For Luck, yeah

For The Sheer Joy Of It

[shu-bullshit]

"To dream of raven locks entwisted, stormy

Of violet eyes, glistening as you weep"

---

I really love the song but this is more of my book Yen interpretation.

Anyways, really enjoyed making this piece. Watercolor and acrylic gouache. Some process photos here:

She's pretty small!!

I just wanted this composition, but after I'm done I realized this shape is quite good for wallpaper.

[increasingly-insane-direwolf]

Half Goblin, half Hobbit.

Goblit.

[increasingly-insane-direwolf]

God dammit I did this just for a pun but now I’m imagining this whole backstory where a wounded female goblin flees from some battle and winds up on the edges of the Shire and she’s gonna jump some Hobbit dude named Blinko Tumbrush but Blinko’s so unfailingly polite that his first reaction on seeing someone in a rough situation is to invite them in to dinner and gobbo chick is just like “… uh… ‘kay.”

And then she has dinner and it’s the best thing she’s ever eaten and even her little green brain is able to put together “If I knife this guy so I can take his stuff he can’t cook more of this” so when he asks her to stay the night she’s just like “Fuck yeah breakfast”.

And all the other Hobbits in the area are staring at this new arrival who starts begrudgingly working in the garden (she can pull out the weeds they’d normally have to hitch livestock to) and they’re all thinking “Uhhhhh that’s a fucking Goblin there, chief” except if they actually acknowledge that she’s a goblin then it’s a huge to-do and a lot of excitement and possibly there would be adventure involved in chasing her off. So they just sort of silently, collectively decide they’re going to ignore it and all go “Oh, Blinko finally found himself a lady, how nice, she must be one of the Glumbrushes from over the far side of West Farthing, I always did hear they were on the homely side, not much hair on their feet you know.”

And eventually in due time along comes Korbo Tumbrush and decently cute Hobbit baby but the biggest fucking ears you ever saw on a Hobbit and he’s a bit green and everyone is thinking “That’s a fucking half-Goblin you’ve got there, chief, you fucked a fucking Goblin, you made a baby with a damn Goblin my guy” but this would be an immensely rude thing to say to someone so they’re just like “Oh how nice, Blinko, he looks just like you, has those Glumbrush eyes though.”

And Korbo the Goblit grows up a proper little man in his waistcoat and pipe and every so often someone visits from a different part of the shire and sees this plump green dude with massive flappy pointed ears and they start to open their mouth only for a local to leap right in and go “HAHA YES THAT IS KORBO TUMBRUSH A VERY UPRIGHT HOBBIT WE ALL LOVE KORBO HE’S GLUMBRUSH ON HIS MOTHER’S SIDE (WE THINK) THAT EXPLAINS EVERYTHING!!!” and the visitor just starts nodding along emphatically because this is clearly something that is Not Spoken Of.

[urbanfantasyinspiration]

I fuckin love it

[countless-potr]

I. I have to know …

Does Korbo know!? Like is the Gobit aware his momma is a goblin? Or does he just grow up like

“yup us Glumbrushes sure do look different”

He leaves home on an adventure and stumbles n a hoard of goblins marches right up like

“how do ya do fellow hobbits? You know I’m half Glumbrush myself”

[increasingly-insane-direwolf]

Alright, so, Korbo got in a fight once.

Once.

The Tumbrushes are, as a family trade, purveyors of fine pieces of wood. Not of large amounts of lumber, for which Hobbits don’t have a particular lot of call save occasionally, but rather of particularly nice pieces suitable for the making of fine window trimmings, floors, or the occasional carved bit of artwork to be given at a fancy event. Obviously for this one doesn’t go cutting down any tree willy-nilly, and Korbo had spent most of the day out and about looking for suitable trees.

(Korbo also personally assisted in cutting them down, being rather well known as on the strong side for a Hobbit, wink wink, nudge nudge.)

Having put in a genuine hard day’s work and rather pleased with himself, Korbo retired to the local bar to have a few beers and a smoke and to partake in good company, all of whom had gotten so used to pretending there was nothing odd about him that it was almost as if there was genuinely nothing odd about him.

Until along comes Humdil Thumbletoe.

Now the Thumbletoes were what was known in the Shire as “experts on genealogy”. This might sound like quite a good thing when you consider how well-versed most Hobbits are in their family lines, until you consider that most Hobbits are already well-versed in their family lines. A Hobbit being thoroughly knowledgeable of their family tree is not much to be remarked upon, so when it is remarked upon it is more to mean that the Hobbits in question are such tremendous mooches that they have had to dive far more deeply into their bloodlines looking for more relatives to leech off of than any Hobbit would generally consider polite.

Humdil was fairly brawny as Hobbits go, which was about all you could say for him. In fact Humdil had realized that was really all that could be said for him and had become a bit of a bully. And so it was he entered the bar that night with a very put-upon third cousin twice removed (by marriage) and caught sight of Korbo for the first time.

“Why, look at that one!” he bellowed, guffawing. “He’s so ugly his mother had to have been a Goblin, ey!”

The whole bar goes quiet. Aside from the obvious abominable rudeness of this, Humdil has said the thing that is never supposed to be said, and is clearly too stupid to realize he’s right. All heads slowly turn to Korbo.

Now, it is well known that Korbo has inherited his father’s tendency to never give a single solitary hairy-toed fuck about anything. He has currently been in the running to be at least the second most chill dude to ever be born in the Shire. And indeed, right now he’s still looking perfectly calm, puffing on his pipe. He sets the pipe aside, finishes off the last of his beer, and stands up.

“Sir, we’ll be needing to step outside.”

Now Hobbits are mostly a peaceable lot, not given to wars or fighting for any old thing, but a bit of fisticuffs outside the bar is hardly unheard of. Mostly everyone is kind of nervous about this because they’re still not sure how Korbo is reacting to this whole Goblin thing. So someone takes Korbo’s jacket and Humdil’s third cousin twice removed (by marriage) grudgingly takes his, and the two square off.

Now, Humdil was a big Hobbit, it was true, but there were a few things that, being a moron who didn’t realize he was right, and who had never been outside the Shire or seen a Goblin anyway, he could not possibly know.

For one, Goblins have long, spindly arms, giving them a surprisingly good reach for their size… not abominably long, certainly not in the case of a half-Goblin, and certainly not above being concealed by the cut of a well-tailored shirt. Second, they are compact, wiry creatures, with dense muscle over their otherwise lanky forms, and given to that a Hobbit’s already greater mass and the anchoring benefit of large, wide feet, well.

The moment Humdil stepped forward and started to swing, Korbo’s fist shot out like one of Gandalf’s better rockets and struck him directly in the nose. His flight was also, for some weeks after, compared to one of Gandalf’s rockets, though not quite as far and the explosion at the end was mostly him laying on the ground cursing wetly due to all the blood streaming from his nose.

Korbo apologizes profusely to all and sundry for the disturbance, collected his jacket, and goes home. Honey is out picking mushrooms (still being of the more nocturnal persuasion after all these years), but Blinko’s sitting by the fire reading a book. Korbo sees that there’s a newspaper (full of lots of extremely important things like how the pipeweed was growing and which barrels of beer were going to be uncasked that month), so picks it up and sits down to read.

“Evening, Da.”

“Evening, son. Pleasant evening out?”

“Oh, fine. Save for I broke Humdil Thumbletoes’s nose for him.”

“Hm, hm, I see. Why did you feel the need to do that?”

“Well, he called Ma a Goblin, you see.”

Blinko slowly lowers his book, and slowly raises his head. Looks at Korbo for long moments. Raises one eyebrow a little.

“Son. You know full well your mother is a Goblin.”

“Well, yes, but he didn’t know that, and he said it as an insult anyway so it being true or not doesn’t really matter that much, does it?“

“Hm, hm. I suppose that’s true at the end of the day, isn’t it?”

Blinko goes back to reading his book. Korbo continues reading the paper.

“You could have stabbed him,” Blinko eventually notes.

“Aye, could have stabbed him,” Korbo agrees easily enough. “But it’s a bit of a mess, isn’t it?”

“True, true, probably would have been a bit of a mess in the road, not very thoughtful to the community,” Blinko allows.

And that was the end of it.

[pens-and-paperbacks]

I love all of this so much. Also-

“Sir, we’ll be needing to step outside.”

The power. I set down my drink after that one.

[prismatic-bell]

Oddly enough, one might expect Korbo to have trouble finding a lady hobbit. He’s not given to being as plump as his fellows, and his feet are a bit small, and he’s rather, well, tall for a hobbit, isn’t he. And green. Always looks a bit like he’s eaten something that didn’t agree with him.

But he runs into Hilda Greebrook one day in town, and she’s lost her favorite pipe, which is of course a tragedy of the highest order. It’s not unheard of for a lady to smoke, but it isn’t particularly encouraged, either, and so the general reaction is “you poor dear, perhaps it’ll turn up, hadn’t you best be getting home for luncheon?”

Korbo, however, stops to help her look for the pipe, and when it’s nowhere to be found he offers to make her another just like it, if she can tell him what precisely made it so special that it was a favorite, for after all a favorite must be distinguishable by something.

Unfortunately the thing that distinguishes it is that she got it from Gandalf and it’s quite unlike most pipes in the Shire, so recreating it is quite the task. But Korbo sets himself to it anyway, working a bit each night and handing it to Hilda daily to see if it feels quite right, and six months later he’s done it—recreated a pipe that came from the world of men, or perhaps elves, but certainly not that of hobbits.

Hilda for her part discovers Korbo quite likes to read, and though he’s from a reasonably well-to-do family—for hobbits are always in need of new toys and fancy party decorations after all—can’t get his hands on books fast enough to satisfy himself, and, well, her da’s a transcriber, someone’s got to write out the papers after all, and she’s got access to practically every book in the Shire, and ways to make copies besides.

At first people think it’s odd, a hobbit who can’t see asking to borrow books, but then they find out Korbo is involved and asking questions could lead to excitement and so they absolutely do not ask and simply offer up their histories and books of poetry and hobbit folklore (for even without want for excitement there are things it’s good to remember, and things every hobbit child should know so they, too, can grow up properly plump and staying well away from adventure), and resign themselves to never seeing their books again.

And then they find that far from their books quite disappearing, they return in fine form—albeit usually in a timeframe rather too long to be polite—but oddly quite a lot seem to have tiny bits of wood shavings in, although one wouldn’t expect it in a hobbit home? And THEN Hoptus Redbranch finds Korbo one day in his workshop, he’s just stopped by for the wood to repair a door after an unfortunate incident with attempting to remove a colony of bees and rather too much smoke for the moving of bees, and Korbo is simply. Pressing small pieces of hot iron into a very thin piece of wood, making small triangle patterns like no hobbit decoration Hoptus has ever seen, and he’s quite frequently checking into a book on his left that turns out to be one of Hoptus’ own books, and very carefully turning the pages with a cloth so as to not get oil from the hot iron all over the pages—

—and THEN, not long after the news of Korbo’s strange woodburning activities have spread across most of the Shire (and caused no small amount of consternation, because goblins are clever but so often the things they make are cruel and the cause of ever so much unpleasantness), Hilda is seen in her own garden with Korbo with a stack of these thin pieces of wood all carefully hinged together, running her fingers over carefully sanded and varnished pieces and feeling the triangles and reciting a hobbit tale.

For all those months of strangely disappeared books, Korbo has been translating Westron into an alphabet that can be read with one’s fingers, and making Hilda books, and teaching her to read them.

Nobody is entirely surprised, after about three years, when the two of them vanish for a few months, and come back quite married.

[limnaia]

Within a few generations, this is absolutely going to be a thing Not Worth Remarking Upon. So when a young hobbit finds themselves accidentally ripping the knobs off doors when they’re cross, their parents will sigh and the elder hobbits in the village will remark that ‘that’ll be the Glumbrush in ‘im coming through, I told you his ears were a little bigger than his siblings, didn’t I?’ much the same as they always did on Bilbo and Frodo’s Took relations and the resulting hankering for adventure.

Were anyone from the outside to visit the Shire, they’d find a small colony of goblins thoroughly intermarried and also avoiding the usual goblin tendencies towards stabbing, so long as no one is so gauche as to insult them for being goblins.

(Sooner or later, one very flustered hobbit is going to accidentally do the same thing with an orc.)

[stargazeranswers]

The Tumbrushes, as with all Hobbits, were quite proud of their work, and rightly so. Their works are fine, of the highest quality, and they fetch the appropriate price for their labors, making them quite well-to-do. In the Shire, wealth breeds respect, of course, and so the Tumbrushes are quite well respected.

And yet there’s a difference between “well to do” and “scandalously wealthy.”

So when, when Blinko Tumbrush recieved a letter inviting them to the Baggins residence for tea, he of course brought his wife and son along.

Now, Korbo had crossed paths with Bilbo Baggins a time or two in the market, never for much longer than the time required for Polite Conversation, and so wasn’t expecting much. Sure, everyone knew Bilbo was odd, and were willing to talk about it, since Bilbo made no effort to hide his adventures and had, on numerous occasions, commented on visiting the elves or poking around the mountains, but they were in the Shire, no adventure in sight, and so this should be a normal, proper visit between client and craftsman.

And then Bilbo opened the door, pipe in hand, took the three of them in, and said, quite out of nowhere, “Ah, Shoebiter clan.”

Honey Tumbrush, late of the Shoebiter clan of the Misty Mountains, smiled with all her teeth and replied “Dragon thief!”

Bilbo guffawed and waved them inside, offering them hospitality in the goblin tongue, with the guarantee of safety and threat of violence that implied. They had arrived in time for second breakfast, and didn’t leave until past dinner, having hammered out a contract and shared many a story.

Blinko Tumbrush had only one thing to say as he walked home, arm in arm with his wife and son trailing behind. “He’s an odd fellow, that Bilbo, but nice enough. Yes, nice enough indeed.”

[mrkida-art]

I love them

[peaceheather]

Gets better and better every time I see it

[silverwolftales]

What was removed?! Which guidelines did it violate? This post was complete last time I saw it.

[mrkida-art]

Here’s my art that apparently was too much for tumblr!

[hilaritatis]

I’d probably have rebageled anyway, but because of the Tumblr content removal, I *HAD* to…

[deehellcat]

Another one I’ve probably reblogged multiple times, but not sure I’ve seen it since the ‘content violation’. lol. I especially love Korbo falling for Hilda and basically inventing Westron Braille for her. <3 It makes me think of this one fic I love that includes something along that line, where a f/f orc couple (who steal every scene they are in!) settle in the Shire post- War of the Ring, others follow, and a pleasant bit of cross-pollination occurs.

[comicgeekscomicgeek]

Worth another reblog.

[stargeyzers]

ain't they wonderful?

[screambirdscreaming]

Perhaps the most peeving thing here is the way people keep jumping up to say, "you dont understand! I just want comforting narratives where people like me are embraced by society, as a break from reading stuff where I have to think about implications - you just don't understand the appeal of reading cozy mindless things to relax!"

And I'm like. Actually I really do! I often enjoy stories that are comforting and not emotionally challenging! I just dont find narratives of assimilation comforting. I don't find it reassuring or mindless to be shown a world where certain people have been moved from the "marginalized" box to the "normalized" box, and proceed to have a totally standard normal-guy low-stakes narrative from the lap of societal acceptance! I dont find it at all a balm or comfort to the struggles of marginalization. I find it grating and exhausting, and it makes me feel *more* aware of the forces of oppression and how they exist as the necessary inverse process of the forces of normalization.

There's a lot of political baggage here, obviously. Without digging too deep into that: if the type of story that gives you the least cognitive dissonance is one where you are - without changing in any way - allowed back into realms of "socially normal", what that means is basically that you consider your expulsion from normalcy an aberration, rather than a sign of deep flaws in the concept of social acceptance. You have not integrated your own experience of marginalization into a perspective on what marginalization says about society. You have not sought solidarity with other perspectives on marginalization, or if you have, it's still with the back-pocket loophole that you think you might, personally, be allowed back in. And that you're not sure you wouldn't take it, if you were.

And I get that for queer people right now, a lot of this is hazy. Maybe you would be allowed back in! Maybe you are! There's been a big swing in social acceptance, even if it's really unstable. Maybe the idea of a world where you, personally, can go back to being unmarginalized is a possibility that feels genuinely comforting.

But if you, or your friends, are a little farther out of reach of that edge. If the nature of society is so fundamentally hostile to you that simply being "accepted back in" would not meaningfully alleviate what hurts you about society - if the bare minimum for a world that isn't hostile to you requires deeper than a surface-level change - than playing pretend with that surface level change provides no comfort. If anything, it makes the cognitive dissonance worse - and makes you feel like your supposed allies are fairweather friends who would ditch you in the struggle if they were offered a bargain of acceptance. Which is very lonely and upsetting.

Or, regardless of how personal it is to you, if you've read and thought deeply enough into history or social theory to see how arbitrarily constructed the whole concept of social acceptance is - if you're a bit aware of the implications and underpinnings of things like family structures and divisions of labor and the like - the kinds of slight-of-hand shortcuts that are used to put those problems out of sight become very frustrating. Again it's a matter of cognitive dissonance: whether the typical fiction/fantasy "stock answers" to various concerns reassure your sense of how things normally work, or whether they raise red flags of horrors shoved out of sight.

Some people will act like you're "overthinking everything" and "actively looking for problems" if you talk about your emotional reaction to those red flags. But no: it's as direct and thoughtless as the reaction of finding them a comforting reassurance of business going on as usual. (You could say, the curtains are red at home. Comfort is a matter of perspective!)

Anyway, it comes back to a baseline of: what ways of conceptualizing the world feel easy, comfortable, and thoughtless to you? They may not be the same as the concepts you would consciously acknowledge, or agree with on a cognitive level! There are a lot of layers to integrating ideas into your worldview. It can take a lot of time and reflection for things to reach deeply, to the level of your intuitive reactions.

When people say, "I know it doesn't really hold up to scrutiny, but it's just really mindless and relaxing" - what that indicates, I think, is a certain particular position on that curve of conceptual integration. Where your deep emotional relationship to the idea of normalcy and assimilation is in a different place than the concept you consciously hold. And I can see where people get really upset when you push on this, because it feels like you're invalidating the things they truly and actively believe, by pointing out that the things they emotionally resonate with are in fundamental contradiction to those beliefs.

But it's also really annoying when people insist that you "just don't understand the appeal of mindless comfort fiction", when what you are actually trying to say is that you think it would be nice if people wrote more fiction that was comforting to people who find the idea of assimilation uncomfortable.

[catastrophe-jones]

I... don't get it?

I don't think anyone should tell somebody 'you don't understand' about their own experiences with consuming fiction, but would it be possible for someone to explain to me why

"writing about worlds in which queerness is no longer hated or thought of as 'less than', but instead is just as 'normal' as being cishet is"

could be bad?

Or am I misunderstanding the point of this post?

[trasenaar]

It’s not that it’s bad… but it can be lazy. Often these stories in question write queer characters just as “normal” as the cis, but without in any way addressing the underlying structures and norms of the society that make queer people discriminated against in the first place. The result tends to be making queer people and relationships more like cis people and their relationships, instead of making the fictional world more tolerant of actual queerness.

To me personally, the effect feels a little like imagining wearing a straight jacket. Like saying that you too could be accepted and normal… if only you were more like the “normal” people—but not as I actually am.

[screambirdscreaming]

The reply above me mostly covers it, but there is another layer to my frustration here, which I don't think I was able to convey in the original post. So here's a more direct attempt at it.

First of all on the question of what is "good" or "bad" in terms of fiction. I don't think it's useful to categorize any fiction as "bad", or to say it's "bad" to read or write fiction that reiterates harmful/reductive worldviews. Fiction doesn't invent these ways of thinking, and while it is part of the cycle of reaffirming and consolidating views, it's only a very small corner of that much larger social process. Trying to control, prevent, or even morally judge fiction for its role in this process leads to many immediate types of harm (censorship, moral panics) and also doesn't even begin to touch the actual process of worldview transmission.

Also, fiction often serves to make legible what those types of underlying biases and narratives are, and what draws people to emotionally relate to them. Discussing and critiquing trends that appear in fiction is a way to learn about and unpack social biases, including fairly nuanced and complex ones that might be hard to pin down in other terms. That type of discussion is the context in which the original post was written: a discussion of narrative trends that often appear in stories that bill themselves as "queernorm", and how those trends frequently reinforce regressive views on monogamy, amatonormativity, marriage, gender segregation, and even reproductive control of women.

Not to say that any of those are at all intrinsic to writing a fictional world in which being queer is not socially punished! Just observing that over and over, in stories which center a romantic arc between (usually cismale) gay leads, the specific narrative choices that are made to uplift the social valuing of that relationship, imply pretty awful things about what may be happening to other people offpage. And the reason those choices get made in those ways, is because the narrative is aiming to provide the emotional satisfaction of seeing a queer relationship get emotionally valued *in the same ways* we are used to seeing straight relationships valued in fiction. Which is interesting, because the ways straight relationships are valued in fiction far overshoot "this is an accepted aspect of your life", running more towards propaganda on the all-consuming life-affirming value of getting married and having children, for women in particular. Trying to transpose that entire narrative emotional arc onto a couple of cis guys lands you in some tricky places. And even in the case of queernorm stories that don't go all-out heavy handed with this, there are very often weird echoes of this approach.

For example: a big part of romance narrative propaganda is about laundering "bearing children within a marriage is an absolute necessity to have a stable future, someone to inherit your livelihood, and care for you in your old age; and also if you're a woman you have a lot riding on being able to bear a child yourself because otherwise your husband will probably take another wife or mistress in order to secure offspring, leaving you in a pretty rough place" into a lot of emotional heart-string-pulling about the irreplaceable emotional experience of having *your own child together* as a romantic relationship goal. When queernorm stories try to provide this emotional beat to a queer couple, this focus on the romantic couple having *sole parental ownership* of the child generally remains, often explicitly cutting ties to any other family or community the kid might have come from. If you know even a little bit about the history and present of adoption as a concept, this casts some incredibly bleak narrative shadows.

(There was a whole rabbithole of discussion about this I'm not going to rehash but in brief: no, random orphans are not the easy answer you think they are. Please go read about how the christian adoption industry has shaped the modern concept of adoption before you even try to talk about fictional adoption to me. Please. And double that for surrogacy! Holy shit!)

((Notably, while stories in which a cis male couple Aquires A Child tend to brush past or completely diregard the kid's biological parents, stories in which a cis female couple decide to have a kid by one of them getting pregnant often focus inordinately on the thoughtful selection of a biological father. Folks, we are not beating the patriarchy allegations here....))

Anyway! Setting all that sort of detail aside: stories keep leaning into these narrative tropes and emotional beats because they resonate in some way with the author and/or audience. Often that resonance is because of how they relate to other stories: straight romance tropes are so well-worn that just seeing them invoked in a queer context can create an emotional resonance, regardless of how much troubling implication has been shoved in to bend the trope into shape. And romance, as a genre and a readership, has a particularly complicated relationship with the implications left behind by its emotional beats. Because there are so many types of overt social propaganda around romance, and so many systems of oppression tangled up in it, romance fiction is pretty much constantly dealing with baggage and implications. And for readers, the baseline approach to that minefield is to engage with what you find emotionally interesting, and not put too much moral weight on anything, because damn it's a mess in there. And sometimes, as I mentioned before, to go trawling through the trends and implications, to see what they say about broader social perspectives.

And in this case, what I think the trend of applying straight romance tropes to queer relationship stories says about the bigger social picture, is that there is a cohort of people who consider their queer identity to be an isolated, self-contained identity trait, rather than being located within a continuum of social pressures around gender, relationships, childbearing, financial and social inheritance, etc. In order to look at a queernorm story in which for example, a prince marries a man and this is acknowledged as a marriage and everyone is happy about it - and perceive that as being a queer story - you have to have a definition of queerness based entirely around an internal experience of gender and attraction. Rather than defining queerness as a disjunction between the way you want to live your life, and the social pressures that punish or coerce you into having a certain social role and type of relationship.

In fact, trying to define what "queer" even means in the context of a queernorm setting very quickly becomes a mess of circular reasoning, because the definitions of "gender" and "attraction" and "relationship" and "marriage" being used, are all forms defined in the current sociocultural context, in which they are explicitly shaped if not outright defined by cisheteronormativity. What are these marriage concepts even doing in this setting? Why hasn't the social position of women changed? The only way in which these stories make any sense is from the lens of our society, from which we paint in the sexist and homophobic context everywhere it's necessary to make the society as described hang together, and then scrub it away from the narrow view window of the lead couple.

Now to be clear: there's tons of fiction out there that shakes up heterosexual relationship norms in all sorts of ways. Many times this ends up looking like a society in which relationships our society treats as queer are accepted readily! Arguably, you could call this all queernorm, and then half of what I'm saying wouldn't make any sense.

But that isn't the subsection of fiction I'm talking about, and I don't think it's what you're asking about either, because of this specific bit of phrasing:

"queerness is no longer hated or thought of as 'less than', but instead is just as 'normal' as being cishet is."

Just as normal! Which means we are explicitly talking about a world where being cishet is still normal. Where the concept of a normal, acceptable, socially supported type of relationship exists, which means there are still social pressures built around romantic life partnerships. And the concepts of cis/trans male/female still exist basically just like in our society, because that is the framework in which we are defining "straight" or "gay", they've just been somehow severed from the social forces that relate the definition of genders to the construction of cisheteropatriarchy.

And there is a lot of fiction out there that operates on these terms! Actually a surprisingly abundant amount! And it all operates on this sort of cognitive dissonance basis, in which the sexism that holds the whole society together is present everywhere except when you're looking directly at it.

And that also is not really unusual as far as the romance genre goes. Romance is written to hit certain emotional beats and to avoid hitting other ones, most of those emotions are derived from factors that in reality have a lot of complicated baggage, so a lot of that baggage is often getting handwaved and shoved out of sight so you don't emotionally step in it.

And as I said up top I think that's fundamentally not a moral issue. Playing around with narratives and emotional constructs and tropes and socially normalized assumptions - it's fun, it's interesting, some of it pisses you off more badly than you can possibly articulate, but it's all a reflection of what runs through society. Saying that certain ways stories handle these things frustrate or upset me or alienate me isn't saying that those stories are bad. Nor is it saying that people who like those stories are bad, just that I disagree with them.

BUT. When you challenge stories that treat queerness as "just as normal", when you pick apart the worldbuilding and find tons of hidden sexism, when you just generally complain that this sort of thing is frustrating and exhausting, it turns out that you get a lot of pushback from people who think queernorm-type stories are actively morally good. That they constitute some type of meaningful social progress towards queer rights and openmindedness. And this is what I take issue with.

I do believe it's possible for fiction to have a direct, positive effect on people's social conscience. I think that sometimes people read stories that introduce them to new ways of thinking, that challenge and overturn their unexamined biases. I don't think this happens with any predictability or regularity, it has a lot to do with the specific landscape of where that person is at in their understanding of the world, more so even than it has to do with how the book is written. I think attempts to write books with the aim of inducing this effect are probably less effective at actually achieving it than writing books that come sincerely from what the author finds compelling. (And also probably more boring.)

But I don't think a story that reaffirms the idealization of regressive romantic tropes, just for the sake of projecting them onto a couple the reader's society treats as queer, is going to cause that sort of expansion of social values. I just do not think it is structurally in the cards. If the major emotional punch of a story relies on upholding normative relationship values (but gay) then normative relationship values is what's going to land.

And fundamentally, I think this is a problem because I think that the derision of queer relationships is only another face of the same social force as the pressure to be in a correct, cis-hetero reproductive marriage. A socially correct marriage ensures the proliferation of gender roles, the gendered division of labor, reproductive control of women, social control over children, and in general the production of a new generation of children who are correctly encultured to uphold these same values, and to take care of you in your old age. It's all in there. All relationship values tie back to this conglomerate goal: chastity, monogamy and faithfulness, lifelong stability of partnerships, financial provision for the family, emotional labor and childcare, hyper-gendered behavior in flirting, on and on. And to be queer is to be defined as being a threat to this structure. By being someone who doesn't fit one of the allowed roles, by refusing the role you're assigned, by wanting to structure your life in some other way and acting on it.

Social movements have pried loose certain pieces of the trap - no-fault divorce, birth control and abortion, education for women and the right for women to to hold their own jobs and open their own bank accounts. It is much less inescapable than it once was, which has led some people to act like it's truly become optional. However the social pressures to conformity with at least the general shape of a heteronormative relationship are still extremely strong.

So, to position queer relationships as being in alignment with core cultural relationship values is sort of a tricky thing. From one angle, it looks like uplifting queer relationships towards the social status given to straight relationships, allowing people to prioritize their partners openly without strife. From another angle, it looks like a concession, cutting off the scope and variety of ways queer people live and love, to redefine a slice of them as "acceptable enough" to allow some people back into the social fold. And from yet another angle, it looks like political display of submission to the institution of marriage and its ideals: look, we're not challenging your way of life, we're not dismantling the patriarchy and the gender binary and the way you live and love and raise children, we're playing along! Just like you, but over here, not a threat to your social control over your children!

I'm not casting personal judgment on people who position their personal lives this way to get by: it's hard to be living in this society, we all do what we do. And I'm certainly not casting moral judgment on people for what dynamics they enjoy in fiction, what kind of wish fulfillment scratches what emotional itch. It's absurd to treat that sort of thing as political in any serious sense.

Unless you make it your politics. If you are out here saying that you actively support normalizing queer relationships as being Just Like straight relationships, equally normal and subject to just the same social values - if you think fiction pushing this perspective is a force of political good - then my political opinion is that that's a copout and a deflection from actually pushing for social changes that would help people live free of gendered and sexual oppression, including discrimination for being queer.

And my nonpolitical opinion remains that there is fiction out there doing more interesting things with queerness and I prefer it.

[thenewplanets-deactivated202512]

there is also something to be said about how these cozy queer assimilation narratives come from an inescapably white perspective. smarter people than me have spoken extensively on this, but it's something that's always bothered me-- and that's impossible not to notice once you start looking. narratives like this sometimes feel the need to smooth over racism as well, for maximum comfort, without understanding what racism is or the impact it's had on the world. it'll be an otherwise genre-typical high fantasy story that ostensibly treats all people as equal, while ignoring the xenophobia inherent to the tropes and genre and still present in the story that now exist unquestioned, without a reason or context. it'll be race blind "historical fiction" set in a world where racism doesn't exist but the social systems built and reliant on it are unchanged. most often it doesn't even work-- the characters of color are poorly thought out stereotypes, colorism thrives unchecked, the creator picks and chooses what kinds of racism are excluded and included based on their own biases, etc. it's a superficial, fundamentally flawed understanding of racism as "people are mean to other people because of their skin color :(" rather than as a social mechanism that the standards of normal, the standards these fiction aspire to, rely on perpetuating.

and yes, this does extend to the way these authors write queerness in these cozy narratives. they aspire towards a standard of normal that relies upon systemic oppression. like a cozy queer narrative that unthinkingly recreates heteropatriarchal systemic forces with a veneer of queerness, stories like this tend to wallpaper over racism with a faux-woke facade that questions nothing. it betrays the truth of queer assimilation that is extremely obvious to those of us excluded from it (that, frankly, i'm able to articulate in large part from people like @storyweavingspider discussing it way more effectively): a lot of white queer people view their place in society as an aberration, and their goal, implicit or otherwise, is to regain the privileges of whiteness denied to them by their social position. fiction like this reinstates that social order. the only thing their idealized narratives "fix" is the idea of homophobia, tending to ignore other and related forms of oppression in favor of elevating its (usually white, or at best "race-blind") protagonists.

viewed purely as fiction, this is... whatever. boring, uninspired, something i as a reader of color glance sidelong at but rarely bring up for fear of being too woke about other people's comfort media. like op said, the issue is when people bring this up as genuine praxis. nothing is above criticism, and while it does make you unpopular to point out that that includes things intended to be thoughtless and cozy, it's always important to point out. comfort is not beyond criticism: in fact, the insistence upon it, and the pushback against anything that feels uncomfortable, allow these forms of bigotry to thrive unopposed.

[luliadraws]

The implementation of Tim’s cowl

[turrondeluxe]

obsessed with the concept of catwoman finding jason before batman and her being the one who snatches jason from the streets

[ashrayus]

wing au 🪽

[lilacsandlillies]

Funniest part about Robin Jason canonically going to heaven is that it implies either 1) Jason didn’t kill Felipe and Bruce completely blew up their relationship for no reason or 2) you’re allowed in heaven after killing someone as long as that someone really deserved it, which would then imply that heaven itself is on Jason’s side in the Jason vs Bruce conflict.

[superboyprimed]

Jason knight au

[gifs-by-renegadesstuff]

GERALT & JASKIER ❤️

↳ THE WITCHER | 4.08 “Baptism of Fire”

[existential-queeer]

Gotta shout out Dijkstra, a Geraskier truther.

He sent Jaskier to Radovid, knowing damn well that he wouldn't leave Geralt behind for anything. He also knew that Radovid would be devastated by Jaskier not choosing him. Bro didn't think that Radovid would boss up, so he lost in the end, but still.

"It was genius" yes Geralt it was, because even that bald bitch knew Jaskier would never leave you behind

Lets also not gloss over the "your bard" and "your witcher" from Dijkstra AND Radovid in the same episode. Radovid knows competition when he sees it

[olwolo]

so there is this fish soup scene...

[demonicsuffrage]

Bruce dropped out of medical school and as much as he tries to hide it, his kids all find out. Ofcourse they never let him live it down after that

Emo 21-year-old Bruce: You're not my father, Alfred!

Alfred: Quite right. I have a medical degree, and you don't.

Bruce:

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Dick: Hey I'm dropping out of Gotham University

Bruce: What? You're quitting college halfway?! Unacceptable, you cannot just give up on your engineering degree-

Dick: I did not just hear the failed doctor say that

Bruce:

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Bruce, fuming: You left my side tonight to go and gallivant around with harley quinn? A villain?

Steph: So what if she's a villain, Bruce? Atleast the villain has a doctorate.

Bruce:

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Bruce, bandaging Duke's wound because Alfred was busy: There, all done

Duke: Woah, didn't expect that from a college dropout

Bruce:

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Bruce: Stop ignoring my orders in the field! You need to listen, I have more experience-

Jason, as red hood, with his PhD in English: Which one of us actually has a Dr in front of their name?

Bruce:

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Tim: So I'm dropping out of high school

Bruce: You too?! First Dick and now you?!

Tim: No, first it was you, then Dick, and now me

Bruce:

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Bruce: Damian, your recent report card indicates you're falling behind in Biology

Damian: Tt. Must run in the family, then.

Bruce:

[hateusandseeifwemind-deactivate]

Girl, you made me giggle. How can I ever repay you?

[demaparbat-hp]

Be careful what you believe in.

[flekh]

and when they both died, they met at the Hanged Man, and she was teaching the Fade spirits to cheat in the Wicked Grace heavily inspired by @tethrawke's Hope and Dream which i LOVED!!! the fic ever. always thinking about it. nobody does it like her.

[limerental]

Hi, could you explain what you mean by the virginity themes you mentioned in the tags of this post? https://www.tumblr.com/limerental/755084499303497728/tumblr-does-not-do-well-with-interpreting-cycle-of?source=share

I only recently finished the books and ended up feeling really mixed abt Mistle/Ciri's relationship, and honestly didn't know what to make of it aside from the obvious. I think hearing other people's thoughts about it might help me parse my own.

Post link

So that tag was a little bit unrelated to the subject of the post in question and more about Sapkowski's intentions overall. As he says in that quoted interview, Ciri/Mistle exists as a subversion of expectations within the fantasy genre, which is basically the entire shtick of the Witcher books. Every way you think that a traditional fairytale fantasy story should play out veers off in the opposite direction.

Under the cut because this got long

So yeah, I think Ciri remaining a "virgin" (as in, has not had sex with a man) by the end of the books is one of those subversions. Ciri's continued (unlikely) virginity is rehashed over and over. Ihuarraquax appears to her in the desert, paired with the mid-chapter blurb about virgin unicorn hunters. Mistle interrupts Kayleigh. Death interrupts Hotspurn. Impotence interrupts Auberon. Vilgefortz's intentions divorce reproduction from sexuality.

Only when Ciri escapes the cycle of the story at the end does that stop. Or at least it's implied by her sexual feelings toward Galahad. At that point, she's run off into a whole different genre where the brave young knight finds and woos a maiden, the grail, etc. There are different rules and expectations in her epilogue than her previous life.

I'm not going to say I enjoy the focus on virginity in Ciri's story, especially given the heteronormative idea of what "counts" as sex or not, but it's very omnipresent in the story and can give you a better idea of what Sapkowski was potentially going for when he included Ciri's relationship with Mistle.

He certainly wasn't attempting to add queer representation to the genre out of a desire for more diversity. I dislike seeing the Witcher series on lists of "fantasy books with queer characters" for that reason. They do have multiple queer characters but Philippa's political lesbianism and Triss' one-off mention of sex with women and Ciri's struggle with sexuality don't really add up to a queer book series.

So yeah, I can't really help you parse Ciri/Mistle necessarily. It's understandable to feel uncomfortable about it, because that's part of the intention. Ciri's whole story isn't meant to be comfortable.