#the lack of self awareness is fucking incredible like it's legitimately funny

[altschmerzes]

listening to my mom on the phone and she's telling me about how she's listening to some podcast about how sometimes people will use writing as a way to process things, especially things that happened to them in their childhood you know, like, processing and grappling with difficult things that happen to them and boy maybe i'll find that interesting to hear from that perspective because, you know, "you're a writer and all!" and i'm like [looking into the camera like on the office] do they now. is that something people do. in writing. do they now.

[navree]

What about the Baratheons in the book?

Renly - Renly's fine, he's just not someone that compels me in any way and he does kinda tend to come off as more of a wannabe-Jaime to me than anyone who's interesting in his own right. Plus he's a dick and it takes a lot for me to get fond of characters who are deliberate assholes, and that generally involves them being self aware and having a purpose to it than Renly, who's just a bored pretty boy with too much time on his hands. Best way I can describe Renly is he's the Brucie Wayne personal of Bruce Wayne without any of the hidden depths or complexities, and also if he lived in medieval times. There's elements of Renly I can get behind, like Stannis says, the boy he once was seems to have been very sweet and bright and that does sometimes make me Sad, not to mention his relationship with his brothers holds a wealth of drama that makes him interesting enough.

Robert - I hate Robert. Like, I really, really hate Robert Baratheon, with the burning passion of the sun. I find him to be such an unimaginable asshole and I'm glad his death was slow and long suffering. I think it's entirely valid of Lyanna to not want to marry him for being a philanderer and an ass of a person (even though I don't approve of the 24 year old grown married man with two kids swooping in and taking advantage of that and starting a war in the process) and I think it's very very valid of Cersei to want him dead and to not miss him after he raped and abused her for years. Not to mention, perhaps it's just me, but if you keep sending assassins after innocent children (Viserys and Dany were innocent and clearly were in real danger) and condoning the absolute butchery of Elia and her children because they were "dragonspawn", then you deserve to get beaned in the head with a chair forever. Fuck him, he sucks.

Stannis - Stannis 👏 the 👏 mannis 👏👏👏 I love him. He's another top character in ASOIAF for me, I do adore him. For one, he's a character archetype that I love, I love the outwardly emotionless, cold characters with a good mind and a firm belief in themselves who have hidden depths that very few see (and there's not a lot I approve of what the show did with Stannis but the scenes with him and Shireen, minus the last one, were top tier), so I'm incredibly predisposed to liking him on that alone. For two, as a character he's so wonderful. I can't find the post but someone said that Stannis's arc is just "what if an account was mistake as a world saving fire sword wielding hero of ancient prophecy" which is what it is and that's very funny. But Stannis as someone who feels shoved into this role not because he wanted it, because Stannis has never wanted anything of what he's had to deal with, not the dead parents or the issues with his family or having to settle for Dragonstone and certainly not being Robert's legitimate heir, but because he has to, because he has an ironclad sense of justice and wants to do what's right even if it's against his own wishes? That fucks. That fucks really hard. Stannis has a very strong sense of right and wrong, it's why what happens to Renly tears him up so much, not just because of the love he had for his brother but because it goes directly against his moral code, and considering all the grey morality of ASOIAF, that's very fun to watch. There's also this great element of Stannis in that we are never in his head, we only ever see him through the eyes of others, primarily Davos. So we see and hear about his bad qualities, his intransigence and stunning lack of charisma, from peoople who don't care for him and are on opposite sides of him, but we also see him through the eyes of someone who really loves him. Someone who views Stannis as the best there is, in spite of those qualities, and through that we can see Stannis in that light too. We can see the boy who was tenderhearted enough to nurse Proudwing, who clung to his atheism not due to any beliefs but just because of how upset he was when his parents died, the seventeen year old who had to fight against his own morals ("my king or my brother, my blood or my liege" GOD) for the sake of family, who starved himself in the service of his brother's war and was probably giving as much of his food as he could to his little brother, who accepted Davos into his service with a minor punishment and who clearly relied on him and loved him in turn just as much as Davos did. The complexities and the layers to Stannis are amazing, I love him so much. And his claim is the most legitimate one besides, even if he's not gonna get the throne in the end. Also, Stannis and Davos. Just read any of the chapters where they share scenes, they're gay as Hell.

[pumpkinpaix]

** the disclaimer still applies: don’t fucking dogpile, don’t harass using this as a springboard. furthermore, do NOT @ robin about this for fuck’s sake she’s already taken far more than what was warranted and this is not about her **

@daciafelix, out of respect for robin’s request to lay things to rest, I will be speaking to you on a separate post here.

however, I will not be letting your replies on the post in question slide. I’m very angry with you, and I want you to fucking know it. I’ll paste the three replies here.

1:

mirrorofprinces go back under the bridge please. Robin, you should ignore the trolls, they aren’t solitary creature it seems. You apologized and you should move on. I am tired of seeing a good author beaten down by people who don’t seem to understand how nonprofit fictional worlds work, not to mention reality. Dear “Chinese diaspora” , your trauma is real, attacking people is not the way to solve it. This type of attitude is what got Archiveofourown banned in China.

what the actual fuck was this? “Dear ‘Chinese diaspora’“? you have the audacity to tell us not to attack people while mocking us in the same goddamn breath? the lack of self-awareness that takes is stunning. congratulations for lowering the fucking bar once again!

perfunctorily saying that our “trauma is real” means nothing when the rest of your response dismisses us wholesale as “trolls”, insults our cultural identity -- one that we have repeatedly explained is a complex, difficult topic -- asserts that we have no grasp on the politics of fandom, that we’re delusional, and then!! has the fucking sanctimonious presumption to blame us for CCP censorship of AO3 in china. whether or not you intended any of that is irrelevant, because you still fucking said all of it and we still fucking heard it.

you don’t know jack fucking shit about the 227 event and it shows. the lack of respect that you exhibited in this reply is unbelievable. I was fucking there when this went down, I cried for days. I watched my chinese friends having mental breakdowns in private forums, a chinese friend i had met literally two weeks prior on AO3 emailed me in dismay for what had happened -- this is someone who had been working up the courage to send me a message for literal months and we managed to exchange emails just before the firewall went up -- you don’t understand, you can’t understand the sort of devastation that was felt. if you did, you wouldn’t have brought it up like this as a cudgel for sweeping our legitimate pain aside. blaming the victims for the acts of a violent and oppressive government is a fucking shitty look.

2:

Cloudyfromoobsession I have read it [*the chinese diaspora statement], it makes me really disappointed. They treat fan fiction as some deep existential writing, which is not necessarily wrong but they have to acknowledge that not everyone is divining the meaning of life in a mdzs fic or any other fandom. Transformative work as a principle is based in the exploration of alternative visions starting from a canonical point, there is no rule that fan fic needs to appease a certain portion of the fandom or even stay true to canon.

I see that you have shit reading comprehension as well! not to mention a seriously questionable philosophy on the responsibility of transformative work as a whole. once again, you mock our genuine efforts to express something very important to us by saying that not everyone is trying to “divine the meaning of life” from a fic -- we never once said that fandom wasn’t supposed to be lighthearted and fun -- I’m pretty sure we said the opposite in fact! I love that you think that our concerns are a matter of taking things too seriously! you’re basically just telling us hey, it’s not that deep! let it go!

why should i fucking have to let this go when so many people act like you and have in every sphere of my life from the time I was born? why should I continue to bite my tongue, smile and play nice? because it’s not convenient when the model minority kicks up a fuss?

“there is no rule that fan fic needs to appease a certain portion of the fandom or even stay true to canon,” you say, like our race, identity, generational trauma, are just a matter of differing headcanons or taste. this isn’t about fucking appeasement, it’s about human respect and compassion. no, there’s no rule that all fic has to match anyone’s personal taste, but there is a fucking expectation that fic, and any other creative endeavor in this community, has a responsibility to examine its own impact in context. how explicit must the harm be before you put your foot down? if the characters said “ching chong” and chinese diaspora shouted it down, would you still say, “well, it doesn’t have to appease you”? “just look away”? “but I liked it”?

tell me to ignore my own oppression again for your personal comfort, I fucking dare you.

3:

mirror, as the author has asked to put all this to rest I will not engage with you. I’m well aware that Chinese censorship is a more complex issue and larger that a fandom spat, and yes it had nothing to do with chinese diaspora fans, it was the spirit of this type of “poisoning the well” I was invoking.Limited word comments are not good for exhaustive discussion. But being rude and dismissive to someone who apologized(I mean the author) makes you an immature bully. Good day

funny how you think you can act like you’re taking the moral high ground by acting like you’re complying with robin’s wishes to “lay things to rest” when you ignored her requests to stop defending her twice with your asinine bullshit. if you’re going to act like you’ve got the moral high ground, you better make damn fucking sure you actually have it.

I am going to give you. a sliver of the benefit of the doubt and try to believe that you didn’t intentionally try to justify your sinophobia using a turn of phrase with  antisemitic associations (one that was already discussed at length during the previous incident). I know that the history of “poisoning the well” isn’t terribly well-known, so this is just a reminder/to let you know that it’s a loaded phrase and should be used with caution, especially in a discussion that involves antisemitism.

in any case, you’ve already demonstrated an incredible amount of ignorance regarding chinese politics, so I don’t see any reason to believe that you are “well aware” of the complexity that underlies chinese censorship. the fact that you invoked it at all betrays how little sense you have of the history, how close it is, how much very real, terrifying harm has been wrought -- people love to use the CCP as a gotcha! to shut down or derail conversations about sinophobia. it’s an extremely common tactic, whether or not you realized it. do you all not realize that the people who suffer the most from an oppressive government are the people that live under its shadow? why is that so hard to grasp?

i have friends younger than me whose parents were close enough to tiananmen to hear the first shots ring out. the daughter of one of the photographers of tank man that snuck it out of the country is a year older than I am. my mother has been cautioning me for having political views since I was in middle school, citing the red guards of her generation and how they were manipulated and left to die by the CCP. I could tell you about shit that happened in my immediate family that would make your blood curdle. these stories are not unique or rare. keep that in mind the next time you want to whip out the CCP in an argument.

you’ve stated that limited character replies aren’t a good medium for discussion. fine. you’re welcome to pick this up in reblogs if you want. I’ve said my piece. good fucking day.

[gerrydelano]

yeah, no. i really can’t get comfortable with the idea of legitimately acting like gertrude was actually some sincere surrogate mother figure to gerry in any way considering she wound up doing things in all but exact same vein that mary keay did: treating his suffering like a tool and neglecting to get him help in any way when she watched him start to deteriorate. wringing him for use like halved fruit over a glass that isn’t quite full and never will be, now, because well, i guess that’s all that was left in him. shame.

jon comments in MAG 107 as he’s relaying into the tape recorder that the two of them masqueraded around as mother and son as a cover and he has to recoil a bit in discomfort because he gets the idea that gertrude took a perverse joy from the pretense. like... it’s uncomfortable. it’s bad. it’s not actually this cute, funny thing? it’s not found family, it’s not the type of thing that we ought to romanticize as being such. as an outsider it’s nice to imagine gerry having a surrogate mother figure in his life that treated him better, i guess, but gertrude is not that person.

it may have felt like it, sometimes. in the quiet moments in hotel rooms while traveling when she asks if he’s packed everything and reminds him not to forget his toothbrush, or mindlessly pats his arm as they pass each other on the way to their respective sides of the car, but he wasn’t in the practice of letting a sore heart fool him out of remembering that he’s here because he has a function. they both regarded each other like terse co-workers more anything. they were not family. he knew.

he said himself that he didn’t trust her, she was always the work. she reminded him of his own mother and for good reason. because while she chose a different end goal to pursue, her ruthlessness was the very same and her moral compass pointed pin straight to a willingness to categorize other people as expendable or otherwise. her ends justified her neat and bloody means. he saw it in her and he knew but consider — it was all he knew. it was familiar. in a sick way, comfortable.

when you grow up in a habitat designed to nurture C-PTSD, it becomes more uncomfortable to seek healing and stray from the familiarity of the pain that conditioned you. gerard is not lacking in self awareness. he knew what he was neck deep in and he told himself that perhaps he’d be alright sinking down to his nose, disappearing in it, because he’d gotten in the water with the knowledge that no one takes his pain seriously anyway. what could he have expected? a second chance at growing up loved? 

as if. they were not family. he knew.

still doesn’t exactly make the fundamentals of the situation of his cancer any less of a carpet being ripped out from underneath him to reveal some black hole carved out of the floor. she may have given him tea and turned the lights down when he had one of his splitting headaches but she never insisted against his predisposition to deny himself medical help. just the stress of fighting the forces of evil, most likely. she gets headaches, too, it comes with the job.

but not really. depending on the type of tumor, who even knows what could have been going on in those last few months. it could have been very clear even without the beholding.

and even if it wasn’t actually cancer and was instead some supernatural consequence for using little beholding powers without using them to scare people and feed it/himself, she’d still? have an idea about that? you would fucking think? like, the point here isn’t to drive in the gruesome details of tumor symptoms, it’s the fact that whatever was happening to him, gertrude did nothing to intervene and in fact exacerbated it with knowing intent.

gertrude is an incredibly interesting character and i actually enjoy her quite a lot from a writing perspective but really, the last thing this poor man needed was another cold old woman manipulating the course of his life and then literally binding him to the book that ruined it to start with. the one thing that would hurt him most, she did, after he had no life left in him to fight it. she took advantage of his circumstance so deeply that even if he expected that something was coming, that could not have felt like anything but the betrayal he’d been talking himself out of calling it whenever it did.

he must have felt handed off like a racing baton, going from the nail-raking clutches of one insidious woman to the careful, practiced grip of another one.

gertrude knew mary well. she knew what she had done and what she enjoyed doing and how she got her way. she watched gerard and learned him and riddled out what he got from his mother and mimicked her for a reason.

eric asked her to check on gerry when they spoke, and she neglected to do so in the way he had meant for her to. she only checked in to watch, to mark the decline of his ability to handle being haunted by the somewhat-ghost of his half-immortal mother for five solid years, and only acted when he was conveniently desperate enough to aid her in her own endeavors since he would feel indebted to her. she waited for the proper moment. she had to have checked in, and did nothing. she was actively complicit in his abuse, and essentially just continued it under a different pretense.

she may not have had the same exact plans for gerard that mary did, but that doesn’t change her methodology. it doesn’t change the fact that she exploited weaknesses that they both knew he had, and knew he didn’t have enough in him to fight. she used his illness as a tool, and said nothing until he couldn’t explain away his own seizures as being something he could put up with because what choice does he have?

in a way gerry sort of pulled an eric and accepted it from gertrude, i think. he wound up unwittingly mimicking that uncomfortable complacency under the pretense of thinking that since he knows he was being used, manipulated, and would eventually catch some sort of knife in the back for it, he can’t be all that mad about it. in the case of gertrude, it turned out to be a particularly vile case of bystander effect.

she spent most of her time considering the future through an objective lens. the greater war they’re waging. rationally decided that the needs of the many outweigh the pre-determinedly doomed soul of the one. she didn’t doom the boy herself, no, but she certainly took a disturbingly literal leaf out of mary keay’s book and finished the job. whether it was necessary or not hardly matters. enough of the ends; the means matter. nothing justifies that.

even if she didn’t say "i’m going to let you suffer the untreated effects of cancer until you can’t assist me anymore,” she was somehow still explicitly clear. at least it wasn’t a real betrayal because he saw it coming — saw something coming — or should have, or maybe considered it and doesn’t think he should be surprised, even though it hurts like hell and the person he spent his last moments around who had worn that pinched up little smirk when someone assumed he was her son didn’t just let him rest when he was finished. she had to know how badly he needed to be finished.

he knew exactly what was going on in terms of whether she actually cared about him as a person, and it was still somehow preferable to mary’s bullshit because he was an adult by this point, not a helpless child. he knew from the start that they were far from equals, too, and he didn’t try to get on her level in a personal way but he may have at least somewhat felt like he had at least the illusion of agency. until the very end, of course. 

that was the part he didn’t expect. that’s the part that really drives home that gerard keay has only ever had one sort of domineering woman in his life, and there was an infinite array of things that they openly chose over him. the only way that gertrude was a “mother figure” to him was in the sense that she almost perfectly paralleled the one he already had, and she did it on purpose.

telling himself that he expected it the way one expects an oncoming train from their place in the middle of the tracks doesn’t make the impact any softer when it hits. you still get caught under the wheels. the weight of it is still impossible, the speed of full realization does nothing to pack bone dust back into shapes that can carry you.

like father like son, i suppose.

[sleepywoodlouse-blog]

Here’s the thing. I am a transgender man (see photo of my mug for context). I love all trans people and I love non binary people. But lately some of my trans spaces (both on the web and irl) that are mainly non binary have started to feel a little hostile. I want to make something perfectly clear before I continue - I love and respect non binary people, I think their genders are valid and I am in no way suggesting they are any less important that myself or any other binary trans person. I also need you to understand that this isn’t meant to be a post calling out non binary people at all, it is just me talking about my personal experiences in the hope that it can get people to be a little more considerate sometimes? In university spaces, it seems that there is a growing population of non binary people that tends to dominate trans groups. Which is good in lots of ways, especially since it shows how this generation has become much more relaxed and aware that gender is a construct and fluidity is key. However, amongst people I know there is a lot of 'ew gross men', or 'ew gross trans men that are masculine', while at the same time being predominantly DFAB populations. Now trust me, I very much understand the dislike a lot of dfab trans people have of men. A lot of us are survivors and I think that does play a big part in how we feel about the gender overall. Not to mention it is not uncommon for men to be, for lack of a better word- wankers. However, I don’t think people consider trans men when we are talking about this. Making a comment like 'ew men are so fucking gross' to a room of trans people means that to a trans man you are saying one of two things - 1) you are gross, or 2) you aren’t gross because you’re not a Real Man, and you are excluded from this statement because you are and always will be, partly a woman. Even now I feel uncomfortable 'complaining' about this. I have to remind myself that just as suggesting that a trans woman is somehow different to other women would be considered incredibly offensive, so is it for trans men. I didn’t realise how much this stuff affected me until it did. Constantly being around people that talk about, how body hair on men is gross, masculinity is by default toxic, making jokes about my masculinity being toxic when I excitedly tell people that I’ve started going to the gym and its making me feel better about my body. No, it’s not funny. It’s MY dysphoria I’m trying to ease. I as a trans person want to feel supported and loved when I do things that have a chance of making me feel good about my body. It hit me like a brick wall when I realised how much it had affected me. I was with my partner, and was trying to have sex, but I just broke down. I felt so incredibly disgusted with my body and myself. So much hair, so masculine. The noises I made, gross. The way I touched him, creepy. I couldn’t get out of my head the idea that later in life he would talk to people about how gross and unshaven I was, just like I had heard friends describe ex boyfriends so many times before. I felt cheated because these were the changes I WANTED my body to make. But now they felt ruined. Spoiled. It was after that realisation that I decided I had to get out. I stopped going to some of student socials and instead started attending a group for older trans people. It was so refreshing to meet other trans men for once (just because I rarely meet them at uni, and it was nice to talk to someone similar.) It was awesome to be around people who weren’t shitty about trans people being stealth (as I remember I once was.) There are some important things to take away from all of this: 1) Telling trans boys and men that they are disgusting for wanting to be like men will only destroy self esteem and feed into the toxic environment that a lot of cis boys grow up in. 2) Non binary people are extremely valid and awesome, but also must accept they have a responsibility to cultivate a supportive and friendly atmosphere in spaces where they are dominant (I put this in here for university spaces especially) 3) Laughing at a trans man/woman for being excessively masc/fem presenting if you are a dfab nb person who mainly presents as fem or androgynous is facetious and not respecting that they may have to present that way to stay safe, (especially in the case of trans women that may be more 'obviously trans') and that despite suffering prejudice in many ways, the one thing you are not realistically facing is street violence and such because you inevitably are not going to be clocked as trans. (which yes, does NOT make your transness invalid but we have to respect the different struggles people in our community face.) 4) Someone being stealth does not mean they are adhering to 'toxic gender roles'. It means they are either 1) trying to be safe or 2) surprise surprise they want to live their life as the gender they identify with. Trans people are not less legitimately trans because you think they are 'acting cis'. 5) Being a binary trans person does not give you privilege over nb people. Like seriously, trans women are literally the most likely to be murdered. Don’t be a dick. Erasure is a problem yes but it’s not the same. I read names out at the TDOR vigil and pretty much all of them were trans women of colour. Respect that. Help the community. This isn’t about scoring points over who has it the shittiest. 6) The idea that the only good kinda of trans men are 'soft sensitive kinda trans masc guys that don’t have surgeries and shave all their body hair' is shitty and offensive (tho that kind of trans man is totally valid, that not what i mean). Its shitty because one you’re sexualising them either as more childlike or more feminine (both is rude, former is creepy), but its perpetuating the idea that trans men aren’t really men and the best ones are the ones that YOU think still kinda look suitably enough like women.