"ive been this way i want to change" @nowhere-4ever - Tumblr Blog

Intro Post

Basics name: Nowhere, Iskander, and all variations (Alexander, alex, al, etc.) (nicknames welcome) pronouns: he/him current age: 17 nationality/ethnicity: 50/50 american palestinian/lebanese, currenty living in the usa (hoping to move away for college) sexuality/gender: queer (aroacespec, biromantic men leaning, demiromantic, transmasc)

i came over here from pinterest, if youre going to post anything i post here, over there or on instagram then i cant stop you but PLEASE tag/credit me (same username just a _ not - )

Last Update: Wed may 27 (added a stamp thingy at the bottom)

this is super long so DNIs, disclaimers, fandoms, tag system and more are under the cut

carryallyournames

actually the beauty of the cycle is that over and over again you’ll return home bruised and bleeding and someone will be there to stitch you up and hold you through the night. you’ll be coming home shaking from the cold but when you get there someone will lend you a hoodie and make a fire. you’ll be starving and dehydrated but it’s dinner time at camp and they saved you some warm food just in case tonight might be the night you escape. they might not be coming to save you but they’re waiting for you. and that’s enough

#im very normal about this #tøp lore #tøp #my reblogs

wholeheartedsuggestions

someone will love you.

love you softly. love you wholly. love you passionately. love you hopefully. love you compassionately. love you excitedly. love you vigorously. love you genuinely. love you unconditionally. love you fearlessly.

#my reblogs #love #gay yearning

what-id-like-to-be-called

i once again want to say that i. really don’t like bloodymary

what-id-like-to-be-called

to preface this, yes, i’m aromantic (aroallo). i’m also the number ONE mlm enjoyer. i love romance. i LOVE falling in love vicariously through fiction, where it’s safe and i’m not a real person and where i can actually see the appeal of something like that. shitty gay fanfic, romantic or purely smut, helped me realize i was trans. i love romantic fiction and i love characters and i love shipping. this is coming purely from my perspective as someone who’s aromantic on the basis of that identity, not out of romance-repulsion*.

however. i think it’s telling that y’all can’t enjoy a single piece of media, or just talk about it, without romance being on the table once. ryland grace (at least in the movie, haven’t finished the book) says and does NOTHING, not a SINGLE thing, that could be construed as him being interested in romance. there’s soooo much going on with phm. look me in my cold dead aro fujo eyes and tell me with a straight face that the hypothetical of ryan gosling making out with markiplier makes it on the top ten most interesting things about project hail mary. (fuck, tell me it’s top ten about iron lung.)

so many of you just can’t fathom exploring a character’s relationship dynamics without applying an allonormative framework to it. that’s it, full stop. both of these movies are vaguely similar (space, saving the world and some such, male mcs), and both of their main characters are suspiciously single. this is a problem that must be fixed. killing two birds with one stone - how *happy* would they be as a couple? they’ve both got something fundamental missing from their lives, wouldn’t it be cute if they could fix that, together?

i think that’s WEIRD. i actively enjoy shipping and i actively enjoy making things wayyy gayer than they have any right being. i love imagining homoerotic subtext that isn’t there. however, i find it infinitely more enjoyable when two things are true. (these are basically my prerequisites for enjoying any ship, and 99% of the time they’re true!):

1. there’s another character that they have chemistry and/or an interesting dynamic with; OR, there’s another character with which they would have had chemistry and/or an interesting dynamic with; OR there’s an aspect of this character that would be more interesting to explore with a romantic relationship (this last one is very, very, very rarely true).

2. the character canonically has at least HINTED at feeling romantic attraction at some point; OR the character entertains the thought at some point of entering a romantic relationship.

if the first condition isn’t satisfied, well, i just think that’s plain boring. (i also think that this separates shipping just to ship, which can’t be divorced from the allonormative and aphobic context in which it happens imho, from an actual exploration of a relationship. ofc i am talking about romantic relationships and sexual relationships often don’t require this, but that’s something else entirely and not what’s happening in this case.)

if the second condition isn’t satisfied…

(to be elaborated on in the why-ryland-grace-is-canonically-aromantic section. yes i am going there)

shipping is fun because exploring relationships and creating drama is fun. shipping is NOT fun because characters being in relationships is inherently fulfilling or a reward or GOOD.

and genuinely? deadass? do you want my opinion? the appeal of bloodymary hinges on the latter idea. it hinges on ‘curling up in ryan gosling’s arms’ being a hard-earned reward for what simon has been through. not that these two characters would have any chemistry (and, yeah bite me, there’s no reason to think they would) or that their stories would intersect in any meaningful way. it’s that neither of these movies have romance, and there’s a subconscious need to make them have it. that completely fanon romance with no textual backing is more worthwhile to engage in than the canonical aromantic subtext and/or platonic relationships. alloromantic relationships are more worthwhile than aromantic ones, because you all are comfortable celebrating that form of queerness and PRETENDING THAT THE OTHER DOESN’T FUCKING EXIST.

okayyy okay this is genuinely making me mad i’m becoming less articulate ughhhh lmao. sorry if that didn’t make sense.

part two!:

ryland grace is my close personal friend and he told me that he’s aromantic.

canonically! he’s canonically queer! are you all happy? are you all celebrating the way you would if he was canonically gay?

…hello?

okay, i think we can all agree that having a character show not a single sign of being interested in romance in any capacity is an anomaly. it’s an anomaly to the degree that it’s used as evidence for queercoding (in the aspec-exclusionary sense; ie same-sex attraction, not lack of attraction) when a character has no interest in straight relationships. (i also hate this idea, that a character not being straight codes them as gay, but that aphobia is a lot more blatant and needs less explanation. i hope.) so much of fiction actively avoids characters like this, because, well. people who act like ryland grace in the real world are queer. it’s not the typical human experience around attraction. this is what aromanticism and asexuality, and the whole a-spectrum in general, are. it is always a conscious decision to make a character, let alone a MAIN character with two hours of screen time and plenty of opportunity for an off-handed comment, entirely uninvolved with romance.

no, grace does not stand up in front of the whole science team and say ‘hey, just so no one gets any funny ideas, i am aromantic! this means that i do not experience romantic attraction! just so we are all clear! i am aspec! i am a queer character!’

yeah, jack twist and ennis del mar also don’t look at the screen and say, ‘i’m a homosexual man and this is my homosexual lover and we are in love and gay and members of the lgbtq community.’ (hell, they even clarify for you that they aren’t ‘queers’! the woman that wrote them said that it’s not a gay love story**! what’s with these modern-day gay audiences making everything about them?) they just have gay sex in front of you onscreen and ruin their lives because… uh,,, raising kids sucks?

calling the gay cowboys from brokeback mountain gay cowboys is not WRONG. not once in the movie is their queerness brought up in any heavy-handed way; they don’t even say ‘i love you’. they’re gay cowboys because they’re two men who like having sex with each other, we as an audience recognize that this is what being gay is, and we extrapolate that their succeeding struggles are due to this gay identity. (i’m now trying to imagine what watching this movie would be like for someone who fully took them at their word that they weren’t queer and it’s almost funny. the whole movie would just be random disconnected vignettes of boring good looking people acting weirdly, lmao.) as in-your-face as it is, this is subtext.

grace is subtextually queer. stratt’s comment about him living alone without ‘even a dog’ paints him as subtextually queer as jake gyllenhaal’s character getting pounded does. (pssst. if you’re questioning this, imagine if stratt had said that he had a boyfriend in this scene. then would he be canonically queer? if you think that’s true, but this isn’t, then you probably just view aspec people as less definitively queer than gay people, i’m ngl. say it with your full chest next time, or maybe reexamine this.)

okay, beyond the analogy. logically: a character is single and, as far as the audience knows, wants nothing more than to be single. as established earlier, this is a conscious choice by the author, and it’s likely that the character does not possess a secret burning internal desire for romance that they refuse to disclose publicly. so, the character then definitively wants nothing more than to be single. a person who feels this way in the real world is aromantic, whether they identify themselves as such or not. thus, the character is subtextually and canonically aromantic. aromanticism is queer, thus, the character is subtextually and canonically queer.

sure, ryland grace is not wearing an aroace flag shirt like y’all draw him in (although he totally would and they totally should have done that). and owen/isabel from i saw the tv glow doesn’t have a fucking pronouns.page. would you deadass, straight-faced, tell me that that character is cisgender? or, since the genderqueerness is officially author-approved and the main focus, does that make it more real? or, once again, do you view a hypothetically alloromantic allosexual transgender person to be more queer than a hypothetically aroace cisgender person?

in any case, i 100% fully completely believe that grace is subtextually aromantic (and likely aroace), and thus it would be accurate to describe him as simply aromantic. grace is an aromantic character. he’s queer! does this upset you? why? at the very, very, VERY least, let’s agree to call him aromantic-coded. he’s actually queercoded!

i’m not saying that you’re evil and a bigot for liking bloodymary, it’s a ship, lmao. ultimately this is my reading yap yap yap subjectivity, but i think you can only stretch that so far in good faith. i could read brokeback mountain as a story about a loving husband and his good friend who he likes to wrestle with sometimes. let’s be realistic, though - in a world more kind to and aware of people like me, this would be a very logical and very common opinion. in a world where more people respected aromanticism as a queer identity worth exploring on its own, bloodymary would likely not be as popular.

and it’s not about the individuals or erasure, not really. it’s compounding this evidence that actually exists in the text for a queer reading, one that points towards an identity less respected in queer spaces, with the completely fanon crossover that exists in more comfortable, more allonormative territory. it’s about the systemic erasure of aromantic-coded and subtextually aromantic characters for alloromantic/sexuals’ fun. keep drawing fanart and writing fanfic, i don’t care, but maybe entertain the thought of an aroace character every once in a while? maybe entertain the thought of an allo character separate from their ability to kiss and to procreate for once in a while too, please?

because ultimately this isn’t about you, person who enjoys bloodymary. it’s about the absolutely massive fandom that has gathered around what i can only perceive as one of the most milquetoast ships imaginable that includes one of my favorite queer characters ever, a ship that necessitates the erasure of that identity. it’s about how many goddamn people can look past that, not that you as an individual never thought of it. just… love aspec people more. through respecting us in fiction, being kind to us in fandom or irl, advocating for us in the real world, or giving us all your savings so we can go see project hail mary in theaters ten more times. or just not arguing with our own queer interpretations of fiction, in any case.

thank you for reading :)

* which of course is just as valid as my experience! you’re allowed to dislike something because it’s romantic and you’re aro and romance-repulsed. (i encourage y’all to complain like that, to be completely honest. it’s suchhhh a fucking necessary perspective and calling out people’s biases towards allo characters and allo-presenting relationships is so important. i can’t stress it enough that you deserve to be as loud as [and louder than sometimes, especially in fandom spaces, oh my god!] any other queer person.) i’m just trying to articulate that this is not what i’m trying to argue - that is, i’m actually trying to argue something, not just express an opinion. i love you romance repulsed aromantics (and anyone else!), y’all have been so important to my journey as an aspec person and you deserve the world. and a hundred bucks from anyone who has ever made you uncomfortable in fandom.

** this is actually a really good analogy, not to jerk myself off too much, because of this. she stated that it’s a human love story. as silly as this sounds, they really aren’t gay. they were not written originally with the intention of being gay. they’re men who have sex with men. that doesn’t make people calling them gay incorrect. it’s extrapolation from the (very clear) subtext, regardless of authorial intent. these are men who are shown to be attracted to and have sex with men -> these are gay characters. this is a man who, as established, is deliberately and consciously shown to not be attracted to any gender -> this is an aromantic character.

ohmxbeliever

ok im gonna tap in a reblog so I don’t post a text brick of a comment: im with you here.

Am I a BloodyMary enjoyer?: yes. It’s kind of a crackship to me? Not smth too serious.

Ryland Grace is one of the most aroace characters I’ve ever fucking seen. I didn’t put the queer subtext together while I was watching the movie, but I was too busy crying over a fucking rock to really think about it. I didn’t go into the movie looking for romantic subtext because I didn’t think that’s what it’d be about. Even when Stratt was introduced, that’s not what I was thinking.

(Also, I think Ryland Grace made me realize im DEFINITELY arospec in some way but THATS neither here nor there)

Like, even if he and Simon DID exist in the same universe…He wouldn’t fucking say that. He wouldn’t fucking do that. He’d offer the same amount of love and care he did to Rocky. Neither character needs / wants a romantic relationship to be happy and that’s incredibly obvious.

OH, and it wasn’t mentioned here, but i don’t care for RockyGrace / RockyAdrianGrace (idk the ship names sorry) FAR more than I don’t care for Bloodymary. Let friendship save the day just this once. Let a piece of media exist without romance, it won’t kill you.

nowhere-4ever

YES all of this!

ok so: i love bloodymary, i see myself in both of them and the way the fandoms adopted them is lovely to me. by that i mean they saw two people who, one of which had a tragic death ending and the other was left as the only human around him for the rest of his life, and decided they wanted them to have happy endings so put them together on the same planet so they wouldnt be alone/live their last moments in suffering and fear. i just think thats neat :) (this is the way i originally interprited the ship on my own)

BUT

i think any romantic bloodymary ship is out of character for Ryland. (thats why its a crack ship, like prev said) (also) as prev said, hed treat simon with the same love he treats Rocky. this is also a good time to say i LOVE platonic and QPR versions of this ship. the more i think about it the more i wish there was more of them PLATONICALLY(or queer platonically, giving rep to QPRs) only, id love to see two people who understadn each other to just hang out and help each other through trauma.

taking a canonically(as close to canon as possible) aromantic/aroace character (who has never expressed wanting to be in a relationship) and shiping him romantically and/or sexually with another character is erasing him as an aromantic character from the eyes of the fandom, the eyes of aromantic people searching for repersentation, and the eyes of the general public.

Also! like OP said, there is SO MUCH going on in both phm and iron lung. so many bigger, greater, more complex things than romance. its always a breath of fresh air when i find a post on just iron lung or just phm with no shiping, even though i do like the ship as well.

i dont think most of the fandom means it in anyway (infact ive seen many say they think ryland is aroace and also ship bloodymary or are aroace themselves) but it is aromantic erasure. i never read mark's 'curl up in ryan gosling's arms' as a 'reward or conselation prize' for simon but i can deffinitly see it being read that way. and the more that i think about it the more it sounds like it.

personally i dislike grace/rocky/adrian ships bc theyre friends let friends be friends omfg! but also, at least that means theyre being seen as equals instead of the way some people (no offence to anyone /gen) see rocky as 'a rock' and not entirly his own person or equal to grace (though i dont see it much, only ever in jokes, its really just a minor thing but it still rubs me the wrong way sometimes

also book ryland suports all this, he is not ever in romantic or sexual relationships nor wants one, so uh yeah :)

and one last thing: when talking about bloodymary PLEASE dont use the iron lung, phm, or character tags, it makes it super hard for people not wanting to interact witht he ship to find content thats ONLY about one movie or the other

#this was a long rant but worth it #my reblogs #talking reblogs #so much talking #bloodymary #aroace ryland grace #aromantic ryland grace

coolnicheperson

alien jøsh moodboard .𖥔 ݁ ˖ִ🛸👽༄˖°.

#my reblogs #alien josh #tøp #moodboard

spicyprincezuko

I wish all Black girls a clear shot at this world. I wish all Black girls a full belly. I wish all Black girls a respite from their many troubles. I wish all Black girls nothing but grace, prosperity, and ease. Black girls I am hoping for your continued safety and success every single day.

#my reblogs #black girls #reblog bait

cozy-stardust

Imagine Grace defined his name as the elegance definition of grace and Rocky spends years thinking how fucking ironic this clumsy leaky space blobs name is.

Until Grace slips out a sentence along the lines of "could you give me a little grace here" and Rocky immediately points out he used a word wrong so Grace has to explain that yeah, grace means elegance but it can also mean mercy sometimes too.

And Rocky has to suddenly reconcile that the clumsy leaky blob that saved his life twice, that almost certainly doomed himself to come back for him, name is Mercy.

till-dawn-do-us-part

#ryland grace #phm #rocky and ryland #grace and rocky

c00lstb0y3v3r

Something about Grace calling himself a coward because he wanted to live and not risk his life for people. Meanwhile Simon, who is being told this, is confused.

He's angry at the situation Grace was in and what he's calling himself, but the confusion of why calling himself a coward specifically overrides that anger.

Simon has always wanted to live, he fought for it, even when going against something that could've killed him at any time. Hes murdered before, hes seen others fight for their lives for the sake of living. Hes seen humanity, at its lowest, still try and fight to live.

Simon doesn't think of it as cowardice, he thinks of it as natural.

It's natural to want to live, it's natural to want to fight back for your own life. Why would Grace think of himself as a coward for not wanting to die, when it's natural?

#*shakes you* why would you do this to me /pos #bloodymary #my reblogs

loontattoo

see unfortunately I have this condition where if I am not explicitly told that I am a part of the ingroup then I will assume I must be part of the outgroup

#my reblogs #autism #or vampirism