#realizing that I kinda feel disconnected from the whole Gender thing in the same way I feel disconnected from sexuality and romance

[immortalarizona]

for pride month I am haviiiiing. an itty bitty gender crisis

[enbies-and-felonies]

hey felony i've been following your blog for a while and you are a really amazing person and I appreciate you a lot!! I was wondering if you would be willing to kinda go into/discuss your personal journey with faith and queerness? it's something i've been struggling with recently and would really appreciate hearing your thoughts <3 (for real though, please don't feel obligated if youre not comfortable. I know this is a pretty hot topic, so please only if you're ok with it!!!!!!!)

first of all, thank you so much!!! I’m absolutely willing to talk about it, and afterwards if you have any questions (like, about specific aspects of it) I’m completely open to answering them :))

~~ Full thing under the Keep Reading, warnings for a lot of talk about God, Christianity, (a LOT of) homophobia, faith, and so on~~

I would like to start by saying you are completely valid, both in your faith and in your sexuality/gender, no matter what they are, and I am so proud of you.

okay, now about me laskdlsj

I have been raised as a Christian my whole life, and have gone to church everywhere I have lived, and my whole family has been very active in the Church body. It was church Sunday morning, AWANA on Wednesday evenings, and when I was old enough, youth group on Sunday evenings. (For awhile I even did a second youth group at a different church on tuesday nights)

My whole family is Christian (immediate family, that is) and because of that, I was raised surrounded by Christianity. The first two things when moving to a new place were (and are) 1. Unpacking and 2. Finding a new church.

All of this lead to me being more familiar with Christianity and the Bible than the average person. It also meant I had this... unspoken pressure to be Christian. So at a young age (around four I think?) I accepted that Jesus was the Son of God, that I was a sinner, and that by dying (and then coming back to life) Jesus had redeemed me from my sin. All well and good right.

I continued going to church two to three times a week, memorizing a few Bible verses for AWANA, and praying before every meal and sometimes bedtime. I grew older, moved, joined a new church, helped at a food pantry run by my church after a few devastating tornadoes. 

I saw God work in the aftermath of those tornadoes. I saw Him in the way we got donations for the ice maker we desperately needed to provide for disaster relief workers down to the cents of what we needed, and the way we were able to have meals for people who lost everything and the people who were working day in and day out to rebuild houses, clean properties, and overall do anything in their power to help the people affected.

My faith had never been stronger.

A year or so later I began to get really invested into BBC Sherlock, and with newly acquired access to the internet, I searched out the fandom on pinterest and wattpad. I was disgusted by all of the gay art and headcanons that came up. Didn’t they know that being gay was gross and a sin? it was repulsive and disgusting.

But I couldn’t avoid it. I was too far into the fandom and I ended up coming across more and more content with johnlock, crossovers with destiel, there was trans and ace sherlock, dean working through internalized homophobia (back when I didn’t even know who dean was, and I was still homophobic myself). Eventually I stopped clicking away whenever I saw a picture of john and sherlock embracing.

It was like... when you tell a kid they aren’t supposed to know about something, and they immediately want to know it all. I slowly began searching it out, because surely if people shipped them so much, there had to be something redeeming the fact that it was gay.

it started an interesting cycle of seeking out gay content, hating myself and the content because gay is BAD, loving the content because so much of it was loving relationships and heartfelt things, and then seeking out more gay content. eventually i accepted gay being okay, and after that (and a particularly moving trans!sam fic) i ended up accepting trans people.

and then came the hitter.

I started questioning myself.

I started relating to liking guys and girls, realizing that *maybe* finding girls that pretty wasn’t just platonic, and so i did a pro-gamer move (/s) and immediately became homophobic again. i couldn’t be gay, or bi, or anything, because that was WRONG

but it wasn’t. and eventually i was able to admit to myself that i wasn’t straight. I identified as bi at first, and even though i didn’t tell anyone about it, i was still happy that i was finding myself. (even though i still looked away when i noticed a girl was pretty)

then i realized that pan was just, a better fit for me? so pan it was!! and thus began the questioning!! since then I’ve come to id as ace, aro-spec, pan, and polyamorous, and eventually (after a severe gender-crisis) genderfluid.

throughout all of the questioning... I’ve really struggled in my identity and my faith. i often feel like i have to choose between the two.

i’ve been raised to think that if i accept my identity as a queer person, i lose my identity in Christ. and that, if i want to accept my identity as a child of God, i have to reject who i am (and that is partially correct, since i have to reject my sinful nature, but that’s not the same)

but that’s not how it is!! once you believe in God, and accept that Jesus died for your sins, you are irrevocably a Christian, and NOTHING can stop you from being a child of God and going to heaven. Not any sin, not anything you think, or say or do, for the rest of your life.

the thing is, the bible that we *think* condemns homosexuality, actually condemns incest, pedophilia, and adultery. God made people in His own image, and when he saw what he had made it was GOOD. He made me the way I am for a reason, and He LOVES me the way i am.

I still deal with a lot of internalized homophobia and transphobia. but,,, I also know that God is love. He is never-ending, overflowing love. and He thinks of me as His kid. 

My faith has struggled a lot since I started accepting my queerness, but... it’s not God that’s condemning me, it’s the Church (and not even all of the church!!) and my queerness doesn’t mean i can’t follow God and obey Him.

I have bad days, and I have good days, and even when I feel disconnected from God, I know that He loves me and that He is proud of me.

and the same goes for you, okay?

you are not disobeying God for being queer, and being proud of your faith doesn’t mean rejecting your queerness. He loves you and made you the way you are, and He is so proud of you. <3

[mystt]

i have a lot of thoughts about the state of homestuck right now and no one to talk to about it. im so sorry

i really want to love june egbert with all my heart, accept her with open arms!!! i relate so much to the idea of a weird awkward guying going thru a lot of his life feeling like something was wrong, like there was a disconnect between himself and the rest of the world, only to eventually realize that the problem was so deeply rooted that he never even realized that it could BE the problem! all of the art has been amazing, of seeing this just-out trans girl finally ecstactic to be herself and her friends meeting her for the first time all over again. the #juneisreal party on twitter yesterday was the most joyous and connected ive seen the homestuck fandom be for a long time!! but, because this is homestuck, i dont think everything about this situation is all sunshine and rainbows, not in the longterm anyway.....

frankly, a lot of ppl aren’t too happy about this, and they have every right to feel that way.  i can sympathize with those people because tbh i wasn’t a huge fan of roxy being transmasc in the epilogues (to be fair, theyve grown a lot on me now that ive had some time to think about it / see content involving them)! john has been an established character for a long time, someone that a lot of ppl have grown a very deep and personal connection with! its totally possible that someone read homestuck, interpreted john’s character in a very similar way to i just did, and come at the totally opposite outcome! maybe john is actually a trans guy and has a lot of trepidation navigating sexuality and gender because of it. the point is that all of it is valid, and as long as everyone respects eachother’s headcanons we’ll all be fine and dandy, right?

well, with hussie making her ‘real,’ the fandom dynamic around june (and roxy) content will inevitably change. the letter that hussie wrote for the epilogue is a bunch of garbage but it basically boils down to the epilogues not really being an epilogue but an on/off ramp to whatever homestuck ends up being in the future. this all but guarantees more june/transmasc roxy content, which im totally down for, but will that content be as ‘dubiously canon’ as the epilogues were? and if not, what happens then? 

are we supposed to believe that basically all homestuck content from this point on is al-a-carte, where each reader is able to pick and choose what is and isn’t canon? we were already doing that, but that’s the fandom’s job! call me crazy but there has to be some separation between fanon and canon! otherwise, you get complete mob-rule anarchy, which we’ve already seen wrt roxy and june!

homestuck is in a lose-lose situation with its characters at this point. the core appeal of the WHOLE DAMN COMIC is that all of its characters have very defined personalities and very amorphous everything else. homestuck is so everlasting because every reader comes out of it with their own permutations of each character in their head.....almost like.....a headcanon, u could call it!

but at the same time, homestuck has to have more ~representation~ in its cast nowadays. its just the trend that all media is following as people demand to see more of themselves reflected in the things they enjoy. that is absolutely valid in most forms of media where characters are well-defined in their identity, but that doesn’t work with homestuck, because no matter what you WILL be stepping on the toes of someone’s version of a character that they’ve been fostering in their own head for god knows how long

i think there ARE ways to make homestuck’s cast more diverse in a concrete way without making everyone upset! the first is to......make new characters......if homestuck really is entering a new era, why can’t it burst onto the scene with a new rainbow cast of misfits for everyone to imprint themselves onto? not enough trans mlm rep? why not make a new one (that isnt lanque)! not enough canon autistic rep? hire an autistic person to make an autistic character! friendsim would’ve been perfect for this, but they didnt take advantage of it basically AT ALL (and where they did they......kinda fucked up lmao)

something else ive seen suggested is to establish new identities for characters that don’t fundamentally change who they are. if you’re like me and you think homestuck needs more trans girls, why would you take JOHN of all ppl and make him mtf when you have a perfectly good rose....or jade....or terezi (or roxy but eh. thats not on the table anymore) right there!  

and i think its important to say that i dont blame this at all on the original creators of the june headcanon, i appreciate what theyve done and the works theyve inspired a lot! its not their fault, but things have really REALLY got out of hand. with pesterquest on the horizon, i think we’re in a fascinating and nervous period for homestuck. things are going to be changing soon, and i dont know if its gonna be for the better :C

[catboyfeli]

i think the reason i was so adamantly against the concept of nonbinary is, well partially because of crazies on tumblr ruining things, but also because? i thought it was normal for cis people to feel disconnected from their gender? and that social dysphoria was just caused by sexism so it didn’t count? and i thought me not having sex dysphoria meant i’m cis?

but apparently cis girls don’t get excited at the idea of being called he or doing drag or presenting as male, and the way people explained it made it sound like they were just tomboys or gnc cis girls or something, so i thought nonbinary as a concept enforced gender roles and therefore was harmful

but like now i get it. i still don’t like how the nb community forces the label onto anyone who doesn’t conform to gender roles and social roles, but like i get it now, i really do. i was feeling dysphoria this whole time and just brushed it off as internalized misogyny or me being sad that all the guys i like are gay or hating myself for being cis or wlm or something.

buuut ever since realizing this, i suddenly feel way more dysphoric and there’s no way for me to be seen as male and female at the same time and it sUCKS. i def don’t think i’m trans b/c i like being seen as female, but i also like being seen as male :/ the fact that i can’t really be both makes me uncomfortable feeling

but also like?? i’m comfortable with my body? for the most part?? so i’m worried i’m just confused or faking it lol. idk it’s complicated.

anyway the thought that i might be nonbinary fuckin terrifies me like i don’t wanna be seen as one of those crazies and i just?? aaaa??? kinda wish i never realized things so this dysphoria would gO AWAY

[eremji]

Thoughts on Infinity War, and Thanos' Motivation

Disclaimer: I'm not a Marvel expert. Some of my information on comic plots was collected from wikis and secondary articles, due to a lack of access to a primary source or the simple inaccuracy of my own memory. I also mostly enjoyed Infinity War, and any criticism herein should not be taken as decrying the whole.

Spoilers behind the cut. Please close your eyes and scroll super fast, block tags, duck and cover, etc. if you’re on mobile, because, seriously, spoilers.

An extremely simplified version of movie production:

From a production standpoint, Iron Man was a huge risk for the studios fronting the money for it. After critical and box office flops from 90s Batman films and other various superhero action flicks, studios typically found comic book movies to underperform in comparison to budgetary requirements for good visuals, making them unattractive. Marvel has taken a large step away from making comic book movies, to making comic book adaptations, because what works on the page doesn’t work in a moving picture.

Marvel Studios’ cinematic success has almost nothing to do with how compelling the source material is – because some of Marvel’s library is pretty much slush pile garbage. This was before your average artist or consumer realized you can get pretty literary while still having cool pictures on a page. They’re valuable because they propelled the comic industry to widespread success, but the source is best examined with a critical eye towards tone deaf and anachronistic viewpoints on race, sexuality, gender, and pretty much everything else. Marvel Studios has done a fairly consistent job of divorcing the cinematic canon from the original medium’s baggage, to which I attribute a large portion of the films’ success in comparison to very lukewarm iterations of DC or X-Men.

As media consumers, we’re accustomed to having a finished product to hold and analyze. When considering story, in terms of plotting and pacing, I personally believe it’s most helpful to compare the scope of the MCU production to be similar to that of a television show, rather than a traditional movie or movie series. It may be startling to know that even very successful television shows, like Breaking Bad or Stranger Things, often don’t even have all the episodes completely written out prior to beginning filming of a season.

Marvel Studios’ movies have been in production for ten years, with many, many different hands in the pot, and earlier scripts don’t always set up the best planting and payoff of character or plot elements later in the continuity. (For visual learners, Lindsay Ellis has a very layman-friendly example using clips from Mad Max: Fury Road.)

You can see where this might start to cause some consistency issues.

Crossover event comics and the necessary sacrifice of emotional development:

For anyone walking in to expecting Avengers: Infinity War to have a lot of character development, I’m very sorry for your loss.

There was never going to be a grand emotional reunion for Steve and Bucky, and there was never going to be whole hours dedicated to bonding and witty bickering and new friendships that weren’t absolutely vital to the plot. That we got things like the Steve-and-Bucky hug, the jealous Star-Lord vs. Thor moments, and Steve introducing himself politely to Groot were for the benefit of the audience more than advancing the plot, which is a huge victory in terms of crushing as much as possible into a theatrical cut.

A film production has a finite amount of screen time to allocate before a movie becomes bloated. When people joke about Infinity War being the most ambitious crossover event, I don’t think some of them realize how on the mark that is from a production standpoint. Hard decisions have to be made between what isn’t vital to advancing plot in a compelling way and what was retained to meet audience expectations. Infinity War often felt like it tried to recapture that Joss Whedon-ish sassy-but-kinda-flat comedy from the first Avengers, and that meant punchlines for jokes sometimes land at emotionally inappropriate times because characters just don’t have cinematic space for witty banter between shooting aliens and losing everyone they ever cared about.

There’s a difference in author-audience expectations of what’s important in these team-up movies, and also gaps between fans actively participating in fandom because they love the characters and casual moviegoers looking for a blockbuster. It all comes down to how much each party in the creative transaction is willing to settle for. Traditionally, Marvel has set up the character-driven plots and subplots in individual comics with occasional crossover cameos for a few issues when another character or baddie is relevant to the plot. The large crossover events, like Civil War, Contest of Champions, or Infinity are almost always plot-heavy and character-light.

This is so much easier in comic book format, where multiple series can be coordinated in regular, paced releases, and different comic issues may happen parallel or directly before/after the event crossovers. Movies take a significantly larger amount of time to produce, through pre-production, filming, post-production, marketing, and distribution.

A brief (I’m serious, they’ve been making comics since the 1939) explication of source material:

One of the largest disconnects for me, as a fan of both the comics and the movies, was the change in Thanos’ motivation, but not his mission. For those who aren't aware of the origins of his character, he essentially wants to murder people to impress a girl – Mistress Death, to be specific. He wants to kill half of all life in the universe so that he can be her equal and win her affection. 

Dorkly did a pretty solid breakdown of some of Thanos’ Infinity Gauntlet story and the innate misogynistic slant of his character, including comic panels from the original source material, that paints comic!Thanos an internet Nice Guy™. (Feel free to skim the article; it's a bit slow to get to the point.) Perusing the comic panels, you can see Thanos is hella into negging and is spiteful when Mistress Death shows interest in another dude (spoilers: it’s Deadpool). He clearly believes love is possession, and if he can’t have what he wants, then, good golly, no one can.

He’s also really off the rails – dubbed the Mad Titan even before his objectification mega crush on a badass corpse with a wicked bod – and is personally responsible for destroying Titan. He’s not a villain that believes he’s the hero, and this shift away from his motivation being dangerous-and-horrible to dangerous-and-misguided casts the first shadow on the premise.

My (very personal) opinion on the execution:

MCU essentially played keep away with some of the more supernatural elements of the source material, at least until introducing Dr. Strange. In doing so they had to construct Thanos’ motivation for a comic-book-inspired task out of whole cloth. There is no Mistress Death. Secondary characters that were discrete entities are often pulling double duty*.

(*Or triple. See also: Bucky Barnes, who is wearing the backstory of Captain America's gay best friend Arnie Roth and now White Wolf. If you were previously unaware of this factoid, please enjoy the irony that Marvel’s biggest pro-American propaganda piece had an openly gay best friend circa early 80s but Civil War ham-fistedly had to work in that awkward-as-fuck smooch between Steve and Peggy Carter’s hot young romantic surrogate niece.)

So, okay, they have to reinvent Thanos, who we've only seen in a handful of post-credit scenes and vicariously learned, through Loki in the first Avengers movie and then Gamora in Guardians, is a conqueror and also really Bad News™.

I buy everything so far. And why not? Black Panther made me love Killmonger and his rage, and the parallels to contemporary issues made him fairly empathetic without highlighting that his perspective was necessarily the ‘correct’ one. Similarly, Spider-Man: Homecoming’s villain, Vulture, was believable in the sort of suffering everyman-turned-desperate way, highlighting the fallout of the Space Invaders vs. Avengers destruction without suggesting the audience should root for Vulture.

In general, I am on board for these movies going straight for the throat on the big baddies of the comic universe because movie production is lengthy, expensive, and time-consuming. Dear Marvel Studios, Give me Avengers vs. Dr. Doom. Love, Me.

A villain can be built up over the course of a single movie (or two). Armed with this optimism, and heartened by recent Marvel Studios successes in characterization, I walked into Infinity War expecting as much gratuitous violence, universe-cleansing genocide, and genuine fear of Thanos as I could possibly expect from something Disney-adjacent.

I knew people were going to die. Let me say – there was no way to spoil this for me. The Infinity Gauntlet comic series starts with half the universe dying. I expected there to be ‘casualties’ and even though the Russo bros said that this wasn’t two parts of the same movie, it’s certainly serial. At minimum, I was expecting Thanos bent on conquering the cosmos, worshiping at the altar of death in the abstract, if not groveling for an inevitable-cosmic-force-turned unattainable woman.

And yet. And yet.

We got the purple version of the Kool-Aid man with some seriously unaddressed parent-child issues (mirrored in Tony Stark’s loss of Peter Parker) and a wholly unimaginative motivation. I won’t go too far much into the movie’s alarming efforts at framing Thanos as a sympathetic character despite his genocidal and horribly abusive tendencies, because I am A) not an expert at identifying film technique and B) the push for Thanos to be an empathetic villain has been analyzed elsewhere.

Phenomenal, limitless cosmic power and all you want to do is break shit? For all the immaturity of it, Thanos’ comic book motivation was more believable.

To those arguing that the his motivations in the movie are predicated off of him being the Mad Titan and therefore not rooted in logic: The film did not explicitly plant the idea – except in the way that we know genocide is bad due to an innate sense of morality – that he was unhinged and power-mad, nor did they really give the audience any payoff.

Instead, we get, ‘I don’t really want to do this, but I must.’

There was a point where I started wondering why the hell he wasn’t just being steadily roasted by the Avengers for not receiving some sort of basic education in the evils of wealth disparity and resource distribution.

As an audience member, was I meant to believe this incredibly powerful entity at the center of a massive fleet, accompanied by a group of talented and sycophantic followers, couldn’t think of a better way to bring ‘balance’ to the universe?

Perhaps Thanos’ justification is simply the conceit of the way the universe operates, required to propel a plot forward. However, this is also poorly explained. There are many unanswered questions: Why is it a given that killing half the universe will create balance? What does balance look like? Is this state permanent or is it a routine, necessary evil in order to stop entropy? Is balance a socioeconomic state, or does it have some greater cosmological significance? We know that Titan fell after rejecting Thanos’ extreme solution, but would the population have actually endured and flourished if his plan had been carried out?

For a movie that did so well at handling a cast so phenomenally large as the one involved in its production, Infinity War really didn’t go in very hard on selling Thanos. I would have been perfectly happy if Marvel Studios had taken the risk to lean in hard on making the movie Thanos-centric, given Thanos even more screen time to develop his character, motives, and the rules of the universe – and then make Avengers 4 about, you know, the actual avenging.

Parting notes:

What are we left with?

Infinity War gifted us with some badass action clips, a fairly jarring death performance by Tom Holland, Cheerful Goatherd Bucky Barnes, and emotionally traumatizing bubbles. It never really sells the conundrum it sets up via Thanos. You'll never hear me insist a peice of art or entertainment is required to carry some sort of social commentary or moral message, but I feel like this could have been, tonally, a vastly different film had it considered the core of Thanos' motivations the same way it considered Vulture's or Killmonger's.

Also, where the hell is Adam Warlock (set up at the end of GotG: Vol. 2; revisit planting and payoff) to shit talk Thanos’ lack of villainous veracity when we need him?