Embarrassing Story/Confession Time

In which I share things that I cringe to remember, and then insert a moderately related moral to make the telling worthwhile.

So, once upon a time, in days of yore, when lemons were a thing and FF.net was THE place to be, I had an account. I have ZERO recollection of the login info and it is a disturbing possibility that the crap I wrote still exists somewhere (please, I beg of you, don’t look for it.)

I recently reblogged this post that reminded me of my teen years and how far I’ve come (not that the journey is over)...so I figured I might as well tell a story from my cringe problematic past for the lolsies (and the shoe-horned in moral). 

ANyhoo, I didn’t know until I was...errrm, 17 or 18?... that bisexuality existed. I knew that there were people who were gay (that was bad evil bad bad) and straight (that was good within a veeery limiting set of restrictions). In the year or two where I was just starting to hear whispers of this rumoured third option and slowly awakening to the (at the time, horrifying) possibility that it might apply to me, BL and shipping and such were part of the process of exploring that. 

(And yes, there’s plenty to be said about the fetishization of mlm relationships and the many other problematic aspects of a lot of BL, but I was essentially so sheltered as to be developmentally stunted, and those were some of my first exposures to queer romance framed in a positive light. And because they centered guys, and I was a girl, it allowed me to somehow explore my own queerness without ever admitting to myself that that was what I was doing.)

So, I was tiptoeing into queer stories, and queer ships in not-specifically-queer stories, and I wanted to write fanfic for one of my ships. But, problem! Gayness was bad evil bad bad! (I swear in retrospect that I was 17 but operating on 12-year-old software in some ways.) 

So how did I get around this? Weeeelll, I wrote one of the two guys getting magically turned into a woman. But here’s the thing...he, or rather she, was delighted by the change. She’d always felt not-quite-right as a man. She was attracted to her partner but did not feel that her attraction was correctly defined as that of one man towards another. She felt more herself, once she was a woman.

So...in attempting to de-queer my story, I accidentally wrote a moderately recognizable trans character (at least coming from the mind of a kid who had only the slightest awareness of trans folks existing). And I just find that hilarious in hindsight. 

Anyway, the moral I’m gonna tack ham-fistedly on here is this: my fellow adults, be kind to ignorant kids online. Whether they’re far right like I was raised to be, or from the new batch of “so far left they’ve circled back to purity culture” kids. And, if it’s safe for your own mental wellbeing, gently interact with them. So much of who I am now can be credited to a handful of patient and kind LGBTQ+ adults who were just chillin’ in spaces adjacent to my identity crisis, listening to me ask questions like, “doesn’t the way male and female bodies fit together prove it’s the only right option?” and just...not taking my head off for it. I’m not making excuses for grown adults acting like asses, but kids, and even young adults, are usually repeating back something that has been hammered into them. And nothing quite takes the wind out of those indoctrination sails like older folks just listening, and answering questions when they’re able, and not raging at them the way they’ve been told that their “enemies” will. 

... actually im. a bit pissy right now

ahem

you are allowed to like things that are not perfect. liking these things does not affect your value as a person. it does not affect your morals. if the people around you are insisting otherwise, try to explain it to them or just leave. please. you do not need to know exactly why the things you enjoy are not perfect, because, and this is the really important part:

spending countless hours worth of emotional, mental, and physical energy on making sure your entertainment is "morally correct" is damaging to your health.

On Discomfort and Morality

My father finds gay men uncomfortable.

He's told me before that it's like a knee-jerk for him. Something he doesn't consciously control. He sees two men behaving romantically, and his body reacts with mild discomfort.

In the 1960s, when he was in high school, most of the boys in his form thought he was gay on the simple fact that he wasn't homophobic. He wouldn't participate in insulting queer people, he didn't care if someone was gay, he wouldn't have a problem hanging out with gay people. So people thought he was gay. That's how prevalent homophobia was in his formative years.

When I was 10, my dad told me very seriously that Holmes and Watson were gay. That it was obvious from the literature and the time period that they were meant to be a gay couple. When I was 14 and I came out to my parents as bi, when my mum was upset my dad ripped into her for it. Told her that she was being stupid, that it was my life to live how I wanted to and that she needed to get over herself.

My dad formed my views on censorship: that being that it was completely ridiculous and thoroughly evil. He didn't believe in censorship of any kind. If I asked him a question about sex, he answered it honestly. When I was 12 and I asked him about homosexuality, still young and uncertain, he told me that there was nothing wrong with it. That it was just how some people were. That there was likely an evolutionary reason for it. And that for some people it was uncomfortable on an instinctual level.

He taught me that just because you're uncomfortable with something, doesn't make it wrong. He also taught me that most people don't understand this.

I see a lot of this on the internet as of the last few years. The anti shipping movement, the terf movement, the anti ace movement. It all stems from discomfort that people have crossed wires into believing means wrong. Really every -ism and -phobia out there stems from this same fundamental aspect of humanity.

The next time you see something and you automatically think it's disgusting, or wrong, or immoral, I invite you to ask yourself: is this actually wrong or does this just make me uncomfortable?

getting real fed up with my peers treating teenagers like shit. how did you forget so fucking quickly what it's like to be them. shame on you.

i see you i love you i support you and want you in community spaces with me because we’re different sides of the same coin etc etc

something. about. the horror of being sent on an impossible (death) quest and obligations and hospitality politics. the trauma of not having a home, and then the trauma of being in a house that becomes actively hostile to you, one that would swallow you whole and spit out your bones if you step out of line. all of this is conditional, your existence continues to be something men want gone.

it's about going back as far as I can with the perseus narrative because there's always a version of a myth that exists behind the one that survives. the missing pieces are clearly defined, but the oldest recorded version of it isn't there! and there's probably something older before that!! but it's doomed to forever be an unfilled space, clearly defined by an outline of something that was there and continues to be there in it's absence.

and love. it's also about love. even when you had nothing, you had love.

on the opposite side of the spectrum, this is Not About Ovid Or Roman-Renaissance Reception, Depictions And Discourses On The Perseus Narrative.

edit: to add to the above, while it's not about Ovid, because I'm specifically trying to peel things back to the oldest version of this story, Ovid is fine. alterations on the Perseus myth that give more attention Medusa predate Ovid by several centuries. this comic is also not about those, either! there are many versions of this story from the ancient world. there is not one singular True or Better version, they're all saying something.

Perseus, Daniel Ogden

Anthology of Classical Myth: Primary Sources in Translation, edited & translated by Stephen M Trzaskoma, R. Scott Smith, Stephen Brunet

anyways... here's why i think Loki and Matt Murdock should be each other's narrative foil(romantic):

• Loki- famously known liar, Matt Murdock- able to tell when people are lying

• Both wear helmets with horns on them, but Matt's are small and practical and Loki's are large and gaudy.

• Matt Murdock- Practicing Irish Catholic, Loki- Norse "God" of Mischief

• Loki- Presents himself as selfish and self preserving, Matt Murdock- Presents himself as selfless and self sacrificing

• Loki- Will flee if he knows he's gonna get his ass kicked for no gain, Matt Murdock- Knows he's gonna get his ass kicked for no gain and does it anyway

• They simply seem like prime material for a "We vehemently dislike each other up until we (whoops!) realize we love each other so much we can't live without the other" type romance that I am always obsessed over.

• Thor would enjoy it, and, frankly, he deserves the entertainment.

yeah you support trans people but are you normal about trans men who choose to get pregnant

as an ND able-bodied person, i just wanna say that cpunks are NOT doing anything wrong by not allowing us in their community. its completely okay and im actually very very happy that physically disabled people finally have their own space where they dont have to deal with ableism toward them all the time

able-bodied NDs have it made in this sense. we have TWO communities! we have neuropunk and madpunk, and you can go on any social media platform and easily find hundreds of other NDs on there along with little communities and shit. but physically disabled people dont have it that easy. when they DO find one that isnt just about ND people, it's still full of ableism. i've seen it myself and it makes me sick

so physically disabled people decided to make their OWN community. just for them. no one else. then THATS when able-bodied NDs start getting pissy and call them ableist when they were basically doing the exact same shit before.

you can handle not being allowed in one community. theres two more you can be part of just fine

if youre an able-bodied ND who sees yourself in any of this, maybe you should stop and look at yourself. make some improvements

to the cpunk community, dont let people like this tear you down. stand your ground, push these people out. you deserve your OWN safe space and no one will take that from you

can yall guess my favorite character

casual reminder that a fictional story is still fictional even when the characters in it are based on real people

i'm so well fed with amazing female characters in magical girl anime that i forget there's people who only watch shonen and think that's a whole representation of female characters in anime. how sad. you need some sailor moon, precure, and cardcaptor sakura, in your life.

RED, WHITE & ROYAL BLUE (2023) book → screen (x)

So there's this post with a troubling number of notes going around insisting that "dead dove" is not a genre, it doesn't inherently have anything to do with darkfic, and that the tag could be applied to fics that are "100% fluffy where everyone's having a good time" if they happen to contain some abnormal (though entirely non-problematic) content like an unusual kink. The claim is that "dead dove: do not eat" is simply a "courtesy tag" that means "this is a very specific niche, mind the tags." And that's just... wrong.

I wrote up a whole rebuttal to this post since I can't stand misinformation and frankly OP was being kinda rude and judgey on top of their wrongness. But right after I posted my reply, OP turned off reblogs because, and I quote, “some fuckwad added some dumb shit onto this post and it is no longer educational” (the “fuckwad” being me and the “dumb shit” being proof that they were wrong). A couple people have asked me to make a rebloggable version of my response, which I've decided to do because this isn't the first time I've heard similar claims and I want to help set the record straight. However, I'm not linking the original post on the off chance this gains traction because OP did the right thing by turning off reblogs, preventing it from circulating further, and I don't want them to get hate for being unfortunately misinformed.

For those who don't know the history, "dead dove: do not eat" was originally proposed as a catchall "hydra trash party" alternative label for any fandom to warn that the content of a fic may be considered problematic or potentially upsetting and to read the tags carefully so you know what you're getting into and won't complain later. Specifically, DD:DNE was intended to convey that the Bad Things in the fic would likely be reveled in and not explicitly condemned by the narrative, which some people tend to get up in arms about, hence the need for the extra warning in addition to the tags. Don't believe me? Here's the original proposal (note DD:DNE can be found on a handful of fics dated before 2015 but this is when it really took off and became a Thing).

There are currently around 50,000 fics tagged as "dead dove: do not eat" on AO3 and close to 50% of those also include the rape/noncon warning (which of course is not the only type of "dead dove" but is one of the most popular and most consistently tagged). The normal percentage of noncon fics in any given fandom? Around 1-3%. That's a HUGE disparity. So don't tell me that dead dove is just a general "courtesy tag" and doesn't or shouldn't have dark connotations. Even the context of the original joke on Arrested Development has a dark undertone. Micheal Bluth casually finds an animal carcass in a bag in his refrigerator with the label "do not eat", as if eating it would be any sane person's first thought. The whole situation is kinda fucked up. And this fucked up vibe very much carries over into fandom usage too, as was intended.

The claim that dead dove has nothing to do with the content's genre and could just as easily be used to describe a 100% fluffy fic in which everyone's having a good time is straight up Wrong, or at the very least, severely warping the original meaning. Also, when someone these days says that they like/dislike "dead dove" most people in fandom automatically understand what that means because of the consistency of its usage over the years and the way language evolves. Whether you like it or not, "dead dove" IS a genre now and the term does carry a specific connotation. I do agree that DD:DNE should definitely still be used in conjunction with other tags, when applicable, to be explicit about the exact type of fucked up content you may find, but to say that the term is meaningless on its own is patently false and I'm tired of people who don't know what they're talking about pushing this narrative and causing even more confusion.

You want a generic term that also means "mind the tags" and doesn't have any inherently dark connotations? Just use good ol' "what it says on the tin" instead of trying to force dead dove to be something it's not.

hot take but i think that "fictional characters are fictional and liking or disliking them have no real life effect" and "the way you treat certain characters can be an indicative of your character in real life" are statements that can and should coexist

example: character A is violent and makes misogynistic comments. they're still charismatic and their arc is interesting to read/watch. person A acknowledges that the character is bad but they still enjoy consuming content from the character and they do so unapologetically. they're allowed to like the character, especially considering that literally everyone the character has harmed is also fictional. they don't pretend the character isn't violent, or misogynistic, they just like the character despite that. they post about it constantly. this is a neutral action that shows nothing about person A.

character B is a white man that makes racist comments, treats a black person in the show badly and gains money through anti-ethical means. they're still charismatic and their arc is interesting to read/watch. person B claims the character is flawed but overall misunderstood and all their actions are entirely justified. they're allowed to like the character, especially considering that literally everyone the character has harmed is also fictional. person B claims the black character that character B treated badly either had it coming or overreacted. all of person B's favorite characters are white men. person B goes out of their way to justify that all of their favorite characters are actually misunderstood and good people, and more people should like them. this shows that person B likely has some favoritism for white men.

just. you're allowed to like fictional characters even if they're awful fucking people but. and im not sure why this is controversial. the way you interact with media says something about you. this isn't necessarily a bad thing. does this make sense please

can 2024 be the year we stop calling stay-at-home moms stupid for being ‘financially dependent’ and risking being trapped in abusive relationships, and instead start addressing why there are no social safety nets in place for people who choose to leave the workforce to raise their children