the aeor arc is so beautiful like the nein are having the shittiest time of their lives they find out that essek’s in eiselcross they are EXTREMELY suspicious but they go to check it out because what the hell they just fought a dragon might as fucking well. so they rock up to vurmas and essek is having the worlds’ longest most awkward panic attack which they politely ignore. they tell him about the dead member of the wizard cabinet in caleb’s back pocket and essek overcomes five separate complexes to ask them to please leave which they do but then they come back and are like uh. hey. ikithon’s after you. woops. and essek is like um ok well i will die which is like whatever. and THEN caleb’s like well we actually want to ally with trent are you cool with that and essek’s like fuck no but i’m still in love with you :( so the nein lock themselves in his office to debate whether or not they trust him while essek paces outside and considers killing himself and then when they let him back in they’re like ok essek we trust you more than the child torturer like we don’t trust you that much but you can come with us. and essek is too busy staging a dream ballet in his head after he heard the word ‘trust’ to listen to the rest so he gives an impassioned monologue about trust and friendship until the nein are like. well :/ sure buddy if it helps you sleep at night. i guess. and then when they saved the world together for actual real essek helps ONCE and it’s to assist in taking a nap. absolutely insane that this happened on my screen and i’m still here to tell the tale i don’t know how i’m still standing to be honest.

"See you tomorrow"

MDZS Disco Elysium AU part 4 [prev parts]

The reason I refuse to acknowledge any other batfam death other than Jason is because, narratively, none of the others mattered.

Jason's death shaped everything that came after it in how the batfam responded to his death and handled it, and completely shaped his character.

I don't even know about most of the other "deaths" because they were so comparatively unimportant.

It's all "you guys need to understand how SUBTEXT and CODING are usually the only confirmation of representation queer people get in media especially in older media" but once that subtext and coding is used to say a character might be aro or ace coded/have aro/ace subtext then suddenly it's not a valid way to claim representation. Then it's only "headcanon" or "not confirmed" like do you all hear yourselves? It'd be so much easier to say you hate aro/ace ppl at this rate!

dunno if this has been done yet but: airplane didn’t first become aware of peerless cucumber in the comments of pidw, he first saw peerless in the comments of a different web novel (that perhaps was one of airplane’s earlier works?) and so when initially drafting pidw he was inspired to write a villain just like cucumber bc “he’s MEAN MEAN for no reason, a literature snob, and pretends to be all high and mighty while looking down on others. also likes to kick down the little guy” and boom. sqq was born. cut to years later post-transmigration when sqh just casually drops this info with “lol i always did find it funny how much you hated the guy considering he’s literally based off you”

it's the levels of scrutiny too.

a movie that has a largely-female cast has to be well-written, well-shot, well-acted, well-advertised. people will spend 2 hours on youtube talking about a single plot hole; about a moment of bad pacing, about a singular background character's poor scripting. if there isn't something obvious, they will say - well there's nothing specifically bad, but it wasn't specifically good either.

they will turn out another all-male movie, and it's just a movie.

a book that has queer representation in it has to defy every convention of writing while also being true to traditional plot, structure, format, and pacing. it must have no boring chapters, no missteps, no awkward dialogue. it must be able to "prove" that any queer relationship "makes sense", their sparks must fly off the page and their love must be eternal. the writing must be clear and beautiful, the storyline original and fresh, the values traditional but with an undercurrent that is modern and saucy.

they will turn out another book without queer rep, where a man and woman just-fall-in-love, and it's just a book.

i am latinx. i am queer. i am nb & neurodivergent. my father said to me once: you will need to be exceptional to be just-as-good, and you will need to be beyond exceptional before they see you as just-a-person, and not your labels.

i am not beyond exceptional. i am a human person. i am skilled because i worked my ass off to be skilled.

i am currently reading a book that's so-bad-it's-good about a girl that falls in love with a vampire. i was 64% of the way through the book before she figures out tall-dark-fanged is not natural. i like books like these, i like letting myself relax while i just enjoy the read. but i do spend a lot of time wondering - would this have been published if it was about queer people? would this have gotten past the editors if the characters weren't white and sexy?

i want to write a movie about being a woman in a male space, and i want to start that movie with a 10 minute scene where the woman is lectured with the exact same whining that occurs in the youtube comments of even the trailers for those movies: "haven't we had enough diversity?" "we've had enough girl power movies" "sorry, this is just pandering. it's boring."

here's what's fucked up: it shouldn't matter, you're right. my identity shouldn't fold after my name like a battalion of stars: a cry of what i've gone through. what we all know i had to move past and through. i should just be a writer, plain and simple, without my work being shifted through with tweezers - i know everything i make, always, i am incredibly responsible for. beholden to. i don't like knowing that if i fuck up, i am also fucking up for every person like me. every person in a community i belong to.

once, back in undergrad, i wrote a short story about a girl who had been kicked by a horse. it was my first time writing about my experience with my ocd; i felt proud of it. the story was mostly about grief and slow recovery. the queerness of the main character was not important to the plot, my main character was just-queer. there wasn't even a romantic interest in it.

i remember one of my classmates being disappointed. "i just feel like you always write about girls who like girls, and i'm bored of it," he said. "you're a beautiful writer, but i'm like - oh, at some point, it's gonna be gay again." during the workshop, he folded his hands over my story and said, "and okay, i'm just going to say it. she's ocd, she's gay, she's depressed - it's a little much for me to believe is all happening to one person."

it is a little much to be that person (and more besides). i have therapy weekly, after all.

over and over, belonging to exception.

“katara is uptight and gets offended when anyone swears in her vicinity” has gotta be one of the lamest fandom jokes. for what it’s worth, i don’t think any of the atla kids wouldn’t swear out of some naive sense of propriety (with perhaps the exception of azula, because she’s an obedient goody two shoes who thinks coarse speech is for the lower classes), but katara would be one to swear a lot. she definitely swears more than sokka, although she’d also regulate her speech better so as not to offend those around her (especially if she is in the process of sucking up to an adult). sokka would swear just because he’s a grumpy, easily frustrated person whose choice of words reflects his frustration, but katara would swear out of her fundamental sense of rebellion. a deep thrill runs through her every time she says fuck or shit, because she is fourteen and away from the admonishing tongue of gran gran for the first time in her life. katara, toph, and aang are still young enough that saying “bad words” fills them with a sense of excitement over “breaking the rules,” whereas for sokka, zuko, and suki, that novelty wore off a while ago and it’s simply a part of their everyday speech. but while sokka is a teacher’s pet at heart who presents as a misanthropic asshole, katara is a mischievous ne’er-do-well at heart who presents as a beacon of polite decorum whenever she wants to get her way (typical elder vs younger sibling distinction). but you know that when katara is yelling at sokka, pakku, toph, zuko, and every other unfortunate soul who may find themselves on the receiving end of her wrath, she’s cramming in as many “what the fuck is your problem?!”s and “get your shit together!!”s as she possibly can. then again, katara would definitely respond with righteous indignation if toph cursed in front of her, but that’s hardly because katara is offended at toph for saying bad words. rather, it’s simply because she also happens to be. a massive hypocrite.

do girl jeri and boy jerry exist explicitly to torment me

Red Hood Characterization

This is really long so I'm putting a cut here, I've been thinking about Jason Todd's character motivations and the question of whether or not his actions are based in a Moral Code (I don't think so, not to say he's without any morality) and I talk about that in more depth here.

I saw someone say on here that Titans: Beast World: Gotham City was some of the best Jason Todd internal writing they'd seen in a while, and I've been a Red Hood fan for 8 years or so now? pretty much since I read comics for the first time, so I went and checked out and I thought it was good! The way the person I saw talking about it as if it was rare and unusual made me wonder though, because as well-written as i thought his stances on crime were, there wasn't really anything in it that went against the way I conceptualize Jason?

This kinda plays into a larger question I've been thinking about for a while with Jason though, which is that, do people think that the killing is part of a fundamental worldview that motivates him a la batman, and that worldview is the reason he does the things he does?? Because 8 years ago i was a middle schooler engaging with fiction on the level that a middle schooler does, so I simply did not put much thought into it beyond "poor guy :(" but ever since I actually started trying to understand consistent characterization, I don't really see Jason as someone who's motivated by a moral code in his actions the way batman or superman is!

tbh my personal read is that he's a very socially-motivated guy, his actions from resurrection to his Joker-Batman ultimatum in utrh always seemed to me like every choice made leading up to his identity reveal was either a. to give him the leverage and skill necessary to pull off his identity reveal successfully, or b. to twist the knife that little bit more when he does let Bruce find out who he is. Like iirc there's a Judd Winick tweet like "yeah tldr he chose Red Hood as his identity because it's the lowest blow he could think of." And I think that's awesome, I think character motivations rooted so deeply in character's relationships and emotions are really fun to read! I also think it's where the stagnation/flatness of his character comes from in certain comics, because if his main motivation is one event in one relationship that passes, and he is not particularly attached to anything in his life or the world by the time that comes to pass, it's a little harder to come up with a direction to go with the character after that, because there isn't much of a direction that aligns with something the character would reasonably want? But I do think solving this by saying "all of the morally-off emotionally driven cruelty he did on his way to spite Batman was actually reflective of his own version of Batman's stance that's exactly the same except he thinks it's GOOD to kill people" isn't ideal. To be fully honest, it seems to me like he never particularly cared one way or the other about killing people to "clean Gotham of crime," he just did everything he could to get the power necessary to pull off his personal plans, and took out any particularly heinous people he encountered along the way (like in Lost Days.) Not to say I think the fact he killed people keeps him up at night anymore than everything else in his life events, I just never really thought he was out there wholeheartedly kneecapping some dude selling weed or random guy robbing a tv store for justice.

Looping wayyy back to my question, Is this (^) contradictory to the way he's written/the overall average perception of the character? Because like I enjoyed his writing in Beast World i have zero significant issue with anything there, I just didn't believe it would be a hot take, like yeah, that is Jason. It's been a while since I've read utrh and lost days, but I don't think my takeaway directly contradicts either of those too bad iirc. Idk all this to say I think Jason killing and being alright with killing is an obvious and objective fact, but i guess i've always seen it as more of a practical tactic than a moral belief, and I think taking the actions made during the lowest points of a character's life where he is obsessively focused on this ONEEEE thing and trying to apply it as a Motivating Stance to everything he's done after that, doesn't really follow logically for me.

aa5 am I right

Bestie Deficiency

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I've mentioned before I have zero chill about Heaven Sent and do not want to hear anyone's objectively wrong negative opinions about it, but I honestly have to stay in the Whouffaldi bubble even as far as analysis and praise. At least people have to be accepting of the idea or possibility of the ship, not dismissive of it. Not because I need everyone to ship it, but because not realising the love story exists inevitably creates terrible takes on S9 and those people usually shit on Hell Bent and say it ruins the three parter.

The ship is canon and it's woven extremely deeply into the fabric of the story, so much so that if you're oblivious to the romance you will erroneously conclude that the story wasn't coherent. I constantly see people say Hell Bent undoes everything from Face the Raven and Heaven Sent or renders them pointless. And that's because they don't understand what was actually happening. There's still a disturbingly large number of people who say we never found out what the Hybrid was.

It's the single most consistent thing about people being unfair to Hell Bent, even more so than the ones who are just angry it isn't a story about Gallifrey. They're mad because they thought Heaven Sent was about getting over Clara's death and moving on, therefore Hell Bent was a big narrative backtrack. A lot of people say this, totally unwilling to consider that maybe it's not that this one episode radically departs from the thematic impetus of the entire series and is randomly exempt from the heavy, heavy foreshadowing in every other episode, maybe- actually- they missed something.

the opening of into the depths - the thought experiment about the swamp - sticks in my head, because, well. because it's interesting why it's stuck in hera's head.

narratively, of course, it serves two purposes: 1) to frame and present a question about what happened to lovelace, and 2) to connect what is currently happening to lovelace to what hera experiences when she reboots. (which: combined with the ways lovelace is also paralleled to eris, one of an infinite potential iterations of herself, serving a similar purpose for the dear listeners that eris does for goddard - there is even a perspective from which you could argue lovelace is herself "an AI" that i think presents some interesting questions. regardless, the struggle lovelace and hera share in having their humanity recognized is deeply significant to me.)

in-universe, though: why was that thought experiment put in hera's head, for her to think about while she reboots? well. lovelace's s4 arc centers on a certain type of self doubt: she fears a loss of self, of personal identity and continuity of experience, and she fears it's already happened. if hera thinks about this thought experiment as she reboots - does she fear the same? does part of her always worry that the version of her that comes back online is not the same as before? i think that's the purpose.

part of it may be general cruelty, in the same way pryce threatens to give her "a new recurring nightmare" as punishment, but making hera doubt her continuity of experience feels like a very intentional aspect of how she's been dehumanized - it encourages her not to think of herself as a full person, and casts doubt on her future. consider ep 52, where hera hasn't done a full reset of her personality program in months, and is notably hesitant to. or ep 48, where she initially votes against leaving (which is emotionally complicated for multiple reasons, but that's a whole other topic.) it's not the only factor, but i believe hera has lovelace's identity crisis in mind, and i think that casts a certain light on these interactions.

most importantly: these things are not true. she's being emotionally manipulated. obviously. but the fear, i think, is very real, especially in the context of trauma. lovelace's death and resurrection as a clone of herself, from a more metaphorical standpoint, is a strong emotional representation of having been changed, on some unseen but fundamental level, by trauma. lovelace fears that she can't go home because she's already died, and whoever she is now is just something else trying really hard to be isabel lovelace. hera has a hard time imagining a life on earth because she's never really had one, but i think part of her also fears she can't go back because of how it might change her - it's not that she prefers things the way they are, but she fears she'd lose something fundamental and be a different person if her circumstances changed. both of them returning home, and having futures in spite of that fear, means something to me.

Hiya Lauren! I remember a while back you reblogged something about mark being romantically involved with nearly all other queer atypicals and it did mention oliver/mark as unrequited and I wonder if you could elaborate a little more on that?:D I'm just curious:) You don't have to of course! Ty!

oh gosh, I WISH I remembered this - I don't reblog very much that isn't fanart, so I'm having a hard time recalling what post this would've been and what I might've said/added to it!

I don't think of Mark/Oliver as unrequited at all. That said, in The AM Archives specifically, we were not writing toward that ship - it wasn't the intention and we had no idea that Andrew and Kristian had that chemistry until we were recording the whole season all at once. And then we weren't sure if we were going to get another season at all! So there definitely was a period when I was more uncertain about it, mostly because it was unclear what the future would hold for any of the characters.

While they don't get together in The College Tapes, I do think that they very slowly figure things out in the months and years afterward. In the TCT planner (which is technically the last bit of canon that exists in the Bright Universe, in terms of timeline), there's heavy implications that they're living together - or at least spending a lot of time together - and I think all of us who made The College Tapes were thinking of them as a romantic ship when writing that show.

They both have buckets and buckets of trauma and unresolved issues (as did Mark and Sam - and their inability to work through it together/the way they first met and got together, etc. is one of the reasons they didn't ultimately work out) so I can't say what their future holds, but as far as I'm concerned, they're headed toward romantic involvement the last time we hear from them (or already there).

I hope that answers your question!

Regill. <3

Hunger Games rant

This is kind of surprising me because I used to ship Everlark when I read the books years ago but upon a re-read as an adult?

I’m just wandering through the Hunger Games fandom and seriously have to say… I very very much doubt that Katniss and Peeta “would’ve happened anyway” if they were not reaped nor if the Games never existed.

Sure, he had a crush on her which is likely why he gave her the burned bread that day(something that I’m pretty sure isn’t even covered in the movies) which people seem to think makes her required to like him back. Their relationship was also a forced play for the Capitol, she had no choice. If it was “gonna happen anyway”, she would’ve been dating him already by the first book. 

As an (now)Everthorne shipper, I am a little biased but she clearly has more in common with Gale, they had known each other for years, and she even bluntly states that “he is hers and she is his” at one point. Seems straight forward to me. Gale also deserved better than what SC did to him. Yes, he helped to design those bombs but I very much doubt he knew what Coin was going to use them for nor did he know that Prim was going to be there and put in the direct line of fire. Prove me wrong. I’m also slightly irritated that Katniss holds this over his head, and while I understand given that it’s Prim, she should know him better than that. Just seemed like an easy way for Collins to get rid of him so she could pander to fans by putting Katniss with Peeta. Yes, he lied by omission but he didn’t want to hurt her. And I find it odd that she just can’t seem to get over that, while she seems to just instantly forgive Peeta for every manipulation(unintended or not) that he puts her through. 

I do find it funny that some people seriously seem to think that Gale and Katniss actually are cousins. Take the Everlark blinders off, people. You really think that Collins would create a love triangle that involved incest?

She picked Peeta in the end because he could give her stability in a post war world when she had no one, not because she loved him like that. Matches up to “she’ll pick who she can’t survive without” to me. I know people immediately interpret that as “she’ll pick who she loves” but no. If Gale meant it that way, he would’ve said it that way but he also knows the only one Katniss would and could ever truly love is Prim. Peeta does not understand this about her.

The movies just showed a “happy-ever-after Everlark” ending while ignoring that fact that Peeta is still struggling with the hijack(and poses a continuing threat to Katniss because of it) and in the books, Katniss does wonder what kind of future she also could’ve had with Gale like they were talking about before the first reaping. But she dismisses it because she imagines that he’s moved on. Her ending with Peeta comes across to me as “obligation” still. Surprisingly, lots of people seem to get this too I’ve read but most are still “romantic Everlark” anyway. 🤷‍♀️

Katniss had gone through the books pretty adamant that she didn’t want to marry or have children and yes, that was largely because she didn’t want them to have to go through the Games but it’s also been said behind the scenes that she only did these exact things in the end because Peeta wanted it. Literally along the lines of “I didn’t want children but Peeta did and kept asking until I finally caved…” just rubs me the wrong way.

I think it would’ve been a refreshing change to have ended this series the way Katniss originally wanted. Where she didn’t end up with anyone. (@zalrb here on Tumblr says this all way better than I ever could. Go visit them.)