Untitled

[userarmand]

armand getting overstimulated by fledglings through the centuries

[reelaround-deactivated05312024]

[californiastrs]

-Christina Haag, 'Come to the Edge'

[reticent-vampire]

A splinter of coldness in you, is that what makes you fascinating?

[is-bakugou-alive-yet]

Katsuki's character sheet has been updated to also include he was the main co-investor for Izuku's suit

[sneezemonster15]

I'm not a SNS shipper because I'm just not someone who is into shipping in general but I find it strange how most people can't see that Naruto was deliberately written to have romantic feelings for Sasuke. Although I didn't see it when I was a kid, now that I'm an adult his feelings are so clear to me. To be fair I've seen some straight male fans admit that Naruto is likely in love with Sasuke and is in denial about it because of their society but the most popular fan opinion recently is that Kishimoto made a mistake by not making Naruto and Sakura a couple. And I wonder if people are so superficial that they take words as granted and don't look deeper into the actions of the characters. Because Naruto himself may ask Sakura for dates and people around him like Sai may claim that he's in love with her but Naruto's own actions constantly prove the opposite. If he felt something for her, it was at most a puppy love type thing you feel when you're in middle school.

Naruto's motivation to get stronger before the timeskip wasn't to impress Sakura but to gain the respect of Sasuke. He laughed when Rock Lee tried to flirt with Sakura but was jealous when Neji noticed Sasuke. After the timeskip, he never tries to "upgrade" his relationship with Sakura to something more than friendship despite them being often alone together. Instead all he thinks about is Sasuke. When seeing Sakura again after their puberty, he could've called her womanly and beautiful but he said she hadn't changed at all. Yet when Sakura compared Sasuke's looks to Sai's, Naruto betrayed himself by disagreeing with her, which proves he finds Sasuke attractive and that his feelings are therefore not platonic. When Sakura made her false confession and gave him the opportunity to give up on his search for Sasuke, Naruto brushed her off and admitted that he's not after Sasuke because of his promise to her but because he himself cares about Sasuke. If Sakura was his great love, why would he be so willing to die alongside Sasuke after this ? He'd be heartbroken and sad that the girl of his dreams was lying to him, not making a crazily romantic declaration to another boy. Honestly I believe that people hate this arc because it so clearly shows the difference in depth and passion between Naruto's feelings for Sasuke and his feelings for Sakura and this makes them uncomfortable.

Anyway, it's really just weird how Kishimoto went out of his way to consistently portray Sasuke as someone who is dearer to Naruto's heart than Sakura (let alone Hinata but that's another can of worms) and yet people still think that Naruto was totally in love with her and should have married her. Naruto wouldn't have been happier marrying Sakura because the one that he actually loves would still be Sasuke.

Yes to all except that Naruto's crush on Sakura was a cover for his feelings for Sasuke, it's a self preservation tactic for his closeted self where he overcompensates for his taboo feelings for Sasuke. Comphet behaviour.

Anyway. Even if you looked at how classical literature defines romantic love, you would most often find that it's defined as a combination of respect, admiration and passion. And these components can be found in how Naruto and Sasuke treat each other, think of each other and react accordingly towards each other and other characters connected with them. Naruto admires Sasuke's skills, singular minded drive and his humanity. He puts Sasuke on a pedestal because Sasuke (and Iruka) understood and supported Naruto when everyone else was busy branding him as a reject, including Sakura. Hinata never let out a peep to support Naruto, she was just an ineffectual bystander when Naruto was put through physical and emotional hoops, she didn't even go to visit him at the hospital after Sasuke retrieval arc even though she knew he was battered and heartbroken, all because she was too "shy". Love demands voluntary action, which you clearly saw in both Sasuke and Naruto's case. Sasuke lost his shit after he heard Itachi was out there hunting Naruto, a jinchuuriki and despite knowing he was nowhere near as strong as Itachi, he went to confront him and got bashed up as a result. That was voluntary action. Naruto set out to confront Raikage and others and begged them and then threatened them to not hurt Sasuke after he heard how Sasuke was being hunted, that was also voluntary action. Neither of them only dealt in ornamental words when it came to the other, they ACTED out of their love for each other. Their relationship is defined by their respect, admiration and passion for each other. The way Naruto simply lost it after Oro staked a claim to Sasuke meant for his heinous ulterior motives and let the kyuubi chakra out. That's passion. The way he trained and trained and trained uncountable hours, going through all sorts of pain and misery, just to get closer to Sasuke, that was passion. His training for rasenshuriken as a tribute to Sasuke, passion. Him rejecting the entire world especially after gaining the hero status as he always wanted (for the sake of acknowledgement) after the pain arc, passion. What it means is that everything he stands for takes a backseat when it comes to Sasuke, be it his own goals, life, hokageship, everything. That's passion and commitment. Sasuke throwing away the opportunity to train as a shinobi during the bell test, sacrificing his life at the hands of Haku and hence going against his own objectives just so Naruto could eat and live, they were selfless voluntary actions borne of his passion for Naruto. They consistently and openly show love (respect admiration and passion) for each other in the most classical sense, from start to end, the way they don't show for anyone else, be it Hinata or Sakura. They both really admire each other for their strength, durability, resilience, belief systems, inner moral compass, skills, looks, everything. They saw each other grow and wanted to be a part of each other's journey, well until Sasuke was lured away by Oro, because of their respect for each other, and the desire to be together. Kishimoto literally wrote this story where he majorly referred to and gave tribute to Chikamatsu Monzaemon, the Japanese playwright that redefined romance literature in Japan with the concept of shinjuu, the highest political action lovers can committ for the sake of their 'love', and injected the concept into his own story. The whole story revolves around Sasuke and Naruto's relationship with each other, and yet people not only unsee it but reject and trivialise it when explained by other fans. They willingly erase not only the entire core of the narrative of this story, but sweep multiple scenes, dialogues, visual elements, interview bytes, notes and plenty other elements under the carpet. Why? Unconscious bias.

Sure, some do it deliberately because homophobia and personal insecurity. But a lot of the fans see Naruto as a kids show, meant only for entertainment with no extra value or meaning. I mean imagine, the story Kishi very clearly wrote as a critique of the system, imbued with existentialist themes, is interpreted by fans as a nationalistic piece of work where they see and praise Naruto as a classic nation's hero and Sasuke as the terrorist who didn't deserve a pardon at the end. They really don't see anything else. Because of unconscious bias. Like for eg, the director of the 2026 adaptation of 'Wuthering Heights' was asked why she cast a white actor to play the role of Heathcliff, a coloured character, to which she replied that she could only cast actors as she imagined the characters to look like when she read the book. Now the book itself is pretty literal about the physical appearance of Heathcliff, where his character was described as 'dark skinned', lascar (Indian sailor or artilleryman), Romani (people from Indo-aryan ethnic nomadic tribe) and DESPITE ALL OF THIS, the director (a super white woman) "imagined" him to be white. Why? What informed this 'imagination' of hers when the words in the book itself told a different story? Unconscious bias. Same with Naruto. When Naruto specifically says that he doesn't consider Sasuke as a brother to Hagoromo, when Sasuke specifically says to Sai that he doesn't consider Naruto as his brother, where Naruto thinks Sasuke looks hot, where they both call each other their 'one and only', when they both consistently commit actions that a hero and heroine commit for each other in a classic love saga, when they are ready to commit shinjuu aka lovers' suicide for each other in the face of an unjust world, when there is SO MUCH DAMN CONTENT THAT SPECIFICALLY points at a romantic bond and not platonic, what makes these readers reject the romance of it? Of course, SNS often say this but this completely fits in this context that if Sasuke was a woman, fans would one hundred percent agree that it was romantic. But because they are both boys in a shounen media, that negates everything else, including the story, the plot, the narrative, the themes, the character building, the scene building, the impact, the visual elements, the dialogues, everything.

And this isn't any singular, rare thing to happen, it's very common in how media, especially layered and complex media is perceived, most prominently when it comes to a popular story about a topic that discusses things different from the norm, like homosexuality, stories about coloured people and other oppressed people, their dark history, etc. People can only understand something, whether other people, stories, characters etc, from the same depth (intellectual /emotional/psychological) that they have reached in themselves. When the system is built so as to keep the consumer relegated to only the ideas they were fed since birth, and where any deviation to the norm is punished or decentivized, and conformity is rewarded, what will happen? People will stop thinking, questioning, wondering, introspecting, the idea of thinking differently would be made a threat to their stability or social capital/credibility. It's how the system is set up. Look at Naruto forums on x and reddit, even in this day and age, people will get abusive and dismissive the moment you talk about SNS, trolling you and branding you as fujoshis and lesbian fetishizers, no matter the bulk of evidence against it.

Well, that's why I say SNS fans should saturate the forums and bring evidence to supplement their points. Initially, there will be a lot of resistance, but gradually the intensity of resistance will weaken. Change the narrative of the subject matter. Make it so that when SNS talk about this love story, multiple fans should call out any reactionary/prejudiced opposition as homophobic and unintelligent. Flip the narrative.

In the past few years, I have seen this personally. Many fans told me they changed their minds about the intentionality of Kishimoto when they read analysis, that they understood none of it could be coincidental or accidental because it goes against instinct, logic and common sense. Like I said, understanding is never linear, that's why repetition and diverse communication helps.

[pauvrecamille]

— Hilary Mantel, "A Place of Greater Safety"

[dutifullythoughtfulrebel]

the isolllllation!

"of course it is easy for me to talk i have no dearest friend."

"then he thought, of course i do i have Camille"

And in A Declaration of the Rights of Magicians:

"You and that Camille , sniffed Charlotte"

"you haven't even met Camille" said Max

[pauvrecamille]

the way APOGS characters tend to see Robespierre as someone nice and quiet who will never amount to much vs the way most characters see Camille and recognise him as a doomed romantic hero

[aramistinguette]

[frstlass-deactivated20191211]

Reading the commentary on Arya’s costumes in Clapton’s book is making me want to find an open field and scream very loudly into it.

So far we’ve had “warrior”, “adventurer”, “not the marrying type” and “aversion to traditional feminine styles” all used to describe her.

I knew it would be bad but I foolishly did not prepare myself for how bad. All of this shit, which Clapton appears to have just followed suit on, is what D&D decided Arya was from the beginning; what they quite literally forced the character to be because of their embarrassingly inaccurate assumption that a young girl with a complex relationship with femininity must want to ~travel the world~ and hates the idea of dresses and romantic love. These stereotypes are so fucking tired and I am done with gender nonconforming women being treated this way.

Arya literally never had a chance in the hands of these clowns.

[la-reine-de-versailles-deactiva]

I mean when does he ever

[agendercryptidlev-deactivated20]

Still so obsessed with the idea presented in AMC Interview with the Vampire with Armand being pretty much what Antoinette was to Loustat but with Nickistat. Like there's something so compelling about Lestat, as a response to Nicki's general instability and resentment post vampirism, decided to have a little "make him jealous" affair, and choosing the worst possible person to have a little jealousy fling with as Armand has 0 concept of "casual relationship"

[qqueenofhades]

granny hilary, tell us about gay porn in monasteries

Oh, I KNEW that someone was going to ask for this as soon as I reblogged that post with those tags (from you, even!). So yes, Kristen, the pervert tumblr hordes thank you for your service.

As was the case in most medieval single-sex environments, the precise balance of gender politics/constant suspicion of possible queerness was a major concern for monasteries. I've written about this before in the context of military chivalry/knighthood, and how medieval society both encouraged knights to love each other more than anything (battlefield brotherhood etc etc) and worried about whether they would love each other SO much that they would then have, y'know, actual sex. This was also a prominent worry in monasteries, which shut a bunch of often-young men up together and told them to be holy and focus on prayers and not the OTHER things that young men like to think about. My esteemed colleague @oldshrewsburyian has previously written about lesbian nuns, who often formed intense emotional/romantic bonds with other nuns. Hildegard of Bingen herself is a famous example of this, and she wrote many love letters to and about another nun, Richardis von Stade, who is often described as her "intimate friend." Regardless of whether this relationship was physical or not, Hildegard also wrote about "ecstasies" experienced in spiritual union with the Virgin Mary, and other medieval female mystics did the same.

In regard to gay monks, The Name of the Rose by famed medievalist Umberto Eco presents a fictionalized version of this, where one of the monks is something of a local monastery gay playboy and has several other monk lovers who are all presumed to be jealous of each other and possibly willing to commit murder on his behalf. This was also because a large number of monks, especially at wealthier abbeys, weren't there because they had a specific or personal religious calling. It was a common career path for younger sons, getting them out of the way of their elder brother's inheritance of their father's lands and titles, and plenty of career churchmen were relatively secular and interested in worldly pleasure, no matter how hard the Cluniacs and similar reform movements tried to outlaw clergy marriage, concubinage, and other sexual sins. Clergymen were, as is also the case today, often suspected of committing sodomy on the sly or otherwise hypocritically engaging in gay sex, and monastic authors such as Peter Damian, Odo of Cluny, and others wrote endless polemical tracts insisting that priests and monks refrain from having sex with each other, and otherwise bewailing the so-called dismal state of moral relations in the church. Of course, the bulk of concern was over male monks committing sexual sins with women, but the worry over clerical sodomy was never insignificant either. The 12th-century Cistercian monk Aelred of Rievaulx also produced various writings that have been read as homosocial, homoerotic, or otherwise exalting religious same-sex male love.

We also see this gender tension a lot in terms of the accounts of women dressing up as men to enter all-male monasteries and have a male-coded religious experience. Some of them get accused of impregnating local women, which is obviously biologically impossible but may hint at an intimate relationship with said woman, and other monks often note their "attractiveness" or other physical qualities which is then used as proof in discovering their "real gender." This likewise reflects the concern that monks were finding each other attractive even when they WEREN'T secretly women (and the scholarly literature also argues over whether we should consider these women as wearing "male disguise" or as proto-transgender individuals adopting clothing and life experiences that matched their identified gender rather than their gender assigned at birth). As noted above re: Hildegard, intensely "queer" mystical religious experiences involving physical and passionate adoration of the body of Jesus Christ were also common to both genders. Men were encouraged to visualize themselves as the "bride of Christ," transcending the ordinary limits of gender and joining in mystical (and possibly sexual) union with Jesus, and women did the same thing with both Jesus and the Virgin Mary. So yes, the medieval church was a LOT more queer than all the stereotypes would have it. In many ways.

The 14th-century Lollards in England also positioned themselves as reacting against clerical/monastic sodomy and sexual sins, and the Dissolution of the Monasteries by Henry VIII also used the argument that those degenerate monks were all just in there screwing each other at all times, which was obviously rhetorical, but reflected a deeper real-world anxiety that this was in fact actually the case. So in other words: gay monks, like gay knights, absolutely did exist and deeply shaped the social rules, cultural environments, canon law, and everyday experience of their surroundings, even despite the wild unsexiness that is the tonsure haircut. Diversity win.

[gimblestank-the-goblin]

Sources?

[qqueenofhades]

Well, uh, aside from the fact that I am a professional academic historian with a PhD in the subject, who has published peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters on medieval queer history and therefore am NOT actually just talking out of my ass here, here's a reading list if you want to check my homework and/or learn more:

Adams, Marilyn McCord. ‘Trinitarian Friendship: Same-Gender Models of Godly Love in Richard of St. Victor and Aelred of Rievaulx’, Theology and Sexuality: Classic and Contemporary Readings (2002), 322–40.

Boyd, David L. 'Disrupting the Norm: Sodomy, Culture, and the Male Body in Peter Damian's Liber Gomorrhianus', Essays in Medieval Studies 11 (1994), 63-73.

Cadden, Joan. ‘It Takes All Kinds: Sexuality and Gender Differences in Hildegard of Bingen's Book of Compound Medicine’, Traditio 40 (1984), 149–74.

Campbell, Emma. Medieval Saints' Lives: The Gift, Kinship and Community in Old French Hagiography (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2008)

Cottier, Jean-François. ‘“Vitium contra naturam”: sexualité et exclusion dans le Liber Gomorrhianus de Pierre Damien’, Cahiers du Centre d'histoire médiévale 4 (2007) 127–43.

Davis, Stephen J. ‘Crossed Texts, Crossed Sex: Intertextuality and Gender in Early Christian Legends of Holy Women Disguised as Men’, Journal of Early Christian Studies 10 (2001), 1-36.

Diem, Albrecht. ‘Teaching Sodomy in a Carolingian Monastery: A Study of Walahfrid Strabo’s and Heito’s Visio Wettini’, German History 34 (2016), 385-401.

Easton, Martha. ‘“Why Can’t a Woman Be More Like a Man?” Transforming and Transcending Gender in the Lives of Female Saints’, in The Four Modes of Seeing: Approaches to Medieval Imagery in Honor of Madeline Harrison Caviness, ed. by Evelyn Staudinger Lane, Elizabeth Carson Pastan and Ellen M. Shortell (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), pp. 333–47.

Elliot, Dyan. The Corrupter of Boys: Sodomy, Scandal, and the Medieval Clergy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020).

Holsinger, Bruce. ‘The Flesh of the Voice: Embodiment and the Homoerotics of Devotion in the Music of Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179)’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 19 (1993)

Jones, Christopher A. ‘Monastic Identity and Sodomitic Danger in the Occupatio of Odo of Cluny”, Speculum 82 (2007), 1–53.

Lochrie, Karma. ‘Mystical Acts, Queer Tendencies’, in Constructing Medieval Sexuality, ed. Karma Lochrie, Peggy McCracken, and James A. Schultz (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1997)

Masson, Cynthea. ‘Queer Copulation and the Pursuit of Divine Conjunction in Two Middle English Alchemical Poems’, in Intersections of Sexuality and the Divine in Medieval Culture: The Word Made Flesh, ed. Susannah Mary Chewning (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), pp. 37-48.

Matter, E. Ann. ‘My Sister, My Spouse: Woman-Identified Women in Medieval Christianity’, in Weaving the Visions, ed. Judith Plaskow and Carol P. Christ (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1989), pp. 51–62.

McGuire, Brian Patrick. ‘Love, Friendship, and Sex in the Eleventh Century: The Experience of Anselm’, Studia Theologica 28 (1974), 111–52.

McGuire, Brian Patrick. Brother and Lover: Aelred of Rievaulx (New York: Crossroad, 1994)

Mills, Robert. 'Gender, Sodomy, Friendship, and the Medieval Anchorhold,' Journal of Medieval Religious Cultures 36 (2010), 1-27.

Morris, Stephen. 'Where Brothers Dwell in Unity': Byzantine Christianity and Homosexuality (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2016)

Olsen, Glenn W. Of Sodomites, Effeminates, Hermaphrodytes, and Androgynes: Sodomy in the Age of Peter Damian (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies Press, 2011)

Pugh, Tison. ‘Personae, Same-Sex Desire, and Salvation in the Poetry of Marbod of Rennes, Baudri of Bourgueil, and Hildebert of Lavardin’, Comitatus 31 (2000) 57-86.

Roden, Frederick S. ‘Aelred of Rievaulx, Same-Sex Desire and the Victorian Monastery’, in Bradstock, A., Gill, S., Hogan, A., Morgan, S., eds., Masculinity and Spirituality in Victorian Culture (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), pp. 85–99.

Scanlon, Larry. ‘Unmanned Men and Eunuchs of God: Peter Damian’s Liber Gomorrhianus and the Sexual Politics of Papal Reform,’ in New Medieval Literatures, vol. 2, ed. Rita Copeland, David Lawton, and Wendy Scase (Oxford, 1998), 38–64.

Schibanoff, Susan. ‘Hildegard of Bingen and Richardis of Stade: The Discourse of Desire’, in Same Sex: Love and Desire Among Women in the Middle Ages., ed. Francesca Canadé Sautman and Pamela Sheingorn (New York: Palgrave, 2001), pp. 49-83.

Spencer-Hall, Alicia, and Blake Gutt, eds. Trans and Genderqueer Saints in Medieval Hagiography (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020)

Znorovszky, Andrea-Bianka, ‘“Ave Mari(n)a!” Representing a Cross-Dressed Saint in Fourteenth- To Sixteenth-Century Italy/Venice: Influences, Models, and Patterns of Female Sanctity’, Medium Aevum Quotidianum, 69 (2014), 45-62.

[if-one-of-us-falls]

he's a thief. he's royalty. he makes stupid plans on purpose and rolls with them. the gods personally told him to stop whining. a war started over him and he didn't notice. he's a brilliant mastermind. he frequently falls on his face in the dirt. he loves to make a scene. he's slightly naive. he's a brat. he's a hero. he's just a poor little boy. he's the most babygirl i've ever seen. he's working on his handwriting. he critiques everyone's fashion choices. he's so kind. he's a chronic liar. he steals your food. he steals your comb and your jewelry. he's so scared. he's the bravest. he pisses his family off so much he has to live in the library so they won't beat him up. he doesn't want people staring at him. he's so loyal. he would still call you ugly. he's a viper. he's a wonder.

[hoeratius]

When I finish this quiz about which Eugenides you are, it’s over for you bitches

[hoeratius]

It can be found here! Featuring some of my favourite Eugenideses: Eugenides (god), Eugenides (grandfather), not to mention Gen (thief)…

[inziladun]

Agape being onboard with marrying the volatile mess that is Eugenides in Queen of Attolia, and later, presumably, being just as onboard with marrying Sophos's uncle who is Sounis... Interpretations of her agency in those matches might vary, but if you assume she was only too willing to go ahead with them... Something very intimidating about how badly this woman wants a project

"(...)He was an astonishingly angry man, but he had many admirable qualities.” [the Magus] glanced up at Eddis and said, “He could be quite charming.” “Agape might have made something of him,” said Eddis.

Handing Agape problematic men like one hands a trainer problematic dogs dsbhujfdrf

[kil9]

if my name was "wolfgang amadeus" i would also be getting a lot of shit done

[charlesoberonn]

His name wasn't Wolfgang Amadeus. He was baptized in Greek as Joannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart.

He later Germanized it to Wolfgang Gottlieb Mozart, with "Gottlieb" having the same meaning as "Theophilus" (lit. loved by God)

Whenever he wrote in Latin he would Latinize his name to Amadeus (same meaning)

[thegoldenfox64]

reminder that you can just name yourself Wolfgang Amadeus