so is anyone gonna talk about how sketchbook, tony and Colin have all canonically been in the same room together

doodle dump

it's the day after posting the last chapter of where there is darkness and my brain literally exploded ideas with for my cult cas fic. you guys. YOU. GUYS. i cannot wait to share this version of dean and cas with you.

Restorative or Transformative?: Homoerotic Subtext, The Closet, and Ciphers in Pop Culture. The nature of commercial art is that it’s sometimes bad and inconsistent. Notably it’s also misogynistic. One way in which audiences try to reconcile massive plot holes or gaps in character motivation is by reading secrets or hidden information into a plot.

Commonly, male characters are interpreted as closeted gay or bisexual to reconcile the absence of women from commercial narratives with the generally stunted and poorly-written male characters that form the focus on said texts. This reading has become especially common among a non-heterosexual milieu. Rather than transforming the original text into some radically different new form, this closeted interpretation seeks to make the original text stand on its own as a story rather than a Swiss cheese of dumb writing decisions.

This interpretation only works for a specific type of pop, usually genre fiction. Any story in which tortured male leads eschew women in favour of male-male bonds (because female characters are constantly killed off, written sparsely, or written out, because the production team keeps casting their male buddies, because actors demand to keep having scenes with their bros, whatever) can become a sounder structure if you put one of them in a closet.

The gay interpretation is the natural consequence of shoddy misogynistic writing from ventures like Supernatural, Naruto, all the biggest hits. It’s also the natural consequence of more benignly misogynistic writing like The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes or The Lord of the Rings, where women aren’t necessarily rejected but are simply absent from the worlds of the protagonists. When the emotional crux of the story falls on male-male interactions, this reads as romantic because society at large priorities (definitively heterosexual) romance as the pinnacle of human connection. Two forces are in conflict, the primacy of heterosexuality (read as: romance) and the primacy of men.

Anyway. All that is to say that the typical gay or bisexual reading of male characters in pop fiction comes from a very real place. But, in some places, that’s the default interpretation. Angst, insecurity, secrets, double lives, fatigue, disappointment, restrained passion, stunted personal growth, anyone living in the closet can tell you that it impacts and defines your whole life to know that you live in a way fundamentally incompatible with The Proper Way that life is structured around down to tax law and superstore prices (which assume a heterosexual nuclear family unit). Characters in fiction also tend to have personal problems because that makes them interesting and tasty.

If you’ve grown up on stories with the specific type of misogyny that can be papered over with a closeted interpretation of the male leads, carrying this interpretation over to any male character will make sense more often than not. Even a bit of angst or insecurity? Well of course that makes sense if a character is closeted.

Except that’s hurt a normal part of fiction, and sometimes the closeted interpretation takes away from the point of a character. If a male character is on another axis of marginalization, the closeted interpretation imposed by the slash reading community downplays or trivializes the effects of that marginalization in the plot by overwriting it with another type of marginalization. Alternately, sometimes a character’s heterosexuality is a part of the story. There are some sorts of critiques or investigations of misogyny or masculinity that don’t work if the character has an ‘opt out’ of the cisheteropatriarchal perspective. Not that gay/bisexual men aren’t except from misogyny, but misogyny masculinity and heterosexuality are so tightly linked that it sort of defeats the point if you interpret that character outside of heterosexuality.

All that is to say—the closet interpretation is a quick and easy spice to apply to the weaker parts of action-adventure genre fiction to make it taste better. It draws from a large enough sample of art that it’s pretty widely applicable. Because of that, it’s part of some people’s [my] default interpretation package just because the semi-dull macho show at least gets less dull if you imagine there’s a reason for there to be no girls besides simple hatred. That then forms its own problem where the interpretation that works with your average genre work gets then blanket-applied to all genre works and obscures the places where the closet interpretation doesn’t fix the work, and actually makes it less interesting.

it’s been an embarrassingly long time but I think I’m gonna pick up my first watch of Merlin again soon cause I got halfway through Season 2 before shit got busy irl.

but now I’m also desperately trying to remember the details of the AU plot I was telling to Emi that included, like, Arthur discovering Merlin’s magic at the end of either season 1 or season 2 (I can’t remember 💔), but Merlin doesn’t know he knows, and then he spends the whole next season agonising over whether he’d tell Uther or not/confront Merlin or not.

Alone.

No spoilers, just a general reaction. It’s been one week since I finished the Magolor Epilogue and I am still hooting and hollering. That wretched egg became one of my favorite characters ever!!

@veliseraptor stealing your tags to go on a ramble bc this is a little off on a tangent from the op

#lucille sharpe should've been more obviously textually gay. send tweet #the older i get the more i think about lesbian or bi lucille and the happier i am about it #desire sublimated through her brother?? thinking thoughts

bc like. headcanoning/interpreting now. this internal sense of "any attachment, any attraction I have to someone authentically is Bad and Condemned; any socially-sanctioned attraction or relationship model feels lacking at best, coercive at worst". everything she wants in any format just gets tossed in the same bucket of "I'm sick and wrong and Not Allowed To Do That"; they’re all functionally, emotionally equivalent on some level. they can only be expressed in the context of other morally-reprehensible actions. violence and care as two sides of the same coin.

do her feelings for the women her brother marries come before or after the selection, the marriage, the poisoning? yes. in their tying themselves to Thomas, they become owned by Lucille as well, a part of her the same way he is by transitive property. the idea of being in A Relationship herself (properly, with a man of course, that’s what that means) is just another box of someone else controlling and hurting her; while having that connection with another woman is. epistemically closed off, sealed away in the same decrepit rooms as everything else - and so those feelings and actions all become entangled together, because they can’t exist in a dialogue with anything else but one another.

I end up thinking about the “monstrous love” line, right? and two different kinds of intimacy where neither is really quite getting at what she wants, but both are transgressive. attraction and affection and enmeshment and murder and the house all in one big emotional soup of hiding and secret-keeping and putting on one appearance out in the world to cover for something that feels vital to who she (& Thomas) are as people that would otherwise ruin her.

had my second ever dream that had smth to do with genshin, and it was about Natlan from what I can remember

if some of the dragons look like these guys

I will be even more insufferable than I already am about getting Fontaine right

Did it. Not very good and honestly just kinda cobbled together, but if I didn’t do it now and fast i was never gonna do it. As mentioned in the pick, details may change if I ever get better at drawing her; the horns are definitely not doing it, but I don’t know how to draw horns that twist and curve or whatever. I’d like to, but I never make the time to learn, so I’m kinda stuck here till I figure out what to do with this. Fun fact: her draconic ancestry is white dragons, and when she gets really angry/is charging a breath attack, her exhales crystalize the air. Basically, if someone pisses her off her breath looks like it’s like 20 degrees (F) outside even if it’s closer to 70 or something.

she's adorable i love her thank you. i'm petting her snoot as we speak.

Also, if you want, you can try to poke around in HeroForge for ideas. They've all sorts of cool and weird horns, and you can put them on a character, spin the 3D model around, and use it as a drawing reference at different angles.

If you (or frankly, anyone else) wants to try it, here's the link to the site: https://www.heroforge.com/

hi everyone sorry but im about to start blasting you guys with my character thoughts and character design brain things and a bunch of really deep character stuff okay love you bye :3 💖

i came out to my parents as aroace 🫣

Going on a trip to the mountains is a fucking horrible way to rediscover your fear of heights. Anyways here’s the view from our balcony.

Tell me about Government Service Ninja!

(This is for my Mystery Character Ask Game!)

M. Government Service Ninja

Greg, 19-20 years old. The world he lives in is a fantasy realm, with magic and strange beasts and a kingdom where most professions are split up into big (or sometimes highly specific) Guilds. When I first came up with the story Greg was in, he was from the Ninja Guild, but I finally decided that was just a bit TOO silly for the story I wanted to tell. So now, Greg is a member of the Civil Servants Guild, which everybody knows about but no one really knows what they DO. They all seem like a bunch of harmless (if physically fit) civil servants.

They basically train special agents for the crown. Spies, secret agents, crown bodyguards, information-gatherers, and all those varieties. But not assassination and not what you'd normally consider "undercover work." Greg specializes in field recognizance - he is highly fit and agile (like a ninja!) to sneak into places, and his charming personality gives him a leg up in social settings for gathering info from unsuspecting people.

The Civil Servants Guild operates under a very strict policy of total honesty. There are certain truths you cannot tell, but you can divert, distract, allow people to draw incorrect assumptions, even just refuse to answer. The Civil Servants consider themselves a reflection of the crown's reputation, and the people should never trust a ruler who lies to them. Most people know they can expect a Civil Servant to be very honest, even if they can't always trust they understand their MEANING. Greg just goes the extra mile and tells everyone he's a secret agent of the crown, and of COURSE they just laugh it off as a “alright then keep your secrets” type joke because haha no one would just SAY that, right?

Bonus: I started a short story showing his background for the 2022 Inklings challenge. It's not finished yet, but you can read a bit about Little Greg and how he "joined" the Civil Servants Guild. =)

Funny how I'm still able to believe I'll be above something only to simply, inexorably, be human, once again

Alright I’m calling out into the void:

Any Ace Attorney and Sims 4 fans have good CC for making Blackquill? I have all of the packs except for High School Years, My Wedding Stories, Star Wars, Werewolves, and a bunch of the kits, but I’m gonna try to get those all (minus Star Wars) during the winter sale so it’s not a total dealbreaker if they require any of those to work.

I’ve been avoiding CC for making the characters but I just. I can approximate everyone else which is part of the fun for me, working within the confines of what the game offers, but I can’t make a recognizable Simon. It is beyond my skill.