I often think about how one time in college I told my friends I was lonely while we were out drinking, and my drunk friends proceeded to go around a club full of cowboy boots and straight people asking everyone if there were any gay guys present who wanted to make out with a stranger. What a magical night. I wonder what that guy is up to now.

👀 Isaac?

[Image Description: A screenshot of a tweet from Alice Oseman's Twitter. It reads: if we get a season 2 of Heartstopper, I have (all caps) plans. Big asexual plans. End Image Description]

Hi let's talk about this

👏yes👏we👏do

We deserve queer protagonists, not just minor characters.

We deserve queer joy, not just queer trauma.

We deserve queer love stories, not just side plots that can be erased without changing the overarching narrative.

We deserve all the nuance and joy and love and representation that we have been starved for. We are here, and we deserve to see ourselves on screen and in books and in art. We are here, and we deserve to be seen.

real time reaction video to watching Heartstopper

The five stages of Heartstopper grief

One. Denial, aka Did I Really Just Watch all of This But Am I Going To Do It Again Yes: rewatching all eps an indiscriminate number of times and reading/re-reading the graphic novels

Two. Anger, aka What The Fuck Do You Mean There Are Only Eight Episodes: consuming all available internet content, i.e., interviews of Kit Connor and Joe Locke, appreciation posts for Tao and Elle, untempered support for the ally-ship that is Olivia Coleman, which weirdly also turns into respect posts for nice girl Imogen?

Three. Bargaining, aka If I Can’t Have More of This, I’ll Make More And Feel No Shame About It: listening exclusively to the soundtrack with anyone who will tolerate what happens when ~that~ song comes on and you begin roleplaying the characters and forcing esp your SO to pretend to look at you the way Nick looks at Char and vice versa (sorry, babe)

Depression, aka Realizing I’ve Seen All There Is And I Start Retracing My Stages of Grief Which May Or May Not Include Literal Dreams About These Amazing People

Acceptance--I’ll let you know when I get to this stage.

Quick Q RE: Heartstopper

Have you rewatched Heartstopper? Or are you emotionally stable?

Just checking in.

Nicks mom as soon as Nick came out

no I haven’t already listened to these songs a million times no what

HEARTSTOPPER SEASON 1 Nick & Charlie + songs

LETS GO LESBIANS

okay but this was Nick seeing tara and darcy kiss

A Multiverse of Badness

DOCTOR STRANGE SPOILERS

SPOILERS. There are spoilers. This is a review of the movie. There are spoilers, and you have been warned. 

Hi. I’m new to Tumblr. This is my first original post. And I hate to come out swinging, but I’m angry. I just watched Doctor Strange, and Marvel totally fucked up on this movie. I have several reasons. The first, and perhaps the most important, of these reasons is that mainstream media once again BURIES ITS GAYS. Look, I went into this movie with begrudging acceptance that the existence of queers wouldn’t be acknowledged. And I was okay with that. But well, we did get acknowledged. We got a character of color with two moms. I was excited. Two moms. That’s amazing. They’re sweet. They’re kind to each other. They put flowers in each other’s hair. Not even a minute later, Marvel decides that they didn’t survive. Whoosh. Gone. Buried its gays. Killed its queers. I would’ve rather gone without. Alas, I guess Marvel is trying its hand at queer representation. 

This brings me to my second reason. Perhaps less to do with queer representation and more to do with the representation of strong female characters. Marvel did wrong by Wanda Maximov... What a great TV show. I enjoyed it. I thought to myself, wow, Marvel has created a superhero that exists in a morally gray area. Something I understand to be somewhat novel for the studio. (Granted, I’m not a super fan or highly steeped in Marvel lore.) But I loved it because I could relate to her. She was grappling with grief, so much grief and pain, that she lost touch with reality. She repressed the truth rather than deal with it. 

Cut to this movie, which reintroduces her in a totally different light. Right from the beginning she’s evil. She’s dark. She’s twisted. She’s portrayed not as a supervillain, but as the evil you’d find in a horror movie: her blackened finger tips, her glowing red eyes in moments where she assumes control of others’ bodies, her contorted limbs and the snapping of her bodies as she briefly becomes distorted passing through a mirror to aggress our protagonists, the way she kills so many superheroes and chases the protagonists zombie-like through the underground tunnels. She’s abject, she’s other, she’s something horrifying to the characters we’re meant to identify with. And the worst part is what she ultimately represents to the viewers by way of her motivation: by way of the thing that drives her to the exclusion of all else: the thing Marvel reminds us over and over again in the movie: all she wants is a world where she’s a mother. That’s right. She’s willing to set aside all of her morals, all of the good she’s fought for--and we know she has good in her her from the tv show, where we identify her, are convinced to love her--to pursue a reality where she can live out what this movie presents as a sick, perverted fantasy. In the end, Marvel decides that she deserves to be punished for this. She can’t go on. No, only she can undo what she’s begun. And, in a move quite familiar to the horror genre, she is collapsed under the ruins of her mistakes. It is poetic in so far as her final moments are spent realizing that her dream of domesticity, of rearing a child are untenable. 

But it reminds me of the original Carrie. Another movie that draws its horror from othering female sexuality: a girl whose venture into womanhood with the onset of menstruation unleashes anger and violence on her schoolmates and is ultimately buried beneath the dilapidation of her home, the site where her mother failed to fully repress her sexuality, to fully keep her away from womanhood, the place where she too must be poetically punished. Both films want us to fear the aspects of womanhood that men don’t have (motherhood, menstruation), want us to feel that these characters ought to be punished. I could go on. 

Anyways, there’s a third reason, which is that the film fails to keep a narrative center. It loses its sense of self in trying to be everything. I loved the first Doctor Strange movie because it knew what it was: it was a visual spectacle; it was a story about a man who had everything, or at least he thought he did, but lost it, and went a journey to rediscover himself in the mystical arts; it was contained; it was magical. But this film loses that. The moments where it tries to be funny, to have that oh so typical Marvel laugh, don’t land. The mystical is treated as commonplace. And our Steven Strange never achieves his growth, ultimately lost in a tangled web of themes that feel forced. Sure, it’s full of adventure and superheroes. It has twists and turns. And you could definitely enjoy it for the few moments where visual effects do succeed. But you might find yourself disappointed at the end, never fully getting any one thing.

Anyways, I think I’m less angry about it now. Thanks for tuning in. lmao.

ABSOLUTELY NO ONE is talking about joe locke’s incredible performance in heartstopper and it’s so upsetting to me!! he makes the show, there is something so inexplicably charlie about him that makes the two of them work together !! you can’t have nick without charlie and i think kit connor was just as wonderful and incredible but EVERYONE is ignoring the intricacies of charlie’s character that joe has so expertly weaved into little moments such as the anticipative fear and anxiety that hides within charlie!! playing a character like charlie is hard and he did a bloody brilliant job of it !! BASICALLY a joe locke appreciation post

p.s. i love kit connor’s performance just as much but i feel like the love needs to be more evenly spread

#nick’s bisexual journey

Nick needs Char's support in this moment <3

“very few people asked, but this is my favourite moment in the Heartstopper show. the look between them - this is the moment Nick realises that he is safe with Charlie. and allows himself to be truly vulnerable in front of him.”

alice oseman via twitter

Sebastian’s instagram post