#in this house we only trust the queers and the girls fans
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Gege's writing of Gojo Satoru is lazy and bad
Here, I said it.
And I'm of the opinion that "lazy" is an ableist and classicist term thrown around to shame people of their situation, so if I'm using it, I mean it and I'm pissed.
I have been angry since chapter 236 and I fell on an Instagram post, by a fan page, full of the normies fan (aka allocishet boys/men) earlier, which just made me lose it. So, I'm finally going full rant.
I'm using they/them pronouns for Gege, as they use non-gendered pronouns in Japanese. They didn't want their gender to influence the publication (which is a huge problem in the art world, in manga but also in comics and bd (the French-Belgium comics), and I can salute that.
"The Strongest" is not a bad character trait
It is totally possible to tell an interesting story with a character describes as "the strongest in the world", and the idea that Gojo is immediately boring and needed to die for the story to progress is wrong. Superman is an example of this "strongest in the world" character, and he has been thriving for decades. And in manga/anime, we have the great One, who has given us One Punch Man and Mob Psycho. In those two, TWO, stories, One tell us the tale of "the strongest in the world", and One is known to be far from the best artist. So, to sell and have people publish (One Punch Man was originally a webcomic, and the manga isn't drawn by One, but still) and read those manga, it means that One's writing is fucking good. If you have never seen/read Mob Psycho, go do it immediately, it's, imo, the best anime ever. I am still certain that if Reigen was in the jjk's world, everything would be fine, and yes, he still would be a con. One was able to write not one, but two stories about a strongest where you are still sitting at the hedge of your seat during the fights and are so invested, where the other characters still shine and develop their capacities. How? Well, one might be the strongest in a fight, but what about mentally? Emotionally? One explores his characters' flaws and feelings. And the thing is, Gojo has a LOT of flaws that could be exploited to make the story more thrilling. How about how careless he is when fighting, which lead him to be super destructive or letting someone WAY weaker than him get away (Gojo never won a fight perfectly if you look at it)? How he barely shows emotions to others or let himself affected? How he is lonely because of the pedestal the jujutsu society has put him on, and if he got off of it and opened up, he would be way less? A lot of flaws, of "weaknesses", that could be exploited to work on Gojo. That's literally what they did when Gojo got pokeballed, exploited how Gojo does not know how to deal with his emotions because of his upbringing and status, and so, is so deeply affected by the ghost of his one best friend. But it was only to get rid of Gojo, instead of dissecting him. Because, no, we can have that, because it would make him interesting, and Gege hates Gojo.
Hating your characters is an issue
Gege hating on Gojo is funny, until it impacts the writing. And it does, A LOT. Just like loving your character too much can lead you to fail to see the issue in your writings (Catra in She-Ra), hating a character as the same effect. Gege's hate for Gojo led them to be unable to develop him, and to contradict their own writing. For example: Gojo is said to not care about anyone multiple times, Gege even mentioned, outside the manga, that he didn't care about Yuuta or Yuji's lives, he just saw the potential. However, they also wrote Gojo being annoyed at the fact that a teenager was on the death row in jjk 0, Gojo mad that they killed Yuji, Gojo getting angry that civilians are getting killed, Gojo being shaken STILL 10 YEARS LATER by his best friend's betrayal (He cares sooooo much about a man that betrayed him 10 years ago, it's borderline impossible. Like, it's been 10 years, time to stop being soft about this genocidal man, dude. I'm pretty certain that people, after 10 years, either don't care anymore or are pissed at their traitor ex-friend). There's a part of Gege, who is writing an interesting story, that started to develop Gojo, and then, there's the part of Gege that hates Gojo and need to go against this development. When Gojo dies, his dead classmates affirmed he never really cared and was only doing all of this for fun, and it's the final nail in the coffin for me. Gege has a constant need to diminish Gojo's character, that was the issue with Gojo's writing. Gojo couldn't become an interesting "strongest in the world" character because Gege couldn't let him shine. Gege sees Gojo has this uncaring asshole that people only like for his looks (they said that Gojo won the popularity vote only because female readers voted for him, which is so sexist, like women and girls only like a character's looks and cannot appreciate a character's personality and values, but also really diminishing toward his own character, as it would imply nobody could see something interesting in Gojo apart from his looks, but boy, if your character is that popular, it's not just for his looks.) but they could have made it different, a part of them clearly wanted it to be different and knew it was the way to do it. But no! Gege always comes back to hating Gojo and must make him emotionless suddenly. He is never shown to care about the two children HE RAISED for more than 10 years, while still being attached to the man that was is bestie for 3 years more than 10 years ago. That doesn't make sense at all. And he lost the two children he raised while he was pokeballed, after he got distracted. Being distrated by his ex bestie ghost cost him his surrogate family, and we are supposed to believe he is heartless enough to not care??? Gege hates Gojo, and so they keep taking away anything that could make him more interesting. Damn, Gojo wanted to make his students as strong as himself and to change the jujutsu society for the better, and he FAILED. His students are dead (Megumi was at least gone when he was alive) and he never build the new society, so him being fine with his death is so annoying. The strongest actually didn't get what he wanted, he just had "fun" and that was enough, apparently. Yeah, no, fuck you.
YOU WROTE HIM
I'm scared for the futur of jjk
Gege is the creator, the writer, the artist, the mangaka behind Jujutsu Kaisen and so, Gojo Satoru. They are their god. They had the power to make Gojo's interesting, to develop him more, to make him more weak in other aspect, to use his flaws against him, but they didn't. And that's why Gege is lazy to me. Because they refused to do the work to make things better, they chose the easy way to deal with a strong character: killing them. They kept on complaining about Gojo, like they had no power over the writing. And look, they hated Gojo for being "too strong" so they killed him, but now Sukuna and Kenjiro are too strong. Gege just keeps shooting themself in the foot.
This is my personal opinion, and you can disagree completely (don't try to change my mind, tho)
Gege has also mentioned not liking my son, my sun, my boy, Yuji, so what now? Will he also hurt his character because of that? And he has already killed like half of the characters we have been following since the beginning, which is disappointing. Like, I was invested in them, and now I'm supposed to watch some new guys, I have no interested in, fight the big bad? I'm not saying they're bad characters or boring, but it's not the fucking same. It feels like it has just become a "Who is the strongest?! Fight! Fight! Fight!" story, and sorry, but I can watch sports for that little connections or interests in the personal stories or goals (fr, I feel more connection to Teddy Riner, French Judoka, and the strongest in the world. Damn, another strongest interesting guy. He actually lost at the last Olympic Games, we were shocked). I love One Piece (and this is why it is a success) because the characters are following their dreams. They have been going into fights for more than 1000 chapters, and I read them all MULTIPLE TIMES because there's a deep connection to the characters. I love watching Luffy fights because I want him to be the King of the Pirates, because I want the people who have been wronged to get justice, because I want the pos in front of him to get their ass beat. And, as he fights to become King of the Pirates, it has a butterfly effect on the whole world and the oppressive system is crumbling. It's not just a fight. And Jujutsu Kaisen is becoming "just a fight", which seem to be enough to most male reader, but I personally find it boring.
#gojo satoru#jujutsu kaisen#jjk#jjk spoilers#in this house we only trust the queers and the girls fans#boys/mens must pass a test to prove they are valuable members of the fandom#you can not care and just want to enjoy the anime/manga it's ok#but bad boring takes are not okay#the number of times I have seen discussion from boys/men fans only being “X is the strongest tho!” BOOOOOOORING
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Streaming Services & LGBT+ Women Representation in 2024
Let's do a raking of where we stand and what has been going on in the last few months in streaming...
Grades: A+ highest and F lowest/fail
Max C
Max has been having trouble getting any hits in recent years. Though they are not purposeful about giving us representation they do have some gems. There's no quantity but there's some quality stuff. First and foremost. Harley Quinn the Animated Series. The animated series, now renewed for a fifth season and with a spinoff, has gone where no series has gone before. Yeah, animated series have given us representation before there's been Adventure Time, Shera, The Owl House, Steven Universe and more. However, two popular, important characters that are part of a huge franchise getting together in an animated series geared towards adults? And the representation being romantic and sexy and a healthy relationship? Love that for us and at the same time should be the standard. Max also has The Last of Us which was the biggest hit of last year and is returning next year, the lead Ellie is gay and will have a stable relationship next season. However, there's serious lack of quantity. There's some side characters here and there in shows like Peacemaker and The White Lotus but most shows don't have gay women or if they do they get cancelled or leave or handled badly. The gay lead in The sex lives of college girls is leaving, in Vilma Mindy Kaling made us think she's giving us Vilma and Daphne only to go "just kidding she's in love with her guy best friend after all" and the new Pretty Little Liars show original sin? Has no gay girl in it. Hubris.
Apple TV+ A
Apple TV+. For everyone asking what's the best platform for gay girl content that is consistent and of high quality that is your answer. Apple TV+ is not just the place for Dickinson and For all Mankind. It is consistent in giving us wlw in its shows whether that's The last thing he told me, See or Invasion. It is also giving us leads in its big budget, important projects not some small show they made on a dime and nobody noticed while they were advertising straight romcoms. In The Morning Show one of the leads is queer, in Bad Sisters same and of course our best show you could be watching right now, Monarch legacy of Monsters. It also usually renews its shows for at least 3-4 seasons. So, yeah if ur a gay girl you can get an Amen. On Apple TV+. Yeah there's some good stuff here and there on other platforms, Max has Harley Quinn which is revolutionary and The last of us which is one of the best shows of the year, Amazon's best and most successful show Wheel of Time gave us a queer woman lead, Netflix...used to include us in its important projects back in the day when they weren't the Facebook of streaming? But the important thing is, Apple TV+ has the most quality and quantity in its recent projects we've seen in a while. The effort to cater to us is clearly there.
Amazon Prime Video C+
Amazon Prime tries. We have to give them that. They have greenlit some important shows with good budgets that included gay leads. Some of those were The Wilds, A league of their own, Paper girls, Shelter. Notice a pattern? Yeah, cancelled. To be fair that is not always the case. The Wheel of Time, one of their most important shows has a gay woman lead played by fan favorite Rosamund Pike of I Care a Lot fame. They also gave us a whole reality show about Latin American super couple Calle and Poche. However, their misses are way more than their hits and they never give shows room to breath and grow an audience. You can't trust them to do that. Hopefully, they will at some point give us stories that they can finish but for now their efforts are subpar.
Hulu: B-
Hulu has been ramping up its efforts for representation and it shows. While for a long time aquired content was their gayest content (movies like Happiest Season for example) they have some interesting stuff recently. They made a more inclusive How I Met Your Father, with a lesbian being part of the group and treated well, they of course have our fan favorite Killing Eve, and they made a gay romance movie, Crush, casting two actual bi women to play the leads (Rowan Blanchard and Auli'i Cravalho). They have some shows that have important gay women characters like Class of 09, Only Murders in the Building, Dopesick, Little fires everywhere and even their new big bet Death and other details. Hulu has only started focusing on original content in recent years so we'll have to see how it goes.
Netflix: F
Netflix as been very focused on straight people in their 30s over the past couple of years. Gone are the days when they first started with shows like Orange is the New Black, their flagship show, having a wlw couple as its main couple. GenZ, the gayest generation yet(and this research doesn't include genz under 18 or that number would not be what it is😂), will probably be their downfall so there's that but for now it's an important streaming service that has turned into network TV.
It's a shift we've seen happening gradually but became apparent in the last few years the most as there was not only very limited content for us to watch but queer characters have not been given important stories or romantic relationships. The few bright spots (like Fear Street and I Care a lot) are acquired content that they didn't greenlit themselves, they just happened to buy. On the other hand, they have endless reality shows about straight romance and straight romantic comedies. Big budget, well promoted series always have a straight lead (even if they have to straight wash her from the source material *cough archive 81 cough*). Gay women are the gay friend/side character if they exist at all. In the past few years there were some lead characters in shows with miniscule budgets that were not given any importance like First Kill (which they set up to fail by giving it a bad budget, unknown leads, untested writers etc.) and warrior nun that were swiftly cancelled. Similarly, some small budget foreign shows had some gay women leads like Feria The Darkest Light (which was very good but was not promoted at all), and Everything Now(ditto). There were some side characters here and there most notably the ones in The Fall of the House of Usher and Elite but little else. Sometimes they even make it seem like they'll be giving us a show in which the lead girl has an actual romance storyline with another girl (Chosen) only to out it's not that way and the girl is just one of her love interests, given 2 minutes of screentime and not treated all that well.
Good reenactment of how the Netflix experience has been for queer women in the past few years:
Netflix: straight romcom, straight romcom, straight reality show, straight lead, straight romcom...
Other streamers and networks: increased representation
Netflix: one lesbian side character, straight romcom, straight romcom, straight reality show, straight lead who was a lesbian in the original but was straight washed, straight romcom...
Other providers: Movies are becoming gayer look Scream, Mean Girls even the Purge movies got gay! In Yellowjackets you have a lead lesbian with romance and friends cheering her on, in NCIS Hawaii Our lead couple is two women, in Monarch legacy of monsters the lead is a queer woman and in meaningful relationships with women....
Netflix: In Chosen the lead sleeps with a girl, then sleeps with a guy, then has like two conversations with the girl before the season is done then the show is never heard from again. Also, we've been sitting on the rights of The seven husbands of Evelyn Hugo forever. Plus we took a successful podcast with a lesbian lead and ruined its live action adaptation by making her straight and we're always willing to throw in a gay girl side character XO XO
Paramount+ C-
When you think of Paramount+ and gay women you think of Special ops lioness. And that is a good show to think about. However, outside of that Paramount+ is a mixed bag with not a lot of choices. They don't have a lot of original programming, most of their stuff is CBS stuff. Other than Lioness in the original programming category we got dating show Love ALLways, a fun bisexual dating show. In the CBS shows they have NCIS Hawaii, which is awesome and has a wlw as its most important couple. They also bought Paper dolls which is another hidden gem you should definitely check out. Star Trek: Picard gave us two lead women in a relationship only to break them up. You'll find some side characters here and there like in The good fight. What adds some value is some acquired shows they have that you can also find elsewhere, like Showtime favorite Yellowjackets and MGM+ gem From. Still, definitely not enough for anything more than paying for a couple of months to watch Lioness, From and Yellowjackets.
Peacock C
Peacock has had trouble getting any of their shows to resonate with viewers. Most of their shows are the NBC shows. With their limited selection of original programming though they have shown a willingness to maje a real effort to be inclusive. The Saved by the Bell spinoff, which only run for two seasons(most of their original programming are lucky to get that far), made one of its leads bi and gave her a girlfriend. Bel-Air, one of its few shows to survive, made one of Will's sisters gay. Their miniseries The undeclared war has a gay woman lead. Their NBC shows are the ones that add some more quantity. You can find Law & Order: Organized Crime, one of the leads is gay in that one and any NBC show with a gay character from New Amsterdam to Manifest. What they don't have is some shows that you'll really want to watch and get a subscription for but to be fair, that goes for everyone.
Disney+ D
To be fair Disney+ has started its efforts for diversity and we suspect this grade will change in 2025 but for now it's a D. Right now only some small (but important) steps have been made in the right direction. Big Shot was their first show to include a lesbian kiss on the platform, it has since been cancelled. High School Musical The series took an important step by making an important side character bi and giving her a love interest...in its final season 🙃 Andor is really our big win when it comes to Disney+. A successful, already renewed show that introduces two gay women, who are important characters, and in a relationship, to the Star Wars universe. Marvel show She Hulk also threw us a marvel bone by having a gay girl side character. They also have The Owl House which is not nothing. But we need more than that, way more.
#streaming wars#hulu#Netflix#lgbtq#lgbt#lgbtqia#disney+#lesbian#gay#wlw#bi#girls who like girls#tv#sapphic#streaming#max#peacock#paramount+#apple tv+#amazon prime#prime video
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Since the poll is going around of korrasami/beauyasha. As a fan of both I think I need to say something because a few people are already trying to say beauyasha should win because there's more content around them in canon.
Which, if that is your argument to prove it's a better ship, you've lost the contest. Because korrasami becoming canon was world altering for me as a teenager. For the younger queer fans who don't get it, I want you to understand: the creators had to tip toe around their relationship until the last episode. At that point in time, there wasn't a group of children's media where people could see queer main characters having crushes or relationships. There was no steven universe, Owl House, she ra, etc, that was continuing to normalize these ideas.
People loved korrasami but like most queer ships, the idea of it being canon was more of a naive hope than an actual expectation. I know for me I was hoping that korra would end up single if nothing else because I figured she and mako would be back together by the end because that's what always happened. Popular guy/girl relationship that wasn't the best but was still end game because it was build up.
So when korra and Asami sat down in the final episode on those steps and had a heart to heart I was expecting for them to take a friend trip to the spirit world. Because in what realm would a children's show actually have their female leads be bisexual women. But that last shot of them holding hands and staring into each others eyes before the frame moved away gave me a feeling I'll never forget. I still remember sitting in class the day before Christmas break not being able to scream about it to any of my friends because they didn't watch korra but just knowing how monumental this moment was. The winter of 2014 when legend of korra added itself to queer history.
I was elated, I was shocked, what I thought would never happen did. And the creators only doubled down in the coming days by reiterating that yes korra and Asami were in a relationship. And it was a healthy relationship build on friendship and trust, it was one where you could go back and see the moments people were pointing out as a "maybe korrasami endgame" and just know that those weren't baiting fans but instead moments the creators were allowed to add in to show that yes korra and asami's dynamic was changing.
Younger queer fans can't be going around insulting every past bit of queer representation because we get better stuff now, when the only reason we have that better stuff is because of the previous content that was fought tooth and nail for. That sliver of a hand hold will always mean the world to me.
Fans also need to remember beauyasha is from dnd podcast where players can control their characters and don't have to contend with studio interference when they want something.
It's fine to prefer beauyasha and want it to win. I love beauyasha and was part of everyone screaming when they became canon. But don't diminish what korrasami accomplished to do so.
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🔥 X-men/Krakoa?
Allright let me swing at the hornet's nest here a bit: Krakoa was wasted on the X-Men, not the other way around.
Krakoa was, however problematic and shitty and complicated it might have been even from day one, was onto something enough to generate the intense interest and instant fandom it did, and it's biggest problem wasn't with the forgiving of unrepentant monstrous villains (because that door got blown open forever ago), or the no-humans-allowed policy, or the genocide in Latin America, or the pod people resurrection that took the bite out of every mutant genocide and death past and future, or that the entire premise was built around them trusting the funi haha eugenicist Nazi to build their paradise and let himself be stopped later, or that it kept revolving around the petty courtly intrigues of the arch assholes in charge with only like, two writers capable of propping up this to make it worth reading about. The central problem didn't have as much to do with the fact that the newfound central focus on shadowy detached superhumans huffing their supremacist royalist fumes 24/7 is precisely why nobody likes the Inhumans and especially why nobody liked them as a replacement to the X-Men, and you can't cobble a story out of Magneto/Emma Frost/Mr Sinister mean girl one-liners and hot takes even if that's all the fans want (yes, the X-Men are bastards and so is everyone in the MU, how cutting and insightful and powerful they are yes very impressed, but an Epic Bastard Moments compilation is still not a story). I don't even think it can be entirely blamed on the fact that they had the X-Men speedrun through the 14 rules of fascism as the opening act to a larger story only to decide that actually, we don't need that larger story after all, thanks Hickster but we can just take it from here and keep Stage One as is, everyone's gonna be cool with the cult shit if it still feels like it's going anywhere other than back to the school, we can keep this up forever now! This isn't even a bit, I don't think these things were the biggest cause of death for Krakoa even if they all were there.
I think the biggest problem is that, no matter how many cool or great characters they add to their ranks or what turns into epic pulp sci-fi bombast they take, the X-Men might just be foundationally, irreperably broken as a concept, smothered under the weight of the selling metaphor that just gets more dated and problematic and easier to tear holes into with every passing year, and Krakoa ultimately just elevated all these problems to center stage. There was never going to be a world where Magneto says something as full of shit as "There has never been a mutant war and we've never conquered or stolen land or made slaves and that's why we're better, by the way we're going to be your new gods now" with a straight-face and didn't have that proven immediately wrong (not counting all the people in the Council who absolutely did do all of those things). Krakoa couldn't be both the terra nullius dream clubhouse and the "queer separatist utopia" people desperately craved and a cult backed up by genocide run by self-destructive warmongering hypocrites and a next step in evolution and the headquarters to a superhero team you need to tell monthly exploding punchy stories about and a place that was going to live forever and lead us into the better future and a house of cards waiting to be toppled. It didn't have a future because quite frankly, the mutants don't have a future.
The mutants are, even after all this time, still a half-baked idea of people entirely defined by their oppression, by their death and torture and the hollow space where you're expected to insert your own marginalized traits to identify with instead of much of anything akin to how real marginalized identities are formed and developed and solidified over time. Pretending that the mutants can subsist forever on past shoddy worldbuilding and dated, vague parallels just gets more embarassing over time. It's not an issue individually cool comics or characters are going to fundamentally fix. Krakoa, to it's credit, was some way towards trying to define the mutants past their oppression, but they barely had a language or a flag, and even these attempts were smothered under the Claremontian shadow that's been choking this franchise forever and by the inability of The Big Two to truly hand the reins to anyone other than the same stables of white dudes who always get the final say in everything. Krakoa was Going Somewhere up until it wasn't, and the promise alone breathed a whole new life into the X-books, we really did get some very good comics out of this era, but it was always going to end the way it ended.
Actually scrap all of that, my hot take is, not for racist reasons or anything, but we should destroy the X-Men and replace them with big cool robots that can make us safe forever. Has anyone tried that already?
#replies tag#I really do mourn Fred Dukes as a bartender though#the last years went such a long way towards making a character out of him and addressing all the fatphobia and doing such good work with hi#there were indeed decisions made with the characters in this period I did like#but that's more of a case-by-case basis
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Hello RBS,
I really love your blog, my daily routine is to check your updates before I go to sleep 😍
I have sent you many anonymous questions about ggdd before and you have answered them diligently.
This is going to be a personal ask - Do you think gay men and straight women make such great friends as shown in American movies?
Hi Anon, thanks, I'm glad you're enjoying my blog! I hope my ramblings don't give you nightmares! 😅
American TV/movie depiction of queer men is overall very offensive. It's awful, fake and totally glosses over the reality of how homophobic even liberal Americans often are.
Yes, straight women and queer men can sometimes make natural allies/friends. Straight men usually make shitty friends to women, because there's almost always going to be a time when he tries to get her into bed. Straight men will often 'befriend' straight women in the hope of converting the relationship to a romantic or sexual one. With gay men, this is a total non-issue. It makes it easier for trust to take root and grow.
Gay men often enjoy friendships with straight women because women are not afraid of emotions, and there's much more freedom to break out of gender role stereotypes with women than with men.
Gay men and straight women also don't have to deal with the typical competitiveness that often exists in same sex friendships, which makes it easier to just relax and enjoy each other's company. Over time they can often develop strong sibling-like bonds that enrich both of their lives.
HOWEVER.
The depiction of gay male/straight female friendships in popular media should not be taken as reality. Those depictions often serve a heteronormative or even homophobic purpose.
It's not that depictions are necessarily always inaccurate, it's just that the depictions that are chosen tend to be very narrow and specific, and tend to perpetuate and reinforce certain stereotypes. The more these specific depictions are presented, the more the audience starts to perceive them as 'typical' when in fact they are not.
Think of all the minority group depictions in media, and how they tend to artificially narrow the public's perception of what that group is like. Muslim terrorists, greedy or comedic Jews, gang-affiliated black people, South Asian cab drivers. All these depictions are bigoted because they perpetuate harmful stereotypes and present them as representative of the group.
In that same sense, yeah, there are gay men who enjoy being 'one of the girls' in a group of women - getting manicures and facials and going shopping. Yeah, there are gay men who enjoy giving fashion advice and being a shoulder to cry on. Yeah, there are gay men who want to get married and have kids. But that by no means is representative of what gay men are typically like, or of what these friendships are typically like.
These depictions present gay men as empty, emasculated, 2-dimensional caricatures that exist only as an accessory to straight women's lives, which reinforces the widespread perception that gay lives are shallow and superficial, and that their needs/interests are subordinate to straight ones.
What does anyone walk away thinking about gay people after watching a depiction of them in mainstream media? That we are just sassy Ken dolls who are there to boost and serve straight women. It's not at all unlike how female characters often only exist as a narrative device to fulfill the story of the straight male protagonist.
All this trash also helps perpetuate the misogynistic, homophobic idea that gay men aren't 'real' men, that they are essentially just hairy women. It helps reinforce heteronormativity by depicting gays as wanting to live out the standard heteronormative fantasies - the house, the two kids, etc.
I've talked a lot about homophobia and gender role BS in the past, so I'll just give you some of those posts.
DD being into skateboarding and motorcycles must mean he’s straight, right?
Feminization of GG in Fan Fiction
Drag, Gender Identity and Queer Culture
Homophobia and oversexualization in the fandom
In general, if it's on mainstream TV you should question it. Any depiction of anyone, not just gay men. It's all written to appeal to and reinforce mainstream social standards, expectations and conceits. It's not there to show you how things really are.
And I feel the need to add - I'm not an expert on gay men and their relationships just because I'm gay. That's kind of the entire point, right? There exists a wide, broad, diverse range of people who have different personalities, values, interests and approaches. Therefore my views are not a representation of anyone other than myself.
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Billboard USA Exclusion Zone Episode 17 (06/24/2023)
Sorry for posting this late because this girl just graduated! Yes everyone now this is my full time job now /j. No but seriously this week had been a roller coaster and interesting. Certainly more interesting than our new entries here.
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1. "Take Two" by BTS
Seems like BTS is out of their hiatus? Anyways what I found most interesting about this song isn't the song itself, but where it debuted. In both global charts this song debuted at #1 meanwhile on the Hot 100 proper, it only debuted at #48. I think the whole top ten of even the Global 200 that included US numbers suggested that maybe America isn't really trusted anymore for worldwide smash hits or that other countries showed up to have bigger impact that a lot of people realized.
32. "Who Told You" by J Hus ft. Drake
With the rise of afrobeat, I was wondering about what's the early proginator of the genre are cooking up and capitalizing on the success of afrobeat. Well we have a cool and chill afrobeat song from J Hus with a surprisingly decent Drake verse (thank god he didn't do any accent here).
74. "Polaris" by Saiko, Feid & Quevedo ft. Mora
Something is happening in latin music scene and I'm excited for it. This song is one of the reasons as to why because the mix between reggaeton and drum & bass is so seemless. I hope this gets big stateside because man we need more of these.
102. "Grain of Sand" by Lim Young Woong
You know how in Japan, pop and rnb ballads are still big with artists like Back Number and Yuuri scoring multiple hits? Well seems like we have a K-Pop ballad and I'm plesantly surprised at how well produced this song is. Lim has such a great voice and perfect for this guitar driven ballad. Even the whistle isn't bad here. Highly recommended.
103. "Tuya" by Rosalia
I don't know what to make of this song. On one hand it's nice to hear more Rosalia material and even after Motomami she can make some catchy reggaeton song. But just like LLYLM, the song itself felt hollow and kinda checked out? I don't know but this song felt less vibrant than most if not all the songs on Motomami. We'll see what happened next though because I do love the ending portion of the song.
175. "Let Me In" by EXO
I...have never been a fan of EXO. That's partially due to when they were popular I was falling out of love for K-Pop since most of its bigger bands like Super Junior and Shinee were doing conscriptions. I do think EXO was supposed to be THE boyband than would crossover into the USA before BTS did. But the mismanagement and just Kris Wu in general really doesn't helped. But hey they have a new singles out and this is definitely a more subdued RnB comeback that I actually kinda like.
194. "Padam Padam" by Kylie Minogue
I think we need more retrospective deep dive into Kylie Minogue career because she's lowkey still churning out hits after hits even though she's less popular than Madonna. This song is no exception like holy crap she can adapt to the deep house trend that we are in right now. This song does give me clear skin thank you very much queer ally Kylie Minogue.
195. "Lover" by Taylor Swift
One of my favorite moments of 2023 is Swifties memeing Cruel Summer into an actual singles even if Midnights still have its own singles run with Karma.
I highly recommend everyone to listen to these songs
#billboard#billboard charts#music review#pop music#review#rap#pop#kpop#reggaetón#BTS#j hus#afrobeat#drake#lim young woong#rosalia#exo#kylie minogue#padam padam#taylor swift
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Oh I kind of meant that you could answer as many of the numbers as you wanted to.
1. My favorite character:
It won’t be a surprise for most fascinating, but Lilith Clawthorne. The more unspoken stuff we learn from lore is awesome as she goes from shy nerd who was sporty to somewhat insecure and traumatized but still tries to badass Coven Head before finally becoming a confident woman who is still recovering and processing her issues while making up to her sister.
Though a character who I initially loved and still do is Willow Park because I like her character arc and like Lilith, she has so much potential and subtle writing hints that developed later on but did not come up. I love her gently personally just saying badass stuff. She still sometimes struggles with doubt but continues to try overcome it. She deserves a stronger spotlight, but it’s a shame that the series was cut short.
Raine is another favorite top tier character because I love their personality and the fact that they are Nonbinary, as well as having an amazing sense of style. Them going from quiet person with stage fright to being the Head of the Bard Coven and still having stage fright, but that doesn’t stop them from wanting to do the right thing. I know everyone loves Eda for adopting kids, and I do too, but Raine decides to help an assumed a graduate, a young girl who wants to make difference, and finally an innocent young lady who distrusts the system. I like to think Raine deeply cares for them and they care for them.
Camila Noceada because I love her dedication towards her daughter and she joins the onslaught of tragic TOH characters.
2. My least favorite character:
This is unexpected but the direct of school. He was only a flashback, but that guy can go. I don’t tolerate people in academia system manipulating or disrespecting students. It’s all his fault for what happened to Camila and Luz, so fuck him.
Also Belos because he’s Belos, so I hate him ans mucky bony butt.
3. My favorite scene:
Favourite scene…I am currently in a rewatch of the Owl House, but a scene I like going back to is Eda going through process of official accepting the curse and getting to know the Owl Beast. I feel the sense of completion of that part of her arc. The way she out reaches her hand to Owl Beast as they accept each other instead of fighting is good for the both of them. I know people say that Eda would probably reason with the Collector, but I don’t know if the Owl Beast would accept that because they were the reason the beast was in the scroll. Apart of their game. Unless Eda can negotiate with Owl Beast to not immediately kill the Collector, I don’t feel like that’ll happened. But yeah, the acceptance scene is my favourite.
4. My favorite screenshot:
I don’t have one. Sorry. I don’t take screenshots often unless on YouTube.
5. The time I cried the most:
First of all, this is the Owl House, we’re always crying. The scene that made me cry the most is Eda’s sacrifice probably. Her voice actress puts so much emotion as the curse over takes Eda, and I just couldn’t help but become emotional over it.
6. My favorite canon ship:
Raeda. At the age of my early twenties, I have found myself enjoying elder gays and queers. I mean, in my late high school years, I’ve always preferred them over younger ones or more popular ones. Sorry Lumity shippers. I also love Willow’s dads and I want more of them, I think Harvey and Gilbert meeting at HECK while Raine and Eda at HECK just cute. I love friends who have a close bond being lovers trope.
I just love the fan works for Raeda as they are all beautiful.
7. My favorite non-canon ship:
…Please don’t be mad at me because I always have a habit of choosing least popular ship with main character or fan favourite and their best friend than popular ship with main character/ fan favourite character with other popular character.
I like Willuz….I’m sorry. I just love those who have honest trust between each other and always willing to help each other while being supportive.
When I saw these two on screen even though I knew Lumity was very popular after season one ended and my country finally got season one on Disney Plus while fans were in the middle of early season two. I got into the show a year after season one, and when I saw the them interact in Teenage Abomination, I fell hard on their personalities. Luz just being supportive Willow and helping her overcome her problems is amazing. I just loved their dynamic.
I have somewhat moved onto Raeda for my best friends to lovers ship when I noticed that got more traction. I still want Willow to be happy in any way she can. I still love Willuz on some level but I don’t think anyone is interested in me talking about them at this point with where the series is.
Sorry if this is late. I hope you have a nice day/evening. Thank you for the ask.
#willow park#harvey park#gilbert park#raine whispers#camila noceda#luz noceda#edalyn clawthorne#eda clawthorne#lilith clawthorne#raeda#willuz#toh#the owl house#bengi thinks out loud#bengi answers#ask game
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This Week in BL
May 2021 Wk 3
Being a highly subjective assessment of one tiny corner of the interwebs.
It’s a cray cray Friday when Vietnam gets its eng subs up before GMMTV Thailand. What alter-reality are we in? Well, the Vietnamese offerings are better right now anyway. (Oooo, feel that burn.)
Ongoing Series - Thai
Top Secret Together Ep 2 - pulping it up in the best possible way. Sure sound and production values are pants, and in classic Thai fashion the editing in post is exacerbating (rather than fixing) pacing issues, but it’s still CUTE AF. I don’t even mind the added university storyline, because they’ve got good chemistry (and a confident gay fresher after a panicked gay hazer is an old favorite... what can I say, SOTUS was my first love). We aren’t spending too much time with any one couple, so it’s weighted a lot better than Brothers was, but also character development is slow.
Siew Sum Noi Ep 2 - Unfortunately, it’s just too hard to find, plus no subs. I’m dropping it in the hopes it comes back on my radar some day.
Y-Destiny Ep 8 - (Thurs) It’s rough having a ghost boyfriend, half your friends are scared, the other half think you’re crazy, and kissing shortens your lifespan. This was a cute couple even if I wasn’t wild about the surrounding story.
Close Friend Ep 5: (Dear My Star/JimmyTommy) - about high school penpals. It had to rely entirely on voice over work as the actors only meet face to face at the end. It’s a good thing they are appealing screen presences on their own, with good vocal control. It’s hard to imagine any other BL pair carrying this kinda plot. It’s by far my favorite of the series so far, and I’m not even a big JimmyTommy fan.
Fish Upon The Sky Ep 7 - no subs. Do we care? Not really. Because we have...
Nitiman Ep 3 - currently my favorite out of Thailand. It’s the university Thai BL i’ve been waiting for since... when was the last good one? My Engineer? Yowza. Anyway we got: head on my shoulder, baby is a floppy drunk (but still wants to be in control), proximity alert, boyfriend’s closet, seme gets seriously jelly, and a cute twist on feeding him. There’s something fun and complex about Jin’s character. He’s not a panicked bi. He knows exactly what’s going on, he just hasn’t decided if he wants Bb or not. He clearly enjoys being looked after, the compliments, and the attention, but he’s not sure if he’s going to like what happens if he gives in. I like that twist on the usual tsundere uke archetype a lot, cautious rather than willfully obtuse or freaked out. We can see Jin realizing in stages: I like this person, I like that they like me, I like the romantic attentiveness. But in the background is... do I actually want to f*k him? It’s a dynamic we don’t often see on BL.
Ongoing Series - Not Thai
HIStory 4: Close To You (Taiwan) Ep 10 fin - the most ridiculous show using BLs worst tropes in a sort of weird smoothie of bitter greens and too ripe banana. The ending was the sappiest cheesiest thing ever, like cheese syrup tapped from the cheese tree. So of course I loved it, but I’m pretty sure I giggled through all the bits meant to be profound. Because, in the end, to tolerate this show at all, you just can’t take ANY of it seriously. RECOMMENDED (with some SERIOUS reservations and trigger warnings.) Full review here.
Be Loved in House: I Do (Taiwan) Ep 1-2 - I don’t mind a damaged seme character but this one is a bit weird for me. Like creepy Cheese in the Trap level weird. On the bright side, the story has given our tsundere uke good motivation for his angst and great existing friendships, loyalty, and likability. Plus I’m invested in the cafe owner/innocent puppy side dishes. So if it’s only the seme character I’m not jiving with, and he’s the most established actor, it should all turn out fine. I believe in you, Taiwanese BL.
Papa & Daddy (Taiwan) Ep 6 fin - speaking of belief. This such a good show but they gave us a cliffhanger ending. Now we must hope against hope for season two. That’s never guaranteed with Taiwan tho. So, I’m docking a few points and saying, RECOMMENDED so long as you realize it’s a cliffhanger.
Love is Science? (Taiwan) Ep 1-9 (BL subplot) - this is a good het romance, but the fact that the BL subplot is a beautifully acted disaster bi + confident gay means you’re hearing about it whether you want to or not. Plus they just added in some GL! Come on! I gotta support Taiwan normalizing queer to this extent. They are fighting the good fight and if I also have to watch a career lady and her much younger softest straight boi get it on, too? Twist my arm with that service sub subtext. Go on Taiwan, TWIST IT. It’s on Viki. Join the revolution.
* Incidentally if you actually like the D/s het dynamic of this show, I highly recommend Japanese Kimi wa Petto - career woman keeps a hot young dancer boy as a pet. Oh yes, an actual pet, that IS the pitch. Never doubt Japan when kink is on the line. It’s also on Viki. Go get your kink on, thank me later. (If it helps: That was not a request.)
Most Peaceful Place 2 (Vietnam) Ep 2 (AKA 5) - love triangles aren’t my thing, but if you’re gonna do it short form, by all means bring in the lead’s other BL pairing so the chemistry is on point. Now I've no idea who I want him to end up with. Can’t they just be in a poly triad?
My Lascivious Boss (Vietnam) Ep 7 - I’m still enjoying it a lot. It’s still unabashedly queer and the tension is ramping up. We now have secret identity, blackmail, femme fatale, faen fatale, and incoming seme confrontation. Best of all, the series is still airing, which makes it longer than any other Vietnamese BL I’ve seen (aside from Tein Bromance - which is just too weird to count).
Gossip - Thai BL
SEVEN PROJECT TEASERS
No one is entirely sure what Studio Wabi Sabi’s Seven Project/7Project will entail.
It might be like Close Friend (1 episode per couple, no linking),
or Y-Destiny (2 episodes per couple, loosely linked),
or The En of Love (4 episodes per couple, linked but independent consecutive stories).
They’re giving the couple’s arcs separate titles. So each one would be what? Seven Project: Once Upon a Time or the like? We’re in Taiwanese title territory people and NO ONE WANTS TO GO THERE. Anygay...
Once Upon a Time is the BounPrem (og UWMA) anchor story, and seems to be the most dramatic and likely saddest. These two can handle most of what’s thrown at them at this juncture, so it should be good.
Vs Love is a BoomPeak (og Make it Right) university vehicle. Since I thought Boom was done with our nonsense, I couldn’t be more thrilled and surprised this pair is doing another show together. I don’t think either of them are the greatest actors but I find Peak very endearing and Boom charismatic on screen, so I’ll watch.
Would You be My Love is the hotly anticipated SantaEarth launch. They’re a (cultivated) IRL ship and Earth is an established BL actor. They have great chemistry and high energy so this could be lots of fun.
We are also getting a GL from this series from established BL actresses Samantha and Pineare. Nothing teased yet on that, but I’m looking forward to this installment the most. Also curious to see how the ladies handle the branding and promo side, not to mention the culture. (Thailand variety shows gonna force *girls* to play the Pepero game?)
Secret Crush on You upcoming Thai BL with no release date, co-produced by and featuring (but NOT staring) Saint and directed by Cheewin (sigh) with all fresh faces. (Previously known as Stalker the series.) It looks like pure pulp and I’m not wild about the plot but could be better than expected as it’s adapted from a novel. Cheewin is an okay director when he has an actual story to follow.
Don’t Say No the series. Coming from the producers of TharnType this is the JaFirst vehicle many have been waiting for. Friends to lovers + a good boy/bad boy pairing on a sports romance foundation. It’s basketball so they tapped Meen as well (he’s semi-pro). The bad news? You get one guess as to who is writing the darn thing? Yep it’s MAME. So, ya know, expect some slam dunk kidnapping, a light dribbling of rape, and me turning into a basketcase. AKA...
Will I have to live blog this series in order to survive it? That seems to be the only way I can. So probably. Which means the bad sports puns will continue. Look, if I’m suffering, SO ARE YOU!
Rumors of a new YinWar vehicle The Best Story (mini series) coming in July. Also rumors that their previously announced Love Mechanics (full length series) has either been delayed, is facing money issues, or is moving studios, or all three.
Breaking News
DELAYED (I’m talking these three off the watch list until we get new airing dates)
Love Area’s release was pushed out but it got a trailer.
Golden Blood was supposed to drop Weds but comments in MDL report that it is delayed due to C19.
Love’s Outlet (Taiwan) is supposed to have started a 50 episode run (only 3-5 min each, what utter nonsense). Sadly, this delay is due to a surge in cases in Taiwan which was doing so well, but also doesn’t have many inoculations.
Bad Buddy has started workshopping at GMMTV actual.
Kang Insoo’s BTS for Nobleman Ryu’s Wedding is SO FLIPPING CUTE. You have to watch it. Trust me, I don’t rec behind the scenes stuff often.
Next Week Looks Like This:
Some shows may be listed later than actual air date for International accessibility reasons.
Upcoming 2021 BL master post here.
Links to watch are provided when possible, ask in a comment if I missed something.
#thai bl#thaibl#asian bl#asian drama#y-destiny#close friend the series#Fish Upon The Sky#gmmtv#Nitiman#Top Secret Together#Golden Blood#Love Area#HIStory 4: Close To You#Taiwanese bl#taiwanese drama#Papa & Daddy#Be Loved In House: I Do#Love Outlet#Most Peaceful Place#Vietnamese BL#My Lascivious Boss#love is science?#Secret Crush on You#The Best Story#Love Mechanics#YinWar#seven project#7project#studio wabi sabi#be loved in house
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oh here! i’ll come ask you for book recs lol. do you have any spooky and/or autumn-y book recs? or just your fave books :)
First of all, I'm sorry this took me SO long to answer. I want to say I've been busy but it's just been general [waves hand vaguely] life.
ANYWAY thank you for asking! I actually don't read scary stuff a lot b/c I'm a wimp, but I have a few spooky/autumnal books up my sleeves! Let's see what we've got!!
1) The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters
Let me just start by saying that Sarah Waters is one of my absolute favorite authors ever! All her novels are suspenseful, twisty historical novels with great female and queer characters. Although, fair warning, actually The Little Stranger is like her one novel that isn't queer, but it is VERY good. If you read The Little Stranger and like it, please read Fingersmith and/or The Paying Guests.
The Little Stranger is set in the countryside of post-WWII England and follows a mild-mannered doctor as he becomes increasingly involved in the lives of the family living in the local, increasingly decrepit, possibly haunted mansion. Think Downton Abbey but creepy. Strange things keep happening inside the house, from dog bites to mysterious sounds to creepy black spots. Literally just typing that gave me goosebumps. It seems like someone may be out to get the family, but who...or what? Is it simply the ghosts of their own painful memories, or is something more? Sarah Waters is excellent at lush, intricate historical detail, and she leans into that here to create an atmosphere of slowly building dread and horror and mystery.
That being said, as a person who isn't normally a fan of horror, I don't think this book is too scary. It's more of an atmospheric, psychological horror than a jump-scare, bloody horror. It's not a book that will give you nightmares (probably), but you might lie awake thinking about it.
Also. Pro-tip. As a haunted(?) house story, the house is obviously fairly central to the story. Dear fellow Americans, keep in mind that the British refer to the floors of a building differently than us. For Americans, the ground-level floor is called the first floor, the floor above that the second floor, etc. For the British, the ground-level floor is the ground floor, and the floor above that is the first floor, etc. There's all sorts of creepy references to characters hearing noises above them on the first floor, but I was just like, Why are they always in the basement?
2) Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno Garcia
This and the above are two very different books, and yet they are both set in the mid-1900s and both are about weird, creepy, maybe-haunted houses. What can I say, I like gothic fiction.
After our heroine, Noemi, receives a bizarre, borderline incoherent letter from her beloved cousin, she sets out to visit her in the literally decaying mansion she resides in with her husband and his new family deep in the countryside of Mexico. All Noemi wants to do is persuade her cousin to come back home with her, but her cousin's new in-laws are very determined not to let that happen...or to let Noemi leave either. Secrets abound in the bizarre house and even creepier nearby cemetery, and soon Noemi finds that she too is suffering from bizarre dreams and visions...although, are they just dreams?
This book is so weird, but in such a good way? I read it for a book club and every week we had increasingly bizarre theories about what was going on, we were googling alchemy and fungi and St George, and some of our theories were even right. Although definitely not all. Another very twisty one that keeps you guessing.
In terms of scariness, interestingly I think there's more overtly creepy and horrifying moments in this novel than The Little Stranger, but I found TLS more overall scary? But that may be because I read it quickly, which I think is the ideal setting for suspenseful stuff, and I read Mexican Gothic over a longer amount of time since it was for a book club. This one does have some more typical horror elements to it, but I don't think it's more creepy than terrifying.
3) The Echo Wife by Sarah Gailey
I listened to this one as an audiobook and the audiobook is excellent so would recommend that, but have no doubt it would also be great to physically read.
Oh my god this book...it's more thriller than horror, but I think it fits the brief. There were multiple moments listening to this book that I literally gasped or said "OH MY GOD!" out loud, and there are moments which are very creepy and horrifying. There's a particular scene in the backyard... Again, incredibly suspenseful and twisty. And the character development and character psychology is just! really really good! There's also really interesting and knotty feminist stuff which is a lot more complicated and nasty than some of the "girlboss" stuff which is popular right now.
Super minimal summary: All you really need to know is that it is a sci fi novel about a scientific researcher trying to pick up her life after her marriage has imploded, only for everything to go BATSHIT WRONG. Trust me, that's all you need to know, it's better to go into this not knowing what's going to happen or what to expect. I had no clue what this novel was about when I started it, and holy shit. Very good book, absolutely recommend this if you want some super suspenseful, creepy sci fi that will make you say "oh my GOD" repeatedly.
Okay, shifting gears a little now b/c autumn isn't just spooky, it's also cozy and restful and daydreamy!
4) The Thinking Woman's Guide to Real Magic by Emily Croy Barker
This isn't maybe a cozy book per se, but it's a great book to cuddle down with on a dreary day and lose yourself in. If you've ever asked yourself, "What would it be like if you crossed Pride and Prejudice with Howl's Moving Castle except the wizard was way worse but somehow still sexy" - then you should read this book! I actually came across this book b/c I was like, I wanna read a book that's a portal fantasy but for adults, and this book was like OH here's everything you wanted.
It's about a grad student, Nora, who has totally stalled out on her dissertation and is at a shitty wedding when she accidentally wanders through a portal into a beautiful, fantastical fairy world. At first, everything is amazing and literally perfect...but surprise surprise, not all as is it seems, and soon everything goes to, how should I put it, shit. Nora escapes, but rather than returning home, she finds herself trapped in a far more dreary realm. But not one without it's own charms and it's own magic, and Nora finds herself the student-slash-sorta-captive of the crochety, sexy, maybe-killed-his-wife magician Aruendiel* and she begins to learn magic herself.
Unlike the above books, this is not a fast-paced, twisty book, and I think if you go into this expecting high fantasy along the lines of Game of Thrones, you may be disappointed. It's not really a typical high-fantasy novel, it's more of a cross of an 18th/19th century realist novel, a fairy tale, and a fantasy novel. But if you want that, then it's REALLY good! I loved this book! And the magic in it is so cool, something about the way its described feels so visceral and real and like you could really do it if you just tried hard enough. There is a romance and it's totally, intentionally hashtag problematic, but it's very laid back, very slow burn, so I think even if you aren't a person who digs romance you can still enjoy this. If you're looking for a feminist-leaning fantasy novel that you can just sink into and lose yourself in, this is the perfect book. You will long to magically fix broken plates.
5) The Ruthless Lady's Guide to Wizardry by C.M. Waggoner
Honestly I can't even justify why I think this one is an autumn book. It simply is. It's autumn colored in my head. It is the coziest book I have ever read about necromancy and crime. Also I just want to recommend it. This is another one that I listened to as an audiobook and it's also a good audiobook, for those who are interested. But it also means I will not be able to spell absolutely any of the character's names.
This novel follows Delly, an enterprising young scoundrel of a fire witch with a teeny tiny gin habit as she attempts to support herself and her hot-mess of a mom in the roughest neighborhoods of Fantasy-City-That-I-Can't-Remember-The-Name-Of. Lice...gate? When Delly comes across an advertisement for a bodyguarding job for young women for a hefty fee, it seems like the answer to definitely not all but at least some of her problems. She accepts, along with an interesting assortment of other sorcerous young ladies, including a wonderfully bitchy Absentia (my love), a young woman who can turn into a boar, boar girl's necromancer mother, and the very sexy part-troll Winn, who in my imagination looks like Gwendoline Christie and talks like Miranda Hart. Which. Perfect woman. Winn being a fine, wealthy young lady, Delly can't help but think to herself that it wouldn't be such a bad thing if Winn happened to fall in love with her and carried her off to be rich and spoiled the rest of her life.
Of course, things quickly don't go to plan, and soon Delly and her companions find herself caught up in wicked schemes of murder, drugs, and an undead mouse named Buttons who says BONG. I love Buttons SO MUCH.
This book is just a silly romp of a novel which worms into your heart and your brain. It's fun and cute and gay, and also it made me cry. I haven't stopped thinking, "Not quite regulation hammerball" since I listened to it like half a year ago.
Also, while I'm here, this novel is set in the same world as and features a few of the same characters as Unnatural Magic. Which is also a hell of a book. Literally the best bisexual relationship I have ever fuckin read. It's a winter book tho, so I simply can't go into it here.
Aaaaand...that it's! Happy autumnal reading :)
#things you didn't care to know about veronica#book recs#disastershy#i'm sorry it took me so long to answer! it's just been burning in my inbox for weeks and only today#did i have the courage and strength of will to get to it!#jk i just felt like doing it now :)#thanks if you read the whole thing!!!!!
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Dustin’ off the ole blog (or why I don’t feel bad for Becky Albertali)
Hey guys. Wow. Its been like two years since anybody posted here and three since I wrote anything of substance? In my defense I adopted a teen so life got super duper busy around that time, but now that I’ve (mostly) sorted out the day to day parenting stuff, I’m back. At least for today. Because whooo boy do I have A LOT thoughts and feelings about the situation with Becky Albertali.
So let’s jump right in : I don’t feel bad for Becky Albertali . Not at all. I think she is wrong and am not moved by her medium post. I think Gabby Dunn is on the right track to criticize her and I would like do so as well because I think she is wrong.
What Albertali (and her twitter fans) seem to willfully ignore in her medium piece is that readers don’t side-eye straight authors without good reason. We do it because over and over and over again, straight authors do a shit job of writing about queer issues, creating realistic queer characters, and discussing queer issues. How does an author earn the ability to avoid that side-eye? How do they avoid questions, comments, and concerns about their ability to do those things in their writing? By being an open and proud member of the queer community ie coming out. Coming out is important and difficult work in a fundamentally heterosexist society, and hence is rewarded as such by our community. If you don’t do that work, why exactly should I or any other queer person give you that cachet?
Fundamentally I see Becky Albertali wanting the socio-emotional bennies of queer author status, without doing the work of coming out. And I’m just not finding much sympathy for that. She is not owed the benefit of the doubt by readers, particularly queer readers. She has to earn it. Yes, it probably was difficult for her to be questioned about her orientation while questioning, but those questions are reasonable and legitimate.
Queer readers don’t just sit around like a dragon hording legitimacy and saying ‘mwhahaha’ to poor little straight authors. We do this as a self-protection mechanism with good reason. We’ve experienced characters that are just a grab bag of stereotypes. We’ve been gutted when straight authors we trusted as allies say horribly offensive things. We’ve read arguments about queer people that bear no resemblance to our real lives and we’ve literally cried ourselves to sleep over disappointing, nasty, rude, offensive, and heartbreaking books (at least I have).
If Becky Albertali and her defenders want to make life easier on queer authors, then instead of blaming queer readers for asking those questions, they need to interrogate why those questions need to be asked and how to reduce that need.
Instead I see Albertali in her medium piece blaming queer readers for needing to protect themselves, for needing to side-eye, for needing the explicit power of #ownvoices and support of out authors. I don’t see her piece putting rightful, blame on straight people and straight culture that created these situations in the first place. Blaming queer readers for daring to question her is a pernicious type of victim blaming, and I have no time or patience for that. We erect these walls to protect our own hearts and souls, not because we’re big meanies. If you don’t want to be on the wrong side of the wall, then help dismantle the need for it. Don’t blame us for its existence.
I’ve seen some people on twitter say this is somehow gatekeeping or cutting people off from exploring/discovering their queerness in art. And I think that argument is off base. No one was preventing Alberteli from making her art. She could have written in a notebook or on Smashwords for all the days of her life. People can make a dozen deviantart accounts or twitter accounts or AO3 accounts or tumblr accounts or discord servers and post their queer art creations all over the internet while they work out their queer feelings. It is easy and free and no one is stopping anyone else from doing so.
However I think when you cross the line from creating your queer art to profiting off your queer art, something fundamentally changes. The stakes go up. Queer readers need to know so they can decide who to trust with their hard earned cash. We live in capitalism, man. If you think that sucks, help dismantle that too.
Albertali looked back in her piece, so I also want to cast back to early 2015, when Albertali first published Simon vs the Homo Sapiens Agenda. Bi YA author Corrine Duyvis woudn’t coin the term/hastag #ownvoices until September of that year. And it was A LOT easier to get a YA book with LGBTQ characters published if you were straight. How do I know that? Because it was like pulling teeth to find queer authors writing queer characters outside of small queer presses. I was hardcore book blogging at that time. The mainstream publishing industry side-eyed YA/kidlit queer authors, especially those who were less polished due to poverty/educational attainment/systemic racism/disability, to favor straight white authors with post-graduate degrees along with a handful of token queer authors that were already a part of the publishing industry. This was slowly changing but it hadn’t changed that much. It was still easier to get a queer YA published as a straight person.
And Albertali knowingly entered into and profited off that system.
She literally has cash in the bank off the publication of the book Simon vs the Homo Sapiens Agenda, the subsequent film that became Love Simon, the subsequent book reprints and merchandise under the name Love Simon and the subsequent Love Victor show on Hulu. They sold Love Simon shirts at Hot Topic for $20 for crying out loud. She was able to obtain that money, prominence, and influence because she presented herself as a straight woman.
There is no comparable story in queer authorland because queer authors are simply not given the opportunity to turn their queer novels into multimedia cash cow franchises. The closest thing I can think of is Armistand Maupin’s ‘Tales of the City‘ and that took 20 years to be made into a tv miniseries with subsequent books. That was 27 years ago and to my knowledge, no one sold shirts. So for most of my/ Albertali’s lifetime, there has been no viable path to create a queer media empire as a queer author. None.
Until Albertali did it while pretending to be a straight girl.
She says that she legitimately did not know she was queer when Simon vs the Homo Sapiens Agenda was published or when Leah on the Offbeat was written. It does suck that she had to figure that out while living such a public life and I feel bad that it was hard. But honestly it sucks for everyone to figure that out. It sucks to figure that out as an isolated teen or a professional adult. Its just an emotionally grueling process. Wanna make it better for future people? Again work to disable heterosexism and heterocentrism in wider society. Blaming queer people for that heterosexism and heterocentrism, and chiding them for not giving you unearned benefits of the doubt doesn’t do anything to disable those systems. No one forced you to sign a movie deal or do a ton of interviews, you did that all on your own. Ignorance of the consequences of your own actions doesn’t exempt you from having to deal with them.
Only very very recently has the publishing landscape shifted so #ownvoices is a selling point instead of a liability. Only very very recently (and I would argue very minimally) has the publishing industry valued #ownvoices authors enough to nurture and polish their skills with open submissions and contests for people who don’t have grad degree levels of writing skills. And Albertali is upset at being excluded from this? When she literally has the educational privileges of a doctorate and significantly more money than the average queer author has made in my lifetime?
The closet sucks but no one forced Albertali to stay in it and queer people didn’t create it. She chose to publish and license her work to reap the benefits, and as such also reaps the consequences. Apparently one such consequence was that it was personally difficult for her to understand her sexuality and her mental health was poor. Well.... until we can disassemble heteropatriarchy that is the world we live in. Get your queer house in order before you go pro and open yourself up to real reactions from queer readers. But if like Albertali, you don’t do that while choosing more and more publicity and raking in wheelbarrows full of cash, well, don’t expect much sympathy from me.
- Sarah
#becky albertalli#coming out#the closet#queer readers#queer authors#gabby dunn#ownvoices#yes I'm still mad about Bermudez Triangle#84 years later#essays#bisexual authors
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some leverage: redemption reactions
i finished leverage redemption today! and i don't have anyone to talk to about it so, here we have my reactions for all eight episodes, both positive and negative. please feel free to reblog/comment -- discussions are what i'm here for! (under a cut because spoilers and also this ended up being 2k. whoops!)
EPISODE 1: the too many rembrandts job
the "aww, this guy is trying to pull his first heist! how cute" job
what they chose to do with nate was... interesting. it might just be that i read too many of those cracky "here's how they should explain nate's absence" posts, but i was expecting something funny. the grief permeating this episode -- it makes SENSE, but it was still weird. leverage doesn't usually have sadness like this. pain, yes, rage, certainly, but sadness? not usually
the way sophie immediately spots the signs of a con and slips into a character? phenomenal. i'm here for EXPERTS BEING EXPERTS and this show does NOT disappoint
harry wilson is a really solid character! most impressively, he's not flynn, which is impressive enough that i'm making a whole bullet point about it. i was worried that noah wyle was kinda a one-trick pony, but it appears not! good for him tbh
i'm LIVING for the ot3 moments in this episode. "what happened?" "we happened" YESSSSS!!! i wish we'd had more domesticity, but i know they did what they could
"he gets it from his father" FUCK!!!!!
the discussion about redemption in this episode is FANTASTIC but personally i am still delirious with excitement about "my nana leads a multi-denominational household" so expect those thoughts in 3-5 business days
EPISODE 2: the panamanian monkey job
the "flash electropop concert" job
BREANNA INTRODUCTION! i love her so MUCH, y'all. we only got to see her dynamic with hardison in this one episode, but man, it manages to be one of her best dynamics anyway. i just! i love her! i love the way the team works with her!
"in our field, you're one of the best. but there, you're the only one." god we have ELIOT/HARDISON rights and i am NOT OKAY. just!! them!!!!!! being supportive!!!!!! they have learned how to be sweet with each other! they work together so much better (in part because we're seeing them from harry's outsider pov instead of nate's insider pov, but STILL)
midway through this episode, i thought "huh, leverage always focuses on specific people, when really the problem is systematic, and pretending it's anything different is just an excuse to not fight for change". and then at the end harry talks about how the system itself is broken! i love knowing that john rogers and i were reading the same tweets last summer. it's a good feeling to trust the people making a piece of media
who let noah wyle speak spanish. whoever it was, they need to rescind their permission
god, the parker/hardison in this episode. THE PARKER/HARDISON IN THIS EPISODE! they KILL me friends they KILL ME!
also just like, hardison in this episode in general. he made a star trek reference! he made a doctor who reference! he decides there are other people who need him more! the way they wrote around gina bellman's maternity leave in s2 was good but this was phenomenal.
also i'm here for ot3 crumbs so "is this like the time when eliot wanted us to say no" is going on my ot3-is-canon conspiracy board
this is a tiny detail but eliot taking out the drone with a goddamn ORANGE was so good. he's so good at his job!! they're all so good at their jobs!! i know i literally just talked about this but AAA
EPISODE 3: the rollin' on the river job
the "sometimes you just want to rob a vault wearing a floofy dress, and that's valid" job
i did... not. like. how the villain in this one was an immigrant whose exploitable weakness was a "desperation" to be included in the upper crust. and the fact that they beat him with a literal southern belle who explicitly beats him BECAUSE her family has been in the area for "hundreds of years"? it just feels Iffy.
also iffy about this episode was breanna's characterization. it felt inconsistent. she feels inconsistent across the whole season, but this episode in particular... she tells harry she's only with the team because she's desperate, that she doesn't believe in hope, and then at the end of the episode she tells parker she wants to be there to change the world. and like, even in the first place, she's not here out of desperation! SHE asked to join the team! like, i can see how it all kinda fits together, but it just feels... inconsistent. idk. i think these scripts all could've benefited from an extra round or two of editing.
anyway! i loved the way they tied hardison into these episodes, even though aldis hodge couldn't be there. he has binders! breanna doesn't want to read them! parker did! he put in big letters, "when in doubt, trust the person in the van". i'm just so !!! about how much i love him and how much he loves his team and how much his team loves him. FOUND FAMILY, BABY!
all inconsistencies in breanna's characterization aside, i really liked her speech at the end. i know how she feels! it's really nice to have someone on the team who's from -- not my world, really, but a lot closer than any of the others. it's a nice feeling! i love her a lot. i hope her writing gets more consistent
lol, parker ate eliot's carrot cake. i love the parker/eliot rights we get in this show, they're so domestic and it's wonderful.
EPISODE 4: the tower job
the "hardison made his partners learn klingon" job
watching this episode was what made me go "they're not going to make us sit through a harry/sophie romance... right? right?"
i'm still not sure they're gonna let us avoid it but it COULD work so... i've decided to just not worry about it for now
i liked the number of ways the con goes wrong! it was fun to watch them work on the fly like that. i think them not having a dedicated Mastermind(tm) is a good watsonian explanation for their plans being pretty haphazard in general, but it's good, they think well on their feet
nate was a chessmaster. he had the whole situation in his mind from the beginning, accounting for every possible outcome. parker and sophie are much more adaptive, and it's cool to see. they can rely on their respective skillsets a lot more than nate could
a really solid episode! probably one of the strongest ones in the season. i liked it a lot.
(ALSO as mentioned above the klingon lines were fantastic and not just because they were a star trek reference -- every time eliot and parker both mentioned hardison, together, it added a year to my lifespan)
EPISODE 5: the paranormal hacktivity job
the "sophie was worryingly prepared to fake her death" job
i know why they characterized the client as a skeptic, i really do, and i loved the format of this episode, but also. But Also. she should've been a love interest for breanna and I'm Right.
having a girl's episode was the CORRECT choice. they do crimes in their free time! they fleece newbie, cruel criminals! it's so good!
it would've been cool to have eliot around for the assassin guy, but it was also cool to see the others take him out without having eliot to rely on. it's like getting to see how they'd take out eliot, if they were ever on opposing sides.
PARKER CANONICALLY USES SCRIPTS IT'S THE BEST THING EVER
breanna bristling about letting the criminal into the theater's electric system was so good god i love her so much. she knows hardware! i bet she likes to work with her hands. i bet she stims. i bet she has adhd
actually, sidenote, but i LOVE these headquarters. they look so nice! the stage is so nice! i loved having an episode set in and around it, it was such a good choice.
EPISODE 6: the card game job
the "FINALLY AN EXPLICITLY QUEER LEVERAGE CHARACTER" job
QUEER BREANNA QUEER BREANNA QUEER BREANNA QUEER BR
UNFOLLOW ME NOW THIS IS GONNA BE THE ONLY THING I POST ABOUT FOR THE REST OF TIME
GOD, what a good way to reveal it. it's fully about her! i love queer romances, of course i do, but i don't think i've ever seen a character come out without a romance being their reason for doing so (however indirectly). i still think she should've gotten a date with the client from 1x05, but i really liked this too.
this episode just felt like a love letter to fandom, and i love that. i love how much it shone through. i'm used to writers specifically going out of their way to make fun of fans and laugh at them, so it was just. really nice to have someone stand up and go, no, this is important for a reason! people love this for a reason! it MEANS something!
very fun to watch eliot swordfight. very fun to watch sophie recite a sonnet in her classic fashion. very fun to watch parker work at being a good mentor. breanna was so excited about the card game! they're all so good!
oh, and i guess harry's here too.
EPISODE 7: the double-edged sword job
the "harry is addicted to mobile games, which is a mood" job
hot take alert! i think this is the weakest episode of the season by a LOT. it needed so much more editing. it felt so disjointed, so all over the place. the plot was haphazard but in a muffled way, where you had no idea why they were doing what they were doing. the climax was sudden and didn't make any sense. it was just weird.
i'm not the person to comment on this but it feels kind of lazy to cast an east asian guy to play a socially-awkward tech genius. just a thought.
oh, of course jonathan frakes directed this episode. sometimes his stuff is really good but other times (ahem, ds9 3x02) it's disjointed and all over the place. i'm not even surprised it was him.
idk if i have anything else to say about this. oh! some of the team moments were great -- mostly involving eliot. i loved the moment of him recognizing the headshot, i LOVED the ten seconds of everyone teasing him. he and parker talked about the wellbeing of their friend, the woman whose ex tracked her down!
separate bulletpoint to say how much i LOVED his conversation with breanna outside the house. he's so good at reassuring! he could go deeper there, talking about being better than your worst day, but he knew when not to push! it was so good.
"first off, this guy can't TOUCH hardison" deserves its own bulletpoint because like. y'all. Y'ALL.
EPISODE 8: the mastermind job
the "eliot is more than just a pretty face" job
oh man this post is so much longer than i thought it would be. okay just one more episode and then i'm done.
the callbacks to original leverage were SO well done and made me feel emotions without feeling overbearing.
i didn't like the central premise -- that nate would share so many details with a random insurance agent -- in the first place, but i did like how it allowed them to bring back nate without actually hiring timerty mcasshole.
i liked eliot's insistence that he's more than just the muscle! he is, and it's really good to know, textually, that the writers do too!
me, watching the resolution of the episode: ah, yeah, insurance fraud. a classic!
harry bonding with his guard had "they don't even have dental!" energy and i am SUCH a fan. i know it was all for the con but also give me harry, unable to stop advising people, even when they're actively holding him hostage
parker! on the phone with hardison!!!! ADORABLE
is it just me or was someone else expecting the accountant's name to be something significant? with the way they led up to it, i was waiting for a "sterling" or something else. my sensors were pinging for another tara reveal. i'm still convinced we're gonna get this guy dramatically revealed in the season finale.
a really nice episode! i had a lot of fun with it. and now i want to rewatch the rashamon job, but tbh i ALWAYS want to rewatch the rashamon job.
and that's a wrap! overall, a fun season, i enjoyed it a lot. not as solid as original leverage, but it's the very beginning, and it was put together during a global pandemic, so i'm cutting them some slack. also levar burton is gonna show up at some point. that's a big reason of why i'm cutting them so much slack.
my personal ranking of the episodes is 1x04, 1x06, 1x08, 1x01, 1x02, 1x03, and finally last (and least), 1x07.
what did you guys think of the new season? what was your favorite episode? do you agree with any of my opinions? disagree with any? let me know, please, i'd love to discuss!
#leverage#leverage redemption#leverage spoilers#redemption spoilers#leverage redemption spoilers#sb and l rambles#sb and l watches leverage#levred#this is so much longer than i thought it was gonna be#i shouldn't be surprised but ughhhh i'm so tired
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Ninth House, Leigh Bardugo
Rating: Mixed Review
Genre: Fantasy, Mystery, Dark Academia
Representation:
-Bi/pan protagonist
-Jewish protagonist
-Latina mixed race protagonist
Trigger warnings: Sexual assault (in scene), rape (in scene), CSA (in scene), graphic violence, murder, drug use, drug abuse, drugging of another person, overdose, domestic abuse, medical abuse, violence by dogs
Note: Not YA
Why is it that every time I read Leigh Bardugo, I love the book with a passion...except for one thing that makes me want to tear my hair out?
Here’s what seriously impressed me about Ninth House, Bardugo’s entry into New Adult. The pacing was phenomenal. The measured, perfectly timed revelations of information had me finding excuses to listen to the audiobook - taking extra neighborhood walks, doing extra loads of laundry - because I was so hooked. Then, there’s the worldbuilding. Bardugo managed to walk a delicate line, successfully suspending disbelief while still asserting that eight Yale secret societies do secret magic rituals to the benefit of the oligarchical capitalist machine (we all kind of suspected this was the case, right?). But the best part of the book, the part that had me recommending Ninth House in more than one group chat, was, of all things, the point-of-view jumps.
Rarely are point-of-view switches the star of the show, but I was so excited to see a genuinely original, intrinsic-to-the-heart-of-the-whole-novel use of that technical tool. The point of view jumps crank the volume up on the theme of the whole book. We start with the main character, Galaxy “Alex” Stern; she is the point-of-view character for the present semester during which the principal action of the novel takes place. Her upperclassman and mentor Daniel Arlington (or “Darlington”) is the point-of-view character for the semester before - all because something happened to Darlington. Alex is telling people he’s doing a “semester in Spain,” and all the reader knows is that her explanation isn’t strictly true. The point-of-view jumps being so strict (there is never an Alex perspective chapter during last semester, and never a Darlington perspective in the present) serves to separate the two characters from each other with a really incredible emotional effectiveness. The heart of the novel, for me as a reader, was yearning for these two to be reunited - and all because Bardugo holds the two character points-of-view separate across an unbreachable temporal divide. It’s a powerfully effective technique.
But let’s backtrack. Alex is a 20-year-old high school dropout from the west coast. As the story progresses, we learn that Alex can see ghosts, which is why, despite never finishing high school or getting her GED - or even applying - Alex is a freshman at Yale - contingent on her joining the secret society called “Lethe House” as apprentice (“Dante”) to the current leader of the society, Darlington (the “Virgil”). Lethe House is the governing body of the eight Yale secret societies that practice the magic that keeps the elite in power. These secret societies make books sell, make T.V. anchors charming and compelling, and open portals to other parts of the world - when they aren’t throwing over the top Halloween parties with magic designed to alter one’s perception of reality.
Darlington, by contrast to Alex, seems to belong at Yale. He’s from an old family, and he’s preppy and well-read. Most of all, he loves Lethe House and its history of keeping the secret societies from harming people in their pursuit of magic and power. That is, until he disappears just in time for Alex, only half-trained, to investigate the murder of a girl on campus.
The first three quarters of the novel are fantastic for the reasons stated above. Bardugo’s approach to mystery writing is effective. We have half a dozen suspects, most of whom, as elite ivy league magicians, are at least guilty of some misdeed. Having all your red herrings end up somewhat culpable anyway is a good way to keep your mystery difficult to solve until the end. We were off to a good start.
Unfortunately, in the end, Bardugo made the all-too-common choice to value “surprise” over the most compelling, satisfying solution. So while the reader doesn’t see the ending coming, that is at the steep cost of the ending not being justified by the rest of the book. Bardugo even has to invent new rules of magic off the cuff to justify the ending. When the rest of the book so painstakingly developed the rules of magic in a way that made sense and never felt overly expository, undoing all that effort feels like a monumental waste. And for what did Bardugo undermine all her hard work? A mystery that the reader won’t have all the clues to solve? It’s really okay - in fact, good - if the reader can puzzle out your story. It means your story has symmetry, internal logic, or perhaps, some sort of message.
This is what had me tearing my hair out. I know exactly how I would have written the ending of Ninth House to be the perfect conclusion to a stunning book. I know exactly what the message should have been. Is it somewhat ridiculous to say that Bardugo misinterpreted the message of her own book? Perhaps. But given the out-of-left-field-ending, the theme of the book ends up being a rather cheaply bought “No matter how traumatized you are, you can be a girlboss” instead of the message that the very structure of the novel itself was pointing to since page one: one of companionship, trust, and restoration (frankly, a better message for a novel with a main character who suffers so much loss and trauma. But, sure, “girl power” is a theme...I guess...)
Here’s what I mean by the structure of the novel itself pointing to a different theme. (Spoiler warning for the rest of this paragraph). Because the point-of-view switches in the first two thirds of the novel were used by Bardugo like two magnets being held apart, the only way to create a feeling of resolution was, so to speak, putting the magnets back together: getting Darlington back into the “present.” The degree of disconnect between reader expectations and the reality of the book is comparable to picking up a romance novel only to have the two leads decide to just be friends at the end. Bardugo set expectations - akin to genre expectations - but unfortunately Bardugo kneecapped her first book in the service of the sequel.
And then there’s the trauma. Alex’s backstory wouldn’t be the same without some level of trauma; it’s an important part of her character arc. Even the explicit presence of sexual assault on the page was justified in the case of Alex’s backstory - and I think that is rarely true. But when it came to a side character’s explicit in-scene rape, which was used as a clue in the broader murder mystery rather than treated as a crime in its own right, that tipped me over into feeling the trauma in Ninth House was more excessive than necessary for character development. The resolution to that side character’s rape is oddly cartoonish - like an over-the-top prank rather than justice - and again, the only reason the rape happens to the character is to give Alex more information she needs to solve the plot. Maybe that wouldn’t bother some readers, but for me, a book has to bend over backwards to justify showing me a character being raped. Bardugo does well earlier in the book when depicting Alex’s assault; the assault is the explanation for why Alex doesn’t view magic with the same childish excitement as the rest of Yale, and it’s part of what holds her apart from the entitled secret societies. It needed to be in the book. Everything else was gratuitous.
That said, there’s one thing still to address in this roller coaster of a review, and that is: wait, is this a queer book? I had gone into it assuming that it would be, mostly because all my queer friends were reading it. And the answer is….kind of? Knowing Bardugo’s history with putting queer characters in her books, I’m going to assume she wasn’t baiting when she had Alex claim to have loved a girl in her backstory. Which, in the context of the rest of the novel, would make Alex bi or pan. As a book that a lot of queer fans of Bardugo’s YA have read, or will read, it feels appropriate to review it here.
This was a mixed review from start to finish, but to finish up: if you are thinking about reading Ninth House, go for it! There is so much to like about this book. Take to heart that if you read and liked Bardugo’s handling of sexual assault in her YA titles, you should be prepared to be surprised by Ninth House. It is not the same. I would not have called her handling of sexual assault in Six of Crows, for instance, restrained - but compared to Ninth House, it absolutely is. Despite my strongly worded feelings about the ending, Bardugo left room to redeem herself in the sequel (which, if you ask me, is why the ending was so bad in the first place...). I for one will definitely be reading the sequel the second it comes out.
#leigh bardugo#ninth house#fantasy#mystery#dark academia#not ya#mixed review#bi#reviews only#protagonist of color#jewish protagonist
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Hi! As someone who’s literary opinion I really trust, I was surprised that you’re a twilight fan? I know almost nothing except commen knowledge things about that series, and I always assumed it was actually bad/un-feminist. What is it that you like so much that others seem to miss? I’m just genuinely curious about your take on the hate it always seems to get vs. it’s actual quality. I’m not gonna judge bc animorphs is also one of those books where you see it and assume it’s bad.
In over 14 years of loving this series, I’m not sure anyone has ever asked me why I enjoy it instead of simply trying to convince me that I’m wrong to do so. So thank you for that.
First and foremost, I love the Twilight saga because of the vivid detail in Stephenie Meyer’s writing style. The descriptions are so lush and dense with sensory information that you can practically bite down on them as you read. Bella and Jacob aren’t just sitting on the beach; they’re sitting on a gnarled log of driftwood, worn smooth at the top from where so many Quileute teens have sat upon it during bonfires but still uneven enough to rock on its branches when Bella suddenly stands to rage at her own mortality. Meyer describes that log in Twilight, so tangibly and with such economy of detail, that we recognize it immediately when Bella and Jacob return to that spot in Eclipse. I’ve always disliked the movies, because I’ve always felt that the best part of Meyer’s writing simply did not translate well to the screen.
Secondly, I love the feminism.
Okay, let’s take a quick pause to let everyone gasp and clutch their pearls over me calling Twilight a feminist work. I will address the criticisms later. For now, please just hear me out.
Twilight strikes me as a premier example of what Hélène Cixous means when she calls for “women’s writing,” or writing for women, about women, by women, with a strong focus on the concerns and strengths and desires of womanhood. This is a series about building and maintaining close relationships, both romantic and platonic. It celebrates beauty, and love, and care. Bella moves to Forks because she recognizes that her dad is lonely while her mom is quite the opposite, torn between family priorities. She doesn’t simply subsume her interests to those of other people, but instead actively chooses how and when and where to express her love for her birth family and her found families. Most of the other major decisions throughout the story — Alice “adopting” Bella, Carlisle moving the family to Alaska, Jacob becoming werewolf beta, the Cullens going up against the Volturi, etc. — are motivated by care and devotion for one’s family and friends. Even the selfish or morally ambiguous character choices are shown to be motivated by love. Rosalie tells Edward that Bella died because she genuinely thinks it’ll help him move on. Victoria creates an army that nearly destroys Forks because she’s avenging James. Alice abandons Bella and the others before the final battle because if she can’t save her entire family, then she’ll settle for saving her lover before letting him die in vain.
Not only is there a striking concern with love and care, but there’s also a strong commitment to avoiding violence. Bella’s eventual vamp-superpower proves to be preventing violence and protecting others, an awesome character decision that I’d argue gets set up as early as the first book. She lives in a violent world — this is a YA SF story, after all — but she has the power to suppress violence and create peace, both in herself and others. I was already sick of “power = ability to inflict damage” in YA stories well before I knew the word “patriarchy.” Twilight was one of the first books to convey to me that power could be refusing to do harm in spite of hunger or anger, that power could be shielding ones’ family, that power could be about building enough friendships and alliances to have an army at one’s back when facing an enemy too strong to take on alone.
Closely connected to all of that love and care, I love how much Twilight is about navigating teenage girlhood. Is it empowering, intersectional, or all-inclusive? Hell no. Does it still dare to suggest that a completely ordinary teenage girl could have valid concerns about the world? Yep. The main conflict of the story, as Stephen King so derisively explained, is about the romantic entanglements of a teenage girl, and the book therefore has no literary merit. (To quote my dad’s response: “Bold words from the guy who inflicted Firestarter on the world.”)
There is, indeed, a lot of romance in Twilight. There are a lot of clothes. Alice and Rosalie especially spend a lot of time on makeup, and hair, and choosing the prettiest cars and houses. Twilight embraces all the stereotypically “girly” concerns of adolescence, and makes no effort to apologize for or condemn them. Bella isn’t particularly good at performing them — she likes but doesn’t excel at shopping, fiercely defends her ugly car as ugly, hobbles through prom on crutches — but she can still enjoy the feeling of being pretty in a sparkly dress while dancing with her sparkly boyfriend. And Twilight, like Animorphs with Cassie, takes the daring step of treating that feeling as valid.
Speaking of sparkles, I love the commitment to the fantasy concept in Twilight, including the myriad mundanities that Meyer brings with that commitment. If you have super-speed, why not use it to play extreme baseball? If you’re a mindreader with a clairvoyant sister, why wouldn’t you two play mental chess games? I couldn’t tell you, after seven seasons of Buffy or eight of Vampire Diaries, what Spike or Damien or Angel or Stefan does all day when not brooding or lurking in the bushes to creep on human women. I can tell you what the Cullens get up to. Emmett and Rosalie work on their cars, usually by holding them overhead one-handed. Carlisle and Alice read plays, and sometimes talk the whole family into home Shakespeare productions. Edward and Carlisle debate theology, Emmett and Jasper have dumb athletic competitions, Edward and Esme play music, Alice manipulates stock markets, the twins go shopping online, etcetera. The Cullens feel real, feel like the vampires next door, in a way that Louis and Lestat simply do not.
To get to the elephant in the room — I just described Twilight as a feminist text! — let’s talk about the other thing the Cullens do for fun: they have sex. Weird sex. Kinky furniture-breaking sex. Sex that Emmett (who would know) compares to bear-wrestling. These books suck with regards to queer representation, but they are sex-positive. They feature an old-school Anglican protagonist offering his daughter-in-law a medical abortion. They treat Edward’s desire for sex only within marriage and Alice’s desire for sex outside of marriage as both being valid. Like I said, not groundbreaking, even by the standards of 2005, but still more than most teen novels do even today.
There’s a passage from Breaking Dawn that people love to pull out of context as “everything wrong with Twilight in two paragraphs” because it describes Bella waking up the morning after sex with bruises on her arms. That moment is shocking out of context, to be sure — but in context, it’s the end result of an in-depth consent negotiation that lasts four books. Bella says that she’d like to become a vampire. Edward says okay, but only if she spends a few more years living as a human and considering that choice. Bella says okay, but only if Edward, not Carlisle, becomes the one to turn her. Edward says they can use his venom, but that Carlisle, who’s an MD, really needs to supervise the process. Bella doesn’t love the idea of Edward’s stepdad cockblocking what’s supposed to be an intimate moment, and so agrees only on the grounds that she gets to have sex with Edward as a human first. Edward’s hella Catholic, so he requests that they get married first. Bella’s super horny, so she demands that the wedding happen within six months. Edward says that he might hurt her during sex, and Bella says that she wants a little hurt during sex. They marry. They bang. During the banging, Edward makes every effort to be controlled and courteous and gentile, while Bella goes wild and crazy. The next morning, she has bruises and he does not. Edward apologizes, but Bella’s actually really into it. She spends a while admiring her sexy vamp-marked self in the mirror, touches the bruises many times, and reminds us yet again that Bella Swan’s whole M.O. is being a monsterfucker. Her kink is not my kink, and that’s okay.
To be clear, I think there are other aspects of the romance that get criticized for good reason. Edward does not negotiate with Bella before sneaking into her room to watch her sleep, and he does make unacceptable use of their power differences when he thinks she’s in danger of being mauled by werewolves. The text condemns Jacob’s “don’t wanna die a virgin” ploy to manipulate a kiss out of Bella, but not the wider conceit of all the male characters as possessing uncontrollable urges. Bella’s struggles to adjust to a new town feel very feminine and realistic; her amused tolerance of Jacob’s and Mike’s sexual harassment as the price for their friendship does not. Werewolf imprinting might be mostly platonic, but that doesn’t make it okay for Meyer to depict it as a form of soulmate bonding that happens with child characters. Those are good points, all around. I just wish that most of them didn’t come up in the context of post-hoc rationalizations for loathing the femininity of a feminine text.
I’m not calling Twilight an unproblematic series. I’m saying that it gets (rightly!) criticized for appropriating Quileute culture, while Buffy’s total absence of main characters of color and blatant anti-Romani racism are (wrongly!) not remarked upon. I'm saying that I’ve been told I’m a misogynist for liking Twilight but not for liking James Bond. I’m saying that there’s a reason people tend to go “oh, that makes so much sense!” when I let them in on the fact that reactive hatred for “Twitards” started and spread on 4Chan, later home of Gamergate and incel culture. I’m saying that Twilight depicts problematic relationship dynamics as sexy — but then so do Vampire Academy, Blue Bloods, Supernatural, Vladimir Tod, and Vampire Diaries. All of which take the time to stop and thumb their noses at Twilight, smug in the superiority of having vampires that fly rather than vampires that sparkle, and for thoroughly condemning teenage girls for being girly while continuing to show men inflicting violence on them.
After all, as Erin May Kelly puts it: “we live in a world taught to hate everything to do with little girls. We hate the books they read and the bands they like. Is there anything the world makes fun of more than One Direction and Twilight?” No one has ever called me a misogynist for liking the MCU, in spite of less than a third of its movies even managing to clear the low-low bar of the Bechdel test. Because people are still allowed to like Harry Potter in spite of its racism, or Lord of the Rings despite its imperialism. Because hatred for Twilight was never about its very real sexism, or the genuinely silly sparkle-vampires, until it had to justify itself as something other than hate for everything that teenage girls have ever dared openly love.
I enjoy the novels, and I enjoy the fan fiction that tries to fix some of the problems with the novels. I appreciate the extent to which Meyer has elevated fan culture, and made an effort to acknowledge her own past mistakes. I would love to be able to talk about my love for the series as a flawed but beautiful work of literature, but for now I’ll settle for asking that the world just let me enjoy it in peace.
#twilight#the twilight saga#breaking dawn#eclipse#new moon#stephenie meyer#fandom#nothing to do with animorphs#misogyny#ableist language#sexist language#long post#sexism#romance#anonymous#asks
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My First Ship
I was watching the video 36 TV Show Characters Who Should Have Been Gay and it got me thinking about one of my first ever ships - Jim and Blair from The Sentinel. For those who haven't seen the show, Jim is a cop who discovers he has heightened sense super powers that he struggles with how to deal with, while Blair is a PhD student writing his disertation on cultures who have these heightened sense super power people as Sentinels who protect the tribe. Blair helps Jim deal with his powers and they become partners (despite Blair not being remotely a cop) and together they solve crimes.
They have a very... intense relationship through the show with a lot of old married couple vibes. I wouldn't class this as queer baiting because I think the writers were desperately trying to push the message that of course these two are straight by throwing a girl of the week relationship at at least one of them every episode. But it ends up with the two of them having a bunch of really short-lived flings with women who are in an episode or two only to disappear never to be seen again, while Jim and Blair have a deeply affectionate relationship and are willing to do whatever it takes to protect each other. Not to mention, they're constantly hugging, touching, and being ridiculously physically affectionate with each other, or failing that, just standing unnecessarily close to each other with no regard for personal space.
The two of them live together. In a very, very early episode (I think it was the second episode, but it might have been the third - it's been a while since I've seen the show), the place Blair's been living gets blown up and Jim says he can stay with him for a couple of days while he finds somewhere new. Four seasons later, they're still living together. They cook meals together a lot, or Blair will cook for Jim while he's working or when he wants to do something nice. Early on, Jim refers to Blair cooking him breakfast as a "courtship ritual" and they just have a very domestic fluff thing going on. They bicker about chores or Blair playing his music too loud, and Blair takes care of Jim when he gets sick and goes with him on doctor's appointments because they make him anxious. It's all your domestic fluff AU fanfic tropes but... there... on screen... in canon.
And because the showrunners were trying to give a bit of fan service, there are a lot of scenes where Jim is not wearing very much. We get scenes of him sleeping in only his underwear only to get up and walk through the apartment for one reason or another. So you get a lot of scenes where the two of them together and Jim is just casually shirtless. In one episode, Jim gets covered in oil and needs to clean off and we get the next scene where he's wearing only his towel, up until the moment when he's being held at gunpoint and forced to lose the towel. Blair seems slightly distracted from the gun by the fact Jim is getting completely naked right next to him.
There are a lot of moments when they sacrifice/risk things for each other. It's an action show, so there's a lot of risking of lives to protect the other person, but the climax of the series has Blair throw away everything he's worked for to protect Jim's identity. He sacrifices his career, his academic integrity, and a large pile of money by declaring that his Sentinel research was fabricated in order to keep Jim safe.
Then there's the mystical bond between them. Blair is Jim's guide to his Sentinel powers. There's a scene in the second season where an old guide dies and there's a very serious moment where the old guide is holding onto both of their arms with blood-covered hands and telling them that Blair is now Jim's guide and it's his job now to help him. Jim on the other hand is the Blessed Protector - of the city as a whole, but of Blair in particular. It is a very serious moment that implies a very serious bond between them.
Then when Blair drowns, after Jim fails at giving him mouth-to-mouth, we get a spiritual moment where Jim caresses Blair's face while their spirit animals (yeah, the show's a bit appropriative unfortunately) jump into each other and it brings Blair back to life. It's an interesting scene from a subtext perspective.
There are a couple of other bits that stand out as fanfic fodder. In one episode, a new, female colleague joins the show and there's a bit of flirting from both guys. At the end of the episode, both Jim and Blair say that they have a date but when they show up at the restaurant, the other is there. Apparently they both asked the girl of the week out and she said yes to both of them and set up the date at the same time, at the same restaurant. The episode ends with her getting up from the table and leaving the two of them there. It's said that she'll be coming back, but it means that the final shot of the episode is of Jim and Blair sitting together in a restaurant for a romantic, candlelit dinner.
Then there's the undercover episode. Someone needs to go undercover to pretend to live in a neighbourhood to investigate some criminal happenings, and it's decided that it's going to be Jim, Blair, and recurring character Megan. The cover is that Jim and Megan are a couple and Blair is Jim's brother. They have a meeting with a couple who live in one of the neighbouring houses and the reaction of the guy is clearly, "Your brother? Yeah right." This guy is definitely queer coded and shows interest in Blair. After the meeting, Blair says he thinks this couple might be swingers - which Megan completely misunderstands and thinks he's talking about dancing. The scene is not remotely subtle - the neighbour thinks that there's something going on here. Unfortunately, queer coded guy turns out to be the bad guy because of course he does.
I don't think that the creators of the show intended for Jim and Blair's relationship to be coded as queer - in fact there is a lot of "no homo" in the writing to try and distance themselves from it. I think the inclusion of Megan as a recurring character was an attempt to give one of them a long-term relationship with a woman. But neither of them had the chemistry with her that they had with each other.
The end result is my headcanon for the two of them that they're not necessarily in a sexual relationship, and that the relationship they do have is open as far as sex is concerned. Either of them can go off and have a fling with whoever they like, but at the end of the day they are committed to each other. They love each other and are bound to each other 'til death do them part, but there's enough trust that neither worries about the other going off and having fun with whichever girl has caught his eye this week. Once the infatuation with the new girl has passed, they will always return to each other.
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What if you've thought about this for a long time and done lots of self examination and still find that your individual sexuality doesn't include desire for somebody who has a particular set of genitalia or secondary sex characteristics? Like I've really tried. It just leaves me cold, and I know I'm far from alone. Feels weird to be constantly called a bigot for something that is so personal, and that I cannot change 🤷
(I’m assuming this ask is in response to my reblogging this, from @cipheramnesia)
It’s funny that you are asking me this, anon, because I’m both ace and trans- what people have in their pants doesn’t really play much role for me in the grand scheme of things.
I’ve spent a lot of personal time researching sexual attraction, how it works, what it feels like. I’ve asked people to tell me about it and I’ve observed how they interact with it. It’s a feeling I experience very infrequently, if at all, so it’s endlessly fascinating to me.
I’ve also spent a lot of time researching gender identity, dysphoria, euphoria, and the roles they play in peoples’ lives. I’ve spent a lot of time talking to trans people about their experiences as trans people, and I’ve lived my whole life as a trans person.
Given these, I like to think those identities and their overlap gives me a unique perspective to talk about this kind of thing. Please keep in mind that I am not every trans person, every ace person, or every queer person.
Now I’m going to take a page out of Hannah Gadsby’s book, and set your expectations. In other words, here’s a TLDR:
Your sexuality/attraction probably isn’t specifically focused on genitals.
If you’re uncomfortable being called a bigot, ask yourself if you’re behaving like one.
Genitals are gross. People who find them gross still sleep with them, because they’re attracted to the rest of the person.
Even if you specifically have attraction for a specific genital type, you’re probably not going to meet many people genital-first.
“Secondary sex characteristics” that are associated with cis men appear in cis women, and ones that are associated with cis women appear in cis men, naturally.
Your attraction probably has room for things other than the specific look/feel/shape of the genitals of your partner. Consider that any partners you take, or people you feel attraction for, exist outside of any sexual activities you do together (which may or may not involve taking off your pants).
Homework: Examine, please, why you are so focused on genitalia as a deciding factor in your sexuality. It might be the people around you or the people who helped you come out, but it’s important to consider why you think these hypothetical genitals will make or break your potential relationships.
Now that that’s out of the way, let’s begin.
To start: I’m sorry that someone has made you think that your sexuality is only specifically about genitals. It really sucks. Correlating genitals to sexuality has been used for a long time to defend anything from “not exposing” children to non-straight/cis content, to denying health care and housing to people “because we don’t want people doing that, here”.
(Because queer and non-cishet identities are all About Sex and the genitals involved, obviously.)
It sounds like you’re bothered by this topic. Maybe it’s just because you are uncomfortable with being called a bigot, or maybe you actually are a bigot. I don’t know you. I’m going to respond as if it’s the first, because I know there are probably a couple people who follow me with similar concerns.
What I do know is, to put it bluntly, the argument that “my sexuality doesn’t allow for this set of genitals/secondary sex characteristics” is one that gets thrown around in a lot of anti-trans rhetoric, and it’s poison. So lets break down why someone might hear you say that, and then think you are a bigot.
Genitals are gross. I’ve asked people who are REALLY INTO GUYS, who have slept with guys, and have been told (by multiple people!) that penises are weird, and not that sexy. I did then ask, of course, “why do you have sex with them then?” The answer I got was because... apparently, they were also attracted to the rest of the guy. Who knew, right?
I’ve also asked people who are REALLY INTO GIRLS, who have slept with girls, and have been told (again, by multiple people) that vulvas are weird, and not that sexy. Their answer to why they have sex with a body part that’s not that sexy? Also attraction to the rest of the girl.
Why do I mention these? Because even people who are REALLY attracted to a specific gender aren’t (generally) all that invested in the genitals of their partners. I don’t know what kind of life you live, anon, but unless you exclusively meet your partners/people you find attractive via cam-girl tapes or porn, chances are you’ve met and been attracted to at least a couple of trans people who have transitioned, people you would never expect to have (insert binary genital type here).
Let’s talk about secondary sex characteristics. You’re familiar with terms like AGAB/AFAB/AMAB? If you’re not, google them (all together so they come up with the correct definitions). I’ll wait.
Okay, now that you know what they mean, let’s use a hypothetical. Imagine a baby girl is born, and the doctor looks and says “it’s a girl!” Everything looks fine. She grows up, gets her period, examines her gender identity and decides that she is cis.
Now, the secondary sex characteristics people tend to expect from cis women after puberty include a moderately high voice, soft skin, rounded facial features. Socially, women are also pressured to remove body hair and have long hair on their heads, and to move in certain ways to be “ladylike” or “sexy” or “demure” or whatever. Also, generally, people associate vulvas with “ability to get pregnant”.
But lots of cis women don’t fit those! Google Indian or Israeli or Arabic women, who are genetically more likely to have thicker and darker facial and body hair. Google PCOS or endometriosis, which can cause deepening voice, increased and darker facial/body hair, fertility issues and pain. Google vaginismus, which makes PIV sex very painful or impossible. There are posture issues and disabilities that make moving fluidly tricky, and disorders (like hyperthyroidism) that make your head hair fall out or thin. These are all secondary sex characteristics.
The issue I take with your dismissal of “certain secondary sex characteristics” is that, well, they’re secondary. Each body responds differently to genetics and environment both. There are cis men with soft skin, sparse body hair, long head hair, men with high voices and more fluid mannerisms and softer facial features, as well. These not indicators that the person in question is Actually Secretly Trans and is out to hoodwink you.
The argument you’ve brought to me seems to be “I don’t like x genital, therefore I couldn’t sleep with/be attracted to someone who is not cis”. I invite you to, instead of wondering about what genitals you are “attracted to”, consider what kind of person you like. Are they funny? Smart? Beautiful? Handsome? A mix of all of those? Do they tell you jokes? Help you with chores? Are they kind to you?
Honestly, anon, I don’t care who you are attracted to or who you sleep with. I’m not telling you that you need to be attracted to people you don’t find attractive.
But I strongly, strongly urge you to consider why the hypothetical genitals of the people around you are so important to you. Maybe you should reconsider whoever you’re hanging out with, who’s asking you these questions, because I doubt they have your best interest at heart, or the best interest of the trans people around you.
We get attacked, around the world, every day because of our genitals. People police us all the time, want us to “man up” or “be ladylike”, either to pass better or to force us to commit to play the role of cis for the rest of our lives. But the cure for this is NOT tapping out the moment trans people - and our genitals - are brought up and complaining that “I just don’t find (insert genital) sexy!”
As Cipher noted (in that post waaay back at the top of this thing), she’s married to someone who doesn’t particularly like penises, but loves her dearly, and Cipher, in turn, also isn’t a fan of her own. I promise you, anon, I promise you, genitals are strange, and love is stranger. Don’t put your attraction on the fulcrum of “what genitals I will sleep with”. (Note: you also don’t have to sleep with whoever you’re into, I promise, take it from an ace person who doesn’t have sex and still has a lovely time with the people I’m into.)
Instead, here’s a little homework: Consider what is attractive to you about the people you like, and try to let go of the idea of what does or doesn’t constitute a man or woman. Including genitals, sure, but also including secondary sex characteristics. Trust me. It’s worth the work.
#Anonymous#asks#improving#under a readmore because I wrote ~1400 words in response#anon I hope this actually helps you. sorry I took three weeks to write it out#I have been VVV busy#and had no wifi for a good bit#transgender#attraction#sexuality
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Hit Or Miss || Morgan & Bex
TIMING: Current
PARTIES: @inbextween & @mor-beck-more-problems
SUMMARY: Morgan tries to get to know Bex over a game of Battleship. Explosions may or may not ensue.
CONTAINS: brief references to transphobia
There were a few things that death couldn’t take away from Morgan: love, the view of a January day, and board games. She had never been much of a fan as a kid, they were bulky, hard to pack in a hurry, and as soon as you lost a couple pieces, all that mess became worthless. But at Karen’s house a lifetime ago, the novelty special editions of Monopoly and Life and the varnished wood sets of checkers and parcheesi had seemed like treasures from another world; one where the ground was steady beneath your feet and it never occurred to you that the nice things you loved would fall apart. Today, she ran her fingers over a battered edition of Battleship: Classic (was there a Battleship: passé somewhere?) and brought it down to the table by the window she was bogarting at Board to Death, grinning affectionately at the scuffed pegs and stained ships hiding under the lid. It was the only coffee shop in town that anything to offer besides food she couldn’t taste. Her triple espresso had a soothing bitter taste, but all the icing in the world on the danishes or dipped vegan scones couldn’t bring back her old sense of taste.
She sipped the just-below-boiling mixture and watched the living world shuffle by in their puffy coats and bright scarves. When she saw a nervous looking girl approach the window she smiled, nodding in case it was her. When she entered the cafe, Morgan held out her hand. “Hey, you’re Bex, right?”
The strangest part about being back in White Crest was that it felt so nice. There was something about this place that felt enough like home that Bex almost didn’t altogether mind her overbearing parents controlling her every move. Almost. They’d delighted in the fact that she was being scouted by a professor already, and she’d opted to not mention the part where said professor was gay and also recommended by someone who thought they were a witch. For some reason, Bex trusted Nell’s judgement, and Professor Beck seemed really nice. And, well, Bex couldn’t help but leap at the idea of meeting a real life queer person. Especially a woman. Who was out! And open! Even if she couldn’t really ask her about it today. The concept was novel. And so Bex really wanted this meeting to be good.
Therefore, she kept an excited demeanor about herself as she made her way to Board to Death, trying to push the anxiety away. Put on a smile when she opened the door, and glanced around for Professor Beck, seeing her through the window. She scooted herself over, taking her hand. “Hey! Hi, yes! That’s me! I’m Bex! That makes you Professor Beck, then! Unless you’re not, which would make this very awkward,” she chuckled, then stopped, clearing her throat. “S-sorry. Um, hi, thanks for meeting with me!” Glanced down to look at her refreshments on the table, then back up. “I never really knew Board to Death had food! I’ve only been here a few times. Do you come here a lot?”
“I am Professor Beck, yes, but you can just call me Morgan. Pretty much everyone does.” Morgan took another sip of her espresso and gestured for the girl to sit. It wasn’t every day she could tell someone she’d spoken with online just from their demeanor, but Bex was nearly vibrating out of her skin with anxiety. It was an excited kind of anxious, like her face might hurt from smiling so much, but it still gave Morgan some pause. This was a girl who had wrecked a whole computer lab with just the force of her emotions. Even if she couldn’t accept magic yet, some kind emotional release would probably be good for her. “I don’t come here much, no. Coffee tastes pretty much the same to me anywhere, and at least here it comes with something fun to do. You’ve played Battleship before, right? It’s only one of a couple of two player games I’m familiar with that doesn’t make you think too much.” Grinning at her, Morgan lifted the top from the game and started assembling her board.
“Oh, um--” Bex started, feeling that anxiousness already bubbling in her throat again, “-- I’ll try, but no promises. My parents sort of drilled it into me that it’s ‘Mister’ and ‘Misses’, or ‘Doctor’ and ‘Professor’ only!” Her face scrunched, as if she were trying to be angry and she lifted a finger to waggle. A poor imitation of her father. “You are a child, Odelia, and you will address your elders properly!” Not realizing she’d let slip her real name, she looked back across the table at Professor Be-- er, Morgan. “Oh, yeah, I’m much more of a tea person, myself. Coffee makes me jittery and anxious and I think I’m plenty of that all on my own, you know?” She watched as Morgan began assembling the game, not saying too much. Her father had made her play old strategy games like Risk and Chess for hours on end as a child, but Battleship had never seemed to reach their table. “Um, once, at school. You just kinda guess coordinates, right?”
Morgan couldn’t hide the arch in her brow as Bex gave a different name as she impersonated her parents. Did they not address her the way she asked to be? Did she keep the name she gave out to acquaintances as a secret? Still, she snorted kindly and finished setting up her board. “It’s good that you know yourself at least. I’m not sure if the world is ready for a caffeinated Bex just yet.” She finished setting up her board and started on her ships, keeping them mostly spread out from each other. “And yeah, it’s just a fun guessing game! If you know your opponent well, you can try and guess their methodology, but it’s, you know--” She held up the box lid, “Ages 6 and up.” With everything set aside on her end, she could lean back and relax. “So, I do hope you’ll take one of my seminars. My syllabus is way more fun than the other professors’, not to knock my colleagues, because they’re amazing, but I hand out movies and, occasionally, video games too. We look at what speculative and fantastical stories tell us about humanity, how we see ourselves and each other and why changes in those perceptions matter. And, you know, with all the writing homework, you’ll probably get a leg up on your fellow pre-law students. Anyone can have an idea or a feeling, but it takes work to give voice to it. But, that’s my one and only pitch. I’d much rather get to know you. Sometimes strangers can be easier to open up to than others.”
“Oh, it’s definitely not,” Bex agreed with a chuckle. She watched Morgan set up her side-- without peeking, of course!-- before working to set her own side up. She didn’t entirely know the best strategy for Battleship, but she decided she wanted to go for an out there one, sticking all of her ships right in a square in the middle of the map. “Well, I’m definitely six and up, so, I think we’re all good. Who goes first?” She looked across the table to Morgan as she continued to fuss with her pieces, wondering which formation was better, listening to her description of her course. “It sounds like a great class,” she said when the older woman was done speaking, but there was something vibrating inside of her. Something about the description, something about how free and open the course sounded, made her realize something else was going on here. Bex might have been closed off and insecure, but she was observant as well. It was one of the qualities that made her an actual decent law student. Her gaze dropped to her board and she pulled her hands away. “I’m ready to start, then,” she said, lifting her eyes just enough to gaze over the top of the board, the double meaning of her sentence not lost on either of them.
Morgan watched Bex thoughtfully, from the tightness in her shoulders to the shrill chirp of her voice. She was trying, eagerly, desperately, but for what? Morgan wanted to tell her to relax, there were no quizzes or grades handed out at the end of this meet-up. But having been that anxious herself more than once, she knew drawing attention directly didn’t always have the desired effect. “A-10?” She called. “Why don’t you tell me about why you like it here? I thought I saw you mention something about ‘coming back’ on main and I gotta say, I haven’t heard of too many people returning after they’d left. Well, not often by choice anyway.”
“Miss,” Bex said quietly, sticking a peg into A-10. “E-6?” she tried, waiting for the response. She chewed on her lip at the question, thinking a moment. It wasn’t that she really liked it here, but White Crest was home and she knew she had a place here. And even if she hadn’t gone to school here, or grown up with the other kids, or become a regular at all the diners-- she still felt like she fit in here. More so than at Penn State, where the kids looked at her with those eyes, and whispered behind their hands, and posted her private life online. “It just...feels like home, I guess. I went to private school as a kid, so it’s not like I really have any sort of connection to the town, but I just feel right here,” she explained softly, neither smiling nor frowning. She stuck a peg into the missed slot. “I came back because I had to.” Where she really wanted to be was far away from the East coast, maybe in Oregon or Washington or California. Somewhere she could start over brand new and be whoever she wanted to be. She cleared her throat. “How um-- how long have you been in White Crest?”
“Miss,” Morgan called. She let a round pass unremarked, taking in as much as she could. She was just bundled up so tight, it was no wonder she’d exploded in front of Nell. That much repression might do the same even to someone without magic. “Private school, huh? Like boarding school? I didn’t realize those were still a thing in this country.” She made another call, D-6, and took another sip of espresso. “I’ve been here for a year now. I’m starting to see how somebody could feel like they belonged here, even with all the terribleness. It’s not an easy fit, but I don’t think I could leave on a dime, not by myself anyway. But what--is it okay if I ask what made you have to come back? Or if not, maybe tell me about someplace else you dream of being. Those are good ideas to hold onto. The future, I mean.”
“Yep,” Bex said dismissively, “I went to a private boarding school. And they definitely still exist here.” And they suck, she wanted to add, but held her tongue. Uniforms and strict schedules and forced rules. Secrets and hush money and skirting around the fact that Bex was not born a girl. “My parents paid good money for it, it was a Jewish Orthodox school, a really good one, too,” she went on, swallowing down the hard feelings. They didn’t matter anymore. “The town certainly has a charm to it, doesn’t it?” She stuck a peg right between two of her ships as a miss. “Miss. Um...H-7?” She looked up again, contemplating which question she wanted to answer. They both would give away too much, and she was bad at lying. “There was an incident at my old school,” she finally said, the waver in her voice coming through, “my parents thought it best I come back home.”
“It’s okay, Bex,” Morgan said softly. “I want to know you, but you don’t have to talk about anything you don’t really want to. But I am sorry about whatever happened to you over there. It doesn’t seem like something easy.” She tilted her head, trying to meet the girl’s eyes. There was something there, something awful. Bullies, maybe? Did kids chase Bex and lock her in storage cabinets and call her names like they had Morgan? Or was there some kind of accident with her magic? “What do you want, Bex? However important your parents are to your life, however close you might be, your life is still yours. Your future should look like what you hope for. Why don’t you tell me more about that, huh? Or how the law firm fits into that idea.” Another sip of espresso. “Miss, by the way.” She scanned her grid and made a guess toward the middle. “F-6?”
Bexley swallowed hard, trying to make the worble that was building in her throat go away. “It’s okay, it’s kind of public information, anyway,” she stated matter of factly, moving away from the topic enough to not feel too overwhelmed, and thankful for Morgan’s offer. But the next question felt even harder, and Bex could feel the anxiety building in her stomach again. Her hand shook as she went to plug in the peg next to her ship, one hole away and she had to grip it with her other to make it stop. “I want to make my parents proud,” she stated, as if reading from a script, “I’m the sole heir to our business and fortune. That’s all there is to it. M-my future. That’s all I want. To be the perfect daughter for them.” And stop messing up. Since she couldn’t be their son. Since she couldn’t be the best. “Miss,” she said and her voice cracked. “F-5?”
“Miss,” Morgan replied. “And you don’t have to be perfect. No one is perfect. Perfect in terms of being flawless and incapable of improvement isn’t even a real thing. And your parents--” Morgan frowned. She had a lot of fairy tales about what parents should be like, but the more people she met, the more she wondered where she had cooked that one up. “The best way to love someone is to enable them to be the most themselves. The best, freest version of themself. And asking yourself those questions is the best way to find yourself loved better. I don’t know what your situation is, Bex, but you shouldn’t live to be an object in someone else’s story. You’re more than that. What is it that really excites you? What do you hope for?” Morgan waited, peering at this small glimpse of Bex’s pain with growing concern. Then, suddenly remembering that she had yet to call a move, she distractedly mumbled something a few spaces out from her last one. “E-5?”
Bex didn’t like this anymore. Morgan was saying things she already knew, but she also already knew that they were things she couldn’t have, so what was the point in thinking about them? In talking about them? She didn’t even bother putting a peg in this time. This was supposed to be a fun, easy meeting, not a deep dive into her extremely painful situation. “Please stop,” was all she said, hands folded tightly into her lap, “just...please?” Fingers began to pick at nail beds, still red and raw from every other time she’d done it. “All I hope for right now is to make it through each day without messing up or embarrassing someone,” she admitted quietly, but her voice was stern, an anger stewing inside of her that she rarely let to the surface, “And I just hope that I can make it through the week without some shit happening. And I hope that one day I’ll be able to look back on all this and put it behind me, but that’s not feasible right now so I really need to just not think about it and keep trying my best for my parents because they’re all I have.” And she owed them everything. Shakily, she lifted the peg and placed it on one of her ships. “Hit.” A loud whistle behind the cafe counter signaled steaming water and Bex startled. She let out a long sigh. “A-2.”
“I’m sorry,” Morgan said quickly. “I don’t mean to-- I am being sincere in what I am saying and whatever me or my life looks like to you or anyone else peeking on main apparently, it’s-- I do know what it’s like to feel like your life isn’t yours and what you want doesn’t matter and keeping your head down and being small and left alone is the best you’re gonna get. I am deeply, intimately familiar with that feeling. I can only imagine what kind of suffering you’ve been through, but you were meant for more than that, and I’m sorry. I’ll stop, okay? Do you--” Morgan stopped as another kettle trilled, glowing with sudden heat. She made a note of the hit, but didn’t put the red peg on the board. Flustered and desperate to recover the afternoon, she pawed her pockets for her phone. “I have cats. Three of them. Do you want to see pictures of the cats? Or ask me something? This isn’t an interview. If there’s something you want to know you can--” The phone clattered onto the table. Deirdre and Anya’s faces bloomed on the lock screen. “You can do whatever you want, Bex, you don’t even have to stay.”
Everything Morgan was saying just made Bex tense up more and more. Kettle’s started shouting, left and right, even the baristas were beginning to panic, running around and removing them, but finding them still screaming, louder and louder, despite the lack of heat. A crack formed in the window next to Bex as she screwed her eyes shut and clenched her entire body. She didn’t want anyone to feel sorry for her or tell her how much they understood or tell her how sad it was-- she wanted to pretend like how she was living was okay and fine and that one day she’d make it through and suddenly everything would feel okay. And just be okay. She unclenched and the whistles seemed to die down. Looked at the phone that had fallen to the table and saw the happy woman on it, smiling and beautiful. And the cat, so peaceful looking. Tears welled in her eyes. “I have to go,” she said suddenly, standing up. The chair scooted back and toppled over. People turned around to look at them. Her heart seemed to leap into her throat and the mug on the table shattered. “I’m sorry! I have to--” took a step back and all the teapots wailed again. Bex looked around frantically. “It-- It was nice to meet you, Professor Beck, but I--” she didn’t get to finish her sentence as one of the pistons on the espresso machine shot off and shattered a nearby tower of cups. Bex turned and ran before anyone had a chance to ask her anything.
“Bex, wait! You need to--!” Whatever half-assed plea Morgan was working on fizzled out under the crash of falling furniture and screaming machinery. Someone’s baby started wailing, the window buckled like it had been gut-punched, and the steam whirred louder. Morgan grabbed her coat and bag and phone. She wasn’t sure what was going to happen to downtown with Bex like this, if she could talk her down or if following would only make things worse. Shit, probably worse, right? But by the time she stumbled out the door, the girl was long gone and all Morgan had left were more questions. At least she would be able to tell Nell one thing for certain: Bexley was not okay, and under her nerves lay a sadness too deep for her to contain, especially in White Crest.
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