She’s technically a monster too. She might not look it at first glance and seems mostly human, but it isn’t deniable even despite her looks compared to the other monsters.
But she realizes that she is still not like the rest of the monsters either and may not have entirely the same experiences as them, which is why she feels that she might not belong to or deserve to go to the support group. By sometimes passing as human, she feels she isn’t worthy of the space.
The sad reality though is even though she’s mostly human in appearance, that tail she has undeniably would still cause her some struggle. Humans are still gonna look at that tail and think she’s a freak. There are probably still accommodations she needs because of the tail that she may still struggle to have access to. Even if it is just the tail, that tail is still enough to other her from humans and cause her problems and discrimination.
She should get to belong in that support group even if she gets told she’s not monster “enough”. She still shares some of the same struggles as them that are caused by being a monster, and needs support.
This is an excellent demonstration of the flaws in the concept of passing privilege. Bravo to the artist.
he was there during siege of the North. he infiltrated the spirit oasis. he has an uncle who studies spirits and the spirit world. he watched the sky go dark then the moon suddenly reappear like everyone else in the entire world did. and most importantly he watched zhao get eaten by a giant godzilla fish spirit.
Also, Iroh was there? He literally watched Sokka make out with the moon spirit. And you want to tell me that a romantic sap like him would not have immediately told Zuko about this romantic tragedy? Please, Zuko has known about this for ages, he just knows that this is not an acceptable situation in which to say “yeah, I know.”
I liked these tags but I had something to say about it
I already assumed that the dresses were a choice made by the female crew, mostly for my own sanity. They do show (very infrequently) women in tos wearing pants
And they show men wearing dresses in tng, but only ever in the background (unless you count the dress uniforms)
And obviously I like that these were included, but they were clearly a cop out decision.
“Yeah see men can wear dresses, women can wear pants. They just don’t choose to” reads as “of course I’m not sexist, women just like wearing tiny little dresses in the future”
And thinking about it from a late sixties perspective, many women did see more revealing clothes as an empowering choice to make. Men wanted women covered and modest, understated makeup, only exposed or done up for male enjoyment. Some women took that in the opposite direction and chose to wear more extravagant makeup, revealing clothing, and brighter colors. It was a progressive time, and some of the choices made in an attempt to highlight that in the show did not age well.
But at the same time, you can clearly see that some of these “progressive” points were only added in as a write off.
And thinking about it from a late sixties perspective, many women did see more revealing clothes as an empowering choice to make. Men wanted women covered and modest, understated makeup, only exposed or done up for male enjoyment. Some women took that in the opposite direction and chose to wear more extravagant makeup, revealing clothing, and brighter colors.
I think it's worth emphasizing that this very genuinely is the main reason for the "sexist" miniskirts. IRL, women were often not choosing between sexy miniskirts and non-objectifying pants, but long skirts (respectable) and short skirts (rebellious). Deliberately wearing short skirts as rebellion against patriarchal control that mandated long skirts or maaaaybe loose slacks on a good day is still hardly unknown among girls/women leaving conservative communities in the USA, and was only more commonly coded that way at the time.
Sally Kellerman, the actress for Elizabeth Dehner, found the close fit of the supposedly more feminist pants uncomfortable and is often given something to hold in front of her because she was so intensely self-conscious about them. Grace Lee Whitney (Janice Rand) loathed the more "proper" initial look and worked with the (gay) costume designer, William Ware Theiss, to design a different, more daring and cool-looking aesthetic for women of the future that appealed to her personally. That was what resulted in the miniskirt uniform design. No doubt it served the objectifying tastes of various straight men involved, but literally zero of them were responsible for the design of Whitney's and Nichols's uniforms.
Not only did Nichelle Nichols not consider herself suffering from the miniskirt, she admitted later to sometimes deliberately lifting the skirt even higher at Uhura's station to show off more of her legs because she hadn't worked so hard on her body to not show them off. Meanwhile, Jill Ireland, the actress for Leila Kalomi, was nervous that she might have to wear the kinds of revealing costumes so many other TOS actresses did, and Theiss instead designed her the comfortable overalls she wears as Leila in "This Side of Paradise."
The kneejerk backlash against short skirts (in decidedly more reactionary eras of both Star Trek and US culture) led to both the large-scale disappearance of the skirts and the snide commentary on them throughout later iterations of Trek, with zero consideration of the fact that they were designed by a gay man to suit the preferences of the leading actresses at a time when they commonly represented rebellion. The Berman-era Star Trek productions tut-tutting at the old costumes while actually putting actresses in uncomfortable, form-fitting uniforms they disliked is ... uh, something else.
Even while the female Starfleet costumes shifted towards pants (and militarism) in the movies, btw, Nichelle Nichols insisted on getting to wear skirts as Uhura—because she liked them and she had little patience for 80s respectability.
And like. Y'all get that it is you folks now in the 2020s calling the 60s TOS outfits slutty and saying they aged poorly, right? You get that we right now are in an era that has backslid, in many ways, into a greater degree of prudery and paternalism than the original (and very deliberate) filming context of TOS? With our cottagecore-repackaged tradwife influencers and Clean Girl aesthetics and starvation diets? Yeah?
Progress is not linear. We have no laurels to rest on; they've been burning a long while now and the smoke inhalation is a killer.
Thank you. While I couldn't possibly keep up with all the responses to my explanation, this is something that a lot of the otherwise-positive "it has to be understood in the context of its times, it wouldn't be feminist today but it's not fair to project our greater understanding backwards" and "they aged poorly" misses.
Obviously I do think the broad social context that 60s miniskirt-wearers rebels were specifically rebelling against is important to bear in mind, but there's a lot of "we know better now/of course it wouldn't be feminist rebellion now but" that is a) not what I was saying and b) ignores the reactionary, paternalistic, prudish respectability politics that drives the assumption that there's some absolute sense in which revealing clothes are at odds with appropriate feminine dignity and admirable gender presentation, whether you phrase that in the language of conservative modesty or liberal feminism.
That's not a perspective lost to the 60s. As I mentioned in my original explanation, many of the people I know raised in conservative Christian US environments—even before the current hard swing to screeds about the degenerate art and fashion of decadent times (never very far from considering people who make/wear that art as also degenerates, and where did that term come from again?)—end up wearing things like very low-cut tops, very short skirts, very tight/"daring" clothes as rebellion against the politics and aesthetics and pressures we were raised with. Not in 1966, in 2026, today.
For some it's a phase of rebellion on the way to figuring out something else we really like, for others we discover we genuinely love the Forbidden Fashion and 90% of the discourse is just people being weird and obsessive about our bodies in a slightly different way. An Exvangelical friend of mine from North Carolina loves snazzy super-short miniskirts and was anxious when she first moved out to the urban PNW that the good people of Seattle, Washington would be shocked and judgmental, because she was so used to that reaction regardless of politics. I was raised Mormon and on leaving, found that I love really low-cut shirts because my autistic sensory aversions are particularly strong around my neck and upper chest and it's great not to have anything touching my skin there; 20 years of having to wear shirts or dresses with necklines near my collarbones introduced a completely unnecessary and avoidable level of discomfort and stress in the name of what The Right Kind of Clothes for The Right Kind of Girl was.
And repackaging right-wing fetishization of modesty in pseudo-feminist language doesn't actually make it substantially different!
Like, if the lead actress of a high-budget SF/F show today (which is what TOS was at the time) found a less revealing, less flashy outfit boring and unappealing, and worked with the show's costume designer to create a stylish futuristic outfit that would be both more comfortable and fun for her to wear, and it ended up being fairly low-cut with a very short skirt, I think we would be absolutely inundated with tedious thinkpieces about how she's an immodest slut or selling out to the patriarchy with only a thin layer of plausibly deniable phrasing, and even the CYOA phrasing would be a lot more low-effort than it would have been 10 years ago. And I fully believe people would conveniently forget that her outfit was the result of a collaboration between a gay man and a straight woman while making incessant snide remarks about how it was obviously designed one-handed etc, and find some excuse for why that's a reasonable characterization even after being reminded.
We don't live in some enlightened feminist paradise where people aren't obsessed with hyper-scrutinizing the modesty and propriety of women's appearances. If anything the trends of our era have been shifting hard, for years, towards what the miniskirt feminists were rebelling against 60 years ago.
hello!!! i was wondering if you had the pdf for when i'm gone by qiankun_pouch still? i read it years ago and it was my favorite fanfic so i'd like to re read it again. sorry it's such a random ask! i saw you said you had it in this old fic finder post :) thank you!
I do! If you could DM me, I can drop a link to you? I’m a bit wary of posting a link in the open tbh
there is no single argument against including trans women in sports that doesn't boil down to "women aren't supposed to be good at this" and it's fucking insane to me that every woman in the world isn't up in arms about the way this issue has laid institutional misogyny bare to the bone
Every part of Vegas feels like it's pulled out of fiction and is Incredibly off-putting. It's a major city in the middle of one of the world's most inhospitable deserts
Its famous for recreating other world landmarks on a small scale. It uses this as a trap to bait people into making life ruining decisions. It's motto is essentially "never speak of what happened here". Fucked up
"taken" style action movie where a man searches for his wife. as he fights baddies in gunfights and hand-to-hand combat, it's slowly revealed that:
his wife hasn't been kidnapped
their marriage is not healthy or functional
this guy isn't rescuing his wife, he's hunting her down
his wife is a crime boss, those are her henchpeople he's fighting in a john-wick bloodbath
the tension builds until, drenched in blood, our protagonist steps forward for the final showdown. he pulls a manila envelope from his bullet-torn jacket and throws it at his wife's feet. he's just spent an entire trilogy biting & killing & maiming....all so he can deliver his shit wife her divorce papers
And, for a comedic bit, I want one of the wounded/dying henchmen to just say they're a notary or something and he could have had it done in 5 minutes. And she would have known that had she bothered to get to know the people she employs.
Like I don't think you guys comprehend what happened in Poland just now but everyone needs to be talking about it.
A random influencer decided he'll listen to an anti cancer song on loop. People liked it enough times he ended up listening for 9 days.
He raised 90 million in these 9 days, and then 160 million more over the last 10 hours, for a total of 250 million.
Hundreds and thousands of people signed up to donate marrow.
Hundreds of celebrities shaved their heads in solidarity.
The Foundation receiving this money had to create a special commission to figure out how to distribute the money.
The national TV stations got highjacked to stream this for hours because it was better news than anything happening in the world.
Because we broke and DOUBLED the world record for this kind of thing.
They raised about as much as the biggest running charity event in Poland did in a whole year with three decades of tradition and a goddamn army of people.
And they did it on a goddamn amateur set up in a shabby room sitting on folding chairs.
Little update: people keep donating despite the stream being over. We're at 280 million in the fight against cancer.
Łatwogang refuses to collab with companies that only reached out to him now because of popularity or give interviews. He said any medals people wanna give them should go to the doctors and nurses and the cancer patients.
Someone offered to renovate that shabby little flat for him as a thank you. He refused.
Someone counted up how many people appeared in that room during the whole thing - it was 319 total.
Not superstitious and not not superstitious but a third secret thing (read a lot of fairytales as a child and doesn't believe them but also would never be rude to a mountain while still on it just in case)