Cis, she/her. Feminist. Writer. Dreamer. Multi-fandom fangirl. Peggysous trash. Unabashed fan of homoerotic tension. The Gay Pirates have seized control of my brain. I am lillianmmalter on AO3, Deamwidth, Pillowfort, and Discord.
When Niko reads the Night Nurse's manual and points out the regulation requiring her to file an additional form before she can remove the boys from the mortal plane, NN says "I will have to take this up with my superior."
Which is the Principal, right?
Which means Niko pointed out the rule and then NN went to confirm it with... Niko. And that's where she personally steps in, when she visits the office, when she sees the caseboard with her name on it, and when she gets to tell Edwin he's not going back to hell...
So, I don't know how time is working here, like how this older-seeming lady could be the (apparently eternal) Principal and also a young woman who died in 2023 [and wouldn't that have been fun to find out 😢] but I have just decided to hc that there's a time loop happening where the Principal actually wrote that rule for her younger self to find, knowing she'd use it to save her friends, and then to get to see them again 🩷
white women in the us have had the right to vote for 106 years. that is such a middling number of generations back. my great-grandmother grew up during the great depression and like. i knew her. she was a person alive in my life. and she was part of the generation of my family that included the first women who grew up with the right to vote. isn't that crazy. i was born with the right to vote and so was my mom and grandma and great grandmother but not anyone else. that's as far back as it goes. 106 years. i'm always thinking about this these days i'm always thinking about how rights are much less entrenched in history than they seem . and this makes me incredibly unforgiving to passive misogyny. NOT funny DIDN'T laugh misogyny impacts every woman alive every day in one thousand ways . i hope that in fifty years or whatever someone asks me if [aspect of misogynistic culture] really used to be true because it sounds so crazy and egregious and would never happen in 207X. my point is i am getting meaner about misogyny and you should too because not only is it an extremely big deal but every feminist norm and right you've grown up with is so incredibly new.
spent forty-five minutes today helping an 87yo woman who does not own a computer or a cell phone try to set up an email account so that she could then set up a second account in order to access benefits. went with protonmail, because they don't require 2fa, but it turns out that while you can still make a protonmail account without authentication you can no longer use it to create OTHER accounts without it, and the benefits page she needed to get to required both an email and a cell phone to create an account anyway. asked if she wanted to try going in person to see if someone there could help her, and she said that she had, and they'd directed her to the website. she tried signing up with her landline, but of course that didn't work because you can't do SMS authentication that way. finally ended up writing up detailed instructions for how to log in and authenticate her account so she can drive to her severely disabled daughter's house forty minutes away because that's the only person she knows and trusts who has both a cell phone and a computer.
anyway i fucking hate mandatory 2fa and i think the people responsible for it should have to spend a year navigating their lives with no cell phone and no internet access beyond the public library pcs. fuck.
“Ariel sold her voice for legs just because of a guy“
Meanwhile Ariel with legs;
Ariel already loved the human world long before meeting Eric (you don’t get a collection like hers overnight) and when she finally got a chance to explore it, she took it.
Ursula made it more about Eric than Ariel ever did.
and i mean hell this has been talked about before in more depth than i can, but when people complain about how the ending was changed (the original fairytale does not give ariel a happy ending, she dies trying to protect the prince), i think about the fact that this was written by a gay man in the 1980s
and i think it’s entirely valid (and gives her an extremely strong connection to the queer community) to change the story so she doesn’t die because of who she loves
Triton made escape a necessity. Once someone goes to the point of destroying your possessions in a violent rampage, there is no staying and sticking it out, there’s no safety. (And Ariel, even in Ursula’s lair, gave Triton more thought than he deserved at the time.) Nowhere in the ocean she could go and be safe. Everyone’s always ‘why don’t they just leave :|’ in abusive situations until the leaving is not something they find 100% worthy of approval.
Ursula made it about Eric. She didn’t have to. Ariel had to get out from under Triton’s thumb, it could have been literally anything. Ursula took advantage of a desperate victim for her own agenda. Realistic predatory behavior toward a vulnerable person.
And also
There’s always the ‘Eric didn’t want her until she was silent and meek’ criticism - FIRST OF ALL he started out looking for a woman who wasn’t silent, and second of all what part of the carriage driving bit (or any of her other actions on land) is meek, exactly?
People above have noted the queer subtext. Now, on the subject of Ariel being willing to leave her family, aside from the baseline ‘this is an abusive environment and she was not safe there’ angle I already mentioned, consider: Ariel’s father made it clear he would stop at nothing to crush and tear down who she was and replace it with what he wanted her to be. Now - what demographic might that resonate with? And given Ashman’s involvement, do you think that was a coincidence?
there has been scholarly discussion about the idea that the og little mermaid story, where she dies at the end, was written as a queer allegory.
so taking that into account… there is something very touching about taking this story from hans christian andersen from beyond the grave and being like “things are different now. they get to be happy. she gets to live.”
also in re: “Eric didn’t want her until she was silent and meek” the meek part’s been discussed but can we please talk about how when he first met her he thought she wasn’t the girl with the voice that he was trying to find and was disappointed, but that he slowly fell for her anyway? He’d explicitly wanted Ariel WITH her voice, but came to love her without it.
The bit about Howard Ashman being queer is finally giving me some glimmer of understanding of why the teenaged girl mermaid is named “Ariel.” Because, although the Disney movie single-handedly changed popular perception thereafter, Ariel is a boy’s name. Howard Ashman absolutely knew that.
(Ariel in Shakespeare’s The Tempest also has male pronouns, in case anyone was struggling to remember.)
About the Disability Pride Flag
(its design & meaning)
Because:
A) I see it around the Internet where the proportions are off, and I think people are copy/pasting from different thumbnail images that come up in search results, and not clicking through to get the original. It's not a big deal, but it causes a hiccup in my brain whenever I see it.
and
B) There's been some discussion in the Disability Community here on Tumblr on what the precise symbolism should be, and it's changed a bit and gotten complicated. So I want to simplify and broaden it, so it can be explained to curious Normate folk -- without going into a 15 minute explanation of social constructs.
So I'm making a fresh post right now to put all that stuff together.
I'm gonna leave the detailed description of the flag design's proportions just in the alt text (so that people with screen readers know what they are, without having to listen to it twice)
The width of each colored stripe is proportional to the overall width of the flag, but I decided to leave the general proportions of the flag flexible (so it's easier for people to make one based on what materials they can find -- just in case there's a need for a protest sign for a pop-up rally).
The Meaning (Short Version -- what to tell someone who asks while you're waiting for the elevator)
6 colors represent how the Disability Community is Global
The 5 colors in the middle represent how diverse that community is
The black is inspired by pirate flags: rage at injustice, fighting back
The stripes are diagonal to represent cutting through barriers.
The in-depth reasons behind the meaning (Long Version -- If you actually want a 15+ minute discussion of social constructs and history)
The flag has all 6 'standard' colors recognized in international flags, to represent how the Disability Community is bound together by their varied, but shared, experiences, rather than geographical or political affiliation (borrowing that symbolism from Olympic Flag, which represents the global community of athletes -- also bound together by their shared experiences and aspirations).
The five colors cutting across the center of the flag represent the diversity of the Disabled Community, both in terms of physical conditions and in terms of the social-political-economic ways by which disability is understood in society. (No longer trying to assign a specific meaning to any of the individual colors)
The stripes begin centered in the top corner because that's where the "canton" of a flag is, and in flag code, that's the place of highest honor; this is where the stars are in the U.S flag, and also the stars in the flag for the People's Republic of China, and the Union Jack in Australia's flag. It cuts all the way to the end that flies in the wind to show our striving for freedom.
The field is black because Pirates!, yes. But it's also in recognition of the Black Triangle Badge (link goes to Wikipedia), which the Nazis used to mark out a wide range of people in their concentration camps, including the Disabled, that they considered "asocial." And it's in solidarity with the UK-based Black Triangle Campaign (link goes to deathbywelfare.org, from 2010), protesting cuts to disability benefits, and reclassifying disabled people "fit for work."
Reblogging the poll for more visibility, and also to reply to these Quoted tags:
#I am of the opinion that *all* disabilities don't get enough recognition as-is
[...]
#I say this as a person who can be fully able-passing (for short amounts of time)
@strangestructures made similar points in (excellent) replies to this post, especially how any disability can be made "invisible" depending on what resources a person has access to, or the context of what they're doing and when.
Back when I was still in the first stages of designing a disability pride flag (when I was still focused on the cursed zigzag design), and I was still thinking of representation in terms of different medical conditions, I only had four stripes, and someone asked me to add a fifth, for invisible disabilities.
At first, I just stuck that stripe (originally a unique purple, which was hard even for me to reproduce consistently) on top of the other stripes. But after changing it to white, and mucking around with the design, I decided to move it to the center of the design, because Invisibility is at the Center of all Disability.
I accidentally did a Wikipedia binge about 1st wave feminism and fashion and stumbled upon the 1890s bicycle suit. Do people know about this? Why didn't anyone tell me about this? This is dope as hell.
Wikipedia talks about the bloomers and the leg-o-mutton sleeves, but I'm also noticing a lot of these outfits have absolute supervillain lapels, which I also like a lot.
so many people ive known have pushed themselves to burnout trying to deny their disabled reality, skipping accommodations, skipping rests etc. and the world convinces them that the solution to their burnout is to push even harder. it’s a huge tragedy. i know social pressures make it tough but i want more disabled people to make things easier for themselves where possible, to opt out of things that harm them when possible, to quit while they’re ahead. be that person today! protect yourself where you can! take micro breaks while doing your hobby. get that shower chair. sit to brush your teeth. lie down in the middle of the day, even if only for 5 mins. these things add up and it’s so worth it.
just saw a pigeon doing the puffed up courtship dance thing to another pigeon, and as he was strutting around he suddenly stopped for a split second to do a very brief preen-peck at his own side, then returned to the strutting around. and i surprised myself by instantly losing respect for the male pigeon in that moment, like come on man i appreciate you had an itch or whatever but how is she supposed to feel special when you're getting distracted by bullshit like that? which on reflection i don't endorse, i mean those are pretty harsh dating norms i'm imposing on these pigeons, from a total outsider perspective, for no reason. probably not all girl pigeons are as uptight about that sort of thing as i would apparently be if i was a girl pigeon, maybe she even found it endearing who knows, i don't know her. it's none of my business really. sorry pigeons.
yousharknotpass
dailybridgerton
amandla
baratheonpilled
