#thinking about that lesbian again

[facelessoldgargoyle]

Amy Dallon as the Minotaur

The Metatextual Monster: how reading Amy Dallon on multiple levels is necessary to understanding her.

I'm gonna be real, this started out as a daydream about drawing Taylor as Icarus, but I care way more about the Minotaur, and Taylor isn't the Minotaur. Possibly some art about this to follow, but I type faster than I draw. ~700 words.

How many of you have read House of Leaves? Wikipedia. The most important thing to know is that House of Leaves is three stories, which occur nested within each other. The story at the heart is a documentary about a house in which a closet door suddenly appears, which eventually grows into a hallway and then a labyrinth. The next layer is a blind professor's commentary on this documentary, which was discovered scattered around his apartment after his death. The top layer is the chronicle of a tattoo artist trying to reconstruct the commentary. All this to say: it is a book about meta-commentary, which makes describing its themes difficult.

In House of Leaves, the professor has tried to remove all references to the Minotaur by burning the pages of his notes about him. The tattoo artist writes down everything that failed to burn, and indicates that it was burned using red, struck through text. The Minotaur is a character which does not exist, but he haunts the book.

On the top level, he represents the constant editing, rewriting, and destruction of the book itself. Down a level, he is a monster who is stalking the characters in their minds. A claw mark is found next to the professors dead body. Down a level, he's the guilt and shame growing within each author which they project into the house. The labyrinth in the house is a black hole, it signifies nothing, but the human mind impresses its own ideas and image into it.

I'm now realizing that I've written three paragraphs without mentioning Amy once. Shit. Ok. The good stuff.

On the level closest to the text, Amy the character is the malformed, rejected child. When her malformation makes itself known, she is permanently rejected and confined in an inescapable prison. Like the Minotaur in House of Leaves, her ghost haunts the people who fear her and obsess over her. They can't stop thinking about her (Victoria) despite how that obsession only hurts them. When Amy's status as monster can be instrumentalized, it is, like how the Minotaur of myth was used as a method of execution for the youth of Athens. She's set free and used once again.

On another level, Amy Dallon haunts Worm. Her arc is fully fleshed out, and it is tragedy. Like the Minotaur, on one level she must been seen as symbolic. She represents the self-destruction of the nuclear family. In one version of the myth, the Minotaur is the bastard son of Minos. The king did not sacrifice a bull sent to him by Poseidon, and so the queen was cursed to fall in love with the bull. Here, the Minotaur represents the ultimate perversion of the natural order. The king did not honor the god, and so the wife did not honor her husband, and so the child did not honor his mother. Amy represent the same overturning of the natural order. Carol hated the daughter, and so the daughter destroyed her sister. These stories suggest that the so-called natural order actually has something deeply wrong with it!

On the top level, Amy is a scapegoat for the audience. Like the Minotaur in House of Leaves, the reader projects their own hatred on her; they treat her with the same lesbophobia as the text does, if you read her a layer below the symbolic critique of the family, if you read her as a character. People consistently write about her as having an incest kink, or other deviant, highly stigmatized fetish. People post about her being dirty, or ill-intentioned. This reading accepts her as ontologically evil, rather than a product of an oppressive structure. The exact form of the Minotaur (deviant, dirty, ill-intentioned) varies from person to person. He acts as a Rorschach, illuminating what the observer finds offensive.

Like the Minotaur in House of Leaves, Amy must be read on multiple levels. She is a character, she is a metaphor, she is a mirror. Isolate any of these levels from the other, and they fail to make sense. Separating the symbolic from the personal is often what leads people to falling into the trap of projecting lesbophobic narratives onto her!

The Minotaur is out to get you, and Amy is too.

[facelessoldgargoyle]

It’s all about the contamination!!!!

thinking about the Carol interlude again. 3 things.

1) One of Amy’s desperate fixes being to erase Victoria’s memory, something she genuinely regards as a healing kindness (Amy noooo why did they skip the psych rotation when they put you through your child labor residency nooooo), which is indicative of a very “Dallon” ideology; to Heal is to restore a Natural and Correct state is to Remove Contamination (the contamination being any speck on a smooth white canvas, the contamination being her); also some major projection happening where she’d kill to magic away her own Gross Evil Vicky Feelings so of course Victoria will appreciate having that stain gone! It’ll be like it never happened! She’s cleaning up after herself, doing what she’s supposed to do! Everything will be just fine after this. For sure. No it’s not a trauma cope fuck off. For sure for sure.

2) Always drives me bonkers fucking insane that her original plan was to spend the rest of her life healing people as payment, that she says it plain and loud in front of Carol and Sarah and god and everyone and the implications still fall on deaf ears. The worst punishment she can think of for herself is doing exactly what she’s been doing for years of her life. Max-security prison is her compromise. What the Fuck. We all know it’s fucked up but what the fuck.

3) The way she slips up and calls Carol “mom” when she’s trying to plead with her. Let’s all kill ourselves

[red-moon-at-night]

okay the whole vase is great but something about Helen sitting on Aphrodite's lap as she wraps one arm around her shoulder and brushes her leg with her hand, staring into her eyes like that... as she is persuading Helen to go with Paris (while Peitho aka persuasion stands behind them) is so incredibly iconic.

and gay. toxic yuri, if you will.

[carlyraejepsans]

yuri warriors you have my axe

[inkskinned]

yesterday while feverish i wrote about how boats can moor next to each other like pigeons, cooing with the gentle rap of water against their hull. you once said that that the way i see things - birds in the water, feathers in marina paint - was "childish and naive." you said i'd been misdiagnosed - "it can't all be adhd. you might be just kind of stupid and lazy."

i still do certain things like how you taught me - turn the pillow case inside out before putting it on. drive defensively. hate myself entirely.

the prompt for this poem is "mahler's fifth." i wish it wasn't, but mahler's fifth was our song. it ended up in my book. every person that knows your name has promised me they'll give you one swift rabbit punch, right to the face. dean read the book and showed up on my front porch, drenched in sweat from running the 8 miles at 4 in the morning. he was shaking. pacifist and gentle - he works with children - i'd never seen him furious. a punch isn't going to do it, he said, and then said i'm sorry. i had to come to see if you were okay.

mahler's fifth was mine first, like my girlhood. i like the way each movement piles onto the next movement, each instrument bleeding into the next. i like the horn version the best. before i met you, i danced to it on grass still-wet from sprinklers.

later you would tell me that the way you heard it was somehow better. you understood something in it that i couldn't quite wrap my fingers into. once, on our anniversary, you asked the classical music radio station to play it for us. we missed hearing it because we were fighting. one of the things people get wrong about abuse is that sometimes victims are, like, brutally aware of the stupidity of our situation. what do you mean that you thought i wasn't good enough for you? you? you're just... nothing.

sometimes people can pull the poetry out of your life. i watched my words become clothesline, and then thin out into kite twine. i watched you chew through every good syllable of me. so many good songs and places and moments were ruined. i am glad you didn't like most of my music - less to tie back to you.

but still mahler's fifth. the music swells, and i am 21 and throwing up in a bathroom on my birthday. a woman i will later refer to as lesbian jesus runs a cool hand down my back, her perfect pantsuit starch-pressed. she told me to leave you. she said - and this is true, and not an invention of rhyme or fantasy - i'm you from the future.

i am 22, and i got home from an award ceremony, and i remember you telling me - you act so proud of yourself when you're actually so fucking embarrassing. i took you to disney world. you took my virginity. i gave up visiting spain for a week with my family - i instead choose you, to spend the time just-cuddling. you called it "our fuck week." the music swells. it probably should have been a red flag that for about 3 years - i just gave up on crying. my grandfather died and you said nothing. my uncle died and you ghosted me for 3 weeks. you said i need to protect myself from your ongoing tragedy.

every so often i come back to the memory of one of our last afternoons in person. i had just told you that i wasn't going to law school, despite the free ride - i was going to join a creative writing program. master's in fine arts. i was going to finally do it - i was going to follow my dreams. this blog was already internet-famous. however reluctantly, i would occasionally refer to myself as a poet. i got into umass amherst's writing program for fiction authors. it is one of the the top 5 programs in the country.

wait are you seriously considering actually attending that? dumbfounded, you turned completely towards me in your seat. for the 3rd time in our relationship, you almost crashed the car. you actually want to be a writer?

the first time i went viral, it was for a poem i wrote about you:

he wants to say i love you but keeps it to goodnight because love will take some falling and she's afraid of heights.

every time i see that, i want to throw up. you weren't in love with me, you were in love with the control you had over me. a little truth though: i am afraid of heights. you caught a rabbitgirl and skinned her alive.

mahler's fifth still makes me sick.

give me that back. give me back music. give me back everything i had before you. give me back fearlessness. give me back bravery. give me back a scarless body.

give me back what you took from me.

[lazycranberrydoodles]

transfems your wangxian

[uncanny-tranny]

Periodic reminder that unless a person specifically and clearly tells you it is okay to tell others they are trans or queer, you should err on the side of caution and assume they do not want you to tell people (especially random people!) about their transness or queerness.

You have no idea, generally, why somebody doesn't talk openly about their trans or queer status, and you have no idea, truly, how somebody might react to that information. The most progressive person out there is still capable of harbouring incredibly negative thoughts about somebody's queer status.

[notdrawingwhileasleep]

Because the fandom seems to be in "fanmade shadowpeach baby" mindset, and Ive been writing my fanmade baby for my aus.

I shall present Yall, Sān Yân Mihou, Or Sun Xīngxí <- There will be a divorce court level fitgh for the name.

[Sān Yân Mihou, if my chinise dictionary is right, means 3-eyed Macaque, Wukong hates the name, Macaque loves it. Anyways...]

[facelessoldgargoyle]

thinkin about those lesbians again! God I love working with guache

[facelessoldgargoyle]

The crucial underpinning of all of this is that Amy is not allowed to have a separation of identities the way that other capes are. There is no Panacea the way that there is a Skitter; there’s just obligation. Some compartmentalization would have helped Amy massively! Instead, she wakes up at 3am to pace the NICU.

this may or may not make a lick of sense but my approach and the one that makes most sense to me when it comes to analyzing amy is to start at panacea, double back to amelia lavere, and then proceed to amy dallon, instead of going for the obvious route and starting at the last point. panacea is huge. panacea, not ‘amy dallon,’ is the identity where she’s forced to rest all the weight of herself (up until she sheds it). i don’t think it’s possible to understand what it means to “be” amy without first getting incredibly familiar with the expectation that goes into her cape identity (and other people on here, I think, have talked about the nightmare of civilian/cape identity blurring under new wave). it’s a level of moral responsibility above and beyond what anyone else in her life has to handle. there is no existing equivalent to it. to stop being panacea is to let the pooling blood accumulate until it fills you up to your lungs or you transform into something monstrous and gilled. like.

and when you peel that away, get a look at the girl underneath the healer, yes, you see amy dallon, but amy dallon very simply wouldn’t exist without amelia lavere — it’s not just chronology, it’s not just her first identity or the name she used to have, it’s the ghost rattling around in her bones and Fucking It All Up. it fills every silence in her adopted home, hangs behind every unspoken accusation, marks every subtle and unsubtle ostracism. it’s the second obligation of blood after what she does as panacea. that’s what sets the stage for amy dallon, and that’s what creates the end result that people come face to face with: the unwanted, underloved girl clawing like a kitten up the leg of the only person who’s never swatted her away, molded into an irritable, unpersonable teenager whose bottled-and-shaken romantic longing explodes into a gory mess of heartbreak, confusion, and disgust. that’s how you get from point A to point B with her. to me.

[spacebubblehomebase]

Shit post!

Don't take this too seriously, but LMAO XD. -Bubbly💙

[dewwshi]

i liked the sparring scene from the start of siege of darkness a normal amount

[kingjasnah]

opinions on Shallan canonically being a fujoshi

her hairpin turnaround from "um adolin's brother is kinda weird he creeps me out" to "if renarin doesnt kiss another man on the mouth right now im going to blow up the entire spiritual realm" is legendary and should have been expected

[napping-sapphic]

Butch women listen close this is VERY important okay? You NEED to let me kiss your foreheads rn

[biblicalhorror]

Okayyyyy yeah also let's talk about Tammy. I didn't know how I felt about her for awhile because she did very much feel like the Disposable Black Girlfriend, but I'm seeing people saying she's an "abuser" or God forbid "just as bad as Kevin" and that's just. Not at all true.

Yes, Tammy is controlling. She doesn't seem to really like Patty for who she is, and kind of seems to want to change her into someone else instead. HOWEVER, I think we need to look at the whole character to understand WHY she's like that. I don't think she's controlling Patty for personal gain or for the sake of manipulating her. I think she's lonely and desperate for companionship, which leads to her ignoring/pushing past the obvious incompatibility in her relationship with Patty.

Here's what we know about Tammy:

1. She seems to be the only black person in the Worcester social circle. She also mentions frequently how she's surrounded entirely by white men at work.

2. She is also the only openly lgbt person in the area, other than Patty, who is still not exactly out and proud.

3. She describes her entire job as "making excuses for" and "cleaning up after" the men at her job, particularly her partner (whose name I am unfortunately forgetting, does anyone remember?), who even had her plant evidence for him on at least one occasion.

4. Despite being very competent and good at her job, the white men around her keep failing upwards (she mentions a few times that people beneath her keep getting promoted) while she remains stagnant in her career. There doesn't seem to be any explanation for this other than the fact that she is a black lesbian in an extremely white, conservative community.

Basically, Tammy seems like someone who has been taught (like many black women) that she will have to work much harder than everyone else to get ahead in any capacity. She is also likely very, very lonely. She doesn't seem to have any friends outside of work, which isn't surprising given the above. It seems like she doesn't exactly have a ton of prospects, dating-wise, other than Patty. In my opinion, it's really no wonder that she clung to Patty so desperately and immediately and tried to forcibly mold her into someone who could be compatible. She's tough, smart, organized, direct, manipulative, no-nonsense and controlling because, well, she had to be. And she ends up trying to "rein in" Patty because, in her mind, what's the other option? She ends up alone, surrounded by men who force her to cover for their antics and don't care if she lives or dies.

I'm not saying her behavior is healthy. But it comes from an entirely different place than Kevin's abuse, or Chuck's, or even Neil's. And it's also not uncommon. In real life, I know many queer women (specifically small-town lesbians) who end up in relationship dynamics just like that over and over again because they start dating someone who doesn't quite fit, and they compensate for it by trying to force a connection instead of accepting loneliness and isolation. I have a lot of sympathy for Tammy. And I wish the show had taken more care to establish the abuse she faced from her coworkers off-camera.

[rubyrubyrubytuesday]

once again thinking about

anthy watching akio lose, his castle and his illusion of being a prince crashing and throwing herself in front of him VS anthy watching akio lose, his castle and his illusion of being a prince crashing and being thrown in front of him.

sacrificing yourself vs being used and sacrificed.