#touch some grass or something

[glazedsnail]

I AM SO NORMAL ABOUT THE CHICKEN MAN

He's a proud papa Shane 🥹

[man-im-so-high]

i need a bloody makeout session with him

[elodieunderglass]

I have two jockeyposting questions, if I may! 1. Killie has a delightful bear of a boyfriend. Is he out? Horseracing doesn't seem like it would be very queer-friendly but maybe I'm wrong about that. 2. Is the fact that people are generally getting taller a problem for finding tiny jockeys?

Of course thank you so much! I adore getting these thank you so much ☺️

1.) horse racing is not queer-friendly to jockeys.

There is one ☝️ out gay jockey in the Anglosphere/Europe/probably the world, Jack Duern. (1) Duern came out on Twitter and his career tanked, with trainers openly disapproving and no longer offering rides. Since no mounts = no pay, he left the field. Interestingly, he came back a few years later, with lots of inclusion campaigns in the UK promising that “horse racing is for everyone,” but it’s reasonable that nobody else has followed him out! Duern has said that of course there are other gay jockeys, and that the jockeys themselves are actually quite supportive of each other. But as disposable freelancers with no collective bargaining, who don’t hold power in the sport and get rides based on reputation, why risk what very much happened to Duern for no benefit? All the people who hold power in horse racing are ghastly Tories, and the rainbow capitalism clearly hasn’t created conditions of safety or trust in the real world.

Now Killie is of course a fictional jockey who lives in my head. Realistically, he is Not Out in the modern era. Him being out would be MASSIVE. He is barely out to himself. His emotional baggage requires a storage unit. Probably the biggest single piece of baggage was that his twin brother was thrown out (of family, home and sport) for dating men, and disappeared for several years; which broke several load-bearing things in Killie.

He will definitely have to come out of the closet, like a badger boiling furiously from a hole to bite your feet off, possibly in the end by simply bringing Derek as his plus-one to a black-tie event and then lunging at the first person to Have a Problem With It. Suspended jockey license for three months for biting, again.

Mind you, Killie is terrible queer representation. Can you imagine.

Pride is for everyone, even Killie. Pride is for everyone, even Killie. Pride is for -

The answer to question 2) has a trigger warning for discussion of size/weight, tap “keep reading” to keep reading

2.) the legendary tiny jockeys are indeed getting rarer, and their extinction has been claimed in the UK. There is no preference - no economic pressure - for short jockeys; the industry doesn’t care much if you’re a healthy short bastard or a starving lanky skeleton. But there’s two approaches to it at the moment: in the UK, they’ve raised weight limits across the profession. In the rest of the world, where jockey weights are still around 118lbs, jockeys just get recruited to wealthy countries.

Killie races in the UK and there’s a slight problem now. He was initially formed in the 1990s by a child who did NOT want him to have an eating disorder, and therefore, I waved my hand and said that he’s 4’10”, the same size as Julie Krone (Triple Crown winner) and Willie Shoemaker (said to be the best American jockey of all time). This was realistic then, but might be a problem now.

The UK has some of the highest permitted jockey weights in the world, and is the stronghold of steeplechasing (jump racing) which allows the highest weights of all. In 2025 a UK jump jockey can now be 160 lbs, with a minimum floor of 140 (including gear) meaning that a jump jockey needs a minimum riding weight of around 133 lbs(this can include as much lead weight as they need.) Underweight jockeys make up their weight to the assigned number by adding lead weights in the weight cloth, which is absolutely normal, although less desirable than living weight; and handicapping adds extra dimensions; but Killie could realistically jump at close to an average weight, and no longer needs to be extra-tiny to be a flat-and-jump jockey.

The last two UK lightweight jockeys of the old school both just retired Autumn 2024. They were quite successful until the end, and it’s clear that there’s an advantage to their frames - even now and even in the UK - but you can see that at their retirements they had gone from archetypal-jockey-type to outlier-among-the-young-bloods. Killie was intended to have the same build: if he was a person aging at normal rates, he would have been in his 20s when created by a dumb kid in the 90s, and exactly this age (50s) now. Instead, if he’s in his 30s now, he was now probably born around 1990 - and would be the short outlier!

(The UK’s “last lightweight jockeys”, born in the 1970s. Left, Jimmy Quinn (centre, yellow silk) Irish flat jockey with colleagues; centre photo Franny Norton, English flat jockey with sports physiologists; right, Franny Norton, having also been a boxer, showing a child how to box. Jimmy and Franny both retired Autumn 2024, hailed as “the last of the UK’s great lightweight jockeys.” They were both very short, very muscular, very successful and rode healthily into their fifties. The younger jockeys on the left would be considered smaller than average people, but are noticeably in the lankier-framed modern style.)

However. That’s the UK, and its heavier jockeys, higher weight limits and its overarching steeplechase obsession. The rest of the world prefers flat racing, and is stuck firmly on basically the same weight limit as the 1990s, of about 118 lbs. Killie might now be well-below-average for UK steeplechasers; but to ride the most famous flat races in the world, he’s comfortable. He could easily and healthily do the big famous flat races - Japan Cup! Kentucky Derby! - where steeplechasers are limited to very few races.

So given that the UK steeplechasing has pulled away from the rest of the world, we might have to either make Killie a bit taller to keep up with that, or let him focus on international flat racing. ANYWAY, that’s just to say that that’s the immediate impact of rising average heights on Killie as a character.

So how do the flat-racing nations manage to get their tiny jockeys?

Japan pulls from a population that, statistically, has more people who are able to match the weight requirements.

France seems to naturally produce enough little guys to export excesses to the USA. Flavien Prat, who is 5’1” and wins a lot, is one of those.

For better or worse, the USA relies heavily on jockeys from other countries, particularly Latin America. You can draw your own conclusions about colonial power and land justice from this. But on the personal level there is significant representation from Puerto Rico (Irad Ortiz Jr, John R Velasquez) and countries like Panama, the Dominican Republic, Peru, and Mexico. When you subtract French and LatAm riders from the top lists in the USA, you’re left with a few American generational jockeys.

Australian horse racing annoys me so much I don’t even want to touch on them or acknowledge them!! There is a problem with indentured child jockeys around the world, but Australia really kicked this up a notch.

Aotearoa / NZ is not a prominent racing nation, but you know how in the LotR films, most of the Riders of Rohan were women because that’s who the most competent local equestrians were? 40% of their jockeys are women, apparently!

Today, the UAE tends to operate through the UK training system, recruiting UK/EU jockeys. In the past they had widely-reported child jockey and kidnapping scandals.

Ireland is known for producing generational jockeys (Killie’s from a fictional “racing dynasty.”) By nature and nurture or both, they’ll probably keep doing this. Small parents don’t necessarily produce small people, of course, but horse-obsessed families tend to produce horse-obsessed people.

So it’s hard to say! Setting higher weight limits like the UK would offer more talent, but then again, Extracting Immigrant Labour is the system working as intended. the sport itself is declining in most countries, with millennials and everyone after being pretty uninterested.

Killie’s a special little guy, staring into the distance while “Last of My Kind” by Shaboozey plays

(1) There are only a handful of horse-racing countries outside of the Anglosphere and France, where Duern is the only out gay jockey. Japan - whose racing association is famously controlling of the public image of its jockeys - doesn’t have any English-language gossip about them being LGBTQ. I don’t know much about the Hong Kong racing scenes ditto; homosexuality is illegal in the United Arab Emirates. The other nations of the world produce jockeys, and occasionally horses, but don’t host the grade 1 world famous cups that make them major players.

[sideblogdotjpeg]

ive been thinking about the red string superstition recently and also sol bufo always and it makes me sick how uncannily caldwell tanner has made sol to perfectly target me personally

(+ cropped versions !)

[littler0b1n]

My boys…

[poke-poke-poke]

found a goomy doodle i did a few months back--- it's unfinished but cutee (who's gonna tell goomy that they're weak to ice,, they're gonna get sick rip)

[dolls-self-ships]

just saw someone on a self shipping post say to not use the word "obsessed" to describe their feelings for their f/o bc it's harmful to those with ocd and as someone with severe ocd please shut the fuck up and go outside oh my god

[the-love-witch-roleplays]

[baggy-holmes]

happy saturday, nerds

[bakudekublogblog]

it never stops being funny to me that people are bkdk antis in the year 2024 like “katsuki bullied izuku!! how dare you ship izuku with him” ??? take it up with izuku he’s is the one pining his ass off for him. I can’t make izuku not yearn for katsuki ??? I’m sorry I have observational skills?? izuku is just like that you think I can stop him??

[mylittledelulucorner]

I can write a whole essay based on these 2 pictures.

[socksracoon10]

look i am not a lando norris fan at all but for the lando fans pls have SOME decorum we're all stressed about the race coming up, we all have our favorite drivers that we want to win I get it, this is a crucial part of the race. At least on my views, i don't want Lando to crash or DNF like yeah it would help max but i wouldnt wish that on my worst enemy so at the same time stop wishing it for max, dont wish that for any driver imo because that's childish and rude on top of all this, lemme clarify max will NOT try to crash into lando on purpose (ive been seeing posts like that)... i fear people keep forgetting that max has matured a lot more than people give him credit for. He raced clean in Brazil, the worst he's done as of late was his classic pushing them off track limits move but any other driver would do the exact same thing at the moment in order to secure their championship. at the end of the day, it's so funny how a number of people that the drivers have never met will go on long rants to tear down another driver. I have my thoughts about lando, I get mad too and I say stuff not ONLINE where others can read. i think we all need to calm down keep our thoughts in our head and if your argument is "b-b-but other people are - but other people are doing it they're saying mean stuff!" THEN BE THE BETTER PERSON??? dont stoop to their level thats all i wanna say at the end of the day youre not their parents, youre not their gf/bf, youre not even an acquaintance... you are a person on tumblr... that they don't know... dont defend them to death, dont whine about them to death just watch the damn race, pray your driver does well and if they say or do something wrong accept that they did something wrong and move on with your life thats literally it ok im done ranting lol (i mightve gone crazy in the tags lol)

[fantasyinallforms]

Name the people in the fandom you hate.

Name the people in the fandom you hate.

Name the people in the fandom you hate.

Look here, you little bastard. You've sent this to me 7 times, and I've deleted 6 of them. I'm responding in the hopes that you'll stop. You'll be hard-pressed to find a person in fandom that agrees with everyone. There are some people whose ideas are so fundamentally opposed to yours that you will never get along. That is where the glorious use of the block button comes in handy. What does this line of questioning do other than stir a settled pot? I will answer that for you, nothing.

[confusedspaceotter]

Don’t mind me just making memes to cope…

[beanghostprincess]

I mean… wlw content get overshadowed by mlm ships everyday so it is insensitive a little

Not to sound too mean but what do you expect me to do? I get that sapphic ships get overshadowed and underrated all the time in comparison to achillean ones. Believe me. I am a lesbian who is constantly pushing their sapphic ships everywhere.

But you can't expect people to suddenly stop posting about the achillean ships they enjoy just because they're more popular than YOUR favorite ships. Is it bothersome that achillean ships get more attention for the sole reason of being a male pairing while sapphic ships get ignored or not even suggested? Yeah!!!! It's frustrating.

But if you want some change in the amount of content you see then it's YOUR fight only and others should be allowed to post whatever they like. If you want to post only sapphic ships or you're bothered by them being talked in the same light as achillean ones, then it's YOUR choice to make.

Fandom is NOT activism!!! Fandom is meant to be enjoyed in whatever way you want. Fandom is to interpret media in your own way. So, honestly, if I want to make a simple post comparing two ships I like, why should I be trying to defend myself here for that? If people don't like it, then they can just block me, scroll, move on, etc.

To think a post about comparing fictional ships is insensitive is insane to me, tbh.

[pinkyjulien]

Valentin Da Silva | 177/??