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@ray-gurl
Me
Hi, I'm Ray. I've had similar usernames elsewhere; if I seem familiar, that's why! She/Her. Bisexual. Somewhere in my 20s. Please don't follow if you aren't 18+. This is (mostly) a fandom blog.
#ray's writing (✍️) for text; #ray's edits ✂️ for edits; #ray's art 🎨 for (fan)art; #ray's baking 👩🍳 for bakes; #ray's plants 🌵 for my army of houseplants.
AO3.
Do not use AI to interact with my art / writing.
ID: a pride flag with a fucked up 3d train in front of it. text reads, "you're transphobic? ew! get hit by a train!! its free and fun!!
Thank you for the ID
Once when I was in undergrad, someone described something as “problematic” in class and our professor was like, “That’s cool, but ‘problematic’ doesn’t really mean anything. It means that the thing you’re describing has a problem, and in and of itself that’s not bad. Art, especially, should always have problems, or else it’s not interesting and not art, either. It sounds like you’re trying to say that this is bad, but you don’t want to say ‘bad.’ Is that right?”
So from then on whenever one of us called something problematic, he would make us talk it out until we could name the “bad” thing we were hinting at. In this particular class, 7/10 it was some type of oppression, and the remainder was like, “I’m uncomfortable because this is very new/confusing/pushing boundaries that made me feel safe.”
Once we stopped calling things “problematic” and stopping at that, class got way more interesting and... we all had to say, like, “that’s racist” or “that’s misogynistic” or “ew capitalism gross” out loud, which a lot of us had never done in a classroom before. Or we had to be like, “Uhhh... I’m not sure what’s so bad?” and confront our own beliefs and that was maybe even more useful.
Anyway. Whenever I see the word problematic, I can’t help but think of this professor being like, “Good starting point, now let’s get specific.” I think when we have to commit to saying “that’s ___” it requires a lot more careful thought about the truth and impact and complexities of whatever we’re claiming. Sometimes there really is some bullshit afoot, and also sometimes it’s art, and it should be full of problems, because that’s what art is.
ive said it before and i’ll say it again not enough historical romance focuses on technicalities
really for this kind of thing it’s no use going to published trad romance and i should know that. the really good shit is 400k on fanfiction dot net for a heterosexual pairing you’ve never considered from a piece of media you havent thought about in years written by a bored doctoral candidate who’s read a lot of primary sources from the long 18th century
recently rediscovered my absolute favorite entry in the genre: customs and duties by tortoiseshells, which is an insane technicalityromance set in 1738 boston, ft the stuffy british navy guy from pirates of the caribbean/ofc, smuggling, puritanism in the john calvin sense, the legal realities of widowhood, several real historical governors of massachusetts, debts, accounts, and of course customs regulations
I would also like to nominate and psyche's lamp shall darkling be, a story based on the 2025 Frankenstein movie that gets into the intricacies of 1850s convent school life, the process of Catholic ecclesiastical courts verifying miracles, multiple points of mid 19th century marriage and inheritance laws pertaining to property, and also spells the word connection with an X so you know the author has been in the 19th century literature trenches 
"In 1979 Barbara Smith wrote, 'Even now I don’t know that one can write about being a black and a lesbian and live to tell about it.' In 2005, black women write about a variety of sexual and gender identities and live to tell the story. However, the more relevant question is, what now? The Watermelon Woman allows us to identify the ways in which black queer perspec- tives alter the terms and challenge the assumptive logics of black history and cultural production. This work is not simply celebratory, but complicated and often troubling in its depictions. Challenging complicities and compromises to power in order to participate in the 'normalizing' narrative project of history, black lesbian filmmaking creates tensions within the historical framework of the black past, speaking queer experience to black history."
“Our stories Have Never Been Told: Preliminary Thoughts on Black Lesbian Cultural Production as Historiography in The Watermelon Woman” by Matt Richardson
Black Camera, Vol. 2, No. 2, Special Issue: Beyond Normative: Sexuality and Eroticism in Black Film, Cinema, and Video (Spring 2011), pp. 100-113
(Film Analysis Hours)
one fight at a time
A South Dakota mining company has canceled a drilling project in the Black Hills after opposition from Native American tribes and local grou
amazing win🔥 & reading about it I discovered they're trying to do another one (uranium mining near Craven Canyon) just so people are informed:
People who spoke Monday during the hourslong public comment period were all in opposition to the project
i've been phasing the phrase 'google it' out of my vocabulary and going back to 'look it up'. fuck you youve lost your generic trademark privileges
Strange racists and homophobes on the internet seem to have access to an alternate way cooler version of TV than me. "every white character on TV is in an interracial relationship" "every show has a gay couple in it" "main characters keep having to secretly be bisexual and nonbinary" "every show has gratuitous full frontal nudity" like damn promise?? What channel???
as a black gay person real like where y'all be finding this stuff pass the name
for real though, those DO NOT WATCH OR YOU'LL CORRUPT YOUR CHILDREN lists put out by conservative christian family groups is where I find all the stellar tv shows. Like, shit I didn't know half of those existed, thanks for finding them for me, gonna go watch 30 hours of gay tv now!
I think I know how this works.
For personal context, before I went to the '98 Burning Man festival, one of the things I'd read from a couple different journalists was that "everybody" runs around naked. Which, fine by me, I'd already spent a lot of time in clothing-optional spaces, I'm not fanatic about it but it's nice.
So I got there early and set up a public shade structure on one of Black Rock City's main roads and spent most of each afternoon just watching the crowds go by. I don't remember seeing more than one actually naked person the whole week. I think a topless woman passed by my intersection maybe every half an hour, sometimes once an hour. So why in the hell were people, normally pretty smart and observant writers, coming away with the impression that everybody was naked?
Then I remembered an unrelated passage from Joel Garreau's great book about the history of the outer-ring suburbs, Edge City. Mall developers told him flat-out that they tried to keep the crowds in their malls less than 5% black. Not because they themselves were racist, but because they had determined, experimentally, that if more than 5% of the people in the mall are black, the median white shopper will wrongly describe the mall as at least half black, as mostly black. And not a few of them would describe it, at 6% black, as a mall where "only black people go." Why?
Because, emotionally, they were still upset over the last one when the next one came into view.
Same as the journalists describing Black Rock City as all naked. Same as the right-wing religious culture warriors describing television as entirely mixed-race and gender non-conforming. Not because it's even vaguely true, we know that, but because they haven't gotten over their discomfort over the last one by the time the next one comes along. The anger, not the stimulus, is the part that's continuous, so their mind lies to them that it's "all" the thing they can't get over.
Similar effect for the presence/proportion of women in things, by the way: https://health.howstuffworks.com/mental-health/human-nature/perception/how-17-equals-496-the-amazing-multiplying-women.htm
sometimes instead of “why can’t they just be friends” i think it should be “why can’t they also be friends” because sometimes shipping feels much too much like forcing two pretty characters to kiss and be intimate without actually being interested in the dynamic the two people have. what about hanging out together. what about why they like being in each others company. what do they argue about. how do they patch things up. what do they laugh about.
One very small thing I really loved about Portrait of a Lady on Fire was how it subverted the trope of "worldly artist & lower-class" x "well intentioned but naive rich (or noble)" person. In my reading at least, Héloïse definitely knew she was a lesbian. She fell first for Marianne. Marianne fell... maybe not harder, but with more consequence(?) because she also had her queer awakening. I think that fuels a lot of her desire to cling onto Héloïse at the end of the film. Marianne is a bit more rigid and so this overturning of her reality means a shift from one absolute to another.
At the same time, we can see Héloïse already steeling herself to pull away. This difference is seen earlier with how upset she is by Marianne's moments of possessiveness (re: their "this [portrait] is how you will remember me" conversation). Marianne wants a clean (controllable) narrative. Héloïse does not.
This is further clear in how Héloïse literally pushes Marianne to break with artistic conventions! Marianne tries to define things and has a rigidity about her - because to make art and sell it you have to lock onto and portray a version of reality that has intent but doesn't stray too far from marketability. Whereas Héloïse is more accepting of ambiguity (the "how do you see me" and the "you want me to fight" conversations). This is also clear from their different interpretations of the Orpheus myth. Why their goodbye is so devastating.
Marianne doesn't want to, but she ultimately respects Héloïse's choice of what their final moment together - her last memory of her too - will be because she has changed her perspective due to Héloïse's influence. So Héloïse asks her, "Turn around" and she does.
It's only a small detail but it means a lot.
it always kind of tickles me seeing miserable men in the replies of any tweet about netflix castlevania complaining about how they made alucard gay and woke bc why was your beacon of traditional masculinity and heterosexuality an androgynous vampire with a wavy blonde blowout down to his ass
it always kind of tickles me seeing miserable men in the replies of any tweet about netflix castlevania complaining about how they made alucard gay and woke bc why was your beacon of traditional masculinity and heterosexuality an androgynous vampire with a wavy blonde blowout down to his ass
Welp. I just watched Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019)... devastation! Agony! Pain! (Yes I definitely cried). Having shrimp emotions as I stare at the wall. What a film! Will I ever recover? Possibly not.
given the current climate this pride especially i feel i must mention that i love my trans friends, i stand with trans people in the fight against transphobic legislation and those who would enforce it, and this blog is not a good place for you to be if you do not vibe with that
In a move that left hundreds of longtime residents scrambling to find alternative housing, municipal construction crews reportedly demolished a local Black neighborhood Thursday, part of an ongoing city project to make room for nothing in particular. “For decades, this part of Fort Worth has languished as nothing more than a loving community for African American families and a bustling hub for Black-owned businesses,” said Mayor Mattie Parker, adding that the destruction of dozens of beloved restaurants, theaters, barbershops, and newspapers was an essential step toward creating more vacant lots that could sit empty behind fences for an indefinite length of time.
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fact: Jack Rackham’s crew accidentally collects lesbians
hypothesis: when Flint and Thomas break everyone out of the plantation and start their own crew, it winds up being, percentage-wise, pretty gay
extrapolation: “serving under Rackham” and “sailing with Flint” becomes pirate slang for being gay
like
“I met a gorgeous girl last night but then I found out she, you know, serves on Rackham’s crew” “tough, better luck next time you’re on shore leave, mate”
or “we all went up to visit Mapleton’s girls, except for Harrison, ‘cos he sails with Flint”
or “you think she’s on Rackham’s crew, or is it worth asking if i can see her again tomorrow night?” “her? no, I heard she, uh, you know, works for Eleanor Guthrie, I think it’s worth a shot”
anne hears people talking about women who “sail with Rackham” in whispers, so she storms up to jack like “what the fuck are you planning with all these people?? without telling me??” and jack is just like “???? i’ve never heard of those ladies in my life” while max is just giggling in the background because She Knows that jack’s legacy is being the Let’s Go Lesbians guy
