#these are HORRIBLE men!

[pynkhues]

I read somewhere that Rolin specifically wanted Louis to be a brothel owner because he thought it was important for his character that he have the same casual view on the exploitation of people’s bodies as book slave-owner Louis. These are important aspects of his character that I feel the show handles with more nuance and care than the books. Louis should get to have his negative qualities!

(x)

Yeah, I think I read that too, anon, and honestly, I think it really makes a lot of sense for his character, and also is a part of what makes him really interesting? This is a bit of a tangent, and I've got a half-drafted longer reply to someone else's ask about this that I'll post eventually, haha, but there's so much stress on Louis as the most 'human' vampire in fandom, when I think that's both true and untrue? I think Louis feels very connected to human expression (most clearly seen through his love of art and literature), while having detachment at best and derision at worst for the humans who create it (best seen through his cruelty around the artist in Paris, but also his gentrification of San Francisco in the 70s and abandonment of the people in 2.01).

In a lot of ways, even that in itself feels like the embodiment of capitalism, and like - - it's been fascinating to see this embrace in fandom of Louis as a capitalist and yet this sort of denial of the reality that successful capitalism relies on the exploitation and abuse of people for the sake of profit. That exploitation and abuse almost always involves intersections of racism, misogyny and classism, which Louis has absolutely been shown to participate in.

Like, God, in the first episode alone, the Alderman Fenwick tries to anally rape Bricktop, and someone (well, Lestat) murders Miss Lily, and Louis doesn't even bat an eye. Maybe you could make an argument that he had commercial interests at risk with Bricktop, and was distracted by his brother's death and Lestat's Whole Deal by the time Miss Lily was killed, but I think to deny that his flippancy towards both crimes isn't inherently steeped in misogyny and a devaluation of women's bodies and lives, is pretty naive.

I think people tend to think misogyny is just about hating women, and it's not. It's about upholding patriarchal structures and values that oppress and objectify them, and having ingrained prejudice against them. Louis absolutely uses women as a pimp, and I think even at home upholds patriarchal family dynamics with both Grace and Claudia. I've touched on that before, and linked to those posts there, so won't get into it here, but yeah! Louis' relationship with women is complicated and usually paternalistic, dismissive and - ultimately - about him, even with the women he - genuinely! - loves.

And when I say that, I mean it as literally the opposite of a criticism. Like you said, he should be allowed to have negative qualities! Those negative qualities give him texture and humanity and make him real, and are one of the reasons the show's version of him is so, so compelling.

[minihotdog]

I can just imagine the cod boys beefing up on deployment. They’re already big but they come home after 8 months or so and they’ve nearly doubled in muscle mass, a little fat to go with it.

You’re frothing at the mouth when your man comes walking through the door. His usual uniform top clinging for life around his biceps. The fabric struggling to stretch around his body. His pants molded to his thighs.

After months of him being touch starved, nearly nutting at the thought of simply holding you, he gets all the affection and then some when you can’t keep your hands off of him.

He drops his bags down and you just start going off about how big he’s gotten, groping his giant pecs, running your hands all over him.

Eventually he has to start prying your hands off of him because you cannot help yourself.

[angry-kid-with-no-money]

"Nora doesn't know anything about the things she writes about" "aftg is terrible queer rep" "the queer characters in aftg are so problematic"

Idk guys maybe the book series abt problematic ppl set in 2006 and written in the mid 2010s shouldn't be expected to hold up against scrutiny of what we consider to be moral and correct now, in 2024

Idk tho, idk

[corelle-vairel]

Detective sometimes needs a bit of shaking, to do his job better

[squarecloud73]

*I worship you Tumblr please don’t remove it

Inspired by Duckkiken’s art on twitter, they put Holm in the gnome hood Kui designed and my heart melted

[artsycrapfromsai]

My friend is playing my DnD character Amaryllis in a playthrough of their copy of BG3!!

This is an alternate to the post party scene lol

Amaryllis loves making clothes and doesn't really understand flirting, unfortunately for Astarion

(Amaryllis is usually a unicorn girl but we made her an elf here)

[crumb-crumblet-s-crumbington]

lethanfield sleeping arrangements .....

[trans-androgyne]

Yes, trans men and mascs have historically been subjected to less public violence and ridicule than trans women and fems. Is having privilege really the only reason you can think of for that? Have you considered that they had less ability to be publicly visible in the first place? Please remember that the lack of autonomy women have historically been granted also applies to transmascs. They would have been considered the property of men. Spousal rape wasn't illegal everywhere in my country until 1993. How easy do you think it would be for forcibly impregnated transmascs to transition? For abused transmascs in general? Do you think they were all even allowed out of the house often without a man? There are so many stories of transmascs being forcibly institutionalized for being trans. Is that situation and otherwise being quietly abused and erased really so much better than hypervisibility?

[vidalharkness]

X-MEN: DAYS OF FUTURE PAST (2014) dir. Bryan Singer

[localcanadiancreature62]

Marital issues mad scientists..

They just do this a lot,huh?. I swear if i see another one of these fuckers i will start killing with hammers.

[sewerslimetime]

Like if all that comes out is your finger bone, you're dead! You can't say "oh they survived look at this little bone-"

~

Thank you randomalistic for the brainworms I'm obsessed with this horrible awful guy.

[konigsblog]

Just saw a 13 year old call themselves "worthless fuck meat" and claim that their body is only made for a man's pleasure. Jesus Christ.

I feel nauseous. I don't even know what to say anymore. And to see full grown adults (people in their FIFTIES) message this kid, are you fucking kidding me????

Do parents give two fucks about their kids safety?? I will never understand parents not downloading parental controls onto their kid's phone. If you don't, you're a lazy and irresponsible parent. These parents don't deserve to have kids. It's your job to take care of them and to protect them from predators, and you're doing absolutely fucking nothing about it.

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

jin guangshan and lan qiren yaoi perhaps? since their shapes create a perfect balance?

Two old men perform worlds first successful 96.

[florbe-triz]

Malos habitos

[anghraine]

It's always been intriguing to me that, even when Elizabeth hates Darcy and thinks he's genuinely a monstrous, predatory human being, she does not ever perceive him as sexually predatory. In fact, literally no one in the novel suggests or believes he is sexually dangerous at any point. There's not the slightest hint of that as a factor in the rumors surrounding him, even though eighteenth-century fiction writers very often linked masculine villainy to a possibility of sexual predation in the subtext or just text*. Austen herself does this over and over when it comes to the true villains of her novels.

Even as a supposed villain, though, Darcy is broadly understood to be predatory and callous towards men who are weaker than him in status, power, and personality—with no real hint of sexual threat about it at all (certainly none towards women). Darcy's "villainy" is overwhelmingly about abusing his socioeconomic power over other men, like Wickham and Bingley. This can have secondhand effects on women's lives, but as collateral damage. Nobody thinks he's targeting women.

In addition, Elizabeth's interpretations of Darcy in the first half of the book tend to involve associating him with relatively prestigious women by contrast to the men in his life (he's seen as extremely dissimilar from his male friends and, as a villain, from his father). So Elizabeth understands Darcy-as-villain not in terms of the popular, often very sexualized images of masculine villainy at the time, but in terms of rich women she personally despises like Caroline Bingley and Lady Catherine de Bourgh (and even Georgiana Darcy; Elizabeth assumes a lot about Georgiana in service of her hatred of Darcy before ever meeting her).

The only people in Elizabeth's own community who side with Darcy at this time are, interestingly, both women, and likely the highest-status unmarried women in her community: Charlotte Lucas and Jane Bennet. Both have some temperamental affinities with Darcy, and while it's not clear if he recognizes this, he quietly approves of them without even knowing they've been sticking up for him behind the scenes.

This concept of Darcy-as-villain is not just Elizabeth's, either. Darcy is never seen by anyone as a sexual threat no matter how "bad" he's supposed to be. No one is concerned about any danger he might pose to their daughters or sisters. Kitty is afraid of him, but because she's easily intimidated rather than any sense of actual peril. Even another man, Mr Bennet, seems genuinely surprised to discover late in the novel that Darcy experiences attraction to anything other than his own ego.

I was thinking about this because of how often the concept of Darcy as an anti-hero before Elizabeth "fixes him" seems caught up in a hypermasculine, sexually dangerous, bad boy image of him that even people who actively hate him in the novel never subscribe to or remotely imply. Wickham doesn't suggest anything of the kind, Elizabeth doesn't, the various gossips of Meryton don't, Mr Bennet and the Gardiners don't, nobody does. If anything, he's perceived as cold and sexless.

Wickham in particular defines Darcy's villainy in opposition to the patriarchal ideal his father represented. Wickham's version of their history works to link Darcy to Lady Anne, Lady Catherine (primarily), and Georgiana rather than any kind of masculine sexuality. This version of Darcy is a villain who colludes with unsympathetic high-status women to harm men of less power than themselves, but villain!Darcy poses no direct threat to women of any kind.

It's always seemed to me that there's a very strong tendency among fans and academics to frame Darcy as this ultra-gendered figure with some kind of sexual menace going on, textually or subtextually. He's so often understood entirely in terms of masculinity and sexual desire, with his flaws closely tied to both (whether those flaws are his real ones, exaggerated, or entirely manufactured). Yet that doesn't seem to be his vibe to other characters in the story. There's a level at which he does not register to other characters as highly masculine in his affiliations, highly sexual, or in general as at all unsafe** to be around, even when they think he's a monster. And I kind of feel like this makes the revelations of his actual decency all along and his full-on heroism later easier to accept in the end.

------------

*The incompetently awful villain(?) in Sanditon, for instance, imagines himself another Lovelace (a reference to the famous rapist-villain of Samuel Richardson's Clarissa). Evelina's sheltered education and lack of protectors makes her vulnerable to sexual exploitation in Frances Burney's Evelina, though she ultimately manages to avoid it. There's frequently an element of sexual predation in Gothic novels even of very different kinds (e.g. Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho and Matthew Lewis's The Monk both lean into this, in their wildly dissimilar styles). William Godwin's novel Caleb Williams, a book mostly about the destructive evils of class hierarchies and landowning classes specifically, depicts the mutual obsession of the genteel villain Falkland and working class hero Caleb in notoriously homoerotic terms (Godwin himself added a preface in 1832 saying, "Falkland was my Bluebeard, who had perpetrated atrocious crimes ... Caleb Williams was the wife"). This list could go on for a very long time.

**Darcy is also not usually perceived by other characters as a particularly sexual, highly masculine person in a safe way, either, even once his true character is known. Elizabeth emphasizes the resilience of Darcy's love for her more than the passionate intensity they both evidently feel; in the later book, she does sometimes makes assumptions about his true feelings or intentions based on his gender, but these assumptions are pretty much invariably shown to be wrong. In general the cast is completely oblivious to the attraction he does feel; even Charlotte, who wonders about something in that quarter, ends up doubting her own suspicions and wonders if he's just very absent-minded.

The novel emphasizes that he is physically attractive, but it goes to pains to distinguish this from Wickham's sex appeal or the charisma of a Bingley or Fitzwilliam. Mr Bennet (as mentioned above) seems to have assumed Darcy is functionally asexual, insofar as he has a concept of that. Most of the fandom-beloved moments in which Darcy is framed as highly sexual, or where he himself is sexualized for the audience, are very significantly changed in adaptation or just invented altogether for the adaptations they appear in. Darcy watching Elizabeth after his bath in the 1995 is invented for that version, him snapping at Elizabeth in their debates out of UST is a persistent change from his smiling banter with her in the book, the fencing to purge his feelings is invented, the pond swim/wet shirt is invented. In the 2005 P&P, the instant reaction to Elizabeth is invented, the hand flex of repressed passion is invented, the Netherfield Ball dance as anything but an exercise in mutual frustration is invented, the near-kiss after the proposal in invented, etc. And in those as well, he's never presented as sexually predatory, not even as a "villain."

[ayaahh00]

When men are in leadership, they always protect patriarchy and undo any progress we make. Look at the U.S, male justices were behind overturning Roe v Wade, taking away women's right to bodily autonomy . In Poland, men in power passed one of the toughest abortion laws in Europe, and women had to protest just to be heard. And then there's the Taliban in Afghanistan, an all-male regime that completely cut off women from basic rights like education and freedom. When men are in charge, women’s rights are always at risk because men want to uphold patriarchy. Men have made horrible decisions for far too long always targeting women, their non existent leadership skills are pure dictatorship and fascist, and we need to stop letting them lead if we ever want real change.