Extra sugar / Extra salt / Extra oil and MSG

[imminentinertia]

Nobody reads pinned posts but just in case you're trying to find out wtf kind of person I am

AO3: imminentinertia

Discord: imminentinertia (and if you see that username somewhere else it's most likely me)

Some Tumblr only drabbles to be found here

Things that don't really have to do with fandoms, mostly reblogs of art and weird shit, usually end up at @itswinetodaybutpisstomorrow

My current enthusiasm for QL has lead me to make a sort of watchlist blog for more obscure shows, @fellharder, and I'm questioning all my life choices

Also I do a 111 years of queer cinema project (masterlist) - 1914-2024, started in 2025

I translated social media for Lovleg (with a friend doing the Instagram posts): @lovlegskada, which together with our clip-translating and subtitling friends at @lovlegenglish provide the full fan translation of the show (it's great and everyone should watch it! You can find the full translated show here: season 1 and season 2)

For a couple of years a friend (and later one friend more) and I recced evak fics and hosted challenges and Best Of events: @evakteket . There's a lot of good fics linked there, but some works have since been deleted, that's the way it goes

Back in the day I made some posts to help foreign SKAM fic writers with various Norwegian details, they can be found here (some of the information is outdated by now)

I used to be @skamskada btw

Everyone should go look at this post and listen to the amazing singing of the Ode to AO3/Problematic Trope Love Song

I like languages and linguistics an unhealthy amount and I know a thing or two about media analysis, but I usually can't be arsed to analyse much here because fandom is not my job. I'm here to squee

I'm a fandom old and I still have an LJ account (which is not imminentintertia, actually)

[dreamycastaway]

The original pride flag and the sewing machine it was sewn on

[iwriterobots]

[wordsmithofdoom]

ORIGIN

Gilbert Baker was an American artist and activist known for designing the rainbow flag. Born in 1951 in Parsons, Kansas, Baker served in the United States Army from 1970 to 1972. After his discharge, he learned to sew and became involved in the gay rights movement in San Francisco.[7]

Influenced by his friend and gay rights activist, Harvey Milk, Baker adopted Milk’s call for openness and truth among gay people. He saw the flag as a direct way to express presence and identity.[8] At the urging of filmmaker Arthur J. Bressan Jr., Baker created the rainbow flag to serve as a symbol for the movement.[9]

The first flags appeared on June 25, 1978, during the San Francisco Gay Freedom Day Parade celebration.[10][11]

According to a profile published in the Bay Area Reporter in 1985, Baker "chose the rainbow motif because of its associations with the hippie movement of the Sixties but he notes that the use of the design dates all the way back to ancient Egypt".[12] People have speculated that Baker was inspired by the Judy Garland song "Over the Rainbow" (Garland being among the first gay icons),[13][14] but when asked, Baker said that it was "more about the Rolling Stones and their song 'She's a Rainbow'".[15] Baker was likely influenced by the "Brotherhood Flag" (with five horizontal stripes to represent different races: red, white, brown, yellow, and black) popular among the world peace movement and hippie movement of the 1960s.[16][17][18][19]

The first rainbow flags commissioned by the fledgling pride committee were produced by a team that included artist Lynn Segerblom.[20] Segerblom was then known as Faerie Argyle Rainbow; according to her, she created the original dyeing process for the flags.[21] Thirty volunteers hand-dyed and stitched the first two flags for the parade.[22] The original flag design had eight stripes, with a specific meaning assigned to each of the colors:[23][24][25] Hot pink Sex Red Life Orange Healing Yellow Sunlight Green Nature Turquoise Magic/Art Indigo Serenity Violet Spirit

The two flags originally created for the 1978 parade were believed lost for over four decades, until a remnant of one was discovered among Baker's belongings in 2020.

Source: Wikipedia

Rainbow flag (LGBTQ) - Wikipedia

A literal piece of history. Happy pride! --WoD

[soundoftheirwings]

Gotta tell you guys something wild in the Chinese fan sphere

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

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

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

[tlbodine]

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

[solarsyrup]

one of my favorite story elements is "character way past their prime can still absolutely wreck you, leaving you to wonder just how powerful they used to be"

[sdwolfpup]

@padlocked-quintus leaving the funniest response in the tags

[jeffsatyr]

[imminentinertia]

10 shows that spark joy

@sirenofthegreenbanks tagged me, thank you 💕

Rules: make a poll with 10 of your favorite shows, they can be just 10 shows you loved watching or your top 10 tv shows of all time, then tag 10 people

I decided to go with the tag game title and picked the 10 most joy-sparking shows I know - not necessarily the ones I think are the highest quality, or the ones that are most important to me, but there's overlap with those.

In alphabetical order:

What sparks the most joy?

Beforeigners (2019-2021)

Black Books (2000-2004)

Corto Maltese (2002-2004)

Daria (1997-2002)

KinnPorsche (2022)

Lovleg (2018-2019)

Midnight Diner (2009-2019)

Red Dwarf (2009-2020)

Semantic Error (2022)

SKAM (2015-2017)

Remaining time: 5 days 7 hours

Tagging: gaaaaaaaah I'll do what I usually do. If you read this, consider yourself tagged and pls tag me if you do the poll so I can see your list.

Also feel free to scream with me about your fave(s) of these.

[peatchsoda]

Babe today at TILFF 2026 (Thailand's International LGBTQ+ Film & TV Festival 2026)

Question: What would you like to see regarding support for Y-content? Babe: I want to see a focus on craftsmanship—whether it involves the actors, the directing team, or the production crew. I feel that if there were sufficient budget and time—allowing the team to really dedicate themselves to the work—and if support came from various sectors, the quality would improve significantly.

[juliawvicker]

[girlslovegl]

—episode 1 of Shades

[makingqueerhistory]

Quietly Queer Classic

A place for subtext, authors believed to be queer, and classics beloved by the queer community.

Strangers on a Train

Listen on audiobook

Patricia Highsmith

In Patricia Highsmith’s debut novel, we encounter Guy Haines and Charles Anthony Bruno, passengers on the same train. But while Guy is a successful architect in the midst of a divorce, Bruno turns out to be a sadistic psychopath who manipulates Guy into swapping murders with him. As Bruno carries out his twisted plan, Guy is trapped in Highsmith’s perilous world—where, under the right circumstances, anybody is capable of murder.

The inspiration for Alfred Hitchcock’s classic 1951 film, Strangers on a Train launched Highsmith on a prolific career of noir fiction, and proved her mastery of depicting the unsettling forces that tremble beneath the surface of everyday contemporary life.

(Affiliate links above)

[trickstertime]

Just a perfectly normal life hack video, no need to specifically tag @were--ralph for any particular reason

[sour-charity]

[maybe-boys-do-love]

Trans* Series for Pride Month

(That aren’t Euphoria)

Veneno

I’m often struck by how small the scope of television is; there’s a surface-level approach to diversity resulting in shows and characters that feel intrinsically the same. Veneno is a jolting reminder of how big the world is — how precious, beautiful, fucked-up, and knotty our relationships are with ourselves and with others. At its core, it is simply a story about how far a person is willing to go to self-actualize, because anything less feels like no life at all.”

— E. Alex Jung, “Veneno is a Knockout”

Great Men Academy

“Love's story and desires are so potent and rare to encounter in media anywhere. Trans* allegories get reserved for horror, but this show is a trans* fairytale, with a cottage, a magic wish-granting lake, and full-on duels to prove it. And its elements line up with transness in a way few stories honestly admit. Many people only start to experience gender dysphoria after the start of puberty, for example, when adult sexual traits and hormones start to kick in, aligning with the age Love’s unwanted gender-swap occurs. And there’s plenty more of the less well-known sides of trans experience tucked into the show.”

— Is Great Men Academy a BL?

Druck, Season 3

“David isn’t just “the love interest.” He’s a fully fleshed-out character with his own arc, including a subtle but powerful exploration of gender identity and mental health. The show doesn’t slap you with labels or exposition, rather it lets you notice things, feel things, connect the dots. That kind of storytelling? Rare. And deeply respectful.”

— @tometracker, “Quietly Radical, Deeply Tender”

Smells Like Green Spirit

“It's in being able to spot the queerness of people who can pass! And it's in the joy of confessing trans things to someone for the first time! It's in their stolen make-up experiments! And wondering if they like girls or just want to look like them! And weird tastes in super masculine men! And sure, it's also in the bullying and the dissociation, but it's also being vulgar and ridiculous and running around laughing when you find someone who gets it.”

— “Emerging Transness…”

Infinity Train, Season 2

“Lake is not a passenger. She’s a denizen created by it, as many others were, in order to help the passengers, so that they can solve their issues and leave. Even worse, she’s supposed to be a reflection meant to do nothing more than imitate what her prime (That would be the people they reflect: us) did. But she escapes, and while being chased by the Mirror Police, who want to kill her for that, her journey begins.”

— Luca Cazeaux, “Infinity Train and My Journey as a Non-Binary Person”

3 Will Be Free

“Here, you can see that a trans woman also has a dream, gets hurt, struggles, fights back when pushed against a wall... just... like... any... other... human. Jennie gave life to Mae, her chasing an identity she had dreamed about for so long, the pursuit of what she thinks can make her happy, paying back the kindness of the people that have shown it to her. Her character is one of the most developed in this series. She starts off with a meager job and when the unfortunate happened, she "mans" up. As the series progresses, she becomes tougher and tougher, often times at conflict with morality where it’s currently placed her. Can she attain "justice" by inflicting injustice to others, this is the main theme of her character.“

— MDL user crazysexycoolpal, “3 Will Be Free”

DNA Says Love You

“An intersex person is born with reproductive or sexual anatomy that does not fit the boxes of ‘male’ or ‘female’. In Amber’s case, the doctors and family decided that he could more easily identify as a male and therefore he was subsequently altered and raised to be a boy. So how do you tell your closest friends this kind of secret? Yet, through all of that, whether female or male, WenWen continued to love Le Chien. Picking the name Amber rings of poetry. Amber is a very valuable gem if you will. Amber in fossilized from is tree sap that dries to a clear color and if any living material is in that sap, becomes preserved as if they are alive. We can see their form clearly of what it was previously but today, it is admired for its real beauty.”

— PPBongi, “DNA Says Love You”

Feel Good

“It’s not a preachy show attempting to inject woke values into the audience, but instead sharply dramatizes the evolution of our social perceptions and the greater freedom we are discovering by dumping old gender/sexual status quos. There’s casual fun in moments where George tries to get Elliot into kinky role-playing games or group sex, some inspired by Soviet-themed porn she’s discovered online. When Mae interviews with a new agent, the agent automatically assumes Mae must be trans but reassures them it’s perfect for a hip look, describing them as a “lonely millennial.”

— Aldo Rengifo, Entertainment Voice

Wandering Son

“When I first approached Wandering Son I was concerned that, like so many works that have lessons to impart, it would come off as didactic and proselytizing. Instead, we have this warm-hearted, gentle story about a collection of kids growing up. Wandering Son doesn't lay out any argument for the humanity of its characters who diverge from social expectation. It doesn't need to. Takako's book allows you to grow comfortable with these kids as you would members of your own family. You see them happy; you see them hurt. You see their dreams; you see their fears. You see them reaching for lives that make sense to them, struggling even as we all do to find comfort and value in the things that attract our affections—all while trying desperately not to have our spirits crushed along the way.”

— Seth T. Hahne, “Wandering Son”

Muteluv: Diva Deva Mata

“This one is for my t-girls; toey or trans, take your pick. I adore every one of these characters. The pretty bitches, the sweet pageant queens, the brilliant activists, and the girlies who couldn't get their life together or pass without divine intervention. I know all these babies. The fem-life is about wanting to be your own version of your fem-self without sacrificing your whole life to make it happen. So it is with these tgirls. They want love and beauty and fame and popularity, but they also can knock a motherfucker out with a good blow. With all the camp, it still manages to depict their desires, humanity, contradictions, and the fucked up friendships that unite them.”

— “My DIVAS”

[cam1lla]

“Authors should not be ALLOWED to write about–” you are an anti-intellectual and functionally a conservative

“This book should be taken off of shelves for featuring–” you are an anti-intellectual and functionally a conservative

“Schools shouldn’t teach this book in class because–” you are an anti-intellectual and functionally a conservative

“Nobody actually likes or wants to read classics because they’re–” you are an anti-intellectual and an idiot

“I only read YA fantasy books because every classic novel or work of literary fiction is problematic and features–” you are an anti-intellectual and you are robbing yourself of the full richness of the human experience.

[moonshinemagpie]

"you are functionally a conservative" is such a good and clarifying insult

Literally right after I saw this post, I saw another post in a discord chat for BOOK EDITORS in which an outspokenly liberal editor talked about how Nabokov should have never been published because he wrote about p*dophiles and described women's bodies in ways that made her uncomfortable. She described his writing as "objectively terrible" and said she wanted to burn his books. And other editors were bringing up classics they didn't like and talking about how they wanted to throw them in the trash. This wasn't like a light "unpopular opinion!" conversation. This was actual book editors talking about how books should be destroyed and censored.

There is something so scary and toxic in global culture right now. The revival of fascism is influencing everyone's mindset and approach to art, regardless of where they fall on the political spectrum.

I see far more books being censored today than when I was a kid. Librarians handed me The Catcher in the Rye, The Sexual Politics of Meat, and Animal Farm when I was literally 8-11. My mom would never have taken a book away from me. I read everything from the Tao Te Ching to the Qur'an to atheist texts under my desk at school. Teachers thought nothing of it or encouraged it. Books seemed universally acknowledged as sacrosanct to me.

Now I can't find any adults who don't hesitate or want to make exceptions when it comes to censorship. Even the most liberal social activist librarians I know go, "well except for book X..."

Functionally conservative. It's so important to have the language to express that.

[cam1lla]

Thank you for this addition!

[ollieofthebeholder]

I did a report on book banning once.

Actually, I did reports on book banning three separate times with three separate teachers, with three separate sets of parameters so I was able to write about the same topic in different ways, but this is specifically about the report I did in university. The actual specs for the report included that we were supposed to complete some kind of study or poll (this was not a science class). I put the questions out on a couple of forums I belonged to at the time and asked a few IRL friends as well. A lot of the questions were standard for this sort of thing, I think - were you ever assigned to read a banned book, did you ever read banned books on your own, did you read/were you assigned them BECAUSE they were banned or did you find out about them being banned later, what's your opinion on banning books, etc.

But there was one question I asked that ended up reshaping the entire thrust of my presentation: "Are there any books that you think SHOULD be banned, and if so, why?"

Here's the thing. Most of the forums I was posting on were fan spaces for a book series that, at the time, was one of the most banned/challenged books out there. It's a fandom that I have since entirely distanced myself from, that I one hundred percent do not recommend to anyone, that I will actively attempt to dissuade people from reading or talking about, and that I would like to not be popular anymore. I'm sure most of you reading this can guess which one I'm talking about (I won't name it or go into specifics because I don't want to trip any filters unnecessarily). But it was KNOWN that these books were banned in a lot of places. A lot of people wore the "I read banned books" badge with pride. I fully expected that the answer to that question would be a resounding "no" from the forums, and that I'd maybe get a few affirmative answers from one of the other spaces.

I was shocked. Not only did a lot of people come back with either "not exactly but I think we should keep [author] or [book] out of the hands of children" or "yes, [book]/anything by [author] should be banned because XYZPDQ", but not a single person who responded gave me the same answer. The only one I remember - keep in mind it's been almost twenty years - was that one person specifically said The Bone Collector, and for the "why do you think it should be banned" question, they only said, "No. I'm not explaining it. It's too horrible to even think about. Just believe me when I say nobody should ever be allowed to read this book."

I highlighted that last comment in my presentation, along with several other of my "favorite" official reasons for banning books - the Alabama school board that banned The Diary of Anne Frank in 1984 because it was "a real downer", the district that removed A Raisin in the Sun because it was "pornographic", the library that took Charlie and the Chocolate Factory out of circulation because it "might be hurtful to children without parents", and things of that nature - and pointed out that all of these were the same thing. This was somebody saying "I don't like this, therefore nobody should read it, and I shouldn't have to explain why." I also pointed out that if you can't give a good reason, the whole thing falls apart, and then I quoted "Smut" by Tom Lehrer:

All books can be indecent books, Though recent books are bolder, For filth, I'm glad to say, Is in the mind of the beholder. When correctly viewed, Everything is lewd. I can tell you things about Peter Pan And the Wizard of Oz - THERE'S a dirty old man...

Go back to that paragraph I mentioned earlier, about those books that I no longer recommend to anyone. Notice how I phrased that. I don't recommend them. I will tell you all the reasons why I don't think you should buy them. I will tell you all the problems with the author, with the franchise, with the writing. I wish they were out of print, I wish they were deeply unpopular, I wish nobody would ever read them again.

But I still won't advocate for banning them.

It's so easy to twist a justification. Look at what I quoted up there! A Raisin in the Sun was banned for being "pornographic". One of the websites I used as a source responded to that accusation with "Did they read the same play I did?" At the time, I thought the comment was funny. Now, twenty years later, I realize: It was a buzzword. It was a convenient label. At the time of the challenge, just saying "it's pornographic" was enough. Obviously you're not some kind of sicko who wants to hear about all the pornographic details, are you? Freak! That's pornography! And they're teaching it in schools! We should get rid of it!

A Raisin in the Sun, for anyone who didn't study it at any point or read it (or watch the movie, which was very good), is a play/movie about a black family in Chicago in the 1960s. The family matriarch has been in domestic service for years, but she's just received a very large insurance payment from her husband's death and is retiring. Wanting to give her family, especially her young grandson, a better life, she goes out and buys a house...in an otherwise exclusively white neighborhood. The head of the homeowner's association (essentially) comes to visit them and offers to pay them a substantial amount of money to not move into the neighborhood, because segregation isn't officially a thing and they can't legally stop them from moving in, but they don't want them there. There's a lot more that goes on in the play, and I highly recommend you go and read it, but the point is that there is nothing sexual or titillating in the entire thing. The closest we get is a scene where the daughter (Beneatha, a college student) is gifted a traditional African dress from her boyfriend, who's Nigerian, and he shows her how to put it on over the clothes she's already wearing, and maybe the scene where the daughter-in-law (Ruth, a laundress) accidentally reveals that, having found out she's pregnant, she's planning to have an abortion rather than bring another child into the world/have another mouth to feed.

It's not pornographic. But someone didn't want it taught in schools, so they called it that to get it banned.

It's so easy to twist labels. If you, a liberal, agree that books with X trait are okay to ban, the people who don't want books to exist will find a way to say they have X trait, and then what are you going to do, admit that you like that sort of thing? Sicko! Freak! Pervert!

You don't have to like the book, or the author, or the topic. But if you're advocating for banning them entirely, you're functionally a conservative.

[helsinore]

Okay as much as I dunk on academia one thing I really need you all to take from me right now is this: you can read The Problematic Theory Book. you should, fundamentally, always, read the fucking source. You do not have to approach the source context-less, but you should be prepared to read it and make a genuine attempt to comprehend what the argument is without resorting to performatively dunking on it (yes, I get a bit silly with it when I liveblog, but I do actually do my best to understand what's being said. I don't like it when queer theory is bad? I thought it was supposed to help people). If you can't make a genuine effort to comprehend the text, then if the text truly has bad takes, you won't be able to adequately argue against why Thing Bad besides "well thing bad!!" you need to be able to construct a fucking argument. You need to be able to create a framework your worldview is built on. You need clarity of mind. Another thing ALSO alongside this is sometimes you will read The Problematic Theory Book and you will see things that you agree with. You will see analysis in there that has potential. This is actually super normal and something people do in academia is that they identify these nuggets of Actually Good / Potential Filled Takes and they try to expand upon them. Salvaging the potential of Problematic Theory Book does not mean that you implicitly agree with Problematic Theory Book in its original entirety. It means you saw someone going somewhere, saw them swerve into a fucking tree, and went to yourself, "okay, well, they were on the highway before this, so let me try and see if I can steer the car in the right direction. Let me see if I can try and use the work they laid the foundations for and build something actually revolutionary upon it, or otherwise use it for my own, better, more intentionally progressive and inclusive theory." Like, that's actually one thing that academia does that is good. you have to be in conversation with past work and you have to be able to see when an author was saying some shit that had potential, and identify where they fucked up and where they might've had something, and then build on it. you can't reinvent Ur-Theory from base principles in a vacuum and expect it to be good. you can't create theory that is Morally Pure Only Based On Works You've Deemed Morally Pure because that too is a vacuum, and at that point you're treating theory and like, science, as a fucking religion. It's not a religion. You are not going to go to hell if Judith Butler or Andrea Dworkin or bell hooks or Kimberlé Crenshaw, like, breathe on you the wrong way. You can read people who you fully disagree with, understand that at some points they may have been cooking, understand that at other points they were Absolutely Not Fucking Cooking, and try to see what you can take from their work and how you can create something that is NOT a recreation of the original fucking thing but, like, your own new thing that attempts to address real world issues. stop being afraid of The Big Evil Bad Book or suggesting that people shouldn't fucking read books. read the fucking book. engage. be an academic about it, goddamnit.

also conversely stop treating some books like the bible,

[tpwrtrmnky]

This is very correct and actually generalizes outside political theories. The further back you go in any field, the more you're going to deal with the fact that the people who originally had a really clever, useful idea also had a bunch of ideas that were ass.

For instance, Isaac Newton basically laid the foundations of physics and also thought he was chosen by God to interpret prophecies from the Bible, and dedicated significant effort to this.

For some reason, learning about force and acceleration doesn't make people learning physics today scrounge the Book of Revelation for prophecies!

[qlfilmnews]

THAILAND | When Light Fades - Official Trailer

Airing June 25, 2026 on VIU

Following the tragic events of October 6, 1976, Rawin, a young university student, is forced to flee into the forest to join the Communist Party of Thailand. In the shadow of violence and ideological upheaval, he meets Comrade Yue — a man outwardly unyielding yet inwardly tender — who becomes a quiet light in Rawin’s darkness. Meanwhile, a soldier who once grew up at Rawin’s side — a brother in all but blood — begins a relentless search to bring him home. Caught between friendship, love, and the ideology he has chosen, where will Rawin’s heart ultimately belong?

[imminentinertia]

The amazing choice to leave Nikki's face in the shadows in so many heavy scenes, delivering so many significant lines.

[dishvnored]

I was never with you.

[uwemagain]

Min Thanakorn & Fuaiz Thanawat

Payback The Series | EP. 1

[itsanidiom]

#fuaiz could have chemistry with a plastic bag I stg#in his villain era#good for him op these tags are too good