#they're way more recent a phenomenon than people realise

[oidheadh-con-culainn]

i wish i was less nitpicky about terminology in books but why is the book i am currently reading trying to convince me this character is an "adjunct professor" in cambridge in the early twentieth century

[tozettastone]

I am genuinely curious what Kakuzu's reaction was when he found out he was going to have a child. Less about him contemplating parenthood and all that comes with it and more maybe realizing that his old and monstrous ass can still actually reproduce. I am sure it came as a shock to both him and Maddie's mom.

I think it did come as a big surprise! Kakuzu is like... Conceiving kids for the first time ever in his 70s? Like, that would be kind of unusual even if he hadn't subjected his body to a forbidden technique that turned him into an organ stealing ragdoll monster!

Maddie, of course, is a freak accident in so many ways. I have not come up with any explanation for this that is more convincing than "well, it's a shonen manga so things can be as unlikely as I like," but I think it could be... like, her reincarnation glitch life could just have caused a cascade of unlikely events, haha. (Like how when you developing one illness and then three other illnesses, people are always saying, "How can all these things be wrong with you!" and you're like, "You fool, they're interdependent!")

I think both of her parents were probably pretty annoyed, but Kakuzu immediately went: thank god that's not my problem. And arguably he's been thinking that ever since! He's probably an average father within the scope of his own generation and context, when he's actually acting on anything to do with Maddie. But that's not very often. I think for the first ten years of her life he basically didn't even think of Maddie except when he got an update from Ami.

I think he thinks of her a lot more now. Not like in a particularly exciting or affectionate way? But stuff like, 'This bounty required impressive skill to collect... I shall write about it to Madeline. That will fill up at least one postcard, and free me from that obligation for another six months,' or else, 'It's fortunate Hidan has someone else with whom to distract himself for the next two days, and he seems invested in that person,' or, 'I can't do this job myself at this time, but it's within Madeline's capabilities and she is almost certainly not doing anything important right now.' You know. Baby steps!

But yeah, I think that's a very recent phenomenon and Kakuzu did not think overly much about Ami's pregnancy or his kid, at least not until he checked on her that one time and realised she was being stalked by ninja and was also a weird ragdoll monster like her dad.

[tyrannuspitch]

as a trans gay guy, my relationship to the concept of the butch/transmasc overlap is so so weird. because on one level it's by and large a real social phenomenon that underlies a lot of common experiences and draws communities together and so on. but then on another level. like. some of us (transmascs) just Are Not Butch. i recently read fun home, and i was really struck by bechdel's account of butchness and how it... didn't actually resonate with me at all. like, i'm very familiar with feeling uncomfortable with conventional femininity, and with wanting to look male - but i keep re-realising that the experience of specifically aspiring to masculinity is just alien to me. in particular, bechdel describes feeling like she might have been compensating for her dad's femininity, and like... i've never felt anything like that. i've tried to put distance between myself and women's femininity, but i've only ever looked at fem men and felt jealous of them.

but then i look at the cis gay male community for examples of male femininity, and of course, it has its own gnc/trans overlap. and i don't aspire to trans womanhood any more than i aspire to cis womanhood.

so for people on those two cusps, gender and orientation might be very fluid and open-ended, but my personal desired gender expression is actually quite narrow and a very delicate balance - narrower and more specific even than a lot of other fem gay trans guys i've encountered.

what's more, i've heard from a lot of people on the transmasc/butch cusp in particular that, essentially, they know they're queer because they're attracted to women, and the rest is hazier, but maybe also less important. which is an interesting perspective, but again - completely alien to me. gender comes first for me, without a doubt - and even that can be subdivided. orientation comes after gender, but a positive sense of maleness also comes after a completely fundamental sense of non-femaleness. gender and sexuality are entangled for both of us - but once again, in opposite ways.

i conceive of myself as a binary man, but even so, it's like... almost a nonbinary experience, in a way. like, in very old-fashioned views of queerness, there are two basic types of queer - the butch-lesbian-transhet-man group and the fem-gay-transhet-woman group. there are male inverts and female inverts, FtMs and MtFs, or in polari, omee-palones and palone-omees (men-women and women-men). and someone like me just... doesn't fit into that framework. if an invert is a man with a woman's soul or a woman with a man's soul, what is a woman with the soul of a man with the soul of a woman? you need more layers. you need to recognise that gender and orientation are, or at least can be, separable experiences to be able to conceive of me at all. and ironically that often means you have to frame orientation almost like a gender, again - i believe lou sullivan referred to himself as female-to-gay-male, and i can see why.

but at the same time - we've allegedly come so far, and people can now nominally conceive of identities like mine - but it's still a huge struggle to even begin to express it. how do you reconcile rejection of cisfemininity and womanhood with a genuine desire to be subtly feminine/effeminate? i haven't found a way yet. i don't know if it will be possible until i can access medical transition (and even then, it might take years.) so in the meantime, i look butch, and i just have to live with the fact that the identity i'm broadcasting is the direct opposite of who i really want to be.

idk man. i'm a trans man, but maybe i'm transandrogynous. but it has to be the right androgyny, an androgyny i feel is "male", so maybe i'm not! i'm a faggot trapped in a dyke's body. i'm transitioning from one queer gender expression to another, and while i do feel a degree of solidarity and commonality with actual butches, i also feel like butchness is, for me, nearly as suffocating and dissonant as cisfemininity.

and reading this back now, i've realised i'm doing the same thing over again - i'm conflating my own gayness with my own desire for androgyny(?)/effeminacy(?), and somewhere out there, a fem transhet guy or a butch transhet girl is groaning with exactly the same kind of alienation i often feel.

god. gender is so complicated and so important and so stupid at the same time. why does it have to be so hard!!! we all just want to exist.

[esta-elavaris]

hello!! i’m gonna speak plainly to you as a little friend in my phone bc a couple things happened this week and i immediately wanted to tell you so i guess that makes us friends now ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

first off! this link was shared with me and i quite literally needed to forward it to you bc i just thought it was so beautiful and made the scenes so much more personable somehow. seeing it from that vantage made it all feel that more real i suppose. but gotta be honest not sure i needed to “feel like i was there” for that last clip they used😭 (btw the link in question: https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZT8jGnmgy/ )

secondly, after voraciously reading (and partially rereading) HWFG, i decided a rewatch of lotr was in order. so i started watching it. and i was with my mother at the time that i watched the ending of the fellowship of the ring and i began explaining all the facets of the story to her and ultimately veered into boromir as a character and we ended up having such a lengthy conversation about him bc i was trying so hard to stress his goodness!! that all he wants is the power to protect his city and his people!! and that the ring responds to this passion and tries to corrupt it and makes him seem weak to its power but it’s not weakness it’s love for something so much bigger than him and i just adore him ma’am. so after explaining this and unfortunately not turning off the film right before the orc attack . . . i then got to introduce my mother to the heartbreaking moment of boromir’s valiant death. bc obviously she had fallen for him at this point as well. now with every arrow in him i think she screamed out louder and louder but it really was a canon event in the lives of the audience of lotr so i could not interfere. anyways i think that’s it so farewell for now!! (and thanks for reigniting a passion for lotr!!)

HELLO FRIEND! Send your mum a link to the fic I will heal her 👀 I'm kidding, don't do that -- sorry, couldn't resist.

God, it's so weird how changing the orientation of the scenes makes it feel more "real", and how much of a recent phenomenon that must be - I've never seen anything like that before, or even really considered it. Thanks for the link (but also how dare you, because I also did not need to see that last clip, jeezo).

Also "and partially rereading HWFG" ma'am there are fourteen chapters I only started it two minutes ago and you are here rereading parts, I'm going to die you can't do this to my heart 😭💜

Honestly it's funny though because out of all of them, I've absolutely seen FOTR a hundred times more than the others (and I've seen the others a hell of a lot, too, so it says a lot) with the exception of the final half hour. I like to let myself that Boromir decided "nah it's not for me thanks" and just went back to chill in Rivendell or Lothlorien 'til it was all done. Is it in his character? No. Does it hurt less? Absolutely.

I really don't understand how people can hate him as a character. I know a few people who go on to me about how much they hate him every time I mention him, and I just really can't wrap my head around it. There are some characters that I adore but I can see why they're a controversial choice, but he's absolutely not one of them. A lot of the time they do it almost as a way to show their love of Faramir, without realising that like? A) Faramir would not want that, and B) Boromir was GOOD to Faramir and tried to intercede with Denethor on his behalf.

I won't write you a dissertation on this but maaaaaan. I'm glad I'm dragging you back into Boromir hell with me. It's like a different flavour of the same ice cream as Norrington hell. Bon appetit ✨

[my-reality-my-rules]

I don't have anyone to talk to about shifting so I hope I can talk a bit about it here :) It's just I have been trying to shift for over a year and that's fine because I know I will shift soon and I will not give up. I even got a tarot reading telling me I will shift soon but I need to overthink everything less. But you know how hard that is sometimes? Tbh shifting is such a lonely journey because there is nobody that can really help you out (only give some advice but they may work or may not because every person needs different things to help them shift) and in the end it's myself that I truely need to help me. But that's so hard to do because I am someone who needs validation, to know I am doing it right or doing good enough. And since no one can do that for me, I struggle with that a lot. But that's just my problem I have to deal with and overcome. And I will not give up, I will still shift even with these worries and I know I can do it. Sorry for rambling but I just needed to get that off my chest

[thanks for this ask!]

july. this message was sent on the third, and the second one was sent on the tenth. i even remember seeing this in my inbox; i deadass thought i already answered this 😭christ on a crucifix i am so fucking sorry-

also. i apologise for the upcoming rant

- - -

okay. you do have a really good point though. the thing about shifting is that, while it has been an actual practice for many years now, it's only recently that the phenomena is truly being given focus. a lot of us fall victim to that—I'm not saying everyone has, but you have to admit most of the modern shifting community came from either tiktok or amino.

and because of its surgence in recent years, it's viewed as something new, instead of something that's already been cultivated hundreds of years past. this factors in to the isolation of it as a whole, in my opinion, as both a concept and a community.

and i agree with you on the topic of shifting being a lonely journey. the thing is; no one really knows know where they'd belong if they never found out about shifting—do you really think you'd be the same person you are now, had you never heard of the practice?—but at the same time, those same people are also scared to realise that they are worth all of the effort that they're doing, and that, in itself, is one of the reasons that hold them back.

another problem is that shifting had been largely popularised during the first stages of quarantine, which also reinforces the idea of it being a form of escapism. because your current life is going to shit (whether or not by design), you actively look for a way to get away from it. the mindsets of those who did discover reality shifting during quarantine are, to be frank, stuck in what i call the 'online mode'. you saw it online, you decided to try it for yourself; and then you realise that, while you have the whole community to communicate with online, it doesn't necessarily mean that you'd be able to talk about shifting while offline (with family, friends, and et cetera).

and when you do try to talk about it with others in real life, you get ostracised for it. because for them, it was an online phenomenon.

call this arrogant, but; whenever my philosophy professor asks my class if things like the perfect good and the perfect happiness (that which satisfies human nature entirely, both materially and intangibly) exist in an actual reality, i want to scream—because yes, those realities exist, i just can't prove it to you, not really, not in the way it matters. if i could say how, i would. if i could tell someone in real life that I've met all these amazing people in other realities and my life is really looking good, i would. if i could scream about reality shifting on my roof at the top of my fucking lungs, i would.

but i can't, and the consequences of admitting it in the current reality are far more troublesome than if you had just admitted it online.

still, though, being able to overcome that challenge should be one of the most satisfying aspects of it. when you're shifting, whether to a DR or for simple manifestations, you have to realise that all of what you have now, you were always meant to find. you already had these potentials in you—it's not that you have to go looking for it, just that you were looking in the wrong places to begin with. i completely agree with what you'd said about, how, in the end, it's only you who could truly understand and help yourself.

the only person whose validation you truly need is you. and to quote daenerys targaryen; Do you know what kept me standing through all those years in exile? Faith. Not in any gods. Not in myths and legends. In myself.

change always starts with the person. life isn't waiting for you to catch up, so why would you wait for it in return? you already exist with so much to give yourself, and the only thing that's stopping you from achieving it is the mind that you have. that's not to discount others' experiences, obviously, but that's the simplest truth of it.

nevertheless, i am glad that you were able to get a glimpse of your DR, anon. i know it's been four/five months since you sent this in, but you have my sentiments all the same. I'd actually love to hear from you again, if you're willing, haha.

[clinically-not-straight]

One of my friends recently made a huge thing about the word "gypsy" and how we're not allowed to say it any more because it's a slur. Before you ask, she's chronically online she gets her political stance from tiktok because it offered her, as a neurodivergent, an algorithmically approved safe space; she's the sort of person that would fall for a mouse trap.

So, one of my friends was talking, "blah blah gypsy blah" and she goes "you know you can't say that right? It's a slur." Now she's brought this up before, and I did less than 5 minutes of research afterwards which called her out on her bull shit.

So I say "no, it's not over here, it's a really common word that is used very generally to mean traveller" and I went on to explain the stereotype of the horse and caravan thing that we have.

She says "yeah, but they're not egyptian." Because that's what gypsy meant. It was slang for egyptian because that's what we thought the roma were when they were in fact Indian. Now things are a bit different, over here it is used as a commonplace term for traveller.

So this went back and forth, I say "we have people here that call them selves gypsy" and "isn't it really culturally insensitive to call them Romani when they aren't?" And she said "but it's a slur" over and over and over.

But I suddenly remembered that I have an ace up my sleeve, at least two. A couple of my friends are egyptian, in terms of heritage at the very least. One of them is super against PC culture, doesn't hate gay people but will still gladly say the word "faggot" not that it matters much because it's not aimed at gay people or meant to harm; the other is less anti-PC but has an incredibly interesting opinion about it. As someone with egyptian family, he says "yeah, its weird to me that people have a problem with being called egyptian" which is probably one of the most interesting takes I've heard about it ngl. He's really good to talk about historical, semi-political and ethics shit with because even if you disagree with him you still get a good talk out of it.

So tl;dr - it's not a slur to use the word gypsy however it is wrong to use it when talking about genuine romani people.

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

Oh, I'm sorry, you thought this was done? No, there's more to this. That was only the first chapter.

Now, I think back to where my friend learnt that "gypsy" was a slur. I remember that she uses tiktok. A lot. An alarming amount, loudly. The thing about gypsy being a slur was a big thing on tiktok, people were constantly arguing back and forth about it as if their view was the one view, as you do on tiktok.

Now, the reason that all took off was because there was an audio being used at the time called Gypsy Bard. If you don't know, Gypsy Bard is a song from My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, I learned that the hard way. So that basically means that slur discourse was started by this fucker.

I've realised that a lot of the people arguing that it is a slur were American and a lot of the ones against were British and generally from anywhere that wasn't America. This made me get to thinking. I figured, gypsy is a word that we've been using here to generally mean traveller for years upon years now. We even have slurs based round it like 'pikey' and 'gyppo' meaning that people over here agreed that gypsy was just a word and then decided they needed something to imply that it was bad, language evolves.

In a logical sense, this discourse, if it can really be called that, is a prime example of americanisation, a phenomenon where people will say something involving everyone when it really only applies to America. And even then, americanisation, in this sense, is exaggeration; a lot of people were just saying that gypsy is a slur because they heard someone else say it so they agreed because nobody wants to be a bigot; this would explain why there were british kids saying it too.

For being a very anti-nazi standpoint, leftists, as they seem to have called themselves in this instance, are really taking to the nazi-like practice of "erase all cultures/ideologies that aren't ours."

Perhaps that is an overstatement, but the mirroring is there and that is the most worrying part.

tl;dr - americanisation/neglect for differences in language is bad.

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THAT'S RIGHT! THREE FUCKING CHAPTERS!

Ok, this one is shorter.

So let's go back to when I said "some people call themselves gypsy" or something to that degree because that's important.

Some people call themselves that, and that's a fine thing to do. Like I said, our language here evolved to that word meaning traveller. It is much like another evolution of language, queer. That's right, queer meaning strange and unusual only for it to change at some point to meaning "some form of LGBT. Now, I am against being called a queer myself but I will not stop people calling themselves that, sorta like how me and my friends call eachother faggots because it's funny and okay to do within the context we use.

Now, you might be thinking "but [name], gyspy is used in a bad context by some people" and you're right, it is. But so is gay. And lanky. And hairy. And virgin. Note how only gyspy is the only word there that people register as a slur.

tl;dr (for the last time) - context is important. If nobody is being harmed then maybe it's not quite as bad as people are making it out to be.