| maddy | 1993 | bi | cisgirl (she/her) |
| rennie | writer | nanny |
| hopepunk af |
| marvel, lotr, dragon age, mass effect, criminal minds, the magicians, star wars, dc, memes, lots of stuff, idk i'm pretty scattered |
| and not to get all uwu on y'all, but terfs choke and die, all other transphobes and homophobes fall off a cliff, racists drown, nazis take a long walk off the shortest pier you can find, and you know what if you vote red then you should get it by now that you need to fuck off |
| intersectional feminist | BLM |
i’m such a huge fucking fan of having and using magic requiring effort. whether mental, physical, or both. i’m so fond of magic systems that make you sweat, bleed, cry and get your hands dirty when you use them. i love it when powers are earned, not inherent, through years of study and/or exercizing them like a muscle. and i love it when a seemingly effortless display of power is terrifying because of this.
“We talk a lot in the writer’s room about Eliot and Hardison’s friendship and it’s always weird because [Aldis] and Kane are friends and it’s hard to separate out, but Eliot would kill people to keep Hardison safe and it’s something we don’t often talk about. He would kill people to keep any of the team safe.” - John Rogers, ‘The Experimental Job’ DVD Commentary
though I still love Chronicles of Narnia the older I get and the more I learn the clearer it becomes to me why it would have driven Tolkien completely insane
The Santa part almost ruined their friendship
Tolkien: you can’t just patch random things together because you like them, everything has to fit together in a dense textural weave of reasonable causes and effects
Lewis: and then the witch from the other dimension turns the fox to stone for having a contraband tea party …
Tolkein is the nerd that complains that characters’ costumes and weapons are impractical and Lewis is the nerd that thinks the designs fuck
just saw a post where someone put “detrans dni” and like… hey we should be supporting detransitioned people bc if we don’t terfs will
sometimes you’re wrong about your identity and that’s ok like i used to think i was bi but it turns out i was wrong and i know ppl who thought they were trans but it turns out they were wrong and it should be ok and accepted that sometimes people don’t get it right on the first try
This touches on something I have felt for a long time, which is that one of the reasons rigid queer labels and gatekeeping is so dangerous is because if you want to encourage people to explore their gender/sexuality, there has to be a safe “Actually I was wrong” option.
I went through so very much anxiety coming out, and when I really think about it it was squarely from the fear of being wrong about it all. That I was, at heart, a cishet woman, and therefore I was appropriating a label that didn’t ‘belong’ to me, and I would (somehow) be harming other people by doing so. There’s so much more unnecessary pressure if the sword hanging over your head is “But you do have to be right about this, you can’t back out once you’ve even asked the question.”
I think that is Bad. I think it makes fewer people ask the question. I think that includes those who need to ask, and would be much happier for it.
to summarize: one of the things the Q stands for is QUESTIONING
and that is as it should be
I’d like to also submit the possibility that some people may be more prone to shifts in their gender identity than others, and that it’s not necessarily even a case of being “wrong,” so much as it’s a case of just changing over time. I know the predominant narrative we see in discourse is that a person who transitions was never their agab—and I’m sure that’s true for a lot of people! But… it’s not true everyone? I remember reading an interview with Danny Lavery after he came out, and he said something along the lines of “One day, I went to bed a woman and woke up not a woman anymore.” So if a person can change once, who’s to say that can’t change again? For example, I know Eddie Izzard (whose labels have shifted a lot over the decades, as terminology and options for gender identities identity have changed many times over since the 1980s) has said she goes through long block periods of being a particular gender, so right now she’s “based in girl mode,” (her words) but she’s previously had blocks of time being based in “boy mode,” too. So like, whose to say other people don’t have block periods like that? Maybe somebody really was non-binary for ten years and now they’re not anymore, y’know? Not feeling something about yourself forever doesn’t have to mean you were wrong the whole time. Of course, being wrong is okay too! But I’d make room for both.
i LOVE this addition, especially because it helps us move away from the “ive always known” narrative that dominates so much trans space. sometimes your gender literally changes, and it’s not helpful or healthy of us to act like that means everything that came before was false or mistaken.
While we like to joke about Izzy being in the wrong genre, I would argue that there are in fact at least five distinct genre universes in the world of Our Flag Means Death, and all of them have different rules.
Stede Bonnet, and his crew when they’re around him, live in a Muppet movie. I didn’t come up with this analogy but it’s so accurate. Insane physical comedy and comedy-action where no one really gets hurt. Mild peril but you know everything is gonna work out. Terrible puns and sight gags, but room for sweet, genuine emotional moments too. The rules of time, space, probability and logic will bend for a good joke.
Izzy Hands is in a grimdark action/drama where if someone gets stabbed in the gut they will behave normally and fucking die. (Probably slowly and painfully, of sepsis.) Crucially I think Izzy also lives in a genre where you can only be subtextually queer, and violence (done for or with or to each other) is the only acceptable form of intimacy between men. This is why being forcibly dragged into Stede’s world, where everyone is busy having silly low-stakes misadventures and being gay and emotionally available all over the main text–and seeing his Subtextual Boyfriend go into this world and love it–sends him round the twist.
The British, Spanish and other imperialist militaries are in a Master and Commander-style naval adventure where they’re the heroes. This is why they all take it completely seriously when Stede (unintentionally) kills Badminton and takes hostages, even though we can see that he bumbled his way into it ass-backwards. This is also why Stede is so shocked to get actually for real stabbed aboard the Spanish ship. (“Did you mean to do that?”) He didn’t realize until that moment that he’d stepped into a different genre. The stabbing is one of the first Surprise Genre Switch moments we get and in retrospect it’s very important for setting up that in this world, the threat of getting hurt or killed is very real–which we need to understand to know that there are real stakes much later, when Stede almost gets executed by the British.
Tumblr can’t be swapped for other social media website because Tumblr is the only one whose whole base humor is derived from the art of pretending to be a dumbass.
Like if you get a fact wrong on Reddit, the “well actually” crowd will ooze from their mansplainer holes and I think if you pull that shtick on Twitter someone will use it to win a political argument against you that you weren’t even a part of.
Only on Tumblr can you start a sentence with “well sweaty I have 9 Ph.D. :))” and immediately have the upper hand over any clown trying to reasonably correct you.
smooth sharks holds this website together like atlas holding up the sky
