#you are in THE women and queers hobby space!!!!!!!!!!!

[theophagie-remade]

Not sure whether this can be considered a hot take or whatever but something that I really dislike is that there really doesn't seem to be a distinction between fanbase and fandom in many people's minds anymore, which is really grating because you'll see comments from self proclaimed fandom members like "I like [thing] but I'm not one of those crazies who care about ships lol, weirdos 🤪". Because shipping is one of the core elements of fandom, so if you really can't stand it that much maybe the problem lays within the fact that you entered a community that does not fit you

(Which isn't to say that you have to ship something, anything, to be a fandom member, but accepting the existence of shipping as a common practice should be the minimum lol)

[ramenheim]

About prev reblogs: I have never seen TME used to complain about & demarcate cis men's behaviours.

Despite the term ostensibly lumping together *almost any gender configuration that isn't binarily trans woman*, the only times it's used recently is to complain about (trans) ppl that get lumped in with cis women (as intersex ppl trans or otherwise are *never* factored into this dichotomy anyways), including cis women themselves.

I have never once seen it used to delineate trans women from cis men, even as it gets used to delineate cis women's experiences from trans women's experiences. I have only seen /haphazard/ acknowledgement of non-binary experiences included in TMA, but only really as an afterthought or when it's framed as the precursor to 'fully realizing trans womanhood'. I've only seen intersex folks brought up if they elect to use the terms TME/TMA for themselves, with bizarro interrogations into 'how' they were raised/had their genitals 'corrected' only once they individually disagreed with the terminology or had a confounding opinion in a public discussion.

It is regularly used to delineate trans men from trans women; but its users almost uniformly deride any attempt by trans men to coin a term to describe their own unique combinatory transphobia that isn't TME; again despite TME literally just supposing to mean 'transmisogyny-exempt'.... so why would it be used to discuss trans men's *unique* experiences with hatred directed at the fact that they either "are/aren't (real) men" by anyone who wants them to suffer?

It's been *changed* into hastily recycled AGAB terminology bc of wider recognition of the flaws with /that/ but without the driving flaws of that **tool for analysis** ever being fully addressed; and therefore has gotten subsumed into the 'new euphemism' for the Innie vs Outie false dichotomy as its usage became more widespread.

I think it still is a useful discussion tool ONLY when it's viewed *as a tool* and not some inherent marker of identity. It is DEFINITELY just bigotry when used as a NOUN that has negative behaviours ascribed to it, esp in the context of complaining about trans men** as a whole homogenized group, instead of highlighting individual behaviours/belief systems for the harm they contribute to against TMA trans/nb ppl.

Young queers really need to stop swallowing the tradcath radfem juice of "Women Pure + Good & Men Bad + Evil" [**that tumblr feminism has always had a problem with] and acting like you aren't being a transphobic shitheel by adding the word Trans in front of it-- & This is ESPECIALLY a problem when non-trans "Allies" do this, as it sets up trans women for failure whenever they make a mistake/can be reframed as 'being a cause-traitor' since women are punished more harshly for any percieved failure of Righteousness, AND allows them further to enact their unbridled transphobia onto trans men (& enbys/genderqweirdos) and pass it off as 'being an ally to trans women'..... despite them just being extremely transphobic (+ misogynistic + homphobic + intersexist) & then hiding behind """"TMAs"""" as a negative PR meatshield.

TL;DR if you are using TME to mean (nc)AFAB in vent posts, just have the guts to fucking use that as the word & see how it reads then.

(**since transmasc & transfem do not imply either a 'starting' or 'finalized' gender state; they are personal adjectives in and of themselves. Please do not warp them into new innie vs outie binary divides).

[**see related: the raw ass treatment of 'AMAB enbys' on here and in similar online/irl "feminist" environments. (Which was one of the driving factors behind the original TMA/TME coinage & is where I still find useful inter-trans discussions utilizing it as a term; importantly I don't think the term should stop being used altogether!!)]

[dungeonmastersconsortium]

Thinking this morning about the twitter thread where someone said "we need more queer spaces that don't revolve around alcohol and aren't super loud, it's impossible to make new friends" and when people pointed out that it's actually really possible to make new adult friends, and suggested a local movie night, they said they wanted something more quiet. And when someone suggested that there are actually loads of shared communities around various hobbies that are great ways to meet friends and learn to do something new, they said "You people are misunderstanding me, I don't want to spend money, I don't want it to be loud, I don't want to be around alcohol, I don't want to go to burlesque or drag shows, and I don't want to have to learn a new hobby, I just want to meet new people"

Like, what the fuck did they think community is? How the fuck do you propose meeting people? I'm all for inclusive resources but at some point, as an adult, you have to realize that if you want certain things in your life to change, you have to be the one to make changes. If you want to go out and make more friends, you have to be willing to GO OUT AND MAKE MORE FRIENDS. You have to go where the people currently are.

You have to learn a new hobby and go play card games with the trans women and enbies, or put up with some noise and go watch films, or go play pool in the dive bar with the dykes in the dark back corner, or SOMETHING. But at some point you have to say, "the problem is my unwillingness to try to adapt to fit into a community, rather than expect a whole community to be built on me without any effort from me."

Queer spaces that already do exist have a hard enough time staying open, you can't expect MORE and MORE to be made unless YOU want to go make one and see for yourself how hard it is.

If you want a community, you need to be willing to participate in SOMETHING.

[randombush3]

a sense of coming home

ona batlle x reader

summary: part two of this! ona and you are (frustratingly) still just friends

words: 6.5k (i have NO idea why i waffle so much but lets pls allow it)

warnings: there's like five secs of smut at the end

notes: this has been the most self-indulgent fic i've written because this is how i met my gf and so i am glad to show you a nice happy ending

again, the quote is from 'this side of paradise' (said gf's fav book - i don't recommend however because the protagonist is a twat)

also i didn't proofread bc i am exhausted and i am hungover and i am very ready to go to sleep (#globetrotting is not for the weak) x

There is something difficult about forcing oneself back to their toxic roots. Ona discovers as such as she presses her body into a temple of meaningless sex, but she does so because she is a driven person. Ona is determined to get over you, once and for all, except she’d quite like to stay friends (hence why she agreed when asked). She also thinks it would expose her to fall out because her feelings shouldn’t have existed anyway, so she technically shouldn’t be heartbroken? 

Anyway, Ona rampages through Manchester! They appreciate her accent – some even ask her to speak to them in Spanish when she is three fingers deep inside of them, to which she obliges with little fanfare – and it isn’t like the city lacks queer women. It is a super solid way to keep her busy, to tear her attention from hungrily checking your Instagram whenever possible. 

It’s also what lands her with coronavirus. She’s embarrassed to admit just how many people she has come into contact with when the club doctors ask her questions over the phone.

You send her a lovely message after hearing she is yet another fallen soldier. 

Ona is at home, isolating, and you are apparently trapped in Spain, unable to get into Italy. You haven’t quite made it to your parents’ house since your flight was supposed to depart from Madrid. “How come you’re not on the phone to one of your ‘connections’?” Ona asks suspiciously, wondering why this call has lasted longer than ten minutes. “Surely someone knows someone else and they can get you back home.” 

“I’m hardly out of my depth in my own country,” you remind her with a twinging sigh, pained that she has suppressed all memories of your childhood. “It’s not like I don’t speak Spanish.” 

“Didn’t you get rid of it in your head to make space for Italian and English? Oh, and French too, right? That’s where the fashion weeks are.” 

You laugh at her pride for knowing something about your job, but it is not to ridicule her. “I am speaking to you, aren’t I?” 

“In Catalan,” she points out. “Forget Spanish, but don’t forget Catalan.” 

“I can’t. It’s the language everyone uses to tell me about how fucked you’ve been lately.”  You take in a deep breath, uncomfortable with Ona’s silence but knowing your piece needs to be said. “Are you aware of what happened a few months ago? Why I missed the wedding?” One of your friends met her dream man and he whisked her off to Menorca for a small ceremony. Only the people she loved the most were invited, which included your childhood friend group. “We were in New York, a whole bunch of us. It was late but the show had been a big deal so we went out to celebrate, and… these ‘friends’, these people, they aren’t the same as you and me. Most of them are English, you know, and they come from very fancy schools where addiction is normal. Two of them ended up in the hospital that night – the bag hadn’t even made it round to me by the time they’d dropped. I know it seems far-fetched, but all I’m trying to say is that addiction has consequences. Bad consequences.” 

“So you’re not on my side?” Ona isn’t taking this too seriously. A few people have joked about her questionable new hobby, but no one has made it seem so dire that they have needed to get you involved. You who, of course, Ona will listen to. 

“I am always on your side.” 

That is her main take-away from the conversation, Ona chooses, when it ends an hour later. She swoons, meaning the last twenty women have been a waste of time, but she also tortures herself into ignoring the potential problem. Being a sex addict would be embarrassing, so she won’t be. 

Though your subtle shaming for her abundance of quick-fix flings is hypocritical, Ona would also hate for you to see her that way. You can avoid commitment all you like, but she is determined to be different to prove to you that she is a viable candidate, should you wish to stop stringing her along. It’s probably toxic; it probably means that you are both clinging onto a friendship that should either end or be labelled something else. It probably is the push and pull that has kept you interested, Ona thinks, because she knows that you like the chase. 

However, as much as she’d like to be freed of whatever game she is caught up in, she can’t seem to let you go like that.

… 

The next time Ona and you have a proper conversation about something other than how your love lives have been stunted or how people back home are not as successful as the two of you is when most of the restrictions have been lifted. 

You waited out the pandemic in Vilassar de Mar, much to your annoyance, but now that you can travel again, the first person on your mind to visit is your childhood best friend. You’re not as close as you used to be, having drifted further during even more years apart, but it does not dull your love for her, nor hers for you. 

Ona has changed her mind about Manchester and is forcing herself to like it. It works enough for a visit from you to be the last thing on her mind, and so she slows her response time down until the next arranged date to see each other in person is all set for the summer before the Euros in England.

You’re not quite home but you are in the country, and, with the pre-Euros camp in two days, Ona is spending the final few hours of calm left before the storm in the comforting presence of her mum and dad. 

And… you, apparently. 

“You weren’t supposed to be here yet,” is Ona’s greeting when she opens the front door. 

Your smile is wide and genuine, and you are holding a gift bag in one hand. There is a nice bottle of wine in the other. “Not even an ‘hola’?” When no reply comes, you swallow the emotions that have arisen; the ones that are maybe, just a little bit to do with how soft Ona looks with her hair down. And the slope of her jaw. And the ghosts of defined biceps that bulge even when she isn’t flexing her arms. “I’m dropping by to see your parents. I thought you were in Barcelona with your footballer friends.” 

“You visit my parents?” asks Ona curiously. 

“Of course.” 

With that, you side-step her and call out to her mother, announcing both your arrival and your desire to hand them their gifts. Dinner is just about to be served, and Ona is soon tasked with setting another place at the table for you as though the last ten years had never happened and your friendship hadn’t lost its innocence. 

Maybe it would be better for Ona to not know what it feels like to kiss you, to touch you, to – dare she think it – love you. It would certainly make things less painful, and would have saved her from catching at least one illness and spending a good amount of money on Ubers to escape from random apartments. It would make it easier to listen to you talk about your life in Milan, where you seem to exist in a bubble of incredibly attractive people who are desperate to hold hands and form a raft. 

“Modelling can be brutal,” you agree, nodding at Ona’s father as you follow on from his concerns about your career. He voices them regularly; whenever you see him. Ona realises you have spent a lot of time with her parents without her. “It gets quite competitive between the girls so I’ve been somewhat avoiding them. They’ve brought in someone new, scouted from Germany, I think, and I’m a little worried that I’ll have to switch agencies if they start prioritising her.” You glance at Ona, wanting to know if she is listening, hoping she is. You wish that she were as good at suppressing her feelings as you are. You wish she didn’t look at you like you hung the moon, because you know that you have to tell her you have hung it for someone else. “I’d move tomorrow, to be honest, but I’ve started seeing this guy and he’s convincing me to stay in Milan.” 

“The minute he is your boyfriend, you bring him here,” commands Ona’s mother in a tone she hasn’t yet used on her actual daughter (said daughter has never mentioned anyone before). “Show us a picture of him! Is he a model like you?” 

He is, and if Ona holds her fork tighter after she sees the photo you pull up, that is her business. You secretly take in her clenched jaw and furrowed eyebrows, and this might be the worst thing you have ever had to do. To see her so defeated, so hopeless, is upsetting, especially since you are harbouring the same feelings. However, you are able to admit when it is time to throw the towel in, and you can no longer live like this. 

Ona is too perfect for you. She is driven, hard-working, and funny. She likes to nutmeg little children on the street, and she likes to buy them an ice-cream if they slip a goal past her, slotting the flat footballs into imaginary nets and celebrating as though they have just won the Champions League. She knows a lot, more than she thinks she does. She cares about people, but sometimes it manifests in anger, in frustration. 

Any aspect of her is an aspect that you could love, and that is reason enough not to. Because how can you allow yourself to taint such perfection? 

But, in this unspoken rejection, the compliment is obscured from the recipient’s view. All Ona sees when you gush about how he buys you flowers and takes you out to dinner, is a burning, bright question. It flashes red and yellow, both as a warning and cry for attention. How can she compete if you don’t even recognise her as a competitor? 

…

“--And then they proceeded to finish a film they were halfway through as if it were the most normal thing ever,” Ona rants the minute she hits the concrete of Las Rozas, walking into the facility with Aitana and the other girls who travelled with her from Barcelona. Only the midfielder has been gracious enough to listen to the entire monologue, but the others joke that that is because Ona’s emotional state has led her to spiral in her native language. It is forbidden for them to openly speak Catalan in the Spanish camp, according to Jorge Vilda, who loves to hurl a ‘we can send you back to where you came from in an instant’ their way if he so much as hears a ‘bon dia’. Naturally, Aitana doesn’t give a fuck about the rule, although Ona chooses to believe that she is listening because she cares.

“Are you done?” Aitana asks thoughtfully, sucking on her bottom lip as she tries to absorb her friend’s crisis and formulate a valid, sensible response. The two have known each other for a while now, and Aitana remembers a time when Ona was relentlessly teased by their older teammates for being in love with her best friend. It is clear to her that those feelings never ceased, though she has heard through the grapevine (Leila Ouahabi) that you are now a model and you live somewhere in Italy. You’re part Italian, is what Leila also claims, having professed your ethnicity to a small huddle of fellow gossipers one day in the gym at the Barça training facility. 

“No! Nothing is ever done with her. It’s viscous and it continues in a horrid cycle that has me flapping around in circles like some idiot. I am one of her boys.” Ona groans dramatically, the sound perhaps a little too loud. A few of the girls in front of them turn around to see why a cat seems to have been strangled, but they quickly lose interest when they see it is just Ona and her disastrous situation. “Do you know how fucking humiliating it is to be one of her guys? I am a professional footballer! I play for Manchester United, one of the most historic clubs in the world, and I am about to represent my country in a major tournament. I am successful, Aita, and yet I am still not enough for her.” 

“Maybe she only likes men.” 

“A man has never made her scream like I have,” she bites back. Aitana blushes, but Ona is too far gone in her rage to hear her crudeness nor preserve her friend’s sanity. “She’s been like this since she decided she was gay! Isn’t that hilarious? ‘Ona, I think I’m gay’, she said. I know lesbian breakups can be hard, but there is no way my cousin fucked her up to this extent.” 

“I can’t help you with this, Oni,” Aitana laments, sorry to have to confess this to her friend. “I think you need to talk to her about it. A proper conversation to fix long-term issues, not like the ones you obviously had when agreeing to stop having sex and things like that. Only she knows what she’s thinking.” It is definitely not the advice Ona wants to hear, but she cannot deny the midfielder’s wisdom. “But for now, we focus on winning.” 

…

You are more than a little confused. 

To start from the beginning, Ona’s cousin fucked you up. She broke your heart, and that first impression of dating girls was incredibly traumatising. With girls, you don’t just kiss and sleep with them, you get close – really close – and then when you break up, it is like you have lost both a girlfriend and a best friend. 

Men are a lot simpler. Men like you and they aren’t shy about it. They can sometimes be just as cruel, but you have never felt invested enough to care too much. 

Some nights, you don’t fall asleep, tossing and turning between your sexual identity, aware that you don’t need to label it but desperate to… discover yourself. If you don’t understand that part of you, how will someone else? How can you be loved? How do you even know who you want to love you? 

For as much as Milan is great, it definitely doesn’t help you with your crisis. Girls in Milan like to do what they want. It is not uncommon for the models to kiss each other in clubs, in front of appreciative male gazes or not, and then reveal their engagement to their future husband the very next day. It’s easy to be drawn into such a bubble, but the minute you step out of it, you are hit with the real world. 

It’s what makes the pandemic so distressing for you personally, because you are forced to live like normal people for some time. Your eyes are held open and the question is shoved down your throat, and it really doesn’t help that Ona’s cousin never moved out of Vilassar de Mar. 

She sees you one day, saying hello from a suitable distance as you pick up milk as per your mother’s request. “I heard you’re modelling?” she asks with no agenda, no seductive glint in her eye. You notice the ring on her finger, and she feels the heaviness of your staring. “Oh, I got married a year ago. Did Ona not tell you?” 

You realise that you and Ona try to avoid talking about anything other than the love interests you have. “No, she didn’t. Congratulations, though. She’s a lucky woman.” 

“You don’t have to pretend you’re happy for me,” laughs the woman opposite you, amused and somewhat apologetic. “Look, I’m really sorry for how I acted when we were younger. I was definitely not the most mature person out there, and I know I hurt you.” 

“I cried for months.” 

“I’m sorry,” she repeats. You suck in a deep breath, trying to hold the memories of your pain at bay. “The first breakup is usually the worst but at least it gets better, as you probably know.” 

She looks at you expectantly, awaiting your confirmation. It never comes. 

“I haven’t dated another girl since,” you tell her, sounding rather detached from yourself. 

Her eyebrows furrow and she is clearly frowning behind her facemask. “What about Ona? I thought you were together when you lived in Madrid. It takes more than a friendship to do what you did.” 

You were originally going to go to university in England. It was your dream, and Ona wasn’t entirely aware of the situation because you hadn’t wanted to tell her you were leaving. Then she was sent out on a professional contract to Madrid, and it wasn’t like you were the only one leaving. 

Ona’s cousin, years ago, had suggested that you go to Madrid if you wanted to get away from Vilassar de Mar. “You’ll be close enough to come home when you’d like, but not so close that you’ll feel as though nothing has changed,” she had said. 

No one had known about your offers in England aside from your parents. And Ona’s cousin, who’d only found out because you had called her, drunk on celebratory champagne, because you had to tell someone. 

“You gave up a dream for her because you didn’t want her to be alone.” 

“I moved to Milan. In the end, she was alone.” 

“You sound like you regret it,” she replies, nodding once at you to bid you farewell and then heading over to a woman who is standing with a puppy in her arms. You watch as she pulls down her mask and kisses her wife, her eyes shining with love and happiness, and your blood runs green with jealousy. 

You hate Ona’s cousin for devastating you once more. 

Do you regret it? 

It’s unclear. 

You try to make sense of it when you don’t hesitate to fly back to Italy the minute you can, going home to lick your wounds at Ona’s non-committal response to meeting you when you are in London the next month. It hurts that she is no longer at your beck-and-call, but you are somewhat happy for her. You know that lines have been crossed and that she has suffered for it. You know that you are probably the one at fault here. 

This time in Milan, you don’t fight it as much. You kiss other girls and let them go home to their boyfriends; you submit to the thing you had convinced yourself you would never become. 

As you drive yourself deeper and deeper into your stereotype, the thought of Ona gets pushed away and newer, more culturally-acceptable fantasies come to mind.

It takes a photoshoot for him to ask you out on a date. 

It takes returning home and gaining the approval of Ona’s parents (who are far more open than your own) for you to agree to be official. 

You don’t ask Ona what she thinks. She’s busy, you reason, because she is representing Spain at the Euros. She won’t care who you are dating and she certainly doesn’t need it rubbed in her face. 

There are many reasons why you go out with him. 

One is that you do like him; he’s nice, he’s funny, he treats you well. (He’s not Ona.) Another is that rent is going up and him sharing the load is helpful. (He’s not Ona.) There is also that he is very popular within the agency, and your chemistry on camera is enough to keep your jobs rolling in and casting directors satisfied. 

He’s not Ona. You know that. 

That's the whole point. 

If he were Ona, you’d be deeply in love with him. If he were Ona, you would never leave the house, never leave his embrace, never leave the little bubble created when it is just the two of you and no one else. If he were Ona, you would be excited about the conversations he gently guides you into; marriage, children, where you are going to live one day. You’d miss him more when he isn’t here. You’d care. 

But you just… don’t. 

Another year passes, more Ona-less than the last, and then she is suddenly coming back home to Barcelona, a medal around her neck and word of a relationship floating above her head. 

You could ask her about it if you wanted to because she is still one of your closest friends, but the truth is, you really, desperately don’t want to hear it. While Ona has been falling in love with someone else, you have been proving your stupid feelings to yourself. 

The act (your current relationship) lowers enough for you to go home for Christmas. You leave Milan as though fleeing from a hurricane, and you refuse to control the damage until you have entered the new year. Your parents aren’t entirely sure they want you moping about the house, confused how someone so successful can revert to a moody teenager the minute they are back in safe territory, and they heavily encourage you to accept an invite that was extended out to you a few months ago. 

Your friends are going skiing in Andorra, and they’d like for you to come with them. 

“Ona won’t be there,” one of them regretfully informs you. “She said she doesn’t want to make things weird. She has a girlfriend – or, I don’t know, a talking stage. She wants you to have fun.” 

“But Ona and I are friends,” you try to explain, feeling exposed by the look of pity she gives you; the same look someone receives when they find out their ex has gotten married or something similar. As a defensive mechanism, you hastily pull out your phone and dial her number. Everyone watches you, now uninterested in their food as you dine and plan your holiday. 

Ona picks up on the third ring, escaping her dinner with Lucy and rushing into the cool, nighttime air of Barcelona. 

“Hi?” she says – asks – with raised eyebrows, wondering if you’re in danger. 

“You’re coming skiing with us, aren’t you?” 

Your friends hide their laughs behind their hands, surprised by how firm your tone is. You do not need it for Ona, because she does anything you say regardless, but they enjoy seeing this side of you. This is someone who has had to fend for herself in a foreign country. 

Removing the phone from her ear for a moment, Ona sighs, disappointed in herself. 

“Yeah, of course. I’ve missed you, you know.” 

…

Skiing is not something Ona is really allowed to do. As a footballer, her legs are what pay her wage. Career-destroying planks of metal are not the best way to spend the dying embers of the year. She knows that. She does, she swears, but she is so eager to go that Jonatan cannot crush her dreams. He tells her, “if you get injured your contract will be reviewed, Ona Batlle,” and she promises him that it won’t happen. Nothing bad is going to happen. 

It will be the first time she has spent more than a day with her childhood friends, and she is unbelievably excited. 

Lucy finds it adorable and makes it known, helping her pack for her trip, versed in what to bring because her sister skis or something like that (Ona can’t really focus on her almost-girlfriend's monologue). Lucy likes Ona a lot, and it makes her stomach flutter when she thinks about Ona and her friends talking about them. She’s sure her feelings are reciprocated, and she cannot wait for Ona to return to her in the new year, all smiles and lingering hangovers, and ask her to be her girlfriend. Officially. 

Your friends convene in the centre of Vilassar de Mar with two cars between you. There are ten people coming. 

Someone, most-likely trying to keep the peace, instructs Ona into one vehicle and you into the other. The drive isn’t too long, but you suppose that the tension is uncomfortable for those who aren’t accustomed to maintaining a friendship despite the weight of it. 

It’s five days, and you are determined to have fun. 

Ona is naturally good at this, although she claims it is her first time. You, living in Milan, are just as advanced. 

By the third day, the both of you agree that going off together to do some of the harder runs will be harmless. Spending the day together won’t feel like a date or a romantic holiday. Watching Ona glide over the compacted snow won’t be attractive, watching her cocky smirk as she scales the bumps along the side of the piste won’t do anything. 

It won’t. (It does.) 

And it just has to be the third day that someone pulls out two bottles of tequila and a drinking game that is going to ensure every single one of you is off your face by midnight. 

In rooms opposite one another, you and Ona call your respective partners and tell them about how great a time you are having, actively avoiding telling them about who you spent the day with as though it counts as cheating. It doesn’t, technically. Nothing has happened. But, still, it feels intimate and secret; forbidden. 

Then, there is a shout that rings through the house. Everyone comes to the table; the party has begun. 

Ona finds out that she is absolutely terrible at drinking games, and loses in every way possible. 

You find out that she is still just as touchy when she is drunk. 

Your friends try not to comment on it, all having agreed upon yet another passive role in such an irritating situation. Their non-interference almost ceases by the time Ona climbs onto your lap, head turning as she whispers something into your drunk ears, making you laugh privately. In fact, someone has to hold someone else back before they shout at the two of you to make out or break up. 

But it’s not really necessary, their prompting, because it hits a certain hour and… nothing else matters anymore. 

Ona has been touching you the whole night and you have finally reached your limit. 

Boyfriend be damned, you lead her to your bedroom. 

She asks you many times if you still want this, and you cannot think of anything to say other than ‘yes’. 

You’re not as drunk as she is, and you both know that, but everything feels so perfect and right. 

When you wake up the next morning, your anger is more at yourself than the sleeping woman beside you, but she is an outward target for such a boiling emotion and it just makes things easier. 

“Ona.” You shake her awake, not caring for her hangover. “Ona, I can’t believe we’ve done this.” She rubs her eyes, dazed and confused for a moment but coming to her senses soon enough. “I have a boyfriend, Ona, and… I don’t like you like that.” 

It’s not true. 

It’s really, really, really not true, but the fact that you have said it is enough for Ona to leave your room with the intention of never seeing you again. 

She gets the train back to Barcelona, turning up at Lucy’s flat in floods of tears, and barrels straight into those strong arms with the intention of never mentioning what she has done. 

…

You break up with your boyfriend a month later. Or rather, he breaks up with you, tired of being messed around, tired of your hesitation to fully commit. 

The break-up is not the most upsetting thing you’ve been through, but your ego is a little bruised.

You try to make it look like you are having a great time in Milan, even though the agency has once again discarded your file and overlooked you for shoots you used to book in an instant. You try to seem like things aren’t falling apart, but it’s of no use when your father calls you and tells you that your mother is ill. 

It isn’t cancer but it’s similar, and you know that you need to come home.

You pack your bags and leave without a second thought, because maybe Madrid was far enough. Maybe there is a reason Ona signed for her home club again and most of your friends still live relatively close to their parents. 

Maybe you are not meant to be separated from those you love, because running away is futile if you are always going to end up together again. 

In Barcelona, a modelling agency eagerly draws up a contract with you. Although you are from there, your career being based in Milan previously creates an international allure about you (or so they say), and you are assured that work is going to rush towards you as though someone has just knocked down a dam. 

Your job is secured, your mother begins treatment, but there is something you cannot shake off. 

It hurts to think of Ona, to think of how you left things, but it helps, too. Seeing her face in your mind is comforting. You hear her voice as you drift off to sleep, and you let it soothe you in your dreams. 

“Ona has a girlfriend,” her mother tells you when you next visit them. Her frown is unexpected because all she has ever wanted is for her children to be happy and loved. “It’s not right, it doesn’t feel right.” You begin to shrug your shoulders and crawl into your shell, but she interrupts your thought process; “I think you should go see her.” 

“Why?” 

The woman rolls her eyes. “Just do what I say.” 

You nod because she is so scarily sure about it, and you… It’s hard to believe, but you call Ona. 

She picks up. 

“I was sorry to hear about your mum.” 

“Don’t worry. She’s fine.” 

“Are you back at home?” 

“Yeah, I am.” You pause. “Well, not quite. I’m living in Barcelona.” 

Something fizzes in the air; pops, crackles. 

“Need me to show you around the city?” 

And it’s Ona, so how could you say no? 

…

Your visit goes very well. 

She takes you out to dinner and shows you around her neighbourhood. She introduces you when she runs into people she knows, and she is insistent about dragging you to her football match on the weekend. 

Everything is seemingly forgiven and Ona is intent on integrating you back into her life. 

She wants you to feel at home, though she knows you should already, and she wants to lessen the stress of hospital appointments and death and, if not death, then a difficult recovery. 

You are sitting in her apartment – now devoid of all signs of Lucy – on her comfortable sofa, watching something together after a day of walking around and sealing up the cracks that formed in Andorra.

Sitting leads into cuddling and then into wandering hands that eagerly roam underneath layers of fabric.   

Ona’s breath hitches as you brush the hard lines of her abs, your hands particularly drawn to them and just how strong she has become. “You must have only felt them on men,” she offers as an explanation. “How many have you slept with in comparison to–?”

And your hands stop.

“Sorry,” Ona mumbles, seemingly upset at her outburst. “I’m just curious. I can’t work you out.” She can’t quite look you in the eye, mainly due to the logistics of your position, but she isn’t sure she wants to see the truth attached to her statement. 

You question if that’s a good thing, the fact she needs to ask; the fact that she has no choice but to communicate. It was going to happen sooner or later. “A few,” is what you settle on. Ona leaves it at that, carefully pulling the hair tie from your plait, unravelling it with one hand as the other rests against your stomach in an embrace. You smile. “You’re not going to ask who?” 

Her fingers stop for a moment. “No.” She speaks so quietly, her voice almost a whisper in your ear. “I don’t care about them.” You relax into her more, feeling her against your back, feeling the softness of the blanket against your feet as it hangs at the edge of the sofa. 

“Who do you care about, then?” 

“You.” 

Carefully, both her hands hold your hips and she sits you up, smiling as she does. You tell her she’s showing off, she replies that you are always showing off. To that, you brush those hands from your sides and lean down to kiss her, more decidedly for once; more in control. It’s a surprising feeling for both of you, the forcefulness. Urgency. Not unfamiliar, but unexpected for this time on this day. 

The last time you kissed Ona, you had a boyfriend. 

Your mouth goes to her neck as soon as she decides that she wants her hands back on your hips, pushing you down into her lap. It’s now a competition, you think. She’s quickly coming completely undone by your kissing and biting, but you are not ignoring the feeling as she makes you grind down, makes you need that friction. “Fuck,” you moan in her ear. She grips you tighter. 

You start to pull off her shirt having had enough of the grey between you, asking if it’s okay, if she’s sure she isn’t too tired. Her reply is, “take it off, god,” and then the removal of your clothes that get thrown just shy of the wine glasses set out on her coffee table. Leggings aren’t the most practical for impromptu sex, but she’s quick and smooth and someone who has definitely done that before. 

With your bare chest on display and almost nothing between Ona and you, she lifts you up for a moment with the intention of flipping the two of you, getting you on your back. You pause for a moment, trying to decide if she’s doing it because she wants to or because she thinks that’s the only way to do it, but her hands are moving now, up your sides, round the front of your chest and you relax. She laughs quietly, amused, because the tension dissipates, dissolving like sweet, sweet sugar in hot coffee as soon as your legs wrap around her back. 

Ona asks before she does it, picking you up and laying you back down without needing to part her lips from your own. You watch her as she sits up, body in between your thighs. “You’re going to just stay there?” She shakes her head. “I can top,” you tease, a stark contrast from how it was the last time you did this. Ona doesn’t like being told she can’t do something. However indirectly. 

“Yeah?” You nod, biting the smirk out of your lips. “I don’t care.” 

You are in the process of rolling your eyes when her cocky mouth is put to good use. Your underwear was taken off at some point earlier — you hadn’t realised. Ona’s head moves between your legs, up and down, your hand that isn’t holding onto the sofa in her hair, the soft waves lacing between your fingers. 

She’s good at it; thorough, practised. Her tongue circles your clit for a moment before dipping into your entrance. Something about the cockiness of her movements, her tongue, her hand rubbing between her own legs, makes everything more surreal, more blissful. She moans softly, lips kissing their way up your body, hands no longer focused on herself. Instead, they take the place of her mouth, two fingers inside you as quickly as it takes for her to ask if you are okay to carry on. Your reply (“yes”) is cut off quickly by her mouth on yours, tongue swiping at your bottom lip in another question of permission. You can taste yourself on her. 

At her command, you sit up, letting her pull you back onto her lap as she sucks at your neck. “Don’t leave any marks,” you warn as her teeth pull a whimper from your supposed stoicness. “I don’t want the makeup artists asking questions.” It comes out too late, because you feel her teeth graze your collarbone quickly, not painful, no, but something that feels so, so good. “Ona.” She sighs in disappointment and adjusts where you are in her lap, so your legs are either side of her thigh. 

You find yourself rocking slowly, letting her savour your breasts between her hands and her mouth. She whispers that she wants to see you come, that you don’t need to hold back – not with her, not ever – so you start grinding down, harder, faster. Her hands drop back to your hips, guiding your movements, forcing you to slow down when she feels everything building up. Each time, you let out a “fuck” and attempt to go against her grip to get that friction. “Not just yet,” she mutters, no longer touching you anywhere other than where her hands meet your hips and her thigh presses between your legs. 

“Fuck off, Ona,” you breathe, frustrated. “When, then?” 

She slows the pace even more. “Can you last a little longer?” You look at her face, brushing away the strands of hair that have fallen over her eyes, ghosting your fingers along her cheek, running your thumb along her lips. She smiles again, eyes creasing slightly. 

As her hands drop to cup your face, you say, “you’re beautiful.” 

Ona blushes. 

You look down at her exposed cleavage, nipples pebbled against the sports bra that is unusually low-cut. It might border on intense staring as you begin to grind against her with the intention of actually getting off now. She laughs, saying her eyes are higher up than that, but going back to her trail of kisses along your jaw nevertheless. 

For what seems like longer than a few seconds, the build up finally stops, the tower toppling over in a rush of pleasure. Ona’s hands move your hips as your head drops to rest on her shoulder. She talks you through it, telling you that you look so pretty, telling you that she’s so turned on. 

And that’s when she whispers it. 

It has taken years to get to this moment, many of them filled with unnecessary suffering. 

It has taken years but it does not matter. 

Ona tells you that she loves you and that is when you have finally come home. 

[ranticore]

Now that you mentioned it in the tags; I really enjoyed how you did the queerness of characters in-text and I saw you mentioned more than once before how they consider/call themselves gay or anything and I was wondering if you'd be willing to elaborate on that (in Ironwall, MVF etc), but more from a writing standpoint than a worldbuilding one. Hope Im making sense lol

i looked up the invention of the word 'homosexuality' and found that it was invented 6 years after stbh is set

ghksjdg i mean there's more to it than that but it meant that my language was constrained, which also means that the characters' language is constrained as well. i have to think about ways i want this to come across to the reader. at the time i was thinking about how the basic concept of "btw this character is not straight/cis" is communicated in some of the stories i'd read, and one that stood out to me was a comic i read in a fully fantasy setting where the writer brought the narrative to a juddering halt to explain exactly how gender & sexuality are handled by the people here. as in the characters essentially turn to the camera and give the main character a lecture. i really didn't like it, the author's hand was too visible behind the panels.

but i took it as a learning exercise as well on what i didn't want to do. i didn't like the neon signs pointing at any instance of non-heteronormativity and i also don't like stories that market themselves based on the characters' gender identities, particularly stories which do not involve a coming-of-age/character learns to discover themselves narrative. it's a book about two trans men but it's not a book about being trans. that's none of the reader's business, that's hidden from you (particularly in islin's case, intentionally). i never wanted to foster a sense of voyeurism towards trans people particularly knowing that most readers, statistically, will not be trans. crucially the characters are stealth to literally everybody but like 3 people. their transition is done.

i never wanted a coming out moment, or an "i'm here i'm queer" moment either - not even because Society in the setting just because i don't like those things. to completely normalise it in the narrative between these characters is the goal - almost to the point of never even pointing it out at all except when it has to be. the vibe i wanted was like... hanging out in not necessarily a gay space, but with gay people, talking about random other stuff. i didn't even like the One coming out scene i had to put in (senca being like "i only fuck women" to bowman so that he would stop hitting on her)

so when writing i had a pretty good idea of what i didn't want. for the setting i had some strict rules to follow as well. characters would not identify as gay or bisexual or even some fantasy equivalent because those were not identities, they were acts. and heterosexuality wasn't an identity either, it wasn't even "the natural way of things", it was the means by which wealth could transfer between generations. if you do not marry, then you are not conforming to your gender. the four unmarriagable men in mvf are all denied entry to normative manhood for many de-gendering factors (disability, unmanly hobbies, vow of chastity, etc) but the culmination of those factors is that they can't marry, which is the whole POINT of being a man. three of them are entirely denied generational wealth - forcing them into poverty (it's not a coincidence that gay people are overrepresented in the criminal organisation)

from a writing standpoint this leaves them in a grey zone. when writing i tried out different language to see if it read nice to me (19th century equivalents to 'boyfriend' etc) and they all rang quite false, because outside of the whole 'can we put a label on something that doesn't officially exist in society' thing, the characters themselves are not the types of people to think that way. Bowman was dating Léa but he was never dating Félix. you can't date another man. the only people who date men are women, and Bowman is not a woman. therefore he is not dating Félix. to give just one example. ultimately for the language used i found that just leaving it as-is worked the best for me.

so after working all that out i wrote tha thing and then wanted to kind of explore - at what point does it become romantic? is there an actual border between romantic and platonic when you've kind of already fallen between the cracks in society into the grey zone where nothing is defined because it doesn't affirm the power of the ruling class. and in these particular friendships, where they've already been all things to one another, they've already done everything together, good or bad, does adding 'romantic love' to that list of things wildly recontextualise it retroactively or does anything change at all? just like the ending reveal of stbh says: who actually is the guy we've been thinking of as 'félix ortega' ? does it recontextualise everything we've just read? no, right? (or does it?)

the usual 'will-they-won't-they' romance plot isn't a factor in the book, we already know they will, they have, they won't, and they refuse to, all at once.

(jean-baptiste thinks of himself as an invert because he is Learned and has read some fascinating journal articles about cutting-edge sexology, and his relation to his sexuality is very very different. it's not something he shares with his closest friends in spaces without scrutiny; his entire life is scrutinised and his social system is predicated on marriage. like i think i said in the book, probably, i don't remember: he and renard are two guys clinging to the same life raft. they hate each other! but if you push the other guy off the life raft, then you're just one guy alone at sea, forever.)

[olderthannetfic]

"Why I don't write F/F" thread proceeded just as unproductively as I expected. It wasn't about moralizing about the women not writing F/F, it was a question about why personal reasons for avoiding a configuration aren't reflected in opposite directions by other groups. Unlike race, gender has an almost 50/50 split, there's a scale to the proportions not there for other types of identity category. "The femslash police suck" is a factor I can understand. But why wouldn't "personal reasons I just don't feel it towards this configuration" end up an even distribution across the population? The expectation for women to write about women isn't a moral rule, it's that if you allow the logic "men in control of stories write about men (and that's why more mainstream stories center men)", then the flip side is, well, why people clamor for more women behind the camera and in the writers' room. Either accept the logic for both sides or challenge it for both sides. Instead we have the worst of both worlds, we accept it for one side and challenge it for the other. Where's the parallel universe where this imbalance somehow resulted in a different quadrant being the smallest proportion of ships?

--

Why wouldn't "personal reasons" be even? Because the kinds of issues people face based on their demographic aren't.

But I think the larger factor is how socialization affects choice of hobbies and volunteer efforts. Cis men and cis women, on average, go in for different flavors. The dudes tend to be more bothered by the idea of "not getting anything back" for what feels like work. When they do do unpaid labor, it's often the kind that accrues glory and career prospects rather than less showy social ties. Open source coding projects where they can be important, yes. Writing fanfic, no.

Looking up any analysis of volunteering and unpaid work that makes such-and-such a part of society function will get you a lot of discussion of this gendered difference. It's pervasive.

Of course, this is just a broad trend. Plenty of guys do write fanfic, and when they dominate a fanfic space, we see tons of fic focused on the female characters they find attractive, including f/f fic.

And if you're asking about cis gay men specifically... well... again, gendered socialization means that the issues faced by cis lesbians and cis gay men are not equivalent. The reasons and ways that people employ allegory to talk about things "too close to home" will likewise not be exactly the same. Traditional US gay male culture goes in for drag and for an obsession with Hollywood divas and The Golden Girls. Plenty is being mediated through female personas; it's just not translating into fanfic specifically. But most people making "Leave the fujoshi alone" arguments are not thinking about cis gays: they're thinking about people in messier identity categories.

The biggest difference is not behavior but simply that cis men are a small minority on FFN, AO3, and Wattpad, the three big fanfic archives. (Some ancient FFN research found that it was 78% female, and that's the archive known for having more men!) The places with more cis guys are much smaller and don't get talked about as much by most fandom history and fandom meta types from the AO3 side of things.

The reason cis men's taste in favorite characters isn't being "pushed back against" isn't a double standard: it's because:

Cis men simply aren't that relevant to site-wide trends on AO3

and

2. The reverse pattern does happen all the time with vanishingly little m/m and lots of f/f

You sound like you think we'd make this fanfic-specific argument about pro media. In fact, plenty of queer women are open that they produce original f/f but not f/f fanfic or they produce f/f fanworks but not fic. A lot of the "too close to home" arguments are specifically about the kind of id fuel, naked-in-public vibes of AO3-style fanfic. Writing that is less id-driven may not feel that same way. A given woman might have a much easier time writing a mystery novel about a lesbian detective who never gets laid on page than a steamy f/f bodice ripper.

The parallel universe you ask about exists. It's horny imageboards full of fan art of anime girls.

The reason you sound judgmental and are getting "unproductive" responses is that you're phrasing things as though we're refusing to solve a problem. In reality, we're attempting to analyze the situation that exists. It's a descriptive approach.

[bengiyo]

Hi, i'm a newish bl drama watcher from thailand that just started watching thai bls. i'm a bit ashamed to say that for a long time as a gay man living here i've been avoiding bl shows like the plague cuz of both the fandom reputation and of misconception from my yaoi era which i leave far behind. i'm just want to ask how did you got into watching thai bls and what were you preconception before you got into it.

Welcome to the Tumblr side of BL fandom. I'd actually like to also hear more of your experience with yaoi and BL as a gay person growing up in Thailand if you're willing to share.

For me, I'm a Black American from the Gulf Coast (the South). I grew up in a Catholic city and spent my entire adolescence in the closet. Despite having a sense of who I was as early as 8 years old, I kept most of that to myself. Because I didn't talk about it much with people, I found out most information about queer media and queerness from the internet.

I entered BL via queer cinema. I think the first explicitly gay character that I remember from TV was Marco from Degrassi: The Next Generation. There were probably others, and definitely more subtle expressions, but when I think about the oldest gay character I remember and connect to, it's Marco. I don't like counting things like shipping Shawn and Corey on Boy Meets World or Tai and Matt on Digimon for oldest gay characters. Sailor Moon can't even count because we got a censored version of it in America.

I got access to satellite television away from observing eyes around age 16 and started watching content on Logo back when they aired gay content regularly. I watched basically whatever I could late at night. It's how I saw movies like Get Real (1998), Beautiful Thing (1996), and Bent (1997). It's also how I saw Queer as Folk (2000-2005) Noah's Arc (2005-06).

After hitting adulthood I mostly got lost in video games and standard American TV for a while, but I did basically show up to any Gay Event in TV. I appreciate that Stef and Lena from The Fosters (2013-2018) were some of the only TV lesbians to survive the horror of 2016.

I watched a bunch of movies in this time, many of which appear on the Queer Cinema Syllabus I made for a hypothetical Westerner new to BL and queer cinema, which @wen-kexing-apologist has decided to try to complete.

I got into Thai BL in 2018 accidentally. I started seeing gifsets of Kongpob telling Arthit he'll make him his wife passing around Tumblr and was basically like, "Right, what's all this then?"

I had watched a few Thai gay films, mostly notably Love of Siam (2007), Bangkok Love Story (2007), How to Win at Checkers Every Time (2015), and The Blue Hour (2015), but this was the first time I was seeing a long series made available so easily from any Asian country.

From there I got into Make It Right (2016-17) and Love Sick the series (2014). Once I realized that yaoi had moved beyond manga and a few anime adaptations, I went looking for a lot more. I basically haven't left since I started in about 2016 with SOTUS.

There's my basic entry into the genre. I don't think I was as worried about fandom and worries at the time because so much of being a fan of queer cinema was a mostly-private experience for me for so long. I didn't realize that BL fans active in the space would predominantly be women or queers figuring themselves out. It took a while to adjust to that, and also to adjust my expectations of the kinds of queer stories BL distributors were willing to fund.

That being said, I tend to agree with @absolutebl that BL has a useful role in normalization for non-queer audiences who encounter it. I like cheering BL when it does things I think work really well, and also deriding it when I think it does things that are offensive to help nudge the genre and offer my perspective as a gay man.

I like the place we're at right now where there's way too much to watch for any person with other hobbies and responsibilities because it means that people can pick and choose what's to their tastes.

More often than not, I'm probably most-invested in something airing from Japan because of my melancholy nature, but there's so much variety these days that it's okay if you don't like everything. I certainly don't!

I'm glad you joined us on Tumblr and look forward to your thoughts!

[kittyit]

One thing I don't like about trans critical spaces is how they are focused on trans women being unattractive and 'cringe.' this is just my personal experience, but I have been sexually victimized by multiple trans women, most of whom passed, many of whom were skinny and beautiful and most of which had high brow tastes and no interest in anime or other cringe topics. one of these TIMs was a serial sexual assailant and I think probably attracted to underage boys, and she was also beautiful and charismatic. Meanwhile, I also know multiple trans women who are good people and don't infringe on female spaces but who are conventionally "ugly", broad-shouldered, and have masculine interests. It also seems like the only thing TIMs criticize about each other publically is being "ugly", large, or fat.

my position has consistently been for about 15 years that mocking someone's appearance is not a feminist act. it simply isn't.

mocking appearance is essentially a cruel hobby, it's primate social aggression we're using our huge brains for. it's really fun, and that's why almost everyone does it. i sometimes do it too, in private, in intimate company, and it's enjoyable. i say this to clarify that despite my position, i don't set myself apart or above from women who do it. i do it too. and it's constant in basically every subculture online. julie bindel actually posted on her facebook recently troubled about this same thing. as you said, it's so common in queer/trans circles too, the long-forgotten 2013 values of tenderqueerism fallen to the wayside. stan culture, politics, just basically everything...i really can't stress enough that in my opinion, it is a hobby

mocking appearances is not feminist or activism. it quite often is anti-feminist. it's kindergarten stuff to not judge a book by its cover. it doesn't matter what a male person looks like - he is still male and all considerations that apply to male people apply to him. i don't need to think a male person has a hideous appearance to criticize him for any of the oppressive acts he's doing. focus on appearance (or other unrelated personal attacks) often takes the sting out of a criticism of someone's character, morals or actions and makes your argument easier to dismiss. and of course the now mocked & dismissed concept that when you rip into someone's appearance, you do friendly fire to anyone around who shares those features. but of course this doesn't matter to anyone because it's 1. so fun 2. we're so used to it 3. everyone is doing it 4. so who cares? (I do. However)

i also just can't really scrape up that much finger wagging anymore at women who do spend a huge amount of time blowing off steam mocking the insane parodies that trans women present as. it's basically evil imaginative play. it's just not activism and acting like it is, as you said, is really detrimental to radical feminism being understood as a feminist way of thought that deeply affects women's lives.

as for the rest of this, have you read pronouns are rohypnol? you do not have to call a serial rapist pedophile you knew she. there is no one here but us, he cannot hear you. i encourage you to free up processing power in your mind, especially if you've survived trans male violence. calling the men who harmed you he can be a turning point in reclaiming your own sense of reality, it was for me

[butchpillowprince]

Freshly manufactured butch again, and thank you for the answer before!! Would you actually have some advice for newly identified butches? Things you wish someone would have told you years ago when you first started out?

Thanks again!

You're welcome, and thanks for stopping by again! :) I love this question.

My advice for my past self when I was first transitioning toward androgyny/masculinity:

When you spend months dwelling on whether or not to cut your hair short, that's your sign to cut off all your hair. Do it.

Ditch your women's clothes, especially the pants (no pockets) and the panties (ugh) and the bras (barf). It's okay to embrace your natural chest and just wear sports bras. One day you'll even wear a binder and make yourself flatter. Remember when you were a feminine teenage girl and your flat chest was your biggest insecurity? Yeah. Now you love it. :) And you're not a girl, lol.

Buy the bowties and neck ties. The men's dress shirts and shoes. When it's time for your next wedding, go to a tailor for your first suit. Life is short, get the rainbow hair for Pride. Your first relationship won't last, but being in butch4butch love, even fleeting, will change and heal you. Your first butch4butch hookup will too. And no, they won't be the same person, sorry.

Read George's Boi. Explore your butch4butch sexuality. When George's Boi inspires you to write erotica, fucking go with it.

Queer community will also heal you. Keep seeking it out even when you don't find it in certain cities or spaces. Be yourself. Explore yourself. Question your gender. Try new names and pronouns if the idea tickles your fancy. Even if you end up being cis at least you reflected on yourself, and who knows, maybe you'll learn something new about you.

Butch community is hard to find but surprisingly easy to build. When you have ideas for a new butch project, just do it. Make it happen and you'll watch friends and community appear beside you.

It's okay to not be hypermasculine or the butchest butch in the room. Embrace the masculinity that is authentic and comfortable for you. Don't feign interest in hobbies or drinks or mannerisms that aren't really yours, don't worry over measures of physical strength or ability, don't feel pressure to top during sex exclusively or even at all, don't worry about not fitting a certain body type or stereotype. You're butch which means you're another beautiful iteration of butchness. And, it's okay to stop calling yourself "soft butch" because you feel like you're not butch enough to just claim the word "butch" alone. You are butch. You are. You are. You are.

I'm proud of you. Welcome home.

[saintsenara]

As someone who isn't the biggest Hermione fan and keeps it quiet because greater fandom LOVES her, I'm honestly gagging for more of your Hermione takes. Especially your takes on fanon Hermione, who I can't STAND. Have a good one x

thank you very much, anon - there are dozens of us!

hermione is certainly the character i struggle to find common ground with the most - and this has been the case since i first read philosopher's stone as a child.

[which has actually been a really fascinating pop-culture experience - i think we tend to overlook, both because the media landscape and its representation of child and teen girls has changed since the 1990s and because of jkr's increasingly harmful views on gender, just how groundbreaking hermione was as a female protagonist in media which wasn't marketed primarily or exclusively towards girls. there is a reason why so many girls and women identified with her when the books were coming out - and it was very interesting for me growing up to not be one of them.]

the cause of my beef with hermione is for the incredibly petty reason that i find people who possess many of her more... striking traits quite difficult to deal with in real life, particularly if they don't acknowledge [which people in the hermione vein often don't...] that these traits are things it might benefit them to work on in their interpersonal relationships...

but this doesn't prevent me recognising that canon!hermione [and any real person like her] is interesting - and that her more annoying traits work well with her more straightforwardly admirable ones to create a fully-rounded character who, from a fanfiction perspective, is a great vehicle for all sorts of tropes, themes, and storylines.

which brings us - of course - to fanon!hermione...

fanon!hermione is, at her core, another brick in the wall of mary-sues. she's beautiful, and so clever she can solve millennia-old puzzles without batting an eyelid, and she's preternaturally emotionally intelligent, and she's morally spotless, and she's always right, and the story's preferred romantic partner worships the ground she walks on, and anyone who doesn't like her is punished.

i don't think - to be clear - that there is anything wrong, per se, with people wanting to write fanon!hermione [nor, to be frank, with other flawless fanon versions of female characters, oc mary-sues, or self-indulgent self-inserts - i'll defend the right to have fun with characters to the death]. this is a hobby, and people's way of engaging with that hobby doesn't have to appeal to me - it's fun escapism sometimes to write a character who is wonderful and perfect and beloved and has a sexy partner; and when it comes to accusations of writing someone "out-of-character", let she who is without sin cast the first stone...

but i also think - and [sigh] here comes some discourse - that fanon!hermione is part of a slight... girlbossification of female characters in the harry potter fandom [and presumably in others, i just don't follow closely enough to know] which i've always been a little uneasy about.

i understand why this happens - this fandom, like many, has an overwhelming preference for making blorbos of male characters and for imagining these characters in slash relationships. the treatment of female characters in slash subfandoms - i.e. tonks in wolfstar spaces; lily in jegulus spaces - is often straightforwardly misogynistic, and even in cases where it isn't, female characters are often shuffled quietly to the sidelines, except when they pop up - often suddenly in a queer pairing of their own - to benignly cheerlead the male couple.

and i think it's good that this is challenged - as i also think it's good that the heteronormative vibes of a lot of slash are challenged - and that we, as a fandom, are increasingly interested in female-centric works [whether focused on a romantic pairing or otherwise] and discussions. i hope these continue to take up fandom space.

but i have also noticed that the way female characters are written and talked about in these context is - as i've said - quite #girlboss in its approach. the focus is on women as clever and competent and feisty and unruffled and brave.

[including female villains, there are a lot of girlboss bellatrixes knocking around...]

and great! it should be! - but from what i've seen this also comes accompanied by a resistance to the idea that women can also be boring, unintelligent, self-infantilising, vain, arrogant, ignorant, talentless, meek, domestic, rude, dislikable, conservative, incurious, complicit in their own victimisation, plain wrong, and so on, and not only still be worthy of exploration, but be worthy of these characteristics not being automatically considered bad things for someone to possess and it not being seen as letting down the sisterhood to explore a woman who possesses them.

and, sure, hermione cannot be described as many of these things - but she is...

self-righteous; cruel; petty; from a privileged class background in the muggle world which blinkers her understanding of the class structure of the wizarding one; stubborn; terrible under pressure; shown by the text to be intelligent largely due to an ability to rote learn; a people-pleaser with a tendency towards a slightly hagrid-ish blind loyalty; extremely deferential to authority and willing to tolerate cruel treatment from authority figures [i.e. snape]; the most childlike of the trio [she takes her schoolbooks on the run and reads through them for comfort! she's an enormous animal lover!]; interested in one of form of stereotypical femininity [knitting! wearing pretty dresses!] even if she rejects the form of stereotypical femininity liked by e.g. parvati and lavender [and anyone who thinks she's not going to get along with her mother-in-law because molly's a housewife is dead wrong - she's having the time of her life helping put together a sunday lunch at the burrow]; possessed of a filthy sense of humour [i will never understand why emma watson said that the key to playing her was to be prim...]; someone who obviously wants to be liked and to be loved; and so on...

[and also, by the end of the pre-epilogue narrative, eighteen. she's often written in fics in a way which makes her sound like she's seen a lot of life - especially if the fic wants to claim she's "too mature" to bother with men her own age... but she hasn't - she's a teenager, and the reason she's so unpolished and abrasive is because literally all teenagers are unpolished and abrasive. it's just one of the mortifying agonies of growing up.]

we should love this. it makes her thorny and messy and mixed-up and human - and i am perfectly delighted by explorations of her character which delve into unravelling this tangle.

i just like her less as someone who is there to be right and beloved and uncriticised.

unless it's by ron. everyone should be uncomplicatedly adored by their wife guy.

[johannestevans]

Is the Homophobia Worth a New Hobby?

Rolling the dice on homophobia in nerd spaces.

Photo by lil artsy via Pexels.

Originally published in Prism & Pen. Also available on Patreon.

---

I went to a board-game evening last night with my boyfriend Lewis, who’s nonbinary and uses he/they pronouns. Frequently, people assume they’re cisgender, especially because he’s fat and has a gorgeous, thick beard.

I’m a gay trans man, I only use he/him pronouns, and I’m at a point in my transition now where I almost never get clocked as transgender even by other trans people — a lot of the time other trans people don’t even realise I’m trans too unless I say it explicitly or take my shirt off and they can see my tits.

I occasionally joke that the time I really knew I was passing as a man was when other comics in stand-up comedy spaces started making homophobic jokes about me instead of misogynistic ones, joking that they didn’t want to bend over in front of me, or similar.

But just because they don’t know I’m transgender doesn’t mean they don’t know I’m gay.

I’ve written before about my nuanced experiences of gender-based interaction as a gay man who’s perceived unequivocally as gay and effeminate in every situation I’m in, even at a distance, and how this translates to cis women feeling more comfortable with and safer with me than they might if they perceived me as heterosexual.

Gay men often seek out employment in areas that are perceived as being “for women” or stereotypical women’s jobs — nursing is a stereotypical career for queer men, and much of the time, queer men will fall into step with women in retail, hospitality, and other customer service positions, especially if they’re very obviously queer from a distance.

Why?

Because homophobia is hostile to us in every environment.

People will often wonder why queer men will take up stereotypical “women’s jobs” when being men in those positions make them stand out more because there aren’t other men around. Won’t they be opening themselves up to more homophobia by being such a visible queer man among a staff of mostly other women?

And what those people are missing is how like… queer men among women in service positions will absolutely be treated with homophobia, but because they’re alongside women who are going to be treated misogynistically by many customers at a bare minimum, they will be amongst friends.

Even in more traditionally “masculine” careers and environments, queer men might gravitate towards socialising with the women in the space rather than other men who are cishet or just less visibly queer, because it’s safer as a queer man to be amongst those women than to be amongst the men — who might be violent, who might be hostile or rude, or might just treat him as invisible.

People often treat male nurses and midwives, male nannies and primary school teachers, male receptionists and personal assistants as jokes. They might think of them as stereotypically gay and effete, limp-wristed, “sassy.” I know a lot of those gays. They’re my friends and lovers and ex-coworkers.

I’ve worked alongside them. They’re absolutely real.

But what people mix up is the cause and effect of why those men are in those positions. They don’t become sassy and obviously gay because they took a receptionist job. They went for those jobs — and might excel in those jobs because — being hired elsewhere might be harder, and specifically, surviving elsewhere might be harder.

Because it’s not just about getting hired, it’s about getting to do your day-to-day duties, about going for promotions, about how comfortable customers or patients or parents or students are dealing with you.

And while, sure, they might treat you with homophobia in mind, or say homophobic shit to you — because the positions are stereotypical women’s jobs and you as an effete gay man are treated by much of society as woman-lite or basically a woman (“Except you’re technically a man… I guess.”) the idea that you belong in that position is natural.

These are the caring professions, the service professions.

People like women to be in those positions because they’re “more caring” or because they’re “good communicators” — and because they’re expected to constantly smile and be friendly and bubbly and pretty, and to do what they’re told and to say “the customer is always right” and make you feel good even as you treat them disrespectfully.

People are often more comfortable treating a woman like that than they are a straight man, because to do that to a straight man would be emasculating. It would be an insult to his manhood to treat him like that.

What are you insulting with a gay man, when we don’t have the same manhood to insult in the first place? What are you emasculating, when he emasculates himself with his very existence?

Some queer men I know go up the expected men’s path of advancement in their careers, while others are much more in the expected women’s ones. These men get treated in the same way their female colleagues are and impacted by a similar glass ceiling.

It’s not to say gay men can’t benefit from and leverage misogyny against female coworkers in the workplace, any more than women can’t benefit from and leverage homophobia against their queer male coworkers, depending on the dynamics of a particular workplace and the intersections of marginalisation at play — particularly given that I’m only discussing here the intersections of misogyny and homophobia. I’m not even getting into racism and particularly anti-Blackness, ableism, ageism, fatphobia, or any other form of bigotry that influences the power dynamics and marginalised experiences present in any given workplace.

The thing about workplaces is that we often enter them because we have to. We have to navigate different forms of bigotry or marginalisation, slot ourselves into wherever we can safely fit, or at least fit as safely as possible, because ultimately, we need to earn a wage.

We can’t just pick and choose and wait until we can find employment with people who don’t or wouldn’t leverage institutional power over us, or find a mythical workplace that’s untouched by bigotry or capitalism and the desire by bosses, not to mention society, to exploit their workers.

We do our best to fit ourselves into whatever career track or employment position will allow us best to survive and support ourselves, because we need to earn money to live — to pay rent, to feed and clothe ourselves, to support ourselves.

What about hobbies?

What about things that we’re doing ostensibly for fun? Is it worth it then? Any woman can tell you that navigating nerd spaces can be excruciating.

Frequently, women and people perceived as women are presumed to be ignorant of anything around them in such spaces. They’re guessed to be the wives or girlfriends of men in attendance. Simple concepts might continuously be explained to them when they’re veterans of whatever the hobby is.

They’re treated as romantic or sexual prospects of any man who lays eyes on them, with a refusal to allow them to just play and exist in the space without being sexually objectified.

In the event they do show their knowledge or expertise, insecure men might respond by quizzing them and putting them to test after test, or by furiously disagreeing with any mild critique or opinion they share.

And again, I’m only talking about misogyny here — if that woman is Black, or queer, or trans, or all three?

White cishet dudes will froth at the mouth to demand why she thinks she’s allowed to be there, why she thinks she can be comfortable or can enjoy the same things they do, or speak on them with any entitlement or expertise.

Many white cishet dudes in nerd spaces effectively believe that nerd spaces — sci-fi and fantasy literature and entertainment, board games, video games, computing and tech spaces, coding, comic books, etc — were invented by and for men like them. They respond to any kind of diversity of identity or experience in the space as if it’s an invading threat.

Photo by Tima Miroshnichenko via Pexels.

Particularly because many of them have experiences of being emasculated or bullied for not measuring up to mainstream standards of straight masculinity — because they’re disabled or chronically ill, because they’re autistic, or simply because they “look” and came off as nerdy or geeky since they were young, and were never able to navigate “popular” spaces — they take on a very competitive mindset with the other men within the space. A lot of these spaces can be horrifically toxic, with these men putting each other down, wallowing in their loneliness whilst gloating over men who are more lonely or more pathetic or uglier or nerdier than they are.

They don’t want solidarity with each other in most instances — until a woman walks into the room.

They use and have internalised deeply misogynistic ideologies, often thinking of women as prizes to be won, or beautiful trophies, or in general as people who experience emotions — especially loneliness or isolation — in “shallower” or less real ways than they do themselves as men.

Subsequently, they respond to the presence of women in their spaces as a potential threat and/or as potential reward for one of them.

Nerdy guys of this calibre are often very attached to their identity as a societal outsider, and by their own definition of societal outsider (based in faulty assumption and self-obsession) women can’t experience this sort of social isolation. Women are therefore treated as invaders in the space.

Visibly or obviously queer men are not treated in precisely the same way, but in many social environments, because of the ways in which effeminate queer men are socially sorted into a woman category by homophobes, we’re often treated in ways that effectively mirror expressions of misogyny.

I have a stand-up bit about how many cishet people effectively project their expected male-female dynamic of a heterosexual relationship onto a gay couple, where you can see them doing the maths in their head:

Oh, that one rides a motorbike and has short hair, so she must be the husband, and the other one wears dresses and paints her nails, so she must be the wife. But wait, the wife has a high-powered law career and the one with short hair is a stay-at-home mother! Maybe the lawyer is the husband and the mom is the wife! But wait! The lawyer was the one who carried the baby, and the stay-at-home mom is trans! But wait!

And so on.

Straight people are so obsessed with their gender binary that they’ll tell you something like “Dogs are boys and cats are girls,” to the extent that if you’re like, “What? Why?” they’ll say something like, “You know, because dogs are goofy but cats are sexy,” and they’ll treat that shit as completely normal rather than moderately deranged. They’ll act like you’re the odd one for saying how ridiculous that is, because it’s so ingrained in their world view.

So of course, meeting a couple formed of two men or two women (or two people they assume are two men or two women), they’ll naturally project the same gender binary onto them.

I like board games, right?

That’s not true.

I love board games. I’ve been obsessed with them since I was a child. I own dozens of them, and I’m only starting to get more into the hobby as an adult in the past few years, attending board-game nights here and there. I used to have a lot more social anxiety, and I tend to get quite overwhelmed in unfamiliar environments with large groups of people where I’m also learning new skills, so it’s taken me awhile to feel more confident about going to boardgames events — but I’ve pretty much always attended queer ones.

There are multiple queer board and tabletop game nights in the Bristol and Bath area. There’s one or two in Cardiff; there’s a regular running one in Galway; of course, there’s several across the Leeds and Bradford area.

Last night we went to a local board-game night — just a general meet-up. I liked the look of it because it seemed to have an older age cohort than many of the queer ones I’ve gone to, and a good mix of people.

Lewis and I walk in: they’re drinking a pint of cider, I’m drinking a double of Bailey’s on the rocks. They’re wearing an open striped shirt over a t-shirt and a pair of shorts; I’m wearing some blue trousers with a ruffled blouse and an open waistcoat. They have a thick gingery-brown beard; I have thick sideburns and a moustache.

Of course, I also wear eyeliner. He’s fat, I’m thin, and while we both have similar mannerisms — we hold our hands delicately, we both tend to sway our hips somewhat when we walk with a slight sashay, we both gesticulate and express ourselves with our hands — because of the way that people tend to desexualise fat people and particularly those they perceive as fat men, cishet men often treat Lewis slightly differently than they do fellow cishet men, even just assuming they’re a cis gay man.

We often notice and talk about the fact that when Lewis walks in somewhere on their own, people read him as gay, and that’s coloured and influenced by their fatphobia, where they just assume that fat men don’t fuck, but because of a combination of his fatness and his queerness leading people to assume a level of emasculation, they guess that a lot of people assume they’re a bottom.

Until I’m standing next to them and it’s clear we’re a couple — the assumption is that because I’m thinner and because I’m more pretty than Lewis’ handsome, I’m the bottom, and if we’re split into a cishet’s vision of a man and woman, that makes me the woman.

We put our drinks down as I take out the two games we brought with us and a man comes over — tall, white, cis and straight, in his 50s. He’s friendly!

To Lewis.

I was the one that RSVPed to the event, my name was on the attending list, and they were just marked on the list as a +1. I was the one that looked for the event and brought it to them for us to go.

He asks both of us our names, but when asking us about games, he directs most of his questions to Lewis; his body is angled toward Lewis’ conversation; he looks at Lewis about 70 or 80% more than he looks at me, even though I’m leading much more of the conversation.

It’s not that Lewis doesn’t like board games, of course he does! He attends regular queer board-game nights, they enjoy different kinds of board games, but they remarked that what stood out to them about the conversations of the night is that men kept asking them about the different games, and he didn’t know any of the terminology — deckbuilders or worker-placement games, co-operative versus area control games — and wasn’t as familiar with the stalwarts in each genre.

Whereas, I was and was just ignored. Lewis likes board games the way a normal person likes board games — he likes to play different ones, he enjoys them as a method of socialising with others and meeting and engaging with new people.

Photo by Pixabay via Pexels.

I’m a bit of a freak about board games. I own dozens of them, I browse forum entries and read reviews of board games, I’d play board games solo — they’re an area of special interest for me.

The man who walked over asked if anyone was interested in a particular game, and I put up my hand and said I was super interested in playing In The Year of the Dragon (which I very much enjoyed and was absolutely into). Even playing the game, he described a lot of it initially to Lewis and the other guy playing with us and made far less eye contact with me, talked less directly to me, but also in general acted as if I was less interested and invested in the game than anyone else at the table, despite the fact that I was the first volunteer for it.

It’s the sort of thing that’s so blatant when you experience it, and yet if I’d called it out at the time, I would have been treated as being very unreasonable, if not insane. A lot of the time, when cishet men treat women and effeminate men like this (as abled people with disabled people; as white people with POC and esp Black and dark-skinned people; the list goes on and on) they’re often not entirely conscious that they’re doing it.

There have been numerous studies into gendered interactions in different environments, how much men interrupt women versus the reverse, how a minority of women are perceived as making a more significant amount of the group because of how they’re treated as tokens. If you just speak with people anecdotally, some will absolutely relate similar experiences.

Some people will become angry and upset when you point this out, and say that it’s actually the fault of the people being ignored or spoken over, because they’re not being big or loud enough, or angry enough that it’s happening to them.

Except, if you get angry about it, you go from being the woman or gay man being treated as a non-entity to being the woman or gay man treated as an irrational hysteric, imagining mistreatment where none is happening.

As the game went on, and each of us made mistakes or showed that we were learning the game, the attitude toward me at the table did change a bit, especially because Lewis and I answered a lot of questions together, and we do, as a lot of couples do, add to each other’s answers or remind each other of things mid-discussion.

And then, another man came over to the table, because he was obviously a regular at these events, and had never seen Lewis before. He asked Lewis if they were enjoying this game, what sort of games they liked.

He didn’t even look at me, let alone direct any of his questions toward me, even though Lewis looked to me multiple times when they couldn’t remember particular games they’d liked, or wasn’t certain what kind or genre of games they fit into. I actually answered the question of what games I favoured even though he hadn’t asked, and he sort of nodded awkwardly as he left.

I shouldn’t be entirely offended — the thing about nerd spaces (as with many other cishet-male dominated spaces) is that conversation like this isn’t necessarily approached with a view to making new friends or social connections.

A lot of these guys just want to measure each other up so that they know where they stand in the pecking order, which other men are potential threats to their masculinity or to their standing in the pack — will they be better than him at his favourite games? Will they embarrass him by making him look bad, either by being better at certain strategies, or by knowing more than he does about his favourite subjects and specialist fields? Will they out-man him, in short?

I felt horrible after last night even though I genuinely enjoyed the actual game, because the thing is, like…

When someone turns around and calls you a faggot, or even when they make catty little comments about your sexuality, at least you know they know you’re there.

When you’re treated as functionally invisible, an extension of someone else’s humanity, and given the “girlfriend treatment” — whether because you’re actually a woman, because you’re perceived as a woman, or because you’re treated as woman-adjacent because of some element of your personhood that means you’re also deserving of misogyny— it’s maddening, and it’s sickening.

There’s no easy way to actually fight against it, most of all because it’s so thoughtless, and so easily denied as accidental or inconsequential.

One thing I’m very lucky for is that Lewis does know what that experience is like and clocked it and noticed it and why it was happening from the get-go, whereas I know a lot of women dating men particularly have difficulty not just relating that experience but describing it to an uncaring or oblivious partner. I think there’s something really unpleasant particularly about being in their position, because I’ve felt something similar, where you go to an event with someone similarly or differently marginalised to you, and you’re more keyed into what’s happening, but also like…

There’s a sense that you’re being afforded humanity effectively because your partner or the friends you’ve come with is being afforded less. You’re expected to be complicit or fully engage in their manufactured invisibility so that you can enjoy some conditional privilege.

Lewis didn’t, of course. Repeatedly, he would redirect some questions to me or turn and make a show of asking me. It was just ignored to a large extent, but it’s still shitty to be put in that position with the assumption that you wouldn’t want to do so.

We discussed it, afterwards.

If he’d gone alone, would they have shown the same amount of interest in him, or would they have treated him as they did me, without a faggier gay guy next to him to compare and contrast them with? If I’d gone alone, would they have been forced to extend more interest to me as a person, because there’s no partner to assume I’m the “girlfriend” of?

If we’d gone with a bunch of other queer people in tow, outnumbering them, how would it have been different?

How would it have been different if we’d been at a table with some of the women, or at a table where women were the majority? Middle-aged cishet women have their own homophobia, naturally, but it wouldn’t have been quite like this.

There weren’t any visibly queer men there, but what if we’d sat down with some of the lesbians?

I like board games a lot, and I really like talking and interacting with different groups of people, and especially as someone who writes in the SFF genre and regularly attends sci-fi and fantasy events and conventions, I’m familiar with this unsubtle and subtle homophobia, being snubbed or ignored by other men whether they notice they’re doing it or not, but it’s like…

How much do I actually like board games? How much am I willing to weather to establish my personality in certain spaces and to be afforded some humanity? How many times do I go back until I’m seen as a person — as a full person at that?

It’s just shitty, having to weigh up those calculations when all you want to do is sit down, roll your dice, and have a good time. At least I do have queer-run events to avail myself of, and I do know that I rarely if ever experience this attitude as a queer man at them, but they’re neither as often nor as local as other board-game groups.

Like I said, it’s one thing weighing up these things for somewhere you have to be — navigating a workplace, navigating healthcare, etc, but when it’s something you do ostensibly for fun?

It’s not quite as fun when you have to put in a twelve-step strategy just to be seen as a human being.

[manstrans]

“Men can go to hobby groups and-“

Women can too? I spent like 16-17 years as a woman??? I was invited to hobby groups and groups to chill and hang out.

I felt safe in these spaces?

They’re not spaces to share emotions, feelings and struggles while being able to learn and grow as people?

Like, I dunno, I also grew up where a man deciding he wanted to shave his legs because it feels nice got him called a woman, and shamed so much he stopped doing it and lived in discomfort.

Sounds systemic and unsafe to me.

Hobby spaces aren’t safe spaces in the same way that spaces carved out to be safe spaces are.

Also marginalized men exist.

Men of Colour, Trans Men, Gay men?? Queer men as a whole?

Men targeted to uphold patriarchy that are then discarded once the patriarchy is settled.

A black man wanting a space where he isn’t treated like he’s inherently dangerous isn’t just important because he’s a man, but because that idea he is inherently a threat for being a BLACK man is dangerous.

People can’t remove that from conversations about gender either.

Race will ALWAYS matter, and every time I see conversations where people are saying “men don’t deserve safe spaces I should be allowed to bash ALL men (except trans men who are men lite/especially trans men who are traitors to womenhood)” I just think, “so white women convinced you men of colour oppress them for being men, as if white women still don’t get these men punished for being black.

Gay men don’t really 1:1 oppress straight women either.

Men being isolated and kept from their OWN communities is an issue. White supremacy does in fact allow outer groups to strengthen itself until it no longer needs that outer groups strength then it discards them.

There are black neo-nazis. There are gay ones. There are trans men bigots.

There are white women neo-nazis.

Bigots who have fallen into bigotry, and into extremism, usually are fed the ideals and it’s so easy to keep them there by pointing at something vitriol and saying, “look, see, they hate you, they’re your enemies, they deserve your hate and ire”.

Like, idk, that 12 year old boy isn’t good and innocent from his racist and harmful ideals he’s slinging around, but if no one helps him out of those beliefs he’ll be a 25 year old man with those harmful beliefs.

And I don’t know any way of thinking that says a 12 year old listens to horrible bitter put downs over like, long understanding conversations.

Like, even if you personally (broadly, not at you) don’t want to lead someone from those ideals, someone has to teach. Someone has to willingly pull people away from that.

People talk about rehabilitative justice and then turn around and say, “hey I think you’re harmful for existing and you deserve suffering”.

As if that helps somehow?

This just rounds back to, as well, marginalized men exist, and the Men vs Women dichotomy is literally Radical Feminism which ignores the racial factors of oppression. Which is how white women get away wish racism to black women while also saying “we need to stay united”

^^^^^ long but worth reading

[tired-fandom-ndn]

The fact that Alastor is canonically more comfortable around women is so interesting to me.

He doesn't seem to mind it when Rosie and Nifty touch him or enter his personal space. Rosie also seems to be aware of his plans to some extent. Mimzy has been using him as a get out of jail free card for DECADES before he told her to stop.

Meanwhile, when he interacts with other men it is usually much more hostile. He humiliates Vox, keeps Zestial at a distance and refuses to share information, has a rivalry with Lucifer, and we all remember how the Husk scene went.

And that makes the idea of Alastor being in a lavender marriage in life so much more interesting, too.

Because Alastor is good with women, he genuinely LIKES spending time with them. Chances are he got along well with his wife, possibly being close friends.

And the more I think about it, the clearer I can see Alastor being raised by a single mother and developing "girly" hobbies, such as cooking or sewing, and being used to housework. A well-dressed man who hangs out with plenty of women but never makes an advance. There would be rumors about him being gay, and men would hate him either for getting too close to their wives, for being a pansy, or both.

Alastor, in hell, waiting patiently for his wife. Because she was his friend. Because she never loved him and he never loved her, but extra souls never hurt and he'd rather keep her close than let someone like Vox get his hands on her.

[context]

GOD ANON HOW DID YOU READ MY MIND

Like this is EXACTLY what I was picturing holy shit. Alastor raised by a single mother (or with a very absent and/or abusive father), taught how to cook, clean, sew, and garden. I headcanon that he was also a hunter from a pretty young age, but even then they worked together to make an income from the hunting, not just eating or selling the meat but also making clothes from the hides and furs. Alastor is, at his roots, a homemaker which was NOT at all typical for men in his time.

His mother also taught him how to respect women and treat them well, always the perfect gentleman, and that combined with his "oddities" and distrust of men definitely led to his friends being almost entirely women (probably with scattering of queer men). The rumors about him would've been RAMPANT, especially when combined with the racism he'd be facing anyway (Word of God says he's mixed, I headcanon him as Black and Choctaw on his mom's side, white on his dad's), which would just drive him further away from forming any sort of relationships with other men.

I think his wife (I've been headcanoning her as Black too, from a lowerclass family like Alastor's) was probably one of those friends, one of the many women who was easily charmed by his bright smiles and kindness but maybe one of the very, very few people who saw a hint of sharpness in his smile or heard the little thread of truth in his darker jokes. She didn't truly understand Alastor, not like Mimzy did, but she saw enough that he trusted they could have a relatively happy and open life together, with him using their marriage as a shield against suspicion. And the fact that their marriage would benefit her too, giving her more freedom than she would get from living with her family and letting her carry on her relationship with her own lover, was absolutely a bonus.

And they were happy. She didn't tell him about her lover, he didn't tell her about his little hobby, but they were happy. They made a home together, laughed and gossiped over meals, and filled their house with constant music and warmth. Their garden was the envy of their neighborhood (and if she wondered where he got the bones and blood their flowers loved so much, she never asked) and they were the life of every party they were invited to. They didn't love each other, but they didn't need to. They were friends and that's all that mattered.

And yeah, I think Alastor absolutely waited for her or sought her out in Hell. Maybe he never found her and was content in the knowledge that she made it into Heaven. Maybe he found her a few decades after his own death and offered her up a simple contract, something to protect her from other overlords while giving her as much freedom as an owned soul has. He keeps her on as one of his reserved souls (like I mentioned here) and they share meals together every so often and sometimes he summons her to act as a background singer or play an instrument to accompany his singing.

They never talk about their previous relationship, partially because it's just not important to who they are in Hell and partially because it would put her in too much danger. Alastor probably mentions having been married in life a few times and everyone just assumes that Mimzy was his wife and that her contract keeps her from talking about it.

[lifkk]

i’m penning a little response on here so people from other spaces can read my whole rant in one place.

for context, here is the tweet in question:

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my initial gut reaction is here : https://www.tumblr.com/lifkk/765584667298693120/i-shouldnt-be-surprised-but-im-quite

and now here is my little essay on transmisogyny in the melee scene!

i’m generally not online so much but i was shared this tweet and it really lit my fuse so i logged on and poked fun at it. i could’ve guessed without looking but it’s obvious that the community at large doesn’t have an issue with this distinction. let me just say first and foremost that this is simply a drop in bucket of transphobia / misogyny and because lately it has been literally inescapable, im going to approach the few situations i have access to with scrutiny and a critical eye. i’m not going to dispel any ridiculous claims that some might make regarding trans people being jealous or something - none of those are in good faith, so i won’t bother even addressing them seriously. so, let’s get into it!

i’ll start by saying this is inherently divisive. what i am NOT saying is that the distinction between cis and trans is unimportant. i would never say this categorically; there are many times where the nuance is important. this case, i believe doesn’t fit into those times. trans women are women, which means they would also face misogyny. not only does this show on an individual level but at a larger social level too. trans women face misogyny in the same ways that cis women face misogyny in these settings. i’m not sure how im supposed to “prove” this, i think it’s a bit dehumanizing to ask someone of this, but just for example ive had men i’ve met at events harass me and send me dms that were inappropriate, ive felt othered because of my gender which led to apprehension in joining a community largely occupied by men. personally i did not play melee competitively before transitioning. i played some as a kid with siblings and while i was forced into hobbies i fundamentally didn’t enjoy because my parents thought i was a boy, i also had hobbies that were traditionally feminine and ones that were neither. the reason i bring this up is because i see some over generalizing viewpoints as well as incorrect assumptions regarding socialization.

gaming has become a more diverse and accepting space - there are issues that obviously still persist - but to simplify, it’s safer for those who are not white guys to exist in than it once was. trans women were not accepted in these spaces not only because they are queer, but because they are WOMEN. meaning : they are going to have a hard time getting into these spaces because of misogyny. that might look like trans women not having a community behind her passion OR (and i think less acknowledged) it could be a trans women not even trying to engage in a hobby because of the misogynistic barriers in place. all that to say: trans women are facing similar if not largely the same barriers a cis woman would face attempting to join such a space.

i think that some people, with or without knowing it, view trans women as a sort of in between of man and woman. not necessarily in an explicit, invalidating sense where they don’t see them as their gender, but in that they believe trans women went through a growing up and socialization process close enough to men that they are inherently far from cis women in that respect. trans women are simply not socialized as men. they generally do not undergo and accept the roles, expectations and sense of self in society that men and boys do. however, if you think that they do (which in all honesty i can’t blame many people for thinking this because of the rhetoric and language around “transitioning” in cis people’s lives is not nuanced) you can expect trans women to have a similar experience at a young age to boys, and thus imagine them not hitting social barriers a cis woman would. which as i’ve described, is just not the case.

so when you decide to celebrate a woman’s win and you certify it as a win for a cis woman, what are you doing? you’re not celebrating a win exclusive to women because you are excluding a population that broke the same barriers. if a trans woman won the biggest event ever, a victory over all the top players, we celebrate this as a momentous achievement for women, the first to do it; then a cis woman wins the next equally significant event and it was called the “first win for cis woman,” do we not understand how divisive and dismissive this is? how instantly this reduces the win of a trans woman because we imagine she, what, possibly didn’t have quite as hard a time as her cis counterpart? this is not a simply recognition of a specific population. the idea that they MUST and CAN be bisected is simply transmisogyny. a win for a woman is a win for women no matter if they were assigned it at birth or not.

[olderthannetfic]

Do you think that more het-oriented fanfic-writing spaces are more gender-balanced? Or maybe only some of them, with significant enclaves of mostly-men and mostly-women?

--

If we're asking about fic writers in aggregate, every study of het-heavy FFN and Wattpad reveals a shitton of women. There are no dude-heavy fic spaces on that scale, het-filled or otherwise.

People like to argue about this, but we're talking the difference between spaces with literal millions of accounts and spaces with maybe a hundred thousand.

If we're asking about individual smaller spaces where fic writers hang out, then yes, there are some that are mostly men at least as far as we know, and those spaces tend to have a fair amount of het.

I suspect but cannot prove that something like Edward/Bella fandom at its height was significantly less queer than your standard m/m fandom on AO3, but it probably wasn't significantly less female.

--

Just based on numbers, I'd expect more dudes to write fic about Ladies Hot than Dudes Hot.

A more significant trend is that men tend to be trained that they should be paid for their labor and tend to have more hope, sometimes justified, of going mainstream with their hobby efforts. That doesn't mean every dude does it with every hobby, but it does have a dampening effect on the kind of gift economy culture we saw on LJ or whatever.

IME, even guys who are doing things for the good of the community are often expecting more direct respect and less of the amorphous social ties that are the currency of many fic fandoms. They might also be more directly solving a tangible problem or doing something that will get them an advantage in their job even if it isn't directly paid. (Compare dudes doing open source coding to dudes writing fanfic, for example. And yes, yes, notallmen, but we're talking big picture here.)

Combine gendered patterns in fiction consumption overall, some gendered social patterns, and social forces against giving shit away for free, and the patterns we see with fic qua fic are perfectly predictable.

The patterns for barely-renamed expies in "original" stories that could one day be monetized, now...

[bengiyo]

She Loves to Cook, and She Loves to Eat 2 Eps 5-8 Stray Thoughts

Last week, we returned to my favorite ladies. They realized they were spending too much on their hangouts, so made the silly decision to just stop hanging out. That broke fairly quickly at least and they just started having more cost-effective meals together. Nomoto got a full time position along with her work bestie, and they're thriving. Nomoto watched her first lesbian film, and has made an internet friend. Kasuga noticed their new neighbor, and so they have begun the process of befriending her.

Episode 5

Very glad both of my favorite food shows with LGBT couples are wading directly into the importance of marriage equality.

Fuck yes we're getting back to the cabbage rolls!

YES!! A WATCH PARTY!!! Invite Kasuga!!

Kasuga is so careful with Nagumo. I'm not sure I'm reading exactly how determined each of them is being about being polite as Kasuga tries to be helpful.

Oh, Nagumo, I hope you find a way to be comfortable eating with them eventually.

Now, Nomoto, you were so close to telling her. Come on!

These cabbage rolls look good. I hadn't thought about putting them in a soup.

Yes, stay focused on Nagumo! We must befriend her!

Episode 6

I like introducing a character who struggles with eating with others into this show. I'm relieved it's only about eating in front of strangers.

That was an incredible eye roll from Kasuga to the message from her aunt.

Kasuga overhearing older women unpack their disdain for the caregiver expectation placed on them them is a good choice.

An asexual lesbian who wants to watch her stories with others. She is one of us. This is the gay sex and celibacy website z after all.

I like Yaku! She was warm to Nomoto, asked a good question about snacks. Admitted she doesn't like cooking in a way that doesn't make Nomoto's hobby seem bad. Then they enjoyed a film together.

Yaku is great. She's letting Nomoto lead here, and giving her encouragement to continue sharing.

Come through, Yaku! There is room for all types of lesbians! Quiet gays who maybe don't want to have a ton of sex can sit with us too!

"Are we in a drama?" Yes, Yaku, and you are the cool, self-actualized queer.

I'm glad Nomoto can share! This will definitely help her get out of her own head.

Episode 7

Oh, is her name Yako? I will start using that spelling.

Sayama, thank you for trying to help your friend confess to her crush, but she is determined for this to be a slow burn show.

Kasuga backs in to park She's better than all of us.

This conversation is ugly. The dad doesn't think he or the eldest son should do anything to help with elder care, but Kasuga should give up her entire life to take care of people who disrespect her. I can see why she's avoided them for this long.

I'm glad we already knew that Kasuga was not given enough to eat in the first season, so this is all reaffirming it and letting us examine the long term impacts.

They're all sharing on the balcony!

They're making donuts together!!!

Nagumo seems like she had a good time, and they're encouraging her to eat some on her own.

Childhood trauma episode, I see.

Nomoto and Kasuga have so much grace for Nagumo. They let her share about herself, asked her how they can best support her, and Nomoto even encouraged Kasuga to take some donuts home so Nagumo isn't the only one leaving with food.

Episode 8

SAYAMA GETS DONUTS TOO! I love this show!!!

Wow, this conversation between Kasuga and Ms. Fujita hit me. The seriousness with which she stressed to Kasuga not to give up her life for her parents landed so hard. This is complicated for me, because I've accepted that my role as the oldest will be that of caregiver in the future.

They turned her room into a storage space and still just expect her to clean it up. I'm glad she put her foot down here. I do believe in giving back the love and care we've received to our parents when they get older, but you are giving back what was given to you. Kasuga is right to not want to spend her adulthood as a household servant to an ungrateful man and his mother.

Wow, this Chosen Family scene took me right the fuck out.

Nomoto is correct. I will also not forgive Kasuga's father for making her feel like this.

She almost said it! We're getting close!

I'm so glad we're expanding the cast this season to deal with more issues affecting Japanese women. I really like that they spent two episodes on Kasuga deciding that the family she's building here is more important to her than the family that mistreated her. I'm so happy that Nomoto has another lesbian friend to talk to. I'm so relieved that Nagumo is opening up to them and starting to share in the warmth our ladies have offered her. I will be thinking about that donut scene for a while. I'm so happy that we have so much more time with them this season.