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#queer wrestling fans
scumbag4scumbag · 15 days
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This one's for the gays... (queers, bis, pans, trans, etc)
Gonna run this poll for a week... this IS for actual reasons, so please vote... Going on the honor system that queer folks only will vote, but I know there's no way to know for sure, so please be nice.
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eldesperadont · 9 months
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LXKAKJCJSNSNJAHS???? MY MOM JUST CALLED HOOK A LIL GAY BOY??
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emismunch · 5 months
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rhea ripley is a damn homophobe she has fully said the f slur
omg really????? when did this happen i didn’t know holy fuck wtf i’m genuinely sorry babe fuck
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wnightingales · 9 months
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I've been getting into wrestling for the past couple months and just wanted to say that I found your tumblr really helpful for me, because it can be hard to find a more female and/or queer perspective on the topic and especially in aew. I mean, we are all aware of the problems in the women's division and in the fandom itself, but it helps to know that I am not just hallucinating and making up problems where there aren't any and that other people think so, too. Yeah, that's all haha. Keep up the work!
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ahhh this made my heart so warm to read!!! i feel like aew, overall, has a much queerer community than any other wrestling i’ve seen so this was a bit surprising to me! though my main wrestling online hubs are tumblr and reddit and i can already see what you mean on reddit…lmao. i hope your journey into wrestling is fun!!!
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sassysnowperson · 11 months
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How Not to Read Terry Pratchett's Discworld Novels
With the very exciting fantasy books poll bracket going on Discworld and how to read it is in the zeitgeist again. I figured I would take a crack at adding to this important topic with a guide drawn from my own chaotic mess of a reading journey:
Learn that Terry Pratchett is a fantasy author that several people whose reading taste you admire enjoy. He apparently blends comedy, good plotting, and a world that is both grounded and satirical and you're a big fan of all those things.
Fabulous! Decide to read some of his work.
Go to your local library. Love a good library. You're new to the area, so you're also exploring the library for the first time, too.
You have found Terry Pratchett! Points to you! Pull a book off the shelf at random. It's called The Dark Side of the Sun.
Start reading. Realize that this feels more like sci-fi than fantasy. Sigh in smug superiority about people who get the two confused.
Realize about halfway through that this is not, in fact, a Discworld book.
Nobody warned you the guy wrote other things!
It's still good, tho. Maybe a little rough but this was an older book and the author clearly has potential. Let's try again.
Review his works. The vast majority are Discworld. You are highly unlikely to grab another non-Discworld book. Go back to the Terry Pratchett section of the library.
Oh hey he wrote a book with Neil Gaiman! You've hears of that guy!
Grab Good Omens off the shelf.
Take it home, realize, much sooner, that this is also not a Discworld book. Still enjoy yourself thoroughly. You should read more of this Gaiman dude, too.
But okay. For real this time. Go back to the library and don't leave without *CONFIRMING* you have a Discworld book this time.
Grab a book. Look at the cover. Read the back Discworld! Ha HA! You've done it!
It's called Thud.
You are utterly gripped by a story of a man wrestling with himself, his growing child, the political tensions of a city and extremism that echoes reality beautifully while still being entirely true to itself. It's a story of responsibility and love and building communities and Fantasy Chess. You are driven nearly to tears by the sentence *WHERE IS MY COW?*
You emerge from the book fundamentally changed as a person, and finally understanding what all the fuss is about. You are now a Terry Pratchett reader for life.
You realize Thud was in the middle of a series. That was a part of another series. That explains why there was a feeling that you were supposed to know some of these people already.
You finally find one of those flowcharts and figure out a more sensible reading order.
I always sort of laugh when people ask where to start reading Discworld, because Thud would be first on absolutely nobody's sensible Terry Pratchett reading order. I'm still tempted to recommend it though!
(My actual advice: Going Postal if you love con men being stuck doing the right thing, Wee Free Men if you like YA and smart angry girls owning their own power, Guards! Guards! *and* Men at Arms if you like crime shows with heart and are okay giving earlier work a try (the quality gets better and better, but I think it needs at least two books to get you into it), and Monstrous Regiment if you like gender and queer feelings, anti-war books told in the middle of a war, and/or would prefer a stand alone novel...and, you know, Thud if you want a great read and don't mind some chaos.)
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lurkingshan · 3 months
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A love letter to TsukuTabe
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I loved the first season of this drama, but this second season (really more of a straightforward continuation of the first season narrative, which ended unfinished) is a remarkable glow up for an already strong show. These creators did not come to play, and they had a lot to say about the experiences of women living in patriarchal cultures.
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This drama tackled so many experiences that afab people go through as they try to build a life for themselves under pressure to conform to societal norms. We have so many different lived experiences of women in this show, all of whom are queer by way of falling outside the lines of what is expected of them:
Nomoto, who experiences a queer awakening, wrestles with the specifics of her sexual identity, and bravely forges ahead despite feeling pressure from her family to marry a man and procreate
Kasuga, who breaks with her family's expectations that she be a caretaker and insists on living her own life, even if she knows the culture she lives in will sometimes make it hard
Yako, who owns her asexual and lesbian identities, proudly forges a life for herself, builds community for herself and others, and advocates for that community both publicly and privately
Nagumo, who struggles to connect with others because of her eating disorder and mental health struggles and lives a solitary existence as a result, but through building bonds with other women finds the strength to begin healing
Sayama, who pushes herself to date around because she feels pressure to live up to expectations to marry, before reconsidering whether that is a goal she actually has for her life and realizing she is happy being unmarried
Fujita, who struggles through years of an unhappy marriage in which she is subjugated to her husband's family before breaking free and pursuing a divorce so she can live happily on her own
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It means a lot to me to see a show that cares so deeply about these women and their stories, that gives them so much space to explore and think and communicate their feelings. And they do it all so naturally, by allowing them to form bonds with one another and figure out who they are and what they want through their relationships with each other. This story is all about how we can grow through kindness and compassion from others, and how important it is to pay that support back in kind. It's such a beautiful and unique and desperately needed message in the current media landscape.
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And there's more story yet to tell! I have no idea if they will get a third season, but I will be seated for as much of this story as the creators want to make. I would love to see them tackle Nomoto and Kasuga's life as a committed couple, their coming out to their families, and the ongoing lives of the community of queer women around them, which will only continue to broaden and deepen. Like What Did You Eat Yesterday? this show could go on and on forever, and I hope it does. I have so much gratitude for all the people involved in making this show, and to @furritsubs for translating the English subtitles so that international fans could also enjoy it. And if you're seeing this and haven't watched it yet, I am telling you, it is so worth your time.
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takeme-totheworld · 5 months
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You Can't Go Home Again
I'm someone who walked away from my childhood religion almost twenty years ago, and I'm very firmly at a place in my life now where I am very happy to be through with it and have zero lingering desire to go back. I've also been out as some kind of queer person for the same almost-twenty years, and I've been out as trans for almost fifteen of those years.
If you knew absolutely nothing else about me or my life except for those major plot points, and the fact that I'm a Good Omens fan, it would be reasonable to assume that I would identify with Crowley far more than Aziraphale. At least at this point in my life. And in fact, I've seen many fans with backgrounds similar to mine say that they used to be much more like Aziraphale when they were younger, but nowadays they see far more of themself in Crowley. Which makes sense, as a trajectory for people who grew up in controlling religions and then left!
I've been trying to figure out what it is about me that makes me so automatically take Aziraphale's perspective when watching this show, even though the most aggressively Aziraphale time of my life was literal decades ago now. And I think that's probably a very complicated answer, but I realized today that I see an emotional struggle happening in him that I still wrestled with for years and years after leaving the church before I was finally able to completely put it to rest—the struggle to accept that some things can never go back to the way they were.
I seriously suffered so much over this for so long after I left the church. Despite all the damage it had done to me, my entire life had been intertwined with the church and a lot of things that were good—or at least deeply comforting in their familiarity—had also been a part of that. I had plenty of genuinely happy memories all mixed together with the harmful ones (which, in case you were wondering, is confusing as hell). There were fundamental human needs that I had only ever gotten met through the church, and as double-edged as what the church provided was, it was all I knew. Learning to get those needs met in new ways was much healthier, but it wasn't what I had always known growing up and it was a loss.
And I spent a long time refusing to fully accept that going back to any version of Christianity or the church just...wasn't ever going to be in the cards for me.
That is in the cards for some people, I know. Some folks who leave or get kicked out of ultra-dogmatic and controlling churches eventually find new homes in much more progressive and nurturing ones. And that's great! But that was never going to be my path. The process of seeing my childhood religion for what it truly was, losing my beliefs, leaving everything the church was to me further and further behind, and gradually learning who I was without it, changed me too much for me to ever be able to go back again.
I am fine with that now. More than fine. I'm healthier and happier now than I've ever been. Over time I grew into a version of myself that no longer has a church/religion/faith-shaped gaping wound in my life I'm trying to fill. But it was hard and painful and it took a really long time for me to get there. I spent a lot of my twenties and even a bit of my early thirties trying to find something...some new church community that I could be connected to in some way, that would give me back some of what I'd lost when I left my childhood church. But none of them ever did. I was never going to get the same things out of belonging to a church again, because I wasn't the same.
You can't go home again.
I see Aziraphale on that same journey and that's part of what makes my heart automatically go out to him and hurt for him, over and over again. He's still desperately holding onto the idea of a hypothetical version of Heaven and being an angel that can be home again one day. One where all the good things he remembers are still there, and still every bit as good, and all the bad parts have been fixed or gotten rid of, so that being there will be like the old times, only even nicer.
Except that even if he actually succeeded at somehow making Heaven the exact flavor of like-the-old-times-only-even-nicer that he is imagining, it wouldn't matter. Heaven is not his home anymore. He's already changed too much to be able to go back. He just hasn't accepted that yet.
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axel-mania · 4 months
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Something you might have noticed if you've ever looked at old joshi, particularly AJW in the 80s, is that nearly half of the wrestlers are either androgynous or outright masculine. I've heard the explanation for why we got the Beauty Pair, that they were casting Jackie Sato as the Takarazuka otokoyaku and Maki Ueda as the musumeyaku in order to sell CDs to teenage girls. This was queer-coded, obviously, but acceptable to mainstream society as Takarazuka is a transient and exaggerated performance. (Its purported goal is for girls to perform masculinity so they can empathize with their future husbands... lol and lmao.)
However, that clearly wasn't the formula they were following for the Crush Girls: they're both butches! And so I've looked at the idol culture at the time that AJW's rival JWP explicitly tried to emulate, which is very different from today. Girls groups actually tried to appeal to teenage girls and not just adult men, with a youthful girlishness that did by avoiding sexuality often seem fairly androgynous. At least, that's my impression from looking at them, and maybe I'm totally off base. So we could posit that to appeal to teenage girl fans, wrestlers similarly had to look accessible in spite of their muscles and scariness. The alternative is too crazy to think about. That being that they promoted so many fucking butches to appeal to the kinds of girls that grow up to be lesbians! Which is when I present exhibit A, "Boy".
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AJW, what is this? Well, it's a photobook by a wrestler named Kanako Nagatomo, who wrestled at the same time as the Crush Gals and was apparently very popular. Here's another insanity inducing tidbit, a video of her in a suit holding flowers and looking like your highschool boyfriend about to pick you up for the school dance. It's kind of the ultimate expression of the contradiction here, a constructed package for us to buy into yet only really emphasizing the looks these wrestlers chose to adopt every day of their lives.
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How else do we explain this? Genuinely? Because we know there's always going to be queer women interested in handsome butches. The peculiar thing is this being broadcast on mainstream television on a channel for mothers and their children. What strange historical factors gave us such mainstream queerness in a way we'll likely never have again? I know why we don't have it anymore. Rossy Ogawa, who climbed up the ranks of AJW management, and then started his own promotions after its demise, thought joshi could only grow by marketing to men and dropped all the show business meant to appeal to women. And now our big joshi promotions are Stardom and TJPW, where almost everyone is extremely feminine and we release sexy photobooks (which I do enjoy, don't get me wrong).
Anyway, this is what Nagatomo looks like now. (Sona and I both immediately thought "Blue hair and pronouns??") Still androgynous by choice, but married. Maybe the simplest explanation is the wrestlers saw their peers presenting a certain way and liked the look of it enough to copy it, without anything else in mind.
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doberbutts · 4 months
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I also think- having recently seen a post that said Blue Eye Samurai isn't a queer story, it just has queer elements- that sometimes it feels like fans cannot make up their minds.
Do we or do we not want stories that treat being gay as a perfectly normal, perfectly common experience the same way straight people are depicted in every story to ever exist?
In BES, no one is outright stated to be queer. That's partially because in Japan, until Japan felt the need to sanitize itself to appeal to foreigners, it wasn't unheard of at all for men to be gay. Multiple famous samurai and swordsmen and nobles were either outspokenly gay or are commonly theorized to have been gay in modern historical readings. Abijah making multiple references to swinging both ways, Kaji's offer of a male prostitute, the various scenes we have of men being together in sexual positions, they're not met with surprise because homosexuality was an acknowledged thing that happened.
Taigen's erection while he's wrestling Mizu, even though he doesn't yet know her secret, is treated awkwardly because they're supposed to dislike each other and also he's supposed to be in love with Akemi, not because "whoa bro no homo".
(This is also why I keep saying that it's difficult for me to put into English words what I think Mizu's gender is, because gender and sexuality quite frankly did not work the way my 2020s American brain wants to contextualize it, and I think it's important to consider the cultural aspects here esp in a show so heavily leaning on a racial story)
However, compared to many other shows out there even regarding the same area and country, BES is significantly more queer than the majority of them produced in the last 30 years. Is Mizu herself queer? Well... maybe, depending how you define it. Back in the day, otherwise cisgender crossdressers and male-impersonators were still grouped in with those we'd call transgender nowadays. She seems to be exclusively interested in men, but also seems to be equally receptive to considering herself sexually as both a man and a woman pairing with men, than as a man or woman pairing with women which she has adamantly refused with zero interest on multiple occasions.
Is Taigen bi? I mean, maybe! He seemed more mortified that he had an unwanted erection in front of someone he wanted to impress and play with, than that he had it over someone he considers a man, using the excuse that he misses his would-be fiance.
Abijah certainly seems to be bisexual, considering we see him having sex with both women and men, and his various sexual references talk about both men and women as well. This is ignoring whatever weird sexual tension thing he's got going with Heiji, who seems both receptive and repulsed by it.
And, not to be remiss, but there is a reason I specified that homosexuality among men was pretty known. Due to the more rigid policing of women's sexuality in this era, homosexuality among women was less commonly reported (though I have heard stories of noble women and their handmaids, or the working poor women, or among prostitutes living together in the brothels, so also not unheard of but perhaps less accepted as women were largely bought and sold in marriage and sex trafficking) - but even with all of that, Kaji and Kinuyo have something together. Whether that is a mother-daughter thing, or if they were lovers, is up to interpretation. The implication that out of everyone at the brothel that Kaji genuinely cares for, Kinuyo was special, and that wasn't a particularly uncommon arrangement historically if I'm hearing about it 400 years later in a completely different country.
So this "well it's not a queer show" and "if I was told this was a queer story I'd be disappointed" is honestly just ridiculous hooey to me. Do you want characters who are able to explore their sexualities without looking over their shoulder out of fear of homophobia, or not?
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undisputed-queer-a · 1 month
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Fuck The Oklahoma Athletic Commission, or why Nyla Rose deserves the world
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It has been half a year, but I'm back. I told myself I wouldn't write another piece until the right topic came up, and it has.
For those not in the know according to this source: https://okcfox.com/news/local/oklahoma-commission-issues-warning-against-all-elite-wrestling-after-transgender-match7
The Oklahoma Athletic commission have warned AEW "not to do this again or there will be punitive action made against them" in reference to Nyla Rose wrestling a Ciswoman on AEW.
I assume that I need not explain how backwards that is but I shall just quickly. With the amount of time I can assume Nyla has been on HRT there will be absolutely no remnants of Testosterone or other male hormones in her. But also that is all not relevant because this is pro wrestling not any actual sport.
AEW should absolutely never run Oklahoma again (or just run it again and have Nyla on the card) because this is outrageous.
I am a transgender professional wrestling fan. I am a transgender professional wrestling fan who had been having a good day. This has unmade my day. Nyla Rose has uplifted and inspired me so many times and I will never be able to thank her enough for it. AEW made a promise when they made her the second ever AEW women's champion. They may not have known it but to me that made a promise that AEW was a safe place for Trans fans and Trans wrestlers. I hope they maintain that and uphold this promise.
We love you Nyla.
This has been Undisputed Queer-a.
Slay The System, Shock The Cis-tem
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orange-catsidy · 6 months
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on one hand i love calling my 40 y/o male wrestler favs babygirls and saying theyre for the gays and such but on the other, when i see like, 16 y/o wrestling fans doing the same i do get a 'queer neurodivergent teens getting into south park shipping discourse' kind of dread
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heyitsrink · 4 months
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I'm indecisive and easily influenced.
My plans for the weekend were suddenly cancelled which means I have some free time, a strong urge to draw RotE stuff and almost no capacity to decide for myself.
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eldesperadont · 2 years
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sometimes i think about the tumblr girlies (derogatory) that basically complained about Kenny not being visibly queer enough, i hope yall are doing better mentally
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naamahdarling · 4 months
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I'm creating a Eldritch horror story and I'm trying to base it off my own fears. Following that same logic, what kind of cosmic horror would you make?
I was raised with Lovecraft stories (paraphrased at first) as bedtime stories, so I sort of have eldritch/cosmic horror in my blood. I really really really love it.
The Magnus Archives hit it so far out of the park that any sort of eldritch powers fiction I create after this is now going to have to reckon with its presence in the genre. I...do not feel I personally have anything to add to that specific sort of angle after what they produced. Genuinely. Which doesn't mean I won't create, just that I'm aware that whatever I do isn't going to expand or encapsulate the genre the way TMA did.
I really like anthology horror in general, where related works are grouped by a theme, and the whole "witness statements" format that was a prominent part of TMA (and plenty of others) is VERY appealing to me as a fan of real-world weird occurrences, creepypasta, and personal stories of paranormal events, so the sort of thing I would be most likely to create would be a series of accounts or events relating to the same horrible subject.
I have decided that doing it as Magnus Archives fsnfiction would work just fine. Zero of the same characters showing up. Just witness statements. I actually have several written but I want to finish out the suite of Fears with one for each.
The other thing that really appeals to me is the idea that the monstrous and eldritch can be welcome, especially the influence of it on our bodies, but also in terms of the power that being truly feared gives uz. That the terrible chsnges that happen to you can be, somehow, revelatory and identity-affirming. That's a very trans/disabled/etc. theme.
What about the existential horror you would feel as you become LESS monstrous? That the thing that sets you apart and maybe hurts you but also makes you very powerful is suddenly leaving you. Now you are becoming just like the people that your pride in your monstrousness was intended to spite. How, then, can we be monstrous, be OURSELVES, when no-one can see our monstrousness? When we no longer have access to the Secrets and the Horrors and the Powers and the Knowledge, when that which is Other and Unknowable and Terrifying has left us, what do we do?
What if what most would consider "healing" actually destroyed something in the core of us? What if you grew back a wounded part of yourself and it grew back wrong" is an idea mined often enough in cosmic horror to be recognizable. What if growing back "wrong" meant growing back "normal?"
So I would very much enjoy writing a story where the angle was not "healing is scary to those who have been harmed, but it is ultimately for the best UwU" but "being forced to change to align with what others think is good and healthy until you AGREE WITH THEM is the REAL horror." Something I think most queer/trans people and most disabled people will instinctively grasp.
But I would like to extend that to specifically survivors of trauma, who can feel the sickening pressure of being told at every turn that their role now is to work to "get over" and "recover" from something the world did to them when others' definition of "recovery" (a return to normal, or the ability to re-engage with what traumatized them) can feel immediately, viscerally wrong. A denial of the injured state of the self, a shifting of the responsibility onto the traumatized person and away from external change and justice and restoration. A huge force you don't understand trying to change you or warping things around you? That's cosmic horror, baby. The force trying to change you is just "We need you to stop being different now." And you don't understand why you should want to.
I'm wrestling with this right now in therapy and getting almost nowhere by the standards by which most people define "recovery" because I refuse to see why on earth I should be the one to change or why my hate/anger is a problem I should solve to make things easier in the future for the same kind of people who hurt me.
At my core what I most want is for them to be absolutely terrified of me.
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So there's a lot to work with there.
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cornyonmains · 9 months
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I am SO getting the vibe from Mew's character that he and Top are going to wind up in the 'they deserve each other' category by the end of the series.
Firstly, anyone who thinks Mew didn't 100% plan on backing out last minute on Top has not figured out the game that's being played here, because that was part of Mew's screening process. He wanted to see how Top would respond, he also wanted to bait him in so he could accomplish two things, the first is the it gives Top time to get to know him, and the second is it gives Mew time to figure out Top. See, Mew likes stories, he understands cause and effect. He understands Top's archetype in the gay hierarchy almost immediately, and knows he needs time to figure out which buttons to push. And he does.
Mew picks up fairly quickly that Top likes the dichotomy being created between them, the lothario meets boy next door, it's very storybook, it's what he understands. It's what he plays into, but not so much so that he becomes a parody, because he knows Top's intrigued by how self-possessed and sure of himself he is as well. He's also likely aware of how well-positioned he is to occupy a place in Top's life, because Top comes from a family with money, he's in his final year of college, and the reality of that is when Top does decide on someone to take home to meet the parents, it's not going to be someone like Boston. It was never going to be someone like Boston. It's going to be someone like Mew with his perfect grades, flawless social reputation, and easy-listening music. Mew knows how this game is played.
Except, he really doesn't. And that's where shit will inevitably get toxic. No amount of reading or manipulation is going to prepare him for what happens when he catches feelings, and Top manages to wrestle some of the control Mew has back. He's going to be completely in over his head when control is lost, and emotions come into play. Because emotions are what Top understands. Because he'll know exactly how to use Ray and Boston to drive a wedge between them, and get Mew to himself. And at the end of the day, Mew's sensitivity will probably see him choose Top over Boston and Ray, because he's not going to be able to shake the attachments that form after sleeping with him easily.
And let me tell you something, Boston and Ray are sure to be far from the only problems. If this is as true to the queer community as I think it's going to be, we're talking about a small community. One where certain figures are considered like... the top tier. Two well-known and desired figures in the community coming together like the next Bennifer? Oh that's gonna make waves that extend well beyond Boston and Ray. We're talking about a community where locking down certain people is front page news. We have our "It" girls, same as straight folks.
I haven't been so excited for a piece of queer media since Queer As Folk, and I mean it wasn't actually good. It was Russell T Davies using fan-fiction tropes to get good looking guys to act out his thinly veiled sex fetishes, while throwing queer women the most boring bone of all time. Only Friends is both sexy and infinitely more watchable and it's only been a single episode. I'm ready to commit to six seasons and a movie of these messy whores.
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shootingst4rpress · 1 year
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PRO WRESTLING IS FAKE AND GAY!
print for all queer wrestling fans based off @orange-catsidy ‘s blog title which i really liked for some reason :P printed on paper & calico with speedycarve lino and speedball printing ink!
pspsps you can buy these! dm me!
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