Slipping the trap

Hi, I'm polytropic, though most people call me "please stop talking." My pronouns are they/them and he/him. I blog about things I like: speculative fiction, bright colors, queerness, subversive masculinity, theory. I used to blog about activism and current events: now I'm a movement lawyer in my daily life, so I don't use this blog for that any more, because boundaries are important. I welcome messages, including if you're struggling with gender feelings and want some support or advice. Please don't message me for legal advice. I'm a lawyer, not your lawyer.

[watch-grok-brainrot]

Mysterious Lotus Casebook

Question Jiao-jie, understand Jiao-jie, become Jiao-jie, surpass Jiao-jie.

You see, I take the parts that I remember and stitch them back together             to make a creature that will do what I say or love me back. -- "Litany in Which Certain Things Are Crossed Out" By Richard Siken

[maikhiwi00]

I might be mistaken, but I saw him cry twice. When his home was destroyed and when his heart was. [x]

[conflitdecanard]

IT TOOK ME SO LONG BUT IT WAS IN MY TO DRAW LIST AND I AM SO GLAD IT IS DONE YAY !!!!

Listen. I really REALLY liked @supernini235 comment so I had to draw everything - at different levels of details and clealiness but hope you like it !! Thank you for making me draw bears I love bears....!!! (°ー°〃)

[polytropic-liar]

an unpublished appellate court opinion from 2002 that you can't find in the database but allegedly has a pincite that would be super useful to you is a kind of dead wife

[tess-mercer]

still upset anyagiles wasn’t endgame. devastated, even. one I think he would treat her better than xander ever did. two giles absolutely lays pipe better than xander EVER did. three someone makes a may/december snide remark about anya and giles and she SNAPS at them like “god forbid you let a demon have fun with a boytoy a couple hundred years her junior”

[tess-mercer]

she just has so many issues wrt getting older, but with giles she tells him during pillow talk like “I’m glad you’re going to be senile and die way before i go thru menopause and my pussy gets dry” (affectionate) and he’s like “????? thanks. also I know a spell for magic lube”

[dcfanmadezines]

Team Interview - Kaldur's First Pride 🌈

@dakkydraws:

1) What inspired you to write this story? 

Kaldur Ahm was done dirty. He was done dirty in his debut show young justice, he was done dirty in a comic I read where his white country boyfriend dumped him when he found out he was a Meta. 

The whole scene felt so weird to me. Like you are okay with being in a gay, interracial relationship with beautiful Kaldur Ahm, but can’t stomach that he’s got powers? He got in your rusty 4 x 4 so you can cart him out to the dessert to stargaze, but him controlling water is The Dealbreaker? Homeboy wasn’t even that cute!

Also WHY’d they change his origin story for THIS? And WHY do they always give beautiful Kaldur the most awful haircut possible?!

I’ve always dreamed of giving Kaldur a better story with a better companion and a better haircut. I’ve wanted to see Kaldur loved and supported unconditionally, and I wanted to write a callback to Kaldur’s weirdo ex. Just give him the punch he’s always deserved. Idiot! How are you gonna squander Kaldur the Ahm?!

2) What does this story mean to you?

It means a weirdly huge amount for me. I have always been a huge advocate for diverse representation in media, especially since I have worked in daycare and schools my entire life, and seen good representation in action, in real time, and the devastating effects on kids socially when they don’t have rep.

For instance, years ago, when I was working at a daycare, some little white boys were playing avengers in the play area, and a little black girl got excited and went over and asked to play with them. They told her no, because they didn’t know of any black woman heroes, and she was going to slow them down.

Me, being a black woman myself, and also a huge Comic fan, go over to intervene, and I start listing black women heroes, but quickly found myself scraping the bottom of the barrel for names, and quickly getting more and more obscure. I also knew that none of these heroes were on Disney XD, the channel the boys were probably watching. 

They said ‘never heard of them’ and the black girl told me ‘it’s okay.’ And gave up and went inside to go color instead. A travesty for all those kids, for the little girl who was too discouraged to play, *and* for the boys who didn’t see value in her as a playmate because of the segregated media they watched.

It was then I decided to go harder into comics. Rep matters! I think Kaldur being encouraged by seeing a queer mentor he respects acknowledge him in a queer space was too good of a moment to not apply to this zine. It’s been knocking around in my head for ages and I’m happy to finally write it. 

3) What has been your favorite part to illustrate?

I’ve decided I’m gonna have Miguel do Kaldur’s braids to get him ready for pride, that’ll be so sweet. Also I’m gonna draw Kaldur’s little finger webbies.

I’m gonna draw Diana like a titan! She gonna be a BIG LADY and, y’know, we stan big ladies. 7 feet of Diana. I hope my panel of the water splitting for Kaldur’s rescue comes out like how I want it to.

[dcfanmadezines]

Team Interview - Why Be Out? 🌈

@boostergold07:

1) What inspired you to write this story 

I was inspired to write this story because I was feeling lonely. I’ve been wrestling a lot with the concept of authenticity despite singularity. What is the reward of being yourself around people who don’t like who you are? And not just about being queer, which is a huge part of it and this story, but even smaller things like the clothes you wear or the music you like or the way you speak. When you lose or feel like you’ve lost the one person who actually understands those things about you or you’ve never had that at all, it’s hard to find the motivation to be yourself when you know you aren’t going to be seen regardless. So I wanted to deconstruct that because it’s a very Booster Gold (2007 run) theme, which is when my comic takes place. He’s wrestling with the concept of everyone hating this person he has to pretend to be to protect the time stream, and there’s very little people he can be vulnerable or authentic with.

2) What does this story mean to you? 

To me this story is about finding the will to love yourself when nobody is watching. It’s a very specific feeling. It feels amazing to have witnesses to your pain and to your joy, but that’s not always going to happen and you have to show up for yourself despite that. Sometimes you have to save yourself, which is because you have and get to live with yourself everyday. It’s about not betraying yourself and who you are just because some people don’t mesh with you.

3) What do you think readers will love about this story? 

I think readers will find this story to be relatable and I hope what they get out of it is a moment to reflect on their life and how they’re treating themselves. Booster definitely has a very specific situation with Ted being gone, but I think he represents a very real feeling that I’m sure it’s not just me who experiences.

4) What has been your favorite part to illustrate? 

My favorite and least favorite part of drawing is choosing my colors. It’s a head-banging process but something very deliberate and I put a lot of thought into. I love the last panel the best. I really tried to include as much detail as possible with Rip’s weird time headquarters. I had a very specific vision and carried it out almost exactly how I wanted it.

[ravendraculina]

My piece for the @dcfanmadezines pride zine! I worked in a group on a harlivy comic! Here is some of my work on the zine! I did character designs, thumbnails, pencils and inks! Everyone worked so hard!

[allpiesforourown]

Today's SVSSS Quote of the Day is:

Volume 2, Chapter 13: Coercion

[steampunkcorgi]

[foolforshera]

I was thinking about the whole "fandom moves on to something else" thing and it made me think about my annual picnic. Every year, I have a big picnic in early November and invite a bunch of people. I rent out a pavilion at a local lake, have people bring food that I grill for them if they want, have some games for the kids in the group, and just generally hang out.

Now, the way this goes is that I have everyone show up around 4:30pm. People show up, it's a big crowd, it's pretty warm out because the sun is still up and the mingling is great. People eat, share food, the kids run around in the trees and check out the lake, and we all just generally enjoy ourselves and catch up. Then the sun starts to go down.

People start getting under the pavilion, it starts getting a little chilly, and maybe those with really young kids start to pack up and say good-bye. This is usually when I light up the fire in the pavilion's fireplace and people will begin gathering around there. I let the grill burn down and sit down with everyone as everything gets a bit more mellow. Maybe we make s'mores or have cookies or something but this is usually were you start having more people say their good-byes and head out. That's how it goes for the next couple of hours, little dribbles of people winding up and heading on home until it's 9:30 at night and there's just a few people left in the pavilion in the woods sitting around a little fireplace quietly talking.

You know what? That's the best time at these things. Some years we'll be out there until almost midnight, just chatting quietly and staring into the coals. You learn things about people then, you hear interesting things, and you just feel closer.

So what does this have to do with fandom and moving on? Well, I see it like this. The show is still on, that's the early part of the day. Plenty of people around, lots of activity where art gets made, headcanons and meta fly fast and furious, and tons of fic gets written. Then the show ends, people are still creating but a few peel away, they have other things they have to do or just aren't interested in sticking around. Slowly but surely it goes until it's just a few people left.

That's when the interesting things really start coming out. You still have the other stuff but you start to get off the wall headcanons and wild meta, you get odd art, you get fic the person finally decided to write, and it's good. And hey, every once in a while, someone shows up late and you grab some food out of the cooler for them and warm up a burger for them over the coals while others grab a chair for them and you get them up to speed on the conversation and maybe show them some pictures from earlier in the night and they get to have some of that glow from earlier even if they missed the original.

That's fandom to me. As long as a person is still sitting around that fireplace late into the night, ready to chat, the fandom is never dead.

[juunipupu]

Knight under Everything

[sarcasmprodigy]

Making women up like it's a job

[moonyeyes]

Evil of my evil

[polytropic-liar]

DC Pride Fanzine 2026 meta post - part 1

Everyone's seen the @dcfanmadezines fanzine by now right?? Isn't it beautiful????

A while ago I saw @jesncin make a references post for one of their awesome fancomics, and I was inspired to jot down notes as I was working on my first-ever attempt at a comic script. So read on if you would like to see what I'm referencing and why I made certain choices in the fanzine comic The Woman In The Refrigerator!

(This is part one of a series because I wrote too much. The problem with doing semi-academic writing for free on tumblr.com is that no one forces me to edit it down. Seriously it's so long, there's something wrong with me.)

Part 1: Refrigerator Dialogues

It's 1993. You are Ron Marz, DC writer, and you've been tasked with killing Hal Jordan, the current and longstanding Green Lantern, and transitioning the comic to his successor. How are you going to make people invest in and connect with Kyle Rayner, your new protagonist? Especially since this change is part of an editorially-mandated shakeup of DC legacy characters being replaced by a younger, wisecracking, """edgy""" new generation who still needed to fit comfortably into the mold of masculine, white, staunchly capitalist men (e.g. Superboy, Impulse, with Connor Hawke as a notable exception whom DC then spends decades not knowing how to write or draw). Kyle's an artist, which is already a little worryingly non-normatively-masculine, especially compared with Hal "fighter pilot" Jordan. How will you make sure people don't think the new guy is a wimp?

Obviously, you murder his girlfriend.

It's the oldest trick in the book, right? Make up a character who's pretty cool (actually, maybe a little too cool, to the point of threatening Kyle's masculinity herself by having more ambition and competence than him; good thing she isn't sticking around!), put her in the alternating roles of cheerleader, mommy, and trophy for a few issues to motivate and support your protagonist, and then pick a random villain to...cut her body up and put it in a refrigerator for Kyle to find.

Great. Kyle gets to show his masculinity by beating the villain up brutally in revenge, and now he's got manpain and an origin story, so you're good to go. Foolproof plan, nothing can go wrong here.

Except then in 1999, future comics writer Gail Simone uses your story as the centerpiece of her commentary on brutality against women in superhero comics. And she calls the trope "women in refrigerators." And a lot of people take a minute to stop and think and realize, yeah, actually, isn't it weird and fucked up that so many women in comics not only are raped, beaten, and murdered, but that many of them are created as characters for the specific purpose of being raped, beaten, and murdered as plot devices for a man's storyline?

Marz, unfortunately, did not handle this critique particularly well, writing in his defense that...yeah, exactly, he created Alexandra DeWitt solely to be graphically murdered, specifically because he wanted people to empathize with her boyfriend's pain. But he totally wasn't thinking about gender when he did it, so it can't be misogyny.

Simone's insight and coining of the trope have had a much wider cultural impact than the specific Green Lantern storyline the name came from. "Fridging" is now in the dictionary, with the meaning of treating a character, usually a woman, as disposable for the benefit of another character's plot or development.

Catherynne Valente and Annie Wu added to this conversation in 2017 with their graphic novella "The Refrigerator Monologues", a set of monologues from dead women parodying some of the most infamously fridged women in comics canon.

In this work you can see the discussion of the trope really solidify as being about dehumanization: Simone focused her critique in her original letter on how widespread the use of violence against women was, while Valente focused on the narrative roles that disposable women characters play and how they mirror dehumanization of women by their real-life male partners. Please read this book, it's fantastic and fantastically angry.

Subsequent work has examined fridging as applied to Black characters, disabled characters, and queer characters. Incredibly, Kyle Rayner's run as Green Lantern shows up again in the queer fridged characters list: in 2001, new Green Lantern writer Judd Winick introduced Kyle's friend and colleague Terry Berg, wrote an awkward but well-meaning coming out storyline for him, and then in 2002 wrote a story where he is brutally beaten in a homophobic hate crime. The story focuses almost exclusively on Kyle's feelings and his reaction: he once again enacts violent revenge on the perpetrator of the attack, and then loses his faith in humanity and leaves Earth for a while (so that they could write him in space as Ion). Terry disappeared from the comic in 2004, never to be seen again now that he served his purpose. (I brought him back in my script. I also made him a tarot gay. Sorry Terry, you now represent queer people's fundamental human right to be kind of annoying and still be alive and loved.)

We've had about 25 years of solid, thoughtful feminist critique of the women in refrigerators--though I will say, I'm disappointed in the lack of examination of intersectionality in the body of work on it so far. (Some very good articles have tackled intersectional feminist themes in comics more broadly, but I'm really missing a critical, intersectional examination of this trope in particular.) But I thought we could go farther.

Quick vocab note: "queering", as a verb, is a term academics use to express that they're doing something weird to a text. Sometimes the thing they're doing is critique, sometimes it's building off of a theory in a new different direction, and sometimes it's making a new thing taking pieces of the old one. Queering has implications of doing something "non-normative", questioning binaries of various kinds, and radical truth-telling. (It's often brought up in the same conversations as "decolonizing" a text, aka doing something to it that questions colonial perspectives and assumptions.) Fanfiction is a type of queering a text, not just because the fanfic is about queer sex/romance/identity and/or written by queer people, but also because it's doing something weird to the text of the canon, often in a way that questions that canon's assumptions about identity and normativity more broadly.

So when I started looking at queering the infamous woman in the refrigerator storyline, what I started thinking about was the gender binary at the heart of it: the man outside the fridge and the woman inside it. When we blur those lines, suddenly the whole thing gets a lot less stable and a lot more interesting. Who is in the fridge? Who's standing outside the door? Who put the person in there and why?

One might summarize the original Marz storyline as saying: the woman has to go in the fridge so the man can be a man. We have to kill her and chop her up and shut her away because he has to lose her in order to be a hero, to play the role he's supposed to play.

When you phrase it that way, it starts to sound suspiciously familiar to a lot of trans experiences, doesn't it? How many of us tried to cut out and shove down and lock away the parts that we thought were holding us back from the roles we were supposed to play? I sure did, for years. It almost killed me.

My queering of this narrative asks: what if the woman in the refrigerator is the man standing outside it too? What if you can't cut her out and lock her away, because she's you and you're her? What can this new reading show us about this fraught genre trope? What can it show us about the character of Kyle Rayner, who's already got some pretty interesting Gender TroubleTM going on?

Stay tuned for part 2 to see!

[jesncin]

FINALLY READ WOMAN IN THE REFRIGERATOR!! BANGER STORY huge highlight for me in the collection so far!! Excited to read more meta surrounding this story because I'm not caught up on Kyle lore but it was clear the comic made several homages to his many arcs that was readable to a newbie but I bet was a huge treat for Kyle fans.

[polytropic-liar]

aaaaahhhhh this makes me so happy!! Your DC fancomics were the inspiration for me to try my hand at writing this script; reading (Don't Call Me) Superboy especially was really inspiring for me to think about how we can do whatever we want with these characters and we should because we have new things to say about them. I'm so glad to hear you liked the story, this is literally senpai noticing me lmao

part 2 of the meta is in progress! I will @ you when I post it if you want?

[oddarette]

Felt like making a shiny version of the Tide Pod xenomorph.

[dcfanmadezines]

Team Interview - The Woman in the Fridge 🌈

@polytropic-liar:

I've been fascinated by the "Forced Entry" Green Lantern storyline and its legacy for a long time, ever since the first time I read it and hated it wildly. It's become such an iconic moment in comics misogyny--inspiring Gail Simone to coin the "woman in the refrigerator" trope--and it's also shaped so many of Kyle Rayner's future storylines as writers have tried to somehow write around or in response to it. I got really interested in what it would mean to queer that story, especially in conversation with many of Kyle's other stories that also grapple with gender and identity and normativity.

I love fanworks because they let us do things that canon can't or won't! To me this story represents the freedom and creativity of fanworks, the chance to speak back to the corporate canon and say: "there are so many more possibilities for us than you can see. I took your story about violence and manpain and women as tragic props, and made something completely different with it instead." 

I hope that readers who are already Kyle Rayner fans will recognize the character they love, and love seeing that character in a new and different way! And that readers who aren't as familiar with the canon will still love following Kyle on a very personal journey (and maybe will even want to read some of the comics that I drew from!). I *know* they will love the art, because what I've seen so far is fantastic; I'm blown away by it and I know readers will be too. And I especially hope that trans and genderqueer readers will find things in this story that resonate with and celebrate them.

@johnnyanger:

I'm not very familiar with Kyle's stories (or the Lanterns in general), but anything that has to delve into the inner mind or psychic spaces in comics always immensely interests me. As someone who's had to do some admittedly less fantastical self-reflection on my own gender identity, I really felt the frustrations and the catharsis in the process of discovery come through as I was working on this. Hopefully Kyle's experience with the process in this comic can bring some familiarity and comfort to others, as it did to me :) 

Like I said about really feeling those frustrations, it was such a relief to draw that *aha!* reveal where everything clicked into place and the door finally opened. It's such a freeing feeling, and I loved getting to show that happening to someone else.

I'm not going to show the reveal itself, so I think the sequence I have to go with is this one! This is a very introspective comic, and the emotions are really high. It's been an honor to get to draw for this, and I hope people like it just as much as I liked working on it!

[polytropic-liar]

Interviews! Read the fanzine!!! Did you know you can now order a physical copy???