Echo In The Mirror

Personal blog of Thera, 37 year old trans woman, poly and pan and full of whimsy and horrors. Randomly nsfw, not well-tagged

[eldritch-sexting]

Get more from P J Upton on Patreon

Poesy, Collage, and Mythopoeia

Hey all! I’ve started up a Patreon so people can see and support my creative works!

Here’s a sampler of what I get up to:

[rabbitkinglune777]

COMIC UPDATE(CHAPT 1 ALMOST DONE)

[kitnita]

Leaving a baseball game for 5 minutes: Still the same batter, 4 pitches have been fouled off

Leaving a hockey game for 5 minutes: 3 goals have scored, 6 penalties have been called, and 9 fights have broken out

[baseballheritageposts]

baseball heritage post

[hockeyheritageposts]

Hockey Heritage Post

[baseballheritageposts]

wow we should like kiss or something

[milomewmew]

Put my girl in a bunny suit 😳

[smokedrac2004]

[yokowan]

dark souls should have a mechanic where if your character is clocky enough gwyndolin doesn't want to fight you and you two just sit for a while and have a few beers

[ot3]

the spamton fanbase is so crazy to me because it feels like if there was a massively disproportionate chunk of homestuck fans who were convinced not only that lil cal had pathos but that this was in fact a narratively load bearing component of the greater narrative.

[7pleiades7]

Wassernixen (Mermaids) (1920) by Josef Wawra (Austrian, 1893 – 1935), oil on canvas, Belvedere Museum, Vienna

[depsidase]

[swagophile]

me (hero): [in the process of being mindbroken] so you're telling me justice is a social construct? and the lines i draw between good and evil are entirely arbitrary?

evil temptress: yup. and whats more, guess who drew those lines in the first place

me: [tilting my head] who?

evil temptress: power. your entire existence so far functions to uphold the status quo

me: [shakinf my head, not so easily outsmarted] no. my sense of right and wrong is innate. the lines i draw are natural and unquestionable

evil temptress: [smirking and using her most evil of tricks] what if i told you 'natural' is also a social construct

me: [totally overwhelmed by her terrifying power] woah.. thats.. wow.. so you're saying i should give up and be a mindless vessel for the demon lord?

evil temptress: what. i did not say that at all. no that's-

me: your power is most terrifying evil one.. and.. i can admit when i am beat. i will devote the rest of my life to her infernal majesty

evil temptress: [sighing] yknow what. sure. why not. have fun, kid

[npdclaraoswald]

A doll youtuber I watch has made a video about the history of Polly Pocket, and she's describing the plots of the dvd specials, one of which features an elderly woman named Ms. Throckmorton, and my reaction was

[dragon-in-a-fez]

ever wandered around in an open world video game and noticed there are no children? no elderly people? no fat people? no one using a wheelchair? no one with a guide dog? this is supposed to feel like a living world and there's so much of life that's just not there

[dragon-in-a-fez]

lots of people in the notes being like "open world games don't have kids/wheelchair users because if they did the players could kill them!" and I am unrolling my papyrus scroll with my curated reading list on the topic of "oppressed groups being imagined as symbols of innocence and vulnerability that must not be harmed in public instead of acknowledged as real people who are often suffering abuse in private, and why that is bad"

[dragon-in-a-fez]

like yeah I'm aware that our culture would go collectively apeshit over kid NPCs being shot up in GTA. I'm also aware that that very same culture is broadly fine with parents beating their actual real life kids, and that most people, even most people who would never hit their own kids, think other real life kids getting hit is not their business to be enraged about. so maybe like. there's something weird going on there.

[lesbianfidelcastro]

Being anti-USA is the bare minimum for legitimate leftists I'm not even kidding

[springfieldusa]

[xollii]

[tragbarerpanzrabwehrkomplexfagot]

[elekid]

does anyone else see the spectre of stones inside the post

[mousidy]

a lot of my disillusionment with the trans "community" comes down to the fact that too many of you take "gender is different from sex" and go "ah ok, so instead of saying women are fragile and men are strong, I should say afabs are fragile and amabs are strong. to be Inclusive"

then you just treat gender like a surface level aesthetic draped over what someone "actually" is. really is indistinguishable from terf rhetoric

[mousidy]

you all need to unpack your bioessentialism, but we also need a better theory of gender than "it's just dressup." I will pick my words carefully here, but the word "gender" itself refers to so many different phenomena that have been lumped together, and we need to un-lump them

[mousidy]

in a feminist context, "gender" has historically referred to externally imposed categorization and the internalization and performance of said categories. in a paper I wrote on this subject, I called this sense of the word "extrinsic gender"

"intrinsic gender," on the other hand, is what I used to refer to the sense of the word "gender" that a lot of trans people are talking about when they discuss social gender dysphoria and euphoria. it's the internal sense of category that's resistant to external impositions

but then we also use the word "gender" to refer to subconscious sex, which is the term Julia Serano coins in Whipping Girl to name the phenomenon we're talking about when we talk about bodily dysphoria. it is the "gender" being "affirmed" by gender affirming healthcare like HRT and bottom surgery

so, "gender" is: a social classing system, a performance, and at least two internal phenomena as well. and I really don't know if it's doing us a service to conflate all of these things!

[mousidy]

a lot of people lately seem to be going heavy on the "performance" use of the word, ignoring (intentionally or otherwise) social classing, intrinsic gender, and subconscious sex. this seems to have led to a lot of "progressive" people treating trans women like men "amabs" who wear womanhood as a costume, and nobody understands why that's wrong because they also think gender is just a performance