#tales from terf island

[sachermorte]

was hanging out with a friend on mahü and heard "ROLAND!!!" in chorus

whipped around to see four of my students from the camp in england jumping up and down like they met one of the jonas brothers. got crushed in a group hug. wild wild stuff. meanwhile my friend was just standing off to the side like "roland. roland why do you know these children. what's going on"

[sachermorte]

LITERALLY. I'm in the UK right now and the London tube is an absolute joke. Which is why the camp I'm working at is really just using charter buses and our feet, because holy shit. Why is it Like That.

man, the London tube kinda sucks, like I am so sorry to London people, that your underground ain't better

[qqueenofhades]

Can I request a further rant on Alice Albinia's The Britannias please?

Anonymous asked: 'Further rant available upon request' here is my official request.

Aha. You are both prompt and accommodating. And it is my lunch break, so let's do this!

For context, this is the book in question:

This book was recently published, comes highly reviewed and (as I said) has apparently already been longlisted for some prestigious nonfiction writing/women's prizes. I got it from the library the other day and started reading it; I'm about 150 pages in. It has given me an increasing Itch to the point where lo, yes, here I am on Tumblr about to compose a Statement. This may be because of what the book blurb states upfront as its focus and goals:

Trespassing into the past to understand the present, The Britannias uncovers an enduring and subversive mythology of islands ruled by women. Albinia finds female independence woven through Roman colonial reports and Welsh medieval poetry, Restoration utopias and island folk songs. These neglected epics offer fierce feminist countercurrents to mainstream narratives of British identity and shed new light on women's status in the body politic today.

Okay... well. Basically, she wants to write a history of Britain as focused on its islands, which in itself is a perfectly valid thing to do. As she states in the introduction, focusing on the history of a place through its physically and geographically marginalized locations, its relation to the "mainland," the constructions of power and identity, how one resists and influences the other, is all a very interesting thing to do. It's just how she does it that gives me a twitch. Her clearly stated goal is to find a "hidden women's history" wherein these "fierce feminist countercurrents" are allowed to inform and eventually subvert a totally androcentric and oblivious mainstream British history that has apparently prevailed largely unchallenged ever since antiquity, and where the Male Process of History deliberately destroyed and excluded all female contributions. She is somehow, apparently, the first one to notice this and/or put it together.

Now I'll be honest, the Secret Magical Women trope also gives me a twitch wherever it appears, whether in saccharinely self-important historical or fantasy-historical fiction or in this case, attempted historical nonfiction. Albinia's thesis also seems, essentially, directly lifted from Marion Zimmer Bradley's Mists of Avalon fantasy series in the 1980s: the pagan Celtic/British tribes were egalitarian, proto-democratic, female-led and/or female-centric, and the conquering Romans/Christians/Saxons were all virulently misogynist, masculine, authoritarian, and determined to stamp out this wherever it appeared. I have only gotten up to about the year 1000 (it goes chronologically), so I can't speak to what rationales Albinia comes up with for the later centuries, but let me just say: Hmm. It says a lot about the overall style of this book that I read the first 10 pages and then immediately picked up my phone to check Wikipedia and see if she was a TERF. As far as I can tell, fortunately, she isn't, but it does give me the same binary gender-essentialist vibe (men are from Mars, women are from Venus), and yikes. Basically, there are a lot of things going on here, and all of them are Not Good when it comes to the actual practice and investigation of premodern women's history:

First, while Albinia cites a few research articles (via endnotes) and translations of primary sources (thus far, mostly Roman and early medieval) we know nothing about her qualifications for using these sources, how she is comparing and analyzing them, whether they should in fact be taken at face value, whether anyone else has written on these topics (spoiler alert: yes), or why we are supposed to buy her narrative of this Hidden Female History of Britain. For example: she includes several passages from Roman writers discussing (reported) actions or (reported) mythologies of British women or British female-associated places. These are presented as uncritical and general fact, or something which we should apparently assume was really happening as described, even when she (occasionally, and shallowly) points to the issue of using exterior and non-contemporary male writers from far away. Her analysis also does not touch at all on the potential metatextual or political impulses these Roman male writers might have for presenting a freshly conquered imperial territory as corruptly or unacceptably feminine, and whether this correlated at all to an overall real-world practice or belief. Yes, as far as we can tell, the ancient Celts were in some ways more "feminist" than the Romans, in that Roman public culture was deliberately and exclusively masculine and patriarchal and any civic participation by women in other societies would thus appear as more than usual. But that is a whole can of worms for many reasons, none of which are highlighted or dealt with here. (Like... are we even going to talk about how the "Roman standard" for society was itself re-created by the Renaissance and how that shapes Western historical views, or...?)

As I said above, the book completely brushes aside any of the previous existing scholarship on these topics (done, you know, by actual historians) and presents it as Albinia discovering these issues or formulating these arguments for the first time. She does mention a few other people whose work she relies on or who are informing her hypothesis, but several times thus far, this is from the 1920s or some other clearly outdated argument. Nobody in the field is still treating arguments made in the 1920s as au courant, and while I can't say for certain, it reads as her being more able to access older or public-domain work (since more up-to-date publications require institutional access or paying for copies) and doing the equivalent of the people on Wikipedia who cite the 1911 Catholic Encyclopedia for everything: they can get that text for free, so that's what they refer to. Now obviously, we all support uncovering feminist strands of history, doing feminist history, challenging heteronormative or patriarchal narratives, etc. But also, we support doing it well and making some reference to the complexity of it!!!!

Likewise, Albinia is a white British woman whose previous books are based on her time living and traveling in India and Pakistan (both of which are, uh, previously British colonies). I have not read them, so I can't speak to how she treats it, but there's certainly an element of exoticizing them here, and while she does make passing reference to the British Empire's effect on those places, she does a sort of weird inverse here. She obviously knows about the basic facts of empire and colonization, but there's a notable amount of time dedicated to portraying ancient/Celtic Britain as the helpless victim of constantly brutal Roman colonization (she makes a few very brief and offhand references to cultural miscegenation and how this process unfolded in ways apart from violence, but they are clearly secondary to her main thesis of this as a masculine rape analogy). She is very clear about mourning for this "sacred divine [female] Britain" which was then destroyed by the unrelentingly violent and misogynist forces of Roman (cultural/military) and Christian (religious) colonization, and as I said, that is straight up Marion Zimmer Bradley. I haven't gotten past said first 150 pages, but I'm not terribly confident that her historical analysis improves much in the centuries to follow.

The book does have some bright spots: it's well written, it's engaging, she includes some colorful and interesting sociological vignettes about life on the margins of modern Britain, and there are certainly some things she's mentioned that I would like to look into in more depth. But yet again, this is being presented as an Authoritative or Revelatory History deserving of recognition and prizes, when there are real historians who have done so much of this work and in so much better ways. There is very little nuance to her thesis, no context or analysis or critique provided for her sources (yet again: why are we supposed to take Roman men as an authority on British women and why is she presenting them as obvious empirical fact while critiquing all other elements of their system/society?) and some squicky assumptions around gender and empire that really would need to be drawn out and examined in more detail. The Secret Magical [Pagan] Women Erased In History By Brutal Men gimmick is one that got a lot of traction with Philippa Gregory (sidenote: bookstore websites really need to stop recommending me Philippa Gregory for Women's History Month before I do crimes), and has been exasperatingly hard to eradicate ever since. Just to name one, we need to talk a lot more about the gender politics of medieval Christianity, any of the work done on this topic already, or anything else that would complicate her argument beyond the simplistic black-and-white state in which it currently exists. There are plenty of historians who would like to do that! Why don't you give some of THEM a call?!?!

Anyway. There is probably more I could say (and might), but I will leave it here for now. Thank you for the indulgence, etc.

[berylshores]

⸻⸻⸻⸻⸻

“On the coast of a small island known as Beryl Shores, sleepy ‘town’ Sandborn Moores serves as home for a dedicated few. Yet it can hardly be considered a village with less than 50 residents. Mysteries lurk in the waters, there has to be a reason approaching ships keep sinking and outside danger never seems to befall the coast. Yet none have truly seen the creatures in the depths, for dead men tell no tales.”

// > Hi!! I’m Dex AKA @eternallyoctober, and this blog is dedicated to an ongoing worldbuilding project I’ve been working on, a mer-AU of the FNAF DCA’s. However, I consider this to be kinda separate, sorry if you came here for fnaf-centric content :’)  // > This is sort of a mix of an rp-blog, ask-blog, and art-blog so… do whatever! Asks to and about characters are always open, so please don’t be shy. I’ll also be posting random art and tidbits as this serves as a sort of archive of anything I want to dump. Maybe even some writing tidbits? Open to suggestions and requests, too! 

                                                 ⋅•⋅⊰∙∘☽༓☾∘∙⊱⋅•⋅ Character Introductions - // Moondrop + Sunrise // [More to come.]                                                 ⋅•⋅⊰∙∘☽༓☾∘∙⊱⋅•⋅

// > Please read the below things before interacting ⤵

🌊 ˑ༄ؘ ۪۫۫ - BE AWARE - There is a lot focused on the relationships between the two sirens and Joel, the protagonist, which can be interpreted as romantic, s3xual or platonic. While many acts are traditionally romantic and can even be interpreted as risqué, it is platonic centered. Please refrain from overly sexual asks or comments! 

🌊 ˑ༄ؘ ۪۫۫ - TRIGGER WARNINGS - Violence/mentioned violence and death, possessive behavior, unwanted physical intimacy/touch, emotional abuse and manipulation, etc. this ain’t a relationship guide, so don’t treat it as such, y'all. 

🌊 ˑ༄ؘ ۪۫۫ - DNI - Homophobic/Transphobic, Pedo/“Map”/“No-map”, Zoos, TERFs, Neo-Nazis, NSFW, or anything of the sorts. Also please avoid unconstructive criticism or rude comments, I'm cringe and that's based yada yada

🌊 ˑ༄ؘ ۪۫۫ - OVERALL - Mystery, horror, angst, fluff, it’s all here babey  . also gay fish

thank you <3

[brucefromfamilyguy]

Oh you're a terf too? Every time you post I love you more <3

FULL NAME

Bruce

LAST REPORTED AGE

52

PRIMARY EMPLOYMENT

Clerk of a horror novelty shop in "Chitty Chitty Death Bang"

CPR Teacher in "The Cleveland-Loretta Quagmire"

A medium in "Petergeist"

A priest in "Boys Do Cry"

A therapist in "Peter's Two Dads"

A lawyer in "Stewie Kills Lois"

A masseuse in "Baby Not On Board"

Bowling alley shoe counterman in "The Splendid Source"

Bartender in "We Love You, Conrad" (DVD exclusive)

Referee in "Baby, You Knock Me Out"

Laser Tag operator in "Forget-Me-Not"

Waste management in "Island Adventure"

Bowling alley desk in "Better Off Meg"

Couples counselor in "Boys & Squirrels"

Bruce is a major recurring character on Family Guy, known for his various jobs.

Bruce rarely appeared at all in the first three seasons of the show, but has become a recurring character since the show returned from cancellation.

He first appeared as the clerk of a horror novelty shop in "Chitty Chitty Death Bang". In "The Cleveland-Loretta Quagmire", he teaches a CPR course at the Quahog Community Center. His name was first revealed when he appeared as a member of the school board committee of James Woods Regional High School in "No Chris Left Behind". This position was implied when he heard the name change proposal to Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial High School sought by Shauna Parks and Brian Griffin in "Peter's Got Woods".

He appear as a Tetris piece in "Prick Up Your Ears" and as a medium in "Petergeist". He worked for Exotic Entertainment.

In "Untitled Griffin Family History", it is revealed he had an African American slave ancestor named Tobi, who spelled his name with several accents, and is seen being whipped by an English colonist.

In "Road to the Multiverse", he performs "It’s A Wonderful Day for Pie" as a parody of Tinker Bell in the Disney-style universe.

He is Peter Griffin's lawyer for his trial in the accused murder of his wife Lois in "Stewie Kills Lois". He calls Jeffrey about Stewie in "Lois Kills Stewie", and about Peter's mustache in "McStroke".

In "Boys Do Cry", he offers communion wafers with wine. He explicitly warns Stewie not to drink the wine.

In "Baby Not On Board", he is a masseuse.

He appeared at O.J. Simpson's welcome party in "The Juice Is Loose", and joins the mob that chases him out of town.

In "Peter's Two Dads", he is the therapist who helps Peter realize that Francis Griffin is not his biological father.

He debates which groceries to leave behind while in the ten items or less line in "Brian Sings and Swings".

It has been hinted that he may be homosexual throughout the series, such as in "McStroke" when a mustachioed Peter walks by. He has a friend named Jeffrey and in "Road to the North Pole", he declares in "All I Really Want For Christmas" that he wants to marry Jeffrey. Seth MacFarlane confirmed Bruce's homosexuality in an interview with LGBT website The Backlot, citing him as an example of a positive gay character on the show.[1]

In "The Splendid Source", it is revealed that he works at the bowling alley, selling rental shoes. He is one of the people to whom the dirty joke is traced. It s revealed he also has a pet rabbit named Steven.

He plays Greedo in Blue Harvest and Admiral Piett in Something, Something, Something, Dark Side.

In "Tales of a Third Grade Nothing", he seems to be the only one who enjoyed the performance of "Guys & Dolls". He also enjoys ginger ale.

He is the announcer of Lois Griffin's boxing match against Deirdre Jackson in "Baby, You Knock Me Out".

He is an alcoholic, participating in Alcoholics Anonymous meetings Peter attends in "Friends of Peter G".

Bruce can be seen as Stewie rides through town under Brian's car in "Family Guy Viewer Mail No. 2".

The uncensored version of "Ratings Guy" includes a scene of Peter getting a haircut from Bruce, who shaves a misshapen, deformed penis into the back of his head. When Peter questions it, Bruce runs out crying, noting that some people have had an accident.

Bruce is teamed up with Bonnie Swanson in the three-legged race in "He's Bla-ack!".

In the courtroom scene in "The Simpsons Guy", the openly gay Bruce is seated next to the closeted gay Waylon Smithers.

Throughout the series, Mike Henry has given certain anthropomorphic creatures such as Jaws and a Xenomorph the same voice as he's given Bruce.

Bruce is revealed to be 52 in "Underage Peter", having told Jeffrey that he was 39.

In "Married...With Cancer", Bruce officiates Brian's wedding and remarks that it's another wedding he has to watch. He makes his intentions of marriage known to Jeffrey who nervously looks away.

Bruce and the Kool-Aid Man swap bodies in "Switch the Flip". He also has a crowd scene cameo in "No Giggity, No Doubt".

Under pressure from his parents Phil & Candy Straight, Bruce proposes to Meg in "Meg's Wedding". She refuses to acknowledge that he's gay at first, but stops the ceremony and admits she's aware after finding pictures in his phone. He is forced to not only confront his parents, but proposes and marries his long-time boyfriend Jeffery.

[its-all-ineffable]

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen 2 Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkein 3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte 4 Harry Potter series (only 2 of them but...she's a TERF and they're mid books that I no longer own cause fuck her) 5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee 6 The Bible 7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte 8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell 9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman 10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens 11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott 12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy 13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller 14 Complete Works of Shakespeare 15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier 16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien 17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks 18 Catcher in the Rye 19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffeneger 20 Middlemarch – George Eliot 21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell 22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald 23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens 24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy 25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams 26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh 27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky 28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck 29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll 30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame 31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy 32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens 33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis 34 Emma – Jane Austen 35 Persuasion – Jane Austen 36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis 37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini 38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres 39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden 40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne 41 Animal Farm – George Orwell 42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown 43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez 44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving 45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins 46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery 47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy 48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood 49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding 50 Atonement – Ian McEwan

51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel 52 Dune – Frank Herbert 53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons 54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen 55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth 56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon 57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens 58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley 59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon 60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez 61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck 62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov 63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt 64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold 65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas 66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac 67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy 68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding 69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie 70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville 71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens 72 Dracula – Bram Stoker 73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett 74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson 75 Ulysses – James Joyce 76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath 77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome 78 Germinal – Emile Zola 79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray 80 Possession – AS Byatt 81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens 82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchel 83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker 84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro 85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert 86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry 87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White 88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom 89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle 90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton 91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad 92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery 93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks 94 Watership Down – Richard Adams 95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole 96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute 97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas 98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare 99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl 100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

How many have you read?

The BBC estimates that most people will only read 6 books out of the 100 listed below. Reblog this and bold the titles you’ve read.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen 2 Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkein 3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte 4 Harry Potter series 5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee 6 The Bible 7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte 8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell 9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman 10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens 11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott 12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy 13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller 14 Complete Works of Shakespeare 15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier 16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien 17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks 18 Catcher in the Rye 19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffeneger 20 Middlemarch – George Eliot 21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell 22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald 23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens 24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy 25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams 26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh 27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky 28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck 29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll 30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame 31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy 32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens 33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis 34 Emma – Jane Austen 35 Persuasion – Jane Austen 36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis 37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini 38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres 39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden 40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne 41 Animal Farm – George Orwell 42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown 43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez 44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving 45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins 46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery 47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy 48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood 49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding 50 Atonement – Ian McEwan

51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel 52 Dune – Frank Herbert 53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons 54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen 55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth 56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon 57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens 58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley 59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon 60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez 61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck 62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov 63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt 64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold 65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas 66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac 67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy 68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding 69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie 70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville 71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens 72 Dracula – Bram Stoker 73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett 74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson 75 Ulysses – James Joyce 76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath 77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome 78 Germinal – Emile Zola 79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray 80 Possession – AS Byatt 81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens 82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchel 83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker 84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro 85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert 86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry 87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White 88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom 89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle 90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton 91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad 92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery 93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks 94 Watership Down – Richard Adams 95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole 96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute 97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas 98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare 99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl 100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

[my-gf-is-kazuichi-soda]

My first Kazuichi sprite edit. Cinderella's dress pretty much.

From my idea about an AU where Kazuichi could express her autistic comfort interest with fantasy/fairy tale type princesses without having to fit it into a cishet male performative fantasy (in other words, she doesn't have to pretend to wanna date a princess just to gush about them anymore, and she gushes about fairy tale princesses not real ones. So the princess thing is actually separate from Sonia.)

So, it's like Kaz got character development earlier in life and is able to express her gender a bit and the princess thing. She's trans and (for now, this is subject to change) I imagine that she starts off the story where she already calls herself a girl openly and has zero patience explaining it or arguing. Like, she just walks away, especially from Mahiru who I imagine would be annoying as hell about this ("You're a boy and you're just mocking a girl instead of being useful!" Ugh Mahiru and her sexism fucking sucks and she gives off terf vibes to me. Worst danganronpa character imo). I'm still working on all the details of this au in my head.

I can't imagine this in the actual game because the writers are definitely not good at handling queer characters (see: Chihiro), and it would likely change Kaz's role as a comic relief in some ways, so this isn't some kind of "fixit" rewrite it's just fun to imagine this au.

She wears the regular game outfit most of the time but changes into the princess dress for like half of the free time events and some of the in-game events. She was wearing her regular clothes when they got sent to the island, and changed into the dress sometime before you talk to her the first time.

Here's some quotes:

(When asked if she's the Ultimate Princess) "Oh yeah, totally! (laughs) No, I'm not, it's just a funny coincidence we're both here. I haven't actually met her yet, but you're like the fourth person to ask me that. But if you need me to fix anything, I can do that. I'm actually the Ultimate Mechanic."

"Of course this thing has pockets! I sewed them in myself!"

(Mahiru accused her of mocking Sonia). "I'm not mocking her! This doesn't have to do with her! I brought this thing with me before we got here, I just wasn't wearing it yet! And she and I are completely different princesses anyway! Princess...Sonia Whasit? Sonia's a real princess that lives in a real castle, and I'm just - wait, whoops, I don't actually know if she lives in a castle. Are castles still around? I guess she could live in a mansion or something. I don't know jack about real princesses. Maybe I'll ask her about that when I meet her."

[troonwolf]

as your local british skeleton, you can always count on me to reinforce how shitty britain is. yes terf island. yes colonisers with a fake royal family actually from germany. yes stolen artefacts from all around the world that they still won’t give back. yes clown country. yes a mythical land not because of tales of knights and kings but because of how mythically shit it is

[klaxiaaa]

2 things:

1) by 'LGBTQ' lives it's clear they mean trans people specifically

2) when an entire group of peoples right to even exist is on the line there is no impartiality; you're either on their side or you're complicit in their suffering. end of.

a pretty jarring thing to read in an article about the BBC withdrawing from Stonewall's diversity scheme

[sachermorte]

I went to Canterbury Cathedral and I fear something started moving deep within my blackened, withered heart

It was a weird feeling and I didn't entirely care for it. I don't WANT to feel things

[sachermorte]

love when I go through security at VIE and at the point where they have to scan my crutch one of the security agents offers me their blue latex-gloved hand for me to hold onto through the scanner like they're escorting cinderella to the ball

[sachermorte]

got home and literally slept 22 hours with a quick break for laundry. ultimately though 10/10, would do the stupid summer camp with the stupid children again

[msfbgraves]

I agree.

START PERSONAL STUFF, feel free to ignore

My partial solution to this: I enjoy Harry Potter and Fantastic Beasts - have long before her turn to the dark side began. And I feel that not letting myself enjoy that fandom hurts me and helps no one. It's been twenty years, that world is part of my dna, I've been thinking about that world too long to simply turn my back on it.

But no more.

None of her crime novels. Fairy tales. 'Thinkpieces'. Whatever Potter rehash, reboot, desperate cry for attention will follow, Draco's great grandson, the Snape chronicles, whatever. Nothing else.

I already feel her cultural influence is taning. Potter is not aging well. I think she somehow struck a very specific zeitgeist and used a beloved genre, but the zeitgeist has shifted.

And yes, not paying for cinema tickets will make her fade more quickly, I'm aware. But fade she will. Much as the first FB film really struck a nerve with me, they already feel like her trying to recapture what made her relevant as a storyteller and failing. Yes, Colin Farrell and Ezra Miller's chemistry was phenomenal, and the other performances had real heart. But that film already was tonally uneven, and the way she disrespects her own rules makes me feel she doesn't care, so why should anyone else? She's definitely not creating a new audience with them.

And yet. The fact that Ezra Miller did care, so much, has made an impact on my life, and I don't want to disown that.

The really scary part is that anti-trans sentiment is huge in the UK, becoming mainstream, and being allowed under the flag of open debate. I want all women safe from violence, trans women included, and trans men and people of all genders. They're under threat there and they need support and I'm doing my bit to call out the ridiculousness of it when I hear it from people who don't even know what cis means but are parroting the bbc. They don't give a toss about JKR or Potter but they're spouting nonsense anyway, and that needs to be discussed and called out. But they don't even know what TERF's are so I usually loudly say, at dinner: "Do you even hear yourself? Nobody in Holland is talking about this. The Dutch word for maternity care has always been gender neutral, did that ever make you feel attacked in your womanhood?"

"...no."

"Then why should it in English? Honestly, England has been very silly these past few years, you need to get off this island more often, all of you. Brexit this, fishing laws that, gender criticism, honestly."

This often works, the simple asking of "Why should there be an issue in the first place", rather than going with the tacit understanding that 'gender critical' is an ordinary thing to be over there. They often haven't thought it through, and didn't realise they're being fed stuff.

END PERSONAL STUFF

Again, good point, OP.

I don't really care if you like Harry Potter or still engage in the fandom (so long as you're not financially or uncritically supporting it), I think it's kinda, unstoppable force vs immovable object. People are always gonna like Harry Potter and I don't necessarily think telling people to just Stop is going to do anything for trans rights. I think spreading awareness of JKR's bigotry and fighting alongside UK trans people is like, a far more important front than just saying to not enjoy a book anymore.

[sachermorte]

me when I've seen enough

I did generally get some very nice pictures the other day

[sachermorte]

shocked and horrified everyone else with pictures of me wearing all white so you all might as well see it too

I can't really say it entirely suits me but it wasn't a bad look

[sachermorte]

did the stereotypical tourist thing and bought a one of those cord and shell necklaces for four pounds from a shop on the beach. so cringe but I look so cute in it