#who really wanted to know how to better approach interactions with us the queer and trans people they work with & consider friends

[rinielelrandir]

Love when the queer employee resource group I'm in at work puts forth the effort to run an awareness & education event during Pride month, schedules it to be part of an already occurring employee appreciation event do everyone has ample opportunity to participate easily even though it means we're doing more education than we are enjoying the event, and then when the head of our site sends out his "thank you" email for the event he takes the time to thank the folks who ran the primary employee appreciation event and instead of specifically recognizing the queer ERG he's like "thanks to all the ERGs and their members for being active & creating awareness! I support all of them!" Oh yeah, real supportive there, bud. Not highlighting the group who ran the actual queer education event DURING PRIDE MONTH.

[ultimate-shipper-trash-blog]

The Epilogue

It starts off on a simple hot sunny day at the lake.

The kids are giggling and splashing water in each other's faces.

Dustin and Steve are off to the side getting the sandwiches ready. Steve is watching Eddie flip the boys into the water.

"I'm so glad we're all like this together. I never thought I'd even get you an Eddie into the same room."

"Well he's really changed a lot. Definitely since we were kids. I like being his friend, I think we're better for it." He finishes wrapping up the sandwich he's working on and ignores Dustin's eyes piercing into his skull. Behind him he hears another splash and some screaming.

"What."

"I didn't know you used to be friends."

"Friends? It's been a long time since I've been regarded as one of those."

"Be for real I didn't know you and Eddie used to hang out."

"Yeah we used to hang out all the time." Steve looks off into the distance wistfully.

"So what happened?"

"Well, we grew up. I grew up and Eddie grew up and we both grew into different people and Eddie didn't like how different we ended up being. It happens all the time. We didn't have monsters to bond us like you guys."

"Well that sucks, maybe you guys will reconnect as strong as you used to be."

Steve rustles Dustin's hair much to his complaint.

"We'll be fine champ, we're doing well now aren't we?"

"Yeah Stevie we are." They both spin around at the sound of Eddie's voice. He's giving them a confused look. Squinting his eyes at Steve like he doesn't know how to feel.

---

A long time ago

"Do you want to be friends?"

"Why?"

"I think you're cool."

"No you don't you just think I'm cool cause I'm in 4th grade and you're only in the baby 3rd grade class."

"Am not!"

"You are!"

"UGH...I'm Steve by the way."

"Eddie."

Middle school

"Steve there's something wrong with me."

"Don't be ridiculous Eddie, whatever it is we'll fix it."

"This can't be fixed."

"Dude just spit it out I won't get mad!"

"Ok...I have a crush...on a boy."

Eddie's eyes are welling up with tears.

"Hey it's ok Eds." Steve walks closer to him, slowly, like approaching a wounded animal.

"I won't judge you."

"Really?"

"Yeah! So what if you like boys I'll kick anyone's ass who says anything bad. You're still my best friend that's never going to change." He wraps Eddie up in the tightest hug he can muster.

"I love you Steve."

"I love you too Eds."

Before high school

"I just don't know why you're being like this!"

"What Steve? You can't believe I'm mad at you for blowing me off for your other friends?!"

"I wasn't blowing you off! I had basketball practice! Tommy's mom just drove me home dude it's not as crazy as you think it is."

"Oh really?!"

"Yeah! If anything you're being crazy!"

"Oh! If that's how it's gonna be then we don't need to be friends anymore."

Eddie's stomps off. So angry he doesn't hear Steve calling back out to him. The next time they interact, Tommy is pushing Eddie into a locker.

When Steve called Jonathan Byers a queer he remembers the promise he made to Eddie and promptly throws up afterwards.

When Robin comes out to Steve on the bathroom floor he thinks he has a second chance to prove himself. When she ends up being better than he imagines he is so thankful.

God he misses Eddie.

---

"Me and Stevie boy can pack up the car don't worry munchkins."

The two try to pick everything up but Eddie gets progressively angrier by the second. Steve is trying to figure out why he has personal beef with a cooler.

When they reach the car Eddie tries to shove everything in the trunk but it all falls apart.

"What's wrong."

"Me? Nothing, why?" he hastily folds the towels again, shoving them back in.

"Well...you're all huffy."

He spins around, his face getting closer, red with anger.

"You wanna know what my problem is?! I can't believe you told him that like I was the one to break things off, like you ever missed me, like you never hated me!"

"That's ridiculous! I've never hated you! You hated me!"

"No! You're the one who changed. You made the final decision!"

"Yeah because you pushed me away."

"You didn't fight me on it."

"I fought you everyday. Everyday I thought of you. Everyday with the name calling and the lockers, I was trying to get your attention."

"You think I wasn't? You think I stand on tables for fun?!"

"...it's all been a misunderstanding?"

The two stare at each other not even daring to blink.

"We wasted so much time, we could fix that, that is if you still want me"

"I never went a day without thinking of you."

he gets shy, his face darker than his sunburn.

"I know you've changed, I've dealt with that but a part of me still thinks you hate me. For what I am. What you'll hold against me. I don't know if I can handle being friends with you with that fear in my heart."

"I'd never. Ever. Do anything. Besides," Steve flicks his hair back. "Birds of a feather and all that." The blush on his cheeks is high and getting darker by the second.

"The what?"

"I'm uh kind of bisexual."

"Kind of?"

"Definitely. Definitely bisexual."

"Oh."

"Right um...so you won't have any problems from me. I hope that won't be a problem for you."

"No! Never! I'm just...surprised."

"Yeah you would be," Steve grumbles.

"What?"

"Nothing!"

----

Steve is sleeping in his bed when he feels something wrong. His eyes shoot open and he spots a figure standing over his body.

"Jesus Christ!" He shoots out of bed and is ready to grab his weapon when he registers who's in front of him.

"Eddie?" He says softly. "What're you doing here? You had a gig tonight, how did you get in my house? Why are you in my room-"

"Steve." Eddie's face is golden. The moon is reflecting into his eyes, shining so bright. He looks so happy, like he's going to cry. His smile is so bright.

"Steve. I got it."

"You go it?"

"The record deal. I got it."

Steve runs at him and Eddie catches him. Of course he did. He always will.

"Oh my god oh my god," he mutters into his shoulder. Eddie's arms are squeezing his waist tighter. "I'm so proud of you oh my god."

"Steve. I have to tell you something, that's what I came here to say."

"What's going on Eds? You never sound this serious." Eddie lets go of him and sits him down on the edge of the bed. Eddie lingers closer to the door like he's ready to make an exit.

"The recording studio is in Chicago."

"Oh."

"I leave in a week."

"Oh."

"I want you to go with me."

"What?"

Steve feels confusion run through him but he's not complaining. He'd follow Eddie anywhere.

"Yes! Ok! Let's go!"

Eddie smiles but it looks like it's causing him pain.

"There's a condition to you coming with me." He comes closer to Steve but still keeps his distance. "You need to know the truth before you agree to leave everything behind."

"What's going on Eds?"

"Ever since we were kids I've been in love with you. Big. Gay. Feelings. I want to hold you and kiss you and start a life with you. I know you're bi but that doesn't mean you'd be into me, especially considering our history. I was going to keep it a secret, never tell you, but it's not fair for you to be with me and not know my true intentions. I understand if you don't want to speak to me anymore but I'll do anything to keep our friendship. I've tried to forget you but have you met you? You're unforgettable. You're too damn loveable." He chuckles at that, eyes darting at every corner of the room.

"Eddie..."

"I understand-"

"Come here please."

"Um...no."

"Edddiiie," Steve whines. He stands and grabs Eddie's hands and drags him back to his bed laying him down. He crawls on top of him and tucks his head into Eddie's neck.

"I am very confused right now Steve."

"Thank you for telling me, I understand how scary that can be to share your feelings. The only thing is I can't believe you don't see how I feel!" He props his head up until their noses are touching. "I love you you idiot. I've been in love with you since forever. Of course I want to start a life with you and whatever else you wanted-"

"Kissing. I wanted kissing."

"And you'll get it."

Steve giggles into his mouth and the two kiss for what feels like forever. They finally break apart and keep their foreheads touching.

"So...Chicago?"

"Chicago."

-----

Eddie's suit jacket is grabbed and he's thrown into a bathroom stall.

"Oh my god I can't believe you did that."

"Steve how did you even get back here? Bribed a guard. He knew who I was anyway, congratulated me on having such a loving partner." He ends the sentence smashing their lips together shoving Eddie against the wall.

"Mmm well," Eddie pulls away. "I didn't know the next time I'd win a Grammy I wanted to make it count."

"Eddie you confessed your love for me and came out in your speech that was something...something so special. God all I wanted was to see you, be near you. I couldn't go another second not being by your side."

"A bathroom stall was the closest you could get huh?" He smirks.

Steve smirks, sinking to his knees. "What? It's not good enough for you?"

"Nope! It's perfect! Absolutely perfect sweetheart no complaints here.

----

"You want to marry...me?"

"Yeah baby why wouldn't I?"

"I- I...yes! Ok! Yes!"

----

It ends on a simple hot sunny day

seventy years later

"Hello everyone, my husband lived a long successful life. You may know him as the lead guitarist for the many bands he's been apart of during his long career. You knew him as Eddie Munson rockstar but I knew him as much more. I knew him as my love. My husband. An uncle to our little gremlins little gremlins. A friend to all. A supporter of all. He passed away yesterday from natural causes. I was asked by his Manger how I wanted to handle this and I knew I had to do it."

There are tears in his eyes as he stares down the camera but a small smile on his lips.

"He lives on through our friends and family. Through those who have watched him grow. Through his awards and his fans. Through his charity work. Most importantly he lives through his love. He loved so much. So hard. Everthing had meaning to him. Everything had purpose." He wipes a stray tear away.

"I'll see you soon my love."

The final epilougue is the next day, for the sweethearts could not live long without the other. They had already been making up for the time they did not know each other, for they time they spent ignoring each other. They couldn't spend another minute apart.

[notebookmusical]

I truly can’t pinpoint when/what exactly changed about Taylor’s fans/fandom but the last few years (especially the midnights release) has really soured things for me and it’s honestly quite disappointing as someone who genuinely enjoys her music and thinks she’s a great artists. how did we get to the point of not even being able to voice an opinion about taylor without being crucified online. or if heaven forbid you dislike a song/album or enjoy the work of one of her exes (john mayer, the 1975, calvin harris, etc)

i’ve always been very fascinated/intrigued by the relationship between celebrities and their fans. and i think it’s really interesting to look back and think about how taylor built her fanbase by making herself as palatable/relatable/approachable as possible. like secret sessions, t party/loft 89/rep room, swiftmas, lover diaries, etc — all of which allow for fan interaction — but also relies on people getting noticed which then in turn encourages people to be as vocal? extra? whatever it is. which then feeds into the "who is a bigger / better fan" competition. i'm speaking from personal experience here, as someone who has liked her since debut — but i think a lot of this is also rooted in how much of the world hated taylor swift prior to ... i want to say folklore, really — like it was deeply uncool to like taylor swift, to be a swiftie, etc. and because a lot of that early criticism was rooted so much in misogyny, i think fans felt the need to (over the years) defend her — and i was one of those! i still am, when i feel like people are criticizing her unfairly. but i think that lends into the "taylor swift has never done anything wrong, and she's perfect and if you disagree then you're against us and you're a fake fan" mentality.

and then i think there's an element of ... not necessarily a superiority complex, but a something among fans who have met taylor. it's a genius marketing move, intentions aside. taylor's music is very personal — and taylor's marketing, and persona is very personal, in a way that other artists prior to taylor weren't, i think. relatability sells. you can see it in the way that people talk about her, and her music. which is very different from the way people talk about other artists — and obviously there isn't anyone else out there with the amount of fame/popularity as her, but you don't see the same amount of fanfiction-writing personal-life-speculating-projection onto other artists' lyrics as you do with taylor. and i think that when someone is that vulnerable with their thoughts, it makes it easy for people to think that they know them personally.

and i think that — as much as i love taylor — it's important to talk about her white woman feminism mentality. and i think that also seeps into how her fanbase interacts with her. the ginny & georgia "joke" is what comes to mind the quickest, but there are countless instances of taylor's white woman feminism — and her benefiting from it. and obviously it was in her right to call out a misogynistic comment, especially one directed at her, but not saying anything when the actress got so much hate for a line she didn't write ... made me feel a bit 🥴. it's interesting to see who taylor will choose to align herself with, i guess is all i'm saying.

i've really taken a step back from taylor — not just because the fandom is exhausting ( the amount of things i've seen about her, joe, travis, etc. is ... something! it's all projection! we do not know anything about these people other than what they choose to show us! ) but also because of her saying that she wanted to be on the right side of history and then over and over again choosing to be increasingly passive and silent. she will call herself an ally but won’t even talk about queer rights; she won’t talk about the literal genocide that’s going on. gun control, abortion rights, anything at all. it's just "go vote" but even that is incredibly passive. but she will take time to remind us to buy new variants, and to stream her music, and that her ex sucks.

i think there was a huge shift that started with folklore/evermore, just given that there weren't a lot of albums being put out during that time, the overwhelming public reception to it — a lot of people who previously didn't care for (or disliked) taylor started to like her, to give her a second chance, etc. then we get into the rerecordings era/midnights/etc., which started off with fearless and nostalgia and then became "how quickly can i put out the next thing". and bailey @placeinthisworld posted this earlier, which i fully agree with. it's about the next award, the next milestone. it's just all quantity. it's overexposure.

and then we have the joe alwyn breakup and the public response to that was also ... interesting. like i saw people crying over it, or saying that love is a lie, removing things from their playlists, acting like they were the ones who had been broken up with. which is just ... odd, given that we aren't the ones in the relationship. and now there are all these comments about being a "joe defender". and then with taylor dating travis, it feels almost like some weird american pipe dream unfulfilled fantasy for so many people — the singer and the american football player. and obviously, i want her to be happy! i don't care who she dates! but i do think the public reception about her and travis has been ... incredibly odd, and i think that the way people talk about her and travis is just ... very ... off-putting and is very rooted in some weird ... stuff. "she finally gets to be small :(((((" is such a weird thing to say. it feels like there's even more projection and self-insert-y stuff with her dating travis, which is a level i did not think was possible from her fans (and more so, the general public).

i have not felt this ... detached and impassive about a taylor release, ever, and it just makes me incredibly sad because i love her music, and am excited about the work, just not excited about the public reception, the public autopsy of her and joe's relationship, or the noise, and i know that internet spaces (and spaces in general) are what we curate, but it's also difficult when she is everywhere.

[am-i-the-asshole-official]

WIBTA for inviting my cousin to an LGBT meet up?

Cw: mentions of suicide and transphobia

I (18M) am a trans man and my cousin N (21F) is a lesbian who is very masc presenting. We're the only queer cousins in the family (at least in our generation) so weve always been good friends and shes been one of the biggest supporters of my transition, defended me from bigoted family members and always corrected family when they used my deadname/old pronouns. I lowkey hoped she would come out as a trans man or nonbinary as well. We dress in the same style which makes it so when were hanging out together one of us is gonna get misgendered since people asume both of us are trans men or masc girls. When N is the one being misgendered she doesnt bother fighting it since its more trouble than its worth but looking back i think it really annoyed her.

Earlier this year N was severely struggling with her mental health. I apologize for the wording i may have since i dont know the proper terminology for this stuff or any specific disorder diagnosis she may have (other than autism). She was having some sort of manic or depressive episode. She was dead set on pushing people away and making them hate her so she could take her own life without regrets.

I visited N once to give her my support during a struggling time but i stupidly told her there was nothing she could say that would push me away. She told me not to test her but i kept pushing it and i admit what happened next was my fault. She told me in a very cold voice that she was a terf, though that she didnt want me dead but that "we" (im guessing she meant trans ppl) made it so much harder for her to exist(???????). I didnt let her keep talking just and left her room, said my goodbyes to her family and just cried while driving home.

Im still not sure if she meant it or if it was part of her mental episode and just a way for her to hurt me and push me away. On one hand ig it explains some of her behavior? N sometimes complained when she got asked for her pronouns or being misgendered like I mentioned before. On the other hand, I gen do not believe she has been a terf all along esp with how supportive shes been of me. If she was a terf youd think she would try to subtly talk me out of it, but that has never happened. My friends have nicknamed her schrodinger's terf lol

Anyway, i went no contact with N for a few months for my own wellbeing. During this time i heard that she tried to kill herself a few times, which got her into a mental hospital. She was given higher doses of meds and seems to be doing way better.

We had a family reunion this week and i decided to approach her. N seemed a little hesitant to talk to me but stayed polite. I tried testing her and talked about the effects T has been having on me but she acted like she always had and congratulated me and even complimented me on how deep my voice has gotten. I wasnt satisfied cause i wanted an apology for what she had said to me so i pushed it more. She did end up apologzing but it was a very surface level apology. At this point i didnt want to keep pushing in case it set her off again so i just took her apology (plus i wanted my best cousin back) and spent the rest of the day hanging out with her.

On the way home my mom said she was happy me and N had made up and that i should invite her to the lgbt club meetings Ive been going to this year. It seemed like a good idea to me, she lost a few friends during her episode and she could make more queer friends here. If N is trans and just in denial it could help her get the resources she needs to feel comfortable coning out. If N IS a terf maybe having more positive interactions with trans ppl could change her mind on it. Overall i thought it would be a win for her.

I brought it up to my friends and some of them blew up at me. Their argument was that itd be exposing the other trans ppl in the group to a terf and putting them in danger. I truly hadnt considered this angle so im kinda conflicted now. She had never felt like an unsafe person before and now that her episode is over she feels normal again. Even if she is a terf i dont think she could actually cause harm? I want N to get better but i dont want to put my trans friends at risk.

So tumblr, WIBTA for inviting N to my lgbt meet up?

What are these acronyms?

[my-castles-crumbling]

Hi cas!

Two things

1.) I asked you for advice before and I really appreciated what you said back ( it was the one talking about how to know when you're queer) so thank you for that I wish you all the best hugs and kisses

2.) I don't know if you do advice on love, or what not, but there 's this guy I have in some of my classes (I'll call him G). I noticed him earlier in the year around mid-september cause he was cute to me, and this was before I started to realize I might be queer, but I didn't pay him any mind because I just assumed he wouldn't look my way cause I'm shy and don't really interact with guys that aren't either gay or not popular? So he was just in the back of my mind for a while.

But recently around late October to Early November things have started to change. One day I dropped my stuff on a table in a class I don't have friends in to go somewhere (I can't remember) but when I came back I found that the empty table I put my stuff in was no longer empty. Because lo and behold G was sitting right next to me, and I mean right next to me no chair in-between us.

I was super confused because I know G has friends in that class yet he sat next to me with our shoulders breathing only a few cm apart but that's not the only odd occurrence.

When I was sitting with some of my friends telling them this one of them spoke up asking what he looked like and just as I was going to reply, but then G ended up being in the area we were talking in so I just pointed G out to her(though not literally). My friend didn't get a good look at him so we got up to walk around the area.

When we saw him my friend told me to just act normal (because duh) so we acted like we were getting a drink from the water fountain when we passed by G and was at the water fountain she sold me that he saw us and from her peripheral vision ( her words not mine) he glanced at me specifically. If my friend was able to see him staring at me then I thought maybe he likes me and I was really excited since I've never had a person like me to my knowledge.

So someone told me some of G's socials and when I added or followed him, to my surprise on the platforms where it's obvious that it's me he already had me followed. It got me thinking and I genuinely thought maybe he liked me.

But recently I'm getting mixed signals because he hasn't looked my way, make conversation, or sit next to me.

I'm also getting kinda insecure because there is a friend of his who's a girl and they get along a lot better than you'd think. I just don't know how to feel because I think I like him (again the possible queerness) but he just isn't giving me much to work with not to mention He's kinda one of the typical jockish looking guys who tend to party or are popular in general while I don't exactly look like I match his aesthetic

Sorry if this was a long one

HUGS AND KISSES love you dearly

Anon

PS could you give me a name I know I'll definitely ask more things later!

I mean honestly I think you should approach this from a friend perspective first. I know you said you guys are different, but that's no reason you can;t be friends or more. He showed interest for a reason, whether that's because he likes you as a friend or as something more. Try just acting friendly towards him and seeing how he reacts. It could be he backed off because he sensed you were nervous and he took it as that you weren't interested in him in any way.

Once you see if he wants to be friends, then see if there's something deeper there. But whether he's queer or not, 'matching' isn't a reason to not be friends! Opposites can attracts, even in a platonic sense!

Naming you shy anon

[wild-wombytch]

Hey ladies 💗!

You can call me Tañ. I'm a 24yo European disabled dyke with sometimes approximate English. I'm also an anarchist and believe genders and sexual exploitation are as oppressive as (and products of) patriarchy.

I'm a veteran of the Reddit misogyny and purge against "TERFs" for saying neo/microlabels and bi/pan "lesbians" are harming real lesbians and bi women. I was already starting to be skeptical and tired by trans women talking over lesbians with pretty misogynistic takes, so I decided to look into the so frowned upon radical feminism and gender critical ideas, sensing this Reddit drama was just the tip of the iceberg. That's after years being a TRA/libfem.

I'm tired of the marketable liberal feminism and queer communities and catering to males' feelings, when they're actively hurting lesbians to satisfy their ego and so called feeling of erasure (forcing females who want nothing to do with males to cater to their mental health still or trying to coerce them into sex). I'm also tired that "lesbian" is always associated with porn, especially porn for straight men. So I hoped to get to know the radfem community here better, because you are the only ones who seem to give a fuck about women at all these days and trying to keep women from mutilating their beautiful bodies instead of caring for their mental health. I almost did that to myself due to the trans agenda convincing me that I was a "nonbinary transmasc" and not just a good ol' dyke not aligning with heteronormativity, so here I am. I'm still reading and learning about radical feminism. To be frank, I've been quite brainwashed into the TRA/pop feminism cult bs and genuinely have to rebuild myself psychologically and get all these things I interiorised (to be honest, mostly out of fear of being thrown out of my own lesbian community, leftist and "feminist" spaces) out of my head. Including things about my body and the "queer community" pushing for us to cater to men and shutting ourselves up instead of saying things as they are. I hope I can learn by interacting with the community here. I frankly need some sorority to help me out of the patriarchy and its genderist Hell. This ideology definitely made feminism go back of 50 year. Males can wear dress and be feminine without needing to get into our locker rooms and females can be butches and bind to alleviate dysphoria without being men.

What else to say? I don't want to say too much for now, because the world is so fucking dangerous for women, especially if they go against the men ideology. I really hope to find a peaceful corner here where I can interact with other lesbians without getting witch hunted for stating science and that I'm not into penises and without fucking men filling up the only internet spaces where we can just have women talks about women issues without always centering or integrating men.

I also discovered things like the Moon School, which helps me healing my relationship to being a woman and starting to accept again that I'm a lesbian and don't have to convince myself I'm either trans or having to be exactly like straight women or that gender matters. I'm learning to get rid of the internalised misogyny and feeling like I can't love what I want to love, especially if it's "girl things" or be emotional...etc I'll likely open up more and act more like my confident self once I'm used to be able to state my opinions without getting banned. Probably expect some NSFW and New Age content here. I have a spiritual approach to what it means to be a woman (exploring Wicca and the Dark Goddess).

I'm still learning to use Tumblr, so apologies if the tagging is shit or if the reading is hard on my blog for whatever reason (tell me if I can make it more accessible!). I'm still not confident being here, hope I'll learn. Feel free to DM or send recommendations in asks (about how to use Tumblr, radfem communities, radfem books/Youtube channels, women-centered spirituality...anything really) or just introduce yourself! Straight women have valuable inputs too, but I'd prefer to interact with other lesbians and ex-TRA, since we have more shared experiences. Hope I'm not being weird by spam liking and reblogging your posts there!

Also warning word that my beliefs are bound to adjust as I learn about radical feminism and heal my own relationship to being a woman. I'll still navigate radical feminism leaning, but might go more tirf or other orientations over time.

⚠️ Everyone except the dni can follow, I won't tell you "pro TRA kys" like people say about TERFs 🤷🏻. If you don't want gender criticals, misandrists possibly in the future TIRF, TERF, SWIRF, Dianic Witches or whatever to follow you, you can block me. ⚠️

Again, I'm too new to know exactly what I'm going for except radical feminism.

DNI : Men in general, bi/pan/male "lesbians" (febfems are cool, I refer to mspec "lesbians"), conservatives, alt right, the genderist/MOGAI crowd can respectfully interact and is welcome to like and reblog, but you're on thin fucking ice

[gatalentan]

We love and support your AvaMel side but I always laugh when I see something about them bc I remember that Janelle’s tweet 🤣🤣

Ok so for those who don't know, Janelle got tagged in an AvaMel ship fanvid, and replied to one of the quote retweets on that fanvid. I've censored op here for privacy:

Two things can be true:

1. Janelle is allowed to be weirded out by being tagged/seeing ship content. That's her face & those are her co-workers. She's a very private person who mostly keeps fans at arms-length and that's healthy. Ava isn't Janelle, but she has her face (and so does Lisa), so fanvids in particular when accompanied by an explicit caption I can imagine would be really weird to see. As fans we know the diff between real-person and fictional shipping but from her perspective you can see how that would be more nuanced and complicated. Unfortunately, the Twitter algorithm now puts stuff on your feed - regardless of if you follow them or not - based on how it has pigeonholed you, and as a person who sometimes tweets about Abbott/Ava because it's her job, the algo assumes shes a fan and dishes up Abbott fandom content to her whether she likes it or not, so she sees stuff she doesn't wanna see even if she isn't tagged; she wasn't tagged in that QRT, but she still saw it, so we can see that's what happened here. A big problem there is that seeing stuff that makes them uncomfortable can make actors change how they approach the character(s) in future which sucks for everyone. We can't control the algo but on the whole it's better to not try and expose actors to ship content as much as possible because there's scores of ships where the actors became hostile to shippers as a result of being repeatedly exposed to content they don't want to see, or even just getting fatigued by an unintended ship overshadowing the rest of their acting effort. Unfortunately social media giving a lot of access to celebrities is a very double edged sword and difficult to balance, especially when some actors (cough lisa cough) are so far over the line of what's considered normal fan interactions that it gives unrealistic expectations for celebrities that are more private. Actors aren't your best friends, they don't owe you interactions or unconditional support just because you're a fan, they're strangers and real people with their own thoughts and feelings. Everyone has their own limits and boundaries and are allowed to express that and they're entitled to not be comfortable with fan work that uses their image.

2. Actors/creators not supporting a ship doesn't mean we still shouldn't be allowed to play in the sandbox. Work Wives isn't gonna be canon either, but that's not going to stop me from enjoying it. I'm 32 and if I didn't ship stuff just because it didn't have creator support I'd have spent twenty years with nothing to ship at all. As queers we have to carve our own space out where we can see people like us and make a meal out of scraps because otherwise we wouldn't get to engage with media the same way cishet people take for granted. Unless a show is Queer™️, a vehicle for a character's queerness and a major topic of discussion, we rarely get canon queer characters, let alone characters where it's treated respectfully without one of the pair getting fridged or dying. Even The L Word, Queer™️ as it was, killed off one of a major pairing. We deserve to see ourselves across the whole spectrum of genres, not just in Queer™️ TV, but it simply isn't there, so we make it for ourselves in fanwork. In fanwork you can play with these characters however you want. You can give them a soft landing where they're safe (or the opposite, explore darker themes for a light-hearted show). You can give them the type of stories that would never have the space to breathe in the works they came from. You can take them out of their environment completely and put them somewhere else, you can change one thing that changes their whole dynamic, or you can just write absolute filth. Either way, fundamentally they're fictional characters, they do not exist and they don't have free will, only what you put into them as a viewer. We're not about to make Janelle make out with Lisa, but in fiction, Ava and Mel can, and as fictional characters they represent a dynamic we don't see a ton of with two older women, not teenagers/young adults which is the predominant type of representation we get for WLW in TV. So I'm gonna keep shipping AvaMel, I'm just, y'know. Not gonna put it where Janelle might see it. Easy.

Some good vids on this topic: Is Shipping Gay Culture? (James Somerton) | Artists & Fandoms (Philosophy Tube) | Parasocial Relationships: Strangers Aren't Your Friends (Naomi Cannibal) | An Exhaustive Defense of Fanfiction (Sarah Z) | Why We Ship Characters (The Take)

[box-dwelling]

This may be the autism speaking but I genuinely think that a really useful skill in not being an open minded and tolerant person is learning to acknowledge that you are not going to know or understand everything about the people you interact with, are friends with or even love.

Like people are complicated. The world is complicated and you are never going to be able to empathize or be knowledgeable about every experience. And I mean that with empathy being literally being able to directly put yourself in their shoes and know how it feels.

And the instinct that we have to kind of has two outcomes, either your instinct is reactionary and because the experience is unknown to you and therefore it scares you or you presume the other person must be wrong. Or you decide you have to know and pester them about the experience in a way that they probably aren't comfortable with or tire of easily.

But if you just accepted, hey I don't get this. This isn't something I have knowledge or experience of and then just take that as a fact you can just be normal with them. And then that's actually a way better gateway to learn about the experience because either it will just come up as you talk or they'll tell you stuff at a point where they feel comfortable. Now it's absolutely you'll put your foot in your mouth and slip up but then you're already in a better mental position to deal with that because you aren't going to blame yourself or insist the other person is wrong. You already have accepted that this is something you don't know about and can better take mistakes as an opportunity to learn.

It's like to take this at its absolute most basic uncontroversial, I'll give this example. If my dad gets in a conversation where he doesn't know someone's name he absolutely freaks and he has to end the conversation as soon as possible because he's terrified that hes going to mess up and then only tried to talk to them again when he remembers. But I have managed to have multiple friendships with people irl who's name I never learned or learned very late into the relationship because the reality is that you don't actually need to know it that much about someone to get on with them. You don't have to understand the complete workings of who they are. Youd be surprised how little you actually do need.

And this kind of goes the same for other aspects of peoples identity. You just have to kind of yes and it. Like ok, you know more about your experience and who you are than I do. You always will. I can learn from you but I don't need to know. Anything I do learn is cool but I don't need any more information than the stuff you want to give me. Don't try and logic it out or generalize, just take everything they have said as fact and leave it at that.

Then with the reactionary sentiment, that's got lots of other problems for obvious reasons but let's devils advocate here and take the presumption that it's correct. X person has X identity and they are either wrong or its harming them in some way. You aren't going to talk them out of that. Especially when you have no knowledge yourself. They will have heard it before. A lot of time they will have thought it before. You can't change that. So it's best to just accept it and if you're right let them figure it out themselves.

There is kind of this semi deserved backlash to liberal tolerance. Like the kind of "I tolerate queer people and I tolerate Nazis" approach is obviously harmful. But I don't think we should throw the baby out with the bath water either. Because expecting that you must immediately be able to understand, empathize with, know and properly advocate for every marginalised experience is naively optimistic at best and completely impossible at worst. Tolerance is a good first step but you have to recognise it is the first and be prepared to learn more. But being at that step shouldn't prevent you from being decent and normal to the people in your life who do have that experience in the meantime. They aren't there to teach you, but if you're patient you might learn something.

[aqueeracademic]

morse being queer (and other commentary) pt. 9:

season 3, episode 1, “Ride”:

- here we go season three‼️‼️

- give me some gay shit

- i just SMASHED an angel heart and an iced coffee so i am ready to go

- i do recall this episode being very gay in a very Gatsby way so i’m feeling excited

- i love rich people they’re so terrible

- winnie not saying “come home safe” to thursday because they’re all still shook up over what happened

- thursday assuming jakes would be the person to see morse

- “not since he got out.”

- ^jakes picked morse up from prison and also visited him in prison confirmed

- this whole episode proved that morse was well liked even though he doesn’t like being around people

- people. like. him.

- he’s a loner because he chooses to be. because HE thinks there’s something wrong with him

- they were not subtle with their plagiarism of Gatsby and i respect them for it

- going all in on the dark academia vibe

- thursday misses morse so much im SICK

- morse got invited to a party which means the gay stuff is gonna start happening

- monica deserved better ‼️‼️

- “he doesn’t want to be found”

- do you mean physically or spiritually queen?

- morse walking through this party has me cackling he’s so buttoned up

- roddy is gay for bixby

- i have 0 proof i’m going on vibes alone from a 0.2 second interaction

- thursday is wild for just breaking into morse’s house and waiting

- morse is absolutely gorgeous in maroon

- the way morse is so obviously trying to flirt with bixby and is confused when he doesn’t flirt back

- “and what’s the truth of you?”

- king CALM DOWN

- morse looks at bixby like hes another mystery to solve which means he is immediately obsessive and attached

- “you hardly know me!” “gamblers instinct”

- this translates directly to “ur hot”

- morse taking on bixby’s mentality to decide how to approach his life is so…

- “how was it?”

- strange i need you to reconsider the questions you ask

- he was a COP in PRISON

- this woman is awfully quick to assume morse is attracted to her

- the way he’s so uncomfy 😭😭

- given that jakes is the one who went to go see him in prison and given that he is clearly upset that morse is gone and given that he thinks he won’t be coming back…

- jakes is the only one who knows what morse went through in prison

- he knows!

- and he’s mad morse isn’t coming back

- “i wouldn’t hold your breath”

- he’s mad

- i need answers ‼️

- morse looks jealous asf that bixby’s attention is tacked onto Kay instead of him

- it is so unfair that both Kay AND bixby are using morse to get to each other

- like literally using him and for what

- “are you falling in love with me? men do.” “i can see how that might happen.” “then why don’t you kiss me?”

- i fucking HATE these manic pixie dream girls in the sort of episode

- like shut up

- no girl acts like this

- immediately jumping to his boyfriends protection 🙄🙄

- munch.

- “bix, you could have any woman in the world.”

- and then IMMEDIATELY looking ashamed for having said it

- he is basically saying “you could have anyone. you could have me. so why her?”

- them on the dock together is so intimate

- you can tell they feel it’s the last they’ll see of each other

- even though they don’t know why

- a romantic opera playing during this scene (depicting a forlorn man finding his lover dead)

- jakes being the only person to try and talk to him after he finds bixby 🥲

- morse trying to express to thursday why he feels like he doesn’t wanna come back and thursday being like “stop being a pussy and get used to it” is so insane

- bright is doing his absolute best to apologize and i gotta respect him for it

- my mom giggles every time thursday speaks (she has 0 clue what’s going on idk why she’s watching w me)

- morse opening up about prison makes me 🫤

- he didn’t know whether thursday was alive or not for so long 🫤🫤

- rich people in this time period really just stood around in silence drinking and smoking and thats all

- wish i was them

- ope nvm they also got abused by their husbands i do not wanna be them

- thursday WOULD love magic shows

- he is that bitch

- after morse got shot he reacted poorly to everything from a door slamming to a car backfiring; thursday gets shot and he lets a magician fully point a gun at him and fire for FUN

- heroin feels like such a random tie in to this episode

- like it makes sense in the plot but why

- morse is awfully quick to defend bixby despite not knowing him at all

- little bit 💅

- i know he met bixby in a vulnerable state and was glad to have that sort of attention but he is soooo determined to prove bixby is a good person despite FULLY knowing it isn’t true

- which is insane

- and gay

- you gotta be some kind of freak to have a portrait of someone you have no official attachments to hanging above your bed

- i know kay is supposed to be a sort of rattled and traumatized character but i don’t like the way they wrote her at all

- her entire character feels misogynistic

- even my mom doesn’t like it and that’s telling

- “bixby” being alive is so fucking funny to me

- gay people don’t die ‼️

- roddy deserved better! he was j a lil gay guy there was no need for all this hatred

- morse and jakes are so cold with each other this episode i hate it

- i know we don’t get to know anything about jakes as a person in this show but listen

- i feel like he’s intentionally really closed off and defensive and that’s why he’s especially defensive to morse

- morse is able to figure people out so easily and jakes knows that and he doesn’t like it

- he doesn’t want to be figured out

- so it makes sense that he would be particularly cold to morse (especially given that morse is presumably the only one who knows about his Blenheim Vale background)

- jakes just appearing in the shadows while morse is talking

- like what r u doing babe??

- this man killing his son after everything gets found out is so??

- and not a single person did anything about it

- jakes 🥰🥰🥰🥰🥰🥰🥰

- finding out where the coin flip thing came from is fucking sickening

- i will say that i enjoy the notion that morse falls in love really easily and that BECAUSE of that he’s a loner

- also the camera lingering on bixby’s face and morse just staring after they lead you to think he’s watching the film for kay???? that’s queer cinema

- “bixby didn’t belong in their world anymore than i do. did. i wanted to tell him that the last night i saw him. he was better than that.”

- morse convincing himself he could have saved bixby if he told them that neither of them belonged in that world

- because he thinks bixby would have gone with him

- like??

- “there’s no real magic in the world. only love. the rest is just smoke and mirrors.”

- him saying that all that was real between them was the love 🫤🫤🫤

- 10/10 for gay this episode

[denimbex1986]

'"Maybe I didn't hold you / All those lonely, lonely times

And I guess I never told you / I am so happy that you're mine…"

An adult Adam is cross-legged on the floor, gazing upwards, child-like. His deceased mother mutters the words, never once breaking eye contact, while decorating the Christmas tree.

On the surface, the candles and fairy lights should have evoked a homely warmth, stirring early memories of festive joy. But in this scene the air is thick with regret, and the song's poignant lyrics say more than dialogue ever could.

All of Us Strangers first introduces Adam (Andrew Scott) years after this, in his London tower block, with little but his laptop for company. That is, until his neighbour Harry (Paul Mescal) arrives at his door. What unfolds is a cross-generational gay love story, both heartbreaking and beautiful.

But when Adam decides to revisit his childhood, the film also hits home in another way. Watching through tears, in the dim of the movie theatre, I'm struck by how profoundly it resonated with me, as a mother to my boy.

Motherhood is a redefining experience, one that pushes you to reflect while also looking forwards through new eyes. The film articulates that reconnection with your inner child, and the notion of wanting to do things differently for the baby who's now in your arms.

All of Us Strangers captures a weight carried through to adulthood by many queer people: the distance that can be born from your parents not really knowing who you are. The film arrives as a new generation now starts to navigate its own approach to parenthood, determined not to repeat the past.

All of Us Strangers is steeped in grief. But for a story that orbits a man who lost his parents at the tender age of 12, it's far deeper than a physical absence.

Stuck in a sort of purgatory, Adam is seeking out things that make him feel closer to what he's missing. Against a score of '80s hits, which would have formed the soundtrack of his formative years, Adam arrives back to his childhood home. From the wallpaper to his record collection, it's just as he remembers. His parents are still there too, just as they were on the day they died.

Through Adam's conversations with his dead parents, it becomes clear that even in life they were out of reach.

A father, too repressed to comfort his son when he was crying; a mother, too overwhelmed to centre the needs of her child.

In these new interactions Adam's instinct is to suppress his feelings, comforting and tending to his parents' emotions instead. It speaks of a child who learned that his own feelings were a burden, that vulnerability wasn't welcome.

These post-mortem exchanges offer a chance for catharsis, though. Adam is given the opportunity to come out to each of his parents in turn. Their responses are filtered through the moral panic of their time, but having them meet this older, more worldly, version of Adam allows for some growth.

Adam's inner child continues to push through, still yearning to be seen for himself rather than the image that his parents once cultivated. Much like the film's own use of reflection, his parents saw what they wanted to see mirrored back at them, projecting their own expectations rather than truly seeing Adam for the boy he was.

It's a generational cycle that needs to be broken, and this is echoed in his mother's own regret. There's a push and a pull, as his parents start to realise that they were themselves stuck in a pattern passed on to them.

As Adam crawled between his parents in the middle of the night, in his childhood pyjamas that no longer fit, she told him of her yearning to get better, with time.

But of course in reality, a fatal car crash robbed her – and Adam – of these chances. The thought of the childhood that could have been still continued to tighten with that knot in his chest.

For those of us now trying to parent more consciously, to be led by our children, giving them space to discover exactly who they are, free of assumption and expectation, All of Us Strangers has struck a chord.

Our sons will not keep their tears hidden away, un-wiped, behind closed doors. Neither will they be given a complex about sitting with their legs crossed, or burdened with the presumption that they should surely have a girlfriend. Their childhood home will be a sanctuary, removed from those that don't understand, not a place they want to run from at the first opportunity.

The film and the thoughts it has provoked cling as tightly as that final farewell embrace between Adam and Harry.

Days after sitting in that movie theatre, now two-stepping and twirling around to The Housemartins with my own baby, who loves to dance, in his childhood home, these feelings are further solidified.

"Let's build a house where we can stay [ba ba ba ba build], add a new bit every day…"'

[mcmorare]

knowing your partner well can potentially make writing a lot easier! repost, do not reb.log.

name :  quinn!!

pronouns : they/them, she/her, anything really

preference  of  communication : ims or discord

name  of  muse(s) : katrina, tally, & ana!

experience / how  long  ( months / years ? ) :  i’ve done some rp on forums and discord in the past, and i’ve been on here for almost 2 years now!

best  experience : uhhh i guess all the fun i've had writing on here!

rp  pet  peeves / deal  breakers :  honestly, the main one is just intolerance. especially as someone who’s autistic & queer, if someone holds racist/sexist/homophobic/ableist/etc views it’s an automatic no.

muse  preferences  fluff,  angst,  or  smut : both fluff and angst are really fun! i personally don’t write smut though (but no hate to those who do!).

plots  or  memes : both! i know i need to get better at plotting and approaching people because i am Painfully shy but i promise i do not bite and would love to plot with you all! and memes are always a great way to start an interaction!

long  or  short  replies : short replies are usually easier, but i’m fine with both!

best  time  to  write : for me, probably the afternoon/night.

are  you  like  your  muse(s) : in some ways, but i think in terms of how we come off externally and our demeanor katrina and i are very, very different. and i'm definitely very different from ana. tally and i do have more similarities, but i don’t think i’m really just like any of my muses. i can see and understand and even sometimes relate to them in certain ways - for katrina and ana, more in the way that i use them to explore character traits or emotions that don't come as naturally to me. i think i'm very different from them as people.

tagged by: stole it tagging: anyone who wants to!

[fortemelody]

(this was my original comment)

you’re all good! i’ve posted things i regret and have since deleted, so i understand just posting that in the heat of the moment if you saw something you disagreed with (not saying you have to regret your own post; i thought your take was fair and not problematic whatsoever but i just felt it was lacking context so now i understand).

i think this generation gap thing is actually very interesting, seeing as though i only got into the fandom a couple years ago and i’m still a minor. i tend to forget that as the world got more and more progressive, so did the internet/fandom spaces. which means it definitely started on the not-so-excepting side. it reminds me of when people used to get so mad when you called rainbow dash a lesbian lmao.

at the same time though, i feel like it’s tough and odd to compare how much a ship ��has it worse” than queer ships. to make up a random example, i’m sure like 60 - 70 ish % of the sonic fandom hates sonelise (not a real analytic just a guess based of stuff i’ve seen). so therefore people who like this ship would hypothetically get shit on way more than something like sonamy or sonadow because of the more interactions these two have and gained popularity throughout the years.

i don’t know if that example made any sense, but i’ll try to elaborate on the point i’m trying to make. queer ships have it worse when faced with actual discrimination, obviously (saying this as someone in the community). but if you’re just faced with someone who doesn’t like it, it usually comes down to reasoning, game events, and personal preference (unless therye just bein a jerk). basically, if someone is just super ruthless either for or against a ship, but it doesn’t involve homophobia, then it’s kinda hard to compare certain aspects.

going back to sonamy itself, i won’t bore you with the details of why i like the ship (as that could be a whole post itself). but i wanted to say that amy’s character is so all over the place that her narrative with sonic is, also, all over the place. like first people thought she was an insane stalker (which i think is definitely true in a select few games, like sonic free riders), and now people think she’s too boring and her only real character trait is being a girl. i think since sega finally warmed up to the idea that sonic might actually like her, they toned her down so this would be more believable for his sake. however, imo this makes her lose a lot of fun sass. i think right now the best example of what she could/should be in more games is a balance of both, like in the sonic idw riders arc (evan stanley’s writing). a lot of why i like sonamy actually is the same case for amy herself; fans are way better ar interpreting and expressing the little tidbits of lore and character traits that sega gives us.

lastly, the age thing. *shutters* i absolutely HATED how mfs on tiktok who knew nothing about sonic would be like “erm… 12 and 15…yikes!” or “erm technically shadow is 50 and sonic is 15…”. when will people learn that they took away official ages for an ACTUAL REASON. this was seen as some people just an excuse to ship whoever they wanted together, but in the context of the company, it’s simply just to make things less confusing and complicated. this is becus sega over the years couldn’t even get their characters ages straight. in some manuals, sonic was stated to be 15, and in others sonic was 16. in fact, i’m pretty sure at one point they really fucked up and made classic sonic older than modern sonic. i’m someone very against adding up characters just to simply make them sexualized and nothing else. and if you think about the fact that sonic is still a children’s property, obviously this is not the approach they wanted.

anyways, this rant got a bit derailed, apologies 😭 i get very passionate about sonic. this was more of just an analysis rather than an exact response. but i still hope OP and others enjoy!

Sonamy shippers act like they're oppressed as if Sonamy isn't the most popular Sonic ship ever

[nikadd]

i do think that ultimately the whole "don't assume someone is straight" IS a positive thing to internalize but i also do think that the sentiment has somehow transformed into ppl applying certain provisional gay culture qualities upon strangers who might just be hot/creative/funny in unconventional or fresh ways (in kind of a similar way to ppl pointing out how someone is physically attractive if they are perceived as unproblematic ("look how you can age if you stay in your lane" kind of thing), which is a whole issue on its own but i digress) or even if they somehow are adjacent to the culture itself by either being close friends with or dating queer ppl or even creating queer-friendly content.

and i DON'T think that assuming someone is gay or bi is the exact same thing as assuming someone is straight (even though the whole private life thing is like. still very important yk??? it still feels invasive) due to the generally heteronormative world we live in but ALSO i think it's weird to build a certain queer mythos around a person regardless of their own personal identity and experience ESPECIALLY in the age where we are so concerned with observing each other in the digital panopticon. like yeah sure public figures are forced to come to terms with some level of their personal life being open to the public consumption, but popular culture and the way the audiences interact with the celebrities have changed Dramatically in the last few years for better or for worse. the mere idea of celebrity is now so much more casual and approachable and accessible to the masses (both due to the predetermined and the natural developments in social media as public forums) and it's insidious how gradual it feels to become fully succumbed in it.

all that is to say... obviously i can't stop you from considering someone bisexual until proven wrong - i'm not going to posture here and say that i don't have these kinds of thoughts about some people - but it's also important to be careful about the way we kind of tulpa ourselves into building an entire personality for someone most of us would ultimately never know in a private, personal manner (and even then!!!! but this goes without saying.) this kind of thing often turns ugly not just for the person (though they might not be too affected due to the still remaining distance which is honestly a great thing to have, as i've mentioned) but also just for the general tone of conversations ppl have every day online. ppl - yes, even the famous ones - are allowed to not have to contend with the private matters in their public identity, whether it's something that's partially created by their marketing team OR their following. annoyingly, even the idea of someone being a really good ally is being built into some kind of deific martyrdom. i just want ppl to relax and become less concerned with other ppl's personal sense of self.

[itsclydebitches]

Oh I also like how the anon was like "you all keep calling us the 'Anti-rwde' or whatever" as if we are not specifically referring to a specific subsection of the fndm that specifically has labeled themselves as Anti-RWDE and has specifically used that tag so that they can make it easier to turn harassing people over Fandom opinions into a groupwide party game

So not only is anon blowing smoke when they say that YOU of all people "never post anything positive" (a straight-up lie if I ever heard one lol, you are an incredibly positive and upbeat person who clearly loves rwby and are only getting hate because certain sections of the fndm have decided to punish all who stray from the groupthink) but they're also displaying their ignorance by talking as if "Anti-RWDE" is a term we made up to describe people who casually like rwby, rather than the fact that is a label a specific group of people chose for themselves upon deciding to intentionally cyberbully and abuse total strangers because they don't like our opinions about a web cartoon.

Unfortunately, that twisted logic regarding names has been going on since the start. Though I didn’t experience the beginning of all this first-hand (since I came into the fandom a little later), my understanding of the history is basically that:

Fans posted content that existed under the hugely broad category of “negative” opinions (as every fandom does). However, unlike other communities, RWBY defined “negative” content as anything from a horrific, anti-representation rant lacking all evidence and deliberately attacking others… to someone going, “I preferred A over B and here’s an analytical examination as to why.” Anything deemed negative was considered equal, regardless of what should be the very obvious problems with that approach.

Thus, “critics” quickly became “haters” and all attempts to explain the nuances of criticism fell flat.

Purity culture reared its head, emphasizing that haters weren’t just people posting opinions on a webseries others disagreed with, but morally heinous asshole who were actively harming other fans and the creators. They were rude.

Since this is a fandom built on canonical acronyms that function as other words, they’re RWDE.

(And because they've always been haters, it's also the HTDM.)

So, after a long time of trying to explain things—no, just because one asshole is sending RT mean tweets doesn’t mean the majority of us do that; no, that rant isn’t the same thing as posts trying to deconstruct the show; no, a desire for better queer rep doesn’t make us homophobic, etc.—fans basically threw up their hands and went, “Fine! If we’re so rude to you then we’ll embrace it. We’re RWDE now. Might as well adopt the name you all keep calling us since we can’t get you to stop.”

Tumblr’s RWBY community demanded loudly that all criticism be filterable. Or better yet, removed from the site entirely. So, critics started using the RWDE tag in part so others could easily circumvent it.

Then fans got mad that the RWDE tag existed. A space dedicated solely to criticizing the show? The horror! Did you all miss the part where we really just wanted you out of the community entirely?

A lot of critics were successfully harassed into giving up on posting about RWBY, which is ironic given how often we hear the accusation that we harass others. I’ve personally never come across a RWBY fan who left the community because of RWDE. (Or, to be more specific, people who left because of actual RWDE posters. Plenty of fans will claim they were harassed by RWDE, but really they're referring to a handful of specific, bigoted assholes with no association with the rest of the sub-community and using "RWDE" as an inaccurate umbrella term for everyone in the fandom they dislike. As you put it, anon, it's a group-wide party game. "RWDE" has become the catch-all name for anyone you hate and more often than not, people ignore the legit RWDE posters going, "We don't know this person? They've never interacted with us? And we don't approve of their actions either, so why are you lumping us in with them??"). Meanwhile, I know many people who have left the community because of other fans targeting them over posting their disappointment and grievances with the series. And many more have come forward to basically say, “I never posted in the first place because I know the shit that'll get me.”

Because RWDE continued to exist, anti-RWDE then became a popular tag to combat it. They VAST majority of RWDE posters have never even interacted with the crew, but the claim that they're harassers became so ubiquitous that harassing them in turn was seen as justified. You criticized this public, paid-for product of a major corporation and posted it somewhere the creators will never see? We'll send you death threats to your personal inbox. Yes, those are absolutely the same thing.

“But you started this term,” we’ve said. “You created RWDE and then we adopted it precisely because you wanted to filter out our content. We want you to block us if you don't like this stuff. Why would you create a new tag that is specifically all about engaging with opinions you know you disagree with?”

There’s never been an answer to that because it’s really just about feeling superior and enjoying targeting the “bad people” online.

Similar stuff happened over on Reddit. A RWBY sub was made, the community decided they didn’t want anything they deemed as negative, eventually in an effort to carve out their own space/avoid the instant down-voting/appease the fans who very clearly wanted a strict separation in content, the RWBY Critics sub was created.

…and then that was used as evidence for how horrible those fans were. It's become go-to “evidence” presented to new fans as a way to deter them from going to the dark side, so to speak. “Look at how they created an entire space solely for hating on RWBY! RWBY Critics and RWDE are proof that they’re all horrible fake fans who only want to ruin others’ enjoyment.” Which, of course, misses the crucial context that from the start critics have always wanted to be a part of the main circles—I still post in “RWBY” because that’s what my posts are about—and we only created these niche, highly critical-focused spaces because others demanded that separation in the first place. However, I can't really blame new fans for buying into all that. If I came into a community and the majority immediately started warning me about this sub-group, painting them as every horrible thing under the sun (they're racist, transphobic, they hate the canonical queer rep, they're constantly harassing RT, they're the reason all these bad things have happened, etc.) ... I'd be pretty wary too. It speaks volumes that I've encountered a lot of people over the years who have gone, "I legit thought that RWDE was the devil until I was disappointed in something myself. Then I realized just how fast the rest of the community can turn on you if you criticize RWBY - even while still loving it! - and as a result I discovered that the vast majority of RWDE posters aren't like what the rest of the fandom paints them as." There are always exceptions on both sides, of course. You can find asshole RWDE posters and asshole non-RWDE posters, but on the whole RWDE is pretty extensively misrepresented and a lot of that stems from being able to push fans towards specific actions (a name, a new space, simply getting so frustrated that you explode in a private post that then breaks quarantine) and then being able to say, "See? They're so awful."

Though from what I've heard things have been better over there as of late, for a time this misrepresentation became so intense that the RWBY sub attempted a blanket ban on the critics sub, because guilt by association and all that. Luckily, the majority of the fandom realized that this was ridiculous, one step way too far, and it was revoked. But the fact that this happened at all is a good summary of how critics are often perceived in the community.

So yeah, this keeps happening. It's become a predictable cycle. Critics of all varieties are a part of the main community, they’re derided, they eventually get sick of that treatment, they carve out a space for themselves… and then that’s used as “proof” that they were always RWBY-hating assholes. You can’t win when either choice is automatically framed as wrong. The only correct choice, according to fans like that anon, is to stop engaging with RWBY entirely. Which, you know, is advice I personally don't plan to take lol.

[takaraphoenix]

Ship game!! What about Nico and Will?? It’s pretty popular, but I don’t think I’ve seen you write much of it…

That's an interesting one in that I have vocalized my reasons for disliking it way back when it first became popular but instead of just linking that, it has been years so I think it's time for an updated version.

Firstly: This post is gonna be properly tagged and not crosstagged so if any shipper comes across it and feels the need to bitch about it, just don't; your lack of curating your own tumblr experience is not my problem! ;D

Now, there are three key factors that play into my dislike of this ship: How it was written, what it represents, how the fandom around it acts.

1. It’s rushed and uncomfortable

In BoO, it was incredibly rushed. They had literally five sentences of interactions before they walked into the literal sunset together. Five. It was just entirely born from Riordan's Noah's Ark Complex, where he just can't let people be single. The series was ending and he needed Nico to have an endgame so he rushed into some random romance with zero build-up.

The way their interactions went down was also severely uncomfortable for me. Will was acting so offended by Nico not wanting to go to camp and be friends in an entitled way that he had no right to be, he downright guilt-tripped Nico about how he had wanted to be friends. Nico has been just so severely traumatized at such a young age and his coping mechanism, as unhealthy as it was, was to run away and hide. Will acted like Nico not wanting to form attachments to people who could potentially leave him again was somehow just an Edgy Emo Decision and not a direct reaction to his trauma. His entire approach to Nico was basically all these hippie posts of "Don't have depression!! Just go out into the sun and stop being depressed!", which is already a bad take with non-medical people but he's supposed to be a doctor (and let's not get into the shadiness of him technically being Nico's doctor).

There is also an inherent "I can fix him" angle to this ship and to me, only few ship dynamics are more uncomfortable than that. If you want to fundamentally change a person's behavior and personality, you... don't actually want to be with this person.

Now, here's where my points overlap, because the following parts of their writing that bothers me also stand for what this ship fundamentally represents.

2. Solangelo is a queer ship written by and for straights

I'm a queer woman and as a queer woman, I want queer wish-fulfillment, not what straights want out of queerness. I'm kind of tired of that, I've been sitting through it for enough decades now. That's, of course, not to say that no straight writer can give proper queer representation, but far too often do straight writers - even the most well-meaning ones - project straight desires of queerness into their queer representation.

Let me explain that closer through this ship.

Nico's been in love with Percy for years and I'm going to do my best to not hijack this post with some Percico agenda; that's not what this his about, this isn't some "my ship is better than your ship" ship-war nonsense. It's simply a canonical fact that Nico has had romantic feelings for another character for years.

A character who, in this medium, is heterosexual. And if you're queer, you've been there. In love with your straight best friend. It's a cliche, but it's a cliche for a reason.

We have also all been well-meaningly rejected by said straight friend.

And here's the straight desires for you: The queer person who was in love with a straight person just immediately stops having those feelings and will then as quickly as possible fall in love with the next queer person they meet to be happy and no longer uncomfortably in love with a straight person, because that thought makes the straights uncomfortable.

Queer wish-fulfillment would be for Percy to return those feelings, for the queer character to get his first love, to not be rejected. That thing queer teens always dreamed about for themselves.

Aside from the wish-fulfillment angle, the pacing is another problem. Let me repeat, Nico was in love for years. But a five sentence conversation with Will once causes a crush on Will and we see him physically turn away from Percy and toward Will just immediately to rebound and actually fall out of love with Percy and in love with Will. Anyone who's ever been unlucky in love will attest to just how unrealistic and ridiculous the pacing here is.

It's also straight queerness in another respect; Nico has been the first ever queer character we meet in that world. He loves a straight guy - and to get over that, we introduce the second queer character. Because heaven forbid there are multiple queers to pick from. No, in straight-written queer romances, there is always that one main queer and then they introduce a second one and the two just immediately hit it off and develop a romance like all a queer person needs to form attraction to someone is the confirmation that the other person shares your sexuality.

Also the notable gay guy on gay guy ship here, whereas the more queer-wish-fulfillment option would have also included more nuance to the queer experience, because Percy doesn't have to be heterosexual just because he has only been with girls so far. It's a very old-fashioned - think 90s and early 2000s - kind of straight-written queerness that there are only exactly two homosexuals and that those two homosexuals then pair up.

And, listen, I'm not immune to these outdated straight-written queers entirely, I have many such ships that I grew up with that I am still fond of because they were groundbreaking at that time and they weren't outdated yet back when they happened in said 90s and early 2000s. I am however a grown woman now and just like I have grown, so has queer rep so I am not as easily baited into falling onto my knees in gratitude for canon rep. You have to go with the times. And this ship, by all that is given to us, is just entirely outdated straight-written rep.

Which, I mention earlier that even straight-written rep can be good. If the author tries. Riordan doesn't really try though; he does the bare minimum when he writes any of his rep - and there have been many, many more qualified voices being very vocal about his depiction of people of color and, as a woman, I've been vocal about his depiction of women. I don't want to derail this post with all of that, but I do think that it bears mentioning that Riordan doing rep but only doing a bare minimum and not putting in the necessary work to deepen the representation he wants to give is a repeating pattern that has been pointed out many times by now.

(I’d also like to point out that no, it is not just the ship and not just the listed instances that make it straight-written rep for straights. It’s Nico’s entire queer arc, starting with his forced coming out. A severely traumatizing event that is completely brushed over because the straight author doesn’t understand the impact this has on queer people. Not to mention the framework; Nico’s coming out isn’t Nico’s story, it happens in Jason’s POV, it is given to us through the POV of the straight bystander who gets to be Best Ally by assuring Nico that being gay is okay. This kind of coming out is not a queer wish-fulfillment, it’s a straight wish-fulfillment of getting to be the straight savior, the ally to show the gay the light of acceptance. And, additional to the ridiculous pacing of how fast Nico gets over his love for Percy, Nico also gets over years of internalized homophobia just because of, I don’t know, Jason’s few encouraging words and the fact that Will paid attention to him? For a gay kid who was in the closet all his life, the nonchalant way in which he publicly confessed his crush to Percy at the end made absolutely no sense and was written as basically a joke, finished off with Nico literally high-fiving Percy’s girlfriend despite those two never having seen eye to eye before but this is straight wish-fulfillment so all straights are Super Allies, because that’s the way straights want to see themselves, even though Annabeth has shown before just how jealous she can be and she most definitely wouldn’t go around high-fiving people who confess to her boyfriend. Nothing about Nico’s queer arc in HoO felt natural or queer or satisfying.)

Sure, Solangelo on a surface level is big because it's a canon queer couple in a YA book-series and kudos for that and yay for the kids who get to grow up seeing queers in YA books, but I actually do think that kids growing up with books written in the 2010s shouldn't grow up with 1990s levels of representation, because the 2010s overall are actually at a far more nuanced and better level of representation when it comes to queerness. And I do reserve the right to quit on too straight-written and too outdated queer rep in a landscape where I can get more satisfying representation elsewhere; we don’t live in times anymore where you necessarily have to love every bit of rep because it’s the only one you get.

Now that we've gone through my first two gripes, let's wrap this up with the final point, because it also directly ties into this.

3. The new wave of antis hiding behind this ship

A huge part of the fandom is so busy kissing Riordan's ass solely for giving them queer rep at all they think that both the author and the ship are beyond flawless and that kind of attitude is not good. Just because an author includes rep doesn't make either perfect. Absolutely no one is beyond critique - especially not when said critique comes from the very people the author is representing. And even beyond any "valid" critique on the ship, quite frankly, someone should also be allowed to just not like it, without any reasons given at all.

But there is a certain... protective obsessiveness about this ship that doesn't allow a not liking. Very similar to how PJO bore this mindset around Perc/abeth already. It's okay to have OTPs, even OTPs that you have a blindspot for and just don't want to see any flaws in. It is however not okay to then go around attacking people who don't like the thing and mind their own business.

Solangelo's bred a new generation of antis in this fandom. And, particularly with the fact that this post too receives an "anti" tag, I feel like there needs to be a clarification (because tumblr likes to forget what actually makes an anti). Not liking something doesn't make you an anti, venting in properly tagged posts doesn't either; it's the people who harass others, who seek out the content they dislike to then complain that it even exists and who actively try to make others stop creating for it - those are antis.

And with Solangelo's popularity, there was a high rise in Percico antis, who sought it out, were unnecessarily nasty about it, harrassed creators and tried to enforce some kind of "Solangelo supremacy" that won't allow other ships for the characters.

I've been in fandom long enough to be perfectly aware that not all Solangelo shippers count into this category and that there are completely normal and nice Solangelo shippers, but this is a Venn diagram where the overlap between Solangelo shippers and antis is too large to not widely associate the nasty people with the ship itself. (I've been there myself, shipping the very ship behind which a fandom's antis all hid. The second-hand embarrassment of having these people give the ship a bad name is horrendous and I do feel bad for all the normal Solangelo shippers.)

The more often I encountered these people, who made Percico bad (sometimes in wildly ridiculous manners that bent and deliberately misinterpreted canon) and who in the same breath praised Solangelo high, the more tired I grew of that ship. It's a simple game of association, really. You see that linked to the gross and nasty behavior and you start associating the ship itself with that gross and nasty behavior - and with all the things I said before that already weighed into my dislike of the ship, this just was the final tipping point, really.

And that's it. That sums up why I dislike Solangelo. It was hastily rushed, uncomfortable in its execution, it is outdated rep that very much feels as straight-written as it factually is and it does not feel aimed at me as a queer person but rather at the straight audience and it has gathered a cult following of quite uncomfortable people who on their own would be reason enough to avoid it so you can avoid them.

Send me a ship and I will explain why I do or don't ship it

[mikeellee]

Hi @doodlegirl1998

So....I'll try to use a doylist approach first. Ok, you asked why Shig tried to recruit BK and why kidnap(note how Shig didnt even made an investigation about him...if he had, would see how this POS had the best childhood ever)

Hori has stated how he weep when writing Bk vs Izu aka victim blaming. So, if we take this into account...Hori has this version in his head how BK is amazing...and this serve as a great redemption story, only in his mind.

You're right on the money. Shig looks stupid by trying to recruit bk and kidnapping. The logical thing would be recruit or interact more with him.

As for heroes society flaw. As what we see, the issue is more Hero Commission. But saying "hereos are bad" is not something it has ground.

"Ah but hero X accept going to this tv show. He is in for fame" and this take is weak. Think this way, using a simple exemple:

You are tasked to do a cake for a party. You do a wonderful cake and its so amazing, people post on the Instagram and gain cloud. "What amazing cake" however, you said you did yourself and people side eye you. "You want fame for that?" And the cake is famous but no one gives you credit.

Its a silly example. But the idea is there. The heroes wanting credits for their work is not a sin on earth, and not once we see heroes letting fame cloud their minds.

So my point is...Shig doesnt have a real grasp on hero society's struggles. He never involved from "I hate AM" but you are right Izu and Shig talking could have helped both characters.

Shig realizing destruction is not all he can do.

Izu realizing how....he's treated unfairly (he gets no credit for his actions. He defeated Stain, overhaul and no credit...but this is only for him)

Also the whole "quirkless are treated like trash" is smth only happens with Izu thanks to BK. Bk treated him like that bc he wanted, Aldera didnt manipulated him or shit...even if Izu had a quirk...BK would have done the same.

Why Izu wanted to be a hero?

He was quirkless? He had a plan?

Also...note how Izu is ALWYAS single out. He has no groups, people react "funny" when he murmours (as if is smth outwordly) and is the only one doing so, he is the ONLY quirkless student, he is the only one who has a quirk who hurts him (UA doesnt care)

And ....honestly as much I may be in danger to hear "ew gross" it kind makes me ship shigadeku. Why? Shig does the barelt minium. Shig knows Izu is quirkless and instead of saying something cruel...he shurgs and says "oh well" that is way better than Izu's mom did.

Shig canonically asked him out (Ochako shuts down her feelings for....reasons)

Shig has photos of Izu. (Ochako has no idea of his past)

Shig thinks about him. (Class A1 corned him in a way showing how BK and his croonies used to do)

Not hating on Ochako. But Hori single out Izu and Shig so much that...it makes sense ship to them...plus, he is making his villains being queer then...

(Dr. Uijiko confessing to AFO. Stain giving a love letter to AM)

As for Kotaro, yes. The man tried to stop Shig...and some people still see this as a bad thing. Guys, AFO is wearing Shig's body. Kotaro really tried to do smth. The entire family did.

Endeavour only has a pity me party. Nothing else....but we are supposed to see him as a great dude. At the cost of Shoto's development.

Also...I hatr TodoDrama. We wasted pages on them...but know 0 about Izu's family. Izu is the mc holy shit.

I think I mentioned before but in my fics I like to give Izu a granny who was a hero...to not only explain why Izu wanted to be a hero, but another paralel with Shig.

BK

Aizawa (this dude has a hate boner with Midoriya for some reason and...fandom likes to say "he is dadzawa")

Endeavour

Ruined the manga bc Hori needs to make the abusers look cool.

Hey. Only now I can send a question/post related to the post you reblogged. Look, Kotaro Shimura being another abusive dad in a plethora of abusive dads is pretty weak. But what kills me is how...he kind has the potential/ had in this case.

Remember the dream sequence where Shig's family tries to stop him to accept AFO. Kotaro the "shittiest dad ever and so unworthy" tried to stop his son. That is much more than Endeavour ever did to his own sons.

But Hori has a wierd fixation with dad being abusives and abuse being throw around.

Also...have you noticed how Izu and Shig have so much paralels? But it feels it is so accidental? Like Hori is not planning anything for Izu or Shig (aside abuse and more abuse dor lols)

Hello @mikeellee 👋

I agree. In my opinion Shimura Kotaro (like a lot of Hori's characters) has a lot of missed potential like you had pointed out in your reblog. There is so much we don't know about him (and about how the relatives of heroes are treated in general - I blame Hori's weak world building for this.)

Also you make a good point, in that dream sequence Shimura Kotaro attempted to stop his son from going to All For One and was proactive in doing so.

Something that Endeavor, for all his self pity, was never proactive in stopping Touya from self destructing. In fact he was reactive and actively caused the Touya's self destruction. He never actually does anything to stop Touya's descent into villiany. He reacts to his burns, he reacts by shouting at him for self harming and being in distress but doesn't identify he's the cause or try to DO something else to bond with his son. An key criticism I have with Endeavor is this - that he is reactive in what is essentially HIS redemption arc and what was originally meant to be Shoto's story about his recovery as an abusive victim and reclaiming his power as his own.

Izuku and Shiggy have a TONNE of parallels under a better written story those two could have really flourished. Honestly, I feel like MHA would have been better written if Shiggy replaced Bakugou as the main rival and remained as Izuku's villain.

A few of the parallels I've noticed between them.

1) Shiggy having the quirk he did caused his trauma./ Izuku having no quirk caused his trauma.

2) Both were rejected by hero society.

3) Both were abused (Izuku by Bakugou and Shiggy by Kotaro then by AFO.)

4) Both had families that didn't fully accept them.

It always baffled me why, after carrying around photos of Izuku, after seeking him out for advice about Stain why Shiggy didn't do the logical thing and attempt to escalate this to try to kidnap him and not Bakugou.

Especially as that kidnapping did nothing for Bakugou. He didn't grow from it and it only served to make Shiggy look stupid by attempting to try to recruit him in the first place... Izuku on the other hand. Especially if Shiggy looked into his history and tried to repeatedly recruit him would have made for a lot of interesting interactions.

And growth between BOTH of them. With Izuku pointing out the flaws in All for One's teachings and Shiggy would point out the flaws in Hero Society. Shiggy would learn what he wants for himself and learn that it isn't destruction of everything. While Izuku would finally gain some self respect, and realise that how he was treated was wrong.

To think that this is what we could have had and then to see what we got is well...disappointing.

All because Hori loves his abuser characters and Hori insists on Bakugou when the story would have been so much better without him.