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wizardrps · 1 year

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Wanted: RP Partner(s)

Howdy! So long story short, I am once again getting back into roleplaying, and so I thought I'd make this silly little side blog to try and find some people to roleplay with! Soooo let's get on with it!!!

About me:

My name is Jessie, I'm nonbinary, and my pronouns are they/he! I'm a current college student, so I tend to get very busy out of nowhere. My style is what you'd call advanced literate/novella. I write only in 3rd person. I also have a habit of writing a lot. I have been writing and roleplaying for 10 whole years (I have a lot of stories about my rp history. It's kind of embarrassing lol).

As a little disclaimer regarding my response timing: like I mentioned, I'm currently in my undergrad and my schedule can be hectic. Some days, I'm not busy at all and that means I'm free to respond whenever. However, some days I'm super busy and cannot respond. I try my hardest to be as open and communicative with my roleplay partners as possible. That being said, I do not expect a response immediately after I respond. Take as much time as you need! I know that you have a life outside of roleplaying just as much as I do.

Preferences for Roleplay Partners:

I am over 18, so I am... a little uncomfortable with roleplaying certain themes and topics with people who are underaged. Under no circumstances will I roleplay NSFW with a minor. Please, for the love of all things that are good, do not lie about your age just so you can roleplay NSFW with me. I was 14 at some point too and got upset when adults wouldn't roleplay with me either, but trust me when I say it has nothing to do with your maturity or you as a person. It is for both of our safety and well-being.

As for the topic of NSFW, no porn-without-plots. I don't mind nsfw, but I really don't like it to be the bulk of a roleplay. It gets boring really quick for me.

Please be literate! I'm definitely not an amazing writer and don't expect you to be one either. I'm not a stickler for grammar or stuff like that, but literacy is important to me.

Last but not least, someone who is willing to talk OOC! The most fun I've ever had with roleplays was when I've roleplayed with people who have talked to me OOC. Whether it's about the roleplay or anything about your life, talk to me!!! We don't have to be best friends, but I like to think of roleplaying as a good way to make some really cool friends that I can basically work on a story with :) There's no obligation to always be talking to me, but talking from time to time is nice.

The fun stuff!!! What I'm looking for:

Fandom or OC! I lean towards OC, but if there's a fandom we both enjoy that I can comfortably write a character from, then let's do it! My main genres of interest are: high/dark fantasy, modern fantasy, horror/psychological thriller, pretty much any historical fiction especially if it is medieval or takes place in the last 200 years, some sci-fi, or anything that gives Life is Strange vibes. I'm down for realistic fiction settings, but I usually prefer the other stuff.

Ships. As a queer person, I prefer lgbt relationship dynamics. I'm comfortable with straight ships, but they're just not what I'm used to. Most of my OCs are guys, but I have gals, nonbinary, and trans people also thrown into the mix of my endless batch of OCs. Also, platonic ships are welcomed!

Fandoms:

If you are looking to roleplay a fandom, here's what I'm currently into/what I'm willing to roleplay! A Song of Ice and Fire/Game of Thrones, the Witcher(show, books up to a certain point I left off at lol), the Elder Scrolls, Dragon Age (all 3 games), Hannibal, and Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit (movies and books I guess?)

No/no's:

Things that will get you immediately blocked if you try to pull include: non-con, incest, s/a, children in any sexual context, or any fetishes that have to do with bodily fluids.

Things that are iffy/icks: romanticization of mental illness (i.e. if you haven't done the research to be able to correctly pull of an interpretation of a character with ASPD, don't do it), abusive relationships, and dub-con.

Disclaimer: these are things that I am not okay writing into detail about. For example, if your character has a past of being abused, I am okay with having the subject touched upon. However, I am not comfortable writing an abusive relationship where my OC is abusive towards yours, or vice versa. Please just be respectful and speak to me OOC prior to bringing up any of these subjects.

Anyhoodles, that's about it! Sorry this post is long and drawn out. If you're interested in roleplaying, please interact with this post via comment or like, or message me! My main means of roleplaying is through discord. My discord tag is WizardLizard#2018. Please bare in mind that I get busy (and last time I made one of these posts I got absolutely swamped with responses and got overwhelmed), so it might take me a little while to get back to you! No matter what I will respond, though!

#roleplay #roleplay finder #rp finder #roleplay ad #rp ad #rp advert #fantasy roleplay #fandom roleplay #fantasy rp #fandom rp #literate rp #literate roleplay #fantasy rp finder #looking for rp

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kabbalicgay · 1 year

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hiiiiiiiiiii moirra i wanted to ask you about ur thoughts on the concept of child/youth liberation and how the online sphere generally treats young people very poorly and then posts which complain about ''young'' queers and stuff n like. how young queer peop;e hate old queer people. i just want to know your thoughts but if you think it'll bring drama or you don't want to bother with smth like this just delete this!!!!!! i hope you have a nice day/night ╰(✿´⌣`✿)╯♡

Obsessed with the fucking emoticon thing at the end. Very cute, thank you. This is probably going to be long, so I'm putting it under a cut for everyone's sake.

My thoughts are going to be random and uncategorised but I will preface this by saying that I think a lot of people who call themselves "old" or g-d forbid, "Elders", are literally just 30 to 35-year-olds. That's not old, they're not an Elder - they certainly haven't earned the title of Elder - and the most they've done is make posts on tumblr and twitter which will do absolutely nothing for anyone materially. It's an ego boost and nothing more.

I do think, however, that we disregard and show a lot of maliciousness to our elderly. That's not a ''those young queers'' thing, that is a behavioural pattern I've observed in quite a lot of people across groups. You may have seen the screenshot of someone saying that "all boomers are lead-poisoned fascists" or whatever -- that's not an uncommon take from young people (including from the dumbass 30-year-olds who want to call themselves Elders, ironically enough). This ''young people radical and good, old people bad and outdated" mentality is not owned by young queer people, and I don't think it's something that's particularly plaguing the community more than it plagues the whole of our society. Do I think a lot of you reject and ignore the Elders of our community outside the few that are pushed into celebrity or martyr status, and refuse to learn or take anything from them despite much of their experiences being shared by us (and many of the politics and "discourse" being circled)? Yes. Is that unique to the LGBT community and queer people? No.

I also don't think this contradicts youth liberation, or the fact that a lot of you are downright fucking hostile towards minors. I think it stems from the same root cause and problem, and I think it can be solved by acknowledging that we collectively should be in solidarity with each other and that generational divides and differences are not real. Our young and our old are equally the most vulnerable in our societies and have very few rights afforded to them - I think the core principles and theory behind youth liberation are also very similar to the principles around the elderly and ageism.

And just as a side note -- you don't have to agree with me. Just because I post shit and write paragraphs doesn't mean you need to immediately agree with everything I saw or the opinions I have. And I bring this up only because I've seen a lot of people worry about disagreeing with people they like or respect, or people they otherwise agree with. You do not need to agree with someone 100% of the time for you to continue to respect, interact, or like them. So take this response with a grain of salt and come to your own conclusion about how these posts and rhetoric makes you feel.

#I don't know if this is the response you're looking for but I hope it gives you some food for thought at least #answered #anonymous

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asquirrel14 · 1 year

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It's been a rough week. This is pretty much my multi-repeats lately.

"I'm not done learning how to be proud of who I am..." - Ryan Nealon, Bring You Home.

Yeah. I'm proud, outwardly, of where I've made it to. Teen me would be amazed we're still alive let alone everything else. But who I am... label wise... it's hard to be proud when so many people think you're unnatural, when there are politicians whose platforms are almost entirely about eradicating people like you, when telling someone who has loved you your entire life could lead to them not wanting you in their life anymore.

I'm proud that I exist, that I've survived, that I know who I am (because that's a battle in itself). I'm proud of my accomplishments over the years and all I've been able to do just in the last 5 months. But I'm still figuring out how to be proud of my transness, outside of Pride Month when I'm surrounded by lovely people on all sides, and my queerness. Because it's hard to be proud of something when, at present, being it threatens your very life strictly because some people don't understand and won't take time to attempt to. & I'm so glad someone put that part into words - into song. (I can't wait til his song Feel Good comes out - it's about body dysmorphia & it is *chef's kiss*)

Ryan Cassata's song below has been my comfort this week & I think a lot of the younger trans peeps on here could take some comfort in this too - hold on, you belong. We'll make it through this, our elders have before us. It'll be hard but we got this. - and I will fight for your future, even if I won't see the results myself. Because the future generations deserve lives that are less of a struggle than ours are/were. I truly believe that should always be the goal - a better future.

I don't remember where I was going with this originally but hey. Music & some after-work thoughts.

#music #after work #being trans #Ryan Nealon #wrabel #Ryan Cassata #trans pride #learning to love myself #after work ramble #tired ramblings #tired rambles #mentally tired #hold on #being queer #spotify #SoundCloud

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toastling · 2 years

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uhm, sorry to bother but the post about the qu*er terms and umbrella was made by a bi/pan lesbian supporter which is a super hurtful ideology! just a heads up!

You know, not long ago, I argued the same position; bi lesbians couldn't exist because the terminology was fundamentally contradictory. Bi and lesbian both mean different things. But when you look back in queer history, when you talk to our remaining elders, you start to realize - none of this was ever so rigid in the past.

It's only in recent years - and I'm talking mid 00's at the earliest - that all these different terms we use solidified. And then there was an explosion of labels and microlabels in the 10's, and they made everything even more solid, more rigid, more defined. And looking back at the state of the community these past 10 years, particularly online? I think it's pretty safe to say it hasn't done a single good thing for us collectively.

Individually is another matter entirely, though. And ultimately, individual experience is the whole point. The queer community was never supposed to become some rigid classification system for what it is to be human - our queer elders knew better than anyone that one's individual experience and the richness of life and human sexuality all defy categorization, simplification, or identification.

We have terms to help get the gist of our identities across to people who know what they mean - but they're not supposed to define you. They were never supposed to define you. They're a shorthand, at best.

Some people are more organized, and rigid, as individuals. I'm one of them - I like very much that words have rigid definitions, and prefer to believe objectivity is a thing that can and does exist - but a lot of the growing up I've done in my 20's has been gradually coming to accept that the richness of life defies any attempt to capture or define it, that the random fluctuations of quantum mechanics are as manifest and fundamental to our macroscopic internal experiences as they are to the fabric of the universe.

Because of my nature, I fought for a long time that labels were mutually exclusive, that they had to be. They couldn't possibly both describe the same thing, when by their nature they're supposed to be exclusive. But do we not all contain countless contradictions already? Do we really expect something as fluid and nebulous and ever-changing as our sexuality to be any different, to be free of what seems like contradiction, of unnecessary complication?

Our elders figured all this out decades ago, but it's been lost to the sands of time. AIDS is a big part of the reason why. But like...

Okay, just think for a minute. What could somebody possibly be trying to convey by describing themselves as a bi lesbian? Are they trying to invalidate you, or are they trying to validate themselves? Do you think it is more likely they seek to cause discord, or that they are trying to make sense of who they are?

Think about it - bi lesbian - what could that possibly mean? Is it possible it could be an apt description for a woman who has a 90/10 (or higher!) attraction heavily in favor of women?

To all outside appearances, they would be a lesbian - in almost all instances they would be a lesbian, in fact - but that's not their whole truth. There's still that lingering attraction to men, that teeny-tiny amount.

They could call themselves bisexual, and yes, technically speaking this would be correct, but it's also not at all what anybody who isn't already bisexual thinks bisexuality is. They expect the attraction to be at least vaguely even. Maybe 70/30 at the most extreme. But to be almost entirely weighted in one direction? Bisexual feels like the wrong shorthand to use to convey that, doesn't it?

But bi lesbian. If we approach things from a rigid point of view, that makes no sense. But from their perspective it is a better, more honest description of what they are than either term is on its own. It very much gets the point across that they have a strong preference for women, because lesbian, but there's also a slight chance they could find attraction in a man, because bi.

Perhaps it really is a contradiction - but everybody is a contradiction. We are all made of fundamentally opposing views and experiences in every facet of who we are. If it really is a contradiction, is that really so bad? If they find peace in this designation, is that really such a horrible thing?

The queer community used to be all about individual experience. It was founded on this, it was its core tenet. Nobody could tell you what you were but you - and you could use any terms you wanted in any combination that you wanted, anything that made sense to you, individually, and nobody could tell you otherwise. It was about self-expression, self-actualization, self-understanding.

Yes, these words had meanings, and acted as a shorthand to signal some common traits to fellow queers and any allies who put forth an effort to try and know us - but these traits and meanings were intentionally nebulous, because human nature and human experience is nebulous. It cannot be so easily pinned down. They understood this, and they were proud of it.

Why do you think our community used to proudly call themselves queer, a word that essentially means 'different'? They celebrated their differences, they weren't afraid of them. They didn't try to reign them in or rigidly define them, to tell other people how they should think or feel or live their lives. They already lived in that oppression under cishet society, the whole point was that their community was different in every conceivable way. It was free. It was messy. And it was beautiful. And I'd like to think, slowly, we are starting to understand that again.

Some people take great comfort in rigidly defining themselves. They use microlabel after microlabel because they like categorization, they like rigid self-definition, they are personally comfortable with a list of things they can use to - to the best of their ability - summarize themselves as easily as possible for anybody else in-the-know, familiar with their self-designations.

But just as valid, some people are radical abolitionists who use labels with reckless abandon. They're temporary, or they're suggestions, not rules.

Neither is wrong. In fact, both are right, but only for themselves, and that's okay! They figured out what makes sense to them, what makes them happy, what they feel describes them best. What a victory! That should be celebrated! That's what our community is supposed to be all about!

Who are you to tell some separate soul who they are, what they are, what they can or cannot be, or do, or feel? Haven't the cishets already done that to us for centuries? Sexuality is fluid. Gender is fluid. Attraction is fluid. Even love is fundamentally fluid. It's all nebulous. None of it is rational, none of it makes any sense, it's never the same thing from one second to the next, it's rife with contradiction. It's a total fucking flaming disaster. And it's beautiful. It's human.

I think, if this is the label they feel best fits them, if this is what makes them happy? Good for them. They should absolutely be allowed to identify that way.

It's okay for you to disagree with their experience, and assert that yours is different, your friends are different. Nobody is forcing you to concede that. All you need to do is respect it.

Respect our differences, respect our individual experiences. It's okay to think differently from them - your experience is your own - but I really, really do not like this growing trend of dictating to other people what they're allowed to be or feel or call themselves. It's only doing our community more and more harm, and creating more and more room for our oppressors to hide amongst us and sow discord, pitting queer against queer so we tear each other apart for them.

That's not a game I'm comfortable playing anymore. I've gradually started to come to another understanding. I'm slowly starting to stop giving a damn what labels people use to describe themselves, and only worry about my own experience.

Reject definition. Live and be free. Be human. And so long as they aren't hurting anybody, so long as they aren't forcing their experiences onto anybody else, let other people do the same.

#Toast Talks #LGBTQ #Queer Community #Ask Box #Answered #Anonymous #Bi Lesbians

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mostly-mundane-atla · 2 years

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i apologize if you've already answered something like this before, but i've seen a lot of fanfics with nonbinary sokka, and i was thinking of writing sokka into an atla au of a book as a character who is two-spirit. its my understanding that two-spirit isn't the same thing as nonbinary, transgender, or any other LGBT identity, and that it has a lot more to do with a spiritual connection, but i might be wrong about that. what i do know is this particular character in this book is winkte, which is Lakota, which isn't an inspiration for the water tribes as far as i'm aware.

i thought that two-spirit was established as a pan-indian term to replace all the different similar terms in the many different languages spoken by indigenous people across the united states and canada (or maybe just canada?), but i'm not sure if that would be what sokka, or any other Inupiaq-based character, would use to describe their identity. is there any term specific to Inupiat similar/equivalent to this that would be more appropriate to use?

You're in luck as being not only Inupiaq but also nonbinary and figuring out what that means culturally, I have a lot of personal experience on the matter!

So first: two-spirit is a pan-indigenous term, chosen by Native folks because the official term used by white academics (before two-spirit was coined) was an old french word that referred to male sex workers and everyone wanted something a little less blatantly disrespectful. It's used as an umbrella term for genders, gender expressions, and even variations on biological sex experienced in many indigenous cultures that don't neatly fit into the male/female binary that many European cultures believe in and uphold today. It's not necessarily a catch-all term for one specific concept found in all these cultures, but rather for a bunch of concepts classified together because they don't fit into the gender binary colonizers understood. You may have seen people saying you shouldn't refer to two-spirit genders as nonbinary and this is why. These genders are the result of cultures that didn't have a gender binary. The binary was a later addition imposed upon them by land hungry imperialists and missionaries who threatened nonbelievers with hellfire.

As for Inupiaq two-spirit identities, I know there is one term used by the Inuit, sipiniq, but i've only ever found it in Canadian sources so I don't know how widespread it is or if it was there in Alaska before they split and went east way back in the day. I do know it was used to refer to intersex people and the only concern with intersex genitalia seemed to be over the urinary tract being blocked. I've read from some interviews with elders where they said it was usually girls, or people who would have otherwise been considered typical girls, who were sipiniq, and that sometimes you couldn't tell until the child was older and their behavior changed from what you would expect (suggesting there may have been an aspect of gender and gender expression to it as well). I've also read elsewhere that being a sipiniq was more an addition than an entire stand alone identity, and they usually lived as their assigned gender at birth. Keep in mind that all this info is pretty scattered and difficult to cross reference, so i'd take this with a grain of salt.

Okay, onto Inupiaq specific stuff i've learned from family and reconnecting!

So, what does queerness look like in Inupiaq culture? Well, we don't entirely know, for a few reasons. Not much energy went into understanding our cultures as, say, the ancient Greeks and Egyptians for example until we had been pretty thoroughly assimilated. It's not talked about much, but romance in general isn't talked about much either, while a marriage was first and foremost for the purpose of having kids and dividing survival work into what can be done with a baby on your back and what can be done without. Polyandrous marriages were definitely a thing, and considering a lot of environmental and cultural factors, were often more viable than polygynous marriages, but also aren't mentioned much these days. The lack of queerness talked about in cultural circles could be the influence of the church, or maybe the idea that frivolities like chasing love weren't as important as starting your own family and caring for your aging parents is deeply ingrained into the culture. Maybe it's somewhere between.

Either way, I think just about every queer person has eventually figured out that just because it isn't mentioned or isn't considered the norm, doesn't mean it never happens. This is also a culture where people had to maintain deep friendships with others of the same sex and around the same age for allies in survival against the elements and human enemies. These friendships are always described as having a certain intimacy that allows trust and a degree of tenderness. Not to mention a man could have more than one wife or a woman could have more than one husband, and the nature of their contributions to the household meant they would spend a lot of time away from the shared spouse and with each other. This brings me to another aspect that doesn't exactly help figuring out cultural norms for feelings or relationships. We didn't have a written language until, about, the 1940s and it wasn't standardized until the 1980s. That means no private diary entries dripping with yearning or love letters of smouldering passion, which are the typical go-to evidence for relationships and attraction in cultures that do have a written language. Whether a man wished he could marry this man he was friends with since childhood more than the most desired woman in the village, or what goings-on two co-wives found themselves in between chores, we may never know.

So when it comes to something as personal as gender, which arguably involves way fewer people than sexual or romantic orientation, it can be a little difficult to figure out how many people felt that their bodies got something wrong or didn't fit their understanding of themselves. That doesn't mean it didn't happen, just that we very literally don't have a record of it.

So, what does gender look like in Inupiaq culture?

I've often said that the Inupiat leaned pratriarchal rather than stating that they were patriarchal. While patriarchy isn't an inaccurate term, people rarely hear it and imagine cultures where women could have multiple husbands, could divorce their husbands and be welcomed back to their parents' homes, could be the ones to decide whether their sons were ready to marry, etc. Men were by default considered head of the household, but only an idiot would deny the value of a woman with all her skills. The kind of skills men and women were expected to have weren't as strictly divided as one may think. Men were expected to have some proficiency in sewing and cooking, and women were expected to be able to fish, trap, and hunt small game, even if these weren't specialties. In general, gender roles were less about who dominated than we are used to thinking, and more about interdependence and reciprocity.

One thing I think might get to the meat of Inupiaq beliefs about gender as its own concept divorced from biological sex is the belief in reincarnation through renaming. Souls are attached to names, and in giving a baby the name of a dead loved one (i don't think they have to be blood related but often are) as is tradition, the soul lives on through the baby. People refer to that kid as if they were the one they were named after and it's said that the kid would remember things from this past life. But here's the thing: you didn't have to be named after someone of the same assigned gender at birth as you. You could be assigned male at birth, six feet tall, the luckiest at hunting bears, with ivory labrets and hair that was never braided, and that won't stop you from someone your parents' age calling you grandma if you were named after their grandmother. In our current assimilated and Christianized version of the culture, this has become the practice of Eskimo names, which are separate from one's official name on their birth certificate.

If this aforementioned assigned male person found that being called grandma was a source of comfort that made them feel more at ease, if one thing they remembered from being this woman was a feeling that they should be with the women, would that not be comparable to a trans woman's experience? To reiterate an earlier point, we don't have letters or diary entries from these pre-assimilation times. We may never know how many people felt this way. Combine that with the idea that names are inherent to who you are and the fact pronouns are entirely ungendered in all Inupiaq dialects, and I think the trans experience would look and feel very different within this culture. I can't definitively say it would be easier to live and be perceived as a man but feel as a woman, or vice versa, in this culture but I don't think it would be the same as in the current Euro-American cultures we're used to.

When I think about my identity and what it means, i find something very affirming in how my Eskimo name would have been given to boys and girls. By traditional cultural belief, that would mean I lived so many lives as so many different people, male and female, masculine and feminine. I could have been a warrior, a housewife, a keen-eyed berrypicker, an umialik maybe, I could have carved beautiful ivory pieces, been the best dancer, worn down my teeth chewing skins for sewing, and maybe, sometime in the 1960s, gasped at the scandalous implications of red nail polish.

So, in truth, I don't know if a nonbinary Inupiaq Sokka would understand themself as any gender specific Inupiaq culture, but I think they might have a unique relationship to the concept of gender from knowing the beliefs of the culture. That the masculine and the feminine need and support each other, that most people will have a little bit of both within them, that the Inupiat didn't even have separate words for "he" and "she" and the singular they. I know it's helped me understand and accept myself as a nonbinary Inupiaq.

#response #eskimo on main

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ladyloveandjustice · 3 years

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Spring 2021 anime overview: Quick Takes

Now for my Spring 2021 anime thoughts! I’ve decided from now on if a season’s like, 20- to-24 episodes I’m just going to wait ‘til it’s done to review it unless I feels super passionately, so though I watched To Your Eternity (it’s good!) and MHA (eh), I’ll comment on them next time. Also, for the record, I watched the first eight eps of Joran: Princess and Snow of Blood but I dropped it because it had clearly crossed the line from entertainingly dumb to boring dumb.

I will probably give Supercub and some other stuff a shot later, this was a stacked season! May give updates on all that later, but this is what I have for now.

ODDTAXI

Quick Summary: A mild mannered middle-aged walrus taxi driver is drawn into a case involving a missing girl, yakuza, Youtube clout-chasers, manzai comedians and idols with big secrets.

It’s rare to walk away from media and be like “that is a singular experience I will definitely never see repeated again” but ODDTAXI is definitely one of those. A tense noir thriller murder mystery starring cartoon animals that spends an entire episode detailing the one (cat)man’s very fall into darkness triggered by addiction to gacha games and an online auction for a novelty eraser? Also there’s a porcupine Yakuza who speaks entirely in rap? Also there’s tons of meandering conversations about stuff like manzai comedy and the struggle to go viral on Twitter?

Admittedly, I had a hard time getting into the first episode, the dry meandering humor not being enough to hold my attention while I was sitting still, but once I watched this while I was working out at the end of the season, I found it an easy binge. A ton of characters with dark secrets or dangerous ambitions, each with their own part to play in a tableau of intersecting events- and it all actually comes together really well.(As for the female characters, it’s a pretty dude driven story, but they do get nuanced characterization and even some good heroic moments from one of them.)

It’s a great example of a carefully planned narrative paying off, with all the twists appropriately seeded and foreshadowed to reward viewers who paid attention. Even when it ended on a perfect “OH SHIT” moment and denied me closure, I couldn’t help but respect it. If you that all sounds interesting to you, definitely check out the first couple episodes and see if you like it- you’re likely to have a memorable, satisfying experience!

Shadows House

Quick Summary: Emilyko is a ‘living doll’ who’s told she was created to act as the ‘face’ of her shadow master, Kate. The shadows and their ‘dolls’ all reside on the mansion and are required to pass a ‘debut’ to prove they’re a good pairing. If they don’t pass, they might be disposed of. And so the mystery of the Shadow mansion grows...

This slice of gothic intrigue was my favorite of the season, tied with ODDTAXI. With an interesting premise, slightly tense undertones and a strong focus on character building and relationships, it kept me hooked the whole way through. And for any squeamish fans put off by the hype about it, don’t worry, while there are some suspenseful elements, I wouldn’t qualify it as horror. I thought the relationship between Kate and Emilyko might end up being a completely sinister one, but it’s thankfully a lot more complex than that and it’s really interesting to follow how both their characters and relationship grow. The focus of the show is, unsurprisingly, on the “dolls” slowly discovering their autonomy and personhood as they struggle under the rigid system imposed on them by the mysterious elders of this weird Victorian mansion. Can they develop a more equitable relationship with their shadow “masters” (who are also shown to suffer under this system)? There’s a lot to dig into there, and the show has the characters develop through learning to understand and appreciate each other, which is pretty heartwarming. Our hero, Emilyko, is the typical plucky ball of sunshine (they even nickname her sunshine), but she’s also shown to be clever in her own off-the-wall way and she bounces off the far more subdued and cynical Kate well, not to mention the other ‘dolls’ she ends up befriending.

What’s more, the show spends plenty of time to developing several other character pairings and combinations, and they all have their own interesting dynamic that makes you want to see more of them. Same-gender bonds are at the forefront of this show, and many of them are ripe for queer readings (I definitely appreciated the healthy helping of ladies carrying ladies), but even outside that it’s nice to see a show where a strong, complex bond between girls is at the forefront. My only real complaints about the show are the anime original ending is noticeably a bit rushed (though it’s not too bad, and leaves room for a season 2) and I wish the animation used the whole “shadow” theme more strikingly (like the opening and endings do)- instead the colors are a bit washed out which makes the shadows blend into the background sometimes. The “debut” arc also drags a bit in places, but it makes up for it by having a lot of good character integration.

I hope to check out the (full color)! manga soon and see more of this quirky, shadowy story. There’s some physical abuse depicted, sad things happening to characters and naturally the whole “oppressive familial system” thing, but otherwise not much I can think of to warn about. I give this one a big rec, especially If you’re a fan of gothic fairytales and stories of self discovery.

Zombie Land Saga Revenge

Quickest summary: In this sequel season, everyone’s favorite zombie idol group must claw their way back into prominence after a disastrous show- the fate of the Saga prefecture LITERALLY depends on it!

This was a fun follow-up to the first season- if you liked the first zombie-girl romp, you’ll probably enjoy this one. In fact, there were a couple areas it improved on- namely, Kotaro failed, ate crow and embarrassed himself a lot more this season, which made him more likeable (as did the fact the girls gained a lot of independence from him). This season also shed more light on what the ‘goal’ of this zombie raising project is and what kind of shit Kotaro got involved with to make this happen, and it’s appropriately off-the-wall and ridiculous. We finally got some backstory for Yugiri too! I wish it had focused on more of her interiority, but she got to be a badass in it, and it was a treat to see this zombie idol show turn into a period piece for a couple episodes (also her song ruled).

Tae also got a cute focus episode and there was a particular SMASHING performance early on! Also That revelation last season that had the potential to turn creepy hasn’t yet, and hopefully never will. The finale was heartwarming with big hints of more drama to come- I’m definitely down for more zombie hijinks!

Vivy: Flourite Eye’s Song

Quickest Summary: A songstress AI named DIVA (nicknamed Vivy) is approached by another AI named Matsumoto, who says he’s from the future and they must work together to prevent AI exterminating all of humankind 100 years from now.

This show is absolutely gorgeous visually with some really nice action scenes, but when it comes to the story my feelings basically amount to a shrug. It’s fine! I guess! Vivy starts out as an interesting layered character- and I guess still is by the end- with her stoic but stubborn determination bouncing off her fast-talking bossy partner Matsumoto well. She never listens to him, which is delightful. The way the show took place over the course of 100 years was an interesting conceit as well. However, it bought up a lot of themes and then sort of... dropped them. For instance, Vivy interprets her mission (PRIME DIRECTIVE if you will) as protecting humans at all costs, no matter how destructive said humans are or what their fate is supposed to be, and is perfectly willing to murder her fellow androids to do this, showing she inherently thinks of androids (herself and her own people!) as less worthy. Which is a little alarming! There’s a very dramatic point in the show where they bring this up as a potential conflict for her character but then it’s sort of...dropped. Pretty much.

Actually, despite the premise, the show doesn’t dip into the “AI rights” as much as you think it would with the main theme being more about Vivy’s search to find her own creativity and discover what it means to ‘pour your heart into something’. Vivy herself doesn’t actually care if she has rights or anything. Which is in some ways fine, because ‘AI as an oppressed class’ has been done to death, but IT’S ALSO KIND OF IN THE PREMISE, so that means that the show just shrugs really hard at a lot of the questions it brings up basically just going “humans and AI should work together probably” and that’s it. There’s a lot that feels underexplored. The antagonists in the show also either have motivations that don’t really make sense or have boring hackneyed motivations. In the finale in particular, it feels like a lot of things happen “just because” and it falls a little flat.

I also have to warn that one of the arcs focus on a robot ‘pairing’ where the dude-coded robots actions toward his partner are straight up awful and rob her of her autonomy, but it’s played like a tragic love story. I suppose you could read it differently too, but it definitely made me go ‘ew’ the story seemed to want me to sympathize with this robo dude,

Overall, I wouldn’t anti-recommend this show, it’s an all right little sci-fic romp (and definitely SUPER pretty). My favorite element was definitely the episodes where Vivy develops an entirely new (an loveable) personality, because it played with the idea of of an AI getting “rebooted” really well and interplay between her two “selves” was done really well. But there are a lot of other parts of the show that just feel...a little underexplored and empty, making me have an ‘eh’ feeling on the show overall. It’s definitely an ambitious project, and while it didn’t quite stick the landing, there’s something to be said for a show that shoots for the stars and falls short over a show that just languishes in mediocrity.

Fruits Basket The Final

Quick summary: The final season of that dramatic drama about that weird family with a zodiac curse and the girl who loves them.

It’s very weird that after not cutting a lot out, they kinda sped through some material for, you know, the finale. I guess they thought they couldn’t stretch this final arc to 26 episodes? Or weren’t cleared for another double cour? However, though there were a couple places that felt awkward, despite being a bit condensed it mostly held together pretty well for a D R A M A T I C and ultimately heartwarming conclusion. I was really disappointed they kept the part where Ritsu cut their hair for the ‘happy ending’, I thought their intro episode not showing them in men’s clothes meant the anime had decided their presentation didn’t need to be “fixed” but WELL I GUESS NOT. That was the only big upset for me though, otherwise the adaptation went about how I expected, sticking to the source material. Furuba has a lot of bumps, from weird age gap stuff to ...gender, but it also has a lot of important feels and great character arcs. It was a gateway shoujo for many and has its important place in animanga history, so I’m glad it finally got a shiny, full adaptation.

#anime overview #spring 2021 anime #shadows house #oddtaxi #zombie land saga #fruits basket #vivy: fluorite eye's song #zombie land saga revenge #fruits basket the final #anime #my reviews #long post

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shadowfae · 3 years

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We’re all pretty aware that the tumblr otherkin community is at a huge decline; I was wondering if you have any theories as to why that is?

American Protestantism, the decline of queer oppression in North America and the AIDS crisis, helicopter parenting, web 3.0, morality politics, and Tumblr’s porn ban; roughly in that order and rolled up into one bombshell that was a few years in the coming but nobody really saw it and understood it until it was far too late.

That was a mouthful and probably only made sense if you follow current cyberpolitical theory. For some of you reading this, as with every other hot take I have this has a chance of being passed around, that alone is enough. But for others who had no idea what I just said and need the ELI5 version, let me explain that. Buckle up, this’ll be a long one, and will go into fandom history a bit as well because it is actually relevant.

As we know, tumblr is a very American-centric platform. Twitter is also this way, but less so, but tumblr has it bad. Now, I’m ‘lucky’ in the fact that I’m Canadian and a twenty minute drive from the American border, so that puts me in the ‘privileged’ majority. (I say privileged because I’m not really sure what else to call it. Most of the information going around about politics either directly affects me or indirectly affects me approximately one or two links of contact away. Someone who’s only influenced by American politics because it makes their sister’s online friends sad is not going to be privileged in that way.)

This means that American politics and their social climate overwhelmingly affects tumblr’s social climate. This also bleeds through into other fandom spaces, on twitter, instagram, and Pixiv to name a few places; but here’s where I spend the majority of my time so here’s what I’ve witnessed.

America’s main religion, as far as I understand (from the raised agnostic and currently neopagan view I have), is some weirdass capitalistic-Protestantism that is so many miles from what the actual Bible says that if I were a betting man and knew more about cults than I did, I’d say it’s some weird fucking cult and never set foot in the country again for any reason that isn’t gaming free shipping through a PO box. If you have no idea what I just said but are at least vaguely familiar with Christianity, this graphic explains it pretty well. So we can see there’s some glaring issues with that ideal.

The decline of queer oppression and the rise of queer rights in North America, which is to tenderly include my own country but we all know when people say ‘in NA’ they mean ‘America, and Canada where it applies because the right-wing Republicans are really good in the propaganda department to convince everyone that Mexico is a drug-lords-and-anarchy wasteland to the point where even I don’t actually know what’s down there other than bad drivers and heat’; means two things. One, it’s a good thing by a long shot and do not mistake this as me thinking queer oppression being lessened is a bad thing. But two, it means that thanks to the AIDS crisis, queer folks lost a lot of first-person sources as history.

The queer elders in NA who survived are typically either a) bitter anarchists who are often POC, probably still dirt poor and do recreational drugs or b) university-tenured TERFs (trans exclusionary radical feminists). Category A are the people who Republicans have deemed worthless in every way, because racism, queerphobia, ableism, and all the other ways to be wrong and different and Evil that they can’t handle, because Jeezus would never want them to actually learn to love someone who wasn’t just like them, and they don’t have the compassion to do better. Category B are the people who want to be different in just a teensie little bit, typically with TERFs they want to be lesbians, but they don’t want to challenge the status quo. They’re fine with the way things work, they just want to be on top oppressing others over ripping the whole damn thing down and building a more forgiving system.

Now, due to all those ‘isms and the cheerfully malicious aid of the Republicans, pun not intended but drives home the cruelty of it all, we also see the rise of helicopter parenting. The invention of the internet did not really help this. Basically what you’ve got is a whole bunch of parents who saw the civil rights movement, just got access to the internet and things going viral, know the world is changing, and like all parents, they’re scared for their children. Now instead of parents knowing one or two people in their classes who just went missing one day and everyone assumed they ran away, they hear about eight homicides in the city of kids going to parks at night and dying. The Satanic Panic was another event around this time that contributed to that, but I’ll let you research that one.

This means that all of these parents, instead of doing what their parents typically did and let their kids wander off for the day so long as they’re back by sundown, they can’t let their children out of their sight. There might be a freak accident where their child is decapitated on the playground swing! Their baby might get murdered by an evil Satanist walking home from school! Their dearest darling might go online and tell their address to someone who’s got a 100% chance of being a pedophile who will show up and kidnap them in the night!

…You get the idea.

Combine those three things I just established, what we’ve got is a lot of queer kids who have a lot of internalized shame for being different and wrong, because they’re queer, and they can’t find spaces offline to be themselves, because all of the elders who would do that are dead and/or inaccessible and their parents won’t let them go to any clubs that aren’t school-related, which they’ll never find a GSA or queer club because Republicans, ‘isms, propaganda, and the war on Category A queer adults have all done their best to ensure that those spaces don’t exist.

So you have a generation of kids who I am the youngest of. The first generation on the internet. The late Web 1.0 (usenets and Geocities) and early Web 2.0 (livejournal was the big one, ff.net too, also 4chan but fuck those guys) generation. What we were taught was: trust nobody on the internet with your real info no matter how much you like them, this is a wilderness and any crimes that happen won’t be punished or seen so don’t put yourself in a position where you’re going to be the victim of one, and everything you put online is never getting taken down so don’t put anything up that you’re not willing to have on the front page of your local newspaper.

This worked out pretty well, actually! You had kids who knew that if they got in trouble, there was no backup coming to save them. Because the form that backup might take - parents and police - wasn’t going to help. Best case, they’d be banned from their friends and online support groups for being queer. Worst case, they’d be jailed and put in juvie and conversion therapy and turn to drugs and become evil Satanists just like everyone says they secretly are already. So they learned very quickly to take care of themselves. Nobody was going to save them, so they learned to not need saving.

And then, well, Web 2.0 shifted to Web 3.0. Livejournal died because parents - the Warriors for Innocence was the big name - went “gasp how horrible my children are being exposed to the evil pedos and homosexuals they’re going to do drugs and die of AIDS!”. Which is uh. It’s filled with a lot of bigotry, and I’m not excusing them - absolutely I am not - but you can kind of see where they’re coming from, if you tilt your head and squint.

Either way, LJ died, tumblr took its place, Facebook was fast taking off, and the fandom folks who had seen mailing lists go inactive, web admins take their fanfic sites down due to copyright, entire fandoms burnt to the ground in flame wars, said ‘fuck that we’re making our own place’ and that’s how AO3 got made.

That’s important. A lot of folks move to AO3, because well, the rules let them. The rules say ‘you can throw literally anything up here so long as it’s fan content and is not literally illegal, so we don’t get taken down’. It’s a swing for the first generation internet users, those kids who know this place is a wilderness and are carving out our own sanctuary.

But. The children under us. The children for whom AIDS is a nightmarish fairy tale, for whom the ghost stories are conversion therapy, for whom know they can’t really talk to their parents about being queer but can trust they probably won’t get kicked out over it. The children who haven’t spent ten seconds without supervision except online, and their reaction isn’t ‘oh thank god I’m finally free to express myself’ but ‘if I get in trouble, who will protect me?’.

And there’s nobody there. Because we went in knowing there was no backup. And that was fine. But now, the actual adults have figured out that hey uh, maybe we should make cyber laws? Maybe we should make revenge porn and grooming children over the internet crimes? And they grew up with that. They grew up learning that no, even if your parents are suffocating and controlling, they’re always be there for you! Some adult will always be there to protect you!

That isn’t the case. It’s not. But they expect it, because it’s always been done for them. They don’t really want to change the status quo, because that means doing it themselves. They can’t do that, because they don’t know how, they’ve been controlled for every single part of their lives thanks to helicopter parenting and without that control, they don’t know how to keep their lives together, and they demand someone come and control it for them, without restraining them.

Effectively, they want someone to ensure they never face the consequences of their actions. Helicopter parents will rescue you from whatever you did, because you’re their precious baby and it doesn’t matter if you punched a kid, you can do no wrong and the other kid clearly started it.

But being queer is doing wrong. Being queer is something Jeezus doesn’t approve of. So they want to make it something he could approve of! But if it’s too off what they consider to be okay, if it’s too different and weird and wrong and evil, that can’t do, that’s still bad, and they’re precious angels, and children, and minors, why are we the adults not protecting them and letting them see it? Why aren’t we being just like their parents but queer-friendly, why aren’t we protecting the children?

The adults who taught us were the children of those who died as a result of AIDS. The eldest of my generation knew some of them personally. My therapist’s younger brother died at 20 of AIDS, and she told me what it was like. But they don’t have that. These kids of web 3.0, they don’t have that. What they have is over-controlling parents, and the expectation that someone will always be there to protect them but hopefully in ways that don’t hurt them this time, no real understanding of why Category A queer elders are the way they are, and so much internalized shame that they have to do some pretty fancy logic-leaping to keep them from collapsing entirely.

They can’t turn into Category A queer youngsters, because they don’t know how to unravel the system around them, because they’ve never had to actually make choices in their lives and live with the consequences, because they don’t have the example of how to do it. They can’t unravel their internalized shame because again, that’s hard and they don’t have their parents to take away the consequences and pain. It doesn’t come easy to them, so it may as well not come at all.

But, you ask, if Category A queer elders aren’t around to teach the kids, then how are they learning anything positive at all? Well, Category B, our university-tenured TERFs, who don’t want to change the status quo but want to just be at the top of it instead.

For a lot of kids who don’t know how to make hard choices but want to be queer, this is an extremely attractive option. But when they go online to queer spaces, a lot of them say fuck terfs, we don’t support your hate, and they go ‘yeah okay that makes sense’. They can say fuck terfs without ever actually questioning why terfs are bad. They’re Bad and Evil, just like drug addicts, just like fairytale nazis, just like the evil homophobes.

And we saw them say ‘yeah fuck terfs’ and we were like, ‘aight you got it’ and we never questioned if they actually understood us. They didn’t. They didn’t, and we didn’t do enough to fix it, because not enough of us realized the problem. So terfs got a little sneaky. They hid behind dogwhistles and easy little comments, hiding their rhetoric in queer theory that you’ll absolutely miss if you just memorize it and never actually question it and understand why that point is being made.

This goes back to America sucking, because their school system is far more focused on rote memorization over actual logic and understanding of the text. They’re engaging with queer theory the way they’ve been taught, which is memorize and don’t think, don’t question. Besides, questioning and understanding is hard. Being shown different points of view and asked what they think is not only hard but requires them to go against all of the conditioning that says to just listen and agree and never question it, which goes back to tearing the system and internalized shame down, and we’ve established they can’t do that so naturally they don’t do that.

This begets, then, the rise of exclusionary politics. They’re turning into Category B queer youngsters, because we told them ‘hey that’s a terf talking point what are you doing’ and they never questioned why. They learned you can do all sorts of things, just don’t say X, Y, or Z, because they never thought deeply about it.

The children who have grown on Web 3.0 do not want to do any heavy lifting to make things easier for themselves long-run. They want to do as little as possible and have things get better for them. There isn’t enough of us left in Category A, because Category B terfs are very good at recruiting young folks and Cat. A is overwhelming poor, dead, and easily dismissed in the system as evil and bad, so we can’t exactly convince the young folks to listen. If all of the young kids could agree to tear down the system, a lot more older folks might listen. Change always starts with the young, and there’s a reason for that.

But Republicans have figured out, if you get people fighting, they never put together a force that can actually stop you. TERFs, who want the exact same thing as Republicans but with themselves on top, are doing this to queer youth, and Cat. A elders can’t fight back because there isn’t enough of them and the odds are against them, and the young folk like me who follow their lead.

People can kinda handle gay people. It’s not so far from the acceptable normal that it’s impassable. But you want them to handle kinky people? Gay people of colour? Kinky gay people of colour? Trans people? Those are bridges too far to step across. The original idea was to get the foot in the door with marriage equality and inch our way through with racial equality, sex positivity, dismantling ableism and perisexism (forgive me if that isn’t the word for anti-intersex ‘ism), and see if we can’t patch up the system instead of inciting a civil war over this and have to tear down the system entirely.

Well, we might’ve managed that if not for AIDS being the perfect ‘Jeezus is killing all the evil gay people for being sinners’ propaganda machine. As it stands now, not a chance in hell. So long as Republicans and terfs keep everyone fighting, nobody has the power to dismantle their empire, and they stay in power.

So then, you ask me, “Lu what the fuck does that have to do with the decline of otherkinity on tumblr???” and now that you’ve got all that background knowledge, here is your answer.

Those children who want their experiences curated for them and the evil icky content they don’t like to be gone because it disgusts them and anything that disgusts them is clearly sinful problematic and should be destroyed, are what we call ‘antishippers’, or anti for short.

They like being progressive. Sort of. They learned what Republicans and terfs have honed to a fine talent: keep people fighting, hold them to a bar they have to constantly make or risk being ostracized, and harass the people who don’t play along into getting out of your sight forever. Sound familiar?

They learned of otherkinity, and particularly fictionkind, because web 3.0 means if something goes viral on one site, it doesn’t just go viral on that site, it makes it to worldwide newspapers and twitter and nobody ever, ever fucking forgets it. They realized the following: “Hey wait, if I’m this character for realsies, not only does it help me deal with the internalized shame I’ve done nothing to actually fix because that takes work, I can also tell these people who draw gross content I don’t like they’re hurting me personally, and that actually sounds credible, and I can shame them into stopping”.

If this is your first time here and that sounds sickening, it damn well should, and I am so, so sorry that any of us had to witness this, and I am more sorry I and everyone else who personally witnessed this didn’t realize what was going on and put a stop to it. I answer asks and browse the tags and clear up misinformation and it isn’t just a genuine desire to help. It’s damage control, and my own way of trying to deal with the guilt of not stopping this. I’m well aware I couldn’t have seen it coming, I was a teenager myself still learning and no one person has that much power. I still feel like I should have done more, and I’ll do what I can to fix what’s within my power to fix.

So back to the story. This all culminates around 2016 or so. Trump wins the election, and every queer person ever knows they’re fucked, and the younger generation’s only ever heard horror stories, never seen actual oppression that this could bring. We’re all scared. We all don’t know what to do. Nobody has any answers or any control over the situation.

So they lash out. They attack others for drawing things they don’t like, for challenging them in literally any way, for asking them to reconsider the vile shit they just said, for so much as defending themselves from the harassment they just got. And when challenged, they yell “But I’m a minor! A literal child! How dare you attack me, clearly you get off on this, you evil pedophile!” and they sling around every insult in the book until one sticks. Pedophile is a pretty good one, so is abuser, and sometimes zoophile works out too. Freak is great, everyone gets right pissed off about it.

The fact that Category A queer elders were called pedophiles and freaks is not a fact they know or care about. The fact that they are quickly making every fandom community super toxic is also not a fact they care about. The fact that the ‘kin community has words and terminology and they actually mean shit, and the fact that they’re spreading misinformation faster than we can keep up with, are not facts they care about.

So they come in, take our terms, make it impossible for us to find new folks. They realize our anger is easily a power trip, because we’re already made fun of, so they get off on the little power they can find and make fun of us too, and then when we get rightfully annoyed and pissed off, they can hide behind being minors.

Then tumblr implements their porn ban, because nobody’s stopping them, because it isn’t profitable to have porn on here. Considering most of the otherkin community, and most fandom communities, are full of adults who do occasionally talk about NSFW things, and the fact that they’re just banning everyone who so much as breathes wrong, this begins the start of a mass exodus, scattering already fragile communities to twitter, pillowfort, dreamwidth, and a few other places. Largely, twitter, where you can’t make a post longer than a snappy comeback and where the algorithm is literally designed to piss you off as much as possible.

So community elders have largely left, because they can’t stand the drama and the pain of what’s happened, and that’s if they didn’t get banned for being kinky furries who do talk about how their kintypes merge with their sexuality. Most community members have also left or stopped talking about being ‘kin, because they get associated with antishippers and toxicity and it’s just not worth it. Those of us who are left get drowned out by misinformation and trolls and wishkin and antishippers who appropriate our terminology because it supports them getting a power trip, and whenever we argue, we get called pedophiles and freaks and worse.

And now there isn’t much left. I hope we get to find a better place. Othercon was a good place to talk about it, I did a whole panel (it’s on Youtube!) about what we want to do about it. But I don’t really have any answers.

But to sum it all up... America’s political climate ultimately culminated in destroying queer spaces, and we survived, and then people who wanted to destroy smaller communities to get on top showed up and we were all but defenseless against something we had never, ever dealt with before on this scale.

One of my twitter mutuals mentioned how kinning and otherkin are now completely separate communities. It’s really the best I can do to keep hoping that continues, until nobody realizes the words are at all connected to each other. It’s the best anyone can hope for, now. I hate it. I hate every part of this. But maybe we can salvage what’s left.

#luteia laments #otherkin #fictionkin #alth #alterhuman #asks #anonymous #long post //#discussions #on community history #on politics #on public relations #commentors feel free to add your own thoughts!#Anonymous

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antarestyl · 3 years

Text

Got not tagged but saw this meme and wanted to do it :D

I tag @namekian-maoh and whoever else wanna try!

How many works do you have on AO3?

56 so far.

What’s your total AO3 word count?

600021 at this moment... damnit, I like nice and round numbers more XD

How many fandoms have you written for and what are they?

29 XD well, some are crossover and some are almost-the-same (especially with Video games where I often take multiple entires in a series into account and tag them accordingly)

As for my fandoms:

Video games: Amnesia: The Dark Descent, Among Us, Bowser's Fury, Deltarune, Don't Starve, Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, Final Fantasy XV, Luigi's Mansion, Mario & Luigi RPG, Monkey Island, Pikmin, Pocket Monsters | Pokemon, Super Mario & Related Fandoms, Super Mario Bros, Super Mario Odyssey, Super Paper Mario, Undertale, (+ AU of Undertale)

Comic/Cartoon/Manga/Anime: Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters, Yu-Gi-Oh! (All Media Types), Homestuck, Gravity Falls, DCU (Comics), Booster Gold (Comics), Blue Beetle (Comics)

Books/Movies/Divers: Harry Potter, Mystery Skulls Animated, Olsen-banden | The Olsen Gang (Movies), Ties of Lapis (Skyrim-AU),

What are your top 5 fics by kudos?

1. PTA Sans and other glorious things

73016 words, 3192 Kudos, so far my most successful work XD It’s still ongoing. Undertale Fanfic, Monster-on-the-Surface, True Pacifist Ending, PTA AU, SansxToriel in the Background, everybody is here, mostly happy, silly and only a small dose of angst from time to time. Later chapters with more story.

2. TrioBlasterSets AU - Six puppys and 3 flames

270813 word, 758 Kudos. I write this AU together with @namekian-maoh . Still ongoing. Undertale Baby-Blaster AU with some Underfell and Underswap thrown into it. Dadby, Badster, mostly family fluff and dealing with the experiment!gaster-blaster Background of 3 skeleton children. Also 3 flames who take care of them that have way more drama going on themselves than nessessary. Chapters are not in chronological order. Has a few Spin-offs too (including some NSFW oneshorts about the flames and their relationship ;) )

3. So I won't regret another day

19214 words, 320 Kudos. Undertale Underfell AU, Underfell Sansby with some healthy relationships, the planning of a revolt against an insane king, monster still being monster and not really made for violence in an violent setting. If officially finished but I write new chapters when the fancy strikes me.

4. Grillby's

9894 words, 265 Kudos. Deltarune/Undertale fanfic with a Spin, named Plushyrune (aka Deltarune where eveything is the same, just with Sansby and Sans makes plushies). Started as just pure silly fluff, kinda got a plot now about the kids of Deltarune. Still ongoing, new chapter is 80% done ;)

5. Something old, something new...

6579 words, 208 Kudos. Pure Post-Pacifist Surface Sansby fluff. Mostly from Grillby’s POV how they fall in love and be silly and in love. Still ongoing, haven’t really had to mojo to write more for it lately, but I WILL return at some point.

Do you respond to comments, why or why not?

I try to! I used to not comment on comments because I had this irrational feeling of “cheating the numbers” if I reply to comments but... screw that, I want to interact with people! So I try to answer any and all comments now :)

What’s the fic you’ve written with the angstiest ending?

Ufff, for me it’s a tie between The last chip and Laughter in the Darkness. The Last Chip is a Yu-gi-Oh! Fanfic in a series of Kaiba spiraling downwards after the Manga/Anime ended and sets up the events of Dark Site of Dimensions. It ends pretty much with Kaiba ending up getting borderline suicidal in his Obsession with the Pharaoh.

Laughter in the Darkness is the Epilog I wrote for my Gravity Falls x Amnesia Crossover where Ford is pretty much an Amnesia-Protagonist and archives the very worst ending for himself. Mind the tags if you read this. It ends with Ford at the lowest possible point for himself and its open ended if he is going fully insane or if Bill Chiper really is still around. (and it’s not clear what outcome is the better one)

Have you ever received hate on a fic?

Nah, not really. I am a chill writer in my own little corners of the fandom and most people leave me alone. I did get one “But Queer is a SLUR” comment way back in the day where it was still all “????” to say that out loud. But otherwise? Nah. I am not important enough for hate, lol.

Do you write smut? If so what kind?

I have XD Not much thou. I wrote so far an mastubation scene with the one going down on himself heavily NOT BEING ALRIGHT while doing so XD Other than that I have 2 NSFW Undertale fics with some hot flame-on-flame action. I do like writing not-standard-sex (as in Sex that doesn’t requite human genitila) Otherwise I like to hint or describe feelings more than the act itself. More lime than lemon ;)

Have you ever had a fic stolen?

Not that I know of. As I said, I am not important enough for that.

Have you ever had a fic translated?

I had some ppl asking for permission to translate (which of course) but as far as I know there are no translations out there as of yet.

Have you ever co-written a fic before?

Yeah, I am writing the TrioBlasterSet AU with @namekian-maoh I did Co-write some fics way back during my fanfiction.de time too but that’s a long time ago.

What’s your all time favorite ship?

I ship a lot and am a dirty multishipper XD I have to many ships to really call one out as my favorite.

What’s a WIP that you want to finish but don’t think you ever will?

TrioBlasterSets AU because there is always MORE to tell with this AU XD

What are your writing strengths?

I am the Queen of Worldbuilding and Crossovers baby!

What are your thoughts on writing dialogue in other languages in a fic?

Only do it if you have a REALLY good reason for it AND if you have a good gasp on the language. Like, nothing takes me out of a fic faster than reading stuff in horrible German written by people who were to lazy to just copy/paste the word from google translate (my time in the Apollo Justice fandom has seriously scared me. It’s Fräulein, not Fraulein or Fraülein! Also you can’t just swap ei and ie around THOSE ARE DIFFERENT SOUNDS! als we have the letter ß it’s a shap s sound you can’t just use/not use it as you please!)

Also in 90% of all cases it’s just not nessessary. Write what you wanna write, TELL us it was said in a different language OR let the POV character just tell us their hear something said in an other language they couldn’t understand.

What I want to say is: Have some respect of the language you want to use!

What was the first fandom you ever wrote for?

I THINK it was Harry Potter? IDK I wrote a cringy Star Trek Parodie when I was like 14 or so and those OCs went through a lot from that time on forward but Idk if that even counts XD

What’s your favorite fic you’ve ever written?

The Game of Our Life It’s a series of Mario x Homestuck Fics I wrote before Undertale came along and swept me away XD I love all my fics of course but this one was the first really big one I finished on english and it was the one I am most proud of of the world-building. It has angst, it has lore, my writing style was just really developing there and I am just proud of it. (Also it’s very self-indulging so yeah XD love it a LOT)

#meme #ao3

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sailorbadger · 3 years

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Book Review - 6 modern female-led Robin Hood adaptations

In the past 8 months or so I have read/watched/listened to over 30 different Robin Hood adaptations. Over the summer I found myself reading almost exclusively adaptations that were written by women and centered women in the story one way or another. (I also found out that “lesbian Robin Hood” is a whole genre on its own.) I decided to write short reviews for 6 of these books since I know I have followers that probably share my enjoyment of this particular niche.

This post includes spoiler-free reviews for the following books

Outlaw and Scarlet by Niamh Murphy

Nottingham: The True Story of Robyn Hood by Anna Burke

Hood by Jenny Elder Moke

Marian, Princess Thief by C.K. Brooke

Heart of Sherwood by Edale Lane

The rest of the post will be under the cut since this is quite long.

Despite the fact that I read other books that could technically fit this same category, I decided to focus on these six in my review because these ones are easily accessible to most of my audience (meaning that they are in English and new enough - the oldest one being from 2018 I think - so that you should be able to find them easily).

I tried to keep these reviews relatively short and spoiler-free. That means that describing specific plot points is impossible because in most of these, the basic premise is the typical Robin Hood origin story. I tried to focus on my general feelings about the books and the characters and their relationships.

I won’t be doing any numerical ratings. I know that the order in which I read these impacted on how I felt about them. If I had read them in a different order, I would probably feel differently about some of them. That’s why it’s difficult for me to give any real ratings. The reviews are not in any real order either, apart from my favorite being the last one.

These reviews are also about 75% serious and 25% not serious. When my friend and I started to go through all these different Robin Hood adaptations, we made a bingo card that features tropes/themes/details found in a lot of different versions of the story. I’ll leave quick comments on the reviews on how each of these did, but I won’t go too much into detail on those.

Niamh Murphy: Outlaw & Scarlet

I grouped these two books together because they are the first two parts of a series. My understanding is that the author does plan on eventually releasing more, but since Scarlet was released this year, it might take a while. If a third book does come out, I might read it, but I’m not in a hurry to reread these two.

Outlaw tells the story of how Robyn, the daughter of a baron, ends up becoming an outlaw. If you are familiar with at least a few Robin Hood adaptations, you will know how it goes. There are no big surprises, but I suppose the purpose of this story is to introduce us to the characters and set the scene for the later books. Scarlet continues Robyn’s story and introduces a new character to the story. (I won’t go too much into details on the second book to avoid spoilers, since its plot does not follow familiar beats as much as the first one.)

Besides the books on this list, I have also read/watched/listened to several other Robin Hood adaptations as well, and when it comes to plot, Outlaw lands in the “uninteresting” section. There was nothing new or exciting there, and seeing that I have spent most of the year in a Robin Hood -bubble, I was left wanting more. Scarlet was a slight improvement seeing as Outlaw was mostly a very generic Robin Hood origin story. Together they still feel like this is just the beginning of a longer story, so I hope that if a third book comes out we get into the real action.

Outlaw is marketed as a “lesbian retelling” of the Robin Hood story, but compared to some of the other titles on this list, I was left wanting more. The romance aspect is barely there, so if you’re going to pick these up for Robyn and Marian’s relationship, prepare for slow burn.

The characters didn’t leave a huge impression on me. I do have to say that the Sheriff’s wife was interesting and I wish we had gotten more of her. Other than her, I felt that at times many of the characters could have been from any adaptation.

Overall, there wasn’t anything really wrong with these books, but they just didn’t entertain me as much as the others. I feel that if I had read these before all the other ones on this list, I would have enjoyed them more. Outlaw and Scarlet are a good read for someone who wants a basic Robin Hood story with a lesbian lead. I still think that marketing the first book as a “lesbian retelling” is setting unrealistic expectations for some, but I hope that in the future the series really earns that title.

I completely forgot to fill out a bingo card for these two and at this point I have forgotten many of the details so unfortunately we’ll never know the result. Most of the tropes hit were so general they probably weren’t on our card anyway.

Anna Burke: Nottingham: The True Story of Robyn Hood

Out of all of the books in this list, Anna Burke’s Nottingham is perhaps the most explicit in its queerness. Although the story obviously doesn’t use modern labels, I would say that it includes representation for (at least) lesbian, bi and trans character(s). None of this feels too out-of-place, and instead Nottingham offers a (mostly) historically accurate Robin Hood tale with a queer main cast.

The plot mostly follows your typical Robin Hood -formula: After a hunting accident, Robyn becomes an outlaw, surrounds herself with loyal friends and helps those in need. This aspect of the book doesn’t offer any new ideas or challenge the existing ideas about Robin Hood as a story. However, it focuses more on the characters, so it doesn’t really need anything new. Marian especially has to come to terms with her feelings towards Robyn and women in general. I do have to say though, that the romance between Robyn and Marian happens a little fast - they only meet a few times before falling in love. [Insert joke about lesbians moving too fast here] It didn’t bother me too much, but I do wish there had been a little more buildup.

From this list, I read this book the most recently. It may be that I was just so burned out from reading all these Robin Hood -stories but I didn’t connect with the book that well. I enjoyed it, but I wish there had been more of that fun sense of adventure I look for in these stories.

I would recommend Nottingham to anyone who wants to read a story that manages to be historically accurate and use the Robin Hood mythos to its advantage while not shying away from its portrayal of queerness. Although it did not hold my attention as well as some of the other books, it is still written well and has a good story.

This book didn’t get a bingo unless you interpret “lähentely* which is uncomfortable for the audience” as the sex scene (there is sex in this book but nothing that explicit, I would say high T/low M in Ao3-ratings) being uncomfortable for the reader OR the third person in that scene being uncomfortable. About half of the bingo card was still filled.

*I couldn’t come up with a good translation for this word, it means something along the lines of making moves/coming onto someone/making advances, though for this bingo I use it to generally mean anything flirty/intimate/sexual/etc.

Jenny Elder Moke: Hood

This book was the first one on this list I read. Compared to the other novels, I would say that Hood is the least like your typical Robin Hood story. The book follows Isabelle, Robin and Marian’s daughter, who has to find her father in order to save her mother. The adventure is brand new, though there are still familiar characters and the basic concept of Robin Hood is honored. This is a story about the next generation of outlaws, so if you’re looking for something that focuses on characters from the legends, you may be disappointed.

Speaking of the characters, I loved Little, Patrick and Helena. I could have just read a book where this group of young outlaws has adventures and been satisfied. Unfortunately I didn’t connect well with the main lead, Isabelle, and the love interest, Adam, felt like a very generic hot guy from a YA novel. The romance itself is practically non-existent, and honestly I could have done without it. Seriously, I had completely forgotten about that whole thing until I started writing this review. This story is more about Isabelle’s relationship with her parents, which I like. She also gets to build genuine friendships with the other characters. I just wish the book had been a little longer so that it could have spent more time developing some of these relationships.

Had I read this book when I was a teenager, I most likely would have loved it a lot more. It is YA, and at times it really shows. As far as Robin Hood stories go, I generally enjoy the “outlaws being outlaws in the forest” content the most, and unfortunately this featured surprisingly little of it. It still offered its own take on what could happen after the legends everyone knows, even if it doesn’t add much to the legends themselves.

It is important that I mention here that if Allan has a child in an adaptation, this child must be named either Allan jr. or Alana. This book fulfills this basic need for me and I am satisfied. It also checked most of the boxes on the bingo, and I almost filled the whole sheet. So somehow, despite not really following the typical Robin Hood formula, Hood managed to include all the important tropes.

If you are a teenager who enjoys Robin Hood -stories, I would definitely recommend this book. It’s not the best YA novel out there, but it’s a good standalone story. I think that for adults, this can be a good read if you are a fan of Robin Hood -stories and/or enjoy this type of YA anyway. I wasn’t sure what type of book this was when I started reading, but if you just prepare yourself for a fun adventure aimed at young teens, you can enjoy this. It’s very quick to read, I think I read it in one day.

Also, I must quote a review I saw on Storygraph (imagine this is in all caps) : “hjsxhfjsdksfjk???????????? Patrick best character no cap”

C. K. Brooke: Marian, Princess Thief

In Marian, Princess Thief, Robin Hood doesn’t exist at all. Instead the story follows Marian, who in this version is a princess, who escaped an assassination attempt and is now living in the forest as an outlaw with six other women - the genderbent versions of the Merry Men. Eventually there is a romance in this book as well, but the biggest force carrying through the book is the friendship between the women. If I had to describe the novel in just one word, I would say it’s lovable. If I had to describe it in two, I would say it’s dissappointingly heterosexual.

Maybe the fact that I found a genre that is basically “lesbian Robin Hood” has ruined me, but how can you write a story that features seven women living in the forest as outlaws, and not one of them is queer? This is entirely a thing that bothers me personally, and the book doesn’t need queer representation to be good, but there is no reason to not include it. Headcanons can fortunately go a long way, but I’m just saying that you could easily keep everything about Scarlett’s backstory the same except make her a lesbian. (In fact, I’m 98% joking when I say that her not being a lesbian is a homophobic choice. I will elaborate on this if you ask me but I won’t go too much into it here because I would have to explain things about other adaptations as well.)

As for the straight romance, I can’t say that I was feeling it. I could see the points where I was supposed to feel something, so maybe it’s just the fact that I’m aspec myself, but I didn’t care that much about it. Still, it was refreshing to see a story where the romance doesn’t overshadow the friendships between the women, and instead they are valued just as much (if not more) as the romantic relationship. The story doesn’t dig too deeply into the characters, but I still loved all the women. (I don’t care about the male lead. But I know others who would.)

I think the biggest “problem” this book has (apart from not making Scarlett a lesbian) is that the ending feels just a little bit rushed compared to the rest of the novel. I still think that the novel achieves everything it tries to do, but I could have used one more chapter to flesh out the climax.

The bingo card wasn’t even close to being full, but you know what, Marian, Princess Thief is good enough as it is and doesn’t need to follow all the familiar tropes. Still, how hard is it to include a bird?

This was a very quick read, in fact I basically just read it all in one go. I would definitely recommend it to anyone who wants to read something lighthearted and, like me, is often disappointed by the lack of women in Robin Hood stories.

To end this, I will leave you with a translated quote from my WhatsApp commentary: “What is it that in all these Robin Hood stories these old dudes are all after these young maidens like get yourself a hot milf and leave the kids alone”

Edale Lane: Heart of Sherwood

Heart of Sherwood is my favorite Robin Hood -novel that I have read so far. It has just about everything I could want: good characters, a fun sense of adventure, political scheming, great relationships (both romantic and platonic) and a good ending. I was less than two chapters into this book when I knew that this would be a difficult one to top.

The premise of this book is very similar to Burke’s Nottingham: both follow the story of Robyn becoming an outlaw, making friends with the other Merry (Wo)Men and developing a relationship with Marian. I don’t want to compare these two stories too much, but I did prefer the more lighthearted tone of Heart of Sherwood. This was also the first book where I was actually invested in the romance. Normally in pretty much all Robin Hood adaptations, the relationship between Robin and Marian doesn’t interest me greatly; I don’t mind it, but it’s not something I have too many personal feelings about. However, only a few chapters into Heart of Sherwood I thought: “If these two don’t get a happy ending I’m going to jump out of the window.” (I won’t spoil where this threat ended up going.)

One thing I appreciate about the romance in this one is that Robyn and Marian already know each other, so I didn’t have to deal with a romance that develops too fast. The novel also had other things to offer besides being a “lesbian Robin Hood” story, so I didn’t feel like I had to enjoy the romance to enjoy the whole story. I was very invested the whole way through, and out of all the books I’ve reviewed here, this one made me the most emotional.

As a fan of the BBC show, I do have to say that this novel had a very similar vibe; there was a good balance of action and humor. Maybe that was a part of why I enjoyed this so much. I was also able to predict exactly how certain things would end up. I kind of wish I would have been more surprised.

This novel is well paced, it is exactly the right length for the story it’s telling and overall I can’t really find things to complain about. If I wasn’t petty, I would give this book full five stars, but because I am petty, for very personal reasons I’m giving it 4,99999… stars. As for the bingo, this one filled most of the sheet.

I’ll end this review with this random line I had shared on WhatsApp for some reason: ""Does this mean I am dead?" Alan asked in jest. - - - "Nay; same annoying jester, alive as ever, and likely wanting for a pint about now."”

Conclusion

Writing these reviews was surprisingly difficult because most of the stories follow the same formula, so commenting on anything that moves away from said formula could be considered a spoiler. Hopefully if you read this far you were still interested enough in at least one of these books and feel inspired to read them. I would happily recommend any of them, and if you want to know my more detailed thoughts on them, feel free to message me. The same applies to all the adaptations I’ve gone through. I have Thoughts that I’m dying to share.

#robin hood #my post #I have no idea how to tag this???#my own tag for the bbc robin hood is pretty much my general rh tag but I don't want to put this in the public tag since this technically has #nothing to do with it

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thechekhov · 4 years

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Haven’t been getting enough gay stuff from all my LGBTQ-themed posts lately? Have I got good news for you!

This post is brought to you by - me driving an hour to work and suddenly finding myself with lots of time on my hands to burn through podcasts!

Specifically, I want to bring up and highlight one podcast I’ve been listening to a LOT in order to catch myself up on something important to me - Queer History!

LGBTQIA people have a specific obstacle when it comes to history (or several, who are we kidding) - we struggle to pass culture and history down cross-generationally like other marginalized groups might be able to do. LGBTQ kids are often separated from LGBTQ elders and don’t have spaces to learn about their own history - but it’s still HELLA important!

I am personally not a history buff - but I HIGHLY recommend @queerasfact - an inclusive, trans-friendly, ace-friendly queer history podcast!

TUMBLR 🌈 TWITTER 🌈 PATREON 🌈 PODCAST

What do they do?

Each episode (around 40~60 minutes long) covers an important historical figure or event and how it pertains to LGBTQIA history. They cover lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, NB and asexual historical figures. Each episode describes the life and/or important accomplishments of the person in question, as well as focusing a discussion around their identity, how it impacted their life and how they might have influenced other queer people after their time.

Why do I love it so damn much?

1) It’s INCREDIBLY layman friendly.

As your standard non-historian grump who barrel-rolled out of social studies class as if it were a Tardis, I feel that this is perhaps their most praiseworthy point.

The episodes are done in a storytime style format which mimics casual conversation you’d have with your gay friends while you all sit around a campfire (or a coffee table) and listen to a particularly well-read, distinguished gay info-dump on a specific niche interest of theirs.

It’s relatively simple to follow along, and similarly simple to space out while someone details political war and upheaval until a more interesting plot point comes up.

2) It’s really good about content warnings and inclusivity.

At the beginning of the episode the hosts will run over all the potentially unsavory content that will come up in order to give you fair warning. I’ve already mentioned that they’re trans-friendly, ace-friendly and etc, but I want to also praise how much effort and research they put into making sure that the subjects they’re talking about are gendered correctly and treated with respect.

They’re really frank about the less shining parts of history but they’re also not insensitive about it, which makes learning about these important events so much easier.

3) It’s well-researched and works to debunk common rumors AND provides sources to back up claims!

It’s honestly humbling how seriously the hosts tackle their volunteer service to the community and how committed they are to bringing verified information to the table without resorting to shortcuts. If they don’t know something or can’t verify it, they will say so. If there are conflicting accounts, they will say so. Often I learn more about things by just listening HOW historians think about one thing or another, and that, in turn, makes ME better about how I analyze information I glean from other sources.

I think I’ve probably said enough, so I’ll finish it off there - but I’ll say it again:

If you’re LGBTQIA+ and you don’t know much about our history - I highly encourage you to use this opportunity to dive into it with minimal effort on your part! Not only will you learn more about yourself by listening to the accounts of others who came before you, but you will also learn about how our way of defining identity has evolved through the ages and how we’ve come to be where we are today!

Listen here!

#lgbtq #lgbt #lgbtqia #lgbtqa #queer stuff #queer as fact

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apptowonder · 3 years

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The Confessing Subject: Orthodox Theology, Patristic Epistemology, and the Search for Truth and Love

We progressive Orthodox need to continue the reclamation of patristic subjectivity, especially since much of the best recent work on the subject has been done stunningly by non-Orthodox and rejected by Orthodox (cf. for example Betancourt’s “Byzantine Intersectionality”, Burrus’ “The Sex Lives of Saints” and the emerging work of Jack Bates).

Much was made in the 20th century of the “neopatristic synthesis,” by which is meant (I think) the ability of contemporary Orthodox people to baptize the useful ideological frameworks of our day into Christian usage, creating a synthesis of dogma and philosophy much as the theologians of the patristic era did with the philosophies of their day.*

I think this project can only proceed** if we reclaim patristic subjectivity. That is to say, we can no longer completely separate the ideas, feelings, desires and values of our own day when reading the Fathers and Mothers. Perhaps even more importantly, we need to read the Fathers and Mothers with an eye towards discerning their own inner psychological and social world, and not assume that they were a different species of human being unaffected by the same trends of human behavior which have shifted but remained consistent throughout human history. Eros, embodiment, power, authority, race, gender, identity, economics, etc.

In advocating for this rediscovery of the patristic subject, I am rejecting two common ecclesial approaches and advocating for a third way, one which I hope is a more Orthodox way. The first approach is that of fundamentalism, to take a literal and surface level reading of the Fathers and Mothers and apply it brute force to our own psyche as if it were the voice of God. This kind of fundamental literalism is, I would argue, Protestant in origin***, given that it simply takes the “naive realism” of sola scriptura Biblical literalists and transposes it to the texts of the patristic era. It also erases the subjectivity of both ancient and modern spiritual subjects, and such erasure is an act of violence (seeking to repress God-created facets of the εικόν θεού mentioned above which play a part in the living out of our theological and spiritual lives, and of our progress or hindrance towards theosis).

The second approach I reject is that of detached critical analysis, where we take all our modern tools and impose our own epistemological priorities onto patristic texts, usually taking the easy move of dismissing them and rejecting any relationship our own formation may have with theirs, because they look regressive when analyzed from our cultural moment using the advanced analytical frameworks of our time. This approach comes from a combination of Protestant and Enlightenment tropes, and while it is less damaging to the lived experience of current Christians, it also cedes ground to fundamentalists by asserting that the entire lived history of the Church belongs to those who wish to weaponize it against the marginalized. Rather than treating the Fathers and Mothers as the voice of God, it treats them as another voice of our enemies.

The third way, it would seem, is to treat the Fathers and Mothers as saints, as human vessels transfigured by the light of God but nonetheless human at the same time. It is to listen to their anxieties, their yearnings, their loves and questions, as much as we listen to their doctrine and advice. It is also to recognize that we are future Church Fathers, Mothers and Elders. As we say continually in Orthodoxy, theology as a set of propositions about God is (or rather should be) foreign to us. The Creeds were written in response to the pastoral harm caused by heresies. To a lived problem which required a unified confession as its solution. For the Orthodox, all theology is exomology. All theology is confession, the confession of our experiences of God, and the confession of ourselves in the light of who God has revealed God’s own self to be in our world. The category of confessor saints (eg, St Maximus (icon above) are a group of holy people who were persecuted for their living out the Christian faith. Their theology is not an ideological system constructed or deconstructed in a vacuum, but emerged from their commitment to putting their bodies on the line for Christ, and speaking out of that reality. They would be confessors whether or not they wrote a single word, because of the theology of their lives. All theology is lived before it is ever spoken.

As I mentioned above, many non-Orthodox theologians who write as loyal members of the one holy catholic and apostolic Church are beginning to practice this kind of holy listening to the patristics, and yielding incredible results. I wholeheartedly applaud their efforts. But I worry that Orthodoxy will not fully recover its voice to the wider Christian world until we have Orthodox writers, teachers and spiritual leaders doing the same thing from within our church body.

The mistake in interpreting patristics, I fear, is to read the outcome of the Fathers’ and Mothers’ theology without making an effort to understand what it is confessing, to understand the subjective personhood of the patristics and its expression in theological record. We assume that we can only confess and thereby live theology without talking about it, while we assume the Fathers and Mothers could only speak revealed truths about God and were not bound by the “limits” of confessed theology as we are. That they could somehow speak a truth divorced from their lived experience, rather than intimately interwoven within it.

And so when, for example, I say that this or that saint was queer, I’m not saying that they would have used the same vocabulary I would use to describe my experiences. Rather, I am recognizing the frequencies of a saint’s experience that resonate richly with my own, and listening not only to what they say about God, but what they say about themselves, and granting those self-confessions the dignity of kinship to present realities. I am saying that there is continuity between our queer family, past and present. That we have spoken with many different voices and tongues, but we have always been here.

It must also be named that when we listen to the saints’ confessions and seek to unearth their subjectivity, we may find that they had very different concerns than we do now, or that their answers to the burning questions of human existence take a very different approach than ours. This is not just an evaluating scale of progress, but a process of seeking particularity where we must listen to the conversation happening in their time and place, and understand where they speak from. To listen for the Holy Spirit in conciliar and solitary dialogue moving the Church towards incarnating the truth and love of Christ in their moment. We must also recognize that the Spirit is still moving in our Church to help us confess together, and in so confessing, find the wisdom and love to be the body of Christ in our own moment.

In order to truly live into the neopatristic synthesis and whatever comes after it, we need to listen to the Fathers and Mothers with the same compassionate and human ear we listen to one another. We need to listen not just to what they tell us about God, but what they tell us about God-in-them, about the image of God and the likeness of Christ expressed by their own particular, embodied lives.

*Consensus seems to be varied on how much this is a constructive versus a reproductive work. Florovsky, Lossky and to a lesser extent Zizioulas seem to emphasize more the need to clarify and re-invigorate our teaching of Orthodox dogma such that it shines the light it is capable of shining on the needs of the modern era. Vasiljevic, though certainly in favor of good dogma, seems to go further and suggest that we must engage in the same kind of creative synthesis the Fathers and Mothers did, and that this may produce new theology which is nonetheless built on the foundations of the patristic era. I think both elements are a part of the necessary project, but I don’t think true growth in Christ the True Vine is possible without an openness to Vasiljevic’s constructive turn

**For a look at the value and limits of the neopatristic synthesis idea, see Fr John Behr’s excellent article here. He worked through some of these points long before I did, and I see our approaches as broadly complementary

***Though not all or even most Protestants practice this approach

#theology #orthodox theology #patristics #queer theology #subjectivity #epistemology

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writermich18 · 4 years

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Record Keeper Part 3 - Final

There once were two brothers, with a 14-year difference between them.

They lived during the Dawn of Quirks, mid-to-late 21st Century.

The older brother was Quirked. His Quirk, unknown. The older Brother’s story was never told. At least, not the version of his story that had actually taken place. Even though he was there for the younger brother at the beginning… It wasn’t until much, much later that he actually returns to the narrative. By that point though, the story I’m about to tell you had already been erased from history and the younger brother was dead.

“Oh? You make it sound as if I knew him?”

“If my theory is correct? You did. You were there after all, but then again. That didn’t stop the government from separating the brothers, didn’t stop the 1% from taking back control and erasing such an important piece of history. During the time of the Dawn, you probably remember Fear, protests, riots, destruction, an unresponsive government. Death.”

“Yes, that is what happened. I tried to fix it, rather trying to fix it.”

A shake of the head. “The version you remember is on loop. In the beginning, yes. What they had essentially done, was erase the history of what had actually happened; it was a complete erasure of the culture, society, reforms, and everything that had actually happened. Taken what had happened in the beginning of when Quirks first appeared, then basically put it on loop for the entire generation until they made it appear as if the second generation rose up and put a stop to it. Then they created the society we know today. Then, before the first generation and the generations before them who lived during that time could correct the second and new generations and tell what had actually happened, the government went and erased those generations – either by killing them off completely or wiping their memory. Making it look like those generations had been so traumatized by what they had gone through, their brains had locked the memories away.”

“If you don’t believe us, we Record Keepers have always been slippery folk. The only reason we know this and escaped the government’s reach is because of the younger brother in the story we are telling,” Grandmother Midoriya laughs. “He was just as slippery as we are, much to the amusement of the Rogues he led and the frustration of his older brother who had been searching for him this entire time.”

“Hmm.”

“Interested now?”

“My interest is peaked. I do not like the idea that my memories may be wrong.”

“Much to the displeasure of the guards, if you become outrage by the end of this story, your outrage would be completely justifiable,” Midoriya Hisashi replies, having seen the displeasure of the guards even before they started their story.

“Can I continue with the story now?”

“Go on.”

The younger brother is our story’s focus, mostly because he was the one to come forward with the story.

The brothers were orphans. Their father died before the mother found out she was pregnant. The mother died when the younger brother was only 4 years old.

Like I mentioned, they had a 14-year difference between the two of them. So, by the time their mother had died, even during the turmoil that was going on, the older brother was of legal age to raise the younger brother, despite being Quirked.

The younger brother was Quirkless so you would think at a time like that period, they would have been separated. But no. The older brother raised the younger brother.

Until the younger brother was six years old.

To outsiders, it is told that the younger brother was taken by a van on his way home from school.

Reality is this:

Government agents, from an agency known only as the Lab, came to their home. Kicked their door down.

The two brothers thought they were after the older brother, given that he was Quirked and Quirks were feared.

“Let me guess, they took the older brother and the younger was left alone.”

Izuku smiles grimly. The elder Record Keepers keep quiet, though they stare at All For One with a thousand-yard stares.

The one that the government agents had pointed at, had wanted, wasn’t the older brother.

No.

The finger raised up and pointed at the Younger Brother. The Quirkless six-year-old, under the Quirked 20-year-old’s protection, was the one they wanted.

From the few scattered memories the younger brother had of that day, we can firmly say the older brother hadn’t thought at all, had turned, grabbed his younger brother, and ran.

Into the snow falling woods behind his home.

Within those snowy woods, the government agents gave chase and shot the older brother down 4 times. Knocking the older brother down and releasing the younger brother from his hold.

And the younger brother could nothing as the Lab agents grabbed him and took him from his brother. Could do nothing as they shot his brother again right through the chest to stop him from getting up and getting his brother back.

The younger brother ended up in the Lab, the scientist there called the Men in White Lab Coats.

They re-named him Subject 27, branded him with the number. Put him in a cage and did many experiments upon him.

Even going as far as changing his body to bare children for them to take and experiment on as well, the moment he turned 11 and signs of puberty started to show.

“I may be a monster, but at least the experiments I had the Good Doctor do were on dead or soon-to-be-dead people, and that they were adults and I didn’t do that to any of them.”

“Yes, yes, and you get one brownie point for it,” Grandmother waves him off.

Midoriya and Izuku sweatdrop. “Okaa-sama, you are braver than any Pro Hero or US marine. And I don’t know how to feel about that.”

“You should have realized this long before this meeting, Tou-san.”

“Doesn’t make it any less scary to see.”

Subject 27, upon the discovery the Men in White Lab Coats had made of learning that 27’s body is accepting all of the experiments and the powers those experiments are bringing, was nicknamed by the other experimented-on children.

First, they called him.

A cruel name in the Lab, but one he bore proudly as one of his many scars once he got out.

For he was the first child out of the 27 million Quirkless children taken since the Lab’s establishment in the 1980s who survived the experiments, the harsh training, the conditions, and the labor they were put through.

Subject 27 was 14-years-old when the thought of escape crossed his mind.

He had just witnessed with the four only other surviving now-empowered children a newbie’s attempt to escape. If it had not been for that lucky shot one of the guards had managed to make, the new kid would have survived and been the first child to successfully escape the Lab and its maze of a structure.

That, dead, kid was the one who had inspired the five children who witnessed the whole thing to try and escape themselves for the first time in their lives.

They were successful.

Subjects 100 – Jagger – and 9 – Tiny – took the information the Lab had. Subjects 27 – First – and 48 – Gadget – had weakened the infrastructure and started a fire. Subject 19 – Ruff – had freed the monster children for them to distract the Men in White Lab Coats while this was going on. Then they left.

Right through the electric fence. Watching the whole place burn down to the ground as Gadget frantically drove away.

Through the files, they all searched for their families. Jagger learned that they had been a foster child the system had given up on; Tiny learned she had been torn right from her mother’s arms after her birth because her mom had been a mental asylum patient; Gadget learned his family had given him to the Lab for money, even though they were middle class; Ruff learned he had been practically raised by the house cat because his parents were a workaholic mom and a drug-addicted dad; and First learned that the government knew his brother had a Quirk, and that First hadn’t been their original target until the Lab had intervened and requested First.

“It’s interesting that they had agreed to take the Quirkless child instead of the Quirked adult,” the prisoner hummed. Hisashi gives a harsh bark of a laugh but doesn’t say what he had wanted to say in response.

Izuku knew what he had been thinking. The Quirked brother would have murdered the government agents if they had tried to take him away from his little brother – in fact, if First’s memory of that time is correct, that had been exactly what he had been about to do if they hadn’t pointed at First and demanded him instead.

Once they got to the city, the crew of five teenagers got to work immediately. They wanted to make sure that the Lab couldn’t rebuild its Japanese branch and that the other branches they discovered through the stolen files were immediately dealt with.

They created the organization that would become known as The Rogues. They accepted everybody in their ranks – Quirkless, Quirked, Escapees, Runaways, the Indigenous children who wanted to spit in the governments’ face for abandoning their people, the Black people who wanted to spit in the governments’ face for abandoning their people, the Queer who wanted to spit in the governments’ face for abandoning their people, the Disabled who wanted to spit in the governments’ face for abandoning their people, the Mutant Quirked people who wanted to spit in the governments’ and society’s face for abandoning and hurting their people, all the Quirked people who were discriminated against on all sides of the playing field who wanted Justice, the religious people who wanted Justice for every discrimination and persecution brought upon them. They didn’t care to hear your reason as long as you didn’t back stab them nor were out to assassinate them.

“They weren’t successful, were they?”

Grandmother smiles, “We wouldn’t be here if they weren’t successful. And the 1% would not have eradicated all traces of this piece of history if the Rogues were not successful. You would know this story if they were not successful.”

The Rogues did a lot of damage to the government and society actually.

Within a few months, they were an entire Nonprofit organization, filled with Vigilantes, Heroes, and Runners – Runners being people who did literal damage to corporations and governments including leading riots triggered by the police.

“Runners were basically people recognized by the public as Vigilantes and Heroes like the rest of the organization but labeled as Villains by the government and propaganda. They never touched civilian property or publicly owned items,” his father explained.

All For One snorts in response, “Not surprised.”

Grandmother and Izuku note that he doesn’t seem to recognize the story, though he hides his confusion well.

Izuku pities the guards who will have to deal with an enraged All For One once this story-telling and their visit is over. Especially when he finds out about what had actually happened to his brother.

Doing great damage to the government and society. Within a year, they had people who either directly worked for or supported the Rogues on all playing fields, including the underworld. Though it wouldn’t be until they had completely wiped the government cleaned and gotten started on rebuilding the system and society that they learned of the support coming in from the shadows, 4 years after the original 5 had escaped the Lab.

During the final battle, after 4 years of silent fighting between both sides in the shadows and on all levels, the governmental head in charge of the Lab revealed that the Emperor had no idea about what any of this, that none of the official heads in any of the governments knew of the Lab’s existence but the government over all had known.

First, renamed by the Rogues during the early years as Tsunayoshi, hadn’t been over all surprised by this news. When he had confronted the Emperor only a few months prior, despite the guards’ best efforts to get him to not reveal anything or talk before them, the Emperor had looked confused then horrified as he had provided through the files and his own scars.

It was the second piece of information the Lab Head had provided that had frozen Tsunayoshi in his tracks.

He had given Tsunayoshi the one piece of information he had wondered about his whole life, as an experiment, as an escapee, as the Leader of the Rogues, all the way until that confrontation.

He had told Tsunayoshi his name.

His original family-given name.

And his brother’s name.

Shigaraki Hisashi was the name of his older brother.

Shigaraki Mana was Tsunayoshi’s original name.

A hiss of a sucked-in breath was All For One’s only reaction.

“You remember raising Mana completely, don’t you?” Grandmother Midoriya is ruthless in her assessment. “Doesn’t surprise me. The only reason we even have this information is because Tsunayoshi, or Mana, had come directly to us Record Keepers to have his memory and story stored and later told. Otherwise even us Record Keepers would have believed the same as the historians and everybody else.”

“For once, the piece of history told in the textbooks was written not by the victors but the losers,” Izuku’s dad smirks. He always did like it whenever the history the historians tell or guess at was told by the losers rather than the victors. Claimed it gave the side of the story to the public you never get to hear, outside of word from the mouth of the betrayed.

Tsunayoshi managed to push past the pause and destroy the last king piece. Ended the 4-year-long battle.

With the help of the Emperor, the People, most importantly all of the minority groups, new governments and society was created. New laws, way of life, the erasure and systematic destruction of discrimination on all levels, people joined together. The patriarchy became a thing of the past, all sides of history were researched with the help of the Record Keepers and rebuilt to encompass every aspect, the education system was revamped and reformed. Everything was built from the ground up. Non-Quirk-Users and Quirk Users worked hand-in-hand. The Rogues worked hard to get people to accept others in the way they’ve learned to accept people – for even though they couldn’t promise you wouldn’t earn enemies, they could at least promise the reason wouldn’t be because of something out of your control.

Tsunayoshi, having chosen to focus on his duty as Rogue Leader and not paid attention to the information the Lab Head had given him, did not confront that information about his and his brother’s name until he was 21 years old.

Until he was looking at an exact copy of his dead brother, who had approached the Rogues as their shadow helper from the underworld. You can imagine how enrage he was looking at this supposed copy of his dead brother.

None of our documents, not even the Record Keepers who had witnessed the rage, were able to properly explain or encompass what exactly happened and how enraged Tsunayoshi was. But all of them had agreed that if it wasn’t for the fact that the Men in White Lab Coats had already been persecuted by the Rogues, Tsunayoshi would have made them and all other scientists like them extinct.

It wasn’t until the copy had proven to their Vigilante group that he was indeed Tsunayoshi’s older brother via Quirk, that Tsunayoshi calmed down and allowed the copy who turned out to truly be Shigaraki Hisashi to explain himself.

“Self-repair. If the kidnapping took place when I was 20, then I had already been gifted with several healing Quirks, all of which were fully capable of healing bullet wounds.”

Tsunayoshi had sworn up and down his family’s graves during their escape and initial hunts for their families that he had seen a government agent walk in closer and shoot his brother right through the head. That was why all hunts for Tsunayoshi’s remaining family had stopped, with the others’ own searches stopping soon after, and they had focused on the organization, then the War, and then reconstruction.

A bullet wound to the head, no matter how powerful of a Healing Quirk you have, should not have healed or led to a person’s revival. The Rogues became wary of the strange man and kept an eye on him, even as they continued with their jobs and Tsunayoshi and Hisashi had hidden in his office to continue their previous conversation.

The man, known only as All For One by the rest of the population, tried to get reacquainted with Tsunayoshi as his brother. Tsunayoshi had put a stop to all of these attempts and told him in no uncertain terms that he didn’t need an older brother then and he doesn’t need one now, that their relationship is strictly professional at best and tense Vigilante-Mafia relations at worst.

Let’s just say that Hisashi had not reacted well to the news, having been searching passively and actively for his little brother over the years and not wanting to have him be taken away so soon.

“Not surprised. I’ve always been a bit of a family man.” The dark undertone in his voice indicated that, just like his younger self, he was not happy with the news that his little brother wanted nothing to do with him after years of being separated. Midoriya-tou-san makes note of this in the official Record Keeper file and Izuku moves on.

Tsunayoshi didn’t care. He hasn’t been Shigaraki Mana since he was 6 years old, hasn’t been a younger brother since he was 14. Didn’t plan on reuniting with those mantles any time soon, not with the job that he had to do.

Tsunayoshi was 23 when he approached a Midoriya for the first time and asked to tell his story. There were signs of the 1% who had managed to escape persecution trying to enplant and dismantle all his hard work. He knew that they would try more than that, and wanted at least one Clan that still remembered what life actually was like during his lifetime.

He knew that if their attempts worked, they would try to erase this history and rewrite it to look similar to how it was originally when Quirks first appeared. And he wanted to undermine their efforts.

All it took was one seed. That seed was his story. Tsunayoshi asked us to keep the truth hidden until the time was right.

Tsunayoshi was 37 years old when the story of One For All and All For One – the story you’re more familiar with – happened. By that time, the underworld and remaining 1% were actively working towards dismantling and destroying the Rogues’ Legacy.

Tsunayoshi was 40 years old when he died in battle fighting you and the rest of the underworld. Before he passed, he wiped out the remaining 1% and every single underworld member who had been fighting in that battle.

The only one he hadn’t managed to destroy, as you know, was All For One. Shigaraki Hisashi.

The only reason why, contrary to popular belief, is because he had hesitated and you took advantage of that hesitation.

…

“Yes. I do remember him hesitating and looking at me with something in his eyes I didn’t recognize for the longest time.”

“Love. He had looked at you and remembered the man who had raised him for 6 years before they were brutally ripped apart,” Midoriya-tou-san speaks up, “He had looked at you and seen the version of you he once upon a time had loved. That was what had caused his hesitation. Because even through all the experiments he had been through, some part of him had still managed to hold onto the warmth and love you had given him when he was younger.”

“He had hesitated because he had looked at you, at your weakest point, and had been searching for the warm man who had raised him,” Grandmother picks up the explanation, “We Midoriyas, after all these years, had assumed that he had found him, because, if he had not found that man, the Tsunayoshi we knew would have killed you immediately the second he had the chance. Given that we have records of him trying to do exactly that the first few times you two had met, we know this assumption to be, for the most part, fact.”

All For One, Shigaraki Hisashi, presses his lips together but doesn’t say anything. The timer rings, singling the end of their visitation. The Midoriya’s gather up their supplies and leave the jail, Toshinori catching up to them at the hallway.

“I pity the guards who have to deal with him after that story and revelation,” Toshinori comments once they are driving back to UA, for Izuku, and the Clan home for Midoriya Hisashi and Grandmother Midoriya Nakomi. They had felt the tremors on the bridge connecting Tartarus and the mainland together. AFO was pissed alright but luckily for Izuku who had been telling the story had waited until they were gone before screaming out his rage. Some part of Izuku, kind of almost feels like One For All whispering, had described the emotion they could hear ringing out as not rage, but despair.

If I learned the figure of my younger brother I had been fighting against wasn’t the younger brother I thought I knew, that all the memories I have of him from 6 years old until our infamous fight were false… I would be pretty distressed and outrage too. But mostly, despaired. Because I killed my little brother, someone who apparently, I hadn’t actually known. Izuku kept these thoughts to himself. He didn’t pity AFO. Not really.

Having been raised off of the stories developed because of AFO’s actions over the past 200 years, on top of the stories not related to him, Izuku has heard, seen, and experienced the horrible things All For One had done. Tsunayoshi had certainly felt disappointed and enraged towards his brother when he had told his Guardian Spirit of what his brother had done, with the Noumus and such. No, Izuku didn’t feel any pity towards this man.

But he certainly felt pity towards Shigaraki Hisashi, the young man, boy really, who had raised Mana until he was ripped from his arms without warning.

…

One part of Tsunayoshi’s story the Midoriyas had refused to tell AFO, was that Midoriya Hakoda, the Record Keeper who had record Tsunayoshi’s story, and Tsunayoshi had fallen in love.

That necklace wrapped around Izuku’s neck was the same betrothal necklace Hakoda had craved and gifted to Tsunayoshi as his engagement ring.

They hadn’t told AFO that Shigaraki Mana had grown up to become Midoriya Tsunayoshi, had borne 2 healthy children.

That he had been 4 weeks pregnant with their third child when he had faced off against AFO for the last time.

That the Main Midoriya Clan Line, of which Nakomi, Hisashi, and Izuku all were borne into, was actually Tsunayoshi and Hakoda’s line, with them being of the youngest child’s line and South Japan’s Main Midoriya Clan Line being that of the oldest child’s line.

Nakomi had not indicated to Izuku for him to include that part of the story. Hisashi had wanted to see the world burn in response to Shigaraki’s rage over killing his many-greats-grand-nephew. To which Grandmother had responded by slapping him over the head, to which he grumbled and then reluctantly said that he actually didn’t care if their many-greats-grand-uncle knew or not. Izuku had decided not to say anything but fully planned on claiming the title of being Midoriya Tsunayoshi’s great-great-great-great grandson when he’s a Pro Hero and had been given full clearance to expose the Truth.

After all, everybody believed the words of a Record Keeper far more than the textbooks.

(And years down the line, older Izuku would look back on that promise and silently curse his idiot younger self. All Might didn’t have to deal with the literal manhunt crusade of All For One trying to get ahold of the second only thing he has left of the little brother he apparently knew nothing about. He also silently curses the South Japan Line for dying out because of a completely avoidable situation, and curses his grandmother and father for being dead before he was ready to handle the mantle of Record Keeper and being the only one from Tsunayoshi’s bloodline. If only he had kept his mouth shut!)

#bnha #boku no hero academia #bnha au #midoriya record keeper au #part 3 #izuku midoriya #all for one #midoriya hisashi #first one for all holder #first one for all user #story telling

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