Leave the World Brighter

Mercy - He/Him - Grown ass man /derogatory - Multifandom artist and author. Certified freak. Overall trying to be positive but expect gore, heavy themes and profanity. Choosing to be vocally obnoxious to warn people away instead of putting up a DNI I have a discord server but you'll have to find it lmao. My carrd/portfolio: https://followerofmercy.carrd.co/o/ FollowerofMercy on AO3 - BruisingandBeautiful for the Adulte content

[followerofmercy]

FollowerofMercy

Services sheet and portfolio for Follower of Mercy

Did I mention that I have a carrd with commission info now?

[l-a-clift]

“That’s why it’s hard to make friends when you’re older,” she said. “Friendship is rude.”

Her friend’s eyes widened. “What?”

“Think about it! When we’re kids we decide who we like and stick by them no matter what. As adults, we’re taught to be polite.

But, friendship is an imposition— at least, I want it to be. Call me after nine o’clock. Don’t think you’ll ever wear out your welcome. Overshare, show up at my door, go to the grocery store with me so we can waste another hour chatting.

We’ll never be friends if we spend all of our energy trying not to bother each other.”

[screambirdscreaming]

At an art fair I saw a painting of salmon - spawners, swimming upstream, beautifully rendered through the ripple and distortion of the water. But ever so slightly odd: they were all sockeye, and every one of them male. It's subtle, I guess: the males and females both turn red-and-green, but the males turn bright cherry-red while the females remain more muted (they use that same pigment, accumulated from a lifetime of eating krill, for their eggs). And the males more dramatically change shape, becoming hook-mouthed and hump-backed, iconically so.

If you look at a photo of a crowd of sockeye coming up the river, you could gloss over this variation. Your eye might pick out the most striking, quintessential characters of the fish, the most iconic form, and transpose it onto each and every fish you render in your painting.

There's a certain distance, a certain reference error - the way a camera sees the fish, versus the way a fisherman sees them, or a spawning site surveyor, walking up and down the bank cutting open carcasses to see if they laid their eggs before they died.

It's not a bad way of seeing, but it misses certain things. Theres a gap, a lack of the continuity of knowing, at odds with the effective and impressionistic rendering of the water curving over the backs of the fish - something the camera never captures right, something that tells me the painter really has been there, watching the fish in shallow water.

If I hazard an assumption, I can triangulate the painter's relationship to the fish: near enough to have seen them, watched them, to feel a familiarity - with the fish, with the celebration of their return. The way people crowd onto bridges when they arrive. But far enough to have reached for reference, for photographs - uncertain enough for the references to have pulled them a bit off center from the things they've seen.

Another booth at the same fair: ceramics coiling with sculptural octopodes, swirls of tentacles and suckers. Octopus are tricky - people get caught up in the magnificent gesture of the tentacles, and overlook how much webbing connects the arms, how the shape of the mantle is quite particular and not just round. The eyes are oval too, and the pupils irregular, and often people put them in just - not quite the right place. These ones are good, they look like octopus and not just the pastiche of octopus - but they each have two siphons. One sticking out on either side of the head.

Again, it's a conclusion you might easily make from a photograph. You see the siphon sticking off to one side, you assume on a bilateral organism there must be a matching set. (The siphon is along the midline of the body, singular the way your nose is. But it's quite mobile, they swing it around to poke out in all sorts of places.)

And I'm trying to think why in my experience of octopus I know that. I've seen them in person, in the wild - not often but always memorable. You don't often see the siphon at all. I've watched the octopus in the aquarium, and maybe I saw it then, pulling the siphon around. But I might just know it from analogy to the squid we dissected in high school biology.

There's ways you can know a dead thing, specifically, in detail. Biology often relies on this - any number of keys for identifying species assume you have a dead specimen in front of you, which you can bother at your leisure for traits like the shape of the second inner claw. All information recorded on the life of the creature, how it eats and breathes and reproduces, is locked behind this gate, keyed with a breadcrumb trail of traits of the dead.

Even bird guides used to be like this - this was the dramatic sea change of the Audubon guides, to depict the birds in color images, with references to markings you could actually see on a still-living animal at an achievable distance. Audubon still painted them from dead specimens, of course. How else could it be done?

And now I'm thinking of bad taxidermy, skins transported around the globe and stuffed up by people only guessing at how the animal lived. Which casts into clarity the colonial underpinning of this whole concept: the knowing of something as extractable, exportable. Containable by a museum, by a book of records, by a photograph - by any means other than your own long observation. (It's still true, in biology, that you can learn more about an organism from an hour with someone who truly knows it than from all the books you can call up in a college library - there's frameworks of knowing that still haven't been condensed into the record, possibly that simply can't be.)

How long an observation does it take, to have that knowing? How many brief encounters, held-breath moments when a dragonfly pauses, before you could draw it and know you got it right?

Some things more readily than others. And not just because of what stays still, although it's partly that. Certain things impress themselves in memory, often without noticing. Once I did a drawing of a city skyline, stylized, and didn't realize til a year later that it was the skyline of my hometown seen from the sweep of the approaching highway. Another time, for a class, I drew a detailed forest understory. On a whim, I put a tiny mushroom poking out of a doug fir cone. When I was adding annotations, I thought to look up the fir cone mushrooms, and discovered that what I'd drawn was a single particular species, which grows only on the cones of douglas fir and nowhere else. I'd just thought it looked right for it to be there.

So there is a sense that drawing, or sculpting if you like, can pull up the things we know and show them to us. That the act of fleshing out the details of something can reach for knowledge beyond surface recall. At times you can feel it happening - or more often, when you know to look for it, you can feel its absense. Trying to draw something can lay out your uncertainties and questions, the gaps you don't know how to fill, the proportions you stumble over.

But it's strange, because we live in a world where a detailed representation comes much easier to hand than a knowing one. You can find photographs of anything. You can copy detail to fill in every gap, without any grounding in whether it's the right detail, the right gap.

I always come back to Durer's rhinoceros. It's remarkable how much it captures, being drawn by someone who never saw a live rhinoceros, or even a dead one - only a sketch that someone else had made. That sketch has not survived. What that artist saw or knew of the rhinoceros we don't know, except for what of it was percieved by Durer, and conveyed in his woodcut which was printed so many times. Regardless, Durer's depiction of the rhinoceros is obviously wrong in many regards - from the rendering of the folded skin as plates of armor, to the accompanying text from Pliny, to frankly everything going on with the feet. I can look at it and say that this is all obviously wrong, because I've seen photos of a rhinoceros - and videos, plush toys, molded plastic models - but I've never seen a live rhinoceros either. Or a dead one.

And my relationship to the rhinoceros is not really less colonial than Durer's, either. The rhinoceros he drew - the one he recieved a drawing of - was an individual far from home, in captivity, being paraded for spectacle and proffered to kings. Durer had no part in that directly, except by his involvement in the propagation of its image - which for several centuries was considered the most accurate depiction of a rhino across Europe. But the production and reproduction of the image of a rhinoceros is still very much commodified, and still bought and sold along intensely colonial lines. The specific, detailed accuracy with which I could draw a rhinoceros on the surface obscures how little I know it, but ultimately illuminates how removed I am from anything but its depiction.

Which returns to what compels me about the painting of the salmon. There are also, at this art fair, depictions of local animals so flatly caricatured they strike me as clip-art. The artist might have seen the animals in question, perhaps even alive an in person, but no trace of that encounter is conveyed. But the salmon are almost right. There is a knowing, a relationship, in what the painting conveys. But also a falling short. And a falling back, onto other people's depictions and interpretations, that looses touch.

I feel this tension often in my own art. What do I know? What do I think I know? What slips through unseen - both truths and misconceptions? Where am I patching over with secondhand impressions? What details am I forging?

What questions is the process of depiction leading me to ask? And what is it obscuring from me?

[thesefallenembers]

the problem with reading and writing leading to a strong vocabulary is that you tend to know the vibe of words instead of their meanings.

if I used this word in a sentence, would it make sense? absolutely. if you asked me what it meant, could I tell you? absolutely not.

[fixyourwritinghabits]

OKAY HOLD UP I KNOW THIS IS A SHITPOST BUT I HAVE A DEGREE IN THIS

Okay, so when we talk about the meaning of words, we are talking about denotation, the dictionary definition of the word, and connotation, the context in which native speakers associate with the word. Connotation is why just looking up synonyms of words doesn't always work.

When teaching this to ESL learners, my favorite example is the word "accumulate." Accumulate means to gather or collect in the dictionary definition of the words. The error in the example is for someone to say "I accumulate things" instead of "I collect things." This sounds wrong, because despite the denotation of the word, the most common connotation of accumulate is that a process done over time and without intent. Water accumulates. Dust accumulates. Money accumulates. But a person cannot say they accumulate things, because that is not a natural usage of the word.

However! As a writer who likes to learn new words, you can now use this knowledge to your advantage. Consider the following sentences:

Bob collected unread books until they piled high around his bed.

Versus

Books accumulated around Bob's bed, turning it into a fortress of unread words.

Both sentences are telling us the same thing - but the latter gives us a bit more insight on Bob, in that he's not intentionally obtaining so many books and not reading them, and that's a far more interesting thing to learn. The more you learn these words in context, the more you can use them to enrich your own writing. Embrace the thesaurus - but pay attention to those example sentences and how those words are actually used!

[plecopsar]

[the-problematic-trolley]

Transhumanism, acceptance of progress - furry, specifically protogen.

(Furry has a lot of political weight/associations).

Argument for disability rights with the protogen.

Body acceptance - hip dip, pouch, tig ol’ bitties

Sex positivity - furry, toaster/toast placement

Censorship- toaster/toast placement

[Refer to male/female gaze]

LGBT rights - bi logo on headphones

Freedom of speech/expression - sarcastic “‘all art is political’” to try and disprove it.

Artistic intent/audience response

Argument to be made for symbolism of food insecurity - use of toast for censorship instead of some luxurious food.

[thatnoulguyorsomething]

"Censorship - toaster/toast placement" specifically to cover the nipples. To this day, people on tumblr still joke about "female-presenting nipples," yet the "free the nipple" movement is all but forgotten. If the character was presented/perceived as male, those toasts would not be there, would they?

People keep tagging this nsfw/nsft. Why exactly is a picture considered "not safe"? And why by tumblr specifically?

"Body acceptance" and "male/female gaze" also intersect regarding concepts of beauty. Character is curvy and has big breasts, in art supposed to be sexually evoking - why are those things related?

[starsinoursystem]

this pride month I'm gonna need everyone to be radically pro transgender and also pro intersex and also pro ace and aro spec peoples thanks

[i-like-reblog-maps]

What month were you born in?

January

February

March

April

May

June

July

August

September

October

November

December

Voting ended onMay 28

Doing a final project in my stats class, we have to pick a subject and collect data on it. We need at least 100 data points, and I figured this blog is big enough that a poll on here could get to that pretty easily!

Doing my project on if it’s more likely to be born in certain months :]

I have gotten the OK from my teacher to collect data using a Tumblr poll, btw. I’m also going to have to send her this post as proof of where I got the data from / proof I didn’t just make up the numbers. So. Behave

[edgar-allan-possum]

[bajuuuu]

[maidenvault]

Not “Only my reading of canon is correct” or “Interpretations are subjective and all valid” but a secret third thing, “More than one interpretation can be valid but there’s a reason your English teacher had you cite quotes and examples in your papers, you have to have a strong argument that your interpretation is actually supported by the text or it is just wrong and I’m fine with telling you it’s wrong, actually.”

[mooncustafer]

If the text says the curtains are blue you can argue about what that means; but if you’re going to claim they’re actually yellow you’d better have a really good argument.

[xwilltruman]

i know the curtains better than the author. thank you for coming to my ted talk

[maidenvault]

Fandom has such unresolved mommy/daddy issues about authors. If you apply a little reading comprehension skills to my original post you’ll see I didn’t say anything at all about the author. You guys always make “interpretation” about your beef with the author. You’re all obsessed with the author. This post is just about deciphering what is there in canon. Figuring out what is being communicated by the canon itself with all the words and images and basic formal elements that are there in canon. That’s all it’s about. It really doesn’t matter if the author intentionally put all those things there in a pattern that might support the idea that this one character’s queer. That’s not what this is about. What matters is if you can compellingly argue there’s a pattern of evidence there. Or not. Everyone is conspiring together to make me go insane still adding shit about authorial intent on my post.

[rimonoroni2]

I <3 IRREVERSIBLE DAMAGE !!!

[rimonoroni2]

i’m gonna get top surgery soon and my body is different now than it was before i started T and thats AWESOME. time only goes forward. who knows what my life will be like in the future, or what changes i’ll go through. my physical form is mallaeble and subject to change and i fucking LOVE IT. irreversible damage 5ever!!!!

[rimonoroni2]

got a gender affirming reduction <3 ily irreversible damage!!!!!!!!

[sreegs]

You should take some time to read @3liza's post documenting the Phantom Report Bug (which she deserves praise for doing, thank you eliza) and see how fucking broken Tumblr's report tool is. I also want to reiterate something she is once again correct about: no one files bug reports. I have first hand experience working at Tumblr and I remember having to tell web devs on Staff "i saw a post about someone talking about a bug" and they were unaware because no one followed through to file a bug. I have fixed bugs that I saw people posting about that were in my domain (I'm a mobile dev) but were not in the system. No this is not an endorsement of "complain about it enough and eventually someone will see it", this is an endorsement of "file a bug report directly to computer companies and people will most likely read it and probably fix it". I mean it this is not a Tumblr-only thing. I've seen this at every company I've worked for. Just fucking file a bug report please I beg you, software gets complicated and the devs are just unaware that there's a bug until you bring it to your attention. And they want to fix the bug! I promise!

[3liza]

WHAT AM I ALWAYS SAYING TO YOU PEOPLE. COMPLAINING GETS THE GOODS. YOURE NOT ALLOWED TO GET MAD UNTIL YOUVE COMPLAINED ABOUT THE PROBLEM TO SOMEONE WHOSE JOB IT IS TO FIX IT

[3liza]

POLITELY

[ceescedasticity]

And not just computers! It's happened twice now that the walk signal request at the intersection by my bus stop has stopped working, for several days, but been fixed the morning after I left a message with public works about it.

[calciumcryptid]

I feel like a lot of people get "All Art is Political" confused with "All Art is made with Political Intentions" which is not the same.

[vesnawinters]

Live with love, Hikaru and Yoshiki

[phaeton-flier]

You guys are all aware that they trained people for those civil rights protests, right? That the people doing sit ins had to be trained to keep their cool as white people screamed invectives and pouring drinks on them? It was a very organized operation.

[hbbisenieks]

One of the greatest lies that recent American history has perpetuated is the idea that Rosa Parks was "just a tired Black woman who wanted to sit down on the bus" and not a motivated activist who trained with other civil rights luminaries and very intentionally got on that bus specifically to get arrested about it.

Can you think of a reason why they might not want you to know that the people staging sit-ins and getting arrested for sitting on the bus were trained and organized?

[itsoverfeeling]

Panels from the autobiographical graphic novel March: Book One (2013)

[ftmtftm]

Anyone who tells you you are only safe among people exactly like you is a fascistic liar.

My rapist was nonbinary and bi. My deeply Lutheran grandma was the first person to fully accept me as trans in my primarily liberal athiestic/agnostic family. Years ago my social life was ruined by another trans masculine person who intentionally destroyed all of my close friendships. One of my current closest friends is a cishet guy who has a friend group that is almost entirely populated of queer people because a bunch of his friends have come out around him since high school.

Fascists want you scared and isolated and alone. The way to combat that is to trust other people. And yeah. Trusting other people is vulnerable and can lead to hurt, but sometimes the people you trust blindly based on identity will be the ones who hurt you the most and the ones you dismiss blindly based on identity will be the ones who can keep you the safest.

[headspace-hotel]

All righty here's the

Sex ed/gender/relationships post for people who grew up conservative Christian

by someone who was homeschooled in the Bible Belt and surrounded by that kind of thing.

I've had to have these conversations with people irl and it's become a list of things in my head, so here

The girls who are dressing "immodestly," wearing super short shorts, showing cleavage? They are probably not trying to attract male attention or thinking about what other people think of them at all. The clothes you were raised to see as "immodest" do not, to 90% of people, belong in a distinct category, nor do people usually make clothing decisions based on the amount of "showing skin."

Men aren't "visual beings" or otherwise so different from women that they need women to cover their legs and stomachs to avoid some sort of uncontrollable sexual response. Some men in leadership roles in churches are just creepy perverts.

Masturbation isn't inherently linked to porn. I don't know why people think this. People masturbate using nothing but their own imagination.

Most people do not feel like shit after they masturbate. If you do, it's probably because you're dealing with a ton of anxiety and guilt over it.

Masturbation has a ton of health benefits, it's relaxing, it's fun, it allows you to explore your body and what feels good to you, and it absolutely is not mentioned in the Bible anywhere. Even if you weren't ever outright taught it was bad, you might be anxious about whether it's okay. It is. It's normal.

If you have a vagina: you don't have to put your fingers up in your vagina to masturbate, and plenty of us don't. You'll probably get better results by just rubbing the clitoris or around it.

I know you might have been told that The World will laugh at you for being a virgin, but in actual "liberal" "progressive" social circles, no one cares.

Men don't necessarily want sex more than women, or have a higher sex drive than women. (Throughout ancient and medieval times it was widely thought that women wanted sex more, and were more vulnerable to sexual temptation.) Libido just varies from person to person. Some people (male and female) have a very high sex drive, others (male and female) are not, and will never be, interested in sex at all.

Men can be raped. Women can be rapists.

Skills you have in relating to the same sex also apply to "opposite" sex relationships. 99% of the time, when people think they can't understand their partner because they're not the same gender, it's just that they don't talk to each other.

Sex isn't supposed to hurt. The hymen is a real thing and it can "break" the first time a person experiences vaginal penetration, but many instances of blood and pain during sex are not because of this, but instead because the penetrating partner tore delicate tissues by being too rough or because you weren't ready. You DO NOT have to just force your way through this, and in fact you should definitely stop if this is happening to you. The vagina lubricates itself with slippery fluid when you're aroused. Being comfortable and aroused also helps your muscles relax.

If you have a vagina, I totally recommend putting a hand-held mirror between your legs so you can actually see everything.

The great majority of people with a vagina have been penetrated with fingers before they tried it with a penis, and have had their vulva rubbed and touched before they tried sticking anything at all inside their body.

That is to say: If the most intimate thing you have ever done is kiss someone, it probably isn't a good idea to try penetrative sex your "first time" doing something sexual, as in the way your "wedding night" is supposed to go. There are usually multiple steps before you're ready for that, both mentally and physically.

I don't mean "when you have sex, do these things first" (though that's a good idea). I mean that people often try a lot of touching each other over their clothes and putting their hands down each other's pants and pleasuring each other with hands before they try penetrative sex, and sometimes they get naked but don't have Actual Penetrative Sex, and sometimes they take off some of their clothes but not all of them.

None of these things necessarily creates a slippery slope to anything else. Sex doesn't "just happen" because you took off your bra or let someone put their hand in your pants. Your partner HAS to make sure you're comfortable with doing a new thing, no matter what you are currently doing. If you "ended up" doing something you didn't want to do, it wasn't your fault, no matter what you were doing beforehand. I promise.

Penetrative sex isn't the best way to feel pleasure for everyone, and it isn't something that everyone wants at all. There's really no "default" way to have sex. There's no act that feels good for everyone.

People sometimes feel silly or embarrassed their first time having sex, and trying a new thing can always make someone a little bit nervous, but you're not supposed to be scared or feeling dread or anxiety.

You will have to talk to your partner about sex. It is a part of a healthy sexual relationship. People that have good sex, talk about sex. If you literally can't imagine yourself doing this, idk what to say except you've got to get past it somehow. Mortifying ordeal of being known is mortifying.

You will have to get comfortable with referring to your own, and your partner's, body parts in some way, or it will be a struggle. You can use whatever words you and your partner are cool with, but there isn't anything inherently wrong, bad, or degrading about saying "pussy" or "dick" or "cock" or other more blunt-sounding terms.

Wanting to do things with nipples is common and okay and normal, wanting to do things with butts is common and okay and normal, and that thing you want that seems a little weird is also okay and probably very common and normal. Seriously, I PROMISE almost everyone has desires outside of "penis goes into vagina in missionary position," and it's perfectly fine to want to explore them. Make sure your partner is comfortable with it if you want to give it a try, and you're good.

I know there are others and I'll add them if I think of them, but these are the things that I see the most bad information about and/or the things that have come up in conversation with people with a similar background to mine.

I think a lot of these are things that are assumed obvious, but it's easy to miss them if you never got good sex education that addresses the fact that you grew up with certain misconceptions

[headspace-hotel]

A lot of people in the notes have good additions.

I would like to add that the point of this post is not to be a comprehensive sex ed post (I'm not knowledgeable enough for that!) but to address misconceptions and harmful things that are particularly pervasive if you come from a fundamentalist background, or that reputable resources may not even think to mention.

Some of the things I or my fundamentalist friends genuinely did not know weren't discussed in the many sex-ed resources I sought out. Because the writers of those resources didn't know the types of misinformation and misconception we were exposed to.

With that said, here are some other things:

Abstinence until marriage does not guarantee you a healthy relationship, and having sex before marriage will not ruin your life. It's perfectly fine to want to wait for a committed relationship before you want to have sex! People do that! However, statistics are clear on the fact that roughly 95% of people do not wait until marriage; this was true of the Boomers and it's true today, and plenty of them do have healthy relationships. On the other hand, couples that firmly cherish the idea of abstinence until marriage can and do end up in incredibly toxic, destructive, abusive relationships. The people in my life that cherished sexual abstinence did not end up with less trauma and baggage to carry into their adult relationships, and many, many others who have written about abstinence concur that intense shame about sexuality is itself a form of baggage that will follow you into adult relationships. If you feel guilty or sinful when you have sexual feelings and thoughts, it usually continues when you are in a committed relationship.

Value of "commitment" is alone a terrible indicator of whether someone would make a good partner. The right one for you might be a person who values commitment, but so is an abuser who wants to make it as hard as possible for their victim to leave.

There is no such thing as a special chemical that bonds you to people you have sex with. That's just a complete lie. Oxytocin is released during sex, but also when you hug your friends or pet your dog.

There's also nothing inherently traumatic about having sex with a person and then breaking up with them. Neither is the pain of a breakup evidence that dating itself is bad. To be clear: romantic heartbreak can be excruciatingly painful, but treating it as a unique kind of pain obscures what it is: grief. People also grieve the loss of friendships, communities, and past selves, and it is painful, but it does not mean it was wrong to form those relationships or cherish those seasons of life in the first place.

Already addressed it above, but I didn't emphasize it enough: putting a penis in a vagina is not the "best" way to have sex for everyone, and forms of sex that don't involve a penis entering a vagina are not inherently less pleasurable, neither are they 'unnatural' or inherently degrading. The human body can give and receive pleasure in a wide variety of ways. You may think about a specific sex act and not be able to understand why it would be enjoyable for anyone. That just means that you're... probably not into that thing. You might think, "I can't understand why anyone would want to have someone's penis in their mouth. That sounds horrible." It is IMPORTANT to understand that the answer is "I guess people enjoy different things," and not, "I guess no one should do this thing." And it is REALLY IMPORTANT to understand that the answer is not, and never, ever should be, "I guess sex is just horrible sometimes."

Performing oral sex, on either configuration of genitals, actually is intrinsically fun and rewarding for some people. It isn't innately degrading or disgusting. But if it feels degrading or disgusting to you, that's you, and your partner ought to respect you for you.

Here's one that I haven't seen talked about enough, at all, anywhere: The human body can respond during a sexual assault with what seems like signs of sexual arousal. The vagina will automatically try to lubricate itself when penetrated with something. It is possible to have an orgasm when being raped. It is a physical response of the body that does not mean the victim wanted it or enjoyed it. It is possible to get an erection in response to unwanted sexual contact, again, because it's a physical response that doesn't necessarily indicate that the person 'wants' it. Being forced or coerced into penetrating another person's body is possible and is indeed rape. A person who experiences any of these things is not at fault for anything that happened to them.

It is also extremely common to shut down or 'space out' during an assault instead of fighting back or trying to escape. This can happen even if you think you physically could escape or fight back. "Freeze" is one of your instinctive responses to danger, even if you have no history of trauma, and abusers tend to be very, very skilled at making sure "Fight" and "Flight" don't go off. This response can trick you into thinking what happened must have been "not that bad," but really it means that your brain was so overwhelmed by the event that it can't process it normally.

Men's attraction to women is not innately objectifying, aggressive, uncontrollable, or possessive. Men do not have an innate tendency to constantly think of women as sexual objects. Men do not innately wrestle with the temptation to be sexual predators. If you meet a man that thinks this, RUN. Even if it's your pastor. ESPECIALLY if it's your pastor.

Masturbating while in a committed sexual relationship is not wrong and it's definitely not cheating?? There is no biblical justification for this that isn't insane. Like I know that in the Bible, there's a verse that says when you get married your body belongs not only to you but also to your spouse (which I would be Very Careful with) but if you can read, you'll notice the word ALSO. Your body and your sexuality belongs to you. It does not stop belonging to you. (So many fundamentalist Christians writing about marriage talk about differing sex drives as being this massive relationship-cracking strain. As if one of you masturbating occasionally is worse for your relationship than...one of you being pressured to have sex even when you don't really want it, and the other being sexually frustrated for no reason?)

(On that note, masturbation is not "selfish." Some things, in giving you pleasure, do not take anything away from anyone else. You might as well say that opening the window for a fresh breeze when you're home alone is selfish because it makes you happy and doesn't affect anyone else. At best, it gives a future sexual partner no benefit whatsoever for you to forbid yourself from masturbating, and at worst it means that your early sexual experiences are scarier, more uncomfortable, and less pleasurable for you, and that you ultimately have to spend the first couple years of your relationship unlearning internalized shame about pleasure instead of actually experiencing any.)

No, "consent" doesn't mean "you have to formally ask every single time you want to kiss your partner!" If you're okay with spontaneous kisses, you can just...say that.

Consent is just about making sure your partner is comfortable with what's happening and wants to keep going. Even if you say "Yes, I'm okay with this" at the beginning of something, your partner is supposed to keep communicating with you throughout and ask if you're still okay if you don't seem to be into it. You know, like a decent human being.

If the idea of consent seems to undermine a lot of social norms about romance, sex, and human interaction...that's unfortunately because those norms have roots in veiled coercion. It makes perfect sense that fundamentalists think of asking for sexual consent as weird, because one of the core ideas of Christian fundamentalists is that humans are wired to want bad things. It doesn't matter if you want sex outside of a Christian marriage, because the answer should always be No, and once you're married, the answer should be Yes as much as possible. But consent works when both Yes and No are equally safe. It's not actually good to create a rigid framework to determine when the answer should be "Yes" and when it should be "No," because the traumatizing and painful consequences of sexual coercion are real whether they are convenient for church leaders or not, and abuse is still real whether church leaders will talk about it or not.

[animusbell]

celestia is such a funny character like she's constantly manipulating twilight and friends to do shit instead of just asking and you could arguably frame that as being bc she's a "god" and pushing fate to her design or whatever, except that she engages with the group like a normal and relatable person, which makes it more like villainous machinations, except 90% of this manipulation goes towards things like "I don't want my party to be boring shit again. put my little country girl blorbos in there with zero prep so they fuck it up bad"

[animusbell]

you think you've fucked anything up around princess celestia and she's like heh. no worries. all according to keikaku

[jukashi]

Celestia instantly makes more sense as a character when you ignore the princess stuff and remember that she's a 1000+ years old wizard. Of course she does manipulative trickster stuff to teach moral lessons and/or cause chaos to amuse herself, that's classic wizard behavior. Of course sometimes she's actually socially awkward and bad at personal relationships and has bad ideas that she thought were good that result in her eating shit embarrassing style, that's classic wizard behavior. Of course she lets the aristocrats and nobles run around being assholes she's still running on wizard advisor programming, she's basically trying to merlin the entire upper class of equestria instead of just a king and some knights. "Yeah uuhhh we'll release the incarnation of chaos himself from his ancient prison because we think this shy girl can be friends with him", terrible plan if you're thinking like a ruler, amazing plan if you're thinking like a wizard. Just look at Canterlot 'Castle' for five seconds and ask yourself if that's in any way a castle. No. Wizard tower, yes. Wizard.

[animusbell]

You are so right actually

[endcrys]

@crabussy

[vile-things-zine]

Vile Things zine submission guidelines

Submit to [email protected]

This guide is available in PDF form upon request, just shoot us an email!

What you can submit to this zine:

You may submit writing up to around 3000 words, though less is completely fine. Average submission expected to be around 1500 words. You may write smutty horror fiction, gothic poetry, or you may write about a real life kink scene (it's up to you to keep your playmates safe! Make sure that the information of participants other than yourself is adequately anonymised). The subject line for these should be "Writing submission" and a name/identifier.

You may submit art or photography in greyscale or colour (please use cmyk formatting for digital art!). All photography subjects must be 18 years or older and participants must consent to their photograph being shared. The subject line for these should be "Image submission" and a name/identifier.

You may submit photographs of only your own body parts for our anonymous back cover collage. The subject line for these should be "Body part submission" and a name/identifier.

You may submit a letter to the editor to chat about whatever you want regarding this project—usually used to comment on content from previous issues. The subject line for these should be "Letter to the editor" and a name/identifier.

Note: Identifiers used in subject lines will be used for internal organising purposes only, not published in the zine!

What's allowed?

This is a space for horror smut & dark fetish above anything else. We invite the gross, gothic, gorey corners of your mind to unfold in good company. Fictionalised taboo content which is welcome here includes but is not limited to:

Kidnapping, abduction, stalking

Coercion, manipulation, abuse

Dubcon, rape, molestation

Death, snuff, necrophilia

Violence, beatings, guro

Incest, bestiality, power dynamics

Transformation, mind control, dollification

Body modification, sharps, scarification

Gender play, orientation play, blurplay (system kink)

Bodily fluids, scent, mess

If you have something nasty that's not on this list, send it in. The worst we'll do is say no, but we might love it! We prioritise erotic depiction of marginalised groups as expressed by people from those groups.

What's not allowed?

Okay, but some limits here. Everything that makes it into this zine is up to our discretion in the end, but here's some general stuff we won't publish:

Cop, Nazi, MAGA or white supremacy kinks

Intentional weight loss/starvation kinks

Depictions of genuine assault or photographs of nonconsenting individuals

Heavy/extreme ageplay [ageplay or age gaps are welcome as a layer on a piece, but preferably not as the main focus]

Fanfiction [characters you have developed out of a fan concept are fine, but if I need the context of a film or book to understand your piece properly it doesn't belong here]

Off-theme [the theme is: horror, smut. We are generous with our interpretations of both, but not to the point of incoherence]

Dickheadery [don't use this zine as a platform to harass a person, group, or type-of-person]

We're pretty open to a lot of things. Don't make me add to this list :D

Sumbission details:

Or, what info should I send with my submission? You should of course send a file containing your submission, whether that's a PDF with your writing in it or a PNG with your art. You're welcome to scan something physical or photograph a sculpture, we'll do our best to fit it into the zine—format isn't a huge deal, but something my computer can read is necessary. Each page of the zine will be half an A4 page in size, so bear this in mind regarding how much detail will be seen by the viewer. [If there is interest, we may publish a large-print version of the zine—let us know!]

With every submission email, we need your written confirmation that you understand that this zine will be published both physically and online, and that you (and any participating parties, such as photography subjects) consent to have your work published in this way. This consent can be revoked at any time prior to publication via email.

Please let us know if there are any important stylistic choices present in your piece we might not think to keep such as font, colour, etc. While we will be trying to edit the zine into something cohesive, we'll do our best to showcase your artistic vision! We will not edit grammar or spelling of submissions unless requested, though we are absolutely happy to do so for anyone who wants a proofreader.

Part of the curation of this zine will involve the notation of up to 10 content "tags" per written submission to help a reader decide if a piece might not be for them. A tag is a word or phrase which describes an aspect of your piece—"bondage" "wolves" and "feet" are all tags which might apply to different content. Please feel free to suggest your own tags for your submissions.

You are welcome to send multiple submissions in multiple categories. You are welcome to submit writing or comics with intent for serialisation—we'd love to have ongoing pieces across multiple zines. You are welcome to submit pieces which have been published elsewhere. You are welcome to submit multiple different pieces to be displayed next to each other.

We do not guarantee publication to anybody on the basis of prior publication or social cache. A reply to your submission is only guaranteed if it is accepted. We may hold your submission for use in a future volume of Vile Things—please make us aware if you do not wish for us to do so.

You are welcome to submit further biography alongside your piece & we'll do our best to fit it in, but none of these details are necessary—if you're worried about being identified please just don't give details! The following are examples of things you might share with the audience:

Submission title (absolutely anything)

Submission details (description, content notes?)

Name/pronouns (whatever you want!)

Age ("mid 30's" is fine)

Area (as vague as you like!)

Website (is there somewhere readers can find your work?)

Additional notes (anything you'd like to add?)

Note: Submissions to the back cover collage will be published with no biography details as the collage is intended to be anonymous.

Submit to [email protected]

What if I get in?

Accepted participants will recieve an email response prior to publication with details. Participants will recieve a digital copy of the zine (incl. a print formatted version), as well as a physical copy if they'd like (though I'm not forcing anyone to share their address). That's it! Then you get to say "look at me, I'm published in a zine!" and hope to hell your friends know what that means.

Join our mailing list!

Stay updated with the latest zine drops and submission calls. We we will never spam you! In the age of social media, we simply don't trust that we won't get our accounts nuked constantly. This is the best way to stay connected.

Email [email protected] with the subject line "mailing list" to join!