#they act like they can’t relate to anyone or anything it they aren’t marginalized themselves (being gay or trans which they treat as a

[tariah23]

oooooo white people in my replies really saying ‘I can excuse racism but I draw the line at homophobia’

Not surprised since this is the site that only talks about racism and thinks it’s a big deal when they see it demonstrated in the cartoons and comics they like *coughs* dungeonmeshi *coughs* (for example at least. I haven’t seen THIS many white ppl talk as in depth about racism on here as much as these fandom nerds, man. I stg. Like “Ohhhh, so you all DO acknowledge that racism is real? Just not in real life even if you could feel it slapping you in the face at high speed. Gotcha.” It’s crazy.

Tumblr is like, 90% white and is extremely centered around them. That’s why you barely see stuff that’s important to black and brown people ever trending here or being talked about. It has to be something incredibly huge to the point where even white people can’t ignore it like they usually do, to talk about it here.

They only talked about George Floyd here because the topic of his death became world news. Even people in other countries were talking about it. Before him, it was probably Ferguson and Trayvon Martin… most of them are still trying their best to ignore the genocides because it’s a “touchy subject.” What do you expect from white people who live in their own bubbles of comfort and refuse to pop it with a needle??? They find comfort in their privilege and faux ignorance (they love playing stupid to avoid conversations about important things outside of fandoms like, are these mfs born with half a brain dedicated to fandom or what.) That’s literally all these mfs make a big deal out of, especially on this annoying ass platform. The ao3 mfs will go to war for the site that allows racist ff and cp like it’s no big deal. I wonder how many people here even donated to the site while actively scrolling past dono posts from folks who really do need help. They act like they’re doing a civil service by defending this site that makes over the amount of it’s intended dono goal in minutes.

Then you already know as soon as you even bring up racism in the stuff they like, they start ganging up and harassing black bloggers especially, calling them TERFs and the whole nine. Anything to make that person look bad for being concerned about the racism that they have such an intense aversion to. God, it’s absolutely exhausting knowing that these people would have no problem choosing a cartoon character over your entire existence if they COULD. Isn’t that fucking sad, man?

[rametarin]

A TERF is a very specific thing, anon.

In order to be TERF, one must first be a feminist. So, what is a feminist? And no, a feminist is not just, “anyone that likes sexual equality.” No more than a Christian is, “anyone that likes love and forgiveness and kindness.”

A Feminist is someone that has embraced a few characteristics originating in socialist thought and Marxist theory. In particular, the belief that all different groups, whether they’re based on biology, identity or schools of thought, are “classes.” They believe that it is the nature of these differing groups to try to dominate, subordinate and exploit one another, and this is their absolute nature and how they relate.

A feminist believes that the male sex is an antagonistic and oppressive force in a binary sexed system. Not necessarily based upon existing laws and culture and history; they argue those things, those objective and historical things, are merely proof of this universal truism about classes and the sexes as classes. That Man oppresses Woman, it is the nature of our biology, and without a society and government that affirms and acknowledges that in a vacuum of any legal laws preventing women from participating as equally as any man, that women will STILL always be oppressed by men, they argue there can’t BE equality. They argue that equality will only come from a marrying of society, culture and government that affirms this belief: A Woman Is Always Oppressed, and compensates and protects them thusly as a special class, prevented from being “exploited” by men. Putting them at the heart of society and denying them exposure to any dangers of it, and unless females are given first and utmost priority, then they are being oppressed. That ONLY when a woman is being given things first and their needs satisfied and their desires fulfilled, WITHOUT obligating them to fulfill ANYthing in return, not even interaction or reimbursement of any kind, can society even begin to be equal.

Of course this conveniently says, “Unless men are made a slave class that gives women everything they want and absolve all female people of any risk or inconvenience in life, they’re oppressing and abusing them.” But it does it in a very inverted, flattering, self-aggrandizing way.

TERFs problems with transgendered people aren’t that transgendered people are transgendered; they just have no room for them in their ideology. In Feminist ideology, it is the female human, of all colors, that is the Most Oppressed in human society. TERFs used their position claiming themselves the obligate and perpetually oppressed on the basis of the gender binary, the inescapable biological constant, to argue that a woman is and can only be oppressed under default circumstances.

Social Constructionists, Trans INCLUSIVE Radical Feminists, also believe woman is most oppressed class; But they do not define a woman as, “someone that is female sexed.” Male sexed people or those with single chromosomes can count, if they define themselves as women, and thus, the Most Oppressed group.

TERFs see their club falling out from under them and the exclusive way to net free shit from male sexed people on the self-perpetuating basis of sex disappearing out from under them, in their own ideology, a MORE pure form, that tells them logically there’s a More Oppressed(tm) class than them, that THEY technically are oppressing. And they hate that. But TERF objections to transgenderism cannot be boiled down just to, “bio-essentialism.”

For one to be a true bio-essentialist, one would simply need to argue against any validity to trans rights purely on the basis that sex is essential to gender, and you can only use biological sex to define gender. They invalidate the transgendered entirely, and argue to marginalize them as illegitimate. No preferred pronouns, punishment for trying to act or emulate outside their biological role and how it expresses itself in whatever culture it finds itself in.

TERFs don’t argue to invalidate the transgendered purely on a biological basis, because a TERF doesn’t even define a woman on a purely biological basis. They define woman as a class derived from their sex. To them, gender is just a set of responsibilities and mannerisms, which they argue are imposed on women by men. They’re wrong and conveniently so about it, but there you go.

If you want to call someone that is opposed to trans rights, and they aren’t a feminist, then you’re probably looking for the term, “Bio-essentialist.”

However, it’s inappropriate to use bio-essentialist as an insult UNLESS the person argues the whole 9 yards of opposing transgendered rights. Such as refusing to even use the person’s preferred pronouns or calling for them to be jailed for ‘cross dressing’ in public.

Oh are you a terf that's lame :(

I aint no feminist

[nostalgicatsea]

Common questions about and excuses for racism in fandom

I noticed that the same excuses, justifications, and questions that have come up in response to racism in fandom over the years appear in the notes for my post, so here’s a FAQ of sorts to address them. Hopefully, this will help people understand why these arguments don’t stand up to scrutiny and have something to refer to in lieu of writing a new reply every time someone says these things. 

Due to the length of this post, I made a Google doc for easier reading. Please note that several points are specific to the Marvel fandom and to the post linked above and are often M/M-focused (I explain why in that post), but generally speaking, the following can be applied to any fandom and various relationships. 

TABLE OF CONTENTS 

I can ship whatever I want. Stop being the fandom police!

Shipping isn’t activism. 

Fandom is supposed to be fun. Being told what to do or not to do isn’t fun.

I put a lot of different people in my works, and I do research about the groups they’re in. For example, I have a *marginalized group here* character (e.g., disabled), and I did research to represent them accurately. It’s not fair to say that I don’t care about diversity.

I don’t think people should write about POC if they’re white, just like I wouldn’t want anyone to talk about *insert topic you’re passionate about or interest group you’re in here* (e.g., the BDSM community) if they didn’t know anything about it.

I really don’t have any knowledge about what it’s like to be a POC, though, so maybe I’m not the best person for this. If POC want to see themselves represented, they should make their own works.

I’m not comfortable with writing POC as I’m unfamiliar with the struggles they experience. I don’t want my writing to come off as inauthentic, inaccurate, or offensive. Why are you saying it’s harmful to use this as a reason for abstaining from writing POC?

It doesn’t make sense to include every single POC in my work.

What you said and the data you have don’t necessarily point to racism. It might just be individual preference. I prefer certain ships over others, and it has nothing to do with race/I don’t see color.

A big part of what informs my shipping is physical attraction or interest in the characters.

I don’t ship _____ because I see them as brothers/sisters/siblings.

Some white characters and ships are popular in the MCU fandom because people bring in canon characterization or material from the comics to the character(s)/ship. Your MCU-only examination fails to account for ships with one character from the MCU and one from comics (e.g., MCU Bucky/616 Clint or Spideypool).

Some subfandoms just have fewer POC which means there will naturally be fewer ships featuring POC. To say that the Marvel fandom is racist as a whole is disingenuous; you can see how more diversity in the cast leads to more diverse ships in fanworks.

Some of the characters and ships are popular because white characters get the lion’s share of screen time and development or they appeared in canon earlier.

Is it racist to racebend a character?

Racist language in fics is more important than fandom representation.

My fanworks tend to focus on one ship and don’t really include other characters in general. When they do, the others mostly talk about that relationship. Am I falling into the trap you mentioned? 

I feel guilty about not including or writing about *character of color’s name here*.

How do I ensure that I don’t offend anyone if I include POC in my work?

What should I do to examine myself for any implicit biases?

The rest of the post is under the cut.

I can ship whatever I want. Stop being the fandom police!

As explicitly stated several times in my post, I agree that you can ship whatever you want. I’m not targeting a specific ship. I’m not telling you to stop shipping what you ship. All I’m asking is for everyone, including myself and other POC, to regularly examine ourselves for any implicit biases. If you’re a multishipper, are all of your ships in the fandom white? If you only have one ship and it’s white, are most or all of your ships in your other/previous fandoms white? Is the only media you consume predominantly or all white? 

Shipping isn’t activism. 

No, it isn’t and in many cases, shouldn’t be seen or treated as the same thing. However, by responding this way to POC who want to see themselves represented in fanworks more and not be ignored or written stereotypically, you’re telling us that our mere existence is a “political issue.” 

Fandom is supposed to be fun. Being told what to do or not to do isn’t fun.

It should be fun for us POC too, and it’s not when we’re consistently misrepresented or we don’t exist in this fandom. By using this as an excuse to exclude POC from your works, you’re saying that only some people are allowed to have fun or that having fun is conditional. Also, no one is forcing you as an individual to do or not do anything. See two paragraphs above.

I put a lot of different people in my works, and I do research about the groups they’re in. For example, I have a *marginalized group here* character (e.g., disabled), and I did research to represent them accurately. It’s not fair to say that I don’t care about diversity.

Just like you do research for those groups, you can easily do research on POC. Also, please be aware that this statement is similar to the “I’m not racist because I have a ___ friend/have a ___ person in my works” argument that many people use to prove they’re not racist, homophobic, sexist, etc. We aren’t interchangeable with other groups. 

I don’t think people should write about POC if they’re white, just like I wouldn’t want anyone to talk about *insert topic you’re passionate about or interest group you’re in here* (e.g., the BDSM community) if they didn’t know anything about it.

Something like BDSM is a lifestyle and preference. It is a choice. Being a POC isn’t. We can’t take off our identity every time we leave the house, the way you might keep it secret at work that you’re in the BDSM scene. 

I really don’t have any knowledge about what it’s like to be a POC, though, so maybe I’m not the best person for this. If POC want to see themselves represented, they should make their own works.

We do. Also, all of us fanwork creators make works with characters who are different from us all the time. Fandom is largely composed of people who aren’t straight cis men, yet the bulk of works on AO3 features characters who are canonically or implied to be straight cis men even if we end up changing that in our works. Most of us aren’t billionaires, but we don’t have a problem writing Tony. We don’t know what it’s like to be a WWII-soldier-turned-brainwashed-assassin who was kept in cryo for decades except when deployed on missions, but we don’t have a problem writing Bucky. The list goes on.

I’m not comfortable with writing POC as I’m unfamiliar with the struggles they experience. I don’t want my writing to come off as inauthentic, inaccurate, or offensive. Why are you saying it’s harmful to use this as a reason for abstaining from writing POC?

Your concern isn’t harmful. Reducing us to our trauma is, and you’re doing that if the reason you’re not comfortable with writing POC is that you don’t know how to write our struggles. We’re not only our pain. We’re more than that.

Not every fic has to be about the trauma of being a POC. We deserve to have fun, silly fics in addition to serious, plotty drama. We’re not thinking about our suffering 24/7 even if we do think about or are affected by it a lot. It’s not like if you write a Sam/Bucky fic, Sam is going to randomly lecture Bucky about the history of Black people in the U.S. and modern enslavement through the prison industrial complex while Bucky is trailing kisses down his neck in bed. We don’t need everyone being racist to MJ in a Pride and Prejudice AU. If you do want to include their struggles because that informs the way the characters think or act in your story, you can do so in ways that feel organic. 

Additionally, this is an excuse that we hear often; you may have heard it as people in Hollywood have used it to explain why they don’t have any, or at least any major, characters from marginalized groups in their works. If we allowed this excuse, an overwhelming majority of who we see in the media would be straight, cis white men considering who has power in the film and TV industry—and we would have to say that’s okay. We would have to say that the only people allowed to write about a certain group are members of that group, e.g., only women can write women. That’s not acceptable especially considering the gatekeeping, oppression, and high barriers to entry and success that make it difficult for marginalized people to even be in the room let alone make a name for themselves.

Fandom is no different. You’re saying that you can’t relate to POC because you’re white, but none of us POC have any problems making fanworks with white characters even though we don’t know what it’s like to be white. There are straight women who write fics about gay men and don’t feel uncomfortable doing so when they don’t know a single thing about being a gay man and the struggles of gay men (M/M can include bi or pan men, fics about gay men by straight women can sometimes include problematic portrayals, and straight men, queer women, and non-binary people write M/M too, but this is just an example).

You should be more careful when writing a POC if you're not a POC. The same goes for men writing women, cis people writing trans people, straight people writing queer people, able-bodied people writing disabled people, etc. However, there ARE ways to go about it, and while I understand the fear of messing up, the truth is everyone is racist, sexist, etc. Everyone including people in marginalized groups. Being a white lesbian doesn’t mean you can’t be racist. Being an Asian man doesn’t mean you can’t be sexist. You can see that within groups themselves. POC are not exempt from racism against other POC or from internalized racism against themselves or their own group. Women aren't free from internalized misogyny. The best we can do is to not make that prevent us from making inclusive works; if you make a mistake, which may happen, all we can ask is that you try your best to be open to feedback and grow. 

It doesn’t make sense to include every single POC in my work.

No one is telling you to. Choose characters who make sense for the story. Don’t choose them just so you have a POC in your work. We don’t want them to be tokenized. 

What you said and the data you have don’t necessarily point to racism. It might just be individual preference. I prefer certain ships over others, and it has nothing to do with race/I don’t see color.

This argument is identical to the “not all _____” rebuttal (“not all men,” “not all white people,” etc.) which places the blame on a few lone individuals and shifts the conversation away from an existing widespread problem. When there’s a consistent pattern and there are many examples of it both within the fandom and in other fandoms, it no longer is about individual preference. 

I urge you to consider the following:

If most people say they don’t write about or include a POC in their work because it’s too difficult or they’re afraid of making that character inauthentic, but they don’t seem to have an issue with writing other characters from groups they’re not in (e.g., if you’re a straight woman who writes a lot of M/M fics despite not knowing what it’s like to be a bi, pan, or gay man), doesn’t that say something?

If most people have the same reasons you do about not being interested in POC (e.g., “they’re not fleshed out enough” while being interested in or fleshing out minor white characters who get the same or even less development as those characters) or ships with POC (e.g., saying “they’re like brothers” while being interested in a white ship with similar dynamics and tropes or seeing why other people might ship it if you don’t), doesn’t that say something?

If most people give characters of color the same roles in their works even if that makes them OOC and/or the role reduces them to a (frequently stereotypical) trope, especially if they’re never fleshed out beyond that trope (e.g., the funny sidekick, wise friend who always helps or gives advice/free therapy, or responsible, mature, and sometimes stern friend who “parents” the protagonist), isn’t that saying something?

If race truly isn’t a factor for you when it comes to liking characters and ships, then this isn’t about you and you don’t have to distract people from the conversation by announcing that. That said, we should all look at characters and ships we like anyway instead of assuming that’s the case as that’s good practice. How much of your list is white? If it’s mostly or entirely white, why is that the case and why do you feel differently about ships of color?

A big part of what informs my shipping is physical attraction or interest in the characters.

What characters and actors do you find attractive or interesting? Are they all or mostly white? If they aren’t, are you drawn to any ships that include those POC? Refer to the section above.

I don’t ship _____ because I see them as brothers/sisters/siblings.

Part of this is preference as it comes down to perceived chemistry and relationship dynamics. However, POC are often not seen as romantic leads both in fanworks and the media and are just friends or “brothers/sisters” (this is why Crazy Rich Asians was a big deal). Sometimes, people even argue against POC being or having love interests in the name of diversity. You see this a lot with WOC in the media where the explanation against a love interest is “she’s a strong, independent woman who doesn’t need a man”; yes, they don’t and sometimes the story doesn’t need a romance, but WOC deserve love too and it’s strange that while white women can get the guy and be independent, WOC can’t and it somehow belittles or reduces them if they do. 

The way you can gauge whether it’s just preference at play or biases you may not have been aware of is to see how many relationships featuring a character of color fall under the “just friends/siblings” category for you, what you need to ship something, and how you feel about white ships with the same type of relationship or same lack of chemistry. For instance, you may say that there needs to be enough interaction for you to ship something and that’s why you don’t care much for Rhodey/Sam. Do you feel the same way about Clint/Coulson then, which has much less interaction (actually much less than Rhodey/Sam in this case)? If it’s about chemistry, are Steve and Sam just “brothers,” but Bruce and Thor aren’t or, if you don’t ship Bruce/Thor, you still “see it” and get why other people might be into it?

What do you ship, or what ships do you understand even if they’re not for you, and how is that different from ships that follow the same beats? Why are Steve and Bucky not brothers, but Rhodey and Tony are (there are many parallels between the two relationships—and one can argue the latter is more nuanced—than appears at first glance, and Rhodey/Tony can be just as sweet or angsty)? If you like the rivals/enemies-to-lovers or meet-ugly aspect to Steve/Tony, Sam/Bucky, Scott/Jimmy Woo, and M’Baku/T’Challa have that dynamic. You like that superior/subordinate-to-lovers dynamic that Clint/Coulson has? Coulson/Fury. Flirty meet-cutes or love/trust-at-first-sight? Steve/Sam.

Some white characters and ships are popular in the MCU fandom because people bring in canon characterization or material from the comics to the character(s)/ship. Your MCU-only examination fails to account for ships with one character from the MCU and one from comics (e.g., MCU Bucky/616 Clint or Spideypool).

I explained why I focused on the MCU here and that most of the fics that feature an MCU character and comics ’verse character tend to be heavily or entirely MCU-influenced here.

Also, characters of color exist in the comics, cartoons, and games too. By this logic, Steve/Sam and Rhodey/Tony should be juggernauts in the MCU fandom considering the depth and history of the characters and relationships. Ask yourself why people are happy to ship MCU Spideypool, to draw on the comics for that relationship and even bring a non-MCU character into the MCU and write him based on his comics history and characterization. Ask yourself why people are unhappy with MCU Clint’s terrible writing and lack of characterization and decide to give him his 616 (usually Fraction-era) characterization. And then ask yourself why people don’t do that for characters of color and then use “___ is a minor character/doesn’t have much development” as an excuse for why they’re uninteresting or not shippable with others.

There are many strong and interesting relationships in the comics, but only a few make it to the MCU fandom and almost all, if not all, of them are white.

Some subfandoms just have fewer POC which means there will naturally be fewer ships featuring POC. To say that the Marvel fandom is racist as a whole is disingenuous; you can see how more diversity in the cast leads to more diverse ships in fanworks.

It’s more important to see how many fanworks there are for ships of color in a fandom than how many ships of color there are in that fandom. See how few works there are for POC ships other than MJ/Peter in the MCU Spider-Man fandom despite the diversity of the cast. See how the most popular ships are white and three of them involve white characters from the Iron Man fandom (explain to me how Harley/Peter has over 1,000 works, but Ned/Peter has 436). 

And sure, you can say almost all of the Black Panther ships feature a character of color so there’s “more” diversity, but see how few works there are for them and how works with a white character fare compare to POC-only ships (almost all have 100-200 or fewer fics, with many having so few that I didn’t include them in the post, while BP ships with a white character have more works despite little to no interaction between the characters). 

Both of these, by the way, are critical and box office hits with characters who are clearly supposed to be the faces of the MCU now that the OG6 are gone. Black Panther is an award-winning critical and box office hit, and it is, more than any other film in MCU history, a huge cultural phenomenon with tremendous impact. It broke so many records and milestones, and it’s STILL breaking and making them. It has the most nuanced and balanced ensemble cast with side characters just as three-dimensional as the lead, a rarity in MCU films. Yet, its tag only has 3,966 works, fewer in total for the whole fandom than some of the white M/M ships on this list. Even if you account for BP fanworks that may have been tagged as MCU instead of BP, the number is paltry as you can see in this post. People simply do not want to make fanworks for characters of color (in this case, specifically Black characters) and don’t. It’s not about how diverse or successful a film is.

Some of the characters and ships are popular because white characters get the lion’s share of screen time and development or they appeared in canon earlier.

Yes, that’s true, but fandom has no problem catapulting white ships with minor characters into extreme popularity. See Clint/Coulson. See fics prioritizing Happy and having him show up more than Rhodey in Steve/Tony fics. 

It’s not about chronology. Many ships of color came before white ships as a whole and before white ships with the same white character they have. See Bucky/Clint vs. Bucky/Sam. 

Lastly, please don’t tell me how certain white M/M ships came to be to explain how they’re exempt or how I’m failing to consider other factors for their popularity. I’ve been in the fandom since 2012, and I’ve seen almost all of the white ships in the fandom be born or boom into popularity. Don’t try to explain, for instance, that Clint/Coulson is big because Coulson has his own show and his fans followed him from the show (this logic falls flat when you look at something like Luke Cage); that ship became huge way before that happened and way before Agents of Shield became “big.” Also, see the section above regarding screen time, development, and fame. 

Is it racist to racebend a character? 

People’s opinions differ on racebending—and often that comes from personal background and on the situation—so I can’t speak on anyone’s behalf. However, I think everyone can agree on the following:

Racebending a white character is not the same thing as whitewashing a POC. For example, making Tony Stark Indian vs. turning T’Challa white or as canonical examples, making Fury black in Ultimates and the MCU vs. making the Ancient One or the Maximoffs white. The latter (whitewashing T’Challa, the Ancient One, and the Maximoff twins) is racist for various reasons. There’s a long history of POC being erased and white people taking roles from POC, a huge imbalance in representation between white people and POC, the unfortunate perception by the public and media that “white = neutral/standard” (Bruce’s whiteness doesn’t define his characterization and development), and the way race plays a role in influencing the way POC feel, act, and are treated.

Racebending a POC from one ethnicity or racial group to another is also problematic as we’re not interchangeable. Hollywood often does this and goes, “But they’re still a POC! We’re being diverse!” 

In general, people who racebend white characters to POC want to see more POC in canon and in the media! These aren’t mutually exclusive.

Sometimes people racebend because they’re not represented at all in their works. (This happens with other marginalized groups too; for instance, some people make cis characters trans in their fanworks as there are few to no trans characters in the canonical source.) For example, there are, as of now, no Latinx superheroes in the MCU films. Even if people wanted to, they can’t make works with an MCU Latinx superhero unless they bring one from the comics or the one Latinx superhero from Agents of Shield (if they know the comics or AoS), make a minor Latinx film character like Luis a superhero, or racebend their favorite white character and put a fresh spin on the character, drawing from their personal experience and background.

There’s a massive difference between fans racebending a character and a creator taking credit by pretending they viewed a character as non-white or didn’t see race all along when it’s clear that the character is canonically white (this is different from a creator saying they support anyone, POC or white, playing that character onscreen or onstage). 

Racist language in fics is more important than fandom representation.

We don’t have to pick our battles. Both are important! I focused on fandom representation as it’s much more quantifiable and easy to find and analyze data for than racist language on a fandom-wide scale on my own without any tools. You’re right that the latter is a problem as is racist representation in fanworks, though. 

My fanworks tend to focus on one ship and don’t really include other characters in general. When they do, the others mostly talk about that relationship. Am I falling into the trap you mentioned?

If the story is about a relationship (examining that relationship and the feelings of the characters in it) and there isn’t much of a plot outside of that, then that makes sense. However, even in situations like this, consider how much time you dedicate to characters of color vs. white characters. If the story is about a ship featuring a POC, do you spend more time on the white character of that relationship? Their white friends and how they feel about that relationship? If it’s about a white ship, do white side characters appear more than side characters of color even if the latter have a closer relationship with the protagonists? For example, does Wanda show up more than Sam or play a bigger role than him in a Steve/Bucky fic? Do you have Pepper show up all the time (or even Happy), but Rhodey is chronically absent? Do only the white characters get to be more than the tropes you’re using, if you’re using any, while the POC don’t get to be nuanced? Are there any stereotypes that you’re reducing the POC to?

I feel guilty about not including or writing about *character of color’s name here*.

See “It doesn’t make sense to include every single POC in my work.” Include the character(s) who make sense for the story, perspective you’re writing/drawing from if applicable, and central group or ship if this is a ship-specific work. For example, if you’re drawing the Avengers and you include the newer Avengers, Rhodey and Sam should appear too, not just Wanda, Scott, Bucky, and/or Carol (this happens a lot). If you’re writing a Tony POV fic that includes other characters, depending on the story, it may make sense that Sam doesn’t appear much as he and Tony aren’t close whereas he would in a Steve POV fic.

How do I ensure that I don’t offend anyone if I include POC in my work?

You can’t ensure anything as POC aren’t a monolith, but you can try to be as informed as possible and avoid common pitfalls while writing. You can do research, just the way you might research anything you’re not familiar with. You can ask if anyone is willing to do a sensitivity read while you write or before you post. You can look for betas. There are a lot of resources out there, but these are good places to start if you’re looking for more information and help:

Writing with Color - resources

Writing with Color - Stereotypes and Tropes page

Reference for Writers - POC tag

What should I do to examine myself for any implicit biases?

We should all take stock of:

our feelings about different characters and relationships, both platonic and romantic, who we prioritize in our works, and how much they’re prioritized

our decision whether or not to seek or make content with characters of color. This includes content for white ships because sometimes every white character in the MCU shows up as a side character, but characters of color don’t or all of the white characters play bigger roles than the POC despite how close they are to the protagonist(s)

the way we interpret and write/draw those characters. For example, is Sam a yes-man? A figurative or literal therapist for white friends? The bro who only cracks jokes and/or gives sage advice but seems to not have any flaws, struggles, or life of his own outside of his white friends? The BFF who thinks his white best friend is being ridiculous about another white guy and wants them to get their act together already? Does the character of color talk in the way you perceive everyone of that race to talk rather than the way they personally do (e.g., does Luis randomly and awkwardly switch into Spanish when he talks just because he’s Latinx despite never speaking Spanish with Scott? Does Sam use AAVE with Steve, Bucky, and Natasha when he doesn’t do that with them?)? 

Also, here’s a Google doc with more anti-racist resources.

Even well-meaning people can slip up or not be as proactive as they hoped they would be so it’s just good practice to check in with ourselves every once in a while and see if there’s anything we missed or didn’t notice.

[nightswithkookmin]

G I R L

I just saw y the HYBE x Ithaca Holdings video and it really hit me with some realisations. HYBE partnering with them is bound to change some things in a huge way. Collabs and economics notwithstanding, Ithaca is home to NUMEROUS big name artists. I want to focus on the fact that: (1) Beiber is a heavily tattooed dude, I wonder if this fact will give some leeway for Kook to be a bit more free with his existing tatts or allow him to continue getting more. (2) Demi is an openly queer woman. This, along with how open Ithaca’s artists are with their support for the LGBTQ+ community, makes me wonder how it will influence HYBE artists who might be queer themselves (looking at Jikook 👀). I fully know that culturally Korea is its own thing and HYBE its own entity, but I think this might open up some doors for our boys both musically speaking as well as regarding their own selves. Dearest Goldy of mine, what do you think?

Hmmmmmmm

That's an interesting question.

I do agree that this provides a huge economic opportunity for BTS as a group and as investors in Hybe and for frankly anyone within Hybe labels- there's a lot of talents who would kill to be part of this company now. I just know it.

Hell I wanna be part of Hybe and I can't even sang. Lmho.

Cute, if you think I can dance. 🤣🤣🤣🤣

BigHit just got cooler you know.

But I think you are basically asking if this new acquisition will in effect impact the lifestyle of BTS, specifically Jikook as queer people in any way?

I'd say no- especially on the issue of tattoos. But I might be wrong. I just think it takes more than a business merger to undo a person's lifestlye and or socialization or even influence it.

Unless of course, this merger guarantees them certain universal rights and protections outside their culture and political system I don't see how it's to profit them as queer people in any major way.

Whatever impact I'd say is rather intangible.

If you know what I mean.

I've said a few times now how BTS by virtue of their presence in the international community, in my opinion, are socialized and are expected to be socialized a tad differently from the average regular conservative or even liberal S. Korean person with no external influences whatsoever on their socializations.

Your socialization informs your lifestyle.

Justin, Troye, RM and other artists have undoubtedly had and perhaps continue to have an influence on Jk musically and lifestyle wise, to some extent, but he has his own unique values and beliefs and morals that has been acquired and instilled in him through the years independent of these influences.

He is his own person afterall.

Plus did you see the arm sleeve on the director of the MV for Home? He is surrounded at the work place with people that are tatted too. It can't be just Justin B.

He saw a girl with tattoos and said that was something he'd love to have one day when he got of age and he got it- in spite of Suga's objection. He's always expressed interests in tattoos and wanting to become a tattoo artist.

He got these tattoos in spite of the inconveniences they pose to his expressions of self within his career and society- as tattoos are still pretty much stigmatized in S.K and aren't legally allowed on certain broadcasts within S. Korea. And he continues to add on them, draw over them etc way before this merger came into existence.

If he decides that's what he wants he will get them but it wouldn't be because Justin Bieber is heavily tatted or because his company expanded.

I'm not sure what you mean by leeway, but in a recent Run episode (the one with the famous chef) we saw his full arm out and I think that was the first time we had seen his tats on full display on run.

Contrastingly, he had his whole arm bandaged in the Let's BTS interview on KBS.

He covers his tattoos most times because of broadcast rules that prohibits (regulates) not just tattoos but alcohol consumption, cussing, nudity etc on public television that require specific ratings.

Merger or not he will still have to adhere to the laws of South Korea, including entertainment and media broadcasting laws and hide his tattoos as and where.

On the topic of queerness, I think now more than ever BTS would have to become socially, racially and culturally conscious and aware the instant this deal is concluded in May.

Ithaca has one of the most diversified group of artists under its belt- from Quavo who is black to Demi who is queer like you pointed out.

Now more than ever they are at the center of the global conversations we are having in our generation- from racism, to LBGTQ plus marginalizations, to all oppressions of minorities and minority groups.

And with that proximity comes a need to keep themselves in check now more so than ever- which include a check on the cultural appropriation bit, the queer baiting, drawing on queer aesthetics in their 'fan service' culture and other problematic issues that is characteristic of KPop.

What they do now matters more than ever- socially speaking of course.

When Jin started eating a lollipop JM gave him provocatively, JM asked him not to do that on camera but to reserve things like that for the group off camera.

If 'gay' is not gay but their 'culture' I think they know better to keep it to themselves off camera and act 'right' on camera- especially now.

I'm not about to stan a group that capitalizes on the trauma and oppression of me and my people in the name of entertainment. That's just tacky.

On the plus, I think it's great that they be surrounded by other queer folks in the business and be part of a community that welcomes and support queerness so they don't feel like they are the only ones.

That's not to say they aren't surrounded by queer people in their dialy lives.

I mean they have a large staff and I know damn well some of those staffers are queer as well- why wouldn't they be. Lol.

They've always had that 'supportive' environment to foster their relationship- well except for that one time a manager tried to bitch slap JK. Lol. Sorry.

It's not funny at all. Serious face.

They've always been free and loose in places outside Korea- Japan for one, to be themselves in certain 'controlled" areas of their lives.

I think if anything there's gonna be a focus on creating conducive and inclusive work environments and ethics for everyone not just queer people within the company at large.

I think Jikook can relate more, have certain essential conversations in the group, be exposed to and be part of the 'community' in a way that just felt so distant to them prior to the acquisition- in my opinion.

There is strength in numbers after all. Other than that those two companies might operate like night and day with a few eclipses in between.

The bigger question for me is how SK is going to react to Hybe as an international company from now on. No elite Korean company has openly admitted queer artists within their label. Such revelations presumably is bound to impact their social and economic standing...

Seems in acquiring Ithaca though Hybe have circumvented the conservative problem within Kpop and their culture as they have acquired openly queer artists.

Not that they care about an artist's sexuality. Bang have made it perfectly clear he prioritizes a person's talent over their sexual preference and thus hire artists based on their skills regardless of their sexuality.

But that is also not to say that the company wouldn't be met with harsh criticisms and suffer economic loss should they openly admit the sexuality of certain artists they work with.

I mean he did advise Jo Kwan on the risks he would be taking in going in the direction he wanted to go in with his heels schtick. So he is aware of the risks involved in going public with an artist's sexual orientation.

He talked about Korean companies playing it safe and not taking certain risks especially when it comes to deeds that are deemed 'rebellious' against the Korean conservative way.

-Watch and learn people, if you can't hire openly gay talents acquire their company. Problem solved. Lol.

From May, Hybe will technically officially become the first elite Korean company with openly queer artists under its labels that openly touches on and advocates for LGBTQ plus rights.

I'm waiting for Pride month with a cup of tea. Mu haha ha.

BTS has performed with queer artists in the past, dabbled in LGBTQ plus conversations which was mostly met with mixed reactions from the general public- some oblivious to who these artists were much less that they were queer. (Sis laugh with me. Hehe. If you know you know)

BigHit is gradually evolving the status quo.

It's an interesting development I must say, one I'm very much invested in at this point.

BigHit has always aimed beyond the borders of Korean commercial verse often straddling the line of conservatism, literally just became an international company within South Korea governed by both Korean and American laws that in all essence conflict with eachother morally and constitutionally.

Bang has some heavy balls I'll give him that.

Also, since this is an acquisition and not a merger I doubt if much will change in the structures of either company- the family photoshoots would be interesting to watch.

Imagine trying to get Arianna, Justin, BTS, TXT in one large studio for a photoshoot. I'm literally cackling. Lmho.

Scooter Braun will become part of the board of Hybe to manage the company and he is part owner of Hybe along with Justin, Ariana and BTS who also have shares in the company- until they decide to sell their shares that is.

That's about it.

I'm not sure how these Asian haters are gonna respond to an Asian company taking over 'America.' That's something to watch out for.

Then there's this whole issue of 'scandals' and both campanies view on it.

Western companies feed off chaos and drama and scandals, Kpop is the exact opposite.

Most of these Artists under Ithaca have had some pretty bad records and are prone to scandals and stuff like that. In case of an inevitable future scandal, the news would read 'BTS's so so and so.'

They are gonna make it all about BTS.

I mean when BigHit went public with their IPO and it went south it was all about BTS' 'failed IPO' in the news rather than the company it's self.

I have mixed feelings about this acquisition.

It's obvious BigHit is saving Justin Bieber's label. You don't sell unless you are in some huge financial decline blah blah.

Hybe is keeping them in business while building their own portfolio in the industry. BTS may not have a Grammy but Hybe has several artists with Grammys under it's belt now. Smirk.

The success of Justin, Ariana and all these artists are the success of Hybe which together with the powerhouse that is BTS gives Hybe more prestige- it's like watching the game of thrones but this time it's a bunch of nerds with chapsticks and Prada. Lmho.

At least now people will think twice before they peddle the 'they are not gay, it's their culture' nonsense.

Not sure if this answers your question?

I purple you💜💜💜💜💜

Signed,

GOLDY

[kosakka]

Here's a summary/breakdown of the random Miraculous Ladybug dream I had a few days ago... (Set post-season 3/Miracle Queen)

Marinette and Luka go missing after meeting up at a small recording studio to work on something for Kitty Section's new track (another customer renting one of the other booths becomes akumatized and uses his powers before they can react).

The following day, the class notices Marinette is absent/Jukela shares that her brother never came home last night, and that they were supposed to meet up the previous day, leading them to speculate that the two have run off together and eloped. Adrien isn't sure why the thought bothers him so much.

After school, a breaking news story reveals that several hundred people have gone missing since the previous day. The police notice the only thing the missing people have in common is that several of them worked in a specific area of town. When the citizens working in that area were questioned, they all mentioned that the crew from the afternoon shift (who were now missing) had left their jobs unattended mid-task, as if they had simply vanished into thin air. Everyone wonders if it's due to a new akuma, but there's been no sign of who or what it could be.

Alya uploads a video on the Ladyblog asking for people to come forward if they notice anything amiss, as well as calling for Ladybug to make a statement confirming whether an akuma is the cause. Adrien transforms and scopes out the area, but comes up with nothing, and is unable to contact Ladybug. He wonders if she was fighting the akuma alone, but got caught up in whatever caused the disappearances. His only consolation is that Luka and Marinette are also missing, which means Ladybug might be able to have Viperion and Multimouse aid her.

The next day, Alya, Nino, and Adrien visit the bakery to check in on Marinette's parents. While sitting down with them, Adrien excuses himself to use the bathroom. After doing his business, he passes by the ladder leading to Marinette's room and Plagg darts out of his pocket and phases through the trapdoor. Adrien reluctantly follows in order to wrangle his kwami, and finds Plagg hovering near Marinette's bed. He tells the kwami off for being a pervert but Plagg ignores him and orders Adrien to open the drawer of the nightstand. He begrudgingly does so, discovering the drawer is much shallower than it first appeared, due to a false bottom compartment. Annoyed that Adrien is taking so long, Plagg lifts the thin plywood of the false bottom and reveals a very familiar polka dot box. Adrien pulls the box out and wonders why Ladybug would leave something so important with Marinette, even if they're good friends. Plagg points out that she wouldn't (it's as close to the truth as his magic will allow). Numb with shock, Adrien brushes his fingers over the box, causing it to open. The surprise snaps him out of it enough to examine the contents, noting that all of the other kwamis' accessories are still there, including Sass's bangle.

Alya and Nino go upstairs to find Adrien so they can leave and discover the entrance to the trapdoor is open. Furious at the invasion of Marinette's privacy, Alya storms up the ladder and catches Adrien snooping by the bed. Adrien fumbles the box, trying to hide it away again before they notice, but his bad luck kicks in and one of the accessories falls on the floor. Alya pauses mid-tirade as she recognizes Trixx's necklace. Nino yanks Adrien away from the nightstand, demanding an answer for why he's up here, snooping through Marinette's stuff. Adrien's other hand is still on the handle of the drawer, so when he's pulled away, the whole drawer comes out. Alya rushes to rescue the necklace, catching the drawer frame awkwardly enough that the contents spill out onto the floor. Nino turns his attention to Alya in order to make sure she's okay, but ends up voicing his thoughts aloud when he asks 'why does Marinette have Wayzz's bracelet?'

The trio reconcile their superhero identities, as well as the knowledge that Marinette is most likely Ladybug. Adrien admits that he's Chat Noir, and that his kwami was the one who led to the box's discovery. Alya and Nino forgive him for the breach of Marinette's privacy and the conversation turns toward the disappearances. Adrien notes that Ladybug's earrings aren't there, so Marinette must have had them with her when she went missing. When Nino brings up the possibility of other heroes being there, Adrien points out that everyone else's miraculous are still here. Alya suggests that they team up with the other wielders, but Adrien admits that he only knows the identities of Viperion and Ryuko, and that one of them is among the missing. He explains Ladybug's rule of not knowing the wielders' identities, and shares her concerns about it. He shares that after their identities were revealed, Ladybug decided it was too dangerous for them to continue being heroes, lest Hawkmoth use their families against them. Reluctantly, they agree to put the box back for safekeeping. Adrien tells them he'll keep them in the loop if he finds anything, and the trio head home.

-*-

Meanwhile, Marinette and Luka find themselves trapped in a pocket dimension with the other people who have disappeared. Everything appears to be normal, so they finish out their day unaware, but when they try to return home, they discover that they're trapped. They can't leave the area and end up returning if they try to walk past a certain point (they can see beyond it, but can't continue without being turned back around). Marinette struggles to find a way to talk to Tykki alone so they can assess the situation, and Luka guesses the reason she's uncomfortable. Luka reveals that he already knows she's Ladybug, because 'their music is the same.' Together, they find a private spot and discuss things with Tykki.

They agree to have Marinette transform in order to lure out the akuma, who should have instructions to take Ladybug's miraculous and give it to Hawkmoth. Ladybug attempts to call Chat Noir, but he doesn't answer. She leaves a message and decides to go through with the plan for now. Luka positions himself on the roof of the tallest building within the bubble, acting as a lookout since they don't know where the akuma will be coming from. After an hour of acting as bait, even resorting to taunts and call-outs, the akuma still doesn't show. Puzzled, Ladybug swings around the entire bubble, but never catches sight of anyone who might be the akuma. She attempts to call Chat again, but he still won't pick up. She leaves another message with an update and wonders whether the messages are getting through at all.

At an impasse, Marinette and Luka agree to find some place to stay for the night and try to figure out another plan in the morning. Luckily, a small hotel was caught in the bubble, and most of the people who are trapped end up staying there for the night. There's a shortage of rooms, however, so friendly groups are given a single room in order to make space for others. Marinette and Luka awkwardly share a room for the night, washing up in shifts and dressing down as comfortably as they can, given the circumstances. When Luka offers to sleep on the floor without any blankets or pillows (which had been commandeered for larger groups prior to their arrival), Marinette allows him to share the bed. Noticing how uncomfortable she is despite her offer, Luka decides to compromise and sleep on top of the sheets so that there's a barrier between them. Feeling marginally better, Marinette rolls over to face the opposite way and squeaks out a goodnight, still nervous, but is somehow able to sleep.

The next day, after a small panic-attack on Marinette's part (when she wakes up to find Luka setting out breakfast in their shared room and her sleep-addled brain has to catch up), they settle down to discuss their next move. Since their attempts to bait the akuma didn't work, they decide to scour the whole bubble, one building at a time. In order to simplify the process, they decide to have Ladybug direct the citizens to gather in the hotel (after they've searched it) while she searches the rest of the area. They follow through with the plan, but are only able to get through half of the bubble by the end of the day. After letting the citizens know which areas have been cleared, Marinette finds a place to change back and heads back to the room with Luka.

They spend another awkward night together, and Luka comforts Marinette when she starts berating herself for not resolving the issue more quickly. He apologizes for not being able to help more without his miraculous, and she chastizes him for apologising for something he has no control over. The conversation leads to Marinette admitting that she feels lost in her new role as Guardian, and that it might be better to change up some of the old rules she'd been following. If the other wielders had their miraculous on hand, then they would always be at the ready in case of an emergency. Doing so would also allow them to practice with their powers and grow closer to their respective kwamis. She admits that the main thing holding her back from making the change is worry over someone else abusing their power like Chloe. Luka asks why she chose Chloe to be a wielder in the first place, and Marinette relates the story of how Chloe found it on her own. Luka points out that all the other people she's actually chosen have taken it seriously and have always returned their miraculous when she's asked for them back. He encourages her to trust in her partners, and in her own ability to judge a person's character. When she brings up the incident with Adrien, who had Sass first, Luka mentions that Adrien still respected her and returned the miraculous. Tykki reminds Marinette that it's okay to make mistakes, or to ask for help when she needs it. Marinette argues that she's still worried about what might happen if the wielders knew each other's identities (and laments that she has to choose new weilders due to the events of Miracle Queen), but that she'll consider lending out the miraculous on a more long-term basis. She thanks Luka for comforting her, and the two grow a little closer.

The following day, Marinette transforms and gathers the citizens together again before searching the other half of the bubble. Luka discovers the akuma still inside the recording studio and sneaks outside to flag Ladybug down. Together, they creep inside to observe the akuma and attempt to figure out where the akumatized item might be hiding. The akuma is lost in their own world, recording their music. Ladybug and Luka retreat to an empty booth and speculate as to why the akuma wouldn't go after her miraculous after all this time. Ladybug theorizes that the akuma's power has cut them off from everything outside the bubble, including communication between miraculous (which would explain the radio silence from Chat Noir, and Hawkmoth allowing the akuma to do as they pleased for so long).

They discuss how to proceed, since akuma usually act out if someone tries to take away their powers or impede whatever their goals are. Luka suggests that if the akuma doesn't feel threatened, there may be a chance to talk to them and better understand their motives, which could help narrow down the akumatized item. Ladybug is hesitant to put him in harm's way, but agrees that aggravating the akuma may lead to further complications (like the akuma walling himself off a second time, to where they couldn't reach). She agrees to attempt Luka's plan and remains out of sight, ready to jump in and protect him if need be.

Luka knocks on the door of the akuma's booth and strikes up a casual conversation. He's hypervigilant of any change in their 'music' that might signal an aggressive response, but maintains an air of calm and curiosity. The akuma is suspicious at first, but relaxes his guard when the topic stays on his music, and what he's trying to accomplish. When Luka offers to help, the akuma's wariness spikes again, and Luka notices they seem protective of their (insert item here), but after a tense moment, they calm down again. Luka stays and helps a bit to keep up pretenses before excusing himself to grab a bottle of water.

He fills Ladybug in on his findings and they decide to have him return in order to keep the akuma at ease and distract them while Ladybug sneaks in to destroy the akumatized item. While Luka is chatting with the akuma, Ladybug quietly enters the room and attempts to get close enough to retrieve the item. The akuma catches her and realizes that Luka was working with Ladybug all along. She quickly summons her Lucky Charm, before the akuma can use their powers again. Using the Lucky Charm, she's able to manipulate the akuma into attacking her, leaving Luka an opening to grab the akumatized item. He breaks it, Ladybug cleanses the butterfly, and then uses her Miraculous Ladybug skill to return the bubble to normal.

-*-

Outside of the bubble, the others are on their way home when the displaced dome flickers into existence, followed by a commotion when the missing people start reappearing. Adrien transforms and rushes over to the area, meeting Alya and Nino along the way. They spot Ladybug and Luka coming out of the recording studio and rush to greet them. Ladybug reassures them that Marinette is alright, and the trio admit to discovering her identity. Luka puts a comforting hand on her shoulder (giving away the fact he also knows), but Ladybug shakes her head and doesn't deny it. Choosing to put the citizens before her own troubles, Ladybug asks to meet up at the eiffel tower to talk later, then focuses on helping the citizens reorient themselves.

When they reconvene, Ladybug tells the story of what happened inside the bubble, and why her messages weren't getting through. When they ask about Luka's involvement, and how he found out about Ladybug's identity, Luka explains that he figured it out on his own. This bring up the topic of how the others found out, and they tell their side of the story, explaining what had happened with Plagg (while referring to Adrien as Chat, even though she can surmise Chat must be someone close to her, considering her parents let him in). She tells them that it couldn't be helped, and that any blame should be placed squarely on Plagg. Even so, the kwami was only worried about what might happen without Ladybug around, which is why finding new, permanent weilders is so important.

After settling that issue, Ladybug apologizes for hiding her identity from Alya and Nino. They express their conflicted feelings, but acknowledge that they understand her reasons for doing so. In an attempt to lighten the mood, Nino comments that Marinette will no longer need to flub for excuses when encountering an akuma in their civilian lives, and can just transform around them. Alya jokingly bemoans that she should have realized it sooner, considering how awkwardly disjointed some of Marinette's excuses were previously. Luka just smiles at Ladybug reassuringly, offering to help with whatever he can even if he's not Viperion anymore. Ladybug is relieved their friendship is still strong, even though this new dynamic will undoubtedly take some getting used to on all sides.

Once things have been smoothed over, they agree to keep her secret and offer support however they can. Thoroughly drained, Ladybug bids them goodnight, knowing she still has to get through a tearful reunion with her parents before she can rest.

-*-

Everyone has a moment of reflection about the day's revelations. Marinette texts Luka to thank him again for the support, let him know that she got home okay. Alya and Nino try to reconcile the fact everyone in their main friend group are/were superheroes, but that Marinette still doesn't know Adrien is Chat Noir. Adrien frets about how to act around Marinette now that he knows she's Ladybug, when she's still unaware that his civilian self knows/doesn't know that he's Chat.

-*-

The following day, Adrien, Alya, and Nino wait in front of the school for Marinette to arrive. They talk for a bit about how to interact, and Alya asks about whether Chat's feelings for Ladybug are true. Adrien admits he's had a huge crush on Ladybug since Stoneheart, but isn't sure what to do since Marinette always seems so awkward around him, despite being one of his best friends. Alya and Nino share a look, but try to be encouraging- letting him know that Marinette cares about him a lot, and to try to show her that she's special to him. Adrien is hesitant to do so, since he's not sure how Marinette feels about him, especially since the class seems to think she's interested in Luka. Marinette arrives before Alya and Nino can reply. Adrien resolves to ask Marinette about her feelings later, as Chat.

Marinette notices Adrien is acting a little strangely, but is too wrapped up in dealing with the post-reveal aftermath and brainstorming candidates for miraculous to do much about it. When she catches a moment where she's alone with them, she lets Alya and Nino know she plans to duck out right after school to focus on superhero things. Once at home, she transforms long enough to leave a message for Chat asking him to stop by later that night to talk things over.

-*-

While Marinette focuses on planning, Alya and Nino let Adrien know why she left, then try to talk to him about his crush again. He says he'll think it over, but has to run to fencing practice.

Adrien's mind is obviously somewhere else during practice, so Kagami cajoles him into talking. He gives her a vague outline of his predicament, taking care to dodge around names or anything that would implicate their superhero identities. Kagami realizes this is most likely about Marinette, and bluntly tells him to weigh his options- pursue someone who hasn't made up her mind (Marinette), someone who has (her), or don't pursue either. She then leaves him with his thoughts, and he spends the rest of the afternoon mulling over his relationship with Kagami, and what may have happened in the bubble between Marinette and Luka.

-*-

That evening, Marinette jots down ideas in her journal while she waits for Chat Noir to show up. Once he does, they chat about the other miraculous for a bit before the conversation turns to their identities. Chat admits that he was surprised to discover her identity, but that looking back on Marinette's involvement with akuma, he shouldn't have been- that she was just as brave and resourceful as Ladybug even as a civilian. He expresses embarrassment over his actions during the Evillustrator and Weredad cases, and Marinette admits to rolling her eyes behind his back several times. Chat mentions wishing he could take it back, knowing what he does now. When Marinette points out that she's had her fair share of embarrassing moments, he explains he was referring to his declaration that he wasn't in love with Marinette. At first she's a little flattered by this statement, but quickly points out that he truly didn't feel that way about "just Marinette" at the time, and that he should reconcile those feelings before confessing his love now that he's found out she's Ladybug. If he decides that he feels the same way about all of Marinette, not just Ladybug, then she'll accept his confession. Chat asks if that means she'll choose him over Luka, which causes Marinette to consider her own feelings. She admits that she's unsure about who she'll choose in the end, since there's still a different boy she's trying to get over. Chat is jealous, but tries to comfort her, telling her that whoever the other guy is, he's missing out.

-*-

(That's it, folks. I assume a lot of character growth and relationship drama ensues, but the end pairings and such are up to you. I just wanted to jot down the core idea from my dream and fleshed it out a bit.

Feel free to run with it and write a fic or draw fanart or whatever, just link it back to this post/dm me so I can see them. :) Have fun!)

[hypnoticwinter]

110 Epigrams, in no particular order

1. there is no such thing as bad writing so long as you are saying what you mean to say the way you mean to say it to the people you mean to hear it.

2. prose is only inexcusably purple when it is pretentious or unnecessarily complex.

3. the most important part of any relationship is knowing what you want and knowing what they want.

4. you handicap yourself if you have power but refuse to exercise it.

5. characters don't have to be likeable and don't have to grow, but they do have to have logical motives for their actions.

6. everything is art, but that doesn't automatically make it worthy of discussion.

7. literature is multidimensional and the original author should not be placed on a pedestal; however, the original author should also not be completely disregarded.

8. intelligence is the ability to take in knowledge and dissect it; wisdom is the ability to use it in your life.

9. the good don't need the law and the bad don't obey it.

10. in great attempts, even to fail is glorious.

11. it's not what you do with your life, it's how you feel about it. If you're content, nothing else matters.

12. the quickest and laziest way to solve a problem (provided the entire problem is completely solved) is always the best way.

13. money can't buy happiness, but it can buy fun.

14. irony has come to define people and their vain struggle to escape the cage only accentuates its existence.

15. either have something new to say or a new way to say something old.

16. you shouldn't marry someone unless you'd still do it if there was no cake, no celebration, no witnesses, no rings, and the only thing you got from it was a little piece of paper that said 'ur marid now grats.'

17. never buy people things they are better at selecting themselves.

18. being truthful is preferable to lying, but if you have to lie, do it to anyone but yourself.

19. the point of marketing is to make people think they want your product.

20. you can have an infinite set without having all possibilities.

21. morals are for people who want to feel better than anyone else, but can't get money or sex.

22. people only do things because it benefits them in some manner.

23. a law is only as powerful as the apparatus that enforces it.

24. being fat is prole, but having a lot of muscles is prole too.

25. you're not a dog, so don't reward yourself with food.

26. the only person who will always be there for you is yourself.

27. you're not as good as people say you are, and you're not as bad as people say you are.

28. if you need to do it with friends to have fun, then it isn't fun.

29. to feel sorrow is to deserve forgiveness.

30. we never love anyone. What we love is the idea we have of someone. It's our own concept—our own selves—that we love.

31. slang is the weapon of elitism.

32. art should never be censored.

33. someone fucking someone over because of the bottom line makes sense, but getting fucked over because people are friends irks people the worst way.

34. trust the written word the least, the spoken word a little more, and actions the most. The way people act is the way they feel.

35. carefully cultivated vagueness is any artist's best friend. Let your audience fill in most of the blanks themselves and they'll invent things much more fantastic and memorable than you ever could.

36. no matter how little you care about what other people think of you, their opinions of you still affect you.

37. saying 'then you do it better' is never a valid response to criticism.

38. if you don't respect yourself, nobody else will.

39. make no more enemies than necessary.

40. when people say 'just be yourself' what they really mean is 'don't try to trick me' or 'don't get uppity.'

41. true communication is distinguishing between when the other person doesn't understand you and when they do understand you but don't care.

42. it is always the speaker's responsibility to ensure their message is heard.

43. how hard you work does not and should not affect the value of something you create.

44. the government is a tool to serve a purpose; it should never be the focus of love or unconditional loyalty.

45. finding an aspect or the entirety of a work of art offensive is not a good reason to not absorb and attempt to appreciate it.

46. either have substance or have form.

47. the surest way to identify constitutional weakness in someone is if they phrase their insults and other opinions in the form of a question for no reason; people only do this when they don't believe in themselves because they're afraid of their own voice.

48. the best scams of all are the ones that punish people for not partaking: marriage, taxes, degrees.

49. if you can't bear your power/status gracefully, you don't deserve it.

50. the secret to empathy is to suggest something believable enough that the other person thinks that's what they were thinking.

51. whenever you feel you must do something, make sure you are doing it because you want to do it, not because someone else thinks you ought to. Note that the two are not always mutually exclusive.

52. you cannot feel shame unless you already harbor guilt.

53. it is the responsibility of the commissioner of a task to ensure that it is done to their liking; it is the responsibility of the doer of a task to ensure that it is done to the best of their ability.

54. ignorance is never shameful unless it is willful.

55. once an individual accepts the inherent injustice in the world, all things become just.

56. for praise to be worth something, it has to come from a higher source; thus the object of praise lifts the praise-giver to a superior level.

57. success in life does not come from actual virtue or competence, it comes instead from appropriately and frequently signaling one's holiness through ideological gang signs.

58. people do things publicly so others will notice them. What people do when they're alone is what they truly enjoy.

59. it is difficult to be kind to a person who wants nothing.

60. trying to be calm is not calmness.

61. it is safer to beg than to take, but finer to take than to beg.

62. you are only as good as your latest work.

63. being a victim has become a currency and like all currencies, it is counterfeited.

64. faith is a tool that becomes more necessary when an individual is living close to death.

65. poetry is the only art not consumed by its 'fans' ... it is an art divided between snobs, who refuse to accept any but classical poetry, and other snobs, who ape contemporary poets with none of the requisite skill or understanding.

66. companies are sociopathic entities. They don't have any empathy or desire to help people, nor should they. Their only purpose is to function efficiently and produce money, and it's the government's function to impose human values on them through regulations.

67. if you're actually proud of something, you won't be offended when someone uses it as an insult against you.

68. silencing an opponent through brute force rather than logic makes them a martyr.

69. people want sympathy, not solutions.

70. rules have no inherent power, and people no inherent obligation to follow them. Rather, the enforcers of rules are the ones with power, and rules are only obeyed out of fear of punishment. Corollary: the degree to which a particular rule is obeyed is directly related to the power or aggression of the enforcer of that particular rule. Hence why everybody obeys the law of gravity and nobody obeys laws against jaywalking.

71. people do not normally react aggressively to honest, non-aggressive criticism unless there is an underlying insecurity about the thing being criticized.

72. never put a person in a position where they have to defend themselves, even if they're wrong.

73. never apologize to people who do not believe in forgiveness.

74. never pick up something you aren't willing to put down.

75. if you can't change the situation, change your view of it.

76. the best way of learning is to accept your ignorance and regress to a childlike state where you are not ashamed of not knowing what you are doing and you are free to experiment even with the most basic elements of what you are trying to learn.

77. if you are proud of your country you are either a thug or you haven't read enough history.

78. justice without dispassion is rarely justice.

79. do not do anything for someone that they can do for themselves.

80. the truly marginalized people are the ones you never hear about.

81. change is not the same as progress.

82. the more irrational and bizarre a person's beliefs are, the more their subjective viewpoint is proven to exist.

83. believe in the ideal, not the idol.

84. know when to stop.

85. it is impossible to argue with someone who knows they are right.

86. when you reduce your character to one aspect of yourself, you will begin to assume that every criticism levelled against you stems from prejudice against that aspect instead of any legitimate wrongdoing on your part.

87. trust no information that was transmitted or created in exchange for money or favors.

88. praise the person, not the act.

89. giving an excuse means that you are not sorry.

90. looks depreciate.

91. you will only change if you see a need to.

92. if you want to be noticed, be irreducible. The larger the box you can be shoved in, the more you will stand out.

93. make no quotes in languages you don't speak unless you are certain of what you are saying.

94. a bad defense looks worse than silence.

95. do unto others as they do unto you.

96. if you can't explain something to someone, it's not because they're stupider than you are.

97. if the worst someone can do to you is yell at you, they are no threat.

98. groups are not defined by the outliers.

99. make decisions with irreversible outcomes rarely and with grave consideration.

100. those who refuse to follow are doomed to lead.

101. tribalism allows for blatant hypocrisy without even a trace of self-awareness.

102. a sequel should not undo what was done in the original, it should instead expand on it without damaging the original's legacy.

103. the only people against gatekeeping are those it's meant to keep out.

104. the only human right is the right not to have to do things that you don't want to do, and it is violated wholesale.

105. fudge everything you can get away with.

106. the only law is might makes right, all else is vanity.

107. believing features of a different culture are by default sacred is just a sophisticated way of insulting them for being savages.

108.  never attribute to incompetence that which can be explained by malice.

108a. sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.

109. anything good that flows downstream is an accident.

110. you can't gatekeep if you don't own the keys.

[dgcatanisiri]

This is too long for me to be comfortable to put out without a cut, but dear god, did I need to rant and ramble on this subject...

I always feel awkward when I want to complain about how video games portray and fandom reacts to queer men, because I feel like the conversation (at least here on Tumblr) gets focused on the female protagonists - you know, the Commander Shepard or Alexios/Kassandra debates and that sort. The things where there’s valid comments to make about how important these female protagonists are, especially in an industry that is deeply misogynistic, and, in the case of the Assassin’s Creed protagonists, keep being developed with an eye towards the female-only protagonists, only to have a male protagonist shoved alongside them, if not upstaging entirely (such as Jacob being the center of Syndicate’s marketing, or how Bayek was originally going to die and Aya be the central protagonist of Origins, or the creation of Alexios and probably male Eivor on the basis of “women protagonists don’t sell.”)...

BUT, when I want to talk about my perspective as a gay man, as wanting to play these games for that empowerment, get to enjoy these games for representing me as a gay man, because Shepard, Ryder, Alexios, etc. get to be played as such, that having these male characters who are able to be played as attracted to other men means something to me, and that leads me to not just play the male characters, but prefer them to the female characters, or even to talk about the subject of homophobia in both the games themselves and the fandoms surrounding them... I do feel like there’s this pressure to just effectively shut up and stay quiet and let the women have their empowerment, that the moment needs to be theirs, not mine, that “fandom” (meaning the monolithic entity that is ‘the fandom’ and not necessarily any singular individual who I’m referring to or anything) is pressuring for anyone who enjoys the male protagonists for whatever reason to be silent and let the women enjoy their win, even if there’s a win for underrepresented men in there as well, or even a need to address the problems of homophobia by not representing queer men. That in its way, it’s effectively saying that a win against the sexism against the industry is outweighing or more important than any win against the homophobia. (Or, since I brought up Shepard, racism, considering that Shepard, Ryder, any game with the character creator, can be different skin tones as well, but that’s outside my lane.)

Like, this isn’t a callout post or any kind of directed screed against anyone, just... I suppose it’s a cumulative effect, based on the fact that I remember what the internet in the corners I frequent was like when Odyssey dropped, focused very much (and understandably - let me be clear that I have no desire to step on anyone’s victory or enjoyment of these games here) on Kassandra, and it felt like the fact that I got to play a character I could portray as gay (don’t start me on the bloody DLC though...) was a victory celebration at a table set for one, while (to really stretch my metaphor) seeing this massive party happening across the dining room at the same time, and that (and again, I’m really straining my metaphor, I’m aware), if I wanted to join that party, they would not combine our celebrations, I would have to join in theirs, and, in my wanting to pay attention to my victory, getting laughed at for it. It’s one of those things that makes fandom feel a little alienating, because I don’t particularly have much of a place that feels like it’s a space for me to celebrate my victories, rare as they are, and on occasion, even end up with the impression that, so far as fandom at large cares, that victory I want to celebrate is somehow less important. That the importance of Alexios, playable as a gay man, meant less than Kassandra, period. And, with Valhalla and Cyberpunk’s release on the horizon, along with (maaaaaaybe?) a Mass Effect Trilogy remaster, I find myself bracing myself for this to start up all over again.

And I know some of this is based in the fact that Tumblr and the transformative elements of fandom in general are more of a space that is dominated by women in fandom, who are going to celebrate the wins for them. That’s just how things shake out, I understand that it’s as much the place I’m going for involvement and interaction with fandom at large as it is anything else. Just... I obviously don’t fit in to the areas of “straight male” fandom, and then getting to the places in the “marginalized” segments of the fandom, it still feels like I need to find my way over to the margins of the margins to feel like I have a place in fandom more generally.

Like, I understand that I have male privilege and that is a factor in things - the male characters are probably more likely to be the ones in the marketing, so I get to see that idealized image of myself individually all over the covers and posters and trailers. BUT that doesn’t remove the straight privilege of the people who are shutting down conversations about the importance of the male PCs being portrayed in M/M relationships, even starts going into the realm of casual homophobia - because no acknowledgement of how important it is for the portrayal of gay men, or bi men, IS homophobic. I mean, how often do these companies have their official accounts post images of the M/M pairings? I’ve seen BioWare account retweet FemShep/Garrus and FemShep/Kaidan things, on top of the MaleShep/Female LI pairings. I’ve even seen FemShep/Liara content, which... We could go into the way that F/F pairings get fetishized and tend to be there as either fodder for cishet male titillation or just because the female PC gets swapped in for the male PC (in the way of Peebee riding a non-existent dick in the FemRyder romance scene in Mass Effect Andromeda), I don’t mean to discount that being a thing, so queer women are getting a short stick too. But where’s the M/M relationships? Hell, remember the whole #MakeJaalBi thing? After we got that notice about the patch for his romance would come... Has any official Mass Effect account actually SHOWN content of BroRyder and Jaal?

I mean, remember the Citadel DLC? The appearances of Kaidan’s romance material included FemShep, and Cortez’s content included a split second shot of just him and Shepard holding hands, and since it was blink and you’ll miss it, that means that it doesn’t even make any effort to portray the M/M relationships. And since I brought up Jaal already, BioWare had to be publicly shamed into offering M/M relationships in equal amounts to the other pairings in Mass Effect Andromeda. Like, it’s bad that Peebee’s romance for FemRyder just had the model swapped in for BroRyder, sure. But at least that content was THERE, at release. For gay/bi men who wanted to romance male characters, we have to make sure that we get that patch downloaded (meaning if you play the game without an internet connection, you can’t get access to his romance) - and only because the outrage actually GOT a response, which is not necessarily the norm in this industry.

Hell, the disparity there actually GOT noticed - if you include Scout Harding as a romance, M/M romances are the lowest numerical romances in Dragon Age Inquisition as well, with only Dorian and Bull as options. And I didn’t even realize this until this past year, despite being disappointed in those two options. Even recognizing that Harding is more of a fling than a full romance, it’s still more than M/M romances had. The closest we got was being able to flirt with Cullen twice before he shuts it down (and the rants I’ve had on THAT subject...). 

And that’s just the focus with BioWare - I saw it all through the initial release of Odyssey, while I know that the official metrics are all saying that Alexios saw more play than Kassandra, Kassandra got a lot of positive response in the fandom that was often framed in opposition to Alexios, that she was the “better” protagonist. 

Like, I’m bolding this for emphasis, and so if anyone is TL;DRing this it’s eye-catching enough: My issue is the dismissal and denigration of the male PCs when building up the female PCs. It is not being against celebrating the female PCs. It’s just the way that people will, in their positivity towards a female PC, dismiss the audience who relates to and connects with the male PC. The way that I’ve seen since day one the common “joke” that male Shepard is unnecessary, condemning the voice acting, even asking why he’s there when female Shepard is “the real Shepard”.

It makes fandom a hostile place to be when you’re looking to that character as your representation, your inspiration. Yeah, it’s a joke, but when it is coming from all corners, or at least feels like it, all the time, the humor dies, and you’re left with just the words. The words telling you that this mirror for yourself is something that people don’t care about.

Again, it’s that feeling of already being on the margins and then being pushed further. You are the freak among the freaks. 

But it feels like saying any of this, like I have, is opening the door to be dismissed as being sexist, or misogynistic, or lesbophobic, or anything like that, because people want to boil down what I’m saying to no more than “but what about MEN? Why aren’t you talking about MEN?” in that dismissive way that so many MRA trolls attempt to derail the conversation - except, no, I am TRYING to have a genuine conversation, about men who aren’t represented, men who need these male characters as much as women need the female ones - queer men get the short stick in a lot of cases, like this goes back to the representational matters in a lot of kids TV shows - while we can absolutely talk about the bad representation it was broadly, I remember when Voltron concluded, having Shiro, having arguably the lead male character of the show, end the show marrying and kissing another man... That was heavily ignored by Tumblr. Meanwhile Tumblr EXPLODED for Korra and Asami or Bubblegum and Marceline. 

It’s seeing what is representation for me as a queer man being played down or ignored while the queer women are praised. And, again, I’m not trying to take anything away from queer women, or women in general, but... Where, exactly, am I supposed to look for that same empowerment? And, more importantly, when the same media offers the empowerment for both groups, like video games do, why does it seem almost expected that I as a queer man back off and allow this to just be for the women in general, when the whole point of a variable protagonist is that it allows that empowerment for EVERYONE?

I mean, I say it feels like “opening the door” to these comments because it has happened before, and likely will again. Because saying “this joke feels hostile to me, as a member of an underrepresented group, can we please not?” or speaking about my individual experiences and feelings - often even just in my own space, on my blog, frequently only tagged with my individual tags for organization in my space, rather than publicly shouting it through a megaphone by putting it in public tags, and somehow STILL getting attacked for these comments - is apparently all those things... That’s been the response I’ve gotten to saying things like this in the past. 

And, in case I haven’t been clear with the repeated comments and the bolded statement above, it’s not about me, a man, trying to take away this thing for women. Rather, it’s me, a queer person - and fine, yes, a queer man - who wants to celebrate being seen, wants to celebrate what is still not a common thing of seeing myself in my media, and then feeling like I’m being shoved out of the way because other people celebrating their representation is considered more important, to hell with me and my mirrors.

Like, I’m not saying any of this is anything actively conscious or even intentionally malicious. It does seem like a reflexive defensive position - “men have tried to take this from us, so we’re not letting ANY man through.” I don’t want to come across as flippant or not aware of the fact that this isn’t a walk in the park for women. I get it, I really do. I’m just... It does feel like my struggles are something that I’m being told to downplay in the name of allowing others to have their celebration.

Thing is, my own experiences as a queer person already leave me feeling like I’m getting that as well - I mentioned before (and have elsewhere) that Dragon Age Inquisition’s M/M romances didn’t work for me. But I have often felt like I need to downplay the fact that I don’t emotionally connect to Dorian as a character - in the immediate aftermath of the game’s release, you could not say ANYTHING negative about him without getting shouted down as either a homophobe or dealing with internalized homophobia. Meanwhile, I’m here, pointing out that, hey, the previous games did not really have any direct homophobia, and the little bits that did lean in that direction felt more like the writers living in a homophobic society and not able to wholly divorce that in their writing than anything in-universe. To me, Thedas was a place where being gay was a difference that made no difference. And then Inquisition tore away that escape from homophobia so bluntly.

So, Dorian doesn’t empower me, you ask, so what about Bull? Yeah, I identify with “queer man” because while I’m a man romantically attracted to other men, I’m also asexual - just regular vanilla sex is in the fringes of my comfort zone. Bondage is an outright catapult out of there. At mach three. So I’m left uncomfortable by both of my “options” in Inquisition. And the response I have always braced myself for when I bring this up, when I do add my voice to the conversation about the M/M options, is “well, they can’t please everyone, and this was good for some people, so you should be content with that.” Being told I can’t have everything, so feeling uncomfortable at best is just something I have to live with, because hey, THOSE OTHER PEOPLE got satisfied, and so you should just be happy for them.

It’s that pained metaphor I offered earlier - the victory celebration isn’t for me, I’m on the outside looking in EVEN STILL. I am the freak among freaks. 

Where is my place to belong, in all of this? Because it’s honestly hard to find, when all the spaces deemed “for me” still feel like an exclusionary party?

[bthump]

I am curious why you don't like het pairings across the board since I ship both het and same sex pairings . I understand LGBTQ+ peoples' desire to see themselves represented in media , but I think that when it comes to fandom people tend to fetish same sex pairings especially mlm pairings and bashing female characters that get in the way of their ship.

I’ve done my fair share of navel gazing about why I hate 99.9% of het in media since I was a teen and I could write a long list of reasons that probably influence my preferences, like gender essentialism, the vast vast vast majority of creators being men influencing how they write women + het relationships in ways that offend me, the fact that it’s the default and my interests are often influenced by spite, the rote way it’s usually written, i hate 99% of the tropes that are usually associated with it, the fact that irl I have 0 interest in engaging in a hetero relationship myself and therefore can’t relate...

but yeah ultimately I don’t know or care or think it matters lol, the vast majority of het ships just do not spark joy for me.

And now, The Discourse, which I would love to put under a cut but apparently that’s just not in the cards right now, thanks tumblr.

please don’t reblog I guess?

I just like, disagree with the rest of your ask lol, sorry. And I know this is a very standard take in fandom so I’ll try to explain why I disagree. I appreciate you asking politely Anon and I’m hoping this doesn’t come across as too annoyed or anything - like I’m annoyed by the discourse in general lol, not by you specifically.

In my experience in online fandom the most female character bashing I’ve seen, and the most vicious, has come from fans of rival het ships, and regardless I don’t particularly consider “bashing” fictional characters to be much of an issue. The problem is when people do so in offensive ways (eg “she’s a slut” or w/e lol), and then the issue is people believing and saying offensive shit, not people hating fictional characters, and the focus should be on general awareness of what misogyny (among other oppressions) is and how to avoid perpetuating it in all areas of life, and not on declaring groups of fans problematic depending on which fictional characters they do or don’t like.

And sure, some majority m/m fans do bash female characters, and some do it in offensive ways, but I don’t think it’s at a rate higher than other het fans, or even f/f fans in the few fandoms with rival f/f ships ime, so it bugs me that people act like it’s an m/m fangirl thing.

I also think fandom discourse wildly misuses the term “fetishizing.” Fetishizing, in yk oppressor/oppressed contexts, means to reduce someone down to a single aspect of their being in a way that dehumanizes them. And like 99% of fanfic does the opposite, shipping is all about being invested in and exploring characters as people (or trying to, bc lbr it’s amateur fiction and writing fully fleshed out 3 dimensional people is a skill that amateurs can’t necessarily be expected to have perfected, which is a big reason discourse focusing so hard on problematic fanfiction is a waste of time lol). Someone who isn’t a gay/bi man getting turned on by imagining 2 dudes fucking and writing a story about it isn’t automatically fetishizatizing gay men, even if it’s a straight woman doing it, even if it’s 2k words of sex written to turn readers on.

Fetishization doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with sex - it can, but it can also be sexless. For instance, a gay character showing up in one episode of a sitcom to make limp wrist jokes, or a gay character showing up in one episode of a drama to die of aids and make you sad, is fetishization. Conversely a pwp about say Guts and Griffith fucking after a battle or something is almost guaranteed to have more care and consideration for the emotions involved and characterization, because the people who are inclined to write that are already invested in the characters as characters rather than generic gay stereotypes.

Fic writers can write offensive/homophobic/fetishizing things just like anyone else can (and having het ships as well as gay ships doesn’t make someone less likely to write homophobic things either), but the way fandom discourse reduces everything to wide generalities is less than useless imo, the key is to address actual specific behaviours, like the aformentioned “I hate X female character” vs “X female character is a slut who doesn’t deserve Y.” The former is a non-issue, the latter is a symptom of ingrained misogynistic attitudes.

Anyway ultimately I think fanfic is like, the least useful thing for media oriented discourse and activism to focus on for various reasons including the lack of reach and impact fic has, the lack of systemic quality control, the fact that fic writers aren’t pros and aren’t getting paid, the fact that fic writers aren’t pros and shouldn’t be expected to have the talent required to convey difficult subjects in completely inoffensive ways even if their personal politics are beyond reproach - because it does take straight up writing skill as well as understanding, the fact that fic writers have no industry power or influence, the fact that the vast majority of fic writers are marginalized in some way themselves (and misogyny against real women should always take precedence over misogyny against fictional women), the fact that many are just teenagers, etc

tl;dr I don’t think women preferring to ship m/m is inherently problematic, and I don’t think the current state of online discourse is equipped to even address the cases when it can be problematic lol because nuance is virtually impossible in unmoderated spaces where reblogging/tweeting divorces something from context and twitter posts and tumblr asks have a character limit and vague non-specific hot takes always get more clout and notes than carefully considered nuanced discussions and essays - and amateur unpublished writing is so unimpactful in the grand scheme of things that it barely matters anyway.

[cardentist]

the transmisandry “debate” and the attitude towards trans men is so transparently a retreading of literally every exclusionary movement of the last few decades and Yet it’s being perpetrated and tolerated by what otherwise should be inclusionist spaces because it’s once again being pointed at a more “acceptable” target

like, on some level I understand the gut reaction, the term itself is associated with a lot of negativity and “mens rights activists” and the like have made the idea of men specifically facing oppression for being men at best laughable and at worst a red flag for violent misogyny. it’s one of those things that a lot of people in left leaning spaces take for granted as being true across the board, something they don’t need to think about or examine. and to be clear “they” included me for quite some time, I do understand where the feeling comes from

but it’s not about oppression for being men, it’s oppression for being trans men, it’s transmisandry for the same reason that transmisogyny is transmisogyny. it’s a term specifically meant to cast a net over the broad array of experiences that people have specifically as trans men to give them an outlet to both examine their experiences in relation to the wider community of trans men and to specifically seek and give reassurance and solidarity to each other. 

the bigger problem with this argument is that many people will resort to denying what I’ve just said in order to reject the proposed term, whether it’s something they’d actually believe once they examined the situation in earnest or not. because people act as though acknowledging that trans men face oppression for being trans men will open up the floodgates leading to cis straight white men convincing people that they’re oppressed for being men. so trans men Can’t be oppressed for being trans men because trans men are men and men aren’t oppressed.

so leading from this line of thought what you’ll generally see is the argument that what trans men experience is “just” transphobia, and if you press the issue or bring up a personal example you’ll almost as commonly get that anything else is “just” “misdirected” misogyny. and just, there’s so So much to unpack there that I’m almost tempted to just leave it where it is, but ignoring the issue won’t make it go away and I wouldn’t be writing this post if I didn’t want the issue to change.

the point with, I think, the least baggage is one that I’ve already touched upon, that being that the experiences of trans men and trans women are just naturally going to be different from each other and it’s useful for both parties to have language to talk specifically about their experiences, in the same way that it’s useful to examine the differences between the experiences of binary and nonbinary trans people. it doesn’t matter who you think has it “worse” because this isn’t a competition to see who’s oppressed enough to Deserve having their experiences heard. the urge for trans men to make a term to describe their experiences isn’t some way to try to argue that they’re more oppressed, it’s born from the inherent need to be understood and to see that other people exist in the way that you have. it’s the solidarity that brought the trans community together in the first place

a point leading off of that with probably significantly more baggage is the idea that queer and lgbt+ spaces are a contest to measure your oppression in the first place. don’t get me wrong, it Is useful to recognize different axis’ of oppression, to recognize larger patterns of violence faced by specific groups of people at a disproportionate rate. it helps us, as an entire community, identify the most vulnerable groups of people so we can lean into helping them on both a systemic and individual level, so we can see whose voices need to be boosted so they can be heard both in and out of the community. and moreover having these numbers and experiences together can help people outside of the community see that it’s is a problem as well. 

however, the issue comes in when perceived theoretical oppression is used as a social capital to decide who is and is not allowed to be heard. I’m sure I’ve already lost the ace exclusionists ages ago by now, so that’s a perfect example. at it’s most extreme ace exclusionism is blatant bigotry and hatred justified with the excuse that they’re protecting the queer and lgbt+ community from privileged invaders, and even when in it’s milder form ace exclusionism is powered by the idea that asexual people don’t face oppression. marginalized people are denied resources, solidarity, safe spaces, and voices because they’re painted as not being oppressed or not being oppressed Enough. this wouldn’t be able to happen if your worth as a member of the lgbt+ community wasn’t measured by how oppressed your particular minority group is, if it didn’t have the sway that it has. creating a power structure in any way at all leaves people with the ability to exploit that structure, and the specific one that’s emerged within the queer community and leftist spaces in general allows people to exploit it while hiding it as moral, while hiding that they’re causing any pain at all. it’s the same frame of mind that’s made bullying cool in activist spaces 

another reason why this hierarchy tends to fail on an individual level is, of course, that the level of oppression that an entire group faces does not dictate someone’s lived experiences, which is an idea that goes both ways. the argument over whether or not asexuals are oppressed is ultimately a meaningless distraction from the lived experiences of asexual people. it is a Fact that asexuals face higher levels of rape and sexual assault than straight people, you can deny that what they’re facing counts as oppression specifically but what does that matter? there are people who are suffering and that suffering can be lessened by allowing those people into our community, shouldn’t that be enough? likewise, comparing the suffering of individual people as if they were the same as the suffering of their respective groups combined is absolutely absurd. someone who is murdered for being a trans man isn’t less dead than someone who was murdered for being a trans woman. a trans woman isn’t Guaranteed to have lived a harder life than any and every other trans man just because of a difference in statistics, and the same can be said for literally every other member of the lgbt+ and queer communities. other community members aren’t concepts, they aren’t numbers, they’re people with unique lives and sorrows and joy. neither you or I or anyone else is the culmination of our respective or joint communities and some people need to learn how to act like it.

again, there is Meaning in seeing how our oppression is different, it’s not inherently wrong, but creating a framework where it can be used to paint a group of people as both lesser within the community and less deserving of help is creating a framework that can more than readily be abused. and because it positions the abused as privileged it creates a situation where the abuser can justify it to themselves. you use another minority as an outlet for the pain you feel under the weight of the same system that hurts them while denying their pain.

but to pull the conversation back to trans men specifically, lets examine lived experiences for a while longer. “misdirected misogyny” and “just misogyny” are both employed commonly in exclusionist spaces to deny that either someone’s oppression happened to them for the reason they say it did or to deny that their oppression is their own, and often times it’s both. for instance, the claim that ‘asexual people may face higher rates of sexual assault but That’s just because of misogyny (and/or misdirected homophobia)’ is used to deny that what asexual people face is oppression for being asexual. if you can’t deny that an assault victim was assaulted without either violating your own moral code or the moral code of the community you’ve surrounded yourself with then denying the cause of their assault is a more socially acceptable way of depriving them of the resources they need to address that assault. their pain wasn’t their own, it belongs to someone else, someone who’s Really oppressed.

in the context of trans men the argument is, of course, that they’re men. if they just so happen to face misogyny then it’s because they were mistakenly perceived as women. this works a convenient socially acceptable way to deny the lived experiences of a group you want to silence both in the ways that I’ve already illustrated And with the added bonus woke points of doing so while affirming someone’s gender identity in the process.

again, I want to reiterate, even if it were objectively true that all trans men face transphobia and misogyny totally separately, like a picky toddler that doesn’t want their peas anywhere near their mashed potatoes, that is ultimately an insufficient framework when talking about individual lives. there’s literally nothing wrong with trans men wanting to talk about their lived experiences with other trans men in the context of them Being trans men. being black isn’t inherently a part of the trans experience but being black Does ultimately affect your experiences as a trans person and how they impact you and it’s meaningful to discuss the intersection of those two experiences on an individual level. 

but it just, Isn’t true. this shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone, but trans men were born in bodies that are perceived as being women, misogyny is a Feature to the experiences of trans men inherently. even trans men who are fully transitioned, have full surgery, have all their papers worked out, completely pass, move to a new state and changed their name, and have zero contact with anyone who ever knew them before or during their transition still lived a significant portion of their lives under a system that was misogynistic against them. of course there’s still a spectrum of personal experiences with it, just like there are with cis women and trans women, but to present the misogyny that trans men face as “accidental” is just absurd.  and moreover, most trans men Aren’t the hypothetical Perfect Passing Pete. I’ve identified as trans for seven years now and I frankly don’t have the resources to even begin thinking about transitioning and won’t for what’s looking to be indefinitely, I don’t even begin to come within the ballpark of passing and it Sure Does Show. misogyny is just as present in my life as it would be for a cis woman but the difference is that I’m not supposed to talk about it.  and even barring That there are transitioned trans men who face misogyny specifically because they are trans men, before during and after transition. you could argue that that’s “just” transphobia but you could do the same for transmisogyny. if we can acknowledge that trans women have experiences that specifically come from their status as women who can be wrongly perceived as men then we should all be able to acknowledge that trans men have experiences that specifically come from their status as men who can be wrongly perceived as women and that both the similarities and differences between these experiences are worth talking about. 

another issue with painting it as “just” misogyny that ties pretty heavily into what I was just talking about is the fact that men don’t have the same access to spaces meant to talk about misogyny that women do.  again, this is something that makes sense on a gut level, it’s not like cis men are being catcalled while walking to 7/11. but like, a lot of trans men are. misogyny is a normal facet in the lives of trans men but male voices are perceived as being invaders in spaces meant to talk about misogyny, both in and out of trans specific spaces and conversations

trans men lose a solidarity with women that they do not gain with men. there’s a certain pain and othering that comes with intimately identifying with the experiences of a group of people while being denied that those experiences are yours, of being treated the same way for the same reason but at once being aware that the comfort and understanding being extended isn’t For you and feeling like you’re cheating some part of your sense of self by identifying with it.

part of that is just the growing pains of getting used to existing as a trans person, but that in and of itself doesn’t mean that we aren’t allowed to find a solution. if trans men can’t, aren’t allowed, or don’t want to speak about their experiences in women’s spaces then why not allow them to talk about their experiences together? the fact that we even have to argue over whether or not trans men Deserve to talk about their experiences is sad enough in it’s own right, but even sadder is inclusionists, people who should frankly know better at this point, refusing to stand up for trans men because someone managed to word blatant bigotry in an acceptable way Once Again.

[yellowmagicalgirl]

Every Ghost In Me

So I thought this would be done in time for the @jlaireweek mini event, but college is hard and this fic decided to be the longest fic I have ever written.

The events of this fic are platonic, but Jim and Claire probably end up falling in love afterward.

Title comes from a Starset song.

Summary:

Jim and Toby are astronauts sent to the dimension known as D-13, or as the media calls it, the Shadow Realm. Jim's tether breaks, and he is left alone.

He isn't alone.

AO3

FFN

“You ready for tomorrow?” Toby asked as he leaned down from the bunk above Jim's. They were on the last day of quarantine before the mission. Despite the darkness, Jim could see a giddy smile on his best friend's face.

“Mostly,” Jim said. He was nervous in a way that his anxiety medication couldn't quite handle. They were going to another dimension, and they'd be the first ones doing so. It'd be just them with nothing more than tethers and space suits. It was probably to save money; the rest of NASA was trying to integrate Akiridion and various other technology into its projects. Jim was an orbital mechanics specialist, not an electrical engineer, so he couldn't be quite sure if it was due to the alliance that the king-and-queen-in-waiting of Akiridion-5 had made or the fact that certain military bases were actually sharing their research now.

“Mostly? What's wrong?”

“Nothing, well, nothing real, just the usual anxiety I've had all my life about something going wrong. But seriously, Tobes, I'll be fine. We'll be fine.”

The next day started inconsequentially, with an alternative rock song about space blaring from Toby's phone. Jim made breakfast and tried not to feel like anything bad would happen. It wasn't a long mission, but since there was no ship the two of the would always have to keep their helmets on. Due to this, they would only be in another dimension for a couple hours. They would be fine.

“Mister Jim, are you alright?” Blinky asked as he helped him suit up. His husband, Arthur, was helping Toby don his own astronaut suit a few feet away.

“Yeah, just, well, nervous.” It was a more courageous word than afraid, but the acting technician seemed to figure out Jim's words anyways.

“Goodness gracious, why wouldn't you be? You and Tobias are the first ones going into uncharted territory, and it doesn't help that the media has been calling this dimension the Shadow Realm. But remember, fear is but the precursor to valor. Don't think, Mister Jim. Become.”

“Um…” Jim trailed off. While he and Blinky had what could be almost considered a father-son relationship, he was technically Jim's superior. Due to both, he didn't want to be even vaguely disrespectful before the mission, not when there was a margin of error for not coming back.

“What's wrong now?”

“We work for NASA; aren't I supposed to think?”

“Well, today's mission isn't exactly rocket science, is it”" After a moment, they both started chuckling.

Jim's nerves were calmer as the airlock doors hissed closed. It was just him, Toby, and the Bridge. Or, well, they had taken to calling it a bridge. If anything, it was closer to being a wormhole, but its shape looked like a bridge, hence the name. Toby had mentioned that they were passing under the bridge, not over it, and thus it didn't make all that much sense, but the name had stuck.

“Ten,” came Eli's voice from the countdown. He was among the youngest of the engineers for the mission, but that came with the territory of being a graduate from MIT with a 4.0 GPA.

“Nine.”

Toby smiled. “You ready for the adventure of our lives?”

“Eight.”

“Of course,” Jim said. “I've got you by my side.”

“Seven.”

Wait.

“Six.”

Had Jim called his mom this morning? Or at least tried to?

“Five.”

Had he at least texted her?

“Four.”

There was a chance that Jim wouldn't be coming back.

“Three.”

Had Jim told her that he loved her?

“Two.”

“Relax, Jimbo. If you hyperventilate now, you'll use up all your oxygen.”

“One.”

Jim took a deep breath. It was only a couple hours, max. He would be back to talk to his mom.

The light at the top of the Bridge flashed bright blue, and bright blue light trailed down the edges. The light was closer to a sky-blue, or even a blue-violet, than the cyan that was common among Akiridion technology. When the light hit the base of the Bridge, that same blue light filled it inside, forming an opaque surface.

The Bridge was open.

“Remember, young Umbranauts,” Dr. Strickler said over the microphone. Toby groaned at the shadow-related pun that the media had created. So did Dr. Vendel, the director of the department. “Don't try to go further than your tether permits and use your best judgement.”

Jim and Toby walked through the Bridge and were immediately met with the feeling of weightlessness. It was a good thing that they had had the standard astronaut training despite not being in outer space. Jim chuckled.

“What's so funny, Jimbo?”

“Remember when they said we shouldn't need to do zero-g training because of Akiridion gravity generators?”

“I guess Steve can go eat his Vespa helmet now.”

“You know we can hear you, right?” Eli asked over the radio comms. The signal was weak and full of static.

“Um, barely?” Toby said. “There's a ton of interference.”

“Be careful, then.”

It was silent for a moment, until Toby pointed into the distance of what apparently wasn't an empty void. “Hey, is that an asteroid?”

It wasn't just one asteroid.

It was an entire cluster of moving asteroids, or at least that's what the two of them could see. The only light was the flashlights built into their suits and the distant glow of the Bridge.

“Well, there's definitely matter here,” Toby said. “I want to get a sample, that way we can figure out what type it is.”

“Knew your geology minor would end up being useful,” Jim said, propelling himself towards the asteroids.

“Hey, that one looks like it might be shaped like a house!” Toby pointed to a particularly large asteroid in the distance.

“That's kind of freaky.”

“Maybe a bit, since most of these asteroids are vaguely spherical, but maybe it used to be large and broke recently?”

“Still freaky, but I'll go with your explanation, Tobes.”

Jim tried to ignore the feeling that he was being watched from the house-shaped asteroid. It was just his anxiety. It had to be just his anxiety.

The two men landed on the asteroid. Toby got out his hard-light knife. It wasn't nearly as powerful as an Akiridion serrator, but it was less weight than the drills that had been used in previous years. “Huh, that's odd.”

“Oh?”

“The handle's glowing gold.”

Jim turned his head to look behind him. “I don't think it's the knife that's glowing, Tobes.” Rather, a large cluster of asteroids floated behind them; all of them were surrounded by golden light.

“I wonder what's causing them to glow like that.”

Jim's head darted to his left.

“Is something wrong?” Toby asked, looking at his friend.

“I thought I saw a flash of purple coming from the house-shaped one.”

Without warning, the golden asteroids began racing towards the two of them. They scrambled to get out of the way, tethers looping between the asteroids that weren't glowing.

“Houston? Eli? Anyone? We've got a problem!” Toby called out. Jim would have called for help as well, but all he could think of was trying to dodge. The glowing ones seemed to move without pattern, without any discernible forces acting upon them. The glowing asteroids changed shape to become sharper.

“What's going on?” Strickler asked. His voice was heavily altered by static. In the background, Eli was stammering something incomprehensible.

“The asteroids want to kill us!” Toby cried.

“They're sharp,” Jim said, his voice a detached, almost dissociated calm that scared him. A calm that certainly didn't match the rapid oscillation of his heartbeat. “They turned sharp.”

“Get out of there,” Vendel said. The order was almost unnecessary because Jim and Toby were already trying to do so. "And be quick about it; we can't let a hostile force into this side of the bridge."

They couldn't. The only person there with any combat experience was Arthur Galadrigal, but the trauma from his experience in the marines was so bad that despite being a brilliant engineer he had a hard time forming words.

The shard-like asteroids paused for a moment before directing themselves behind Toby and Jim, while a medium-sized asteroid rose up to join them. Jim felt a tug from behind him. His tether.

“Tobes! Tobes!” he called, realizing the danger. The shards began slamming down onto the tether. Jim wasn't sure what the asteroids were made of, but whatever it was they were strong enough that the outer shell of his tether was being shredded, leaving the vulnerable craft-store yarn core exposed to the asteroids. The idea of something so easily cut by scissors being the only thing keeping astronauts from flying into the uncaring void of space had made Jim nervous once, but acrylic yarn was cheap and light, and the fibers used as an outer casing were strong enough to resist space junk.

Once again, he feared the fact that the only thing keeping him tethered to the Earth could be cut by the scissors he had in his kitchen at home. Some disconnected part of Jim wondered if he'd be fine if they added in hard light to the blend instead of just using materials that were originally developed when he was fourteen or younger.

In space, no one can hear you scream because sound doesn't carry in a vacuum. In this alternate dimension with killer asteroids, Jim couldn’t hear the telltale ripping, but that might have also been the roar of blood and static in his ears.

Toby turned around in time to see the moment when Jim became freely floating in dimension D-13. He turned around just in time to see the fear that overtook his best friend's face as he began free falling in the Shadow Realm.

“Hold on, I'll get you!” On cue, another asteroid began to rise, and once again there was a flash of purple light.

Jim thought he heard someone saying to reel them back in, but he couldn’t be sure because it blended together with the static, with his heartbeat, with all the anxious thoughts that had come true.

“Tobes, tell my mom I love her!”

“Tell her yourself and look out!”

Jim looked behind himself at the asteroid flying towards him from below and behind. He began looking around for something, anything, to use as a handhold. He saw a blur of purple light that almost looked like a person rush up from below and in front of him. It looked like it was going to push him up and away.

When the light passed through him, Jim felt a rush of shock, and then a second one because the first one hadn’t felt like it was his own. Then he just felt pain. Blunt pain as the asteroid crashed into his back and shattered his helmet. Biting pain as one of the shards of his helmet flew up and cut his cheek because at least some forces were working the way they were supposed to. Burning pain as he tried to keep in the oxygen he had left.

Jim kept his eyes on Toby for as long as he could. He crossed through the Bridge and when it closed Jim couldn’t tell if that was the reason why his vision was going black or the fact that he was suffocating.

“You do realize that you can breathe here, right?” said a voice Jim had never heard before. Still, he found himself exhaling. “There’s enough oxygen in this place that I can start fires.”

He breathed in and out a couple times before turning to the voice despite the screaming of his back. The person-shaped blur of light was now actually a person. Well, a transparent purple one that had a multitude of hairclips in her hair. She looked like she was in the later years of high school at the youngest and barely old enough to start college at the oldest. She was also holding onto a broken-off piece of Jim’s tether.

“I guess I can’t touch you,” she said, and her voice shook a bit. She squeezed her eyes before opening them and pushing her shoulders down and back. The next time she spoke it was firmer, more confident. “Knowing her she’ll try to separate us so hold onto this. I’m going to get us to somewhere safe.”

Jim looked down at the cable. “Are you sure? Those asteroids already ripped through my tether, what’s stopping them from shredding this piece as well?”

“She already used up a lot of energy trying to kill you and that other guy – I think you called him Tobes? She’s probably gone back to wherever she normally lurks and plots how she plans to try and kill my soul and hijack my body next. That means that I won’t get caught off-guard and I can reinforce it with my powers before it can get shredded.”

Jim decided to pretend that he understood what the purple girl was saying about body-hijacking and powers. His day was already much crazier than he had intended. She didn’t seem hostile, and she knew the lay of the land better than he did.

Jim grabbed onto the tether and let himself be led away.

 Toby crashed onto the Earth side of the Bridge. “I could have gotten to him!” he shouted. “I could have saved him if you didn’t start reeling me back!”

“Don’t know that,” Arthur said, breaking quarantine to hug Toby. “Don’t want lose you, too.”

It was probably true. That asteroid had come up too fast for Toby to get to his best friend, but he could have at least brought back his best friend’s body.

 The purple girl was silent as she led him through the asteroid field. They were still moving, but they had relaxed their fast, erratic movements. She kept looking back at Jim, as if to make sure he was still there. Eventually she landed on a particularly large asteroid.

Toby hadn’t pointed out a house-shaped asteroid, even though it had looked like one. He had pointed out an asteroid that had an entire house on top of it.

“Well, we’re here.”

“Right,” Jim said.

She let go of the tether and walked to the front door, pushing it open. “Come on, she won’t be able to get to us inside.”

Jim followed behind the purple girl. “Who is ‘she’?”

The girl shrugged, closing the door behind him. “She has many names. Heck, those were some of her exact words. ‘I have many names.’ Some of her names include Morgana, the Pale Lady, and as I’ve called her sometimes, the gold-plated trashcan who needs to go burn in some other hell. I’m Claire, by the way, what’s yours, NASA-guy?”

“What?”

Claire pointed at the circular patch that rested over his heart. “Unless that’s a stolen spacesuit or the US had to lone one to another country, I’m pretty sure you work for NASA.”

“Yeah, I do, I’m Jim, but how do you know about NASA? We haven’t contacted this dimension at all before today. No one has.”

“Eh, debatable. I mean, I’m as human as you are. Or at least I used to be.”

Jim was silent as he looked around the room. It looked like an average American living room, which would make sense if Claire was from Earth, but that didn’t make sense. He knew Area 49-B wasn’t a fan of sharing extraterrestrial technology, but after General Morando had tried to invade Earth and the king-and-queen-in-waiting had fought him and his army off, all their information had been made public. They hadn’t sent a random girl into an alternate dimension.

“How long have you been here?”

“I think it was May first? Yeah, it probably was, it was a Monday and the day of the AP Chemistry exam and I had gone to the bathroom because I wasn’t feeling well, and,” she shuddered. “And then Morgana tried to possess me, and I’m here now. I haven’t been able to count the days since, well, there’s no sun and I don’t need to eat or sleep since I don’t have a physical body right now. Not to mention, there was that time where I nearly got turned into nothingness and had to pull myself back together. So, like, at most a year and a half?”

“Are you sure? Because May second is my mom’s birthday, and it was on a Friday last year.”

Claire’s face crumpled slightly. “What day is it?”

Jim had memorized the date of the launch, not knowing it would be his last day on Earth. “November seventh, twenty-twenty-six.”

Claire seemed to cave in on herself. “I’ve been here for over a decade.” Her voice was a heartbroken whisper. “I think I’m dead by now.”

 Barbara had just started her lunch break when her cell phone rang. The caller ID said it was Toby Domzalski. He had been Jim’s best friend since the two of them were five and had remained close all their lives. Today they had even went on a mission together.

“Hi, Toby,” she said. “You’re back already?”

“I’m sorry,” Toby said from the other end of the line. “I’m sorry, Dr. L, I’m so sorry, I tried to save him but–”

Barbara didn’t hear what he said next because she had dropped the phone. Toby and Jim had been best friends for nearly all their lives, but her son was gone now.

 Claire had walked away from Jim after claiming to be dead, and Jim had decided to let her have at least a few moments of alone time. He had just met her, and he didn’t know what to say to her to make her feel better. Instead, he had looked for a first aid kit and had begun cleaning his cut. He winced at the sting of alcohol and had placed bandages along the larger areas of the cut, hoping that he wasn’t taking too much of her supply. Afterwards, he put the kit away and climbed the stairs of her house, looking around. As he pushed open the door to a room with a crib, he heard a sob from behind him.

Jim looked into the room and saw Claire wrapped in a blanket. No tears fell from her eyes, but she was shaking enough that she may as well have been crying.

Jim didn’t know her, but he was probably one of the biggest reasons why she was in this state, and there didn’t seem to be anyone else who could comfort her.

“Do you want to talk?” he asked in a soft voice.

She sniffled, and for a moment looked surprised that she could. “Can’t say I’m good at it, since I’ve been alone for… you know.”

Jim sat a foot and a half away from her. She mimed the action of taking a couple deep breaths, but he didn’t hear her breathe. She was probably trying to act like she was still alive and still had a body, and he couldn’t fault her for that.

“I’ve tried to get back to my body multiple times,” she said. “I guess I always thought it was on life support after all this time. But I don’t think my parents would have kept my body around for that long, and since she’s not in it it’s basically a vegetable. And they have my little brother to worry about, anyways.”

“Your brother, what was he like?” Jim asked. “At least, what was he like before you came to the Shadow Realm?”

“The what?”

Internally, Jim wanted to smack himself. “Sorry, that’s what the media’s been calling this place, we’ve been calling it D-13.”

“I mean, I’ve been calling it stuff ‘my own personal empty hellscape’ or ‘prison’, so the Shadow Realm sounds so cool in comparison.”

“Yeah, I think that’s why so few people called it D-13, even those of us who were on the project.”

“Why’d you guys even call it that?”

“Well, it turns out that some parts of string theory were right even though Einstein’s theories of relativity were proven to be true, and there were eleven spatial dimensions and time. So when Dr. Kanjigar discovered it, he just named it numerically.”

“Huh, I thought it would have at least been named after him or something. Also, well, Enrique was barely seven months old when I, you know,” Claire said. Her entire body seemed to glow just a tiny bit brighter when she talked about her brother.

“Guess that explains the crib in the other room.”

“Yeah, I didn’t mean to make it? Since he’s not here, I didn’t need it, but when I made the copy of my house it just looked the same way my house had looked last time I saw it.”

“How did you make it?”

Claire uncurled herself from the blanket. “You remember me saying that I have powers?”

Jim nodded.

“So, I don’t think I’d be able to do this if I was back on Earth, but I can will things into existence, and I can also control the asteroids. I can also sense when things aren’t normal around here, which usually means Morgana’s trying to do something. It took me what felt like a long time to figure out how to use them, though, and it’s not like I can use them to escape.” Her form dimmed. “Believe me, I’ve tried.”

 A tired pair of parents sat in a house that looked a decade more modern than the one in the Shadow Realm, but other than that the same.

“It’s been over ten years,” Ophelia said. Javier rubbed her back and looked at a picture they had of their children.

“I bet she’d be doing something great if she had ever woken up,” he said.

“But she didn’t. Do you think we should…” she trailed off, a guilty look on her face.

“Hey mom? Could you help me with my math homework?” their son called from his homework at their kitchen table.

 “So, what’s the coolest thing you’ve ever done for NASA?” Claire asked.

“Other than get attacked by, as you put it, a gold-plated trashcan while being one of the first people to cross into another dimension? Probably that time I worked on Durian gravity generators.”

“Wait, we have those now? I thought you would’ve had to get zero-gravity training!”

“I mean, Toby and I did, but about a month after you came here the king-and-queen in waiting of the planet Akiridion-5 went into hiding on Earth. Like, they even went to my school, Arcadia Oaks High –”

“Wait, you went to the mole school?” Claire interjected. “I went to Arcadia Oaks Academy!”

Jim gave her a flat look. “Yeah, well, my school hosted interplanetary royalty so I guess that settles the rivalry. Anyways, they stayed on Earth for a couple months before the guy who had taken over their planet invaded, and they fought him off. Afterwards, they forged an alliance with various countries on Earth, and our technology has really taken off since.”

“That’s really cool… wish I had stayed around a little longer, then I could’ve seen aliens.”

“Um, don’t call them ‘aliens’; most extraterrestrial species get offended by that. Refer to them as their species name, or life beings, or if you have to, extraterrestrials, but that one is still a bit touch and go.”

“Cool, will do… if I ever get out of here, of course.”

The words “not that I will” hung unspoken in the air.

“I mean, you getting in here seems pretty impossible, so maybe you can find a way to make it out?”

“Yeah, maybe, probably over my own dead body. I really wish I had picked Truth that night.” Seeing Jim’s confused look, she sighed. “I know this probably sounds crazy, but I’ve had a long time to think it over. Besides, my version of normal involves evil golden space witches and magic powers. A bit over a week before I got sent here, I was at a slumber party with my two best friends, Mary and Darci. You might’ve known them, they went to your school and we’re all about the same age.

“Anyways, we were playing truth or dare, and I knew they were trying to figure out if I had a boyfriend and if it was one of the band guys at my school or the college student who would help me with my calculus homework when I went to the tutoring center in the library after school, and I didn’t want to tell them because they’d tease me over it. So naturally I chose Dare, and Mary had found this weird occult ritual on the internet that was honestly a lot like Bloody Mary, except it was to summon someone called the Eldritch Queen. I’ll give you three guesses who that title refers to.”

“Morgana?”

“Knew you had to be smart to get into NASA. Anyways, I did the ritual, and I didn’t expect it to work or anything. Except then I started getting sick. I thought it was due to stress, but, well, the ritual was actually the real deal, or something. And I don’t blame Mary and Darci for it, because they’re not the type try and banish someone to another dimension, but here I am now.” She sighed. “And probably for all of eternity.”

 Ophelia and Javier had talked about their decision extensively. It wasn’t an easy decision, but it was time. That was why they had driven to the hospital after taking their son to school. Arcadia Oaks was a relatively small town, which meant that the care facility for the dying was another wing of the hospital. It was a wing they were quite familiar with.

Enrique had lived nearly his entire life spending weekends and times after school watching after an older sister who had never woken up. He had spent nearly his entire life with an older sister whose closed eyes would twitch for the first time in months only for her brain activity to show no signs of waking up.

It had been far too long to continue hoping.

“Oh, Mr. and Mrs. Nuñez, we were just about to call you!” one of the nurses at the receptionist’s desk said. Ophelia and Javier looked at each other in confusion.

“Did something happen?” Javier asked. They had wanted to be able to at least say goodbye to what was left of their daughter before they took her off life support.

Seeing their faces, the nurse gave them an awkward smile. “Nothing bad, though I think it’s best if you saw.” They followed the nurse to Claire’s room.

There was a television on in her room. It was always on because hearing was one of the last senses to go and being able to hear things was supposedly good for comatose patients. Right now, it was showing a memorial taking place at JPL. It was for the young man who had died in the mission to dimension D-13 two days ago. In the background, the song “Amazing Grace” was playing.

And vaguely to the tune of “Amazing Grace”, Claire was tapping the fingers of her right hand.

She hadn’t moved her fingers in over ten years.

“I don’t know how or why,” the nurse said, “but I think she might wake up.”

 “What’re you doing?” Claire asked. Jim managed to avoid dropping the equipment he was working on. He didn’t manage to avoid screaming and flailing his arm in such a way that it passed through her multiple times. Claire jumped back; the action of Jim passing through her made them both uncomfortable. He tried to avoid doing anything that would cause him to “touch” her. However, after a decade of not interacting with anyone other than an entity that wanted to possess her body and kill her soul, Claire had forgotten social cues like making noise when she walked to alert people of her presence, or not standing directly behind someone and asking questions out of nowhere.

“Trying to fix my radio. It’s a crapshoot on getting any signal with this, but I might be able to contact JPL or someone else with it. Of course, it might’ve only worked when the Bridge was open.”

“Oh, that’s cool,” Claire said, and while she sounded hopeful her form grew dimmer with disappointment. “I hope they can rescue you.”

Of course, if he was rescued she’d be alone again.

“I can’t say for sure, since I don’t work with that type of technology, but we might be able to transfer you into a machine of some sort once I get back to Earth.”

Claire’s form brightened.

“Can you shine some light near the radio? Thanks,” Jim said. “Akiridions have these robots called Blanks, and while they start out with no personality whatsoever, they’re able to achieve singularity.”

“Isn’t that what happens with black holes and stuff?”

“Er, technically, yeah, but with robots it means they pretty much develop a soul and you can’t really tell them apart from sapient life-beings. If we were to take a brand new Blank and place your soul into it, you might be able to live on Earth again. Well, not live-live but I think you know what I’d mean.”

“I’d like that,” Claire said. If she could form tears there would probably be some collecting in the corners of her eyes. “Want me to see if there’s a way I can try and amplify the signal?”

 It had been a bit over a week since Jim had died, and Eli was putting in overtime. It was either that or rewatching old Buzzfeed: Unsolved episodes while eating way too many chips that his mom would have never let him eat as a kid due to the amount of preservatives and trans fats they had. He glared at the code he was trying to write. If this was a case of a for loop that hadn’t been closed properly, he’d be so mad. The fact that his headphones had started to become staticky wasn’t helping.

Eli took off his headphones, and the static didn’t stop. He then noticed that the radio that they had used for the mission into the Shadow Realm was on.

“Hello?” came a voice from the radio. Eli fumbled with his phone to turn on the voice recorder to make a backup copy just in case.

“Hello, is anyone there?” said the same voice. There was heavy static and distortion overlaying it. “This is Jim Lake Jr, I recently got stranded in the dimension known as D-13. Can anybody hear me?”

“Jim! Is that you? It’s Eli, I’m listening!”

The transmission cut out.

 Claire’s face scrunched up in pain and her hands seized into fists.

The heart monitor beeped more rapidly.

She took a breath. As she exhaled, she released the tension and spirit that had started to build up in her body. Just like she had been for most of a decade, Claire’s body was still and at seeming peace.

 “Hello, is anyone there?” Jim asked into the radio that Claire was holding. Her eyes were closed, and her hair floated around her. “This is Jim Lake Jr, I recently got stranded in the dimension known as D-13.”

There was a loud screeching noise, like a microphone giving feedback, and Claire dropped the radio like it had burned her. Jim was able to catch it before it could hit the ground, but by glancing at it he could tell that parts of it had melted.

Claire was convulsing; her eyes had rolled back into her head and sparks were coming out of her hands. Jim looked around, trying to think of something, anything, that could help her. Claire inhaled, sharply, and for an infinite millisecond she just hung in midair, still and seemingly at peace.

He grabbed a cushion from the couch and used it to catch her when she dropped.

“I’m sorry, I can try to fix it later,” Claire said. She looked and sounded more exhausted than she ever had since Jim had met her. She tried to get up from the cushion but fell back onto it “I just need some time to recharge.”

“Claire, are you okay? It’s like the radio made you have a seizure. If it’s hurting you, we shouldn’t keep doing this.”

“I’m dead, Jim.” She gave him a weak smile. “I’ll be some form of okay no matter what.”

It wasn’t the lie she’d give so long ago. She hadn’t said she was okay right now.

  “You sent me a thousand texts, Eli! A thousand texts!” Toby had tracked down Eli as soon as he could once he arrived at JPL. “What’s your data plan like that you can send me a thousand texts?”

“It’s unlimited talk and text, but it wouldn’t let me send you the thing I wanted to.”

“What were you trying to send me?”

“Something that’s going to rock your world, Tobes.”

Toby glared as Eli began to walk away, gesturing to follow him. “Only one person got to call me Tobes, and that’s not changing.”

“Rock. Your. World.”

They were in a rather empty wing of the building when Eli stopped walking and pulled his phone out. He opened his voice recording app, and pressed play.

Toby started crying when he heard his best friend’s voice. Then he wiped his eyes and took a breath. “What do we do now?”

“I mean, it’s probably illegal and will make us lose our jobs and –”

“Eli.”

“We’d have to reopen the Bridge to get to Jim.”

“Well, it’s a good thing he’s more well-liked now than he was in high school.”

 “If you hadn’t gotten stuck here, what do you think you would’ve done with your life?” Jim asked.

“I’m not sure. I mean, I was dead set on becoming an actress because I liked acting in school plays and musicals, but then I started getting into black holes. Well, not literally, unless we’re inside a black hole right now.”

 Blinky and Arthur looked at each other, and then at Toby and Eli.

“Of course we’ll help you, Tobias,” Blinky said. “We can’t just leave Mister Jim stranded.” Arthur nodded.

“Thanks Blink,” Toby said.

“However, we shouldn’t tell his mother,” Blinky continued.

“Why?” Eli asked.

“Dr. L’s taking Jim’s, well, not-death pretty bad,” Toby said.

“Hurt worse,” Arthur said.

“Precisely,” Blinky said. “It would be cruel to get her hopes up and then immediately dash them if something were to happen to Mister Jim should we fail.”

Claire’s arms were outstretched in front of the kitchen counter. Her eyes were squeezed tightly, and her teeth were slightly gritted. There was a flash of purple light, and several avocados appeared on the counter.

“I thought you didn’t eat,” Jim commented.

“I don’t, but you do and I’m pretty sure at least some of those canned foods are way past their expiration dates.”

“Okay, one, I’ve been avoiding the cans that look like they could be even remotely spoiled. Two, you literally made them using your weird space ghost magic. If the food in them isn’t good, then no offense but I’d be less worried about food poisoning from mundane causes than from the fact that it isn’t from Earth. And if the cans are contaminated by the fact that this dimension is somewhat under control of an evil space witch you summoned at a slumber party, then I can’t see how avocados will be much better.”

Claire ignored his comment in favor of slicing open the avocados. “I used to be good at making guacamole, so I hope this tastes good.”

“You want any help?”

 “Are you sure about him, Eli?” Toby asked.

“Look, I know he wasn’t that great in the past, but he’s not a bad dude! Though he might be a bit more motivated you guys’ rivalry.”

“Exactly! He’s going to want to rub it in everyone’s face that he helped save Jim! I swear, his head’s already so big that I’m not sure how he can fit it in his Vespa helmet.”

“Well, do you have any better ideas for finding someone we can trust both not to rat us out and also to help us save Jim?”

“Yeah. Draal.”

“Isn’t Draal in DC right now?”

“Fuck, fine. Let’s go talk to Steve.”

 Claire didn’t try to fix the radio, at least, not at first. Instead, she was watching as Jim painstakingly took the radio apart piece by piece, and she tried to replicate the pieces he declared “probably okay.” She didn’t want to work on the radio itself after what had happened last time. Besides, that was Jim’s only way out of here. It might be her only way out of here as well.

“You okay?” he asked, looking up from his work. She realized that she was frowning slightly. “Seriously, take a break if you need to.”

“Yeah, no, I’m fine.” And unlike the well-worn excuse she would give when she was alive, she actually meant it.

“So, what you’re saying is that that buttsnack needs saving, and you want me for the job? Of course I’m in!”

Toby suppressed a groan with a half-hearted smile. “Just remember, Steve, no telling anyone.”

“Can I tell Shannon? She’d want to help, and she can probably help divert power.”

“I’ll talk to her,” Eli said.

“By the way,” Toby asked. “How are you in a low-gravity environment?”

 Jim pushed away the radio, blinking. “Okay, I’ll need fresh eyes for this,” he said, before realizing that there wasn’t a telltale purple glow in the room.

“Thanks for letting me talk to myself for an hour,” he said to the empty air. He walked through the house, mainly to stretch his legs but also to see where Claire had gone. He looked through one of the windows of the living room and saw her outside. She held a two-pronged staff made of purple light and fought an invisible opponent. Jim looked at her, grimaced, and then grabbed a broom before going outside. He didn’t want to go out into the asteroid field if he didn’t have to, but he wasn’t leaving her alone to fight.

“Need any help?” he asked from the porch. Claire looked at him and blushed slightly.

She didn’t have blood; how could she blush?

“Uh, no, just training,” she said, not quite looking at him. “Never can be sure if Morgana will attack.”

“Has she ever attacked the house?”

“No, but sometimes I’d get bored and try to explore here. It’s boring, by the way, no use trying to look into it.”

“That’s literally my job, you know. I got sent to this dimension to try and learn about it.”

“Yeah, well, I’m half sure Morgana created all the asteroids, so studying it might be a little hard when her magic is involved. Anyways, she hates me for not turning into her host, and thus she tends to randomly attack me when I go into the asteroid field. I’ve gotten kind of good at sensing her and any other anomalies here, but sometimes things still catch me off guard.”

“Okay, that makes sense. I was just worried you were getting attacked by some sort of invisible monster or something.” Jim looked down to the broom he was holding. “Do you want a sparring partner? I won’t be able to help with kicks and stuff, since we’d pass through each other, but I took fencing lessons in college.”

  “Is everyone ready?” Toby asked. He stood in the same suit he had stood in nearly two weeks ago. It was so much longer than he would have wanted. Instead of having Jim by his side, Steve stood in a stolen space suit – more stolen than the one Toby was wearing, anyways – and held several meters worth of cables that had all been braided together to make something stronger. Something that would hopefully stand up against the barrage of sharpened asteroids.

“Dispatching power on your cue,” Shannon said. In other circumstances, the glee in her eyes at the prospect of hacking the government – specifically, the section of the government that they all worked for and generally trusted to be humane – would have been a little concerning.

“Guard doors,” Arthur said.

“No one appears to be in the area aside from us,” Blinky confirmed.

“Shannon, Eli,” Toby said as he stepped forward. “It’s time.”

“Ten,” Eli started.

“A countdown is superfluous,” Blinky said.

“Right,” Eli said before opening the Bridge.

 Claire didn’t sleep, but Jim did. He had taken the bed in her parents’ room, while Claire tried to quietly practice her guitar. They were almost done fixing the radio. She still wasn’t sure why it had acted up like that, why she had felt such pain course through her. She hadn’t felt actual pain in so long.

Oh, she had felt emotional pain in her decade of being here. The loneliness had hollowed her. Learning that she had been here for a decade was like she had been smashed between two of the asteroids. It was all metaphorical; it all hurt. It was everywhere Claire could feel; it was nowhere she could claim to be a reflection of what had been her body.

This had been different. The pain had started in her hands and it had grown stronger, washing through her and she hadn’t been able to contain it all.

Nothing had hurt like that since Claire’s soul had been first ripped from her body.

Claire twisted the tuning peg, and then stopped as she noticed that something had changed. She stood up and ran to her parents’ room. The door was already open, or else she would have slammed it. She tried to shake Jim awake before being reminded of the fact that they passed through each other.

“Jim. Jim. Jim, wake up. Please don’t make me poke you with a stick, Jim. Wake up, it’s important.”

“Can it wait for five more minutes?”

“No, it can’t.”

Jim rolled over and opened his eyes. “What is it?”

“So, you know how I can sense when changes happen here? And how I was able to tell when your Bridge opened?” Jim nodded. “It’s open.”

Jim blinked away the tiredness that had clung to him. “They got our message.”

“Yeah, but I’m not sure where they’re expecting to find you, so we need to go before Morgana attacks them.”

Jim leapt out of the bed, and then stopped. “We didn’t arrange to get you a new body,” he said.

Claire was already walking out of the room. “I know.” She grimaced. “But I have time. We don’t know how much time you have.”

“Do you know how to fix the rest of the radio? I promise I’ll contact you after I cross through the bridge.”

“I think I’ll be able to figure it out.” She smiled. “Let’s go. You’re going home.”

 Steve floated near the edge of the Shadow Realm. He unspooled the braided cables and watched as Toby floated towards the asteroid field, calling out Jim’s name.

Steve hated low-gravity environments so much. This was why he was usually on Akiridion freighter ships and not old Earth-based ones.

Jim had better be grateful that he was doing this.

 Jim had been trained for low-gravity situations, but compared to Claire’s effortless flight he was clumsy. She was ethereal, a beacon of light in this dimension of shadows.

He was going to miss her so much. They had only known each other for a short amount of time, but they had become close. Or at least, he thought it was only a short amount of time. Jim couldn’t know just how much time had passed back on Earth. After all, Claire had been trapped for over a decade and had thought she had only been here for a couple months.

“Jimbo? Jim, where are you?”

Jim turned towards the sound of his best friend’s voice and was pleased to see that Toby didn’t look much older than when Jim had gotten trapped. Tired, yes, but grief will do that to you. Grief and stress and just the everyday life of a person who worked in STEM.

“Over here!” Jim shouted before coughing.

Claire looked at him in concern. “You okay?”

“Yeah, just space dust,” Jim said, already bounding over to Toby. Jim wasn’t able to see the concern change targets. He was able to see the way Toby lit up when he saw him alive. Jim was able to see the nervousness that came from the fact that Jim wasn’t wearing a helmet – it was easier to just break it all off than to fix it and worry about it breaking again and the glass cutting him. Jim was also able to see the moment Toby saw Claire.

“Jim I’m so glad you’re alive and someone’s behind you!”

“This is Claire, she’s been helping me,” Jim said before hugging him. She smiled from behind before turning her attention to the asteroid field.

“You’re going to have to be quick,” Claire said. “She’ll notice you sooner or later and try to, I don’t know kill you? Or maybe possess your bodies to go to Earth? Heck, if she can she might try going through the Bridge?”

“She?” Toby asked, moving away from the hug to tie a length of cable around Jim’s wrist.

“Evil golden-ghost witch who trapped me here.” Claire turned away from them as if she was trying to hide tears, but she couldn’t physically cry. “She made the, well, she attacked you with the sharpened asteroids.”

“By the way,” Jim said as the three of them – he was glad Claire was seeing him off – bounded towards the Bridge. “How long do you think it’ll take us to get a robot body for Claire? Because she’s been alone for over a decade.”

Toby looked away from the weird ghost girl his best friend had befriended, mainly to hide his own guilty expression. “We can try, but I don’t know how likely any giving our department funding’s going to be, since most people think you’re dead. Didn’t want to get people’s hopes up that you might still be alive if this mission went wrong.”

Jim bit his lip. Had he done just that? Get Claire’s hopes up of ever getting out of here?

“I’ve never seen so much debris here,” Claire said. Her hands lit up slightly, like she was getting ready to fight or manifest something.

“Byproduct of the asteroids, maybe?” Jim asked.

“Maybe, but, well, Morgana and I don’t exactly obey most laws of physics or anything.”

Toby gave Jim an uneasy look, to which Jim just shrugged. He’d explain later, if later ever came.

No, there would be a later. Even though the dust was starting to glow with golden light, Jim had to believe that things would be okay for him and his friends.

“Go, I’ll cover you,” Claire said. She moved as if to push Jim and Toby towards the Bridge, but the tethers that were connected to Toby glowed purple instead. “Hope that’s stronger than whatever asteroids she throws at you.”

“Hey, buttsnacks? What did you do to the tether?” Steve asked. “It’s purple.”

“Jim made a friend; please tell me you’re pulling us in,” Toby said.

“Sorry if I can’t see through the weird gold cloud; sucks to be you if I pull you into an asteroid because you don’t want me to be careful.” Toby felt an actual tug in the direction of the Bridge. “How did Lake make a friend here, anyways?”

“Hurry up!” Shannon called. Steve and Toby winced from the static. “They found us out!”

Steve pulled faster. Toby tried to pull from the other end, hoping he’d meet Steve in the middle and not pull the pilot further into the Shadow Realm.

The gold dust stopped its attacks on Claire. It stopped entirely, and for a second, she thought that Jim was safe. Then the dust became a column pointing to the three astronauts.

Jim saw Steve clearly enough that he could see the panicked expression and the golden reflections on his helmet. He turned his head and saw gold rushing towards the three of them. He also saw Claire, racing against the column to get to him.

I’m as human as you are.

Claire gritted her teeth as she propelled herself forward. Sparks began to crackle off her just like they had when she had amplified Jim’s radio. Her skin burned with magic. There was an incredible amount of pressure on her face and hands, so much that she could almost feel them splintering. Still, she pressed on. She wasn’t letting Morgana hurt anyone else, especially not her family or the guy who had floated into her life. Even if there would be nothing left of her to save due to just how much of her soul she was burning, it had been nice, interacting with another person.

She was already dead, but she didn’t want to die.

Or at least, I used to be.

To say that there was a flash of light would imply that the light went away. Rather, there was a pulse, a supernova of purple light that went through the Shadow Realm, but its source didn’t stop glowing. Rather, Claire was transformed. It had always been a purple light that had comprised her form, but that purple was now just an outline in the brilliant orchid flames that blazed all around her. She changed as she raced towards the Bridge. Her face grew less rounded, and she grew taller. She had been sixteen for over a decade and now she was twenty-six. This was probably what she would have looked like if she had never summoned Morgana.

Claire leapt in between Jim and the column, and the column exploded. A dome of swirling lights surrounded her and the three astronauts, blocking them.

Toby and Steve passed through the Bridge. On instinct, Jim grabbed for Claire’s wrist. He thought he felt warmth, protectiveness, and something that was almost solid.

It always felt odd when they’d pass through each other, but Jim never felt so hollow as when he crashed to Earth and realized that Claire wasn’t there.

 Claire created a dome of swirling lights to let Jim and his friends escape, and then she felt a hand almost grab her wrist. She felt a yank, and then all she saw was darkness.

She heard beeping, and she wrinkled her nose at the smell of rubbing alcohol. It took a considerable amount of effort to open her eyes, but when she did the first thing she saw were blank white walls. She looked around, and saw a young boy look up from the book he was reading.

Two identical pairs of eyes met.

“Mom?” the boy called, jumping up from his chair and poking his head out of the door. “She actually woke up!”

She wasn’t dead.

Was that kid Enrique?

 Dr. Usurna rushed into the room as Jim got his bearings on Earth. Her voice washed over him and slammed into his friends. She wanted to have Toby, Eli, Shannon, Blinky, and Arthur fired. Steve only technically worked for JPL, but she wanted him fired as well.

She didn’t say that she would have rather Jim not come back, but the message was clear.

 “Do you know what your name is?” the nurse asked.

“Claire Maria Nuñez.” Talking was hard. Moving at all was hard. Over a decade of not moving her muscles made for a large amount of muscular atrophy.

“Do you know who she is?” The nurse gestured at Claire’s mom. Her dad had taken Enrique – he was so big now – into the hallway while they tried to see just how much brain damage Claire might have had.

“My mom. She at least used to be a politician.”

Ophelia Nuñez was still enough of a household name that this didn’t make the nurse look at Claire’s mom to confirm her career.

“What’s the last thing you remember from before you woke up?”

The expected answer was for Claire to talk about how it had been the day of the AP Chemistry exam, and she had gone to the bathroom because she wasn’t feeling well.

“A little while ago a guy who worked for NASA got trapped in D-13, colloquially known as the Shadow Realm,” Claire said instead. “The last thing I remember before waking up is shielding him and the rescue party that came for him from a hostile force.”

Claire’s mom and the nurse looked at each other in concern. So Jim, Toby, and the other one whose name she couldn’t recall had tried to tell people, and they hadn’t been allowed to. NASA was part of the government, after all. There could have been a cover-up; no matter how paranoid it sounded it was better the alternatives.

The first alternative was that Jim had given up on her. The second was that she was the only one who had made it out alive.

“This is normal,” the nurse said, more towards Claire’s mother than to Claire herself. “Sometimes coma patients will internalize things they’ve heard. Since her brain was essentially coming back online, it was normal for her to dream and to use things she might’ve heard on the television, such as the funeral, as information for her dreams.”

“But I,” Claire said before looking away. The simplest explanation was usually the correct one. “Did the rescue mission work, at least? Since I probably got that idea on the news?” she asked instead. He wasn’t her Jim, he was just some guy who worked for JPL, but he was still a person who hopefully had a loving family.

“There wasn’t a rescue mission,” the nurse said. “You came up with it on your own.”

If the past decade of loneliness had been an actual nightmare, then that meant that there was no Eldritch Queen wanting to destroy humanity. It had still felt so real, more real than the idea of an entire decade of Claire’s life being a sleeping blank.

 Dr. Vendel was trying to make sure that everyone who had been involved in the rescue mission didn’t get fired, and with some nudging so was Dr. Strickler. Of course, there was talk about shutting down the department and transferring them all to lower-paying positions in other departments.

The idea of getting Claire a robot body felt like an empty promise, a faraway dream that would never come true.

In the meantime, Toby, Jim, and Steve were all in quarantine to make sure that none of them had brought diseases with them from the Shadow Realm. Toby had already had to sit through this, but he had to do so again. At least this time he had company.

Toby unlocked his phone before opening the app that phones were originally invented for. He scrolled through it before tapping a number. The phone rang a few times before the person on the other end picked up.

“Hi, Dr. L! Are you sitting? You might want to be sitting because I’ve got news!” Toby said before handing Jim the phone.

“Tell her yourself,” he mouthed.

Jim’s own mouth went dry as he tried to choke out the words.

“Toby, are you okay?” his mom asked.

Jim took a breath. “Hi, Mom. I love you. I’m back on Earth.”

 Claire’s family had left because Enrique still had school and she was too weak to go home, yet. She doubted it would feel like home to her. It would have changed so much, just like Enrique had. Besides, the Shadow Realm had been –

No, it hadn’t. Her experience in the Shadow Realm had been a dream.

Still, Claire stretched out her hand. She had been craving guacamole for a while. If her dreams were to be believed, then the craving had started before she had manifested all the ingredients to make guac for Jim. She wasn’t going to bother with the ingredients, she was just going to manifest it already made.

After her hand began to shake, Claire set it down and opened her eyes to the same empty white room that contained no guac whatsoever.

She probably couldn’t even eat it, anyways. Her stomach was too weak. Even if she had been trapped in another dimension, her physical body still hadn’t digested anything in years.

“Well, it turns out there was a rescue mission, but they kept it private,” the nurse said, walking into the room. “It succeeded.”

“That’s good for him,” Claire said, keeping the emotions out of her voice.

It had been a random astronaut.

It hadn’t been a guy who went to the mole school and had wanted to save her.

 “So, that purple girl. Or, I think she was a girl ‘cause she looked like one? What was she?” Steve asked half a day into their quarantine.

Jim gave a wet chuckle. He had cried while talking to his mom. He wanted to cry thinking about the girl he’d left behind. “Her name’s Claire. She’s as human as we are, heck, she went to the high school that had been Toby and I’s rival. Well, at least she used to be human before an evil golden space witch tried to possess her. Either way, she’s pretty amazing.” Jim was smiling by the end, but the smile fell off his face. “I was going to find a way for her to live on Earth again, so she wouldn’t have to be alone anymore, but I don’t know if I can do that now.”

 Half a week had passed. According to the doctors and nurses, Claire’s muscles were regaining mass at an incredible speed. They called it a miracle, just like the fact that she had woken up at all.

The angry part of Claire that believed she had been fighting an otherworldly entity for over a decade wanted to scream that it hadn’t been a miracle, it had been hard work. The miracle was that Jim had managed to pull her through. The miracle was that she and Jim had found each other.

The part of Claire that was rational and listened to doctors didn’t completely buy the miracle bit but figured she wouldn’t be getting an explanation any time soon.

Claire had been given a tablet to help her catch up with the world.

Akiridions weren’t something that she had dreamed up.

She hadn’t checked the news to see more about the astronaut that had been stranded in the Shadow Realm. She knew he wasn’t the Jim who had sparred with her, but she didn’t want to let go of her dream boy yet.

No matter how miraculous her recovery had been, brushing her hair was still frustrating. Between her weak arms and the curls that had annoyed her since childhood, it was an ordeal.

Claire squinted into the mirror. Were her roots coming in a ghostly white?

 After the quarantine period had ended, Jim still wasn’t sure if he had a job. He had gone with his mom to her work instead. It was a lot like when he was too young to stay home alone, and his mom hadn’t been able to find a sitter.

Jim was walking back from the bathroom when he saw someone out of the corner of his eye. Jim stopped and looked through the glass wall. It was a woman with shoulder-length brown hair and brown eyes. Five silver hairpins encircled her skull in a deliberate pattern. They kept her hair flat against her head, but towards the bottom it formed curls.

She was beautiful, but that wasn’t why Jim’s breath caught in his throat.

His feet moved before he could second-guess himself.

“Claire?” he asked. She looked up at him; her expression changed to one of shock and wonder.

“Jim?”

He walked to her and took a seat next to her bed. “I thought you were dead, I wasn’t sure how I’d be able to get you out of there.”

“I thought I was dead, too, but everyone tried to tell me it was all just a dream because I had heard about your funeral on the news. I didn’t want to find out who the ‘real’ lost astronaut in the Shadow Realm was because I didn’t want to let go of you.”

Jim took her hand, and it felt odd. Not because of any energy jolting through the two of them, but because he didn’t pass through her. “You won’t have to.” He frowned. “Okay, literally you will, but until I know I have a job I can visit you every day because my mom works here, and we can still talk when I’m working. I can bring you some soup tomorrow, and maybe some guacamole if your stomach is up to it? I’m not sure if it’ll be as good as what you made for me, but I’m a pretty good chef.”

“I’d like that,” Claire said.

The miracle had been that they had found each other.

Fun fact: I always knew that Claire and Jim would find each other in the end when she was in the hospital. That didn't stop me from sobbing as I wrote about Ophelia and Javier thinking that Claire had died before they could say goodbye to her.

[sgnolivia]

weird flex— are you okay??

two days into maybe-olivia’s eat-pray-love-crush-enemy-skulls pillage of cleveland, she’s struck by a migraine so searing that she has enough presence of mind to google psnn hesd dyig strook e ? before she’s left twitching in a trash heap behind starbucks.

two days into maybe-olivia’s eat-pray-love-crush-enemy-skulls pillage of cleveland, she’s struck by a migraine so searing that she has enough presence of mind to google psnn hesd dyig strook e ? before she’s left twitching in a trash heap behind starbucks.

it’s still light out when her brain stops trying to design, manufacture, and detonate it’s own atomic bomb. maybe-olivia isn’t sure if it’s been three hours or three days. the double chocolate chip frappe she bought t-minus five to blackout (ha!) has solidified on her pants. she can taste seafoam under her tongue.

she stares up at the sky in muted exhaustion. 

god, it’s me, she thinks. i would like to invoke my right to choose. 

perhaps if the zygote tube had been pro-choice, none of this would be fucking happening. 

the lizard takes over all executive functioning at that point, forcibly ejecting her from the drivers seat. when she blinks down at her shirt it’s neon green and has a fun i love chicago! written across a black skyline. 

maybe-olivia wonders if she saw the blue bedroom and doesn’t remember it. hopefully the lizard wrote it in the unicorn book.

not that it matters. what’s another forgotten thing in the grand scheme of it all? it’s a fifty-fifty shot she’ll remember anything she’s written in the notebook, anyway. her memory is half a step above melted swiss cheese. 

from that point on, every decision is like russian roulette with a gun that’s fully loaded. maybe-olivia has no fucking idea what’s going to set her spinning into a migraine or send her flying off the realm of human existence or remind her, hey, she fucking loves macaroons. it’s a lot of calculated risks and maybe-olivia discovers that she’s very bad at math. 

it goes on like this for an indeterminable amount of time. 

she tries to balance her world-wide assassination tour with her brain’s need to self-destruct every seventy-three seconds. it is difficult. 

after the act of dying her hair a soft brown sends her tripping into a panic attack, shivering violently and puking all over the nice bathroom of the vacation home she’s squatting in, maybe-olivia decides this isn’t working. 

the unicorn notebook is full, so maybe-olivia unpacks the glittery purple one she bought to replace it. the pen that lights up was lost somewhere in bolivia so she has to settle for a fatter pen that holds four different wells of ink. she feels traitorous for liking it more than its predecessor. 

option 1:

die. 

honestly, this is the easiest and most cost-effective route. at this point she’s ninety-five percent sentient machine gun. there wouldn’t be much lost. blackout was set to be decommissioned after operation foxtrot anyway. maybe-olivia would just be finishing what was set into motion a long time ago. 

she switches the pen into the blue inkwell and sets up a t-chart.

pros:

no more migraines.

won’t wake up in romanian hostel.

stop randomly puking.

permanently get rid of lizard.

cons:

maybe-oliva sits back in the chair. this list is marginally harder. 

agency is exhausting and confusing. some days she’s completely post-verbal and other days she can only speak argentinian spanish, despite having no memories related to argentina. some days she physically can’t wake her body up for more than six minutes at a time. most days she throws up everything she tries to eat. 

maybe-olivia wishes she was strapped back into her holding cell in the unnamed facility, twelve floors below the earth. 

this transforms her body into a wet chihuahua. it takes four hours to pull her bones back inside her skin and another two just to get off the floor. 

jesus, she thinks, and adds keep bones in skin to the pros list. 

she ruminates on her death for a bit, losing time to daydreaming about the endless sleep that might await her. none of her training covered the afterlife so this is as much a guess as everything else in her life. maybe it’s an endless blank void. maybe it’s burning in a pit. maybe it’s a another shot. maybe-olivia hopes not. she doesn’t know if her spirit can handle another go-round of this. 

but, her brain lizard pipes up, then they would win!

maybe-olivia growls out loud and pointedly tells it to shut the fuck up even if she begrudgingly admits that it has a point. 

if she dies, then director howard lives. 

this alights something hot deep in her gut. it feels like she has to puke and run fourteen miles at the same time. there’s no way in hell marcus fucking howard gets to live over her. fuck that. fuck that. 

and really, doesn’t she deserve that? doesn’t she deserve the right to drag howard out of his villa safehouse, shove a piece of rubber in his mouth, break all his fingers, and ask what her real goddamn name is?

project sisyphyus has been trying to kill her��� the real her— for eleven fucking years and they still haven’t gotten it done. she wins, they lose. they’ll have to try harder. 

she writes fuck that in the scrawling, bunched together lettering she’s beginning to associate with her own personal handwriting. it’s nice. it feels like she owns something.

fuck that.

if they want me dead, they better fucking find me.

option 2:

get it the fuck together

there are no cons to this. she doesn’t need a t-chart. 

getting it together proves to be a con all on it’s own. her brain is a glorified vegetable but it’s all she’s got. it’s not like she can swap it out for a new one. it needs serious repairs though, and short of hooking her scalp up to a car battery, maybe-olivia isn’t sure how to go about this. 

google is, though.

and google doesn’t care if she has to look something up four times an hour. it points her towards helpful websites. searching how do i get my memories back and following it with who the fuck am i six times in half as many hours points her to a self-help thread which leads her to a diagnosis forum. she has acute brain trauma, post-traumatic stress disorder, dissociative episodes, panic attacks, and sometimes seizures. also, maybe arthritis. she has to ask google what dissociation means. 

maybe-olivia is struck with the overwhelming knowledge that other people know what she’s going through. there are other people who fell head first out of a plane with no parachute and have been hurtling towards the ground for as long as they can remember. sure, they haven’t been tortured and brainwashed and denied the basic human rights that are allocated pretty much across the board but she doesn’t care. she feels connected to these people who live half outside of their skin, wondering the earth like zombies chewed up in the garbage disposal. 

they teach coping strategies. ways to fake normal existence so that it seems like they’re living in the same reality as everyone else. how to breathe when her lungs collapse. how to avoid physical contact in day-to-day situations. 

a lot of them gently suggest finding creative outlets for her feelings. she tries writing but after penning an expansive four page letter in cantonese only to suddenly forget how to read cantonese, she gives that up. 

she decides she isn’t really ready to sift through her emotions. her bodies fucked up instincts are enough without trying to decide if she’s depressed, furious, or anxious on top of it. 

google assures her that recovery happens in stages and at her own pace. if you aren’t ready today, try a little bit more tomorrow. 

her brain still jerks her around like it’s the worlds most aggressive dog owner and she’s the runt of a teacup poodle’s litter, but it works to her advantage. no one can track her if even she has no idea where she’s going next. the targets come in migraines, in hallucinations, in dissociative fits, but they come and maybe-olivia dutifully follows, even if she can’t remember doing it. it’s admittedly a reckless strategy but if there’s a part of her that isn’t a screaming disaster then she hasn’t recovered that part yet. 

she reviews her notebooks every few days, now. they look like they’ve been written by at least four people, one of them being a small child. there’s a variety of languages, handwriting styles, codes, and small illustrations. one page just says fuck licorice in increasingly bold font, fiercely underlined and surrounded by aggressive exclamation points. 

it doesn’t do much except reaffirm that she has the minimal amount of control required to be a human being, but that’s okay. 

a lot of her problems sort themselves out once a helpful blog post points out that she’s eating about a third of what’s required of adult women. this is mostly because she constantly throws up anything that tastes more flavorful than wheat bread but also because she’s never really had to feed herself before. hunger is just another loud, shrieking signal her body sends at her to inform her that something’s wrong, but it sends fifty of those a minute. how’s she supposed to know where the problem is?

a steady combination of pedialyte, muscle milk, and a bottle of gummy vitamins becomes the solution. she has to set alarms to remind herself to drink them and it isn’t ideal, but it keeps her caloric intake up, and solves the arthritis issue. 

it also makes it easier to actually keep the memories she recovers which is a huge win. 

that doesn’t mean things are smooth by anyone’s standards, including her own. random things still absolutely kneecap her— a dad yelling at his son, a lawn mower starting up outside the motel, her own abilities blinding her first thing in the morning. but every incapaciting moment gives a clue. 

a car backfires on the road and maybe-olivia darts behind a minivan, seeing both the tan metal under her hand and white sand beaches. 

239948S462569W

maybe-olivia has never infiltrated a fully-staffed enemy facility on her own before. that’s alright. it can be a learning experience for everyone. 

[bbclesmis]

TV Is Unwhitewashing History One Character, Period, and Genre at a Time

From “Les Miserables” and “Harlots” to “The Spanish Princess” and “The Terror,” TV producers are restoring the historical narratives of people of color.

Black characters on a show set in Tudor England would be a “stark anachronism” one consultant told “The Spanish Princess” co-showrunner Emma Frost in no uncertain terms. “Even I knew just from basic research that that wasn’t true,” she said in an interview with IndieWire during a set visit last year.

As TV shows seek out more inclusive storytelling, many producers are looking to the past to find new ways to freshen old stories. And while historical records and artwork have shown plenty of black, brown, and Asian faces through centuries of Western history, that same diversity has been largely absent in history class and on the screen unless it takes place after the 1950s. This dearth has affected the types of roles offered and even considered by actors of color.

Mandip Gill, who plays a British police officer of South Asian descent on “Doctor Who,” has only performed in contemporary projects. “I have always said I won’t be in a period drama. I just don’t see it happening,” she said. “I can’t even imagine it. When I’ve written down what types I like to play or where I would like to push the boundaries, it’s not with period dramas. I don’t watch them because I can’t relate to them.”

Danny Sapiani has had a better track record for landing period roles — such as Will North in “Harlots” and Sambene in “Penny Dreadful” — but that wasn’t always the case. “Period drama on screen was not a consideration when I began my professional career. Most film and tv roles were confined to the modern era, post-1950s, ghetto-ized in nature or victims of oppression,” he said.

David Oyelowo, who stars as Inspector Javert in the upcoming PBS-BBC adaptation of “Les Miserables,” agrees. “That was the case for me. And having grown up in the UK, and more specifically, on period drama, I had just resigned myself to the fact that, ‘Okay, those amazing shows are going to be shows I love, but they’re never going to have folks like me in it.’”

Sites like The Public Medievalist and historians like Onyeka have worked to challenge the narrative of the pure-white Western history that’s been widely accepted, even by people of color. Now actors and producers are following their example to restore the place of marginalized people on screen and into the public consciousness.

“The excuse has been used that it’s not historically accurate, and that’s just not true,” said Oyelowo. “If you are an actual genuine student of history — and not just coming from an ignorant kind of purely white lens in relation to European history — you’d know that people of color have been in France, in the UK, all over Europe, for centuries, and not just as slaves.”

Sapiani points to the discoveries and documentation available for anyone to research about the existence of people of color in Europe for centuries.

“As evidenced by the discovery of Cheddar Man, the first complete skeleton found in a gorge in Somerset, the first modern Britons who arrived on the island 10,000 years ago had black to brown skin, blue eyes and dark wavy hair. It is from these earliest arrivals that the inhabitants of Britain derive their origins,” he said.

“In fact, there are very few periods in history where people of color do not feature, not only in Britain — the setting of most costume dramas — but across the entire European continent. The census notes 20,000 blacks living in Britain in 1780, the century we focus on in ‘Harlots,’ more than half that number living in London, which is where ‘Harlots’ is set. Even though this was during the height of the slave trade, not all those people were slaves or victims of white racism. Fascinating characters like Will North, spanned social and class boundaries, often, though not always, against incredible odds.”

Hulu’s “Harlots,” about the war between two brothels in Georgian London, not only features the free man Will North, but also several black harlots, one of whom ran her own brothel.

“There were tens of thousands of people of color living in London in the 1760s. We have found stories of musicians, estate managers, fencing masters, actresses, grocers, prize fighters, haberdashers, soldiers, poets, activists, librarians and clerks,” said “Harlots” co-creator Moira Buffini.

“Some were clearly people of means, like the ‘black lady covered in finery,’ spotted by Hester Thrale at the opera. ‘Harris’s List of Covent Garden Ladies’ has entries for several women of color who were making their living in the sex trade and The Nocturnal Revels tells us of ‘Black Harriot,’ a very successful courtesan who ran a popular ‘house of exotics.’ All our stories are about people trying to find agency when society gives them none — and this seems in especially sharp relief for our characters of color. Violet is a street whore and pickpocket but from her perspective, society is the thief. Her mother was stolen. Violet, in her own eyes, is neither victim nor criminal. She has a raw integrity and a personal truth that others find both intimidating and irresistible.”

For “The Spanish Princess,” an adaptation of two Philippa Gregory historical novels set in Tudor England about Catherine of Aragon, Frost and co-showrunner Matthew Graham turned to books by Onyeka to develop characters of color who would have fit in during that time. In particular, they discovered the story of the real-life Lina de Cardonnes (played by Stephanie Levi-John in the series), a high-ranking noble woman who acted as Catherine’s lady-in-waiting and companion.

“There was a character that was referenced in Phillipa’s books who was what they call a dueñas or a lady-in-waiting to Catherine. Her name was Catalina de Cardonnes and she was just this larger than life character who was depicted as white Spanish,” said Graham. “Then we just did a bit of cursory research and discovered that it was based on Lina de Cardonnes and that she was African Iberian. She was a black lady. So, we were certainly like, ‘Wow, this is a bigger story and a more interesting story than we can possibly imagine.’”

This discovery of the larger part that people of color have played throughout history has been increasing the more people look into telling marginalized stories. The author of “The Miniaturist” Jessie Burton and Netflix’s “Anne With an E” creator Moira Walley-Beckett had similar epiphanies and added black characters in significant roles to their stories set in the Dutch Golden Age and Edwardian Canada, respectively.

In many of these cases, ignorance or acceptance of the dominant narrative could explain the lack of representation in these TV shows. The absence of photographic or film evidence made it easier to whitewash the presence of people of color.

But there’s really no excuse with period dramas set in the 20th century and beyond, when plenty of visual records show the diversity present. As with the #OscarsSoWhite campaign started by activist April Reign, the biggest problems facing more inclusive TV lay in challenging the mindset at the studio level and changing who’s behind the camera.

As seen with many of the shows that are including people of color in historical narratives, the show’s creators are often women, people of color themselves, or part of the LGBTQ community. When marginalized groups help each other, this can address intersectionality.

For example, Carol Hay and Michelle Ricci co-created the Jazz Age mystery adventure show “Frankie Drake Mysteries” coming to Ovation on June 15. Not only did they make a show about Toronto’s first female private detective, but they also cast Chantel Riley as Trudy, Frankie’s partner who happens to also be a black woman.

“When Shaftesbury [Films] came up with this idea and decided to have a black female lead, it was mind-blowing to me because you never really hear about black folk or Asian folk, in that time,” Riley said. “We touch on the Asian community, the black community, even the Indian community as well. That’s why I was really attracted to this particular show, because no one’s really doing that in this particular era.”

In some cases, actors have had to step behind the cameras themselves to increase the opportunities for people of color. Daniel Dae Kim left “Hawaii Five-0,” and the first series that he produced afterward is ABC’s “The Good Doctor,” which has provided numerous on-screen opportunities for actors from marginalized groups.

Similarly, Oyelowo became an executive producer on “Les Miserables” to take control of how his role of Javert and the other people of color were portrayed. Oyelowo also co-produced and starred in the period film “A United Kingdom.”

“I wanted to make sure that me being in [‘Les Miserables’] wasn’t going to be a token thing. I wanted to make sure that people of color were integrated through the story in an organic way that didn’t feel imposed,” he said.

“But also, something very important to me was the American distribution. I wanted it to be on a channel that was worthy of the work that everyone was putting into it. And so, I had a hand in it going to PBS Masterpiece. Anything that takes me away from my kids for any period of time better be worth it. And so, some of the times I produce in order to develop. Some of the times I produce in order to be able to have a say in how things are cast, how they are marketed, how they are distributed. And that’s basically been the case with this.”

Currently, there aren’t many period shows by people of color about people of color on TV. John Singleton’s “Snowfall” on FX is set in Los Angeles during the 1980s crack epidemic and was renewed for a third season.

Over on broadcast, the late 1990s-set comedy “Fresh Off the Boat,” based on the memoir of Eddie Huang and created by Nahnatchka Khan, a queer woman of Iranian descent, is currently in its fifth season. It’s the first TV show with an Asian cast in over 20 years — since Margaret Cho’s short-lived “All American Girl” — and stars Randall Park and Constance Wu as the Huangs, who had relocated to the Florida suburbs with their family. Khan had to make a case for why the show had to remain in the ‘90s to replicate the real-life Huangs’ feelings of alienation.

“I remember having a creative discussion with 20th [Century Fox] at the very beginning about them asking me, ‘Why does it have to be set in the ‘90s?’” she said. “For me it was creating a sense of isolation with the family. They moved to Orlando in the middle of the white suburbs and they don’t know anybody. But in the present day, you can get online and talk to your friends and you can text people. You have a connection outside of your everyday life, even if it’s virtual.”

Other than those, “Underground” was the last period show about people of color by a creator of color, Misha Green. WGN’s critically acclaimed slavery-era period drama lasted two seasons and was canceled shortly after Sinclair Media Group announced it would purchase Tribune Media, which owns WGN.

Fortunately, this scarcity won’t last for long. Many period shows that feature significant narratives for people of color are on the horizon. Green has teamed up with Jordan Peele for the HBO drama horror “Lovecraft Country,” which takes place on a road trip during 1950s Jim Crow America. Barry Jenkins executive produces and directs the upcoming Amazon series “The Underground Railroad,” an adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s book. Justin Lin and Jonathan Tropper’s “Warrior” premieres April 5 on Cinemax and is based on Bruce Lee’s original concept about a Chinese immigrant who becomes a hatchet man for the most powerful tong in late 1800s Chinatown in San Francisco.

One other upcoming series explores a new genre for the period TV show that adds a provocative take on a historical event. In its second season, AMC’s anthology series “The Terror” explores the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II through the lens of Japanese horror. Actor George Takei, who experienced internment, acts as a consultant and series regular.

“We’re telling the story of a very underserved piece of American history using the vocabulary of Japanese-style horror as an analog for the terror of the actual historical event,” said co-creator and showrunner Alexander Woo.

“I don’t want the audience to feel removed from the events that are happening on screen. What a horror movie or horror series does is it makes you feel viscerally in the shoes of the person who’s trapped in the house or the person who’s running away from the monster or whatever it is. So we’re using that style, that language, to make you really feel how terrifying the experience of the Japanese Americans who lived through this terrible experience.”

While the Japanese ghost story trappings fits the tone of the narrative in “The Terror: Infamy,” Woo acknowledges that the genre twist might have helped pitching the show.

“We’re in an era of so much content and a period of such creative power, we have more sophisticated viewers that will hopefully appreciate a period drama told in a specific style,” he said. “Those two things used to not mix. That was not something that you would want to try because it might seem complicated or it might seem challenging, which I think now, in this time, that sounds very appealing… It’s also a terrific lens for us to understand things that are happening in the present. The story of internment is obviously relevant in a host of ways to the present day, so I think it’s a valuable story and has to be told now.”

While these more inclusive narratives continue to be discovered and told, inevitably people used to the status quo will resist and deny those stories. It’s the very reason that these stories haven’t been told in the first place.

“The more recent phenomenon of whitewashing, a political tool of the imperialists, dates back only a few hundred years,” said Sapiani. “I am so proud to see, and be a part of this change towards a more accurate and frankly more interesting dramatized interpretation of our world history. Needless to say, there is so much further to go.”

https://www.indiewire.com/2019/03/tv-unwhitewashing-history-period-dramas-hbo-hulu-pbs-abc-1202049639/

[xen-lovegood]

Headcanons

Xen’s crowning achievement of their Hogwarts years is sabotaging the Slytherin Quidditch team. It wasn’t about winning a game or the house points—Xen couldn’t care less about Quidditch really and the house tournament always seemed rather trivial to them. No, the Slytherin team was being rather awful to a group of first year Hufflepuff girls and someone had to put an end to it. So right before the Slytherin/Gryffindor game, Xeno may have enchanted all their brooms to give them all a horrible case of jock itch.

When Xeno wasn’t trying to sneak into the Restricted Section of the Hogwarts Library or wondering off into the Forbidden Forest, you could usually find them at the lake. It was a nice relaxing place and a good place to get high without the professors catching you. There was, of course, also the giant squid. Xen named him Sqedward and tried desperately to train him. Much to Xen’s dismay, the squid never did listen, no matter what they tried, and their dreams of riding the great beast as Muggles do dolphins at Sea World were thwarted.

Xeno isn’t sure how to feel about all the violence Aversio has been using lately. They’re not much prone to violence themselves and tend to take less traditional approaches when push comes to shove (see above). They don’t necessarily support just how violent the group is being, but they know something needs to be done given the state of the wizarding world and their Muggle relations. Sure, it’s nice the Order exists, but just talking about making change isn’t enough. You have to do something for anything to happen. Maybe Aversio’s path isn’t the right one, but it’s the best path available at the current time, so he’s going to take it.

Xeno has an extremely deep love of New Scamander. They think he’s absolutely brilliant. Living a life searching out and findings and treating and fighting for and writing about magical creatures, it just sounds like an absolute dream. Xen’s copy of Fantastic Beasts long ago had to be enchanted so the pages wouldn’t fall apart from wear and there’s paragraphs of notes scribbled into the margins. If they cared less about trying to make a difference for humans, they would almost certainly become a magizoologist, but there’s far too much work to be done getting humans to care about each other before trying to get them to care for creatures. Not that that puts any damper on Xen’s love of all things animal, vegetable, and mineral and his extraordinary adoration of his hero. The day Luna brought home a Scamader was damn near the proudest day of his whole life.

(Note: I saw you guys have a profession list and picked on that feels the most fitting for a young Xeno. I’m more than open to adjusting to fit your views/group needs for job positions.) Xeno currently works at the Daily Prophet. Sure, it’s corrupt and what they’re printing is hardly the truth, but Xen is convinced they’ll be able to change it from the inside out if only they try hard enough. They thought if they joined the Prophet they’d be able to print articles to change minds and change the ideals of the paper’s staff. So far it doesn’t seem to be going anywhere though. Most of his articles wind up getting cut out of the paper and the editor is scolding him more than publishing him. It’s starting to get frustrating, but they’re still holding out hope to make a difference. (The Quibbler will still be founded at a later date when Xen can no longer deny that they aren’t making any impact at the Prophet. Or possibly the Quibbler is founded as an Aversio propaganda paper that either uses Xen’s eccentric interests as a way to send veiled/coded messages to members or it just simply morphs into something entirely different as the war winds down and after Pandora’s death becoming the zany brain child seen in the books.)

Xenophilius sends Howlers quite frequently to anyone in the select group they consider friends. They’re not angry, no, of course not, that’s just now who he is. But there’s just something about a talking/screaming message that simply conveys things written letters can’t. Hand written messages just aren’t…dramatic emphatic enough.

More often than not, when writing Xen tends to dictate out loud to an enchanted quill while pacing around the room and keeping their hands busy.

Xen is a lover of accessories and is rarely without at least half a dozen rings between their two hands.

Xeno is a babbler. Bring up any topic he’s half interested in with anyone willing to even half pretend to be half listening and he’ll babble on endlessly about most anything. Their speech patters tend to involve long drawn out sentences that can be a bit hard to follow.

A few quick facts about their family: Their dad is a wizard while their mum is a muggle. Their father isn’t entirely supportive of their (for the time) progressive gender and sexual identities—the older Lovegood doesn’t necessarily scorn it or treat their child poorly, but he just doesn’t get it. Xen is an only child.

He brought a toad with him for his years at Hogwarts named Wartly. He talks to him a lot and even created a miniature, functional piano for the little guy to enjoy, fully infuriating most all of the Ravenclaw house as the toad would “play” at all hours of the night and Xen did absolutely nothing to “restrict the creature’s right to freedom of expression.”

Two brief headcanons about Xen as an adult that likely won’t have an impact on game play but I can’t shake:

Xen often calls his wife Panda Bear and his daughter his Little Moon

Xen’s knowns about the Deathly Hallows for quite some time, but the reason he carries so much information about them in Harry’s time is because of Pandora. After her death, Xenophilus poured himself into a way to bring back the love of his life. He’s still certain the only thing that could bring her back. He never managed it and maybe that’s for the best, but his knowledge of the Hallows comes down to his longing to bring back Panda.

Connections: 

(These are a few ideas for connections, all pending approval of the characters’ respective players and naturally his connections aren’t limited to these, but it’s a jumping off point and a look into how he relates to others)

Marlene—Marlene and Xen easily go back to their early Hogwarts days. She’s one of his best friends and one of few that can fully stomach everything that is the complexity of Xenophilius Lovegood. She’s a pub buddy and his go to for someone to smoke with. No one makes them smile and laugh quite the way Marlene can—even if they both spend just as much time rolling their eyes at one another.

The Black Family—The Black Family as a whole is just…distasteful to Xeno. They’re the perfect portrait of everything wrong in the wizarding community. They can’t stand them. Even Sirius, who’s long been a member of the Order and Aversio, Xen can’t quite bring themselves to fully trust—can someone truly disconnect so completely from a family so deeply tainted? The Blacks are violent and bigoted power hungry. Despite his typically warm personality, he’s often notably cold to the Black family and their backwards ways.

Rita—A fellow wizarding journalist, Xen and Rita have always been in the same circles. It doesn’t make them friends though. They have very different world views. She’s the kind who is actually published by the Prophet—though really he can’t see why as so many of her article are full of half-truths and exaggerations. Xeno is always trying to get her to write something good. Something worth her time. Something valuable and positive. It hasn’t worked thus far, so for the time being they’re really just rivals at best.

Arthur—Arthur Weasley is something of a treasure to Xen. They both have immense loves for things that no one else can quite fully appreciate. And sure, they don’t always have interest in the same sorts of things, but there is something nice about finding someone how loves loving things the way you do. The two can sit and babble on for hours, neither really saying anything relating to what the other’s just said and neither really minding because at least someone is finally listening to them.

Sybill—Sybill is so free and strange, just like himself and honestly, Xeno loves it. They always feel free to be unabashedly weird with her and it’s rather freeing. They’ve tried time and time again to get her to teach him divination. And she’s tried, she really has, but every time he fails to see anything of the future, he just tells her he’s failed to teach him properly rather than accept the fact that he’ll never have the affinity she does.

Lucius—Few people really truly get under Xenophilius’s skin quite the way Lucius does. He’s just so smug and so self-important and so sure he’s better than absolutely everyone when the reality is, he’s not. ‘Men’ who act like they are men, like they are more than what they are, when really, push comes to shove, they are nothing, are an utter frustration to Xeno. They’re very, very tempted to put him in his place and at some point, they just may. Someone needs to.

[pond-goblin]

Did you know that before Covid 19 you could see live comedy up to 3 nights a week in St. John's?

These days it's less so but Thursday nights at Trappers is still on. I believe there is a night at The Station, and there is the occasional show at The Peter Easton.

That's enough shows for a decent, small, but thriving comedy community. And many of the names you'll recognize - Mike Lynch, Vicky Mullaly, Matt Wright - teethed on these rooms. They perfected their moves.

With that kind of success - these are working comics, touring comics- you'd think that the comedy community is healthy. But, surprise surprise, it's not. Surprise surprise, it's a hot bed of misogyny, a haven of little baby Jordan Petersons all gathered under their hoods of colonial patriarchy (they can access a dictionary, look them up, stop making excuses), feeling sorry for their own loss of powers, and finding, in comedy other men who share their views, who encourage their regressive behaviour with the weakest excuses of one sided rationale.

This is why the behaviour is dangerous. Comedy is work, and in the workplace today you get fired when you tell coworker that their only value in life is to reproduce. You would lose you job for being a known domestic abuser, rapist, racist - remember the dudes on the Lab airplane last year? - this kind of behavior is not put up with anymore. Except in comedy. In comedy this kind of behaviour is called 'jokes'. That only misogynists laugh at. Because, my friends, St. John's does not actually have a comedy scene, it has a men's rights group who pose as stand ups.

It's a scene without proper mentors. People leave here to make it big. If they make it big they don't come back. They come do a tour of the Arts & Culture centers between St. John's and Wabush and then they fuck off back to Halifax or Toronto where they can properly learn their chops and grow their careers. So the local scene doesnt get much tutelage in comedy ettiquette. That larger communities have proper diversity and a white man using the 'n' word (not newfie) is going to cause you to NOT get stage time.

When folks do move back from not making it, it's usually the mediocre comedians, who are bitter as fuck. 

They've had these big city comedy experiences, they are quick to tell you how the scene works in the big city. Or the parts that suit their own agenda. 'All patriarchal enforcing rules are sacred, so please, give us your rape jokes'.

If you are someone attending these shows you may have noticed that the ratio of cis white male comedians (and audience 'cause let's be honest - you're not attending these shows - or cult meetings as I like to call them) to, well, anyone else really, is high. You may have been told non cis white men arent interested in comedy. Show runners will say 'tried to get them on but they don't show, they canceled so they arent interested - right now I could launch into how this exists through out all types of work and how it is because the patriarchy -a man centric system of society where gender is binary and the female half of that is to have the babies and do the dishes. About how patriarchy has prevented those not under it's hood from advancing. About the glorification of the quiet, toe lining, mother and wife being the perfect woman. I could launch into how this is less and less tolerated in more and more social structures and workplaces - but you already know all that.

You know that the other folks arent there cause theyre exhausted from just trying to function as a secondary, tretiary human.

But there is another reason why there are less non cis dudes (and remember, racist) doing stand up. They are traumatized. Now, you may be thinking, 'Fuck off. Trauma is for veterans. They experience trauma, abused spouses and children. Telling jokes isn't traumatizing." And you're right. Telling jokes is liberating. It's an adrenaline rush. But the constant belittling of your work is traumatizing. 'You only tell political jokes, audiences can't relate to that', 'that women's humour, it's not for everyone'. If an employer and/or workmates did that they'd be a load of dicks. You could take your boss up on harassment charges.

They are traumatized because they HAVE been sexually assaulted and three nights a week they have to listen to a guy who has been brought up on confinement charges tell 'rape jokes' (when you're the raper it's funny, when you're the rapee, not so much). They are scared they are alone in a room dominated by men who think rape is funny. 

And (and possibly an enlightened but) these comedy victims are talking to one another. They know when a rapist is taken on tour, when a domestic abuser is on the line up, when the dude who tells the phobia bits is headlining. They feel unsafe, creeped out, grossed out. They have 'why they aren't a real comedian' splained to them by Shouty MC Smallpants. So they just opt out. They don't take part in open mics - or they do, until the constant nips at their humanity breaks them - and when you don't do the open mics, you don't get the paying gigs (not that they got those anyway. That's another reason why there are so few non cis white men in the scene. Did you know it takes 7 years longer for non cis white men to become professional rather than the 6 shows that cis white men have get under their belts?).

If an audience doesnt see themselves reflected on a stage, an aspiration of themselves, the material is unfamiliar to them, then they arent going to go to the shows.

How do i know this? Go to a comedy show. Look around. How many people aren't dudes? How many members of the audience are the nights performing comedians? How many jokes would you want someone you love to be the punchline of? At their place of work even? And if you don't see anything wrong with the evening's entertainment you are probably ripe for recruitment in the St. John's comedy scene. It's easy, ask a show runner for some time on an open mic and just get up there and punch down! Sure you'll be running your own room by the end of the month!

If you do see something wrong with it, here is how you can help. 

-If you are at a show and the performers for the evening are only dudes, complain to the host. Or the establishment (they want your returning dollars).

- If a joke is offensive, racist, marginalizing. Don't clap. Stay silent. Or speak up.

- Support shows with diversity on the line up. Make an extra effort to spend your dollars and your cheers on the folks who get the least time.

- Book marginalized comedians to do your shows, they need all the inclusive stage time they can get so they can grow.

- Call for leadership from senior comedians, producers, show runners. Tell them if they start acting like professionals, you'll treat them like professionals.

- Support local. It's deadly when Cecil and Mike's nan play Holy Heart - especially when comedy labourer Lisa Baker is opening - but the rest of year you can see weekly comedy in St. John's, head out to one and demand the best of the show. 

Now. Go Youtube some Leslie Jones, or Desiree Birch, or some Rosie Jones. Find some Lara Rae in the CBC archeives, she is everywhere there, and probably the most hard working, professional comedian in the country. Watch Miriam Margolys clips from the Graham Norton Show. Watch all the Eddie Izzard specials back to back.

There are humans in this city that are that funny. That arr inventive, outrageous, thoughtful, playful, progressive. They need the space and the respect to grow, to crack you up, without a single strangling joke in sight.

Check Facebook for weekly live comedy open mics. Demand equality, and respect.

[everygame]

Heavy Rain (PS3)

Developed/Published by: Quantic Dream / Sony Computer Entertainment Released: 23rd February 2010 Completed: 14th January 2018 Completion: Finished it once. Trophies / Achievements: 41%

David Cage, eh? Let’s be honest, he sucks. I thought so well before his recent recently pillorying in the press for not just being a ego-centric fool but also a genuinely toxic one; I don’t need to go into the accusations here, you can read all about them at your leisure. He’s always been something of an anomaly in game development; someone who has literally never managed to make anything good (let’s not forget Peter Molyneux put in his time) yet has managed to get Sony to bankroll genuinely massive productions, not least the upcoming Detroit: Becoming Human. There’s an odd emperor’s new clothes to him.

Since the accusations, things get muddled of course. I don’t think Cage should lead a game again; before, I’d have said purely because he makes shitty things. But now it’s one of those things where the “shitty things” in question have all the hallmarks that make us ask—why weren’t the questions being asked before? One only has to look at his recent wrong-headed defense of triggering sequences from Detroit: Being Human to see there’s something wrong there, as soon as he’s actually challenged.

Perhaps you’d view this all as an aside, but I there’s been a lot of chat recently that the reason gaming hasn’t had its “me too” moment is simply that women and marginalized people in game development simply don’t have the power. It’s very different being a known actress from being a programmer, or an artist in a team of hundreds; Quantic Dream isn’t just a production house that will just put someone else in Cage’s place; he’s the founder, he owns it, he’s not going anywhere. 

It sucks.

[Keza MacDonald would write an article about this lack of a “me too moment” for The Guardian that’s worth reading—pointing out that things like #1reasonwhy shouldn’t be forgotten.]

So with that all said, it’s with rather a different light that I consider my decision with a few friends to play Cage’s post-Fahrenheit/Indigo Prophecy games “as a lark” as a bit… less… funny. I think it’s worthwhile to dig into it, anyway, as an experience, so yeah, let’s genuinely try and make sense of it and him.

For background, let’s discuss Fahrenheit, because sure as shit no one bothers to remember anything about Omikron: The Nomad Soul other than David Bowie was in it (tragically.) It’s a game that opens with a polygon model of Cage himself explaining how to play the game, and I remember cringing myself fully inside-out at that point. After that comes literally Cage’s one (1) memorable interesting bit of game design, the one (1) that literally everyone references. He places you as a man who has to hide a body in the bathroom of a diner and there are lots of different decisions to make as to how you do it; and then you play the police investigating it.

It’s interesting! Genuinely! Because of course, you know where the police should look and what they should do; but there’s that thought where… maybe you don’t want them to? There are lots of interesting things to do with “player omnipotence” in narrative games, but of course, this is basically the only time Cage does anything with it. Indeed, he spirals into what I consider his true trademarks: a complete inability to write a narrative that makes any sense, and leering sexism.

But of course, we’re not here to go into Farenheit’s plot (anyway, you all know it devolves into your zombie protagonist fighting the embodification of the internet, etc.) we’re here to with an open heart explore Heavy Rain as a serious work of an artis… I’m sorry I’ll start laughing like a drain again if I keep this up.

Heavy Rain has trophies, right? The first one you get is, literally, “Thank You For Supporting Interactive Drama.”

The hubris.

I mean, this is why you want to play this, right? Because you desperately want to try and understand how you could have so much ego, so much self-belief, that you literally do something like that.

I’m really not sure what Cage thinks interactive drama is, though. His games crib relentlessly from the language of cinema, but they’re just “interactive” right? So they’re interactive movies, right? But no, they aren’t. Because for some reason Cage is obsessed with the minutia of living. In literally any film, character doing things as mundane as, say, starting their car are cut out, filmed dynamically so they’re expressive and over quickly, or—if they are included—included for a particular narrative or thematic reason. But not in Heavy Rain. In Heavy Rain, if you want to do anything, you have to do it in the most insane detail using the absurd control system. Everything you do takes forever; just opening a door has to be done perfectly.

It adds nothing; it gums up the pacing and seems to be interactivity for interactivity’s sake, because (turns out) when it comes to the crunch your interactivity otherwise is going to be nothing more than quick-time events.

There’s another thing here, too, which I think speaks to Cage’s ego. In Heavy Rain, you can “fail” at basically anything by not doing it just right. So, for example, reaching to open a door. You can mess it up and your hand drops back to your side. You can do it slowly, you can do it fast and then stop. You can basically make your character look like a jerky moron who can’t open a door because you think it’s funny, and I genuinely refuse to believe that Quantic Dream didn’t get testers in who did this. I’ve talked before on this tumblr about how players should “meet the designer in the middle” and play along with what is expected, but a big part of that is (as the designer) not leaving your game open to abuse by offering the player things they don’t need and can basically only use to mess with the game. This is a perfect example of that, and I believe that in every situation Cage said “Real players won’t play it like that. Ignore it.”

Ego.

When you really get down to it, your interactions are little more than tedious housekeeping; only once does it make sense, as the beginning of the game you experience one character’s perfect family life and then (later) experience the shattered mirror of it, except they’re not actually direct analogues so I’m being fairly charitable in assuming that’s the point.

So let’s just pretend the game doesn’t include a lot of interactions that serve no purpose. I mean, if the story is good, usually we can excuse that, right?

Even if Heavy Rain had a plot that generally worked (it doesn’t) it does something so inexcusable that I’m shocked—shocked!—that anyone gives it a pass. I’ll give the (not so vague) spoiler that in this game (about the search for the mysterious “Origami Killer”) one of the characters you play *is* the Origami Killer! Except, for every character you play you can see their thoughts by pushing a button. And all the characters are investigating the Origami Killer, meaning one keeps investigating themselves. “Ah ha,” you might say, “obviously all of his thoughts are cleverly written to not implicate himself, but also are believably what the killer would think.”

No, they literally act like someone who doesn’t know who the killer is, thinking full thoughts that the killer could never think, and it’s not like he’s paranoid about his thoughts, or in a fugue state. It’s just… I mean, is this lazy writing? Or is it just the work of an actual moron? I mean the section of the game where he “cheats” by obscuring the actions of one of the main character is lazy writing. But this is breath-taking, the work of someone who either doesn’t know how stories work, or doesn’t care.

Let’s move on to Cage’s other hallmark; the leering. Heavy Rain is a game that has a lengthy nude shower-scene for the female protagonist that happens… in a dream. Also just to note we… don’t need a shower scene with her anyway? Or for her to like, have to fight off men in her pants for ages and ages, also in a dream? It’s ok though, she’s mostly there to tend the wounds of the male protagonist and shag him.

[“Actually, systems-wise, she’s actually necessary to help the player keep good endings available if they fuck up a lot with the other male protagonists. But yeah, she is mostly a nurse... I mean apart from that bit where she has to rip her dress and act slutty to go on to almost get sexually assaulted”—charitable ed.]

Look, I can’t bang on about Heavy Rain forever, it feels like I have already. After playing through the whole thing, I struggle if anything worse to understand how Cage not just got more work but managed to get Ellen Page to star in his next game? How this game won a BAFTA (well, a video game BAFTA) for STORY!

Heavy Rain is fucking shit and it’s not why David Cage should never work again, though at one point I’ve had said it would be. He should never work again because he’s a toxic garbage person. I hope Sony sticks him in the bin after their obligations relating to Detroit are over.

(Oh and all the staff that have suffered under him and his culture get lovely jobs making things that are good.)

Will I ever play it again? I wondered if it would be more interesting with the Move controls, but I’ll be fucked if I’m ever touching this again.

Final Thought: Above I talked about how this game drowns in the mundane; and I’d like to restate that I do think it’s a mistake to argue this is some kind of a directorial choice, to imbue that mundane with meaning. Like… I don’t know. Anyone from Ozu to Jarmusch can show how that can be used thoughtfully. Hell, just watch David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return. Compare and contrast to failing to open a door because you didn’t hold the trigger down just right.

[dustedmagazine]

Dust Vol. 3, Number 15

Telescopes

Buttercup — Battle of Flowers

Battle of Flowers by Buttercup

Buttercup is a love-of-the-game kind of band, a trio that plays smart, tight, bubbly power pop with a psychedelic sheen. Guitarist Joe Reyes won a Grammy in 2002 for his producing work on Freddy Fender’s La Música de Baldemar Huerta but otherwise he and his bandmates — Erik Sanden and the one-named bassist odie — seem to have left little internet trail. That’s a shame because Battle of Flowers is just so very enjoyable, hooky and engaging with just enough edge to make it stick. “Acting Through Music” chimes and croons and postures like a Teenage Fanclub tune struck by a temporary obsession with “Bohemian Rhapsody,” while “I Love You (You Believed in Me)” is all twitchy, spiky romantic obsession, making fun of itself, but still fundamentally sincere. The best cut, though, and maybe the most resonant right now given what happened in Virginia/New Jersey/Maine etc. last night, is “Henry B. Gonzalez,” a paean to the old school Texas progressive who fought for equality via the filibuster (“for 22 hours, he read the Bible”). It’s the hardest rocking song of the bunch, sweet and abrasive a la Big Star, and exactly what some of us need to hear,  “When did liberal become a bad word? When did liberal become a curse? On Henry B.’s tombstone, it says liberal, it says fighter, democrat, aaaaghhh!”  Ditto to all of that, especially the aaaaaghhh.

Jennifer Kelly

 Chamomile & Whiskey — Sweet Afton (County Wide) 

With a new album named Sweet Afton and a single called “Nelson County,” Chamomile and Whiskey show a commitment to their geography. Set in the band's home region in central Virginia, the music matches, a bouncing Appalachian sound that knows where its roots are. The group – the outgrowth of collaboration between guitarist/singer Koda Kerl and fiddler/vocalist Marie Borgman – pushes back further, though, playing with the Irish connection to their area's mountain music. The phrase “sweet Afton” references not only a Virginia locale but also a Robert Burns poem and Ireland's never far. Connecting modern bluegrass with Celtic roots is not uncommon, but as Chamomile & Whiskey have filled out to a quintet including an Irish-raised banjo player, they've made it a natural connection.  

The album's at its best when it keeps itself a fun romp. The best songs here are bonfire singalongs at heart, even when the musicians' skills elevate them. As you might expect from an act that moves happily between related genres, C&W aren't a one-dimensional act. If “Nelson County” requires car windows to be rolled down, “Thalia” asks its listeners to get in their cups. “Stunt Man” closes the album with an autumnal comedown, a walk outside looking in, casting a chilly feeling wherever you are.  

Justin Cober-Lake

 Elbow — Little Fictions (Concord)

If, when they first appeared, Elbow appeared already ready for middle age, that’s arguably as much because of the fact that they’d been a band for ten years already as anything to do with their actual stylistic or lyrical choices. Still, it’s not surprising at all that aging has treated them very well, albeit this time leaving them without original drummer Richard Jupp (not that tracks like “Gentle Storm” are any less percussion focused). Guy Garvey still has a keen eye for the cutting emotional detail and a voice like a warm sweater (vocally and compositionally he’s somewhere between Peter Gabriel and the National’s Matt Berninger, to take one example before his time and one after), and nothing on the compact, quietly accomplished Little Fictions suggests they’ve lost a step, personnel change or not. You pretty much already know whether you’re interested in Elbow’s music, but anyone on the wavelengths of their sometimes quiet, sometimes gnarled songs of comfort and melancholy will be pleased to find that they persist.  

Ian Mathers

 Fraufraulein—Heavy Objects (Marginal Frequency)

MFCS G | fraufraulein - heavy objects by fraufraulein

Who plays the music and who deals with the baby? New-ish parents Billy Gomberg and Anne Guthrie had to deal with that question as they made Heavy Objects, and that circumstance offers one explanation for the tape’s restraint. While a French horn, bass guitar, digital recorder and synthesizer were all hefted during the recording session, it certainly doesn’t sound like anything heavy was played, let alone dropped. Instead distant environmental recordings negotiate for space with other recordings of hushed in-home activity — the filling of a glass or papers being moved around a table. The musical instruments are heard one note at a time, almost reluctantly, as though whoever was playing them was trying hard not to wake the kid. The result is music well suited to quiet headset listening. Pop the tape in your Walkman or the files in your phone and play them almost subliminally while you shop or stroll, and savor the moment when you can’t tell if the radio or car horn you’re hearing comes from the music or the space you’re traversing. But if you’re easily frightened, you might want to audition side two once in the safety of your home first; I don’t want to spoil the surprise, but there is one sound on it that you’d much rather hear coming from a recording than the street.

Bill Meyer

  Matthew Golombisky—Cuentos Volumes 1 & 2 cassette (Eyes & Ears) 

Matthew Golombisky gets around. He’s spent time in New Orleans, Chicago, Oakland, New York, Asheville and currently lives in Buenos Aires. The bassist has scored films, taught music and held down the groove in countless jazz, pop, and singer/songwriter settings. Despite being the director of Eyes & Ears Records, he hasn’t been particularly diligent in documenting his own music until now. This tape features musicians from Oakland CA and Chicago IL. One side is labeled West Coast, the other Third Coast, but the divide isn’t that tidy, since the California combo includes former Chicagoan/current Copenhagen resident Aram Shelton on reeds. There’s little overlap in the material (over the course of twelve tracks, just one tune gets played by both groups) or line-up (reeds/vibes/cello/acoustic bass guitar on one, trumpet/guitar/contrabass/electric bass guitar on the other), but a fairly consistent chamber jazz vibe. The absence of drums ensures that melodies and interlocking structures are clearly expressed, and whoever carries the tune the most (Shelton and vibraphonist Mark Clifford on the West coast tracks, trumpeter James Davis and bassist Jeff Greene on the Chicago ones) holds the foreground. But cock an ear, and you’ll hear plenty of give and take between the musicians.

Bill Meyer 

Harry Pussy—A Real New England Fuck Up LP (Palilalia)  

You had to be there. There’s just no way to comprehend the impact of Harry Pussy without actually experiencing their volume, aggression, and brevity in real time/volume/injury. Well, not that many people got hurt, except maybe their high-end hearing. And whether you could hear the next day or not, you can say you were levitated by the air-waves radiating away from the collision of experience of Bill Orcutt and Mark Feehan’s high-speed, convoluted riffs and drummer Adris Hoyos building-toppling drumming and mic-swallowing screams. Twenty-odd minutes and it was gone, and only the terminally clueless complained about the set length; everyone else knew they’d been mauled by angels and considered themselves blessed.

 While you had to be there to know, that doesn’t mean recordings are worthless, just inadequate to the task at hand. This LP delivers two sets in glorious speaker-trashing fidelity, one classic example from 1994 and another from 1996. The former documents a night their sound when Orcutt handles the vocals. He can’t muster her scream-power, but the way they rattle and blast off the trio’s playing is still pretty exhilarating. Charalambides guitarist Tom Carter’s liner notes alone are worth the purchase price, but this is an LP, so there’s music, thank God.

Bill Meyer  

The Heliosonic Tone-tette — Heliosonic Toneways, 

Vol. 1 (ScienSonic Laboratories)

Launched in loving observance of the half-century’s worth of rotations around the sun since Sun Ra’s pivotal Heliocentric Worlds project for the ESP label, Heliosonic Toneways, Vol. 1 is a joint venture between nonagenarian Arkestral stalwart Marshall Allen and pan-reed professor Scott Robinson. Both men are known for their fervent multi-instrumentalism, though the expansive setting finds Robinson largely abandoning his voluminous reed arsenal in favor of a different armory that includes electric piano, timpani, theremin, soundsheet, dragon drum and space magnets. In addition to his signature alto, Allen also holds court on three of the eleven pieces from behind the very same bass marimba that Ra used in 1965. The ten-piece group enlisted original engineer Richard Alderson to record the session, although Robinson is careful to point out that all of the music avoids rote derivation from its source of inspiration. Ace sidemen like trombonist Frank Lacy and bass clarinetist JD Parran kick the musical caliber up a notch with an organized band sound that compellingly conveys the cosmic without carrying over into kitsch.

Derek Taylor

 Palberta / No One and the Somebodies — Chips for Dinner (Wharf Cat/Ramp Local) 

 Palberta and No One and the Somebodies share a penchant for bizarre punk that matches lighthearted goofiness and intense attacks. Their split LP Chips for Dinner blows by in 20 minutes, but each group manages to cram in a reasonable expression of they are. No One gets the first five tracks, blending freakouts and noise with classic rock sounds and even a reference — I'm guessing — to Western use of world music. Both “Nü Metal” and “Nü Jazz” are rough send-ups of their titular genres, revealing that this record, without being lazy, is largely about the fun of making it.  

Palberta, coming out of the momentum of this year's Bye Bye Berta, does their weird take on post-punk. Nobody sounds too stable in this group (though if their “Stayin' Alive” cover is fresh in your mind, you don't want stable). It's a late-night walk through a slightly surreal city. “Pharmacy” and “Take You Away” (the latter an oddly long song for the group) narrate and seek to induce psychosis. “Nana” carries a groove, but “Call Me,” while probably in Debbie Harry's city, rolls in the grime and offers little release. The playful release shows one band still energized and another discovering joy in their lack of containment.

Justin Cober-Lake

 Shooting Guns — Flavour Country (RidingEasy Records)

Saskatoon’s own interstellar, pulverizing psych/doom unit Shooting Guns have been frying synapses for over seven years now, but it’s hard not to regard their first proper full length (2013’s Brotherhood of the Ram) as a peak, not least due to a nine and a half minute behemoth called “Motherfuckers Never Learn.” They’ve put out plenty of material since, soundtracks and splits and compilations, but Flavour Country is only their second no-other-qualifications record, and it lives up to those high standards. Opening with a couple of quick, thrashy numbers Shooting Guns set the pace immediately before before blowing it out with the bluesy, low-slung “Beltwhip Snakecharmer,” showing an enviable range and pacing. But as good as the first four tracks are, it’s the two lengthier side two explorations that really lock in and get down to business, whether that’s the steady, harmonica-fulled grind of the title track or “Black Leather Jacket”’s punishing, room melting crawl. Nothing here tops “Motherfuckers Never Learn” in the aggression stakes, but there’s plenty that indicates that Shooting Guns are in it for the long haul.  

Ian Mathers

  Willie “The Lion” Smith & Don Ewell — Grand Piano Duets (Sackville/Delmark) 

Echoing the double entendre of its title, Grand Piano Duets fulfills the promise inherent to the pairing of its reputable principals. Willie “The Lion” Smith was a recognized master who along with the late James P. Johnson and Fats Waller constituted a Holy Trinity of stride pianists. Nearly nineteen years Smith’s junior, Don Ewell embodied a later generation of stride purveyors who developed in the elder’s long shadow. The scheme to team them on record came out of a string of Toronto concerts, first with Ewell solo and later with Smith as formidable foil. Material from those meetings found circulation on the Delmark label and prompted this studio date in early 1967. A danger in these sorts of friendly dust-ups is the musicians playing over each other in the service of bombastic brinksmanship. To their credit, Smith and Ewell manage a fair share of playful and vocal fisticuffs without overstepping into obfuscating bombast or derailing insularity. Piano tandems were already old hat when this encounter of aged mentor and industrious pupil was committed to studio tape. Throughout, Smith and Ewell prove themselves a decidedly separate and tastier kettle of ivory ticklers from the Ferrante & Teicher fare that commonly constituted such ventures in the pop realm of the time.

Derek Taylor