#this is not a condemnation

[tenacious-minds]

About the new hbo show:

I understand, I do. HP is one of those things that shaped my entire childhood and a good portion of my adult life. But when are you going to get it? When are people going to get it.

Supporting new hp content, and ESPECIALLY on this scale is just giving her a bigger platform, and driving trans fans even further away from the few online spaces they still find some comfort in. This is maybe one of the smallest and most insignificant arguments, but it was one of the first things on my mind. And especially now, in a time of such horrific laws being put into place. I can't speak for everyone, but the more support I see for the game and this show the more unsafe I feel, and I think we all need somewhere safe to land right now.

She's doing real harm. I get that you're excited. I really do. Because the thing is I want to be excited to, and I can't be. We don’t get to be.

I hate being overtly political on here, especially outside of the context of politics as they relate specifically to, and within fiction. This is supposed to be a place where I don't have to think about it in the context of the real world. Where I can process the realities of an inherently politicized existence through fiction and without real world consequences, but she makes that nearly impossible. l'm just so incredibly sad to see how much support and excitement this now getting.

[tomi4i]

[gingermintpepper]

I think, perhaps one of the funniest things to come from EPIC popularising the Odyssey is that now a ton of people think Poseidon wanted to kill Odysseus.

In the Odyssey, Poseidon has no intention of killing Odysseus. In fact, part of the whole reason Zeus lets Poseidon do whatever he wants even though he thinks Odysseus is rad and should get to kiss his wife is explicitly because Poseidon had no intentions of killing Odysseus. Poseidon wanted to pay back the suffering/inconvenience blinding Polyphemus would have caused. It's a really abstract thing tbh. How do you pay back someone permanently disabling your son? Poseidon's solution was just to amputate Odysseus from his other half; i.e. Penelope. The end game was never murder, it was always an endurance race.

(Od. Book 1: Zeus reassuring Athena that he is not, in fact, a part of Odysseus Hater-Nation. Trans. Robert Fagles)

Also, for those wondering if there's any sort of in text reason for why Poseidon wasn't around in God Games - at the time in the Odyssey when Athena petitions Zeus to let Odysseus leave Calypso's island, Poseidon was -checks notes- on vacation in Ethiopia. Yep. He left to Ethiopia for a festival and thusly was very much absent for Athena's whole "please let Ody go? Please? 🥺" request.

(Od. Book 1: While Odysseus was suffering, Poseidon went to party in the east)

I am begging y'all to read the Odyssey. It's a comedy for everyone except Odysseus and Penelope who are, in fact, suffering 24/7 365.

[gotstabbedbyapen]

It's always "Hades isn't bad or cruel, his deeds are just metaphors of the inevitable death" or "Hades kidnapping Persephone represent the premature death".

But when the argument "Zeus has numerous affairs and many children because he represent the fertile rain" is brought up, all nuance is suddenly out of the window and Zeus is just a womanizer who can't keep it in his pants.

[wombywoo]

"smile!" 📸

[mossy-aro]

love as religion; am i doomed? / on aromanticism

all highlighted sections from ‘aromanticism’ by moses sumney - the album notes // other excerpts in order: ‘doomed’ - moses sumney / quote by Naïmah Janse / earthlings - sayaka murata / ‘sun bleached flies’ - ethel cain / unknown / ‘doomed’ - final verse

[antizionazi]

During her speech before demonstrators in New York, author and journalist Naomi Klein condemned Israel's crimes against Palestinians, asserting that Zionism has strayed from Jewish values and stating, "Zionism is a false idol that has betrayed every Jewish value."

“We don’t need or want the false idol of Zionism. We want freedom from the project that commits genocide in our name,” she added.

The demonstration, held just one block from the residence of US Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, resulted in the arrest of hundreds of protesters. This event coincided with the Senate's approval of a $95 billion foreign aid package, which includes approximately $17 billion in arms and security funding for Israel.

[edwardsdeathcabcd]

i've said it before but it will forever and always make me insane that jacob's ending is to join the cullens for the sake of bella not having to give anything up. they find out jake will be immortal & tied to renesmee forever, so bella gets to smile & say "my family is finally complete! ^-^" but jake already HAS a family. he has a father and 2 sisters. quil, embry, seth and sam are like his brothers. jacob and leah were planning to run away together. he's always been welcome in emily's home, sue has been a family friend since before his birth. bella abandons her mortality by choice because she feels no connection to the people around her, but jacob has really strong bonds. it's clear that every character we meet in la push is like family to him, he's an active member of the community. jake would've graduated high school and been a mechanic, would've grown into a young man. a good friend, a fun uncle, a present son. he's set up to have such a rich life. and he's just magically compelled to give that up. beyond his control, he loses sight of everything, because his high school crush's baby is now the singular most important thing to him. he's perpetually 18 with his perpetually 18 year old girlfriend, running around vancouver or alaska or wherever with the girl who friendzoned him at 16 & her in-laws (who were antagonistic to him for months). and i'm just supposed to say omg yay now he doesn't have to let go of bella! everyone is happy! it's complete madness

[monttagues]

they haven't even started yet and they're already coming straight for my neck

[toss-a-coin-to-your-stan-account]

waiting for everyone to get on board with "fiction that depicts dark subject matter is not inherently romanticizing it" so we can move on to "fiction that romanticizes dark subject matter should not inherently be condemned and sometimes the dark subject matter may in fact be Intentionally Romanticized to Make A Point"

[teaboot]

Sometimes at work (private security, for those who don’t know) people ask me, “another day of stopping bad guys?” and like. I get that it’s usually a joking thing that people don’t think about but. It still gets to me every time, cause like

I don’t believe there are bad guys

I think that the difference between a bad guy and a person doing bad things is the capacity to do better, and I think that labeling anyone as a “bad guy” both absolves them of accountability and robs them of agency

And I think that everyone I meet who is in act of making bad choices is capable of doing better

Like whether or not they choose to, they could, and that’s both a gift and a responsibility that differentiates a human being from a random force of nature

If I didn’t believe that, I don’t think I could be here

[stars-obsession-pit]

Tim has found his soulmate (not a soulmate AU, just in the like “i think we’re totally meant to be together” way). Well, okay, it’s entirely one-sided so far, but he’s sure SpecterNova will reciprocate once they’re in proper contact.

He’s already found everything he publicly can on the youtuber, but he’s still digging deeper. It’s weirdly difficult—his love must like his privacy!—but he’s making headway.

On the other end, Danny is getting nervous about the dedication of his new internet stalker. Even with Tucker’s help in setting up his online security and the scrambling effects of ectoplasm, they can tell that the person is still making progress. They don’t seem like they’re a part of the GIW, but that doesn’t mean their search can’t harm him in some other way.

He really hopes he doesn’t have to change identities again. Having to do it the first time to flee the GIW was bad enough, and he’s been liking his current life.

[ankles-be-bitten]

idk, i just feel like if your primary argument against transandrophobia/antitransmasculinity theory is that you think it's transmisogynistic you're not being intellectually honest. who does it hurt when trans men and mascs coin a term to describe the intersection of transphobia and sexism as it most frequently affects them? because it does hurt trans men when they're told that they're not entitled to speak on the discrimination they themselves face.

what I'm hearing from people who oppose the antitransmasculinity movement is that transmisogyny is when trans men talk about their problems 👍, but obviously that's not true. i know that's not true. you know that's not true. so then what is the issue? genuinely, enlighten me. you want trans men to shut up and listen? I'm listening.

[ravencromwell]

Rereading Dickens Christmas Carol for the first time in a long time. And the more I reread, the more it strikes me how seamlessly a queer reading could slip within these pages. Not an especially twee reading, wherein all Scrooge's troubles start and end with grief over Jacob Marley's death. For we know that Scrooge was a "Tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge! a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner!" And we know that he and Marley were "two kindred spirits"

And perhaps that very fact makes the similarities to queer life, unintended as they most likely were by Mr. Dickens, achingly poignant to me. Scrooge is, we're told, "secret and self-contained and solitary as an oyster." How much that resonates, for so many of us who shield our innermost selves but from a select group of friends. And we know that Scrooge and Marley were, at the very least, certainly that for one another. Scrooge is Marley's sole mourner; his sole executor and beneficiary; and even Dickens notes, "friend." How reminiscent is that of queer couples across history, estranged from their families?

Scrooge lives in a set of chambers that once belonged to Marley—clearly Dickens wanted us to believe Scrooge gave up his own dwellings after Marley's death to economize. But with only a flicker of change, those chambers become _their chambers, rented by Marley as the senior member of the couple. The place is so desolate Dickens notes "one could scarcely help fancying it must have run there when it was a young house, playing at hide-and-seek with other houses, and have forgotten the way out again." The perfect abode for two queer misers who wanted no one prying into their business.

Marley's name is still above the door of Scrooge's counting-house: a mark by which, no doubt, Dickens meant to convey Scrooge such a penny-pincher he couldn't bother to have it changed. But a thing can be both! mark of frugality to ludicrous excess and! mark of mourning. "sometimes," Dickens opines, "People new to the

business called Scrooge Scrooge, and sometimes Marley, but he answered to both names. It was all the same to him."

This is why "death of the author" matters so much, in expanding our interpretations of texts. It is vastly far from the lens Dickens would have intended. But, the idea of a ghost of queerness, so taboo in the society it could barely be glanced at sidewise in this tale that is all about the inexplicable and yet that lingers over everything becomes an astonishing lens through which to read this book. Thinking of Scrooge as a queer man, his "melancholy dinner at his usual melancholy tavern" becomes a eerie prefiguring of the hollowness of days spent by Isherwood's A Single Man. In this universe, little wonder Scrooge doubly hates mention of time with family, marriage, etc. when the precise nature of his grief is both unacknowledged and unacknowledgable.

And readings like this are vital, because the uncomfortable truth is, discrimination doesn't "discriminate between sinners and saints", to borrow a Miranda phrase. It is easy, in my liberal circles, to fight for queer people who hold "the good sorts of politics". But what about men like Michael Hess, culpable for supporting Reagan even as his contemptuous homophobia let the aids epidemic run rampant? How much harder is it to remember Michael had a partner? That he deserves empathy and compassion for being practically tarred and feathered out of the party upon his own aids diagnosis?

Expanding our imaginative universes to include queerness, not as redemptive panacea, but merely as one aspect of identity, personality, often in vicious conflict with others. Even! as we consider those stories equally worthy of being told feels vital if we're ever to truly express the complexity of what queer humanity looks like.

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

At your side [End of Season 2]

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[kittykatninja321]

fics that villainize Talia are obsessed with having Jason bad mouth her. I think Jason should be the #1 Talia apologist actually. To a toxic degree even. You tell Jason about the weird cloning shit and he’s like “well I’m sure she had her reasons 🤷🏻‍♂️”