[hard-times-paramore]

Okay, real talk now. People love to tag male characters in posts about women, but this post is gonna take this seriously. Is there actually a canonically male character you believe is a trans woman? Or at least has made into a trans woman for a fanart or a fanfic? Excluding the ones canonically implied.

Sound off in the tags! Link to the fanart or fic if available. Do it. Give me the girls. Make more women.

Edit: here's mine!

[partywithponies]

Tragedy and melancholy in art is escapism. Lets you put time and energy into being sad for a bit without thinking about the things making you sad in real life.

[vyvilha]

i think i don't really vibe with most other fans of my favorite male characters is because they usually depict them too much of a man, and i am not interested in men, i am interested in The Character. and i am not saying that they should depict them as women, or nonbinary, or should depict them as feminine, no, not at all. but there's like, you know, you can depict a male character as The Character, and you can depict them as The Man. do you get me? like, i go to the fandom looking for art and fics, and it's just, regardless of his actual characterization, it's all just fantasizing about some kind of an abstract dominant patriarch, wearing my favorite character's face. it may be the most totally-wouldnt-have-normal-relationships (and sometimes even would-literally-abuse-you) kind of guy, and you join a dedicated space for his fans, and all they talk about is how they want to marry and start a tradcore 50s style nuclear family with him. it can be a guy who's arrogance and attempts of domination are explicitly shown to be a facade that hide the fact that he's actually kind of a massive pathetic wet loser, and you go to his fics, and they're all depicting him as a caricaturish daddy dom. at this point it's like, do you even like the character at all, or do you just like The Man, and project this man onto whatever character you find visually attractive? and these people kind of, really really poison actual discussion of the character, who is kind of a fucked up evil person (i only like *those* types, so im talking about them) because they see analysis of the actual character as an attack on their fantasized daddy dom husband, who is actually isn't The Character at all, and is simply a face of the day for The Man

[pluralthey]

okay i've sketched another 100 pages of idletry, but the problem is it's like 3 scenes. they are way too long and i plan on fixing them during the developmental editing phase. so whatever. yay, 300 pages. here's some random moments.

[soundoftheirwings]

Gotta tell you guys something wild in the Chinese fan sphere

So some fanartist drew a “sexy” (read: booby) version of a (cartoon) character who is traditionally very non-sexualised. Fans of the character got mad about it because it’s kind of groundbreaking how that character is written and portrayed and this art totally ignores the entire point of the character. They demanded the art be deleted. In response to that other people said, well what the fanartist did may be distateful but they have every right to draw what they’re into. The two sides fight for days and each starts a harassment campaign and even report their “opponents’” accounts.

So far so typical. But things eventually come to a head and they decide that this will be settled by votes - not through a poll. Through donations to a children’s education charity via each side’s portal. Whoever can get the highest amount of donation wins.

And that is how this charity received over 1 million in donations in three days lol. Oh btw the “freedom of expression” side won by a landslide (960k to 40k)

[tlbodine]

From now on this is how all petty fandom disputes should be settled.

[buried-in-stardust]

Both donation groups finished collecting donations on May 31st, and the charity has since reached out to the "freedom of expression" group's organizers to notify them that their donations will be specifically allocated to girls. The charity works with schools to allow impoverished students to go to high school (which isn't free in China), so they will be distributing 7500 RMB each for 128 girls to attend their 3 years of high school.

Also for anyone curious, the character is Luye from The Legend of Hei II. Official design vs. the fanart under the cut:

[boudicca]

how many modern hildegards von bingen have we lost since the advent of sumatriptan

[vague-humanoid]

Mexico cuts workweek, bans after-hours contact, and guarantees no worker will take a pay cut in the most sweeping labor reform in a generati

Mexico amends its constitution to cut the maximum workweek from 48 to 40 hours by 2030 and gives 13.5 million workers the legal right to ign

Mexico amends its constitution to cut the maximum workweek from 48 to 40 hours by 2030 and gives 13.5 million workers the legal right to ignore their boss’s calls, messages, and emails after their shift ends, in the most significant overhaul of Mexican labor law in a generation.

Mexico has rewritten its constitution to guarantee every worker in the country a shorter working week, a legal right to switch off from work after hours, and a guarantee that no employer can cut their pay in response, enacting in a single legislative package a set of labor rights that workers in wealthier countries have spent decades campaigning for without success.

[innerchildabortionclinic]

i'm so tired of social media users saying "successful people are abusing stimulants". unsuccessful people are too. #WEMATTER

[chriskotiesen]

my old bedroom / parents' storage room

[lockssteps]

monster attack

[lycosouris]

NOW we're talking

[lycosouris]

Another one to see it eat

[captain-price-returns]

A real page on the White House website

[free-and-to-none-accountable]

The American century of humiliation is goin great 👍

[eudaemon-m]

a long walk

[rexalogy]

[b-vandykei]

there may be An App For That™, but have you considered that there is also very likely a Parasitoid Wasp For That™

[byjove]

‘Nuclear Family Month’ is so funny as a concept. I have never seen a nuclear family worth celebrating.

[byjove]

The problem with the concept of the ‘nuclear family’ and further, the glorification of it by the American right and their feeble attempt at launching Nuclear Family Month, is that it is a concept built on the Christian patriarchal family structure. A man should be the leader of the house, parents should have ownership over their children, children having more than two parental figures or aunts, uncles and grandparents living in the home challenges this. It’s not that a straight couple and their children can’t form a healthy family structure, it is that the glorification of the ‘nuclear family’ as the gold standard of family situations pushes individualism, stigmatizes divorce and multigenerational households and continues to push the 1950s-esque ‘Children need a mommy and a daddy, no matter how fucking evil the mommy or daddy is.’ bullshit. There are so many children that did not grow up in ‘broken’ homes and suffered for it. Stop staying together for the kids. The support and involvement of the extended family in childrearing isn’t inherently trashy or lazy. Families come in so many different shapes and sizes and prioritizing and romanticizing the nuclear family continues to harm everyone.

[northstareclipse]

A lot of criticism of delivery apps focuses on the fact that they offer convenience and variety, which I find much less compelling than criticizing the fact that the apps often send their contractors on fetch quests from Hell.

There are real labor problems here. Base pay is often insulting. Customer tips carry too much of the burden. Workers need better protections, more transparent algorithms, protection from arbitrary deactivation, and actual recourse when the app or a customer screws them over. Car-dependent delivery is also an environmental and infrastructural problem, though in a denser city I’d still be doing this work; I’d just be doing it by bike.

But when people talk about delivery work, I rarely see them talk to actual delivery workers. I see a lot of abstract arguments about convenience, consumer decadence, “hustle culture,” and internalized neoliberalism. Meanwhile, when I’m out working and waiting in restaurants for orders, the other Dashers I meet are usually people who only speak Spanish, people who read as neurodivergent, visibly physically disabled people, or some combination of the above.

I have not met this mythical Disco Elysium poor ultraliberal hustlegrinder-wannabe people seem to be arguing with. Maybe that archetype exists somewhere. If it exists among any kind of gig worker, it would probably be rideshare drivers. But most of what I see looks less like “rise and grind” and more like “this is one of the few forms of work available to people who need flexibility, low barriers to entry, limited managerial surveillance, or a way to work around language barriers, disability, burnout, chronic illnesses and injuries with symptoms that come and go unpredictably, caregiving, résumé gaps, or discrimination.”

That does not make the current system good. It means the current system is filling a real gap that a lot of supposedly better systems do not even acknowledge.

As a disabled person who is burnout-prone and demand-sensitive, contracting as a delivery driver has given me an unprecedented level of financial flexibility. I can work when I have capacity. I can stop when I’m deteriorating. I can build my day around my actual body instead of being trapped under a manager who thinks “reliable” means “able to perform the same way every day no matter what.” That matters. It does not cancel out the exploitation, but it is also not fake just because it is politically inconvenient.

And delivery itself is not some inherently decadent evil. Sometimes people live alone. Sometimes they are sick. Sometimes they are disabled, exhausted, overwhelmed, grieving, overloaded, or recovering from something else - perhaps the stress and fatigue induced by their own job. Sometimes they need medicine, groceries, or a meal that will actually unplug their sinuses instead of whatever generic community-care slop someone thinks they should be grateful for. Humans are allowed to need specificity. “Food” is not the same as “the food I can actually eat right now.”

A serious labor critique would ask how to make delivery work safer, better-paid, less tip-dependent, less car-dependent, less algorithmically punitive, and less precarious. It would ask what kinds of flexible, accessible work should exist for people who cannot thrive in conventional employment. It would ask how cities could support bike delivery, worker cooperatives, public infrastructure, and real protections without simply replacing one bad system with a moral sermon about how nobody should ever want takeout.

But a lot of the discourse does not do that. It treats convenience itself as suspicious. It treats wanting flexible work as false consciousness. It treats the needs of disabled people, immigrants, and other people who can't fit into traditional employment structures as details to be swept aside in favor of a cleaner political image.

I guess the opinions of delivery workers only count when they are politically convenient.