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felixcloud6288 · 1 day ago

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Dungeon Meshi Chapter 61

It's back to those two guys.

Before this, the only hint to what Kabru's life under his foster mother was a single panel in chapter 55 showing him being a bit annoyed at her hugging him. He commented that things will get tiresome if he has to ask for her help.

Honestly, it's always difficult for a parent to realize their children are growing up. It's probably even harder for elves since their children grow much slower. So an elf raising a non-elf would probably struggle to realize how quickly their kid is growing. It's probably a similar vibe to having a dog all their life and still thinking of them as a baby even when they're old.

This shot made sure you noticed all the scars on her arms.

Over the entire page this panel is in, her arms became more visible as Kabru kept talking about wanting to go into the dungeons and asking her to train him to fight.

Even if she is strong, she didn't walk out of dungeons unharmed. No matter how strong you are, death is always a possibility when it comes to the dungeons.

I almost feel like she trained Kabru wrong on purpose. As I've pointed out before, Kabru's fighting style is better suited to assassination than monster hunting. And the only glimpse we see of his training was him fighting her and her dolls. She wanted to make him give up on swordsmanship. But if that failed, not giving him the skills needed to actually explore a dungeon might discourage him as well.

Mithrun is pragmatic. Even if he might have any negative feelings about what Kabru pulled, it's not like he can get through the dungeon alone, especially since they ended up all the way down the sixth floor.

I do have to question how they ended up in the sixth floor specifically. I can understand ending up all the way down to the fifth floor since the subterranean graveyard stretches wider than the second through fourth floors, but the sixth floor is entirely underground.

The fall was entirely due to Thistle's magic, so he probably just erased everything directly below the area that collapsed, leaving an opening to the sixth floor.

Kabru confirmed a few things about the Canaries. The ear notches indicate the criminals in the group. Meanwhile Pattadol and Mithrun are nobles in charge of them. Do only guards have those fairy companions?

Kabru's notes on Mithrun mention black eyes are rare for an elf. Since his eyes seem to change color when he strongly emotes, there's probably something to that.

And of course Kabru doesn't find Mithrun interesting. Mithrun has no personality to speak of.

Got excited to see another shapeshifter. I really wish we got more recurring monsters throughout this series. Most of them just appear for one chapter, get eaten, and then never appear again.

And shapeshifter is its actual name since Mithrun called it that. When Laios's team encountered it, "shapeshifter" seemed to be a generic term for monsters like certain types of slime, succubi, or magic mirrors that use mimicry or illusions to infiltrate a group.

Mithrun has totally used his teammates as projectiles in the past.

While the fake Mithrun might look and behave exactly like the real one, there's no way it has the same information the real one has. When Laios's party encountered the shapeshifter, only the real Laios could explain what was happening. And the party identified his fakes because they couldn't chime in at all.

Since Kabru didn't know what a shapeshifter was, I'm inclined to believe the Mithrun on the right is the real one. He led the discussion on shapeshifters, and Kabru could have filled in the blanks allowing the left Mithrun to say what he said.

The Mithrun who suggested they leave to dispel the illusion, the one who contacted the canaries, and the one who was generally in the forefront of each group shot is also likely the real one.

Meanwhile, I can't tell for the life of me which one is the real Kabru.

This will be fun to see animated. I think the fairy switched between Fleki, Otta, and the guy who turns into a wolf. Fleki's name got dropped in the conversation.

Mithrun couldn't tell which Kabru was the real one.

Despite being a guard and (presumably) being second-in-command, Pattadol does not get much respect in the group. Cithis seems to be the real second-in-command.

Cithis said it will take about a week before they can come for the captain. On Laios's side, seven or eight days have passed since he parted ways with Kabru. So the Canaries likely are already deep in the dungeon when the Winged Lion warned Laios about them last chapter.

Love seeing how much psychic damage Laios has caused Kabru. This looks like the poster of a cheap B horror movie from the 1950s.

Haven't seen anything this poor in nutrition since Falin's skeleton.

Kabru is trying so hard to cozy up to someone who doesn't care at all.

He's treating Mithrun the same way his foster mother treated him at the start of the chapter.

Kabru is manipulative and always tries to see through people to figure out who they really are underneath. Ironically, Laios has given him an entirely wrong impression by just acting like himself and willingly sharing his bizarre interests.

From a physics perspective, this works and makes sense and I kind of hate that it does.

Since things like momentum and velocity are kept when teleporting, a falling object that is teleported in place but flipped upside-down would still keep its relative velocity. This would probably make for an interesting physics problem. "An object falling at terminal velocity is suddenly teleported upside-down causing its velocity to now go upward. How many seconds will the object move upward and how long does it take for it to return to falling at the same speed before it was teleported?"

Kabru and Mithrun have apparently found the Touden party's lost gear before they did. So they're only several hours ahead of the party at this point. I bet the shapeshifter from earlier is the same one Laios's party encounters.

The dungeon will provide various necessities when anyone in it wishes for them. Mithrun said to not wish often though. The dungeon is feeding off desires so it probably becomes stronger every time someone looks for a place to rest.

Big bombshell reveal.

So Mithrun probably was trying to be sympathetic to Thistle during their fight. Mithrun was also a dungeon lord and he may have been trying to convince Thistle to give up his title before whatever happened to Mithrun and his unit happens to Thistle.

Mithrun is stoic and unemotive, so him making these faces and these dramatic gestures while talking about being a dungeon lord means whatever happened was serious.

back

#dungeon meshi #delicious in dungeon #dungeon meshi readthrough

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artemis-potnia-theron · 7 months ago

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Hi 💙

I would like to worship Artemis, i've looking and investigate about hellenic polytheism and i have a special bond with the Delian triad (Artemis, Apollon and Leto), i love them, but i'm new in this and i want to start first with Artemis...

How i could start? How do you begin with her? I don't know how to start and what i have to do... Could you help me? I see how is your relationship with her and i love it ✨

Khaire! 🫂

So excited to hear about your interest in the trio!! They all hold very special places in my heart, so I love to hear when other people find them as well!

However, although I consider Apollo(n) to be my spiritual father and Leto to be my spiritual grandmother, the relationship I have with Artemis is an intersection of mother, sister, best friend, love of my life, spiritual mistress, queen, ect...so I will be approaching this from a more Artemis focused perspective lol. Hope that's okay!!

First, I would strongly recommend reading She Who Hunts: Artemis: The Goddess Who Changed the World by Carla Ionescu for a really solid, comprehensive overview of her worship. Understanding her history and domains can be very helpful in understanding Artemis as a goddess. Apollo(n) and Leto are featured in it, but mostly in relation to her.

Theoi.com is a good overall resource, but I would recommend sticking to 'scholarly' or peer-reviewed sources as much as possible when trying to get historical information about her cults, worship, and associated religious practices. The same goes for Apollo(n) and Leto.

In terms of personal practice stuff, it took me years to really forge the connection and relationship I have with her how. She can be prickly in certain ways. Her energy is as intense and wild as anything I've ever experienced. Early on, it felt like getting close to a roaming wolf or a hunting lioness. But once you bridge that gap, she's as protective and loves with as much ferocity as a mother bear. Apollo(n) and Leto were a bit less distant, even in the early days - at least for me. So take your time. Don't rush things with any of them, but most specifically not with Artemis lol.

In terms of activities/stuff she likes, I can list some random, everyday ways I connect with her!

- Being out in the moonlight, walking with the nightroaming critters 🌙🦇

- Going on nature walks, hikes, or just sitting outside! Touching grass really works haha

- Work on healing your 'inner child' through shadow work, but mostly importantly through therapy if it's accessible

- Taking care of and/or spending time with animals

- Reading her myths

- 'Ecstatic' dance. She shares a connection with The Mousai (The Muses) and to singing and music in general - a domain she shares with her brother

- Anything involved in childcare and/or childbirth

- Practicing archery

- Standing up for yourself

- Appericating solitude/independence

- Listening to folk music, lol. She loves The Amazing Devil

- Of course, connecting with others close to her helps! Apollo(n) and Leto are the most obvious ones, but she also has close ties to Hekate, Kybele, Dionysus, Persephone, Demeter, Zeus, Athene, Pan, and many more both inside and outside of her 'main' pantheon.

- In terms of symbols and stuff I've found she likes for her altars, she loves deer, bear, dog, fish, boar, and wolf imagery in particular. I associate green, brown, grey, blue, and purple with her. She's loves amethyst. And of course she loves any nature-related offerings!

- I also love connecting everyday stuff with her - albeit in a UPG kind of way lol. I associate the movies Beasts of the Southern Wild and Princess Mononoke with her as well as A Children's Bible by Lydia Millet and We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shriely Jackson and that's all super UPG! Personalize your practice to you, your life, and your beliefs.

What matters most is fostering a relationship with a good foundation. As cliche as it sounds, it really can be about the journey rather than the destination when it comes to deity work. Enjoy yourself, be respectful, decide what you believe, and listen to the lessons she has to teach you. The rest will come naturally :)

Don't hesitate to let me know if you have any other questions! May Artemis' arrow guide you always.

- Taylor 🌙🏹🦌

#helpol #deity work #deity worship #artemis devotee #artemis #artemis deity #artemis devotion #artemis worship

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wickmitz · 4 months ago

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what do you think mitzi’s type in men is?

hmm, this is a fun little ask! especially since her love interests, on a surface level, couldn’t be more different. we have :

zib : former long term boyfriend but not quite … they were very loose with labels, as we know from outside information and the way zib lives life in general. but despite this, whatever feelings fostered between them were intense ; enough so for him to stick around years later, resigned to a chained down lifestyle simply because he doesn’t want to leave mitzi. he’s very loyal in that sense! even if it’s not a conventional type of loyalty. we know that before bitterness seeped inbetween their bond that zib took good care of her, while also being a complete mess of a person ; someone perpetually scared whenever physical conflict is concerned and being a musically inclined man who very much treats himself as a free spirit, with a morbid philosophy and feel towards life. he’s got a major tortured artist aesthetic!! is a little gripped by melancholy and nostalgia … zib is a lot of things, and ambitious is surprisingly one of the many puzzle pieces that make up dorian zibowski.

atlas : ruthless gangster, has an eerie presence that frightens even the people closest to him. he is prone to a more quiet disposition ; never speaking and always a blot of unremarkable grey. but he is an opportunist! someone who can manage a business and take advantage of shortcuts and loopholes to become even more successful … basically he is wealthy and uses his assets well. but all of this is done with a manner of distance, leaving even those closest to him never having the full picture of who he was. it’s also worth noting that mitzi and him had eventual problems, which caused her to seperate. also perhaps has a heart of some kind, but whatever love he possesses is hidden under layers of blood and mystery.

wick : well-to-do bore, and i say this with all the love in the world for wick! but compared to previous paramours he’s rather clean and talkative … there is a constant earnestness to him that bleeds out, an honesty and a more conventional sort of kindness. he doesn’t hide behind smoke and mirrors and there’s never really a front he puts up around mitzi -- or his investors for that matter, hence why he’s treated as an ‘outsider’ so to speak. he is an alcoholic who loathes the details of his job but is more than passionate about the job itself and makes this everyone’s problem … he is a little helpless, in the sense he’d die without someone there to make sure he functions … and is, like zib, perpetually afraid of conflict. can be a little wishywashy and can come across as uncaring due to his cheeky tone … but he’s loyal and caring, with a hobby for the unusual ( bugs and rocks lol ) as well as being able to look past the gossip mill and see the actual mitzi may as he knows her, someone who’s going through a rough time and is either too kind or classy to be a brutal killer. he is hypocritical, a little snobby, and rather forward with mitzi too. kind of a flirt when he wants to be!

something that immediately stands out to me when looking at this lineup is that mitzi doesn’t enjoy a violent man. i don’t think she loathes someone who can so brutally or clinically remove others from this earth, but if she were to go for someone they’d usually be sweeter in a sense. it meshes well with her old personality and kinder heart, perhaps brings it out in her, and that sort of levity and breeziness is more enjoyable than, say, being fully aware of the dangers that lurk around every corner because the man you’re beside is prone to bringing it. she also enjoys more talkative types, someone who’s less quiet and demure and serious, and is keen on her men having a hobby they care deeply for ; some sort of long term goal to work towards doesn’t hurt either. and because of some scenes in the comic, i’m a firm believer that mitzi wants someone who can make her smile or laugh with ease, whether because they’re ridiculous by nature or genuinely funny! she has a sort of funny bone herself, enamored with gallow’s humor and darker jokes, so having someone who either a.) reacts hilariously in the face of her jokes or b.) who can return that energy with teasing or their own brand of silly is desirable. everyone could use a good laugh or two, a sense of joy injected into the bustling life they all live, and this all ties back to mitzi being more drawn towards the less stuffy types of men.

so atlas seems to be an outlier when it comes to her type in many ways, hence the later problems they apparently had in their relationship even if she did love him dearly. but, of course, atlas did have something very appealing to her that zib had failed to give, which she rather fondly recalls in the comic page vestige. whether zib likes acknowledging it or not, mitzi wasn’t as gungho about their normad life as he was … or, at the very least, when she lived another life besides that one, she realized she had a preference! and atlas gave her that path, that knowledge that she wanted something else, and seemingly for the very first time in her life … she felt like a proper lady, a feeling that clearly meant a lot to her. it wasn’t just the dresses or the wealth, it was the constant eye of atlas who could have any dame he wanted, but fancied her his wife regardless. it was having someone so respectable looking, dressed well and groomed well, being able to see her as something other than a sweating, exposed girl in a bawdy dress. atlas’s seemingly polite treatment towards mitzi was enough to garner her affections in spite of everything else, so i think she enjoys that now in others, ; folks who treat her as though she’s a woman in high society, men who don’t gawk at her or make lewd remarks immediately … she probably prefers the courting process now and the quaint dates ( that she doesn’t pay for, mind you ) that come along with it. she just -- likes mutual respect, i think. and who doesn’t? she’s been through a lot to get to where she is now, even if it’s a bad predicament, and she’d like for that to amount to something. some sort of acknowledgment, some kind of recognition.

however, it’s worth mentioning that her views on romance and all that it entails have been warped since the death of her husband. such a loss would change how anyone approaches their dating life, if they were to even have one afterwards … after all, mitzi’s whole problem is that she doesn’t want to move on from atlas and has thus completely romanticized him in her head, to the point that she earnestly believes she’ll be miserable forever without his presence. any problems she had with atlas have long since been erased by her tortured mind, leaving her with a profound misery she’s wallowing in. i think she believes herself as incapble of romantic or sexual inclinations nowdays, leading her to view the advances made towards wick as a necessary ‘evil’ for the sake of atlas may and little else -- when she genuinely does like sedgewick to a degree, and wouldn’t go on dates or kiss a man unless some part of her honestly wanted to do so. ( i also think she was attracted to wick somewhat even while married to atlas, but that’s besides the point ) so this is all a rather complicated affair! she is vulnerable and weak, is too aware of herself and the criminal underbelly squeezing in closer … add this on top of her still heavily grieving and having no one she feels she can talk to, you have someone who is rather changed. mitzi is so far removed from herself and who she truly is, or was, that there’s no doubt it’s affected her type ; now she’ll settle for anyone if they’ll just help her, and even then she’d be dispassionate if romantic entanglement of any kind was involved in that relationship. it’s not something she wants right now, and honestly, it all seems scary and daunting … besides atlas, zib was the only other man she’s ever loved enough to stay around for, so she’s never faced a loss like this before. has kept zib throughout all the turmoil and changes -- so this is, as far as we know, her first major loss where it concerns matters of the heart. it’s not shocking she’s so messed up after it, especially given how fresh it all still is. all of this rambling is to say that mitzi’s a little more stingy and cagey then she used to be about love or sex, and she has a lot of inner battles to face before she can fall for someone and be sure about it. needs to thaw, i think, and she would require patience and understanding from anyone who actually wanted to be with her. mitzi could move on with time ( i do not think she’s the type of widow who’d never date again! ) but it would take quite some time to do so. well, in a world where she’s allowed / is able to heal anyway!

while her type would probably remain the same, i could see her wanting a serious relationship more than she did prior to the death of her husband. has no energy for the loopholes, or the rationalizations, or the fickle nature that can grip someone’s heart. she has matured in a lot of ways since her band days and would take comfort in frivolous things like labels and promises of a future, together, as lovers. while what she had with zib was nice and is cherished alongside the freedom to do as she pleased while on the road with the band, i don’t think she misses it. having the stability and assurance of an actual relationship, with all the hardships that come with it, would be better suited for her. as long as she’s treated like an equal of course! i don’t think she’d be keen on her partner hiding anything from her, even if it’s meant to protect her, due to where that put mitzi when atlas was killed. she’d rather know and be disgusted, or worried, or scared than to not know about something at all until it’s too late … again. naturally patience and compassion would also be of importance, as would the usual things she loves like loyalty and a passion for something in life. and while never required, she’d be happy if the person possessed even a singular musical bone in their body! she still thinks artists, particularly musicans, are sexy after all … likes the angst and brooding that comes with it, the slight flare towards the dramatics … as long as they can handle mitzi in her pitiful entirety and do, to some degree, care deeply for her and will compromise … i think she could find some happiness wherever. bonus points if she can live comfortably for the rest of her days too, lord knows she’s tired of the constant battle of hucking and bargaining.

but yeah! mitzi’s love life is vast and complex and i definitely see her as someone who is more flexible in type than other people are. though there are similarities between her suitors if you really look! anyway, i hope i was able to briefly touch upon this subject because my shipping brain loved your question and kinda went into overdrive, alas. tldr ; her ideal type is wick sable. sorry. once wick learns an instrument the wedding is back on!! … i’m kidding lol. well, mostly <3

#my asks.#lackadaisy analysis.#lackadaisy #mitzi may #i’m a person who believes the dixie drifters were one big polyam mess!! just on the record haha #and while that polyam and open relationship lifestyle was nice i do not think mitzi enjoyed all of it …#which isn’t to say she’s PURELY monogamous now! but she leans more towards it than not i think #she enjoys having one partner solely focused on her … someone entirely her own …#but she could ( potentially ) be alright with or encourage them to take on a third #or a forth … it all depends really! but she is still flexible in a lot of ways romantically #anyway!! i hope this makes some semblance of sense!!#i have many thoughts about mitzi’s love life and her romantic relationships and grief #so i tried to put a sprinkle of all that in here since it’s relevant to the topic #while also avoiding tangents!!!#in the end i think i’m a little confusing but get the points across regardless so <3 i’ll stop messing with this and just post it already #thank you for wanting me to go crazy and talk about mitzi may AND her shipping scene #( also forgot to add this but mitzi loves a person who will take photos with her or be photographed BY her #she’s big on photos … and a man who’s depressed. but that’s kinda obvious given her love interests lmao )

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crescenthistory · 18 days ago

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Hi Carina! Don’t know if this is too random to ask but what is your experience being a student in London? I am thinking about doing my master’s there but as an international student and I really don’t know what to expect.

hi there lovely!! not too random at all, i'm happy to help<33

keep in mind now that i have wanted to study in london since i was literally 6 years old, so my experience is coloured by the naivety of having a dream lmao. additionally, i'm from norway, which isn't that far away and has a similar culture + everyone here is fluent in english, so the change isn't that drastic for me.

i would say studying in london is fucking great IF:

you want the full study experience

you are getting into an industry/sector where london is relevant (e.g. i'm studying history and there are loads of history in london to be studied + the uk are very influential in the discipline)

you enjoy a rigorous education

you LOVE to study and enjoy the city life

the last point is particularly important, because the biggest downside to studying in london is the economic one – do not underestimate how expensive tuition and housing is for an international student. you HAVE to love your master's, writing essays, deadlines, studying and being in london, if not it will not be worth it.

if you don't really like studying but feel like you should/have to, or if you don't really enjoy the big city but want to get away from home, then london is not for you. there are loads of cheaper, quieter places to study that still give you the study abroad feel and distance. on the other hand, if you are passionate and dedicated, then most universities in london (in my experience) will truly foster that like no other. i feel like my ambition is fuelled and supported thoroughly by my uni, and to anyone who share my mindset of adoring what you do and loving life in a big hustling city, then it is such a great choice.

in terms of what to expect, here are some things off the top of my head that you might not be informed about:

everything is very systemised here – you have a personal tutor that sees you through the term, you have a personalised online portal that you access and hand in everything through, you have very specific forms to fill out in cases of disability, illness or mitigating circumstances

you can get a lot through the uni, though you should usually apply early (talking dorms, scholarships, gym memberships, disability help, a general practitioner, a therapist, etc.)

some degrees have a majority of home students while others have a majority of international students, and it can be beneficial to figure out what the case is for your master's

there is quite a lot of pub life going on, but in my experience there isn't really any pressure to drink. though, going out will make making friends easier, but most people are very willing to subsitute that with coffee or study dates

most professors are super passionate about what they do and are willing to take you on for extra support/tutoring

most graduate teaching assistants are tired beyond belief and will not be much help lmao (with exceptions, @ tom the light of my life)

i have no idea if this was too much or too little compared with what you wanted to know. please let me know (through asks or dms) if you have any more questions! i am more than happy to talk about it 🫂

#carina chats #carina is a student #student life in london

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catboybiologist · 1 year ago

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I'm trans! Here's a way-too-long ramble on my internal thoughts on that!

My other posts on this:

https://www.tumblr.com/catboybiologist/725852054829023232/im-going-to-document-some-things-about-my?source=share

https://www.tumblr.com/catboybiologist/725851397783011328/the-short-answer-is-no-but-im-gonna-have-a?source=share

So yay I’m trans! Which like, is neither unexpected nor abnormal for the community I’ve fostered here, so I’m guessing most of y’all’s reactions is just a “hey cool”. But, you see the online side of me, not the irl side, so there’s still a lot of thoughts to sort out on my end. So I’m dumping a lot of thoughts here to sort all that out. And hoooly shit, it got very long, and I still feel like I have more to say… but yeah. If you wanna hear some perspectives on my relation to gender, transness, and femboy culture, read on!

I guess the best way I can think to style this is as an interview with an imaginary third person, sooo…. Bold text is questions I can imagine people having LOL

So what’s my own personal relationship with the term femboy, catboy, and gendered terminology in general? Is the name of your accounts gonna change?

Short answer, no. I like the name CatboyBiologist. “Catboy” itself is a term that is completely untethered from gender at this point to me. Tbqh, the “cat” part feels more wrong than the boy part- as time goes on, I’ve generally ditched the cat ears for most of my outfits as I take them a bit more seriously. Maybe that’ll change when my transition actually starts, but for now, CatboyBiologist stays, and the femboy related language stays in all of my own past posts (keyword, past- more on that in a bit).

I’m not gonna be updating my approach to pronouns. Any pronouns do just fine, I’m sending a vibe into the world and pronouns are my feedback as to what other people interpret that vibe is. Default to they/them if you don’t know what to do with that.

I will be updating my pinned post to link all of these posts, but mostly copy/paste the information from before. That might take a moment cuz I’m lazy, tbh.

And let’s get something else out of the way.

I’m not socially transitioning yet, and probably won’t for a while.

Which, I think leads to a lot of follow up:

Well, why not?

I present fully male and masculine on a day to day basis, and look the part too. Part of it is just this looks insecurity. The mask stays on in my pictures for a reason. Beyond just facial hair (which grows aggressively on me and always shows some shadow), my face looks pretty masculine overall. It takes time to look the way I do in my posts. I wanna give my face and body some time to change so I can look more femme in more casual ways before I present it to the world.

Beyond that, I’m also just worried about being “accepted” as femme straight off the bat. Implicitly, I know this will be easier if I already have some small amounts of physical feminization down my belt.

There’s two main environments that worry me: family, and professionally. Family is a weird hot mess grey area that is too personal to talk about here, but the professional atmosphere is certainly going to be a bit… weird. I live in an accepting geographic region, and around people who are very outspokenly trans supportive…. But most of whom are cishet and simply don’t have a lot of experience seeing or working around trans people. I’m more afraid of being seen as “trans first, biologist second” as far as my career is concerned, than I am about outright transphobia. I know this will never fully go away, and given that I’m 6’2”, I’ll probably never “fully” pass- but I’d at least like people to implicitly read my as femme on a gut level before I start changing how I present that way. One thing my irl femboy experience has shown me is that, even if people can “clock” you intellectually, the way their gut instinct reads you affects whether they treat you as masc or femme. I hope that makes sense on some level. Of course its always going to be an awkward shift, but I hope some time on HRT will make it less awkward.

I’ve come out to one person that doesn’t know about this online persona, or the depths of my queerness. They straight up told me they were shocked. They were incredibly supportive, but they told me they didn’t see it coming at all. And they already knew that I “crossdressed occasionally”. So that’s kinda what I’m working with here.

Essentially, I’m not actually truly “transitioning” in a real sense yet. More than that, I feel like I’m getting the ball rolling. If there’s anything I learned in my research, it’s that HRT takes a while, much longer than anyone expects (suppressing my rant about how the media cherrypicks people in early transition for trans representation and the effect that has on public perception). Two years is often cited as the “end” point, but based on both scientific and anecdotal accounts, that is wildly untrue and variable. I also know that the first changes onset quickly (skin and mood, most notably), but that overall body shape changes sometimes take a VERY long time to start and progress. So to be quite honest, I barely feel like I’m transitioning yet, I’m just laying groundwork for the future.

So yeah. I’m gonna be boymoding for a bit. Possibly a year or more. Even for the people who know, I’ve still asked them to address me as he/him or they/them, and use my masculine name for now (haven’t even really decided on a femme name yet, although I have ideas [open to suggestions as well]).

Wait, so why address it online at all?

Put simply, honesty. I’m displaying a lot of selfies and experimentation with my look here, and I want to make it abundantly clear what I’m doing to have an effect on that. People have asked me if I’m on HRT in comments before, and like, I’m not gonna lie about that. Might as well also make a shitpost, a data gathering post, and a too-long ramble about it as well (which you’re reading now!).

There are a LOT of body image issues in femboy spaces (and trans spaces too!), often among very young people. While I have no issue with people on HRT continuing to call themselves a femboy (more on that in a bit), I do think transparency on that matter is helpful for those body image issues.

So to make it abundantly clear: all of my selfies and pictures that I’m labeling and tagging as “femboy” are pre-HRT. In the future, everything I tag with “trans” is post-HRT. I still got 1-2 weeks before actually starting, and I’m still going to use the femboy tag for any outfits I post during that time. The moment an estradiol pill hits my mouth, though, new pics will use trans tags.

Posts that relate to discussion of the interplay of the communities, and how I view myself within them, I’ll tag with both.

Which leads to another follow up question. This one isn’t about me specifically, but it’s my hot take about a certain brand of trans discourse I’ve seen around (mostly on reddit tbh):

Why would someone who knows they’re mtf trans willingly call themselves a femboy and/or request people to “misgender” them?

So this is actually gonna be striking a nerve with me, and I know I’m gonna kinda be strawmanning here by arguing against the ghost of reddit comments past. I’m not gonna try to dig any of them up in the internet archive, but they are sentiments I’ve seen multiple times.

I’ve seen this question almost word for word in the comments of trans subreddits multiple times. Imma be blunt, and it’s maybe gonna sound a little mean. If this thought is going through your head, you’re likely way more sensitive and particular about labels than most people. And that’s okay! Ask people to address you how you want, you deserve that respect! But the real answer to this question is that many people simply don’t mind being called whatever label is most useful or familiar to themselves in various contexts.

The moment that it becomes completely unacceptable is when someone does actually change their pronouns, name, presentation, etc, and people still address them as “male” or “femboy”. That is completely the fuck out of line, and if you don’t agree, fuck off.

Why does this strike a little bit of a nerve with me? Well, the “conclusion” I saw reached in these trans spaces multiple times when the subject was brought up was annoying as hell. That conclusion was that the only or primary reason that people labeled themselves a femboy, even while on HRT… was to sell their onlyfans. My fucking god, seriously? This is just conservative rhetoric. Luckily, on tumblr, it seems that people are a lot more accepting towards people using whatever language they like to describe themselves, which I’ve enjoyed a lot.

I’ve also had a lot of hate towards “fencesitting” directed at me on reddit, from trans people, for calling myself a femboy. I can’t remember it verbatim, but I very distinctly recall getting a DM that went something like “I fucking hate femboys, just transition already. You’re making us (transfemmes) look bad.” So yeah. Bit of a sore spot.

Yadda yadda yadda the personal journey shit

If I can be real for a moment…. In an ideal world, I would still want to be a part time femboy. Even moreso than the sheer utility of it all (eg, enjoy cis male privilege when I want, but still get treated more femme in certain contexts), it feels almost more profound to fuck with gender norms without sitting on one side of the gender line or another. But I can’t really ignore what I’ve described as my “mental resting state”- a baseline crackle of dysphoria that fills the space in my head when there’s nothing else to fill it. It’s easily distracted, but its always there, and I can’t imagine living my life that way anymore.

I’ve pretty much known I was trans since I was about 12, and had a realization that puberty was just starting to hit me, and I hated it. I suppressed it deeply, for many, many reasons that I don’t think I want to share here. But it made a lot of other mental health struggles in my life a lot worse, even if I didn’t consciously acknowledge that’s what was happening. By the time I was willing to consciously acknowledge it, I realized that my dysphoria wasn’t so bad as to dive in right away. But, I made moves to stabilize my life overall, which have been massively beneficial to me in other ways as well.

During the pandemic, I found myself living alone for the first time ever. So during the pandemic, in one last ditch effort to try to convince myself I wasn’t trans, I delved into femboy aesthetics to try and “just be a feminine man”.

That failed.

So yeah, here I am. I have a wonderful queer community both irl and online, a meagre but stable income, health insurance that has great coverage for trans care, and accepting people around me in my life. It’s long overdue. Maybe I’ll beat myself up for waiting so long and masculinizing so much as a result, but I don’t think I really could have done it any other way.

This all said, I don’t actually really consider myself a woman yet. I’m sure many of you are aware of two different ways transfemmes view themselves(and trans people in general, but using a transfemme perspective here):

-Some view themselves as having always been girls or women, but took some time to realize it and make their body more comfortable for themselves with that information.

-Others view themselves as boys or men who made efforts to become women later.

I fall strongly in the second line of thinking for myself. For my own personal experiences, even though I have felt dysphoria for a long time, I don’t really think I’m “actually” a woman yet. I don’t know what my identity as a woman looks like yet. But I deeply want to discover and create who that person is, and there’s no way to do that without transitioning.

B but… BASIC BIOLOGY!!!!!

How many biology degrees do you have? I got a BS and an MS, and I’m working on my PhD. I’m sure you’ve brought a similar level of expertise to this discussion.

But seriously, I could genuinely write an entire fucking essay about how studying biology has influenced my views on this subject, but honestly, that’s an entirely different topic. But tl;dr is that bioessentialism is brainrot, and if someone tries to use essentialist language to “justify” someone’s transness (or gender in general)… well, I think they’re wrong. Plain and simple. We don’t say someone isn’t “really able to see” if they put glasses in front of their eyes.

I’m stopping myself before I write more here, because this warrants another post or even a fucking video essay, to be quite honest. But yeah. Biology based.

Conclusion?

Uhhhh… in conclusion, I’m not particular about language or pronouns you use for me, I’m making posts about it anyways to ensure honesty associated with my selfies, if you’re transphobic jump of the tallest bridge you can find. I think that about covers it.

#femboy #transitioning #trans #transgender #mtf #cross dressing

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gallifreyinstituteforlearning · 9 months ago

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What does a traditional family/House dynamic look like, especially in terms of children?

[Does the whole House live in one large building, or is the House more of a common family space? Are children usually cared for by their parents, or is child minding more of a communal responsibility along the lines of "it takes a village to raise a child"? Etc.] < please treat these questions as additional questions like the ones on a school test that the teacher puts in to make sure that the student understands the original big question. I only included them so you could know what I meant when I say "House/family dynamic", because I know that can be confusing

Gosh, I wish you'd have written my exams.

What does a traditional family/House dynamic look like?

Houses are both residences and familial hubs containing a lot of related Gallifreyans. Here's what the dynamic typically looks like, especially when it comes to raising children:

🏠 Brief House Overview

First, a bit of context - Gallifreyan Houses are huge, often sentient structures. They're designed to support entire extended families, often containing multiple generations.

Interior Design: Houses often have high ceilings, large rooms, and sprawling corridors. This setup is on purpose - designed to make newly loomed Gallifreyans feel like children (many loomlings are created with fully-grown adult bodies).

Living Spaces: Houses contain individual bedrooms, communal living spaces, and operational facilities such as the Loomshed. They also have their own crypts for dead House members.

Animated Features: The Houses often have animated furniture, which, if not properly trained, might chase people around. Paintings whisper at passing cousins, and Druges, large automated humanoid servants, roam the premises, performing various duties.

👨‍👩‍👦‍👦 Family Dynamics

Gallifreyan families tend to be large and very hierarchical, with cousins, aunts, uncles, and other relatives living under the same roof. There's a strong thread of communal responsibility and shared upbringing when it comes to childrene (childe = singular, childrene = plural):

Childcare: Childrene are typically cared for by a combination of their parents and other relatives. Parents are present and will look after their child, performing the usual trips out to the galactic zoo or whatever.

Education: The responsibility for education and upbringing is communal, with older House members playing a significant role in brainbuffing (the educational process designed to shape young Gallifreyan minds). This is supported by the help of Avatroids - mechanical beings who were (basically) enslaved by the Time Lords. The boy Doctor had his own personal Avatroid named Badger, whose job it was to protect and educate him.

Communal Responsibilities: Given the House's size and structure, childcare is often a collective effort. The extended family takes part in guiding the children's education and development, with the aim of instilling a sense of duty and obedience ie. House values.

🧒 Children and Brainbuffing

As mentioned, childrene undergo brainbuffing, a rigorous educational process that equips them with a ton of knowledge before they step out into the big wide world. This process involves both formal schooling and informal training at home.

Early Education: During the first eight years, childrene are educated in writing, culture, mathematics, and science, surpassing the knowledge level of many human college students. Extended family members play a significant role in this process.

Traditional Activities: Despite the emphasis on duty, childrene can happily engage in activities like lushberrying and playing with onion dolls. However, there are no playgrounds on Gallifrey due to the focus on obedience.

Communal Upbringing: The entire House contributes to the upbringing, fostering a strong sense of community and collective responsibility.

🔥Then Comes Life

At the age of eight, children are snatched away from all of this and put into Chapter Academies away from their Houses and families for around 200 years. Bummer.

🏫 So ...

Gallifreyan Houses blend family living with communal responsibilities. They focus on fostering a sense of duty and service, with a significant emphasis on education and discipline. While parents play a crucial role in raising childrene, the communal approach ensures that every child has a network of support and guidance throughout their early years, which is then completely turned on its head.

Hope that helped! 😃

More content ... →📫Got a question? | 📚Complete list of Q+A and factoids →😆Jokes |🩻Biology |🗨️Language |🕰️Throwbacks |🤓Facts →🫀Gallifreyan Anatomy and Physiology Guide (pending) →⚕️Gallifreyan Emergency Medicine Guides →📝Source list (WIP) →📜Masterpost If you're finding your happy place in this part of the internet, feel free to buy a coffee to help keep our exhausted human conscious. She works full-time in medicine and is so very tired 😴

#doctor who #gil #gallifrey institute for learning #dr who #dw eu #gallifrey #gallifreyans #ask answered #whoniverse

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hanzajesthanza · 2 years ago

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use #the witcher books for the witcher books tag

hi there! if you are a fan of the witcher in general or specifically the witcher book series, you may have found it difficult to find book-related art, textposts, edits, and other posts in the main #witcher or #the witcher tags on tumblr, as adaptations and non-adaptations also bearing the witcher name (e.g., netflix or games) tend to dominate those tags.

the results of the poll conducted earlier this week concluded that #the witcher books should be the tag (at least, here on tumblr) to both find and post posts related to the book series.

as the tag designations stand:

#the witcher books : books-related posts | all languages #wiedźmin : all mediums | polish language content, or posts with no language (e.g., visual art or edits, which would not hinder a search)

of course, it is up to each person's individual discretion whether or not to use the book tag, especially if their posts contain or are about multiple mediums, but there have typically been few issues with keeping the tag book-centered, so this isn't really a worry as of now.

the reason for this post is to let people in the witcher fandom know that there is a books tag, if they are looking for books-focused content, or want to post books-focused content themselves.

if you are a fan of the witcher (any medium) or post about the witcher, i encourage you to consider reblogging and sharing this post to inform the community of how to use these tags.

and under the readmore, you can find:

the poll results and reasoning behind these tag designations

a quick tutorial on how to search a tag on tumblr (because there is a difference between searching a tag and searching a phrase).

how this was decided

after both a poll and conversations amongst the community, many came to the conclusion to use #the witcher books as the tag for content about the book series.

here, i will describe the poll results and boost some voices and opinions i thought were significant in this decision.

poll results

there were two primary contenders for book witcher tags on tumblr: #wiedźmin and #the witcher books.

#the witcher books won with nearly 40% of all responders, and together, over 70% of all responders were in favor of either only using #the witcher books or using both tags.

this decision, however, does not mean that one should not tag their witcher books posts with #wiedźmin. the decision was for #wiedźmin to remain an all mediums tag, and for #the witcher books to be the book community's main go-to to post and search book-related content. but read the below for more context.

commentary and opinions

in this post, i also wanted to include some reasoning behind this decision and foster discussion within the community about this topic. (as a note, i will be using the term 'anglophone' in this post now to mean those who speak english but do not speak polish)

the word wiedźmin is literally just the non-translated "witcher," and thus applies to all mediums of the witcher: books, games, netflix, 2001 film ("hexer" in english), musical, you name it.

generally, it was expressed that #wiedźmin should be a place for polish language posts because there are already so many places for english posts, and it can be difficult to specifically find posts in polish for this reason. for many polish fans seeking polish-language posts and other polish fans or creators to connect with, it can be aggravating to see a polish tag appropriated for english-language posts.

and with the alternative of using an english tag for english-language posts, the choice seems like a no-brainer here.

additionally, the broader community already has some history with anglophone fans appropriating the polish name for something (or someone) to mean that thing (or character) in "only this specific medium" ... yes, jaskier, i am talking about jaskier, whose polish name and tag seemed to become synonymous with netflix's jaskier overnight, with little room left for the books or games jaskier... and suddenly, the tag became unusable for polish posts.

of course, this opinion was not expressed by every single member of the community, but by several mutuals, friends, and followers who pointed out that it is important for polish witcher fandom to have its own space.

thus, #wiedźmin should generally be prioritized for polish posts or posts with no language (e.g., visual art or edits, posts which would not hinder a search).

intentions

edit, july 10th, 2023: i have been thinking about this and i realized that i should have a disclaimer for this post, so here that is.

this is just what i have found from my own initiative and responses i encountered when asking around—i in no way speak for any entire community, and i never intended to make this post to be representative of any entire population.

i am aware, of course, that some don’t care about finding books content, that for some english-language content in #wiedźmin isn’t a bother, that for some tumblr is not a concern to them and it’s not worth deliberating what goes in what tag.

at the same time, the majority of commentary i encountered when asking about this topic both urged to (1) have a specific place for books content only (i.e. no netflix content) and (2) have a specific place for polish-language content. the commentary i speak of were received via tumblr replies, tumblr asks, discord messages, tags left on the initial post, tags left on the poll post, and and poll results.

all in all, it’s just tumblr and it doesn’t matter much in the grand scheme of life. it’s definitely not the end of the world if tags are used in a way that people disagree about; however, let me be clear about what motivated me to make this post:

my goals with this post were the following:

make tumblr more usuable for fans of the witcher books: both for fans who are interested in “all ‘witcher’s”, and fans that are only interested in the books. (personally, i appreciate organization and i like to use tags to organize and find the content i am interested in).

casually inquire as to how the english-speaking witcher fans on tumblr can support or improve the experiences of polish-speaking fans on tumblr.

create a post to boost visibility; show that the tags #the witcher books and #wiedźmin exist.

my intentions were NOT:

assume authority and tell everyone what to do

assume leadership and speak for everyone involved

assume everyone deeply cares about this topic

i made this post because i have not seen anyone else speak and speak up about this topic, and the very polite and kind anonymous ask i received also made me think some action should be taken as a help to the community, especially during this time of netflix’s season 3 premiering.

the reason why i am making this edit is that after some reflection i realized it is not obvious and does not go without saying why i made this post, and i always want to be clear with my intentions.

i would also like to be clear that this is my own reflection which prompted this edit, and i have thankfully not received any hateful comments or anything like that—this is just me thinking to myself and saying i could have done better when explaining why i made this post.

how to use tag search on tumblr

a question raised during this poll was, what about when non-book posts tag #the witcher, but mention "books" somewhere in their post, so it gets put into #the witcher books tag?

to which i must point out, there is a difference between searching a phrase on tumblr and searching a tag on tumblr.

searching a tag will send you to that tag, where you can see all posts tagged with that tag.

searching a phrase will return a search, where you can see all posts containing the keywords in your search.

[desktop]

on desktop, it’s very simple:

just navigate to the searchbar, and type in the tag you want to browse.

to search the tag, click the highlighted "Go to #the witcher books".

this will send you to tumblr.com/tagged/the%20witcher%20books.

do not hit return to search the phrase, which will instead send you to tumblr.com/search/the%20witcher%20books

[mobile]

i follow #the witcher books tag:

which makes it more streamlined to open the tag, which looks like this:

oh, a familiar face at the bottom there, how nice

by the way, the very nice featured art in the tag header right now is by @onlymagpie! here is the post to reblog if you wanted to see the featured post of the tag

but you can also navigate to the tag in other ways.

for instance, if i open the search tab, it leads me to a search fork much like the desktop version.

i can either search the phrase, which is not what i want, as it will return posts that have not explicitly tagged #the witcher books, but rather all posts which include the keyphrases “witcher” and “books”:

or, i can search the tag.

to do this, you have to either select the "Go to #the witcher books" in the search function, as per it is on desktop

or, you can also go to “tags” from the search you returned, and select the tag you want to browse:

then, you will end up in the tag (see above).

conclusion

this is how you navigate tags and searches on tumblr. though somewhat complicated, one has the choice whether to search all posts containing certain keywords words, or only posts tagged with a tag with the keywords in the right order.

#the witcher books #the witcher #the witcher netflix #witcher #my apologies this is a little late but i wanted to spend time making this post + add the tutorial

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chernayawidow · 2 years ago

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Indigenous Australians ARE BLACK. I’ve just come from tiktok after seeing lots of Americans say that First Nation people are not black. THERE ARE OTHER PLACES AND CULTURES IN THE WORLD OUTSIDE OF THE USA.

I myself am white, so if any Indigenous Australians are uncomfortable with me saying any of this please let me know and I’ll take it down. Or if any terms/information needs correction please please please let me know.

I have friends who are light skinned Indigenous and they should NOT have to defend their heritage against a country of ignorant fools. My primary example is Malakai and Missy from Heartbreak High, an AUSTRALIAN show, who are having their heritage erased because they’re not “black enough”. How the fuck are people saying that in 2023?

If your country cared enough to acknowledge the existence of others in the world, you would know that Indigenous Australians were subjected to the Stolen Generation. What’s that, you ask? Where Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children were stolen from their families by governments, churches and welfare bodies to be raised in institutions, fostered out or adopted by non-Indigenous families, as a way of white washing them and erasing their culture and heritage.

TW: Racism, Death/Murder, Abuse - sexual and physical - (not graphic but mentioned)

They were abused, killed and raped by white people, as well as being forced to have their children as a way of “breeding out the black”. So when you guys say “they’re not black enough”, it’s one of the most disgusting and insensitive things you can say. The amount of pain Indigenous Australians have suffered is astounding, and they’re finally getting some on-screen representation. But here come you Americans, just shitting all over them. African American representation is extremely low, now guess what? Indigenous Australian representation is even lower. To the point where you guys don’t even know they exist.

To this day, they experience systemic racism at the hands of government, and especially the police. Not only that, but Australia is still fighting to change the date of “Australia Day” so that it doesn’t fall on Invasion Day. They’re trying to reclaim land that is rightfully theirs, as well as protect and maintain the preservation of what little history they have left. So before you go shitting on the oldest and longest running Indigenous culture in the world, do your fucking research.

#malakai mitchell #indigenous Australians #aboriginal #aboriginals #indigenous culture #Australia #poc #heartbreak high #the stolen generation #torres strait islanders

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thessalian · 6 months ago

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Thess vs The Shooting

About recent news: I'm not going to enjoy the next few news cycles very much? But while this might be problematic short term, I don't think it's going to be the disaster people say it is. At least, not if everyone follows the advice that has been given all along - don't decide your vote doesn't matter, don't decide that third-party protest votes will be your best course of action, just vote and vote blue.

Here's why:

Look, at this point, everyone that's going to vote for Trump is going to vote for Trump no matter what - there is no getting them off that particular Titanic. Marginals? I'm sorry, but Trump does not appeal to marginals. Trump appeals to ... well, MAGA types, and there are a few too many of those. Getting shot at does not make one a viable political candidate, no matter how many people talk conspiracy.

And let's face it - Trump is not going to pull the "Biden conspired to have me killed" card. Not because he doesn't want to (and no one's going to gainsay it because the man who allegedly fired the shots is apparently dead), but because it would probably have that stupid decision the Supreme Court made about what kinds of immunity a president has being relevant sooner than Trump wants it to be. He wants to be able to pick up that tactical nuke that the Supreme Court dropped outside the White House. If anything, if he gets the presidency, he's going to pick it up and use it to round up political enemies "for his own protection" because "he got shot at once, you know". But that entirely relies on his being elected. Which, because of the above, can be stopped by the simple method of a bunch of people actually getting out and voting blue in November.

Plus ... seriously, this is going to eat a couple of news cycles and die no matter how hard Trump tries to capitalise on this. He's currently yelling that America must "stand united" when he's the one who went to such lengths to deepen the divides in the first place, but at the end of the day, it's a piece of news, and most of the news will move on. The ... I don't remember what the American equivalent of GB News is (the one that's worse than Fox), but that one'll run conspiracy theories for as long as it's allowed, and it'll be all over Truth Social and probably Twitter, but news cycles are way different than they were when I was a kid. They blow up fast and blow over faster, and this probably won't be any different.

Basically, I'm not going to panic. I'll keep a half an eye on it, but at the end of the day, news is theatre at this point. It's "what makes good TV" or whatever. It's put together by people who believe (sometimes rightly) that the populace has the collective attention span of concussed goldfish and about as much memory capacity. There's a lot we don't know, and news outlets will spend a fair bit of time analysing what we do know (and why we aren't able to know more, and I'm looking at the ones who apparently killed the alleged shooter, because now we can't ask that individual the kinds of questions that would indicate whether it was politically motivated or it was just like that guy who shot at Reagan to impress Jodie Foster). But after they've wrung out the last bits of information, it's going to fade away no matter what Trump does to keep it alive. And he's basically painted himself into a corner there because he's got that whole "toxic masculinity" thing going on and any attempts to drag out how brave he was in the wake of being shot at after the fact? They're going to look like whining.

But it's going to be a fairly gross week in the news while this gets processed, I'll give you that. I just can't afford to panic until the world proves me wrong about how shit like the news works.

Anyway, life goes on. (I admit to some very uncharitable thoughts about that whole situation in the immediate, though. I generally find it distasteful to wish death on anyone, but I do admit to being uncharitable enough as a person to have a few exceptions, if you see what I mean. But I'm not going to harp on about it at the end of the day because it doesn't help.)

#Thess on politics #Thess on the news

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ranchthoughts · 2 years ago

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thoughts on genre, tropes, Bad Buddy, and My School President

and here she is! the full text all together, not split into the three parts previously posted here: part 1, part 2, part 3

I also go more in detail about a lot of the terms and concepts I use here (indexes, conventions, genres, intertextuality, etc) in this post here, in case you would like more context

[strap yourselves in, this is loooooong]

The BL “genre” has so many conventions - in narrative, characterization, themes, settings, iconography, filmic techniques, and of course, tropes.

Bad Buddy and MSP do not lack these genre conventions (both are stories about boys in love, both are set in schools which is very common in Thai BLs especially, both explore a budding relationship and other social and emotional problems of youth, both hit familiar plot beats like confessions and narrative/emotional climaxes, both utilize many editing and sound effect techniques seen in other BLs, and both deploy many BL tropes like cheek kisses, head pats, forced proximity, looming, etc.). However! Bad Buddy and MSP are atypical in their deployment of genre conventions, especially with regards to trope usage and pacing - they go against genre and trope expectations to subvert seme/uke roles and dynamics and they space their narrative beats differently than other shows. As a result, the shows feel familiar but also fresh to BL audiences.

Bad Buddy, MSP, and tropes

BL tropes index so much information to audiences familiar with the genre (e.g., the nature of the relationship between characters, the seme/uke dynamics, other social information, etc.). Bad Buddy and MSP take these familiar indexes, with their well established meanings, and mix them up, give them new contexts, and use what they normally tell us about the characters, social context, relationship dynamic, etc. to tell a new story.

There are SO many examples of this so I have decided to focus on two “subcategories” of tropes: the faen fatale and tropes which are strongly associated with seme/uke dynamics.

Faen Fatales

In most BLs, the faen fatale (thanks to AbsoluteBL for the term) is a character (male or female) whose sole purpose is to drive a wedge between the main pair, often serving as a catalyst for their relationship/confession, and who generally does not get much character development or identity of their own.

In Bad Buddy, Ink seems like a classic faen fatale: she is introduced as an old high school friend that Pat was interested in and Pran was jealous of because of that fact, and now in the present day of the show Pat pursues her again and Pran is once again jealous, especially since it seems Pat is succeeding (they get food together, they hang out a lot, Pat wears the bracelet Ink gave him in high school, etc.). Pran believes that Pat likes Ink and that they are well on their way to being together, if they aren’t together already. Pat even tells Pran he likes Ink. However, it becomes clear quite quickly that Ink is not a typical faen fatale. Her interactions with both boys feel platonic, she shows just as much interest in fostering a friendship with Pran, and when Pat uses Pa’s patented “Four Ways to Tell if Someone Likes You,” Ink fails in every category. She does act a a catalyst to Pat and Pran’s romantic relationship in some ways (e.g., Pat using Pa’s patented Four Ways he learned to assess Ink to realize his own feelings for Pran), and she does act as a barrier to their relationship as some of Pran’s hesitation post their ep.5 kiss comes from his understanding that Pat has a crush on Ink (though of course their family and friends present the main barrier). However, Ink has her own personality, interests, and crucially, her own romantic arc. She is a fully fleshed out character who never had anything but platonic feelings for either lead: ergo, a subversion of the faen fatale trope.

In MSP, there are a couple of potential faen fatales, but neither develop that way in the end. Sound is introduced as Tinn’s rival, and romance media logic would suggest he will fulfill a love rival role in the show, competing with Tinn for Gun’s affections (especially as Sound is interested in music like Gun and he joins Chinzilla). Even Tiw suggests Tinn should look out for Sound moving in on Gun. However, Sound never shows interest in Gun and quickly gets acclimated into the band, only briefly presenting a threat to Tinn and Gun’s relationship when Tiw witnesses them having a seemingly intimate moment but that is sorted by the end of the episode. Like Ink, Sound never has anything other than platonic feelings for either lead and ends up with his own romantic arc. The other possible faen fatale in MSP is Nook, though she is present so briefly. I think other shows would have stretched out her plot line more and had her fill more of a faen fatale role. As it stands in MSP: Gun sees her give a gift to Tinn and compliment him, he gets jealous and snaps at Tinn, and then the show/Tinn immediately reveal to us and to Gun that it was a case of mistaken identity (Yo was catfishing with Tinn’s picture). In a matter of minutes, Nook went from being a faen fatale set up to simply someone involved in another character’s arc, part of a problem that Tinn and Gun could work on together.

Neither Bad Buddy nor MSP have faen fatale characters, though there are characters that could, and indeed seem to be set up to, fill that role. Both shows subvert our expectations and BL tropes by having potential faen fatales be uninterested in either lead and possess more character development than most other examples of the trope (including their own, completely separate, romantic arcs). In the case of Ink, this also subverts typical BL handling of female characters, who tend to be few and far between and generally relegated to the under-developed role of faen fatale.

Seme/uke Tropes

Most BL shows can be read through a lens of seme/uke dynamics, which originated in yaoi. The seme is the “pursuer” character and the uke is the “pursued”. There are certain physical (height, skin colour, etc.), social (age, wealth, social capital, etc.), and personality (active vs. passive, extroverted vs. introverted, flirtier vs. shyer) markers which are typically associated with either the seme or the uke. For example, semes tend to be taller, wealthier, older, flirtier, tanner, more active, and have a higher social status, while ukes tend to be shorter, poorer, younger, shyer, paler, and have a lower social status. “Seme” and “uke” roles are also sometimes conflated with masculinity and femininity (semes are “masculine” and ukes are “feminine”) and sexual preferences (semes are dominant and tops and ukes are submissive and bottoms). There are also tropes associated with either the seme or the uke, like ukes typically give cheek kisses and semes forehead kisses.

Thus, things like height, age, wealth, personality, presumed sexual preference, and the role they take in tropes can index the character’s status as a seme or a uke, and in turn the character’s identity as a seme or uke in the narrative (pursuer vs. pursued) indexes a character’s personality, sexual preferences, etc., however unrealistic and simplistic that is in real life. In a BL, we would expect the seme (pursuer) and uke (pursued) characters to exhibit most, if not all, of the associated seme or uke traits and roles in tropes, though this is not always true (and some BLs have little to no seme/uke dynamics at all).

In terms of physical, social, and personality markers in Bad Buddy, Pat exhibits slightly more “seme” traits than Pran, like his larger size and more “rugged” and “typical” masculinity compared to Pran’s neatness. However, both Pat and Pran take the seme or uke role in tropes about the same amount of time, with Pran having several significant moments where he embodies the seme role (looming over Pat, licking his fingers, drying his hair, etc., not to mention the post-sex scene in ep.11) and Pat many significant moments where he embodies a uke or even “feminine” role (casting himself as the girlfriend at the bus stop, being clingy, pretending to be sick so Pran will give him a sponge bath, etc.). In fact, tropes often happen twice, with Pat and Pran taking turns in the seme and uke role (e.g., both take turns cleaning the other’s face, both cook for the other, both kiss the other’s cheek, etc.). Furthermore, and I’ve spoken about this before here: both Pran and Pat deliberately take on the seme role during their ep.7 Flirt-Off bet (”whoever falls in love first loses”). To win the bet, they have to be the pursuer (i.e., seme), and thus spend the episode taking it in turns to exhibit the seme role in tropes (Pat takes off his shirt multiple times, Pran looms over Pat, they wash each other’s faces, they take the seme roles with Ink and Wai at the noodle shop to make the other jealous, etc.), thus also spending the episode taking it in turns to fulfill the uke role in tropes. The fact that the seme and uke roles in Bad Buddy are so interchangeable and balanced (they sometimes ever play the narrative roles of pursuer and pursued at the same time) demonstrates the show’s upending of traditional seme/uke dichotomies.

In MSP, Tinn and Gun are pretty much the perfect seme and uke in terms of physical and social markers: Tinn is taller, wealthier, has a higher social status, and even has a female “faen fatale” (more typical for seme characters), while Gun is shorter, poorer, from a marginalized club at school, and has a male “faen fatale” (more typical for uke characters). Some one on Tumblr (and I cannot for the life of me find this post again) mentioned that Tinn is a little “feminine” coded when it comes to romance (he is the dreamer, the romantic, always imagining romantic situations), while Gun is more what we’d think of as “masculine” when it comes to romance (more brusque, less sappy), though I am not sure how applicable these types of divisions are to BL. In term of preference markers, there isn’t much sexual content to go off of, but MSP does mention the TinnGun vs GunTinn divide in ep.12, never coming down on either side, and one of the things the homophobic teacher says is that he thought Gun was more “masculine” so he is surprised to see him dating a boy. Overall, the show deliberately eschews and criticizes the association of top/bottom or masculine/feminine with the pair. Furthermore, Tin talks a lot about wanting to be Gun’s boyfriend, to belong to Gun - and as @cinna-bin points out here, for a genre that equates seme with dominance, the one who shows and has ownership of the other, it is pretty subversive to have the seme character in the narrative express a desire to be “owned”. Like Pat and Pran, Tinn and Gun are fairly egalitarian when it comes to which role they take in tropes (Tinn catches Gun when he falls, Gun touches Tinn’s chin constantly, they both kiss the other’s cheek). I’ve talked about this here too, but often Tinn will imagine a moment with himself in the seme role (e.g., wiping Gun’s face) that won’t come to fruition, but when it does happen in real life, the trope is reversed and Gun takes the seme role (e.g., when it happens in real life, Gun wipes Tinn’s mouth). In MSP, the deployment of tropes is more about natural moment and real life, and less adhering to strict role divisions. This back and forth feels more accurate, more high school - they both take it in turns to boldly initiate and then to be shy (all the aborted kiss chances, etc.).

Finally, I’d like to add that there are many moments in both Bad Buddy and MSP where the characters are aware of the romantic tropes and intentionally utilize them to further a romantic agenda. We aren’t exactly subverting tropes here, but we are playing with them deliberately and consciously in a way you don’t get in a lot of BLs so I thought it worth mentioning here. Most of these instances come in the Bad Buddy ep.7 Flirt-Off or from Tinn’s day dreams and include:

Pat employing the “drinking from a water bottle/pouring water on yourself” and “shirt off” tropes to try and get Pran hot and bothered in ep.7

Pran looming over Pat during the bet

Pat and Pran trying to make each other jealous by employing various classic tropes with Ink and Wai respectively while eating noodles (opening their water bottle, feeding them, wiping their mouth, etc.)

Pran symbolically losing the bet by wiping Pat’s mouth

Tinn imagining himself wiping Gun’s mouth

Tinn imagining a Ghost moment while cooking with Gun

Tinn making a joke about a “hot underwater kiss”

Pacing

Both MSP and Bad Buddy are also slightly unconventional when it comes to pacing. Both shows hit the standard BL narrative beats (falling for one another, confessions, first kiss, confirmation of relationship, conflict, beach eps, etc) but at unconventional timings, they utilize a lot of time skips, and they also condense plot lines which in other shows might have been much longer.

The Placement of Narrative Beats

I will focus on two of the main places where both Bad Buddy and MSP diverge from the usual BL placement of narrative beats. Firstly, the first kiss on both shows: while there is a lot of variety in the timing of first kisses for BL shows, Pat and Pran’s rooftop kiss at the beginning of ep.5 is perhaps a little earlier than usually, especially since the two do not truly confess or get together until the end of ep.7; and in MSP, their first kiss comes quite late, especially given the numerous near-kisses that happen throughout the latter half of the show. The first kiss for MSP coming in ep.12 is not unheard of for a low-heat BL and really makes sense given the tone and setting of the show (lighthearted, high school), but combined with the early confession of feelings (hinted at as early as ep.3, and fairly confirmed in ep.6) as well as those fake-out kisses makes it feel unusual.

Secondly, both shows eschew the typical ep.11 of doom structure of a BL, where ep.11 sees peak emotional angst and the narrative/plot climax, in favour of a ep.10 (and even ep.9 in Bad Buddy) of doom, an ep.11 denouement, and an ep.12 conclusion. Eps.9 and 10 in Bad Buddy are when Pat and Pran’s friends and parents, the two biggest barriers to their relationship, find out about them. Pat is shot, they learn the real story behind their parents feud, there are a lot of emotions, etc. In ep.10 of MSP, there is the finale of Hot Wave and Gun’s mother’s illness (culminating in her receiving surgery at the end of the episode). Neither show has the main couple break up in their eps. of doom, like is common in other BLs’ ep.11 of doom, though they do have their relationships tested. Ep.11 in both Bad Buddy and MSP are instead the denouement, a quieter, more introspective look at the emotions and plot event of the previous episode(s). Pat and Pran run away from their families for their “honeymoon” on the beach and come to terms with everything they’ve learned, and MSP focuses more on the aftermath of Hot Wave and the tensions and emotions among Chinzilla, though there is of course parts about Tinn and Gun’s relationship in the face of disappointment. The final ep. for both show is thus given a bit more breathing room than in other BLs - they don’t have to wrap up the emotions and plot lines of an ep.11 of doom AND conclude the series, and can instead focus on wrapping up the series and even introducing new ideas and a look into the future (there are timeskips in both ep.12s, Bad Buddy does their PatPran breakup fake out, and MSP explores homophobia).

Time Skips

While time skips aren’t unheard of in BLs, especially in the final episode, Bad Buddy and MSP’s usage of them interject a level of realism into the series that isn’t always seen. The time jump of 6 or so months at the beginning of ep.7 in Bad Buddy means the tension build of the Flirt-Off doesn’t happen over a matter of days or weeks but in fact months. Pat and Pran are stubborn, this won’t be resolved quickly, and it give time for the tension to realistically reach a breaking point. MSP features several time skips in ep.9, ep.10, and ep.12, stretching both the Hot Wave competition schedule and Tinn and Gun’s budding relationship over a much more realistic full school year, instead of pretending the competition and build up of tension or feelings could be happening over a span of weeks. Paradoxically, the fact that the shows use time skips instead of showing (either in full, in part, or in a montage) the parts they skip (the Flirt-Off, the weeks of Tinn and Gun coming closer together and Chinzilla practicing) connects to my next point: the shows aren’t afraid to speed things up sometimes. The use of time skips both slows down the narrative and emotional arcs over a longer period of time while also demonstrating that the shows feel confident in their narratives: there is no need to stretch story lines out over episodes and episodes.

Condensing Plot Lines

The most striking thing about Bad Buddy and MSP’s pacing is how fast they move through plot lines, especially compared to other shows. In Bad Buddy, the plot line where Pat and Pran are anonymously and unknowingly flirting with each other through gifts and notes left at each other’s doors could have been the plot line for most of a show, if not a whole show, but it is introduced and resolved within ep.2. Ink is introduced in ep.4 and seems to be a potential faen fatale, but by the end of ep.4 this seems somehow unlikely and by halfway through ep.5 it is confirmed that she won’t be. The Flirt-Off happens in large part off-screen, in the 6 months or so time skip between eps.6 and 7, and is shown to us and resolved in ep.7. Other shows could have spent episodes if not half the show exploring that plot line.

I've talked at length about the pacing of MSP here and a bit here - like Bad Buddy, MSP moves quickly through plot lines that might have spanned episodes or even a whole season in another show. By the end of the first episode, MSP establish that Tinn is soft and pining hard over Gun (instead of keeping up the premise that he is cold and out to get the music club), the finale of Hot Wave comes two episodes before the end, the plot lines around Gun’s mother’s health are resolved in about one episode (the conflict around Tinn keeping Gun’s mother’s illness from him is resolved in a couple of scenes, and she has surgery and is pronounced ok by the end of the episode), any jealousy plot line around Nook is resolved in two scenes, the conflict introduced by Sound joining the band is resolved in one episode, and so on. Pretty much every problem introduced at the beginning of an episode is resolved by the end.

Bad Buddy and MSP feel confident, like they know they have narrative material to spare and don’t need to stretch plot lines out with twists, miscommunication, and jealousy. Thus, they move through plot lines much more quickly than other shows would.

Both shows feel so fresh because of this - they keep things moving, they surprise us by resolving things faster than other shows would, they don’t linger in jealousy and miscommunication like many other shows do, they skip over parts that other shows might have lingered on for the biggest punch, and they break the patterns that us, the audience, have come to expect from BLs (like the ep.11 of doom). Even the progression of the relationships, which we know will be romantic and probably happy in the end (these are BLs after all) and conform vaguely to enemies-to-lovers and will-they-won’t-they conventions, stay fresh: Pat and Pran have kissed and all but confessed their feelings, but they now embark on a months long Flirt-Off bet that delays them actually getting together. We know Tinn has a crush on Gun from the end of the first ep. and we begin to see hints that Gun might like him back from ep.3 onwards, and at first the show seems like it is going to go the typical romcom route wherein Gun doesn’t realize Tinn’s crush is on him (especially with him offering to help Tinn flirt with his crush), but like I talked about in my post here, they don’t and instead have Gun know it is him Tinn has a crush on, he’s just uncertain and a bit scared. Bad Buddy and MSP are both quicker and slower than other shows: they move through plot lines without lingering, but they use time skips to create realistic long term development of the core relationships, allowing the characters to build tension, live in hesitancy, and in the case of Tinn and Gun, be realistically slow in the physical progression of their relationship.

Conclusions

Bad Buddy and MSP subvert audience expectations with regards to tropes and narratives - like their handling of the faen fatale trope (both shows give us characters that could be faen fatales, and probably would be in other shows, that do not fulfill the narrative role of a faen fatale and receive character development and arcs of their own unlike other faen fatales) and how they play with expectations surrounding seme/uke dynamics (those who embody the seme or uke role in tropes aren’t necessarily the ones who exhibit the most seme or uke physical, social or personality markers; tropes iterations are balanced and reciprocal). Both shows change up the usual BL timelines and expected pacing - they hit their peak narrative, emotional, and angst climaxes before the standard ep.11 peak, plot beats come quicker than in other shows, and story arcs that are usually dragged on in other shows are concluded more quickly. On the other hand, both shows are “slower” than other BLs in other ways, like their usage of time skips to create realistic progressions of the core relationships. As a result of these subversions of BL genre conventions, the shows are familiar but also fresh to BL audiences.

But what does this say about Bad Buddy and MSP, and the BL genre in general?

Firstly, these shows remind us again of the importance of intertextuality. Texts (and this includes television shows) are intertextual; they all refer to one another and cannot exist separately from other texts. BLs especially are very intertextual - they have so many shared elements (tropes, characters, locations, etc.) they always (deliberately or unintentionally) draw parallels to other BLs. We would never notice how Bad Buddy and MSP diverge from other BL shows if we did not by necessity/automatically think of all previous BLs while watching them. Furthermore, where and how Bad Buddy and MSP divert from genre conventions and previous examples of the genre demonstrates their relationship to the genre and underlines the messages the shows are trying to send. Bad Buddy and MSP subvert the particular genre expectations they do and in the way they do to make a point - by giving new meanings to familiar conventions and juxtaposing typical meanings of genre conventions with their own (either explicitly, or through the audience’s intertextual analyses) the shows ground themselves in a different world view than other BL shows and give a more nuanced and realistic look at human and queer experience.

For example, the way Bad Buddy and MSP move quickly through plot points (avoiding extended plot lines centering on jealousy or miscommunications) and the reciprocity of their trope usages (deliberately balancing the seme and uke dynamics of their lead pairs) is unusual in the world of BL. It serves to emphasize the reciprocal and egalitarian nature of the lead pairs’ relationships which we also see in their treatment of one another (communicating, understanding each other’s needs and taking turns acquiescing to make the other happy, e.g., ep.11 where Pran agrees to run away and stay on the honeymoon to make Pat happier and then Pat agrees to return home to make Pran happier, or Tinn and Gun being so supportive and understanding of one another’s dreams and physical boundaries, etc.). In this post @miscellar argues the lack of miscommunication as a plot device in Bad Buddy is inherently queer and that the show as a whole does away with heterosexual/heteronormative tropes. In their reciprocity, egalitarianism, and communication, Pat and Pran and Tinn and Gun eschew the standard power dynamics of BLs which come as a result of BL’s encoded seme/uke dynamics, which in turn come from heteronormative and misogynistic ideas in the het romance genre and beyond about men and women. Defying genre conventions in some ways (e.g., subverting tropes) strengthens and underlines how the shows defy genre conventions in other ways (queerer, more realistic stories; fairer treatment for women; less heteronormativity, etc.) - these smaller, more obvious subversions of genre conventions and expectations indicates to us, the audience, that we should be prepared for larger, more subtle and implicit shake ups of genre conventions and expectations, ones that might rewrite the BL genre code for the future.

By reflecting on what Bad Buddy and MSP change, we can understand and identify the standard BL world view and set of assumptions. For example, by weakening and subverting seme/uke dynamics and their associations with things like dominance/submission, masculinity/femininity, and top/bottom, Bad Buddy and MSP reject the heteronormative and misogynistic assumptions that underlie most BLs: that gay couples have a “man” and a “woman;” that the penetrated must be feminine, weaker, sex averse, etc. like women are in heterosexual relationships; that there is always an unbalance of power (social and/or sexual) in relationships. While these are “just” romance tropes, or you might say that it’s odd to be so absorbed by the dynamics between two characters (particularly when it come to analyzing seme vs. uke and top vs. bottom), in a world where these tropes and their execution, and the preferred sexual position of a character and what that says about their personality etc., are so tied to other things and issues like misogyny, homophobia, etc., refusing to engage and deliberately obscuring are pretty radical things that say a lot about the message and view point of the shows.

Bad Buddy and MSP feel more realistic than a lot of other BLs. This is not to say that shows have to be realistic to be good, or even that viewers/that I prefer realistic shows, but it is certainly something that strikes me when I think about Bad Buddy and MSP. The relationship progression is slower, there is less dwelling in miscommunications, they even have not entirely happy but hopeful endings (Pat and Pran are continuing to hide their relationship from their parents, but it seems they are coming around; Tinn and Gun face homophobia from people in their lives, but also receive support from their classmate and parents). And beyond being realistic to the “real world,” they also feel more realistic to the queer experience: queer relationships don’t usually have such strict relationship roles and power dynamics, adhere so strictly to heteronormative ideals, or exist in world without homophobia or disapproval. They are varied, often deliberately contrasting and rejecting hetero norms, and sometimes involve being scared to come out (even to accepting parents), facing homophobia, and living in a “glass closet” limbo.

Many people have talked about how Bad Buddy walked so MSP could run - Bad Buddy was more heavy handed and noticeably deliberate with its trope subversions, intentionally trying to correct problems that have existed in the BL genre since the beginning, and this allowed MSP coming later to be more subtle with their changes, working them even more seamlessly into the style and the tone of the show. After MSP, what will be next? Where is GMMTV, and BL as a whole (in Thailand and beyond) heading? I’m excited to find out.

Bibliography

@absolutebl, specifically these posts: 1 (faen fatales), 2 (seme/uke), 3 (seme/uke tropes), 4 (GMMTV correcting for its mistakes), and all their posts about BL tropes

Agha, Asif. 2003. “The social life of cultural value.” Language & Communication 23: 231-273.

Ahearn, Laura. M. 2012. Living Language: An Introduction to Linguistic Anthropology. Hoboken: Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

Bakhtin, Mikhail M. 1982. “Discourse in the Novel.” In The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M.M. Bakhtin, edited by Michael Holquist, translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, 260- 422. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Chandler, Daniel. Semiotics for Beginners. http://visual-memory.co.uk/daniel//Documents/S4B/semiotic.html

Chandler, Daniel. Genre Theory. http://visual-memory.co.uk/daniel//Documents/intgenre/intgenre.html

@cinna-bin: https://cinna-bin.tumblr.com/post/704496825511641088/his-boyfriend-words-matter

Irvine, Judith T. 1996. “Shadow Conversations: The Indeterminacy of Participant Roles.” In Natural Histories of Discourse, edited by Michael Silverstein and Greg Urban, 131-159. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Laineste, Liisi, and Piret Voolaid. 2017. “Laughing Across Borders: Intertextuality of Internet Memes.” European Journal of Humour Research 4, no. 4: 26–49.

@miscellar: https://www.tumblr.com/miscellar/674021449476997120/here-are-a-few-things-off-the-top-of-my-head-1 AND edited to add this post, which is so crucial to understanding how intentional all this is when it comes to Bad Buddy: https://www.tumblr.com/miscellar/710442440997371904/hello-in-a-convo-we-were-having-about-qls-that

Proctor, Devin. 2020. "Intertextuality." In The SAGE International Encyclopedia of Mass Media and Society, edited by Debra L. Merskin, 849-50. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications.

@ranchthoughts (myself): 1 (signs, symbols, icons, indexes, genre and BL), 2 (Bad Buddy and seme/uke tropes), 3 (MSP and imagination vs. reality), 4 (MSP being a good-natured show), 5 (MSP and narrative structure and pacing), 6 (Gun and knowing about Tinn’s crush); and everyone I referenced in those posts as well

Wiggins, Bradley E. 2019. The Discursive Power of Memes in Digital Culture: Ideology, Semiotics, and Intertextuality. London: Routledge.

#bb #bb meta #msp #msp meta #bl meta #ranch thoughts #bad buddy #my school president #this post is a monster... it's a full thesis basically #ppt thoughts

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whilereadingandwalking · 1 year ago

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The Turnaway Study: Ten Years, a Thousand Women, and the Consequences of Having—or Being Denied—an Abortion by Diana Greene Foster is a superb and necessary book. It's the first major study done to get scientific data to compare women who couldn't get an abortion compared to women who did—rather than doing a study comparing women who got an abortion to all women who had a child, which includes wanted and planned pregnancies.

The study has a lot of learnings that I expected—but also a lot of learnings that I didn't. It's remarkably even-handed and open. But overall, its point of view is that the data shows that women accurately weigh consequences and judge for themselves whether it's the right time for them to have a child. The reasons women give for not wanting a child are carried out in the data—for example, many women say they don't have the money to raise a child, and women who are forced to carry a child to term struggle financially. Women deserve the "dignity of risk"—the right to make their own decisions, even ones they might regret—and the data shows that overwhelmingly, women who choose to get an abortion and get one do not regret it.

Now, if you believe that abortion is murder, the data from this study can't prove you right or wrong. What it can do is target misconceptions and take down conjecture. Conservatives like to argue in recent years that barriers to abortion are necessary to protect women's health. But based on the statistics, legal abortion is extremely safe (far safer than carrying a child to term). This study tells us what the actual consequences of having an abortion or being denied an abortion are—in terms of mental health, domestic violence, life satisfaction, happiness and development of existing and future children, and more.

This book is so full of vital knowledge I didn't anticipate, but the biggest one for me personally was its analysis of late-term abortions. This study showed that the main reasons for late-term abortions were learning about a pregnancy late and being delayed due to the financial and bureaucratic difficulties of accessing an abortion. She makes the case that late-term abortions could be vastly reduced if getting an abortion was easier, and that improving sex ed, contraceptive access, and other resources would help women catch pregnancies earlier. It is very rare that a woman takes a long time to decide whether abortion is right for her—she seems to make a decision quickly as soon as she knows.

The book includes a good conclusion and analysis of what will come or could come with laws against abortion, written first before Trump's presidency and then with her read on the situation upcoming to the Supreme Court. There were only one or two small flaws. One is that a couple times, she mentions obesity without any real discussion of more general fatphobia. Second, I sometimes got mixed up in her double-negatives or refutations. But overall, this book was incredibly informative and fascinating.

Content warnings for miscarriage, sexual assault, fatphobia, trauma/medical trauma, misogyny, abuse.

#the turnaway study #diana greene foster #reproductive justice #reproductive freedom #abortion is a right #abortion is healthcare #my book reviews

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catt-nuevenor · 2 years ago

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Soap

I am about to get extremely nerdy and excited about ancient soaps. Consider yourselves warned, this is gonna be me getting giddy about tracking a plant through linguistic records, and botanical records.

All who don't want to geek out about this topic, I hope you enjoy your future scrolling and have a nice day. All who do, click the read more and join me down the rabbit hole.

So, soap.

There's an unfortunate belief that we in the modern period are the first descendents of the ape to understand the need of personal hygiene, sterilisation, and washing. This is wrong. We've understood dirt is bad for general health (as in food, water, and wounds) for thousands of years.

Allow me a few examples for the sceptical:

Galen, Hygiene Vol I, Book I. written between 165-175 CE.

And for those looking for something a wee bit older:

Unknown Author, writing style Sumerian dates to Third Dynasty of Ur, c.2158-2008 BCE. Page from Healing Hands by Guido Majno 1992

As Manjo points out in his discussion of this prescription, note the hot water as well as the beer.

I could go on, but I hope you see why I find 'all ancient peoples were dirty and only had a bath once a year,' an asinine statement. So, onto the 'Dark Ages'.

I needed to figure out what compound or substance the Lǽce, or medical practitioners in the story, would use to clean their hands after an examination. I've recently been looking into something of a plant 'shopping list' cross-referencing archaeological records and written records for what came to Northern Europe and when. Here's where I attempt to introduce you all to the term 'archaeophyte'.

An Archaeophyte is a plant that came to the geographical area or region of study before 1500 CE. Any plant that made its way to an area before this date, be with human intervention or without, falls into this category. A plant that arrives after this date is a Neophyte.

An example for the UK; Corn Marigold, Chrysanthemum segetum for all you folks who want to see me fight my way through Latin, arrived in the UK first in the Iron Age (in this context being about 940 BCE to 43 CE) as evidenced by archaeological finds, with later examples occurring in a Roman, then medieval context.

See Archaeolophytes in Britain, Preston, Pearman, and Hall for sources and more information

Right, so I've been constructing this list of plants I can use in the story. My rules are that it must occur in a Pre-Roman context North of Frankfurt, Germany, and West of Warsaw, Poland. The reasoning for this ruleset is too complicated to go into in this post, so just try and accept this as my baseline.

I started to go through this list this morning, looking for a plant that could be used for cleaning hands in a medical setting. I looked at Yarrow to begin with, it being an Archaeophyte for the area with archaeological evidence dating back to the Neolithic period (10,000-4,500BC) in the context of feasting at stone henge. It has limited scientific write up, but there is some evidence to suggest that it has antibacterial properties, anti-inflammatory properties, and may help with the staunching of wounds (see Medical Plants, Simmonds, Howes, and Irving 2016, Royal Botanical Gardens Kew, and Culpeper's Complete Herbal modern edition edited by Steven Foster, 2019).

So far so good, but not in anyway perfect. Then, while flicking through one of my books to locate yet another entry on yarrow to triple check my notes, I skimmed past an entry for a plant called Soapwort. To say I sat and stared at it dumbfounded for a while is an understatement.

My first thought was that the suffix 'wort' was a very good sign. 'Wort' comes from the Old English 'wyrt', which basically means a usable plant, be that edible as food, used in dyes, or applied in medicine. However, Old English speakers are infamous for making new compounds up of familiar elements to suit imported objects or ideas.

What I should have done next was to look up the etymology of the word 'soap', but I didn't. Instead, I went running back to the 'Archaeophytes in Britain...' article and did a ctrl F search for the Latin name, 'saponaria officinalis'. As soon as I typed it in, my heart sank.

Soap - Saponaria

That's a little too close for comfort, implying that the names were not only related, but likely came from the Old Latin, indicating that I was dealing with a re-emerging Roman export. Briefly, the Anglo-Saxons, the speakers of the Old English Language, came to the UK sometime in the 400s CE, after Rome withdrew. There is a marked dip in Roman culture, architecture, goods and especially language in this time, indicating some think, that the Roman settlers were not widely integrated with the Brittonic peoples. Latinised, or Late Roman, culture and influences do not really re-enter the UK until the Christianisation of the Anglo-Saxons some time later. When it did re-emerge, the Latin was favoured in academic contexts over the Old English, and for this reason I choose to use the Old English as a good waypoint for pre-existing features.

Back to the article on Archaeophytes. There is no known record of soapwort in the UK before the 1500's CE. However, it is found in Germany and Poland as a 'native' species, meaning that it predates 1500 CE, and reached the geographic area without human intervention (this can be discerned through where a sample is found, for example bog or wetland pollen deposits, or ancient forest remains). This slots it nicely into my 'can use' category.

It was only at this point that I decided to look up the etymology of 'soap'.

Soap <- Sope Middle English <- Sápe Old English <;- Saipá Proto-Germanic <- seyb- Proto-Indo-European

Which rather made all the fussing I did about Roman and Latin mute. -_-

The Anglo-Saxon's called Soapwort either leáþorwyrt or grundsópa by the by, meaning literally lather wort and ground soap.

The plant Soapwort contains large amounts of Saponin (about 20% when flowering, according to Wikipedia). This produces a lather when in contact with water, and basically breaks down various cell membrane components. That's about as far as my limited grasp of biochemistry leaves me high and dry, I'm afraid, but hopefully you get the idea.

In short summary; the Lǽce in the story can literally use soap, and I should always look up etymologies before I go traipsing through academic papers. Hope those who made it this far found it interesting!

Photo Credits to TeunSpaans Wikipedia

#Background research #language fun #ancient languages #plants #long reads #soap

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