point of contention in the film. The journey we see in this period of Alike’s life is that of a girl exploring her relationship with stereotypes of gender, sexuality, and race, and the intersections between the three. Much of this story felt familiar from other films and from real life. I’m thinking specifically about Alike’s mother trying desperately to convince her daughter to wear feminine clothing, a tactic that my own mother tried, albeit with significantly less homophobia tied into her reasoning. I could have told Alike’s mother that it wouldn’t work, that by pushing for feminine clothing she was actually pushing Alike away from wearing it. What really stuck out to me, though, was the sequence in which Alike tries wearing a strap-on to the club. Her discomfort with the prosthetic penis is immediately palpable, and that discomfort isn’t just a result of the physical feeling of wearing it. You get the sense in this moment that while Alike is exploring what being a girl means to her, she’s still just that: a girl. Rees is emphasizing the importance of the butch lesbian identity as separate from the male identity and also highlighting Alike’s unique relationship with the “butch” label by contrasting her with Laura. While I don’t think the Nussbaum reading on loving an individual applies much to Pariah, I do think Alike’s development as an individual in a broader community is a key aspect of her story.

In the ending of the film, Alike makes a choice. She chooses to leave the world she knows and the people she loves to attain a better future for herself, where she can express her identity and her talent without fear. She sets herself on the path to finding the ecstasy in being a queer black woman, even if that means upending her whole world. The Black Ecstatic refers to this intertwined relationship between ecstasy and pain in stating, “[t]he unruly structure and experience of ecstasy carry the risks of overwhelm and destruction – even as ecstasy eventuates in renewal after the disastrous event.” In order for Alike to become the person she wants to and can be, she must leave Laura and her father, who clearly loves her even if he doesn’t know how to navigate her homosexuality. The Greek root of ecstasy, according to Abdur-Rahman, translates as “to be or stand outside of oneself, a removal to elsewhere.” While this would typically refer to a sort of out-of-body experience, Pariah fits this definition in the literal sense; only through removal from her current environment, in which she is inherently connected to the pain caused by her family and their friends, can Alike flourish. We presume that her journey won’t be perfect, and she will surely encounter sexism, racism, and homophobia wherever she goes. The important note, though, is that she will be given the opportunity to fight for herself without an inescapable connection holding her back. In her new space, she will transform into a new person, one without a surrounding social structure that masks her ability to feel the ecstasy of embracing her identity.

[insertsighs]

hey! i don't mean to be annoying or anything but i was just wondering what you thought of 13 reasons why? I've heard some people say it's horrible rep for those with mental illness and others praise it and since you're mentally ill and studying psych (and one of the calmest people when it comes to discourse lol(, i wanted to know if it is problematic or not?

Hi! You’re not bothering me at all. My very long and probably very disorganized answer (sorry, I tried but there’s so much to talk about) is under the cut, but overall, 13 reasons why isn’t problematic per say, but it has it’s faults. 

Trigger Warning: Discussion of suicide and depression below. 

I was first introduced to 13 reasons why when I read the book in early high school before I was officially diagnosed with depression and anxiety. I remember loving it back then, but also vaguely remembering that what I was feeling was so different from what Hannah was describing and feeling. But this is when I was 14 and obviously my personal and professional opinion about mental illness has changed so much over the last six years. 

Unfortunately, before I watched the Netflix show, I didn’t get a chance to reread the book, but I walked in with high hopes because this was such an important part of my youth, and I’ll be honest, at first the show made me extremely uncomfortable. I felt like the show was essentially blaming the people on the tapes for Hannah’s suicide, when that’s not what lead to kill herself. She killed herself because she had a mental illness. Yes, the things people did to her did not help her mental health at all, but at the end of the day, people kill themselves most of the time because they have a mental illness, no one else is inherently responsible for someone else’s suicide. 

Another aspect of the show that made me uncomfortable was that it made it seem like you needed to have a bad life or be bullied to have depression when that’s not the case. Anyone can have depression no matter what, and again, the bullying didn’t make it easier for Hannah to live with a mental illness, but it’s also not what caused her to have a mental illness. I also was slightly annoyed that even though this is a show about a girl who killed herself, 13 reasons why never actually mentioned that Hannah had depression. It’s important for characters to be diagnosed on TV, and in general, media focuses a lot of suicide in general instead of the underlying mental illnesses that cause suicide. 

And the last major problem I have with 13 reasons why is that it does kinda fit into the whole “love saves you ideology.” Mental illness representation in media usually falls into four categories. One, the people who are mentally ill are antagonists and/or serial killers which adds to the stereotype that all mentally ill people are dangerous (which is SO false considering they’re more likely to be victims of a crime but that’s another topic). Two, a character is diagnosed with a mental illness, but their illness is never mentioned again even if they’re diagnosed with a life long one. Three, mentally ill people are automatically saved because they find a significant other. Four, the mentally ill character ends up dying. 

Personally, I think that 13 reasons why does perpetuate categories three and four. Throughout the show we see that Clay and Hannah have mutual feelings for each other and it’s completely normal for Clay to blame himself for not saving her, but I think the show was irresponsible by not enforcing the fact that even if you’re in a relationship, you are still depressed, and there was no guarantee that Hannah would have not committed suicide if she was dating him. Depression is a life long and draining illness for a lot of people and all the support/love in the world will not guarantee that you won’t kill yourself. 

Finally, 13 reasons why doesn’t do anything new when it comes to mental illness representation because Hannah does end up dying. Obviously I was expecting this, but too often in media when a mentally ill character exists, they’re either murdered for being a villain or kill themselves and are used to further other people’s plots. As someone who has probably been depressed her entire life and still struggles immensely with their mental health almost six years after starting therapy, it can be a little discouraging seeing every mentally ill character die. If you’re looking for mental illness representation where characters are diagnosed and have a realistic recovery, but still are shown to acknowledge that their illness is life long and there will be slip ups, 13 reasons why is not that show.  

Although I personally have a lot of issues with 13 reasons why, I do think there were also some very important pieces to this show. First of all, this show is encouraging people talk about mental health which is always important when it comes to ending stigma. Secondly, even though Hannah’s experience was not my personal experience with depression (I didn’t get bullied, etc.), it is someone’s else’s experience, and it’s needed to highlight the impact bullying does have on depression, even if that bullying is never the true underlying cause of suicide (as mentioned before, the mental illness is the cause). Finally, it does bring attention to the fact that schools need to do better regarding mental health, which is something many mentally ill high schoolers and myself vouch for. 

Overall, I do think that their are issues with 13 reasons why, but it’s also a step in the right direction for mental illness representation. However, it’s obviously going to take a while until we can talk about medication, mental illness and intersectionality regarding race/gender, and even less known/antagonized mental illnesses such as personality disorders on TV, and hopefully we’ll get there one day. 

[duaneodavila]

Racial Income Disparities: Outcomes Without Explanations

Spend time in the trenches and you get to know a lot of black and Hispanic kids very well. You take responsibility for their lives, and in the course of being their lawyer, you talk. You learn about them, their lives, their families. You learn about the education, their problems, their world. It’s not quite a representative sampling, since the people you get to know best have the common thread of being arrested and prosecuted, but you get close to a great many.

Unlike public defenders, private criminal defense lawyers get to spend far more time with their clients, and accordingly get to know them far better as people. We get to know their spouses, kids, parents and friends. These aren’t destitute people, but generally people who have sufficient funds to retain our services, so they aren’t exactly poor.

And one perpetual realization* has been that, had they not been black, not been Hispanic, they could be the CEO of a multinational corporation. You think it’s easy to create an organization where your competitors want to take away your market share with extreme prejudice? And beyond the competition, the 3-4 Precinct regulates your business with guns? Yet, they do. Some of these guys are quite brilliant, incredible organizations, motivators and business people. So why aren’t they ruling the world?

Finding #2: The black-white income gap is entirely driven by differences in men’s, not women’s, outcomes.

Among those who grow up in families with comparable incomes, black men grow up to earn substantially less than the white men. In contrast, black women earn slightly more than white women conditional on parent income. Moreover, there is little or no gap in wage rates or hours of work between black and white women.

We find analogous gender differences in other outcomes: black-white gaps in high school completion rates, college attendance rates, and incarceration are all substantially larger for men than for women. Black women have higher college attendance rates than white men, conditional on parental income. For men, the gap in incarceration is particularly stark: 21% of black men born to the lowest-income families are incarcerated on a given day, far higher than for any other subgroup.

The New York Times has a major article on this study on Race and Economic Opportunity, and the the findings as to outcomes are deeply disturbing. But the Times has “weaponized” the study in a way that makes it particularly dangerous. The danger begins with the headline.

Extensive Data Shows Punishing Reach of Racism for Black Boys

The data is, indeed, devastating, but whether it shows racism begs the question. The study does not show what causes these outcomes, but merely the outcomes. The writers take for granted that it’s racism, because what else could it be?

This isn’t a question of whether racism exists. Obviously, it does. And equally obviously, it’s facile to assume racism to be the cause of all problems affecting black boys. But then, why not black girls, for whom the outcomes match white girls when black boys of well-to-do families fall off the charts in the next generation?

Black boys raised in America, even in the wealthiest families and living in some of the most well-to-do neighborhoods, still earn less in adulthood than white boys with similar backgrounds, according to a sweeping new study that traced the lives of millions of children.

White boys who grow up rich are likely to remain that way. Black boys raised at the top, however, are more likely to become poor than to stay wealthy in their own adult households.

There is an array of potential reasons why these outcomes differ, some of which are acceptable in polite company and some of which are not. The study provides the outcomes. The reasons exist only in the assumptions of the writers and the bias of the readers.

Even when children grow up next to each other with parents who earn similar incomes, black boys fare worse than white boys in 99 percent of America. And the gaps only worsen in the kind of neighborhoods that promise low poverty and good schools.

The problems of poverty and education raise additional causation issues, but explaining why a black boy of a wealthy family growing up next door to a white boy of a wealthy family would end up poor can’t be simply chalked up to racism. They can’t be chalked up to anything on such a simple level.

The disparities that remain also can’t be explained by differences in cognitive ability, an argument made by people who cite racial gaps in test scores that appear for both black boys and girls. If such inherent differences existed by race, “you’ve got to explain to me why these putative ability differences aren’t handicapping women,” said David Grusky, a Stanford sociologist who has reviewed the research.

This is certainly reasonable, but the same argument that dispels differences in cognitive ability similarly undermines the argument that racism answers all questions. Why would the racism that putatively impacts black boys have no impact on black girls? If it’s racism, then it should apply to all black children, not just males.

The good intentions, combined with pressures of ideology that makes it impossible to consider causes other than racism, may serve to soothe our collective guilt about our treatment of minorities, but if our concern was real, finding real solutions would be more important. Finding real solutions does not mean indulging our social justice ideology, as sad tears aren’t going to help any black boy to make a better life for himself, no less establish a path where we can rise about these outcomes.

Am I suggesting it’s not racism? I have no idea, and I assume that racism plays a significant role in driving these disparities. But having spent far too much of my life and career trying to help black boys, Hispanic boys, to get and stay out of prison, indulging in the facile fantasy that racism answers all questions is something I refuse to do.

For those who actually believe in racial equality, and want to see the eradication of racial disparities in society, then rejecting the easy and obvious politically-correct assumptions in favor of seeking hard answers should be the goal. The Times article that tries so hard to spin correlation into causation doesn’t serve to help black kids, but inflames assumptions. Real help means real questions and real answers.

This study tells us of bad outcomes, but it doesn’t tell us why they’re happening. The New York Times does, but it’s just making it up. That’s not going to help anyone. Would you rather help or stroke your bias?

I fully expect the woke to call me racist for not accepting the assumption that all bad things that happen to black boys must be caused by racism. Unlike the woke, however, it’s more important to find viable solutions that adhere to simplistic ideology, so I’ll just have to suck it up and let the SjWs yell at me. This is the price of seeking real solutions.

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[hypnagogicheresy]

TOXICITY AND POWER STRUGGLES

There is something toxic about the energy by which heterosexual relationships are driven. It’s almost instinctively masculine. Abrasive. Invasive even. Of course everything that follows is written in theory, for I don’t truly despise every heterosexual relationship. I would not have been born without one, due to my parents’ ingrained disrespect for everything out of what they assume to be “the ordinary”. Also, some heterosexual relationships have been the cause of why I have enjoyed the presence and company of the few individuals who make my life truly worth living. I just have some bolded, italicized, underlined problems with the perception, implementation, and influence of these relationships. Let me explain.

To preface, this statement will follow no particular order. Hell, it may not even make actual sense. It is essentially pure, unadulterated thought streamlined onto this page with no considerable structure or filter for support. I just feel what I feel. You feel what you feel about what I feel. Let me be, and I’ll reciprocate. //

I cannot understand the desire for a relationship whose metaphorical root lies within a centuries-old power struggle. Personally, I could not maintain anything like this. I almost dare not call it a relationship. And obviously there are levels and layers to this shit. Like onions. Like stratified rock. Like hell. The explanation goes here. One person long ago had a false epiphany that essentially declared that bigger equals better. From this assumption, we have systematically built the foundation of our society. Let us consider gender roles first because gender has been one of the most visible constructs - especially given that it is one of few ways in which we distinguish each individual from the next. This person, the original fucker let’s call him (yes I am most certain he was a man), most likely saw the retractable nature of the male genitalia and applied this bigger equals better philosophy. He must have leapt for joy when he also realized that men typically have bigger and more exaggerated features and bodies. This application changed the way we think about all men. See.. if bigger equals better then there are at least two (2) follow up assumptions. The first is that there are only two genders – it is “better” not “best”. Anyone with a high school degree… fuck it, anyone who passed third grade language class can tell you that the terms better and best only differ when there are more than two things to compare. And since we’re making assumptions, I’m going to go out on a very sturdy, almost trunk-like limb and say that men mistook those words to mean the same thing. In doing so, any idea of there being more than two genders is pretty much shot to hell. A harmful assumption that is - and I know I’m using that word a lot but I can call it nothing else. The second follow up is that men must be inherently better than women in all things. As humans, we are generally bad at moderating things that do not pertain to us individually. When approximately half of the population thinks that they are somehow better, then it is easy for them to spread that fire to all things that have the potential to burn. For the record, men are not better at everything all the time. Fuck it honestly because men are not better at most of the things some of the time. But telling that to half the population when they have been primed by the original fucker’s opinion doesn’t exactly have the greatest turn out. Now we are stuck with a world divided. Just as it is difficult to endow a being with sentience and subsequently strip it of the ability, it is damn near impossible to pry whatever power is associated with the six letter b word (ugh its better and I know you counted) from the once warm hands of half a population. Fast forward thousands and thousands of years and now women are struggling to gain equal rights for things that have no actual foundation in gender. And don’t even get me started on the rights that gender nonconforming individuals are still fighting for. That’s a whole other inferno and all I’ve brought to the bonfire is kindling and lighter fluid. We are now in a re-education process for the world because not only do some men still hold onto the original fucker’s philosophy, but some women have come to hate the core of their being so much that they have embraced it too. Bigger is not better, bigger is not best. Bigger is just more to see. And if we zoom out a decent amount, not even a lot honestly, we will realize that the things we consider big are still just a speck in the universe. In fact, relativity is the only big thing here. This time try zooming in and taking a look at protons and electrons. They have different masses, with electrons coming up short in the amu category, yet they still hold opposite charges that attract one another. Do we think there’s a general consensus in the subatomic miniverse that protons are somehow inherently better than electrons? No? Then maybe it’s a dumb as fuck idea that should have never been put out into the universe in the first place. Fuck the original fucker – who, by the way, doesn’t even deserve to have the first letters of his name capitalized because he literally fucked up a whole society with this concept. Fuck him with a glass dildo. And I hope that bitch breaks mid-climax you inattentive, unaware piece of shit.

But I’m not done here because I still have to talk about this idea’s impact on relationships, how we as a society perceive them, and how they actually influence others. A relationship in the vaguest form is comprised of a flow of energy between individuals. The nature of a relationship can vary so much that honestly neither being even needs full sentience. Domesticated dogs connect in ways that we don’t even understand and they’re sort of just floating around in this realm that I like to call sub-sentience. So imagine the complex thought and energy with which humans are bound in one of these forsaken relationships. But thoughts – as I have mentioned before in poetry – can be abusive and abrasive, ESPECIALLY when one of the few beings in a romantic or sexual relationship believes that most of the power is in their hands. This causes stress, and there are two rumored reactions to stress. Fight and flight. First scenario is fight. A woman begins to understand that she has been given the short end of the stick so she becomes a fighter. She does not take this branch when her male counterpart has been given the trunk. She externalizes. Second scenario is flight. A woman begins to run away from the idea that she is more than she was told. She takes the branch and maybe even asks for something smaller like a twig to reduce her responsibility. She internalizes. However, there is another response to stress that we don’t often pay much mind to: freeze. A woman who freezes acts less like a deer in headlights and more like a bored feline. She does not engage. She does not place herself in a situation that forces her to care about her position on the power spectrum, and honestly she probably doesn’t even know where she stands on it. Meanwhile, men are not typically put in the position to respond in one of these three ways. Men are expected to be dominant and structural and unwavering in their beliefs and actions. This is an imbalance. It is unhealthy for the same reason a wobbly foundation is dangerous. So now this relationship – if that’s what you choose to call it – is characterized by said imbalance, making the shared energy majorly masculine. And like I said, that’s abrasive. Invasive. And all because a clumsy, unsupported thought was embraced a long time ago.

Like a bad cell, however, this shit replicates. We accept the imbalance, rooting for it even. Sexist rhetoric and gender-charged assertions literally prime individuals with these thoughts before they have capacity to understand what a relationship truly is. And we all know what happens when you instill a toxic idea in the minds of the youth. For those of you who do not, I shall tell you: we mass produce individuals with cut and dry ideas about the levels of power in a relationship. We tell them things like “God wanted man to be superior to woman”. And they grow up understanding the world to work this way. The few who have the mental strength to resist are seen as anomalies or I don’t know… probably grow up to be those creepy motherfuckers who shoot squirrels in the face at 13 years old and don the title “troubled”. The cycle continues for generations and the idea spreads like a virus. Unfortunately, I haven’t the time or capability to track this through the ages. My only use is to provide a comparative study by hopes of interacting with other individuals who chose fight over flight or freeze. And as we continue to fuck ourselves over generation after generation, I want you to ask yourselves a couple of questions for the next session. They follow.

What is woman? What is man? And unless the answers to these questions lie within something other than physiological dichotomy or an assumed derivative of it, aren’t these questions actually the same?