[phantomato]

Hi, I’m Tomato! (they/them)

I’m generally into into old books, especially about boarding schools, and older BL manga, especially Tokyo Babylon or works by Moto Hagio. I write fanfiction, mostly m/m.

Elsewhere

Feel free to reach out!

Archive of Our Own - fic Dreamwidth - long-form posting Discord: phantomtomato

Tags

navel gazing: longer essays where I introspect about my experiences in fandom nottmort: content for the ship of Nott Sr. and Tom | Voldemort, my OTP trans voldemort: my thoughts on reading Voldemort as an allegory for the trans experience tomato shorts: shortfic posted exclusively to tumblr

[mangled-by-disuse]

in happier pride news i actually found this deeply heartwarming

that's solidarity baybeeee

[lgbtlaughs]

Further context: Durham city council (Reform UK) cut funding and support for Pride. The Durham Miner's Association and other trade unions raised enough money for Durham Pride 2026 to go ahead - a direct call back to when Lesbian and Gays Support the Miners (LGSM) raised money for mining communities when Margaret Thatcher seized union funding during the miner strikes of 1984-85.

At the 1985 Labour party meet, the motion to support LGBT rights as a party was passed due to a block vote from mining unions.

Stephen Guy, the chair of the Durham Miners’ Association, said that when it became apparent Durham Pride was under threat, he took it upon himself to “encourage the trade union movement to step up and do the right thing, and stand shoulder to shoulder with the LGBT+ community […] They not only raised funds for us, but came to our communities, uplifted our spirits when they were down, and showed their solidarity.”

[ydolem-art]

Practicing 2D animation with the horses from Spirit, Hercules and Mulan!

[chainofclovers]

Put in the tags the completely finished (whether cancelled or wrapped up on its own terms) TV series that has YOUR perfect ending, however you define that

Please don’t include huge spoilers for the specifics of the endings, and it would also make me happy if people don’t use this to talk about the shows whose endings they hated

[opera-ghost]

[phantomato]

Reading Roundup, May 2026

Read on Dreamwidth

Books this month:

Howards End, E. M. Forster (reread) Nocturnes for the King of Naples, Edmund White Orlando, Virginia Woolf The Woman of Colour: A Tale, by an anonymous author Despised and Rejected, Rose Allatini

[prokopetz]

If we’re being honest, most of us study our favourite character less like an entomologist studies a bug and more like an astronomer studies a distant star: drawing complicated inferences from extremely limited data, then getting tetchy about it when somebody else draws incompatible but equally well-supported inferences from the same data because it’s the fucking principle of the thing.

[exitwound]

Im grading the final exams for the class I TA for and I'm checking the name of the one I've just graded so I can enter it in the gradebook when I notice that after the name it says in parentheses "just visiting ! =)". And that I do not know this student, they are not enrolled in this class, and they just showed up on the last day to take the final . Innovative use of free will

[syphabelnyades]

[gorgynei]

in the age of repression and purity culture, getting more perverted is the only morally correct course of action

[starlitsecrets]

Remember when joining fandom as a younger person meant lurking for a bit and figuring out the vibe and etiquette instead of coming in on day one and calling people weirdos for liking weirdo shit in the weirdo factory.

[cheruib]

miss taking an uquiz every time i opened the tumblr app… it was an era i took for granted

[rosiefingereddawn]

There are two wolves inside me: one that thinks I should dnf any book I don't like because it is a waste of my time to not read something I enjoy, the other wolf wants to finish the book so that I can be a well informed hater

[oldpaintings]

The Seeress of Prevorst in High Sleep, 1892 by Gabriel von Max (Austrian, 1840–1915)

[holespoles]

Yutaka Murakami's "Foreign Books and a Kitten"

村上ゆたか「洋書と子猫」

[phantomato]

For the writing ask meme: 14 also, 20, 36? :)

Write and share the first sentence of a new fic. Just that.

How dare, this is the hardest one! ;)

I wasn’t in love with him. We had fucked, after meeting at the bar at Le Bristol in Paris, where he was holidaying and I was—well. But I was not in love with him when I was invited to his house, and I didn’t accept under any romantic pretenses. He wasn’t in love with me, either. 

Do you work on a single project or many at the same time? How does that work for you?

Oh, I can only do one at a time! Even when I’ve written multiple fics for the same exchange, for example, I finish them sequentially. I’m extremely sequential as a general rule: one book at a time, one writing project at a time, one knitting project at a time. I say that I’m bad at balancing multiple competing things, but maybe it’s truer to say that I have to do that already at work and in keeping house, and it’s nice to just keep my hobbies as free as possible from that kind of optimizing and prioritization.

How do you come up with fic titles? What's the one you're most proud of?

Mostly my fic titles come from poetry and song lyrics, which really are the same, aren’t they? :) Some of my favorites are:

Night Comes With Her Own Counsels which comes from C. P. Cavafy (I have a few from Cavafy)

In Fealty to Apollo, which is a line in Keats’ “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer”

Idyll XII, which is just straight up meant as a pointer to go read Theocritus’ Idyll XII

Whenever I choose a song or poem title, it’s because the song/poem speaks to the mood of the fic. I like the process of looking up poetry and figuring out what really captures the sentiment of the story that I wrote!

[pururin]

[ismenes]

When my son was about to turn two, strangers would offer condolences. There’s a collective cultural dread of toddlers, who get described more like animals than people. Kids in their "terrible twos," I was warned, are illogical, unregulated, and feral. "Good luck," people would say. "He'll grow out of it."

I'm lucky: My son is a very easygoing kid. But I remember the first tantrum he threw for me. He was standing by our front door and asked to go outside. So I opened the door and grabbed his shoes. But as soon as he stepped onto the porch, he pointed back into the house.

"Inside," he said.

"Okay," I said. I picked him up and brought him inside.

But as soon as I shut the front door, he pointed outside.

"Outside!" he said.

You know where this is going. We went back and forth, inside and outside, again and again. He got more frustrated. And I got more frustrated. Eventually he wound up straddling the threshold of our house, sobbing. When I tried to comfort him, he screamed at me. "You go wherever you want!" I said. He just got madder. I felt trapped, convinced he’d concocted the whole episode as a pretext to unleash his rage at me. It was ridiculous. I consoled myself with the thought that he was just being a toddler.

But later I kept thinking about him wailing at our front door, one foot inside, one foot outside. His misery wasn't unreasonable, or trivial, or silly. My son was experiencing the agony of wanting two things that were impossible to have at the same time. What a fundamentally human sorrow! My son wasn't being a toddler; he was being a person. Adults may not walk around howling, but that same pain rages within us. In that moment, as a father, I was powerless to solve my son's problem. I told him he could go wherever he wanted, but of course I was wrong. To be where he wanted was impossible.

Make Believe: On Telling Stories to Children by Mac Barnett