#one of her potential partners is a trans man and she loves and respects him a lot

[supermarine-silvally]

Yara 😍 what's your hogwarts house, camp halfblood cabin and personality type if you don't mind answering

"I don't mind at all. I'm here to answer any questions you might have. I've been told that I can come across as a bit intimidating, having inherited my father's infamous glare and all, so this should help me work on that."

Ask Yara (or any of my OCs) anything!

[welcometothejianghu]

Welcome to another round of W2 Tells You What You Should See, where W2 (me) tries to sell you (you) on something you should be watching. Today's choice: 天国と地獄 ~サイコな2人～/ Tengoku to Jigoku: Psychona Futari / Heaven and Hell: Soul Exchange.

Heaven and Hell: Soul Exchange is a 2021 Japanese drama about a headstrong cop, the shady CEO she suspects of being a serial killer, and what happens when they magically switch bodies.

With a premise like that, there are basically two tonal choices: You can make it a wacky comedy, or you can get real fucked-up and dark about it. This 10-episode series somehow manages the secret third thing of splitting the difference, so it's got a lot of deliciously fucked-up stuff in the setup, but it never quite has the courage of its convictions to go all the way. What that gets you is the kind of frustrating that you can't stop thinking about afterward, both for what it did and what it didn't have the guts to do.

So! If you're interested in a story that's compelling and occasionally very funny, with just enough unrealized potential that your brain keeps batting it around like a kitten with a squeaky toy at 4AM, I have five reasons that you might want to give this one a shot.

1. Half-Trans: Full Trans Consequences

We're gonna hit this one right off the bat: This is a story where a girl and boy trade bodies, so you know it's got the genders.

Mochizuki Ayako is the only female cop in her department. She's headstrong, kind of obnoxious, a slob, and not particularly feminine -- so of course the dude cops hate her. In the process of investigating a serial murder, she comes across Hidaka Haruto, who's got that kind of smug sinister aura of a smart man who's clearly hiding some shit, though all his underlings love him. When they unexpectedly bodyswap with no idea how to switch back, they're forced to keep one another's lies going so they don't both wind up in jail, except she's still trying to catch him and he's still trying to get away with it.

They work a very good contrast with the difference in their respective attachments to their genders. Despite her hardass demeanor and her lack of super-femme presentation, Mochizuki is without question a woman. She's deeply uncomfortable in a male body, and when someone calls her a man, her instinct is to deny it. Having to deal with a borrowed penis nearly gives her a meltdown.

Hidaka, on the other hand, is a fruity little guy whose first response to finding himself inside a woman's body is to get all girly and take it for a test drive. It's less that he's transfeminine and more that he just really doesn't seem all that attached to any gender. He's got boobs now, and boobs are what he's going to make work for him. Regardless of his sexuality -- and the show does leave that one a big row of question marks -- his gender is gay.

There's also some fairly solid bodyswap acting! ...kinda. Both actors have unfortunately different interpretations of Mochizuki's character. If you're being charitable, it's true she's freaking out and having some kind of gender dysphoria the entire time she's in boy mode, which could explain why she's much softer and girlier when she's being played by the male actor, Takahashi Issei. If you're more inclined to nitpick, well, you're not wrong that the performances don't line up. That said, the actors both do a great job of switching characters, so it's pretty clear when they're being different people (even if it's not necessarily the same different person).

Now, you should by no means assume this show is some conscious exploration of genderqueer existence in contemporary Japan. It is, however, way more thoughtful than I expected it to be. It leaves some very interesting silences, especially around what exactly Hidaka's taste in partners is and why Mochizuki's own body kinda gives her a lesbian awakening when someone else is in there. If you're the type who likes a trans-flavored imagination adventure, this is a spectacular starting point. You're going to have a blast.

2. The Mochizuki Support Squad

Nobody from Hidaka's side realizes what's going on with the swap; sure, the boss is acting weird, but they buy his explanations for it. Mochizuki, however, has exactly two people in the world who care so much about her that they figure out what's happened: her junior cop partner, Yamaki Hideo, and her roommate, Watanabe Riku.

You have to love a character where their closest friends are like, either you've started suddenly acting polite and nice, or you've mystically swapped bodies with another person, and honestly, the bodyswap is the more likely explanation.

This is one of those places where the show takes the goofier and more lighthearted tack. Leaving it so the only people who knew about the swap were Mochizuki and Hidaka themselves would be incredibly isolating and paranoia-inducing, especially for Mochizuki. Giving her (eventually) two buddies who know what's going on both gives her a cushion of support for her ordeal and creates a number of comic moments where these guys are looking at a stranger and seeing their friend -- and vice versa.

They're both kind of daffy sweethearts, too, which adds even more comic relief to the show. Yamaki is an easily flustered, mildly hysterical nerd who just wants his mean bestie back so she can go back to telling him what to do. Riku is a blue-collar himbo who would technically be a hobosexual except for how he both really does pull his weight around the house and (probably) isn't getting laid. They're willing to put themselves on the line and do what they can to make sure their friend is okay, no matter what body she's in.

I actually like how the show has more than couple male-female dynamics where the people involved are just friends -- or, if things change so they're not, it's strongly implied that they could have gone on being just friends and that would have been fine or even better for both parties involved. Romance is not the endgame of every mixed-genital relationship! Sometimes people who love one another dearly are friends without further obligation! You can care for people a lot without wanting to fuck them! And that's great.

Besides, I know it won't shock you to learn that the real horny part of the show plays out as...

3. An interesting game of cat and mouse

Mochizuki's got an interesting problem: She's a cop inside the body of a murderer, and as long as she's stuck here, there's a murderer inside the body of a cop out on the loose. She could, as Hidaka, confess to the murders and in a way that puts him physically in jail, but she doesn't know how to swap their bodies back. She's got to keep Hidaka appeased, or he, in her official capacity, might arrest her and just keep her body forever while she goes down for the crime. She could find a way to take them both down, but that would ruin her life too and is an absolute last resort. She could just let him go and cover up the crimes, but her sense of justice won't allow it.

While Hidaka ... well, Hidaka's got a lot going on. I'm not even going to get into Hidaka's whole deal, because it's related to some late-series spoilers. The simple version is that he's got to be pretending to catch himself while actually trying to destroy evidence about the murders, all while having to dig into gendered expectations to play a version of Mochizuki capable of ingratiating herself with her asshole coworkers instead of alienating them.

And yeah, it's pretty darn horny.

It's one of those delicious enemies-to-allies-to-grudging-friends setups where you've got two people at cross purposes who have to play nice with one another (while still being very mean to one another), and in that process they find things about the other person that are actually worth liking. Because this is a literal life-and-death situation, emotions are running high! Wanting to kill someone and wanting to save them are not mutually exclusive states.

The show makes a great decision not to have Mochizuki and Hidaka hook up, or even to acknowledge that their bond has any erotic component beyond whatever's inherent in borrowing someone else's genitals. This means that their dynamic is very intimate and physical without being textually sexual, which actually winds up making it way more sexual than it would have been otherwise. It's like horror, where what you don't see is almost always scarier than what you do -- with sexual tension, especially across ostensibly heterosexual pairs, subversion and longing are almost always much sexier than having things brought to completion onscreen. I mean, seriously, think of the number of things you've seen where there's pining, and pining, and more pining, and you ship it hard, and then they finally get together and it's a giant disappointment. Better to be left hungry for more of this almost-t4t goodness.

There's also an incredible amount of lapel-grabbing and kabedon-delivering here, so if you're in to that, itadakimasu!

4. A Cop Are Bastard

There are a number of antagonists in this story -- I mean, not shocking, considering both the premise and the way the serial murder case at the heart of the story gets weirdly complicated. The most prominent and persistent of those antagonists, though, is not a serial murderer, but one of the cops.

The character's name is Kawahara Mitsuo, but Mochizuki and Yamaki call him "Seku-Hara," as those are the first two syllables of each word in "sexual harassment." It's fitting. He's sleazy, arrogant, and an entire bag of dicks who talks like a gangster and is willing to do a lot of backhanded dirty-cop shit to get his way.

All this lands him firmly in the Love To Hate category. If you enjoy throwing popcorn at onscreen villains, pop some extra for Kawahara, because that fucker deserves it.

Maybe the most interesting thing about him is how often he's actually right. When he's not being an asshole who's doing bad cop work, he actually does good cop work, and he comes to some pretty astute conclusions about what exactly is going on with the case. Despite Mochizuki and Hidaka's joint interference, he figures out a lot of what's the two of them are up to, even without ever picking up on the bodyswap angle. So he's not just a slimy buffoon -- he's actually a formidable opponent.

Also, did I mention he's hot in a gross way? I dunno, maybe it helps that I've seen Kitamura Kazuki be hot in a not-gross way in other things, like Nekozamurai, where he plays a handsome and noble samurai sworn to protect a very cute kitty. Here, though, he's not noble at all -- he's a thug of a cop with a cocky swagger and a deep voice, and I am not above admitting that I see the appeal.

Like, fuck, I'm not usually into eyebrows, and I'm into his eyebrows. Those are some good eyebrows.

5. argh it's almost so good (but still pretty good!)

I'm about to be slightly spoilery from this point forward, not about specific plot points, but about general narrative moves. If you'd prefer to remain unspoiled for such things, stop reading right now and go to either Viki or Netflix to watch the whole show. You're welcome.

Still here? Great. See, where this show really lacks the courage of its convictions is with Hidaka's character. He starts off the series really evil! He does some very bad things! He's clearly quite sinister. Then about halfway through, the show starts to backpedal real hard and introduces another factor into the murder cases that makes him a much less outright bad guy than he seems at first blush.

...And that sucks! Because as the show first portrays him, he's deliciously kind of a fucker. He's not only confident and threatening, he's happy to take Mochizuki's body and do whatever he wants with it, regardless of her feelings. He reads as a straight-up two-faced psychopath who just wants to keep on ridding the world of bad people by straight-up grotesquely murdering them. But the show doesn't have the guts to either take him down in a blaze of glory or create a redemption arc for a guy who's got a taste for some pretty gnarly body horror, so it's got to find a way to convince you not to believe your lying eyes.

However! I do not consider this a dealbreaker, because I find what the show does wind up doing actually pretty interesting. Just because it's not the ending to the story I, personally, would have told doesn't mean it's not a story worth telling. It's maybe a little artificially convoluted, but you've already suspended your disbelief for the bodyswap thing, right? So just roll with the rest of it.

At the risk of belaboring the duality metaphor, I really do feel like this is a show constantly being pulled in two different directions at once. It seems like half the show loves to roll around in the blood and perversion of vigilante serial murder, while the other half wishes it'd picked a more innocuous crime, like art theft or securities fraud. Half of it wants Hidaka to be a right cold bastard who deals Mochizuki a lot of serious damage, and the other half wants to keep him always on the side of the line where he never does anything unredeemable. Half of it wants this to be a sexy queer exploration of gendered expectations through suddenly different bodies, and the other half wants to play a straight PG-13 bodyswap comedy. Half of it wants to be Hannibal, and the other half wants to be Freaky Friday.

And where it all lands is ... well, in the middle.

Obviously my general disappointment with the show's eventual final form has not left me heartbroken. To the contrary, I've had a lot of fun thinking about it afterward, both pondering what was actually on the screen and having imagination adventures about how I would have done it differently. That, to me, is fun. I enjoy this. Like the Maxx said, the shows in my mind are almost always better.

I might have been a little more put off by the lack of my ideal resolution if the show had required more of a commitment from me, but no, it gets things done in ten one-hour episodes, which makes it a great small-medium bite. You can knock this one out pretty quickly, and then have all the time in the world left for thinking about how things could have been different if the show had not taken the Goldilocks approach to its queer serial murder bodyswap setup. The Hump of Compelling Mediocrity strikes again!

Up for a watch?

As I mentioned earlier, both Viki and Netflix have this one!

No joke, I hope people read this, get enticed by the horny potential of it, watch the show, go a little feral for what fits into those silences I mentioned, and write some dang sexy fanfic for me to enjoy. There's only one piece of anything on AO3 about it! One! One is not a sufficient number of things! Especially not with this promising of a setup. Come on, fellow perverts. We can do better.

Aw, look, they're so cute when they get to be themselves.

[jenniferdiazisatransgirl]

I think I’m straight!

Hey,

So mental health is still kinda shit but I want to make this post. It does feel kinda cringy to come out as straight, but at the same time it has taken me a long time to figure out and like I think I finally have figured it out.

For those who’ve followed this blog for a while, you’ll know I’m a trans woman and when it comes to my sexuality I’ve never really had it down. I have had times where I thought I did, but it changes a lot.

For the past few years I have identified as demisexual and I think that comes down to the fact I’ve imagined I can have a relationship with a woman, but there would need to be a strong emotional bond for something more. But when I think about the potential of dating a guy, that need for a strong emotional bond doesn’t seem to be there.

Not sure if that really makes sense, but I guess if and when I imagine being with a woman in a relationship. My brain has to do a lot of extra steps and gymnastics to be like, “Yeah, that feels like it would be right.” Whereas if I imagine being with a man in a relationship, my brain is instantly like, “Yeah, I can see that happening.”

Like feels weird to say, “I don’t need a strong emotional bond with a guy”. Cos that kinda isn’t true in many respects. Like I need to be in a relationship with someone I trust and who I share interests with, etc. But of course, as we all know attraction doesn’t necessarily play by the rules of what would be ideal in a partner. You can find someone initially attractive and then their personality puts you off. And God, does that happen a lot. My one date with a dude and straight dude at that, he confessed that he’d love to meet a WWII NAZI in real life and I’m just like sat at the table in the coffee shop terrified going, “Riiiiight! Make no sudden moves. Just get through this and then never talk to this guy again.” Wasn’t the only red flag with that dude. He seemed to be one of those people who wanted to hear people out just because and it is like, “You don’t need to know the reasoning of what a NAZI is doing to know what they did is awful.”

Sorry, bit of a tangent there.

I have found this difficult to come to terms with though. Like when I was younger and I first remember experiencing any attraction it was to women. Like at 10 years old, I figured out I should be a woman but I also started experiencing attraction to women at the same time.

Someone pointed out yesterday though, that my attraction to women could have likely been envy. And I guess when I look back on it, that was very likely true. I think the huge issue I had between 10 to 16, is testosterone can really muddy the waters on attraction. Especially when you are trying desperately to understand yourself. And like I get confusion in your teen years especially is part of life, but I think testosterone and being a guy when that felt really wrong just caused the wrong kinds of confusion. Like I at least knew since 10 that transition was possible. I didn’t know what it entailed but I knew one day I could be a woman if that was how I really felt. Sadly that did not mean I had an accepting Mum, just that I had one who was honest when I curiously asked, “Mum, can people change sex?” in my clunky 10 year old vocabulary. I asked her that on the bus to my Grandma’s 😂 She said, “Yes.” Probably putting it down to childhood curiosity. I guess it took away some of the confusion. Like at 10 I figured out I should be a girl and I could at least latch onto that, not thinking it was totally impossible. But then there was still envy for my female classmates which my testosterone fuelled brain at the time clearly mistook for attraction.

And when it came to figuring out I like guys, my attraction was dampened for other reasons. Without going into details, events that took place during my childhood made me extremely fearful of men. I remember in primary (elementary) school, having a male supply (substitute) teacher and being utterly terrified of him. And like for a few years, social services was involved in my life, they used to pick me up from school every week. It was usually a woman who came to pick me up, but one week two men came to pick me up. I seriously was terrified as hell and I had it in my head these guys were kidnapping me. When I got to the centre I think I ended up telling my social worker how scared it made me being picked up by two men. Plus I spent a lot of my school years being called “gay” and bullied for being perceived as such. Like any desire to explore my attraction to men was dampened by fear and while weird to say, given the topic of this is me coming out as straight, internalised homophobia.

I mean while from 10 I knew I was a girl, from the outside I was a guy and exploring being a guy who likes guys was not something I wanted to explore. Being perceived as gay never really sat right with me though. Like I readily admit there was some internalised homophobia there, but I also despise misinformation about myself. Like, all I could think is “I’m not gay. I like women.” And I knew my classmates meant gay as in I was a guy who likes guys. And let’s imagine the fact, that they were half correct, I do like guys. I was not a guy who likes guys, I’m a girl who likes guys. But of course, without coming out, exploring my sexuality in any meaningful way at school would have given the wrong impression about me. It would have just backed up that idea I’m gay. Which not bad in anyway, but I didn’t want to be viewed as gay.

And look, I can safely say that was my brain hating misinformation. I kinda got outed at school, but the news didn’t reach everyone. I came out to one guy and he told enough people that by the next day most people at school knew. The news missed a few girls I hung out with though. I was dating a bisexual girl at the time and the reasoning they had assumed for me dating that girl was basically, “You’re a typical guy. Dating a bi girl for a threesome.”

Like I hated that so much and with already so many people in the school knowing I was trans anyway. I was just like, “Okay. Let’s stop this rumour before it even starts. The reason I’m dating a bi girl is cos I’m a girl.”

And that is likely another reason I didn’t explore my sexuality much at that age. When I finally came out as trans in school, I was in a relationship and one that lasted nearly the remainder of my time at school. Also super weird note, but you know that thing where it is said you are more attractive when in a relationship? Despite being outed to the entire school as trans, so many girls were interested in me and clearly expressed it during that time. There was one lass I had to watch out for in the corridors as she’d side swipe me with hugs from a run that made me nearly fall over. That was an interesting time.

If any guys expressed interest for me during that time though, I think it was safe to say I was oblivious to it. I did dance with a guy at my prom, but I feel safe in saying that was platonic. The song was “Mr Brightside” by The Killers though and it is still a memory I look back on fondly. Weirdly enough, the dance was with the guy who outed me. I think I’ve said before, he was hard to stay mad at during the time, as being outed actually caused a lot of bullying to stop for me. It was like my being trans took away a lot of the power my bullies had over me and then I had a girlfriend so calling me gay was a lil weak.

I do remember one of my bullies approaching me one day though and just going, “So all these years we were calling you gay. You’re a lesbian, so we were technically correct.” I think my response was something along the lines of, “Technically, yes.” And thinking internally, how he’d made me miserable along with the rest of my bullies so it was kinda beside the point.

I think I’m just rambling now though. Main take away was my head was filled with a lot of confusion and at times still is. I do think I finally have enough clarity on it all to say I’m straight though.

Enjoy my post!

[let-it-rip-bear]

The Topic of Chef's Kiss

Part 1: Context

I very rarely interact with fandom at all. I was a shy kid and still nervous, though I've found ways around it. I write, read, and comment on fanfiction works, and that's about the extent of it. Then The Bear came along. It's a small fandom, but it's very active considering season 2 is about to come out. I hyperfixated intensely on season 1, though I had to take a break for school. As a result, I scrolled through the tag with a thoroughness that I had never employed before. I was a bit disappointed to see so much shipping discourse.

Before anyone tries to say otherwise, I'm not against shipping. I promise this post will not stop anyone from having fun.

Anyway, I'm not big on shipping. That's not to say I avoid it entirely. It's just not a priority. I primarily engage with media by trying to understand my favorite characters and playing with found family dynamics. So, it's frustrating seeing so many posts focusing intently on Carmy and Sydney's potential relationship instead of their current dynamic. Many people take all of their interactions and put them through the lens of romance and only romance. This is exhausting to me.

And again, before anyone tries to assume anything—just because I find something frustrating does not mean I think it's objectively bad or morally wrong or what the fuck ever. It's an opinion, not a condemnation.

Another bit of context for this post: I'm a queer trans man. I don't mean to use that as leverage, by the way. Disagreeing with me is just a difference of opinions. I'd never claim it's on the grounds of trans/queerphobia. I'm including it as a piece of context for the following point.

Mainstream media romance has always been bland to me. Much of it is saturated with pairings that feel empty and soulless—straight couples getting together for no reason other than being a man and a woman, and that's apparently enough. Many pairings are virtually meaningless because the relationship doesn't change anything. Their arcs are unaffected. They aren't intertwined in any compelling way, they have no chemistry. The carelessness and heteronormativity are exhausting. That is where I am coming from and why I don't ship them all that much.

Part 2: Chef's Kiss

None of what I said in the previous paragraph applies to Chef's Kiss, though. Sydney and Carmy have great chemistry as the two leads. I, personally, don't see it as romantic. That's subjective, though, and I can see why someone would ship them! They're a cute pairing—in theory.

But considering canon, I don't want to see them together. At least, not where their respective characters are at the end of season one. In my opinion, it would be disrespectful to their characters to throw them together just for the sake of it being canon. There are a lot of reasons why they shouldn't have dated in the first season, beginning with the power imbalance, since Carmy is technically Sydney's boss. of course, by the end of the season (really, by the 3rd or 4th episode), Sydney has cemented her role as one of the very reasons that The Beef survived at all, so that's not really an issue (I think) going forward into the next season!

Another reason is that Sydney and Carmy both have these personal issues at their core that dictates their every move, respectively. Carmy, obviously, has his grief to deal with and his fear that Mikey never truly loved him the way he loved Mikey. Sydney feels so much pressure to prove herself, despite the fact that she already has and is an amazing chef and business partner. She has to process the failure of Sheridan Road...and I'm not entirely sure she's done that by the end of season 1? That's not exactly the point in all of this, though.

My point is that I don't think it works for them to be together currently (subject to change with season 2, of course) and that is why I don't really ship them, especially because I'm honestly more concerned with their current state in canon. That doesn't mean I don't find them cute and enjoy some SPECULATION on their relationship's potential, whether platonic or romantic. They might be great for each other in the future.

I'd also like to point out that shipping is traditionally centered around pairings that aren't canon. There aren't any requirements for a ship, so it's totally valid to ship two characters that aren't currently compatible in canon. Again, I'm just explaining why I personally don't ship it. I'm not at all saying that people shouldn't ship them.

Part 3: Shipping Discourse

Firstly, I want to acknowledge that fan spaces have been notoriously racist and specifically anti-black and continue to be, as well as misogynistic, and that the intersectionality of black women is relevant in all parts of life, including the consumption of media. Discussions of misogynoir are incredibly important. I'll always support fans who call out hateful shit in fandom, particularly because it can be a scary thing, considering the attitude many fans have and the tendency to dogpile an individual. It is not my intention to claim that fan spaces are untouched by real-life issues or that there can't be discussions of real-life issues within fan spaces. With that established, I'll continue.

It seems to me that the two primary reasons why some fans don't ship Chef's Kiss are 1) they would prefer The Bear to not focus on romance, and/or 2) they don't feel that Sydney and Carmy's chemistry is romantic/they value the platonic relationship between the two. My issue with the shipping discourse in this fandom is how much of it stems from people pushing the idea that the show itself has to be setting up their romance, or else. Not only do many posts that condemn Chef's Kiss nonshippers completely ignore the aforementioned arguments, but they also leave absolutely no room for nuance. You either ship it or you're a racist.

I've seen many posts in which a question is posed: "What are your thoughts on Sydney/Carmy?" with the response being "Fans that don't like it are racist lol". I don't believe that is a proportional response. There are also posts in which people in this fandom argue that anyone who is against Chef's Kiss is motivated by misogynoir and that, at the heart of it, fans who don't like the ship or support the lack of romance in The Bear believe that Sydney is not worthy of being with Carmy because she is a black woman. I am by no means saying that this is not possible. That is not the argument I am making.

It is my opinion that shipping discourse is not a platform meant to handle topics such as misogynoir—though that's not to say there are no meaningful arguments to be made there. In fact, there's at least one post in the tag that speaks about Chef's Kiss, and that I think did a good job of articulating the undercurrents of misogynoir found in fan spaces. There are also plenty of essays out there on fan culture and social/political issues within it. The thing is, those essays have the purpose of articulating the grievances of a marginalized community through the lens of their experience with fan culture. Whereas the situation that I'm describing is, instead, minimizing very complex ideas to argue in favor of the validity (and even canonical presence) of a fucking ship.

I guess what I want to say is this: fans with marginalized identities should always be supported in calling out shitty, hateful, and discriminatory behavior in fan spaces. Those discussions should be given the time and attention they need. Though the characters are not real, the people within the fandom are. With all of that said, I think that it is, at the very least, distasteful to use the discussion of racism in order to defend a ship. The way that discourse concerning Chef's Kiss employs, quite rampantly, the issue of misogynoir in order to argue that Chef's Kiss is, should be, or will be canon is inconsiderate and tactless. Furthermore, equivocating a person's stance on a ship to their moral standing is bizarre and scummy.

Now to end this post, which is even longer than I thought it would be, I implore anyone who may or may not feel obliged to respond to do so with civility. also, remember that this is a tumblr post in which I did my best to cover everything necessary and articulate my thoughts, not an academic essay. I am just a guy who hyperfixated on The Bear.

[genderkoolaid]

Love your transmasc retelling tag, and wanted to at least offer a concept since I can't get the words out myself, I feel Beauty and the Beast has some serious potential for it.

Oh of COURSE!! The trans potential!!

Also I did in fact rewatch the animated Beauty and the Beast for you, anon. I probably didn’t have to but I sure did. I also spent an unexpected amount of time on this because my brain is broken.

We have a woman, Belle, who's love interests are a very typical patriarchal man (white and cishet) and a being that can barely being considered human, never mind a man. The Beast is clearly masculine, but in an foreign, monstrous way (kind of like Hyde in @transmascrage's interpretation of Jekyll & Hyde). He's hairy and enormous and raging, almost like a parody of masculinity, while not being able to achieve the humanity and social approval of a man like Gaston (who literally has an entire song devoted to just how perfect his masculinity is). He's only capable of going through the general motions of a prince; when he first meet him, he isn’t even wearing proper clothes. He's only pretending to be a prince. The movie asks the question "Who could ever love a Beast?", which can be seen as "Who could ever love such a monstrous creature pretending to be a man?"

Belle, herself, is not a "typical woman"- she's different from all the other women in the town. She has an "unfeminine" hobby, and while not being outright despised, is viewed as extremely odd by the town. Gaston is interested in her for her physical beauty, but she is not interested in him at all. She could be seen as a closeted transmasc person and/or one who is feminine, who is perceived by others as a "strange girl" who's beauty is going to waste because of her lack of interest in a patriarchal, cishet man. She isn't disliked but she isn't "a part of any crowd". She spends all her time dreaming of what she could be, including "a prince in disguise", not interested in the physical world she is stuck in. Belle is desperate not only for a different life, but for someone who can understand her desires and make her feel less alone in society,

And eventually, she comes to a shadowy castle in the woods– a castle that has been abandoned and forgotten by society, so she would have no idea it even existed. 

In it, she meets the Beast, who as I said, shows the extremes of toxic masculinity. Gaston demands Belle be his wife through coercion, but the Beast makes her promise to stay with him forever. However, there is clearly a difference between them. The Beast is putting on his rage more than Gaston; he clearly wants to connect with Belle, but isn’t sure how and, lacking any other way of interacting, chooses anger to hide this fear. He compares himself to Belle; she is beautiful and perfect, and the Beast is… a beast.

When he saves her from the wolves, he shows the first trait of positive masculinity; he is selfless in defending Belle at personal cost to himself. Belle and him have their first real conversation as she helps him recover, and their relationship is able to actually begin. Later, the Beast eagerly shows her the library as a gift, once again showing he is genuinely interested in her and her interests (gift-giving to feminine partners is often seen in butch/femme dynamics). The Beast begins to win her over by letting himself be soft, and kind, and he realizes that someone is willing to treat him softly and kindly and not revile him as a monster. Belle is self-assured in her strangeness and this allows the Beast to become more comfortable in his. This is contrasted with Gaston planning to force Belle into marriage by institutionalizing her father, using ableism/ageism and the patriarchy to “win her over”.

The most important moment that the Beast shows positive masculinity is when he lets Belle go save her father, and gives her the mirror. He does what Gaston would never do; freely lets Belle leave out of love and respect. 

The Beast, as a threat, is at first met with mockery by society. The Beast is viewed as a hilarious joke, not something to be taken seriously. But later, when Belle proves the Beast’s existence, the threat becomes very real – and very centered around the Beast as Gaston’s future wife’s kidnapper. Gaston encourages the villagers to believe that the Beast will steal their children and their wives, and he needs to kill it to protect Belle’s position as his future wife and mother to his children. Fearmongering leads the town to blindly hate the Beast, and lock up Belle and her father for their as delusional traitors. 

Gaston attacks the Beast, who does not resist the attempts to kill him. Gaston mocks him for being “too kind and gentle to fight back”. He ridicules him for daring to love Belle, asking him, “Did you honestly think she’d want you when she had someone like me?” Gaston views the Beast’s affection and his manhood as corrupt and undesirable. When the Beast proves his physical power over Gaston, he chooses not to kill him, once again choosing to embody positive masculinity instead of the toxic masculinity Gaston values. Ironically, Gaston’s decision to stab the Beast results in his death.

The Beast seems almost suicidal at the end, between him not resisting Gaston and first and saying “maybe it’s better this way” as he dies. Ultimately, of course, he is transformed into his human form, his ideal form. No longer a monster pretending to be a man, he is the man he always was internally (named Adam, after the first man). His transition into Adam was achieved by embracing the positive masculinity Belle encouraged and rejecting the toxic masculinity that was fueled by self-loathing.

TL;DR,  Beauty and the Beast can be viewed as a t4t love story about not letting yourself be defined by toxic masculinity. And it is surprisingly easy to get me to watch something if I can make it queer analysis, even if that thing is Beauty and the Beast (1991), a movie I have barely ever thought about and have seen maybe once before.

[exn0bisstudios]

【❰❬ ᴅᴇᴍᴏ ᴛʙᴀ | ʙʟᴏɢ | ᴅɪsᴄᴏʀᴅ ❭❱】

A psychological horror/thriller about choice & consequence, TTO is an interactive fiction tale written in Twine that follows the trials of the Seer as they navigate the high fantasy world of Yereth-Shai, battling demons both literal and figurative. Will they save the world, or will they burn it down?

【❰❬ ᴘʟᴏᴛ sᴜᴍᴍᴀʀʏ ❭❱】

You are a Seer: a respected member of the Twilight Order. Seers are bound to a Nightmare, making them the only mortals capable of Void magic and, thus, the only ones capable of neutralizing the Nightmare threat. Seers are honored for their sacrifice, as their power, while necessary, is a death sentence. Most die violent deaths from the corruption or simply go insane in only a few short years.

Not you, though. You are special. You didn't choose the position, train vigorously for years, or undergo the binding ritual that would forcibly meld a Nightmare to your psyche. Your Nightmare has always been there, seemingly because they want to be.

You were brought to the Order as a child when your abilities became known. After many years of study, tests, and training, you have made a name for yourself as one of the most potent Seers in history.

Now the Order is sending you to investigate Void activity reports out of Alli vi Piugio, capital of the merchant kingdom of Chepria. While there, it has become quickly apparent there is more going on than meets the eye.

Figures that being 'special' would mean you have to literally save the world.

【❰❬ ɢᴀᴍᴇ ғᴇᴀᴛᴜʀᴇs ❭❱】

A fully malleable MC, with plenty of customization options! Choose your given name, gender (cis, trans, or non-binary), pronouns (independent of gender), appearance, and more!

Play as one of four different races (human, elf, half-elf, ork), each with their own unique pros and cons!

Choose from a variety of unique backgrounds for your MC (orphan, noble, merchant, laborer), giving them roots - and stat boosts - in the larger fantasy world of Yereth-Shai! 

Pursue romance across the spectrum by playing as gay, bi/pan, or straight, with both allo and ace-spec options for everyone!

Choose between 7 different romance options, as well as 2 additional polyamorous options (closed triads), for a total of 9 different potential romances! Or don’t romance anyone at all and just enjoy your little found family!

Nickname the entity that lives in your head in retaliation for the fact they still insist on calling you ‘child’!

Enjoy a story that has no wrong choices, forcing you to explore the topics of morality and face the consequences of your beliefs!

Wield an ancient and all-encompassing power - use it to save the world, destroy everything utterly, or maybe just try to nap through the whole thing!

Pet a giant fucking tiger!

...And more!

【❰❬ ʀᴏᴍᴀɴᴄᴇ ᴏᴘᴛɪᴏɴs ❭❱】

❥ The Young Prodigy — Mira Twilight 【 human • 26 • 6′5″ (196cm) • gender selectable • ENFP-A 】 Your assigned partner of the last 5 years, Mira is a Hunter of prodigal talent and unshakable loyalty. Their sheltered upbringing within the Order has made them an interesting travel companion at times, but you’d be hard pressed to find better - even if their eternal optimism can get a bit tiring.

❥ The Tired Rogue — Désiré Desrosiers 【 half-elf • 37 • 6′2″ (188cm) • male, he/him • ISTJ-T 】 A man who could make a career out of being existentially exhausted, Dez is an accomplished smuggler with a reputation as impressive as his crew is eccentric. But don’t let the long-suffering sighs or grumpy expression fool you; those close to him insist he’s actually a giant softy (much to his chagrin).

❥ The Lone Wolf — “Echo”, aka Stella 【 human • 29 • 5′8″ (173cm) • gender selectable • ENTJ-T 】 A legendary assassin of unknown origin, Stella has perfected the art of seeming to be everybody’s best friend while keeping the whole world at arm’s length. With a vigilante history and tendency to redistribute wealth to the lower strata, they are both well-loved and completely unknown.

❥ The Eccentric Nightmare — Nova Dreamreaver 【 Nightmare • ??? • 6′0″ (183cm) • agender, they/them • ENTP-A 】 The very first of their kind, Nova is a Nightmare that has taken a mortal form through their own power - no possession required. Masquerading as a Dream-touched Elf, most assume they are simply some eccentric merchant and leave them be. And, while they keep their secrets close, it’s clear they’re more fond of mortals than of their own kind.

❥ The Noble Bastard — Vittore Simone “Vittone” Armati 【 half-elf • 24 • 6′2″ (188cm) • male, he/him • ENFJ-A 】 The bastard son of the most powerful Merchant Prince of Chepria, Vittore Simone is a name tied to scandal. Known for being a troublemaker, having distaste for the aristocracy, remaining his father’s favorite despite it all, and for being the one truly behind his family’s flourishing business empire, he is often described with expletives and as a genius in the same sentence.

❥ The Brooding Ranger — Andrai Freestrider 【 elf • 72 • 5′11″ (180cm) • male, he/him, gay • INFJ-T 】 A ranger out of the elven homeland of Ongi ga Kueno, Andrai much prefers the company of nature and his soulbonded animal companion Namira to that of the general populace. Despite his brooding and attempts to convince people otherwise, he does in fact have a conscience, and is known to offer his skills to those in need.

❥ The Determined Scholar — Vzridmi Ri’kho’ve 【 ork• 52 • 6′7″ (205cm) • female, she/her • INTJ-A 】 An accomplished scholar, alchemist, and hobbyist tinkerer, Vzridmi is well known in academic circles both for her unparalleled work in Void studies and for her divisive theories. She takes the criticism in stride, doggedly pursuing her research and remaining unflinchingly optimistic that she will prove herself right.

❥ Closed Poly Triad Options — Nova & Mira • Nova & Stella

[cuntess-carmilla]

hey im a bisexual woman who prefers men/wants a boyfriend, and if i had one i would treat him as important and respectful and prioritize as any other romantic partner and have been told that means i center men in my life, but i dont think i do? women, wlw, woc, trans women, nonbinary women, are all important to me although i consider my focus heavily on bi women. what exactly does it mean to decenter men from my life? what happens if i cant do it??

That definitely doesn't mean you "center men" oh my God. I'm so sorry people have told you such stupid things. All that means is you want to treat your partners with respect and priority (perfectly fucking fine and normal), a partner who you'd at least for now prefer to be a guy (and even if that never changes, that's perfectly ok too).

Decentering men is treated in spaces crowded with idiotic people as pretty much Not Dating/Fucking Men As Activism and/or Identity As Activism, but it's really about unlearning the misogynistic indoctrination that women's lives should center on satisfying men's desires and needs (from sexual/romantic to domestic, political and social), to the detriment of ourselves and our relationships with other women (romantic, sexual, familial, friendships, co-workers, etc), collaborating with our own oppression by sabotaging or abandoning ourselves and fellow women in favor of men.

It's about practicing taking back control over our own individual lives, and practicing prioritizing ourselves + our bonds, communities and solidarity with other women, over getting men's approval, appeacement or satisfaction.

Every woman can do this, and every woman can fail at doing this, lesbians and bi women who only pursue women included as having the potential to fail.

It doesn't matter who we do or don't get involved with romantically/sexually. It matters how we develop our relationships, community and politics with other people.

Being straight or (in your case) being bi with a preference for men, is in no way an impediment to this. No woman needs to swear off men as partners to achieve this, and a woman who loves a man doesn't have to disregard her love for him and life with him to politically decenter men. If what a woman truly and uncoercedly wants is a committed loving relationship with a man, then going for it is following her true wishes and if she doesn't disregard her bonds, community and solidarity with other women in the process, that can perfectly be part of what decentering men means to her. It's HER desire, not a man's!

By what you say, I have the feeling you do already practice decentering men in your own positive way. Don't let dumb misogynists and biphobes who think that women being with men is inherently servitude, as if women can't have agency or desires of their own with men, tell you otherwise. You're fantastic, love. They're the misogynistic idiots.

[seagullcharmer]

don’t mind me just rambling some ideas

so, basically. knight!zelda, prince!link, college-graduate-turned-pigkeeper!ganondorf

-zelda was raised by impa, grew to love learning and knowledge, but also cares deeply about others and wants to protect people, so became a knight! tbh i don’t know anything about how knighthood => military works, so i’m handwaving most of the details. zelda trained for years, is well-respected, and at this point is basically allowed to go off on her own for research purposes, instead of being in command or part of a guard or army or whatever

-(she makes it her responsibility to protect link, like a personal guard, a la botw. sort of. not exactly.)

-link is the prince of hyrule, but won’t be crowned until either he has a grand military success (unlikely) or comes of age (not for two years). he doesn’t particularly care for politics, but he’s done well in all his classes and is for all practical purposes prepared for the role. unfortunately, the regent is kinda obsessed with power and is plotting to get rid of link. (hence zelda becoming his guard)

-link’s parents were murdered when he was seven, which was very traumatic and is a major factor in his selective mutism. his mutism, in turn, lead to him not really being in personal contact with the other leaders and communities in hyrule, so most people think of prince link as being arrogant and incompetent, rather than sheltered and practically imprisoned.

-he’s also really into nature, but that’s a different matter.

-ganondorf is trans and left gerudo town when he was 15, under claims of ‘finding a man’ but really just wanted to explore and maybe transition and oh he’s going to college now that’s pretty cool. this is where he met beedle, another trans man, and they became college besties who transitioned together, and a bond like that is not easily broken

-i haven’t decided what he studied yet, whoops

-foreign relations? international(cultural) diplomacy? anthropology? languages? he’s into history and people but hm. further thinking required. i don’t remember college courses

-while he loves education, ultimately, he actually really loves taking care of pigs and gardening and the things that go into that. (this is how he meets zelda and link aha)

-he’s also secretly trying to find ways to communicate with moblins and bokoblins and other such ‘monsters’ because he knows they’re sentient, just misunderstood, and really, if people just tried, but anyway he doesn’t talk about that.

-i’m cherrypicking SO much from loz canon and lore, but since i don’t know anything, and this is my au, i do what i want. it’s great.

-beedle and agitha are research partners working on their entomology degrees. they hate each other, but have a grudging respect because no one else does what they do, and they understand each other really well. they just have very different personalities.

-zelda and mipha....... potential gfs......... (mipha has access to a lot of resources unavailable to zelda, and helps her with her research. zelda has learned so much about zora history and culture. zora recordkeeping is very different.) (they kiss sometimes)

-IMPA my beloved. was set to be the next sheikah matriarch, but hated fighting and bloodshed. details to be hammered out later, but she left those ways behind to become a midwife. adopting zelda was an accident. purah makes fun of her for it to this day.

-impa is also very bad at feelings. she loves zelda very much, but Knows something. feels very guilty about keeping secrets. zelda just wants to call her mom but knows that won’t go over well. they love each other SO much but they’re so bad at communicating this. one day. it’s gonna be so heartwarming, just as soon as i learn how to write.

-ganondorf is the only one who knows he has a piece of the triforce. he hates himself so much, and is very afraid that he’s going to be evil like his predecessors. very emotional scene where he talks to the great deku tree about it. tears, anguish, potential feelings of betrayal?? idk. we’ll see.

-the deku tree knows the truth about everything. tries to get zelda to realise. link gets the master sword. the goal is to be about 60k in by now. i’ve never written longer than 15k. we’ll see how it goes.

-haha turns out link and zelda were born on the same day???? that’s neat

-(they’re NOT siblings don’t worry)

[anewbeginningagain]

Skate America 2020 - thoughts and analysis 

Let’s talk COVID. I have to say that I was pleasantly surprised. After following the Russian events so far I worried we’ll get a similar level of “COVID? what COVID?” that we are seeing in Russia. But here things are way different, skater wear a mask at all times aside from the 3-4 minutes they skate and including when they are in the K&C, coaches are with masks and we basically don’t see them since they are not allowed to greet their skaters coming off the ice or be with them in the K&C, officials are with masks at all times and they sit very far from each other. Overall you can tell they are doing everything in their power to not only protect everyone involved but also send a message about how serious the situation is and I respect that. From what we’ve seen if you are going to hold competition this is they way to do it (and not like Russia ffs).

Dance thoughts:

 Whoever did Green/Parsons FD did it with Disco Brits Vogue FD in mind, there were so many moments that I felt were way too similar. I don’t really like this FD for them, they are a quality couple who goes for a flashy style that doesn't really suit them too much. 

Carreira/Ponomeranko were shaky in the FD, especially him and did mostly well in the RD. When you see them skate right before Hawayek/Baker and compare the quality of the skating and material - it’s a real disadvantage for C/P.

This competition is the best I’ve ever seen Hawayek/Baker skate. Their RD is great and it’s obvious they love it and their new “Heart Of Glass” FD is my favorite from them. They skated is amazingly here, the skating quality and the improved lifts and spin were top notch, and given that Wang/Liu and Disco/Brits are getting scores in the 118-119 area, 121 for H/B is well deserved.

And most importantly - the fact that H/B finished almost 17 points higher than C/P - one of the most correct calls in a competition in a really long time. It’s about time to stop pretending they are at the same or even similar level, C/P show promise but they still have a long way to go.

I will make a dedicated post about H/D since I have a lot to say but that RD dress has to go and the FD dress must stay (more about the skating and scoring later).

Ladies thoughts:

Two very rough skates from Gracie, seems to be a combination of lack of confidence and lacking conditioning. Not sure what more to say, I just wish her happiness.

Audrey Shin was a revelations for me, such a lovely skater who has good jumps and good artistry, I really hope we’ll see more from her.

Amber Glenn struggled to deliver but you can tell she’s close. With her it’s combination of lack of confidence and an injury she had recently so I hope she’ll move forward and crush it.

This was the best I’ve seen Karen Chen skate in a long time and she didn’t even do a triple-triple, if she keeps up she can potentially overtake Bradie/Mariah. 

Bradie’s packaging remains unfortunate. @macaroni-rascal​ said it best - you can’t have the same hair style for a R&J program and for a sexy program, it just makes no sense. Her jumps were called either UR or q (and I think the q ones should have been UR) so I think she should focus on nailing them and not on the 3A. Still, she should have probably won this one tbh. Both program are OK with room to grow, not groundbreaking but not bad either.

Mariah is legit the one skater that can skate to something as cheesy as ABBA and it will still work. She seems unprepared at the moment and it’s fine considering the year we had. She won here based on her SP lead which was questionable and you can tell she felt it from her post-skat comment. Still, between her and Bradie, I think she’s the more interesting skater. 

Men Thoughts

Bychenko won’t get back to his old self but for now this will do, glad to have him around.

Zhou’s quads were mostly called UR which is an improvement but while I think he is getting better with time to give him higher PCS than Keegan is a no.

Keegan is Keegan, not much more to say other than be glad he keeps going and appreciate his bromance with Nam.

Nathan is human and the jumps aren’t all there and it’s fine. If there’s one skater we can count on to get them back it’s him. His post skate comments were great, he is such an articulate young man and it’s pretty impressive. 

Pairs thoughts

Only watched Knierim/Frazier and was pleasantly surprised. I guess this is what you get when you take the best skaters out of two mediocre teams and if they stay consistent they can achieve quire a lot. Actually I also watched Mervin Tran and his partner and while I love him it’s obvious they won’t get too far with training only once a week... 

[heeres-suffering]

Be More Alluring: a Personality Swap AU

[pic description and source will be at the bottom of this post, under the read more]

Start of summary:

“You need to be more alluring.”

"... don’t you mean attractive?”

“I do not. Your attractiveness is adequate, Brooke; if you want to mask your apparently latent queerness, you have to make them want you straight. Isn’t that why your step-father defended you?” 

Brooke Lohst is a loser.

But you know what? That was okay.

She always knew she was a weird one. The intensity of her affection for puppies, picture books, and near-constant daydreaming has lasted well-past a normalcy she can’t seem to grasp; when coupled with her inability to befriend anyone (besides the similarly self-identified loser Michael Mell), it’s not a surprise the rest of her peers have left her behind.

However, there were... ah, worse things in her life to worry about then some mild bullying. She liked her passion well enough, and all of her true insecurities went largely unnoticed, so any insults or weird looks rarely lingered in her mind. It’s not like she was a constant target either, which helped a lot. All in all, she just planned to hunker down, wait out the awkwardness of High School like everyone else, and move on to the rest of her life... 

Except.

When Brooke develops a crush on a girl she’s never talked to, after years of avoiding fairy tale romance and trying not to think about the inevitability of marriage (or how finicky her attraction to boys is in the first place), it feels like her whole world is about to cave in. She’d do anything to make sure her parents, especially daddy, never find out... including buying an edible super computer from the loudest, tiniest guy in school.

End of summary.

Alright!

Hi, hello, it’s Mod Seb, and here’s an AU I’ve been rolling around for a few days! You are free to do with this concept whatever you want, but I wanted to introduce it with a good chunk of the info I’ve already worked out in my head.

So. As the CWs are... too numerous, I’m going to go with a blanket “Dead Dove: Do Not Eat” label and encourage you not to read the rest of this if you have any big darkfic triggers that could be upset by mere mention; this isn’t a fic tho, so descriptions of anything awful won’t last long. 

Although, I will mention upfront that Brooke isn’t a binary lesbian. I know the description might read like I’m setting her up to be 100% homosexual; she’s bi with a strong preference for girls, and anyone who presents soft enough in gender or appearance. If it wasn’t for the end-game pairings, her unfamiliarity with smaller details/history of the LGBTQ+ community, and general “gay newb” status, she’d likely ID as a bi lesbian!

(ships and everything else under the Read More)

Okay. That out of the way, there’s quite a number of pairings; I’m pretty sure it’s a super polyamorous and sexual AU, though you’re free to change this list as much as you’d like:

[bolded are end-game ships. italics physically hook up at least once. strike-through means they were in a relationship but break-up in some way before the ending. (H) stands for healthy, while (T) is toxic and/or noncon. underlined characters are pining for the other and may never confess their true feelings]

Brooke/Christine (H), Brooke/Rich (H), Brooke/Jenna (H), Brooke/Michael (H), Brooke/Chloe (T), Brooke/her Daddy (T), Brooke/Squip (H), Brooke/Jeremy (soft T at first bc of mirrored canon-compliant manipulation, H later on), Brooke/Squip/Jeremy (H), Brooke/Squip/Jeremy/Rich (H), Rich/Moses (H), [insert every form of Rich/Mo/Squip/Jeremy here] (H), Jeremy/Chloe (T), Jeremy/Michael (H), Michael/Christine (H), Michael/Christine/Mr. Heere (H; no, seriously), Madeline/Brooke (H)

This is, of course, a role swap AU where Brooke and Jeremy trade places based on my personal lore for their home lives. I always have some pretty fucked ideas as I don’t imagine MB is a great place with great adults, and I pick and choose which parts of canons I use and which I don’t. 

There is no definite ending planned in mind as this isn’t an outline; it’s meta (or an imagine or w/e) for an AU that you’re free to do whatever with. 

So,

The big difference is that Brooke was picked by Michael, while Jeremy was picked by Chloe. Jeremy is trans and hadn’t come out yet; if Chloe had known he was a boy, she wouldn’t have grabbed him. In contrast, Michael’s never gave a shit about potential friends genders.

Jer and B’s personalities... are altered some. Not ALL the way, but kiiinda fusing into their roles, kinda tweaked (I'll get back to that).

The main point of this for me was Brooke/Squip/Jeremy, with B/Jer having a MUCH stronger focus than in canon, and a really bad Chloe acting as one of the major villains.

Michael gets roped into Chloe’s shit, even tho he's still generally a good guy here, bc he's worried about B and thinks she can't properly take care of herself.

While B DOES have a strong crush on Christine, she’s the opposite of the Squip’s “goal”; that’s (obvs) masking, or making passably digestible, her queerness.

Her Mom and step-’Daddy’ have reacted to her friendship w/ ‘openly gay moms, also very flamboyant and GNC’ Michael... poorly.

Michael thinks the solution has to be “act as aggressively yourself as you can, and if they reject you, you know me and the mom’s have a space for you”. This works for him bc he’s permanently hyper-visible, what with all of his own marginalized identities. But, not only has she flied under the radar in comparison to him for years, he doesn’t know everything about her life.

In fact, he doesn’t know most of it. She’s very good at hiding things.

Meanwhile, Jeremy, one of the more popular ‘boy... ish’ (we’ll get to this, too) people in school, is mid-psychosis and self-destruction. He actually has schizo-affective disorder--as is the case with all of my versions of Jeremy--which he needs medication for. Combined that with so many bad influences and trauma, he can no longer fully control himself or his life.

The way he handles this (badly) is to ‘whore around’--which, besides being Chloe’s pet, is kinda why he’s so popular. Nobody respects him, but he’s viewed some form of favorably.

Jeremy is in a relationship with Rich, but he won't let him get as close/protective as Rich wants; Mo and Rich were doing their own man-whoring (but healthy, just droppin’ panties and making dudes and chicks swoon--yeah, Rich is out as bisexual, this is a very ‘the Squips are a good thing’ AU) to gain their standard reputation, but in the course of that, they got together with Jeremy and it became... complicated. Both of them are very "nnn" about how bad his life is for Jer.

The way that their personalities are altered is... okay. To explain this, I have to talk about my characterization of canon-Brooke and Jeremy in relation to this, starting with Brooke:

I imagine B as just a liiittle below the line of "all the way there" for sorta-similar reasons to Jeremy here: trauma, and Chloe (which is why that’s what Jeremy gets in this, it’s just WAY worse when compounded by everything else). She’s also--like me, and like almost every character I write as a result--autistic, in a near-permanent state of “not enough accommodations” and over-stimulation. This leads to a lot of dissociation and a very wandering mind, as well as being perceived as a bimbo or dumb blonde or w/e misogynistic bullshit is projected onto her by the boys she dates (she’s also much more down the middle bi outside this AU).

So, going back to how she is for this AU: she's actually not super nerdy, despite the close connection she and Michael have. Honestly, it’s their general neurodivergent weirdness that bring them together, and so she’s mostly adopted her nerdy interests through him, whether directly a thing he likes, or finding a whimsical variant that fits her tastes.

Obviously, unlike Jeremy, she doesn’t mind being called a loser. She does any insinuation she might be queer. This including anyone who calls her gay or a dyke.

She has too much Cis Male Trauma (unlike canon, where it comes from both cis angles) to really entertain the idea of a Traditionally Male Partner. This means she skews HEAVILY towards hard GNC guys at the very least, and generally finds herself most interested in the idea of enbies and women. she's also not super into butches tho, bc her trauma mixing with her sexuality has latched on to Strong Masc People Are A Threat. 

An expansion on her interests, in canon and otherwise: animals, ASMR/sensual service work (including massages and stuff), spending hours just sorta sitting by herself and letting her imagination wander, fairy tales, and YA-and-under fantasy books.

(Here, she tries to avoid het or f/f romance... except that, this past year or two, she’s started really like m/m stuff--esp after getting REALLY into drag shows, which she could enjoy safely since girls like Chloe have gotten into them too; in canon, she’s a romance fanatic)

Now... this is one of the really darkfic element; she's fucking her step-dad. 

She does this so that he doesn't walk out on her, her mom, and her little sister*. Her mom has a good-enough job as a standard office woman, but he makes enough to pay the rent on their nice townhouse and all the bills she can’t. So, after he expressed interest in Brooke and then casually mentioned he could always just leave if she wasn’t comfortable, she reluctantly entered a relationship with him

(* = her sister is currently know as her brother; he’s like 12 or 13, and started showing signs of trans/queerness which have been Heavily Discouraged. Brooke worries about him a lot)

((I didn’t use she/her pronouns bc I’m not entirely sure he would change them? This is an OC Oli created at the beginning of our interest in BMC, and we haven’t worked on him at all since, so how his characterization will be is up in the air))

Canonically, Brooke's "in love" with her daddy, which is a self-imposed delusion; if she actually addressed it, she’d says she’s well aware that’s not true, but it's so much easier to pretend when you’re cornered like that. Brooke’s life blows.

She’s a lot more honest to herself about hating him here; still, she tries to be as polite and generally-friendly as she can, doing what he says whenever he wants.

OKAY, THAT’S BROOKE. If any of that is badly described or potentially-offensive, it’s just bc I glossed over SO MUCH DETAIL, even in that amount of it!

So. Jeremy.

I don’t have to go over him much and we’re all mostly aware of how I feel about him and also I don’t have the energy to do this again--

(just... read my fics The Devil at your Door or hello yesterday or something... eyyy actually do that, my ao3 username is Sedusa, blah blah blah ANYWAY)

--but basically: He's still very nerdy, like, he’s super into film as well as video games (which is another constant for me), but after being largely ignored in elementary, he's been trailing behind Chloe at her orders since they were in 6th grade. As a result he isn't very open about... any of his interests.

In 7th grade, he came out as trans to everyone. Chloe was furious, but at the same time, intrigued; this was around the time Chloe gets her own... ah shit I gotta go into that too--

--yet another hc of mine is that Chloe gets a Squip on accident around this time at a party (there was one in a “”candy bowl””), and from there, she claws her way up the ladder. I... will not go into that much, but her Squip was crippled by the drugs and alcohol in her system, and therefore largely at her mercy. She’s used his power to manipulate certain things about herself and to sharpen her focus on popularity to the point she’s full-blown Alpha Bitch.

Man, I’ve had to go on so many tangents, I apologize.

Anyway, she drags Jeremy around as a punching bag. She constantly mocks Jeremy's transness, even though she usually calls him by his correct name and pronouns.

This has made the rest of the school follow her lead, hence why I said “boy-ish”; he’s popular, he’s technically ‘well liked’, but nobody really takes him seriously. This is compounded by Chloe’s refusal to let him dress in 'dorky' casual clothes, and, as he’s both too poor to afford designer clothes and also generally hates popular guy fashion, he has to wear the hyper femme clothing Chloe specifically tells him too/

As such, people call him a boy but largely see him as either an idiot, a slut, an attention seeker, or all of the above.

So of course, in Brooke's place, his neurodivergence is more prominent than ever; every day he slips further into this psychosis and self-infantilization haze, as his his mom leaving, his dad severely depressed, Chloe's sexual violence, and other repressed trauma (see: my fic hello yesterday on ao3) all weighing on him. This makes him INCREDIBLY regressed, like, all the time by Junior year.

And then Brooke's Squip (IE: canon Squip) falls in love with Jeremy extremely fucking hard. He pushes her to date him as a way to compromise on her queer desires, since Jeremy is technically a boy, and certainly a few other straight-ish girls have hooked up with him in the past.

WHEW. That is a fucking lot. To wrap this up, lemme go over the interpersonal relationships not already mentioned, and what directions I think it takes.

First off, Madeline has a more prominent role, as I quite like her tbh; she’s a sex worker, she has her own Squip, she’s one of Chloe’s most hated enemies, and she gravitates towards both Brooke and Jeremy. She’s also Actually French, Chloe’s just weird.

(Anyway she prolly sees through Brooke’s straight act and asks her why she’s pretending to be a good little cishet. It rattles Brooke.)

Chloe is scum. This bears repeating. She DEFINITELY rapes Brooke at the Halloween party, and becomes obsessed with her, along with already being obsessed with Jeremy and Jake. 

Jake, by the way, has a lot of regressive behavior and impulsiveness bc he’s been in an abusive relationship off and on with Chloe for years now.

Speaking of Jake, moving on to his best bro: Rich doesn’t set himself on fire. He’s having a good time with his Squip.

But.

He IS set on fire at the Halloween party.

Instead of the Smartphone Hour being about Rich's instability, it's actually about the mystery of Someone Did It To Him But No One Saw Who It Was, They Were Disguised.

The answer relates to the fact that Rich and Brooke are ALSO hooking up, after she’s already with Jeremy, bc he Properly introduces her to him and the three of them hit it off really well.

(She initially wasn’t interested, but while Rich is loud and still kinda abrasive, his Squip doesn’t drive him to act like a bully--and in private, his nerdiness is really obvious and he’s extremely gentle with her and Jeremy. Add to that that he’s bi and trans*, when Brooke connects best w/ queer men over cishet one, and it off-sets his masc-ness enough to make him an Exception.

* = I always imagine him as trans. See: all of Vanceypants fics.)

Sooo... the culprit is actually Brooke's daddy, who sees her with this obvious heartthrob and Cannot let that be.

Chloe convinces Michael that the Squips are Very Very Bad and has him team up with her to force Brooke into drinking Red, with the intention to convince him to kill himself after to get him out of the way, bc she’s really going nuts at this point.

Eventually, he snaps out of it when he and Christine get together (he’s thought he was Full Homo all of his life, but Christine’s prolly genderqueer-ness makes him realize “oh shit, I’m bisexual”) and she starts to question why he’s acting the way he is towards Christine.

He also definitely has a crush on Jeremy and during his time with Chloe he kinda tried to flirt a little but couldn’t really... he’s not up for dating someone as sexually active and a push-over as Jeremy is in this.

However, when he snaps out of Chloe’s manipulation, he and Christine approach Mr. Heere to convince him to straighten up and help Jeremy and also bc they really need an adult to successfully fight Chloe.

This requires a month+ of Christine getting him to see her psychiatrist (the one who prescribes her ADHD meds). Jeremy spends the majority of his time staying with Chloe, and very rarely comes home to gather things or to make sure his dad is eating/still alive, as much as he can remember to in his own haze of mental illness. Anyway, point is, he doesn’t know Christine and Michael are there often... not that, in the course of growing close to Mr. H, they both fall for him hard and it becomes one of my stranger OT3s.

(God, Jeremy goes through a lot of shit in this, tho.)

Pre-Squip, Jenna was kinda-sorta Brooke’s friend--or, well, friendly. However, she’s actually full blown “oh my God she’s wonderful” in love with Brooke.

Brooke isn't aware of that, esp since Jenna tries her not to be around her a lot. She's also trying to hide her own queerness, bc she’s a trans woman and she knows Chloe finding that out would be extremely dangerous.

Eventually, Chloe succeeds in making Brooke take the Red months after canon usually ends, w/o Michael’s help. If you’re curious, Red doesn’t affect her normal Squip bc she’s had him too long and a lot of his receptors and stuff are damaged, so it’s the second one she gets in canon that turns off.

This plan backfires, however, as Brooke’s Squip comes back with a physical body w/ help from Rich and also-bodied-now Moses.

With a body, and shenanigans, Mo and Squip take out Brooke’s daddy too. His life insurance more than makes up for the loss of his income, as it’s a sizable amount. Now that Brooke feels more empowered and strong, she overrides her mother’s neglectfulness and takes control of the household w/ her boyfriends*, comes out as queer, helps her sister transition, and begin to heal from all of this trauma.

(* = Rich and Mo move in, as does Jeremy eventually, after graduation; Jeremy gets a psychiatrist and a therapist and prolly has to go through some intense outpatient care and possibly a stay in the hospital, before finally making major breakthroughs and looking like himself again. The five of them are now happy and in love.)

Chloe, after her arm gets twisted by the Squip’s protective presence so thoroughly, gives up on Jeremy and Brooke to focus on Jake. This too gets abandoned when Rich and Mo help him cut her off, and so she stays in her own popularity bubble, bitter, until graduating and going to a community college in a different state.

All in all, things work out well in the end, but getting there is a long, difficult process. This AU fascinates me immensely and feels like a great way to examine some of my really dark headcanons about MB, as I think it’s a town similar to Derry in Stephen King’s IT--as in, just chronically The Worst Place Ever, with this, like, miasma of low-key despair around it. People adjust and don’t question it, which is why so much of BMC is this flippant dark humor in the face of some highly questionable shit.

I’m so sorry this post is so long (I’ll be uploading it to AU under my usual Sedusa account, as metas like this are more than allowed), but I really adore these characters and the way they can be twisted around, so I had a lot to say!

Thank you for reading <3

-mod Seb

image description: virtual-like stairs pointed forward and bathed in neon yellow and blue to represent Brook and Jeremy, which I’ve modified from the original blue-only design.

source: x (link description: a free Wallpaper Flare image that I found off Google Image’s “filtered by ‘labeled and reuse with modification” feature) 

[chasingparamasturbatoryillusions]

Hey, so perhaps you could rethink your headcanon about Mulder being 'straight but down to fwb with guys' as it is not only biphobic but homophobic as well. Also, it might be a good idea to also rethink your trans verse, since having something like this as a 'verse' is very transphobic. It is highly likely that this would upset the lgbt community.

this is going to be long, so placing it under the cut.

first of all, nonnie, thank you for addressing this with me directly!  i do apologize for how long it has taken me to respond, but i want you to know that a lot of thought went into both of your concerns and how best to word this reply.  as you know, most of the time the reaction to these sorts of accusations is a knee-jerk defensive no, i can’t possibly be doing something wrong here, just let me have a good time sort of thing, often including some sort of rebuttal accusation, and i wanted to make sure that wasn’t what i was doing here.  these are important issues and deserved to be dealt with in that manner, so i wanted to take the time to make sure that i was looking at this as well as i could.rest assured, i certainly took your request that i rethink my headcanon and mulder’s trans verse very seriously.  the past little while i have been thinking and rethinking and rerethinking, which is…part of why it took so long.  i also wanted to make sure i didn’t end up on a soapbox, as i tend to do on occasion.  that doesn’t help anyone in these sorts of situations, so i’m going to try and avoid that as much as possible.that said, i do want to address both of your accusations.  i plan to address them separately because although there may be some overlap, i believe that they are two entirely separate things.i also only plan to address this once.if you have further questions or concerns in relation to my thoughts on these issues and how i plan to deal with them (or not), my request is that you come to me off anon so that we can discuss this as reasonably and respectfully as possible.  i fear to continue to address the issue in this manner would end up in circular territory at best and mudslinging at worst.  neither of those seem particularly useful to me.anyway.1) Mulder being ‘straight but down to fwb with guys’ is bi- and homophobic.first of all, this was poor word choice on my part.  i’ll agree with that.  the idea of friends with benefits, particularly as it tends to be portrayed in media, often assumes that one side is taking advantage of another side who is in love with them - taking advantage of a romantic attraction to fulfill a sexual one or other sexual desires.  i was working under a more idealized assumption where two people who are friends are okay with using each other for sexual benefit without any further attachment.  i will address the wording there and reblog it to change that.second, and perhaps this is more important, the idea that a man who has sex with another man must, by nature, be bisexual or homosexual, which i think is more your issue here, as opposed to word choice.  if mulder is okay with sleeping with a man but continues to identify as straight, this is harmful to bisexuals or homosexuals because he clearly must be in reality at least bisexual.  because everyone who sleeps with someone else must be sexually attracted to that person, right?this is flawed logic.in fact, this denies the experience of any person of any orientation who has sex with someone that they are not sexually attracted to and in particular erases the identity of asexuals who do not feel sexual attraction but may, for whatever reason seems appropriate to them (whether that be sexual libido, romantic attraction, or anything else), have sex with another person.

now - i do want to make this clear - i do not believe that is what you intend to do, nonnie.  (and i hope that it is okay that i continue to address you in this manner, because i want to be having a discussion with you as a person instead of thinking of you as a greyface.  it’s all too easy to look at an anon and think the worst, and being able to refer to you in this way helps me discuss.  it helps me to think of you as a friend.)  i want to believe that you are someone who is addressing these problems with me because you want to make sure i do something that is good for the community and not bad for it.  you police my language because these things are very important to you, and so i cannot believe you intend in your words to somehow imply something that might hurt another part of that same community.  i just want to point out the implications the same way that you did with me.

this is why the rest of that headcanon was so important.  mulder is dealing with his relation to sexual relationships with men in a similar manner to how an asexual who is still okay with having sex for their own reasons (and not all of us are) might.  he is not sexually attracted to men, but in the context of a relationship - whether that is a romantic one or a queer-platonic one - he would be okay with having sex with them for his own reasons (likely, in a romantic relationship, more for the benefit of his partner and also because he enjoys sex - in the same manner as an asexual might for the benefit of their partner or because they might enjoy sex).in the same way that having sex with someone does not change an asexual’s orientation because they still lack sexual attraction to any gender, having sex with a man does not change mulder’s straight orientation because he still lacks sexual attraction to men.if he were sexually attracted to men, i’d change his identifier.  in fact, i have other characters with a variety of other sexual orientations (let’s not even talk about amy and her internalized homophobia, who might be the closest analogy except that she actually is bi).to be honest, i really did think a lot about mulder’s sexual and gender identity before addressing either of those, because sometimes mulder does things that feel much more feminine coded and mulder is in the process of a potential ship with another male character.  i did consider mulder might be bisexual, but the more i’ve seen how he reacts - especially in relation to that ship - the more i’m confronted with him not being sexually attracted to men.  in fact, the only reason i took that much time to explain it in that post was for the purpose of my trying to understand what was going on in that ship.so - i’ll go back and change the wording.  i do think that is appropriate.  but i will not be changing the headcanon itself.tl;dr: mulder is still straight.  he still identifies as straight.  and he is not sexually attracted to men.  however, in the context of a relationship (whether that be romantic or queer-platonic), mulder might have sex with another man in the same manner as an asexual might have sex within the context of one of their relationships (whether that be romantic or queer-platonic).

2) Mulder having a trans verse is transphobic.i see where you are coming from.

it took me a lot of time and a lot of thought and a lot of introspection into an aspect of my own identity and how i would react in relation to that integral part of my identity being used as a verse for a character, but i can see where you are coming from.  i got there.i also believe that you are specifically referencing this post, which unfortunately doesn’t talk about why it’s transphobic, only says that it is, which doesn’t really help people learn, but that’s another commentary entirely.the main concern, as i understand it, with having a trans verse as opposed to having the main be trans is that this implies that the character, within the context of their canon, cannot be trans.  this is inherently transphobic simply due to that implication - for all intents and purposes, the character could be trans in respect to their canon.the post also explicitly makes mention of cisbending and gendebending as transphobic as well, because the majority of the time when someone cis- or genderbends a character, they aren’t taking everything into consideration and are often just doing so for shipping purposes.  they would take, say, a cis straight male and bend them into a cis straight female, without any regards to the idea that an afab character might still identify as male or vice-versa or further that even if an afab character still happened to identify as female, they might still be attracted to women and thus be lesbian.  they do not do the research, and they take the easy way out.  basically.

and, again, i’m not saying that all people who write these sorts of things do that.  only that the vast majority seem to go that route.

in my mind, this is incredibly offensive, and i think that’s the point of the posts about that.  if you make a verse for your character to explore these issues - or even if it’s the main verse - do the research.  don’t just half-ass something, whole ass it, right?in point of fact, this is how mulder’s trans verse started in the first place.it was a headcanon - this one, in fact - prompted by a post going around decrying how most cis- and genderbends worked because identity is a spectrum and doesn’t have to be attached gender to biological sex, as well as the concerns with sexual/romantic orientation.  now, i will admit, i did previously - and it’s been a while - have a bent verse for one of my other characters where their name was changed, their story changed, their sexual orientation didn’t - and i will admit that some aspects of this i did not think about.  then again, given the character, looking at it now, the only aspect of that i might change would be their gender identity because the assumed base - the initial change - is cis in nature, taking them from afab to amab.that said, this was not the case with mulder.  i started with that initial change - amab to afab - and then looked at him as a character, at how that would influence who he might be in terms of gender (and then relationships - sexual/romantic orientation - and i revised my stance on that issue when i set the verse up, as you can see in this post).  i stand by my assertion that mulder would identify as male regardless of what he was assigned at birth, particularly in regards to our current culture (as opposed to the time period in which the x-files was initially set, where i believe he still would, but he would not know to notice it as such given the cultural climate of the period in which he was raised).  his sexual orientation does not change - he is still very much a straight male - but he does lose that possibility to have a romantic or queer-platonic relationship with another guy.initially, i did not plan to set up a verse.  i was making a commentary based on my muse prompted by the outcry to the general way cis- or genderbent verses were set-up - without thought into the character themselves.  past that, it wasn’t something i planned to explore.but if you are a fellow writer, you will know the nature of things - how sometimes you can have a thought about something and comment on it and leave it to rest but also how sometimes an idea sticks in the back of your mind and gestates and a character talks to you and prods you until, finally, you give in because the idea doesn’t die.that is very much what happened with trans mulder.now, when i set up that verse, there was not the general outcry that setting up a trans verse could be transphobic - or, if there was, i had not yet heard of it.  i actually assumed, by nature, that because i was looking at something that was considered problematic and going in a direction that the post that prompted it seemed to imply was the correct way of dealing with these things i was not doing something problematic.within a short while, the post i mentioned above, which includes that comment, circulated and found its way onto my dash, and i remember very clearly my reaction to that.  first, it was that knee-jerk defensive reaction that i mentioned above - that sort of thing where you look at something and you think it’s wrong and you make really really stupid comments in private to the sort of people who won’t judge you too harshly for making them and understand what you’re trying to say through the salt.but once that passed, i did take a very serious look at what i was doing.  was a trans verse, by nature, in and of itself, transphobic?  at the time, i concluded that what i was doing, given my nature to research and review and the extensive effort i put into my portrayals, was not.  i acknowledged that there were cases where it might be, but those were more in relation to people who did not do the research as opposed to what i was doing.regardless, i made the decision then to keep this portrayal as a verse instead of moving it to another blog primarily for the following reasons:1) i have, on more than one occasion, had one or more verses for a character as a separate blog (often this was as a sideblog, but not always), and in the majority of cases, this ended with the verse(s) returning to the main blog.the first time i did this, it was the result of an attempt to fix issues that were brought to my attention.  not quite similar to how you are doing now because there was a lot more personal drama involved (which, to our credit, was kept primarily off the dash and in private, with the exception of a post i made in regards to it and the response to that of one of the others involved), but i suppose with what you hope will be the same result - moving the verse, or in this case verses, to a separate blog.in that case, it was a bad idea.moving those verses to a separate blog did not fix the primary issue and in fact only led to a lot of hassle on my part, such that when i remade the blog, those verses were folded back in so that it was on the same blog again.  honestly, in that case, the verses shouldn’t have been moved in the first place.the second time i did this (and, oddly, this was around the same time the aforementioned verses were being folded back into the rebooted blog), it was an acknowledgment of the two verses becoming entirely separate characters, such that one was no longer an image of the other but an entirely separate person.  i will address this more below.this is the only time i believe that such a change was the best decision.the third time i did this, it was the result of a combination of things.  one of them (and i think the primary one) was the decision that this character was a completely separate interpretation, but also, and in my opinion just as if not even more important, the desire to stick to a strict timeline.  all threads would impact each other, and i would only write with one of each character in the hopes of something similar to a group verse.for the latter reasons, keeping this verse on a separate blog was a good idea at the time.  it functioned much differently than any other verses i did for that character in regards to the rules i’d set up and so needed to be kept separate so as not to cause confusion.however, because that verse was very much focused on shipping, when the ship died, so did the blog.  as i found that i still wanted to use those verses, i moved it away from those timeline and character restraints and in so doing folded it in with the original blog.as you can see, in all but one of these cases, the verse(s) folded back in regardless.  now, i understand that in terms of statistics and grades, 2/3 is still a D, but it is a significantly higher percentage than the 1/3 where that wasn’t the case.2) the interpretation seen in this verse is not currently separate enough to warrant a separate blog.let me go back to the second of the cases i listed above, where the movement of the verse was a good idea.at the time that the verse was separated, as i stated before, the interpretation of the character had become an entirely separate thing, so that you could see influences from my original interpretation but that so much was different they could no longer truly be called the same character.also, the verse that was moved was getting a significant flow of interactions of their own, such that it was fighting for dominance with the verses dealing with the main interpretation of the character of that blog.  it was developing enough to require multiple verses itself, not just from different points in that character’s life, but also to develop alternate universes of its own that were entirely different from those of the main interpretation.

i might as well have been writing a multimuse for the two muses, which was not what i wanted to do.

in my original plan and decision for leaving this interpretation as a verse, the idea was that if/when trans mulder became fleshed out enough to stand on his own two feet, when he was developed enough to be his own person separate from canon mulder, and, more importantly, when he had enough interactions to prove that he could survive the move to his own blog, i would set him up on a second blog.  the main markers for this were similar to those of that earlier successful split - character development unique from the main interpretation, outside interest as indicated by amount of thread and meme content in comparison to the main interpretation, and the establishment of verses unique to the character as a result of said development and interest.  once these criteria were met, the trans verse would get its own blog.that was the plan.now, as a result of your message, i have rethought this, as you requested i do, and i’m glad that you requested me to do so because it did allow me to look at this from a different angle in regards to, as i mentioned above, that integral aspect of my own identity and how i would feel if that were used as a verse for the character instead of the main interpretation.this gave me a third avenue in relation to these issues, which i think is just as important as my own personal experiences.3) whether or not the character as portrayed in canon can be trans.this is important to me and especially to this blog, given that my intent was to portray mulder as he is seen in canon in part because i have muse for him, but also in part as a present to one of my partners.  i did not make mulder on a whim, as i tend to do with other blogs and other characters.  i spent months - about three - marathoning the series and heacanoning.  in fact, as you will note on the main page itself, this blog existed for well over a month before i opened it as i delved into mulder’s canon.  not only that, but the idea of my writing mulder started almost three years ago when i first started trying to marathon the series for much the same purpose.  i cannot tell you how many urls i still have saved just from trying to get muse for him and watching the show - and, at the time, i did not have muse and another writer popped up and i gave up, basically.  the url i use now is actually a quote specific form of one that i had saved from that original attempt.so you must understand that portraying mulder as he is in canon is of utmost importance on this blog.  anything that is a deviation from that canon - whether that is setting him in a different universe (like star wars) or a different string of circumstances (like having a soulmate that you swap with at a given time - slightly different in that mulder did have a soulmate in canon, but it’s an entirely separate set of circumstances) or even potentially being trans - must then be a verse and not the main interpretation of the blog.the question then becomes - is it possible for mulder, in canon, to be trans?and, unfortunately, the answer is very clearly no.now, if the reasons for that answer were something brought up and passed off in one of the monster of the week episodes, i might be able to ignore that, in the same way that people have a tendency to ignore mulder being colorblind.  however, because the reason for that answer is specific to the plot multiple times, to do otherwise would be to become canon-divergent, and, as i’ve stated, my focus on this blog in its main interpretation is to adhere to canon.you may ask, then, why can’t mulder, in canon, be trans?very simply, he gets scully pregnant.  at least once.  this is extremely plot significant, both in the details of william’s birth and in the matter of scully specifically asking him to be a sperm donor, but also in the matter of this season’s finale, where scully is once again pregnant with mulder’s child (dear x-files.  why.  seriously, why).trans men cannot reproduce in that manner.  they do not have sperm.now - there is ongoing research into options for trans men to have children, and there is the theory of taking bone marrow and turning that into viable sperm, which if the x-files had chosen to make mulder a trans man, likely would have done.  but they didn’t, which very clearly points to mulder in canon as being cis male.as a result, my main interpretation on this blog cannot be trans, given that my intent here with that main interpretation is to stick with canon.could i make the trans verse the main verse and stick canon as a side verse?  yes.  however, that goes against the other point of this blog, which was for it to be a gift.  also, and just as important, canon mulder has already met the criteria listed above in relation to character development, interaction-based interest, and unique verses.could i decide to make mulder trans in his other verses?  potentially.  in his star wars verse, certainly.  in his current soulmate verse, not likely, as we’ve already established mulder as cis male in that verse and plotted it enough that such a decision should have been present from the onset.so, this leaves me with three options in regards to mulder’s trans verse.1) i could move it to another blog right now while he is still being fleshed out.  it is possible while he is there that he could prove interest based on interactions and he likely would end up with multiple verses, some unique, some not necessarily (star wars, for instance).  but he just as well might not, which would lead to a death of the interpretation or a death of the blog, at which point, i would fold him back into the current blog.  personally, i don’t want to move him to another blog with the risk that he might just end up back on this one.  i don’t think that’s fair to him or to the people who might be interested in writing with him.also, i want to make sure i have a better idea of him before throwing him on his own blog, especially given my own tendency to make blogs and abandon them.  it seems worse to me to set him up and then potentially abandon the blog entirely.  (the concern of abandoning him by moving him to a new blog too soon is especially prevalent in this case, as this was the outcome of the one successful split of a verse into a separate blog, only in that case the original interpretation was abandoned.  however, i think the reasons and circumstances for that are different than what would be seen with this blog and a potential move of trans mulder to a separate blog.)so, i will not be moving him to a new blog.2) i could remove the trans verse entirely and choose not to explore mulder as a trans man.  i feel like this is even more detrimental to the community if i do my research and write him well.  not on basis of me or my writing, because real talk here, i’m not the greatest writer and there are probably people who would do him more justice than i would.  so, in this case, read i as anyone who would do the research and do a trans character justice.  in this case, removing the verse, if it were done well, would rob us of a portrayal that actually explores the issues with tact and gives a greater presence of mind to people who might not do otherwise, potentially even encouraging other people to realize that, hey, they can write trans characters.  it increases visibility and understanding, if it is done well.–and i do mean if it is done well, because this is the aspect that was most prevalent in my rethinking as you prompted.  i considered whether i would accept a verse interpretation over a main blog interpretation if the character in canon was blatantly not that aspect of my identity, and my decision was roughly the same as it would be if it were the main interpretation - as long as it was done well.  in fact, i would be more picky with this in the case of a verse because oftentimes verses aren’t necessarily there to explore the issues themselves but for the purposes of novelty or shipping - which means a verse interpretation often has less research and is more likely to be wrong with its portrayal.because i know myself well enough to know that when i write verses and keep them, when there is interest, i do the research and work on my portrayal to make sure it is an adequate blend of canon with what is new or changed as well as making sure that it is also accurate to what i’m trying to portray (of all my characters, bedelia is the one who showcases this the most, especially in regards to her ahs: coven verse), i do not think that giving up the verse is a good idea.also, i’m selfish.  i’m intrigued with this character, with the ins and outs of him, with how he is different from how he is seen in canon, with how he might interact differently with other characters, etc.  i do not want to give up the verse - and more to the point, i don’t think it fixes the issue.which leaves me with the third option:3) to continue as i originally planned, to keep the trans verse as it is until such a time that it proves it can survive the move to another blog, and then at that point to move him to a separate blog.i know that this is not the response you want.  honestly, of these options, i think the only one that would end with what you want is to move him to a new blog immediately.  i do not think you would be satisfied with my abandoning the verse because that would lead to the claim that i don’t want to put in the effort to write a trans character.  precisely the opposite.  i want to explore mulder as a trans man and how that might change him, how he might be different than how he is in canon (and i think to imply that this sort of identity change would never change how a person was raised or how they dealt with things throughout life is wrong.  for example, if amy elliott dunne were amab, that character would be entirely different just based on the characters of her parents and how they would have raised her and how she - or he, depending on how that interpretation identified - would have dealt with that situation.  the point being made by the cis/genderbending posts is very much in effect - do the research; understand the character; understand how those changes might change the character - not that they always will, but that they might).  but, for the reasons listed above, i hope you understand precisely why i’m not moving him to a new blog yet.as i have mentioned, i do plan to move him if/when the situation in regards to his development and his interactions calls for it.  but he is not to that point yet, and i do not want to rush it and lose him.tl;dr: moving trans mulder to a separate blog at this time would likely not end well and so i plan to wait until a time where it would be more successful before making such a change, even though this might not happen.i do hope that i have thoroughly explained this enough that you understand why i made - and continue to make - the decisions i have in regards to both of the issues which you kindly brought up.  i apologize if the conclusions i have reached are not to your liking, but unfortunately, this is the route i plan to take with regards to these issues.if you feel that these reasons are inadequate, then i suggest you unfollow.  as i have already stated, i do not plan to address this again with further anon messages, and although you are welcome to come discuss this with me off anon, i do not think it is likely that i will change my mind.  it is my humble request that you do not take more drastic measures, but given the current climate of this platform, i will understand if you choose to do so.  in fact, i was warned not to answer you by multiple people under the assumption that if i did not answer to your liking then such would be the result.but, nonnie, i like to think of you as a friend, someone who is bringing these issues to me so that i look into them further and try to find an avenue that causes the least harm so as not to offend a community of which i am part.  if you are truly my friend, as i hope you are, then i do not think you would treat me in such a way.  then again, perhaps your friendship is only based on my compliance on these issues, in which case i do apologize, again, and hope that your course of action is simply to unfollow.again, nonnie, thank you for asking and requesting i reconsider.  thank you for giving me the opportunity to explain myself, and i hope that we can continue as friends in the future.

[wifeasami]

Zhu Li, Tarrlok & Ozai if its okay to send 3 :)

ZHU LI:

Sexuality headcanon: i know i keep saying characters are bi....... but she’s bi.

Gender headcanon: i get nonbinary vibes from her....

A ship I have with said character: i like her relationship with varrick marginally more in the comics than in the show, which still isn't a whole lot. like am i remembering it wrong or did he go from treating her like an assistant to proposing in the span of like, a day? and she accepted?? i don’t even know how a relationship between the two of them could work, at the very least it has to be after a considerable amount of time bonding in a romantic context rather than going straight from boss/assistant to married (because there are moments where he still treats her like an assistant after marriage and it’s played for laughs?). and i know i know this sounds like a NOTP, but i don’t hate zhurrick. i like the potential it has and wish it had been done better, & hope it will be.

A BROTP I have with said character: okay i loved her and asami being Business Babes in turf wars

A NOTP I have with said character: bolin???? because apparently that’s a ship

A random headcanon: she keeps rabbits. idk why, that just popped into my head and i like it

General opinion over said character: nothing but respect for my president of the united republic. honestly i’m glad zhu li’s getting time to shine away from varrick and recognition of the incredible person she is! the presidency thing kinda came out of nowhere, but i’m glad we don’t have to see raiko’s dumb face anymore. and you KNOW she’s gonna kill it.

TARRLOK:

Sexuality headcanon: that gay coding is intentional, right?

Gender headcanon: hmmm i think tarrlok as a trans man could add some interesting context to his backstory, particularly in regard to him feeling inferior to his brother, as yakone was at least a teenager when the NWT forbade women and girls from fighting. so if he held those beliefs by the time he had kids, having a daughter may have been a disappointment. transphobia is never brought up in the avatar universe, but if the water tribes are okay with being gay then i would hope being trans is okay too. in which case i could see yakone being happy about it, but at the same time harder on tarrlok for not measuring up to “being a man”.

A ship I have with said character: i hc that he had a long-term partner, a waterbender and healer, who ended things with him when he started to become more paranoid and oppressive towards nonbenders in his anti-equalist quest.

A BROTP I have with said character: his relationship with amon/noatak was really interesting, and something i wish we saw more of. even just like, a longer conversation between the two of them before their deaths.

A NOTP I have with said character: KORRA. AMON. they're so disgusting.

A random headcanon: can't think of a better one rn, so i hc that he became basically his mother's carer before he began his career in government, shortly after which she died, as if she was holding on until he got his life started.

General opinion over said character: he’s a good villain! the joseph mccarthy/a. mitchell palmer parallels are fun, and the fact that he's partly inspired by azula is really evident. book one's plot just holds a special place in my heart, and i love characters with complicated family dynamics, so tarrlok and his family are up there as some of the most compelling characters to me

OZAI:

Sexuality headcanon: straight, but he's incapable of feeling love or affection.

Gender headcanon: cis man

A ship I have with said character: NOBODY. tho i’ve said before that his relationship with ursa does intrigue me while also making me extremely uncomfortable. i’m just gonna copy and paste what i wrote then: “i would love to read a well-written fic from ursa’s point of view, chronicling her time in the royal family, that’s respectful towards her and doesn’t go all game of thrones on the abuse she received, and handles it better than the comics. she’s such an important figure and deserves a better story than what we got.“

A BROTP I have with said character: ozai neither has nor wants nor deserves friends

A NOTP I have with said character: literally everybody, but especially ursa

A random headcanon: hmmm doing the math means izumi must have been born when zuko was in his 20s, so i hc that ozai was still alive as she was growing up, and while zuko banned him from ever seeing her, ozai still attempted to sway and influence her like he tried with zuko, with undercover prison guards and such scheming with his followers on the outside. i can see life imprisonment eventually making him into a shell of his former self, but i believe he's still a bastard for some decades before that.

General opinion over said character: god he’s a fucking asshole. his character is written well enough to make me incredibly angry and hateful, but he’s still bottom of my list of favorite main villains. the show did a great job of building him up as this super powerful final boss, but for me personally he’s not as compelling as azula and the LOK villains (maybe excluding unalaq, as they're quite similar). like, i find his personal life and relationships much more interesting than his ambition or power

[tieflng]

chocobox 2020 letter under the cut, because i do things and participate in things now i think.

dear chocolatier: thanks for writing for me! my actual requests were sparse because they were. quite long. especially the pyre one, because it turns out i have a lot of thoughts about minor/historical background characters as seen in the book of rites. so my prompts are all here, along with the dnws just repeated for good measure. thanks for reading all of this, i hope you can find something to have fun with.

pyre -

oops!! all golathanian! i was just really drawn to him reading the book of rites; there's something about an ordinary (certainly flawed) human man making the choices that brought every event in the game to pass and turned him into a godlike eldritch basketball saint. also, 'you gave your freedom that i might yet have mine' is a line i've been thinking about for an entire year. also, the g in lgbt is for golathanian. i'm really into the idea that the man the commonwealth could lionize as the ideal of strength is admirable not as a conqueror or warlord, but as someone with commitments to others that make him overcome his flaws-- someone who does the cooking for the group and makes dry comments and lectures out of worry and has a stupid laugh and acts like a grouch when he is secretly a giant softy. (and someone who is visibly gay and gnc, because the base of my mazlow hierarchy of needs is gay/bi men presented as admirable figures of authority, and i think that's something that should have been in the game, even if the commonwealth in-universe was going to erase it.) the heart and idealism and earnestness is what makes him worthy of respect, and that he's human, even if technically he ends up as a demigod sports-omen star.

i'm firmly in favor of autistic scribes (solidarity with chae) and scribes as large-r Readers. aside from soliam and khaylmer who both have cis energy i'm very up for any of the requested characters as trans or nonbinary, and near and dear to my heart especially are transfem chae and triesta and a nonbinary/my-gender-is-just-gay gol. explicit lgbt identities in general are a plus. environmental details-- i adore the richness and mystery and wonder of the downside, but i'd also kill for some sahrian imperial court ambiance. adventure is good, character study is always good, shenanigans and mischievous escapades between friends, misunderstandings that work out or not, angst with comfort is fine, moral or philosophical dilemmas or conversations (perfect for this group). it'd be nice to see something about titans, about (r/R)eading, the downside as an eldritch landscape, the simultaneous decay and might of imperial sahr, about turning into celestial bodies, a good old fashioned slow burn/mutual pining.

ha'ub & gol - i've always imagined these two are best friends - the first two scribes, 2/3 of the og triumvirate, and both dealing with the fact that 'mercy' means they have to keep soliam murr's fool ass alive. ha'ub is a chaotic little bumpkin who's never belonged anywhere, gol is an increasingly long-suffering visitor to purgatory dimension-- i feel like for all that he knows more about survival here than his new Big Friends, ha'ub feels just as indebted to them for being able to relate to him. it can't be easy being the first imp with human-like intelligence, or at least surely the only imp you know. misunderstandings between different species, teaching each other about sahrian human and downside imp customs, teaming up against howlers (did the howler/imp distinction exist yet, if all imps were wild and drive imps didn't exist??), learning to communicate with someone whose speech and language are very different. gol standing up for ha'ub in the 'why does an imp get a triumvirate' debate. why is ha'ub accursed? too, if there's gol/soliam, there's an opportunity for 'just kiss him already', or whatever misunderstandings imps have about human relationships/will-they-or-won't-they tensions.

gol & chae - please call the vagabond girl chae! i loved her basically at the moment i saw her and her arc means a lot to me. she’s autistic coded but her belief in the scribes-- in actually hearing and speaking to the scribes-- is never undercut by the narrative. and she’s immensely strong! she’s survived in the downside by herself from 17-19! and imo at least the scribe known for being strong and resilient and untiring, not to mention idealistic and loyal, would admire the absolute fuck out of her. i’d like her childhood as moontouched/homeless and displaced, her topside ending as a religious leader and inspiration in the sahrian union, wandering alone in the downside, her role with the nightwings-- i just really want to see what conversations these two would get up to, i want them to learn from each other, i want chae to have support and encouragement and comfort from everyone’s favorite nomad scribe. what does she ask him? what does he tell her? passing messages from ti’zo or the heralds? looking for advice/help on behalf of the nightwings, or just comfort when she’s feeling out of place? god, the fact that she’s in the companion class that parallels khaylmer-- do they talk about that, or how does gol feel? there are so many damn good interactions here. please don’t infantilize her or portray her beliefs and reactions as nonsensical or weird.

gol/soliam - i have so many thoughts about these two that i almost don’t want to say everything. my sense is they didn’t get together until the downside, with a very long enemies > grudging allies > friends > lovers, at least on gol’s end. you don’t jump over the edge of the world to kill someone and immediately kiss and make up. topside before he gets disillusioned there’s potential for that good courtly love - gol pining hopelessly (and perhaps obliviously, depending on how soliam acts towards him) for his beautiful distant liege, sol who so very clearly did not feel anything genuine for anyone as emperor, but who maybe has some ‘oooh, master-general ;)’ poking out of the hedonism-flavored depression. and then he falls down the river and realizes he was a big idiot. i could do very early sweet moments, courtly aesthetic and accidental intimacy, seeing a tender side to the emperor that most people never get close enough for/soliam murr Almost having a real feeling other than physical attraction. i could also do rebuilding their trust and rapport in the downside, mutual pining, growing closer despite everything and wondering privately if they couldn’t actually work out. or established relationship tenderness and fluff. i could also very much do explicit content with these two.

gol & khaylmer - ahh, yes. enemies. i got the impression from gol’s account (and gol’s account is really all we get) that these two hated each other, to ‘put his picture on the bull’s eye of the dartboard’ levels of hatred-- but also, maybe, that they had more in common than they wanted. gol and khaylmer as the only two grownups in a decadence-obsessed imperial court? certainly as the closest advisers to the emperor, whatever that means when your emperor is soliam murr. i always got the impression that gol was a bit more of a bastard than he let on-- nomad masteries are very ‘now i’ve thrown him off his rhythm!’ and you can’t tell me ‘preferred to fall on his enemies by surprise under the cover of darkness’ Isn’t the trait of a highly slippery character. then again, their worldviews and beliefs might as well be from two different planets, but then again again, do we really get an unbiased opinion on khaylmer to know what his worldviews really is? two driven and idiosyncratic people, more similar than they think, who just deeply hate and misunderstand each other at a fundamental level. also, please a deep dive into khaylmer’s head. lot of opportunity for backroom dealing and court drama here.

scribes & scribes - scribe adventures! or scribe shenanigans and arguments! i see these eight as having strong and contrasting personalities, but fundamentally caring about each other, even if they can get into real drama and conflict. fighting titans, exploring together, writing the book of rites, becoming eldritch basketball gods. found family is great, early stages of found family that grouchily insist they're business associates is better. there is so much you could do with these losers as a collective and i love them with my entire heart.

dnw: fantasy homophobia or transphobia, dubcon/noncon including under the influence, hand/eye trauma, unsanitary things, angst without a positive/hopeful resolution. in terms of explicit content, please no humiliation or impact play/physical pain. fandom specific: don't undercut chae's feelings or beliefs or write her in an ableist way. i also see gol and soliam as gay, and milithe and triesta as lesbians, so i'd prefer no references to past/current m/w relationships for them-- not because having m/w history invalidates gay peoples' identities, but because for me personally that'd be a horrible experience and it makes me sad thinking about my favorite characters going through that.

hades -

i did not expect to like a large soft-spoken honor-bound minotaur who duels you in honorable combat as much as i did, but probably should have knowing basic facts about myself. anything asterius-focused is great-- i really want to see him well-received in elysium and with a partner who cares about him......! he deserves nice things! elysium as a setting is so lush, environmental details, moments of respite, greenery, the river lethe, the elysian stadium, the beauty of eternal paradise And the fact that the people who live here decide to just beat the tar out of each other for fun.

this game has a really strong cast, and i'd love to see mentioned or featured olympians/house denizens/run npcs other than the requested characters. patroclus is a strong possibility for a fic in elysium, but achilles, hypnos, hermes/artemis/athena, and eurydice are also favorites of mine. i'm always down for explicit gay/bi identities, and i've been toying with trans masc zag and/or nonbinary aster.

Asterius/Zag - the inherent romantic tension of having a standing date to fight someone in hand to hand combat. but also, meeting outside of the arena in some way - a peaceful moment in a fountain chamber? maybe aster helps zag in a tough spot with some exalted? they both meet up in patroclus's chamber? i like how aster respects you for your strength and ability and the comparison he draws between them both as having been born monstrous/in darkness could use some (gentle) exploration. both of them uncovering hidden depths or softness in each other.

Asterius/Theseus/Zag - the inherent romantic tension of having a standing date to fight two people in hand to hand combat. i very much see this as an aster-centric v-- i don't really buy these or zag being into each other on their own, but learning to get along for the sake of their mutual boyfriend is good, and the comedy that ensues. anything i like in aster/zag or aster/these would be good here. absolutely not opposed to an aster-centered threesome (he deserves it).

Asterius/Theseus - how did these persuade hades to move the bull of minos to elysium? how did they become champions in the stadium? fighting by each others' sides, aster discovering after a mortal lifetime confined to a labyrinth that he's into men, these feeling weirdly compelled to show off or impress him. theseus training him in 'heroic ways'. theseus's lines about ariadne felt needlessly gross/borderline misogynistic and i'd like for them either to not come up Or for aster to sit him down and give him a piece of his mind. that's his sister, you idiot.

Cerberus & Zag - just a boy and his dog! cerby comforting a younger zag when hades is on his bullshit, or kid zag sleeping all cuddled up with his pubby. growing up and watching the house change. zag venting to cerberus or asking for advice, like you do with your pets when you don't expect an answer (and maybe getting one??). something in styx would be good, or zag finding any other kind of treat or toy and smuggling it back in from one of his runs.

dnw: fantasy homophobia or transphobia, dubcon/noncon including under the influence, hand/eye trauma, unsanitary things (please light on the descriptions of the satyr sack, lmao), angst without a positive/hopeful resolution. in terms of explicit content, please no humiliation or impact play/physical pain. as far as fandom specific: please nothing that portrays hades as good or justified in any of his actions. nothing zag/meg or zag/than; i really prefer zag and meg to have acknowledged their feelings and decided to stay friends.

arthuriana/let’s be real i’m here for the gawain and the green knight - 

......i'm just in this for the inherent homoeroticism. explicitly gay/bi gawain and bi bertilak is great, bertilak and his wife both being in on it is great, threesome? more christmas games? courtly flirting? being cozy inside? going on a dangerous quest? anything sounds great, just have fun with it!

dnw: homophobia including period-typical (just not why i read fanfiction), dubcon/noncon including under the influence, unsanitary things, hand/eye trauma, cheating/negative feelings between the hautdeserts, angst. in terms of explicit content, please no humiliation or impact play/physical pain.

[maneaterwithtail]

Panda thoughts

We’re now in a Quantum state with the characterization of Panda on We Bare Bears. You could very easily change it so that he’s learning about his sexuality or gender identity or something. This is the type pf character and time/situation that tends to attract people to lionize a character in a form of identity. Sometimes this can be good, after all I’m promoting the comic that basically recast and frames the Fryman family as a combination of both stand-in and actual trans Folk or as bisexual or homosexual. When a character ultimately speaks to a group reinterpreting them for that purpose is another form of enjoying art 

However part and parcel of the entire slash phenomenon is in many ways a kind of sexism.As soon as someone is a man and they in any way leave the check list of traits that we very rigidly and commonly defined as heterosexual or masculine than they must be gay or queer in some way Now interpretation is always going to be differing line for some people. For me when a work has aspect that does it seem as if gay characters exist or even being considered. Because by defining that boundary you can indicate that you understand how each is supposed to work. We bare Bears is definitely a show where gay people could exist. We often see same sex pairings which may be friends or may actually be dates. Of course it’s set in San Francisco and I think everybody knows that bear is often slang for a type of gay man by now.  OK KO is the same with two subtle but rather explicit male/male relationships (Lord Boxman and Professor Venomous, Nick Army and Joff, possibly Brandon and Real Magic Skeleton)  As such though I’d have put money on Gar being gay he really seems into Carol/KO’s mom.  No need to reinterpret characters being gay if speculation or be open to the idea. Panda in particular has always given off two contrary aspects which works for a comedy character. He’s incredibly thirsty for female companionship and romance and even has some retrograde and selfish ideas about what it is to be a woman and wanting to have one for his very own. . At the same time he often shows interest and is very very often put in scenarios in which he’s more or less easily inferred as being sexually gratifying or romantically pursued or entangled with a male character. At first this was Grizz later this was Charlie.

The overall idea of Charlie and Panda getting together as a couple definitely has some appeal. In the fact that a lot of the things that we associate with a romance, namely attaining emotional maturity, interaction, and learning to cross boundaries are very much a part of pandas experience when he’s interacting with Charlie. However at the exact same time I feel in order to make this subtext happen people are often ignoring the full context of it. Would we really be comfortable with the idea- if we’re all being gender-blind or not being limited by gender assumptions- with a romantic pursuer that constantly violate someone’s personal space keeps on insisting on intimate forms of address at the person’s constant denial who often never wants to be intimate or physically near the person? Panda has a lot of anxieties that Charlie attacks. This is fun to see because it creates drama and Conflict for us as well comedy. But does this necessarily mean that the best person for panda is Charlie?  

In some ways I much prefer the idea that Charlie is certainly someone who’s helping Panda expand but he’s not necessarily going to be his romantic love interest. I like the idea ultimately that Panda’s Journey has been about becoming a full-fledged full rounded person. Someone who can appreciate a romantic partner and all that that entails as well as being seen fulfilling someone else’s needs. More importantly a lot of the Romantic elements that people Champion as being indicative of Panda’s deep down attraction to Charlie kind of bother me in the context in which they are presented in the show and then taken out in order to share among the fans

In Charlie’s Foot Panda does not want to be associated with Charlie at all. The only time he starts to reciprocate is when he’s been drugged out of his mind and been forced by his brothers in order to do so. It’s kind of off-putting because it’s implied that someone can be effectively harassing the person physically and emotionally they have to break down and eventually accept what’s happened. If Panda was a girl and Charlie was doing this I imagine that a great deal of fans would feel deeply uncomfortable by the subtext implied 

I’m uncomfortable with the subtext implied by fan interpretations of Charlie effectively getting through to Panda as a romantic interest. Panda is straight. It’s as simple as that so far. Maybe he is bisexual or gay or maybe his sexuality is fluid. All of these are things that I can advocate and if they end up going there in the show I’m going to be interested. But I feel as if in fan presentation there’s this overall belief that there only way that Panda can actually Advance is if he’s ultimately going to turn out to be gay and especially gay for Charlie

This feels off-putting because Panda shows not just a disinterest in male contact but repulsion towards male contact outside of very specific areas. More importantly I think we kind of crossed this kind of subject matter several times in the show with the encounter of Tom and the number of times he’s had to interact with Charlie, Grizz, or be seen as “Cute.” He started to get out of his shell, yes, but it seems weird to say that the only way that he can ultimately grow up is if he decides to date dudes. He effectively ended up dating with Tom and that didn’t solve any of his problems his relationship with him in fact that highlighted a lot of the problems he already had

Effectively Charlie is fulfilling the role that often a love interest or pseudo love interest does in stories. He’s effectively affecting pandas character growth helping him become more empathic and see the world in a different light.   

The one time he accepted Charlie’s advances sober was preceded by “ I’m just too tired to fight you off anymore.” Does that seem really all that romantic or respectful or a positive message? That said, the idea in fan circles is given a lot of good use. I love how one fan artist has had kids for them and their characterization

 and they have this really great comic where they have both kids talk to buy both parents and they explain how they ultimately ended up together.

(reference)

That all said I often feel as if people re-characterize Charlie so he’s just a manic pixie dream girl there to enable male loves male scenarios. He’s missing a lot of his full characterization just so that that way he can be romantic love interest and given the changes that this demands of Panda’s core characterization, motives, goals, and progress that also bothers me I really do like some of the effort that’s been put into Panlie idea. So I’m in this weird place where I really like the fan idea but I’m not sure if I ever wanted to become Canon because it feels off to validate or say that that’s appropriate behavior. A lot of this came to head for me and some of the on Tumblr reaction to Summer Love. Panda’s actually been advancing in terms of his lovelorn character traits. For one he’s can actually seem to expand Beyond just Manga and Anime. If anything his relationship with Amanda felt more appropriate. Yes he did a lot of the Romantic pining and projecting but in some ways a lot of this was based on him putting in actual effort and other things. The fact that he’s able to finally get it and the conclusion of how things are supposed to be and appreciate that someone else has their own aims in life to live shows genuine maturity on his part. More importantly compared to most of his other attempts where it was like, “pretty girl I want to have her” here he saw someone whom he had potential connection with and connected her plights with his.

 He often didn’t seem to want to do something for someone he acted to do something to get someone. By contrast and comparison hei returning of Amanda’s phone, while of course involving some selfishness, is ultimately about fulfilling her. it’s why he doesn’t try to push any further when he realizes that she’s going her separate way. Unlike the manga who he’s been imitating he actually doesn’t force her to stay or choose him. So overall this is just me thinking out loud about characterization and reception. What are your thoughts?

[wiremagazine]

SPOTLIGHT FILMS: 22 OF THE BEST FILMS AT  THE 2019 OUTSHINE FILM FESTIVAL FORT LAUDERDALE EDITION

Photos and film synopses provided by OUTshine Film Festival

ADAM (U.S., 2019) Director: Rhys Ernst In English

It's 2006 and awkward, self-conscious Adam Freeman has just finished his junior year of high school. His cool older sister Casey (Margaret Qualley) suggests he visit her in New York for the summer. Casey has enthusiastically embraced life amidst Brooklyn's young LGBTQ+ community and invites Adam to tag along with her to queer bars, marriage equality rallies and other happenings. When Adam falls at first sight for Gillian, a smart, beautiful young woman in this new crowd, she mistakenly assumes he is trans. Flummoxed and enamored, he haplessly goes along with her assumption, resulting in an increasingly complex comedy – and tragedy – of errors he's ill-equipped to navigate.

AND THEN WE DANCED (Georgia, Sweden, France, 2019) Director: Levan Akin In Georgian, with English subtitles

Merab is a talented dancer. His burgeoning romance with stage partner Mary is thrown into disarray by the arrival of the magnetic Irakli, leading to a forbidden sexual attraction that recalls those in Moonlight and God's Own Country. Georgia is a country that only celebrated its first LGBTQ+ pride event seven years ago and its society remains conservative. Because of this, And Then We Danced has stirred controversy and many involved remain anonymous out of fear. Amid the potential for socially explosive fireworks, Swedish director of Georgian heritage Levan Akin has captured something uniquely tender and personal.

BENJAMIN (UK, 2019) Director: Simon Amstell In English

In Simon Amstell's affecting, bittersweet comedy, a rising young filmmaker is thrown into emotional turmoil by a burgeoning romance and the upcoming premiere of his second feature. It's perhaps no surprise that the imminent release of Benjamin's sophomore feature plunges him into an existential crisis. In this heightened state of insecurity, even meeting his potential dream match, young French musician Noah, doesn't soothe Benjamin's fears and self-loathing. And that's before he has to screen his film to the merciless film festival audiences. Benjamin is a low-key, intimate film, exposing the contradictions of a creative culture while perfectly balancing drama and comedy.

DEFIANT SOULS (Cuba, Switzerland, 2018) Director: Fernando Pérez and Laura Cazador In Spanish, with English subtitles

Defiant Souls is based on the true story of a woman who, disguised as a man, became the first female surgeon in Latin America. In the early 19th century, Swiss doctor Enrique Faber (Sylvie Testud at her best) travels to Cuba to search for his son, who is said to have been killed in a slave uprising. The local population is jealous of Faber's success as a surgeon and his marriage to Juana, an attractive outsider. Before long, rumors spread regarding his high-pitched voice and his gentle features, and a drama of epic proportions unfolds around one of the most scandalous cases in Cuban colonial history.

EVERYBODY CHANGES (Panama, 2019) Director: Arturo Montenegro In Spanish, with English subtitles

The Ponce Family is the perfect family. They live in the quiet, close-knit mountain town of Bambito, where everyone knows everyone and, unfortunately, everyone knows everyone's business. Frederico is the successful father, Carol the loving mother, and they have three wonderful boys. Despite appearances, perfect might not be the best way to describe the family as Frederico and Carol share a secret: Lizzie, the woman that Frederico has always wanted - no, needed - to be.

FROM ZERO TO I LOVE YOU (U.S., 2019) Director: Doug Spearman In English

Pete Logsdon is just a guy in Philadelphia whose fear of intimacy creates his history of getting involved with married men. His father and his soon-to-be step-mother are on him to settle down and find someone who's actually available. Instead, he finds a man named Jack who is fifteen years into a perfect marriage, has two beautiful children and an enviable wife, and is firmly inside the closet. Could this be the one? Featuring strong chemistry between the leads, director Doug Spearman (Noah's Arc) creates authentic characters in this highly engaging, obstacle-filled romantic comedy.

HAM: A MUSICAL MEMOIR (U.S., 2019) Director: Andrew Putschoegl In English

In this dazzlingly filmed live performance of Sam Harris' award-winning one-man musical, Harris belts out original songs and beloved ballads while playing 11 different roles to tell his own life story - from growing up gay in Oklahoma's Bible Belt to his escape for Los Angeles, where his rendition of "Over the Rainbow" on Star Search led to fame, Broadway, television, platinum records and Carnegie Hall. But after the highs and lows of a life in show business, Sam ultimately learns to ask: when is enough finally enough?

LEONARD SOLOWAY'S BROADWAY (U.S., 2019) Director: Jeff Wolk In English

Through verité documentary footage, humorous storytelling, interviews and archival film material, Leonard Soloway's Broadway captures a Broadway few ever see as told through the eyes of a legendary Broadway producer you've probably never heard of. He lives an unconventional life on his own terms and, over a 70-year span, staged over 100 shows (and counting) which generated history making headlines, over 40 Tony Awards, 62 Tony Nominations, 21 Drama Desk Awards, 29 Drama Desk nominations and 3 Pulitzer Prizes, in addition to launching the careers of famous stars known the world over.

SELL BY (U.S., 2019) Director: Mike Doyle In English

Does every relationship have an expiration date? Adam and Marklin are about to find out. Their 5-year relationship has gone from a passionate flame to a medium burn, forcing them to reconcile with each other's shortcomings all while watching their support network crumble around them. But in this mess, hope springs eternal as they all muddle their way through to try and make life work. Featuring Scott Evans, Augustus Prew, Kate Walsh, and Academy Award nominee Patricia Clarkson, Sell By asks the timeless questions… how do you know who's right for you and how do you know when to let go?

SONG LANG (Vietnam, 2018) Director: Leon Le In Vietnamese, with English subtitles

An unlikely bond develops between hunky, brooding and tough debt collector Dung and Linh Phung, a charismatic young opera singer from a struggling Cai-luong troupe (traditional Vietnamese opera). The two meet when Dung comes to forcefully collect a debt from the opera troupe, but when their paths cross again, a friendship – and then more – develops, awakening surprising, tender feelings in both men. Their story, too, soon scales operatic heights. Director Leon Le has delivered a rich drama, a smoldering relationship between two apparent opposites set against the backdrop of a gorgeous, fading art form. Set in 1980s Saigon, Song Lang is a gritty underworld noir hiding a tender, romantic heart.

STRAIGHT UP (U.S., 2019) Director: James Sweeney In English

The path to relationship bliss is often filled with self-doubt, second guessing and other methods of self-sabotage, but Todd takes this to a whole new level. After all, he is questioning his sexuality… not a good start when forging a new relationship. Todd might be gay. Rory might not care. The result is a neat, romantic-comedy drama with a twist; this is a love story without the thrill of copulation. With wit, humor and poignant moments, coupled with some of the best rapid-fire one-liners in a movie, Straight Up is a feature film about intellectual soul mates.

THE PRINCE (Chile, Argentina, Belgium, 2019) Director: Sebastián Muñoz In Spanish, with English subtitles

Chile, 1970. During a night of heavy drinking, Jaime, a lonely 20-year-old young man, stabs his best friend in what seems a crime of passion. Sentenced to prison, he meets The Stallion, an older and respected man in whom he finds protection and from whom he learns about love and loyalty. Behind bars, Jaime becomes known as The Prince. But as their relationship grows stronger, The Stallion faces the violent power struggles within the prison. The Prince is brutal, raw and cold, yet also beautiful, sincere and honest.

THE SHINY SHRIMPS (France, 2019) Director: Maxime Govare and Cédric Le Gallo In French, with English subtitles

Matthias, an Olympic swimming champion at the end of his career, makes a homophobic statement on TV. His punishment: coach the Shiny Shrimps, a very flamboyant, very bad and very LGBTQ water polo team. They have only one thing in mind: to qualify for the Gay Games in Croatia where the hottest international LGBTQ athletes will compete. It's the start of a bumpy and joyful ride. If the Bad News Bears were a water polo team, and LGBTQ, they would be The Shiny Shrimps. Faster, higher, stronger… and fabulous.

UNSETTLED: SEEKING REFUGE IN AMERICA (U.S., 2019) Director: Tom Shepard In English

A remarkable look at the untold stories of LGBTQ+ refugees and asylum seekers who have fled intense persecution from their home countries and who are resettling in the U.S. The film follows four new arrivals, each of whom have escaped potential peril in their native countries for being different. They've landed in the purported "gay mecca" of San Francisco, yet even there, building a new life in an adopted nation is a precarious undertaking. As new leadership in America continues to restrict immigrants and drastically cuts the flow of refugees and asylum seekers, Unsettled: Seeking Refuge in America humanizes a group about which few people know.

WHERE WE GO FROM HERE (U.S., 2018) Director: Anthony Meindl In English, French, with English subtitles

In Binghamton, an ESL teacher dealing with domestic abuse finds even greater violence at her school. In Orlando, two lovers drifting apart may be separated by the hate of another. In Paris, friends on an introspective night out are caught up in a brutal madness. Three acts of terror disrupt the lives of ordinary people. Will love win out over violence? With gripping performances and storylines all too familiar and frightening, Where We Go From Here is not an easy film to digest nor is it a question easily answered, but both are ultimately worth the effort.

MEN'S SHORTS

Black Hat  Director: Sarah Smith, U.S., 15 minutes

Softer Director: Lovell Holder, U.S., 10 minutes

The Proposal Director: Gerlando Infuso, France, 15 minutes

Thrive Director: JamieDi Spirito, UK, 17 minutes

Touchscreen Director: Arthur Halpern, U.S., 15 minutes

Vacaciones Director: Juan Olivares, Spain, 21 minutes

Wonder Director: Javier Molina, U.S., 16 minutes

This was originally published in Wire Magazine Issue 20.2019

[janiedean]

lol no idea about b/ellarke but i'm soo sick of seeing the platonic argument for jb too like even on the show season 6 had ONE b episode but it was so shippy that all my show-only friends who don't even care about the ship were like "such eye-sex, omg" and YET some will say it's platonic lol. that reply was a++

no listen I have a serious, serious, serious problem with the term platonic being attached to a lot of ships in order to deny that they’re romantic but especially with jb I really can’t stand it for a number of reasons and sorry but you touched on a sore point so I might rant at you but:

I’m sick tired of this idea that platonic relationships are inherently *purer* than romantic ones or that two people who are romantically in love with each other and have been written as such should be *platonic* because they somehow work better as friends. now, that’s brought up with m/m ships too, but with f/m ships - where the romance is maybe more expected because it’s the norm - there’s the really irksome habit of saying it when it’s not your typical couple. b/ellarke is an interracial couple with the male lead being half-filipino which is not a typical combination and guess why most of the bashing goes to him, but with jb we go to what is my serious fucking problem with it.

as in: it’s a hot guy and an ugly woman who happens to not be the kind you can turn beautiful with make-up and who is, actually, the stereotype deconstruction of a lot of things with her character type.

what I mean: usually ugly women who aren’t feminine in appearance or manners or who have *male*-coded jobs are lesbians or trans or hate being women and/or have gender issues and if they aren’t they usually go back to their feminine-coded jobs/appearance later (ie, I love eowyn to pieces but she’s hot regardless and her story ends with finding the man of her life and giving the sword up, and mind I ship it with the force of a thousand suns and I love how that story goes because it’s one specific trope tolkien knew what he was doing). brienne is ugly, and she’s also not lesbian or trans nor she hates being a woman nor she has issues with her gender - she happens to dress like a guy and do things guys do (ie: being a knight) because that’s what she’s good at, but she doesn’t resent being a woman, she only resents not having fit into society’s standards to give her father a heir that was either one or the other. she fell for renly because he danced with her without laughing and I have a feeling she wouldn’t have a problem wearing dresses if no one gave her shit for it. brienne is a woman who’s NOT pretty which makes her undesirable by society’s standards (and westeros’ tbh) but at the same time she’s the kind of seventeen year-old who irl would probably write mrs jaime lannister on her diary without realizing jaime writes mr brienne tarth on his, but never mind. and sorry but it’s not a model that’s very popular.

as in: I have weird issues when it comes to personally relating to brienne because I know I’m objectively a lot better looking but I never felt like I was and is2g in every single affc chapter of hers I read there was one flashback where she’d remember something that was the westeros version of shit that happened to me at some point in between elementary and high school. at some point it was creepy how accurate it was. and thing is: it was the first time in my life I actually related to a fictional character that way because at the ripe age of twenty-two I had never run into a female character who was UGLY, straight and not belonging to a romantic or sexual minority and who was never gonna get any prettier and who was also, incidentally, the person with the straightest moral compass in the series pretty much. wow. amazing. and guess what -

she’s also the tangible/possible love interest of a guy who’s a lot hotter than she is, who respects her greatly for her skills, who trusts her because of them and with whom she has a thriving relationship and who doesn’t give two fucks that she’s ugly and who, on top of that, even had not so platonic boners when seeing her naked. now, on her side it’s pretty much canon that she’s in love with jaime and honest I think it’s gonna be clear on his very soon, but like, the thing is that it’s not a dynamic that usually gets this kind of treatment. ugly guys tend to get hot girls, but hot guys always are with ugly girls who suddenly turned beautiful or weren’t really ugly in the first place or have one part of their body that doesn’t look good but are hot regardless, or who are ugly for someone’s standards but not for others. and honestly, I don’t care if people don’t ship it - you can dislike it how you want, no one is obliged to - but going like ‘ah but they’re friends WHY CAN’T THEY BE PLATONIC’ or the everlasting ‘but she’s too ugly for him’ (rotfl jaime is the one person who didn’t give a fuck about his brother being disabled/*ugly* for westeros standards you think he cares about brienne’s looks) is basically denying all over again that if you’re a woman who doesn’t look hot or attractive then you can’t be seen as a romantic or sexual desire object by someone who’s actually hot.

and I’m really fucking tired of that. I mean, I see that shit everywhere also with famous people (like I’ve seen people being shocked that hugh j*ackman’s wife is very average when they’ve been together since forever and they obv love each other??, same as m*isha collins’s wife like ‘oh I’m so surprised she’s really plain couldn’t he do better’) and honestly, from the point of view of someone who really has trouble seeing themselves as as such (because as stated before I really don’t see myself as good looking), having a canon romance where the girl isn’t hot and will never become such and it doesn’t fucking matter because the guy wants her regardless of her fucking attractiveness factor would be really, really refreshing.

but no. they’re friends. they’re comrades. it has to be platonic. can’t be that it’s romantic. you know what, no. it doesn’t have to be platonic. if you see it as such fine, but it can be romantic, there’s literally no reason for it not to be since on brienne’s side it’s basically canon and jaime certainly doesn’t think of her in platonic terms regardless of what he likes to tell himself (I don’t get boners for people I have no attraction to, and given that jaime in general doesn’t feel attracted to people that aren’t his sister maybe that means fucking something) and denying that it can be romantic in this case to me sounds dangerously like ‘but she’s ugly and he’s not so it doesn’t make sense’. yes, because in order to partner with someone you have to be the same level of attractive. yeah, nope.

anyway sorry for the rant but since as stated I have *personal* investment in the ‘can we stop saying ugly girls can’t be sexual or romantic partners’ issue I just really can’t stand this stupid argument especially for jb. especially when they treat it like a romantic relationship is somehow cheapening it. because, spoilers, some of us actually WANT romantic relationships and enjoy the idea and would also not mind some X-rated activity thrown in the mix and saying that this whole thing is somehow less noble than some crappy purity-based relationship where you’re supposed to have deep affinity but be just *friends* and love the soul and all that jazz is frankly a thing that should be deleted from existence.

especially when platonic in theory and in the beginning didn’t even fucking mean that and the sexual component was fundamental in the concept, but never mind that.

ugh, sorry I went on that rant but I really have Issues TM with jb attached to platonic love from people who want to deny at all costs that they have romantic potential rather than just say that it exists but they don’t care for the dynamic.