#they where gay change my mind

[h0ney-dames]

NATM DAY!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[rystiel]

idk what we’re all calling the concept of fiddlestan working together but i’m calling my version the portal partners AU 🙏🏼

[apatheticlexicographer]

i think i finally understand the exact reasoning behind how both will and mike's sexualities are presented, and how those presentations flatter each other.

will is barely queercoded from a subtextual perspective because there's no need to queercode him. the writers verbally establish in season one episode one that people percieve this kid as gay, so you're immediately guided to see him through the same lens, at least subconsciously. people continue to refer to him as gay and he continues to "act" gay, and most of the audience is able to see this for what it is very easily without the need for heavy symbolism. will being gay is simply treated as a fact from the start by both the characters around him and the writers themselves, for better or for worse.

MIKE, on the other hand, is so heavily queercoded it's barely even funny. he's the one with the queer imagery, the blocking, the set design, the lighting. he's never explicitly referred to as queer, it isn't so much as suggested verbally, but the sheer amount of incredibly blatant subtextual material that surrounds him is insane. none of the characters within the show have the slightest clue that mike is gay. there's a good chance that mike himself doesn't know, or has only begun to realize very recently. even the writers do their damn best to make it appear like they themselves don't know. still, the fact remains that he is, it just isn't expressed in a way that the homophobic masses both within and outside the show are capable of picking up on. when he comes out it will be a shock to the characters and the majority heterosexual audience, but not to the queer people who pick up instinctually on the signalling. basically, you only know mike is gay if you have a genuinely functioning gaydar.

in this way they're so strongly representative of two very different gay experiences, both of which are important and both of which are treated respectfully by the writers, despite the setting.

will is the kid who never really gets the luxury of choosing whether to come out to people, because everybody has had him pegged from the start. even his own family: jonathan tells will he accepts him before will can even hint toward the topic himself. however as much as we're told that he "seems" gay to other people, all we are shown subtextually is a totally normal child who happens to have feelings for another boy. this is important because it subverts the trope of making "being gay" the "obviously gay" character's sole or core trait.

mike is the kid who people would never in a million years guess was queer. it's not just that he gets the luxury of choosing when to come out of the closet; he's so deep in it that he's drowning in winter coats. he's the "twist queer character," except he's not. his subtextual queercoding has been there beneath the surface for just as long as will has been textually referred to as queer on a surface level. this makes it clear that him being gay isn't some kind of last minute decision and the subtlety of his presentation wasn't an accident. if you don't knkw mike is gay now before it's revealed then you aren't supposed to.

they're foils like that. they're the archetypal queers, and i think it's kind of beautiful.

(and if anybody tries to argue that one expression of Queer Experience is more important than another then i'm coming for their kneecaps. having both experiences not only represented but thoroughly explored is so rare, although there are people all over the world who resonate with each.)

[carnivalcarriondiscarded]

this is how it feels to chew 5 gum being a barnaby/howdy enjoyer. im Unwell

[enbysiriusblack]

gay and wondrous life of caleb gallo as marauders:

caleb gallo- sirius

karen- lily

billy- james

benicio- remus

freckle- peter

lenjamin- marlene

tatiana- pandora

[disappearinginq]

I hate that people on a whole don't understand a narrative. Like...your English/literature teacher should've flunked people over this.

Probably the people who understand it best are the ones marginalized in life, because hey, we see ourselves in those characters. Other people have the luxury of just going "eh" and moving on.

But when hugely popular shows and movies and even books keep killing off their marginalized and suffering characters as the "only way this could've ended" I want to reach through a screen and choke them out because stop telling me the world is better without me in it., Or I will take you with me, and we'll see who's mourned.

It's not even just Bury Your Gays. In Outer Banks, they kill of the kid who is told from season 1 that you'll never make anything of yourself. You will always be poor, homeless, unloved, and alone. And then spend three and a half seasons showing you that this character absolutely will beat his own narrative - he finds friends that are his family, he finds a life he loves with the people he loves and they love him back, and then - they kill him. BUT THE RICH BITCH FUCKING PSYCHOPATH GETS A REDEMPTION ARC? I don't care how good the actors are, the narrative has now wildly swung from 'you can make it if you don't give up' to 'don't even bother - life will find a way to beat you down to where you belong' and airing two days after the catastrophic American elections - where the billionaires and greed and hate win?

The Umbrella Academy had three seasons of fun, quirky, broken people who tried so hard to fix their mistakes, to fix what they broke, and canonically, are representing marginalized groups that never get the happy endings. But dammit, this family tried. They didn't always get along, they were dysfunctional, but they still came together in the end, and loved one another despite the bad they have done. And then - the narrative again spins a wild one eighty and the story ends with "the world is better without you in it - die". Which is a very real narrative a lot of us live with.

The MCU - kills off Iron Man/Tony Stark, one of the very first popular characters who suffers from extreme CPTSD along with an alphabet of mental disorders; Loki, who is the adopted child and queer across the board, loses absolutely everyone and everything; Steve, who while he isn't dead, his character most certainly is because he goes from the one who does sacrifice everything to making a selfish, personal decision that winds up fucking over everyone; Bucky, who again isn't dead but he is openly blamed for the things he did while he was a prisoner and a mind-controlled assassin for the bad guys against his will by his mental health professional. And the narrative is "no, you should sacrifice yourself so the rest of us who treated you like shit can live a better life."

The stupidity of wanting to punish your audience who is punished enough in the real world often enough we don't need it or want it in fiction is just...mind boggling. And when those are the real words used by writers to justify their shit decisions?

I hope your death serves a narrative purpose, since you seem to think that is the noblist way to go.

[everybodyknows-everybodydies]

The world is white.

The world is always some degree of white in Winterhold, some degree of pale monochrome, but this silence is… wrong. It takes Mirabelle a moment to realize the un-silence is the ringing in her ears muffling everything else.

An unfocused dark shadow interrupts the sea of white. Mirabelle blinks, once, twice; slowly, slowly, her vision clears a little; a hazy Faralda is leaning over her, wild curls haloed around her tight face. Saying something. Something important, surely; Faralda has never wasted a word.

“What? What is it?” Mirabelle tries to say, but can’t work her jaw, can’t hear either of them over the loud echo of nothing in her ears and some awful taste in her mouth and a heat—somehow both familiar and unfamiliar—that has caught her right hand. She tries to spit out whatever is in her mouth and is illogically self-conscious that she nearly chokes on it instead.

She can’t move. Why can’t she move? The warm tell-tale glow of restoration magic at her chest, where it feels like a mammoth has sat down. Ah—she recognizes, or remembers, or it only starts now that everything hurts. Pain clenches through every muscle. There, at least: sound beginning to seep faintly, barely, back in. “…going to need at least another three hours of this,” Colette is saying, her reedy voice on edge as ever, but with a sincere and tearful panic Mirabelle is unused to hearing from her. Take deep breaths, she wants to remind her, but her tongue is heavy in her mouth and tastes of metal. She can’t take a deep breath. “It’s too much. It’s too much. I haven’t got enough magicka to last that long.”

“Use mine. Take mine.” Faralda sounds utterly grim. That isn’t what she’s supposed to sound like, Mirabelle thinks vaguely as the world fades out again. Where has her eternal wry humor gone?

 ---

This is already much longer than she should have been able to go. The light keeps sputtering out in her hands, her magicka taut and ragged and wispy as a fraying thread on the verge of snapping. “I can’t,” Colette chokes. “I need both hands here. I can’t do it. I can’t do it.”

Poor Savos was already dead before any of them could reach him. It will be much worse, she imagines, a little distant from herself, to have Mirabelle die like this, under her own ineffective shivering fingertips.

There’s too much to knit together where she can’t see, too much displaced, misaligned; she’d straightened out the spine first to try to help get everything else closer to where it belongs, but Mirabelle had only opened her eyes to spit out a horribly solid chunk of something bloody with an awful gurgling sound and gasp, frighteningly shallow. Lungs. Ribs. The heart at least seems fine for now, and thank Mara for small miracles, but the abdominal cavity, which is disorganized on a good day—she thinks with a sudden fierce passion that she has always hated the abdominal cavity—

Faralda’s mouth is a grim line across from her. “You have to,” she says, never looking up. “You have to. This isn’t—it’s not—”

A shadow. A hand on her shoulder. She prepares to snap that she has told everyone to stay well away to let them make their futile attempt in isolation, terrified at the thought of the whole College audience to her impending certain failure, but it dies in her throat. Uncharacteristically pale and unsmiling, Kharish kneels beside her. “The thing in Labyrinthian,” she says, quieter than Colette has ever heard her, “knew how to siphon. I hadn’t…” She shifts her jaw. “I know what it feels like, now. I can try to—to replicate it, in reverse. To help. So you can cast uninterrupted.”

“You won’t last long enough either,” Faralda says, voice hard and glinting. She thrusts out a hand, palm upwards, long fingers rigidly straight. “I said use mine and I meant it. You can’t let her—” She snaps her teeth together suddenly and doesn’t finish the thought, as if biting off the word could prevent its happening, as if it isn’t already hanging in the air ready to outlast all their scrabbling efforts. “You will not,” she says at last, with a terrible finality, and says no more.

“I’m sorry I’m not very good,” Kharish admits, an embarrassed little tremor to her voice, “at dual casting.” She takes Faralda’s outstretched hand.

The rush of foreign magicka blazes so hot and so sudden that for half a second Colette is convinced there will be a print on her shoulder forever, and the end of a curl that has fallen into her eyes briefly catches fire—but it’s there.

Lungs first. She pulls the ribs straight, smooths out the tissue, moving with the airflow. Follow a breath in and out: less ragged, less wet. Good. Again. Again.

Again.

---

It is much later than she would have expected when it shifts and the wild heat burns out at last, replaced by something else, soft in the way of freshly-sanded wood. Faralda huffs out a breath, shivering—Colette has never seen Faralda shiver before—and says, hoarse, “I’ve got it. I can keep on.” She has not let go of Mirabelle’s hand. They will be here all night, and Faralda will not let go of her hand. The way her mouth is set, she looks as though she might never let go again.

“Take a moment to recover,” Colette says through gritted teeth, concentrating on the way the liver fits into place. “She and I can manage just fine until then.”

“How—how much longer do you think…” Kharish wets her lips. Her grip on Colette’s shoulder tightens for a moment.

She’s afraid to look, Colette thinks. “She’s breathing fine now,” she tells her, which does not really answer the question but is all she can do for now. And that is good. She sets after the tangle of the abdominal cavity, which she has decided lamentingly is her archnemesis. It does not seem nearly so insurmountable as it had when the sun was still up, though, and holding fast to the thought that whatever else she manages, Mirabelle has time now, she presses on.

Kharish’s magicka runs dry much sooner than Faralda’s had. Colette has barely begun knitting the intestines back into shape when the wood-soft feeling splinters away, leaving only her own, unaugmented. Immediately Faralda is there again, scorching. “Sorry,” Kharish croaks out, alarmed, “I didn’t ask if you were ready—”

“Yes. Yes.” Faralda shakes her head once, hard, as if waking up. “Please.”

After a moment spent studying her haggard face, Colette says, “You are both keeping a reserve so I don’t have two more people to worry after, aren’t you? Aren’t you?”

“Ye-es,” winces Kharish, which is so painfully and clearly a lie that Colette would laugh if she didn’t also have much more concerning things at hand.

“Don’t worry about me,” says Faralda; “I will be as irresponsible about it as I need to be.”

This is not reassuring in the slightest, but it does get them through the abdomen.

---

The sky has begun to grey into dawn when Colette shakes Kharish’s hand off her shoulder and says, “Give me her hand, that’s all now.”

Faralda’s expression contorts about thirteen different ways in the span of half a second before she lets go. “That’s all,” she says, almost disbelieving.

Kharish opens her eyes. “We did it?”

“Well—it will be a few weeks before we should expect to see her in the halls, certainly, but,” she swallows and sits back on her heels, rubbing her palms on her thighs where they’ve gone numb from the constant channeling, “yes.”

Faralda laughs, far higher than usual, and then says suddenly, “Oh. I’ve got to sit down.”

“You are sitting down,” Colette says, exasperated. “I told you to hold back a reserve—”

“I’m not sitting down. I’ll go to tell—to tell everyone.” A stupid giddy smile on her face, Kharish pauses halfway to her feet, swaying dangerously, like a drunkard. “Oh,” she says. “Hang on. I’ve got a really good one to celebrate. Do you know the difference between a joke and a rhetorical question?”

“This is not the time for your nonsense,” Colette begins to bark, and then with a whuff Kharish pitches backwards into the snow. Mouth agape, Colette stares for a moment, then whips her head around to Faralda, who has only prevented her own collapse by propping herself up against the stone wall of the bridge first. “Really!” She stands, knees wobbling most unfortunately, and sends up the flimsiest magelight that possibly ever was cast. It does the job, at least—a shout, and a handful of dark shapes come running from town. “I have to do everything myself!”

---

Mirabelle opens her eyes to the soft glow of candlelight. Colette freezes in the doorway. “Oh, your timing is awful.” She hurries to amend, “That is—I am very glad to see you awake. But I’ve just gotten her to leave—are you really awake this time? Say something, and I’ll tell her you said hello or—whatever it is you like!” And then she’s sniffling violently, which is alarming, and says with startling intensity, “None of you are ever scaring me like this again! Promise me, Mirabelle!”

Mirabelle, bewildered, tries to sit up and finds she has been buried under what appears to be every blanket in the building. She opens her mouth—there was a foul taste, or something, she recalls, but it isn’t there now. “I think,” she manages around the dryness of her tongue, “I need some water, and then you can explain what exactly… happened.” She licks at her lips, thoughtfully flexing the fingers of her right hand. Something warm there, too, she remembers, and something tingles at the back of her neck. “And if it’s alright,” she pushes at the mountain of blankets, “I think I would rather a fire.”

[fisheito]

Lol angst ? about nukani , my super unserious gayporngacha game? Can't be that bad

(10k words later into a fic) Ooohh.ohhh it was a mistake. I should not have read this hahahahahahahgyrk *choking sounds*

[basoogil]

what he thinkin of hrrrmmm

yeah so i wanted to mess around with putting random memes and doodles in the background and i got slightly carried away. it was fun tho :)

[draw-you-coward]

POV u discover "straight tok" or overhear your neighbours screaming at each other while ur in a normal nontoxic relationship

[the-real-awidferd]

My brief thoughts on "Rogue"

[big-bad-betty-of-the-apocalypse]

correct take: loki definitely timeslipped back and spent the entire time making out with mobius

[valiant-portabella-pirkko]

hot new* Dragonstorm bug let's go

ended the intro cutscene to find myself randomly teleported into Primordus's lava, taking no damage. so I ran away and immediately burst into flames and just... started taking continuous damage, the fire overlay stuck on my screen. Just Permanently On Fire.

and then the grand twist: attacking Jormag finally put me out so I guess the dragons really do neutralize each other! wild

* DISCLAIMER: I have no idea if this bug is actually new, this is just the first time I've ever experienced it so it's new to ME specifically

[windor-truffle]

asbel please.

[carmenpeach]

i think i need to transition