stay with me

Bee - mid-20s - she/her or they/them or whatever's funniest at the time - ace - k-pop @hui-ing - cql etc @yunmeng-jiang - beep is short for beeposts - if i like a bunch of your posts in a row i'm probably putting them in my queue

[runawayfuture]

magic isn't real because if it was i would curse everyone who pissed me off so that every time they tried to say "wednesday" they'd say "squid" instead

[brehaaorgana]

Something I always find really fascinating about like...any fantasy story or fanfiction which is at least somewhat historical (like basically anything pre-19th century) — is how OFTEN people talk about clothes not fitting by a little bit and therefore needing to buy completely new clothes that fit.

Stories will tell us: "oh they lost/gained a little weight and need to buy new clothes." Or in the same vein, "she just found out she was pregnant and didn't want people to know just yet so she bought new clothes." Or "suddenly none of his clothes fit so he had to buy all new ones." Or "they grew taller so they needed new clothes."

And it's like. Oh! Okay! So you don't know how clothing works before the invention of sewing machines. Like. At all! You don't know what large seam allowances or like, fasten/wrap to fit clothing looks like. You are not aware of like, loom width measurements being a factor here.

No one is going around buying brand new clothes simply because they grew an inch somewhere when everything they own can be taken out at the seams first, extended or modified with extra fabric second, and possibly even just tied less tightly as a third because the clothing style is actually just "giant rectangles with ties or belts."

[tiwaztyrsfist]

Ah yes, she went and bought clothes. At the shop. The shop where you buy clothes. The shop where you by premade clothes, based on standard sizing, which is totally a thing that existed before like the 1920s. Yes, of course it did, mm-hm! And certainly would also be cheap and affordable, just like modern clothes in the US...

[runawayfuture]

Yuri and Dorothea practicing their lines for a performance

[tennessoui]

currently writing the sidious tries to give anakin truth serum fic, and a line in it made me think of another cracky au where sidious becomes convinced that actually obi-wan kenobi is a hidden sith lord because nothing else explains how fucking annoying he is and how strong he is and how invincible he is (read: won't die even when sidious really wants him to)

and like obi-wan's a very polite guy, right, he keeps his Force signature tightly contained because he thinks it's rude and unseemly to let it run wild around oneself (cough, Anakin, cough), so sidious can't figure out if he's actually as Light as he seems. but he's rather certain that no one could be that Light, so he must be a hidden sith lord who has infiltrated the Temple and the Jedi Council and got his claws into the Chosen One before sidious could !!!

and the thing is that sidious has made a lot of enemies over the years to get where he is and to amass the power he has, so loyalty is a bit hard to come by. when one of his allies defects (too much torture), the guy runs straight to the person he's heard so much about, the rival sith lord sidious seems the most afraid of. surely this rival sith lord can protect him from the wrath of darth sidious????

obi-wan is just incredibly confused why low-level sith acolytes keep showing up at his doorstep begging for his protection specifically. anakin's getting a bit territorial over the whole thing. yeah his master's great but he's taken. he's already anakin's master. he doesn't have time to take on twenty new padawans. that's not even allowed. and everyone knows obi-wan kenobi is the best and lightest Jedi who always follows the rules

(featuring one sith acolyte who asks for obi-wan's (sith) name upon arrival, and obi-wan is like ? it's obi-wan? you know that?

and the sith is like yes....but what's your, you know...your other name? that you use for...secret...things?

and obi-wan is like ! oh. ben?

and the sith is like....darth ben....of course.....that sounds fearsome my liege)

[arumbleinthedark]

NEW TUMBLR SCAM

IF YOU ARE TAGGED IN A POST LIKE THIS, DO NOT CLICK ANY LINKS. REPORT THE POST IMMEDIATELY.

[runawayfuture]

Sylvain and Ingrid in a Regency AU

[goodluckjoy]

ashen demon

[charl0ttan]

okay dont be mad but i just scheduled you for every appointment ever. you have an open house on tuesday and a doctor is removing your all of it tomorrow 👍

[phantomrose96]

You know, in my first proper rewatch in 10 years of Mob Psycho, I'm finding the themes hitting even harder than they did on my first watch. And I don't think it's that I understood the messages less the first time. But I think the circumstances have changed.

When mp100 season 1 aired in the summer of 2016, Trump was a joke who wasn't going to win anything. Legalization of gay marriage had happened pretty recently, with what felt like a lot of momentum and support. "Manosphere influencers" had no foothold and were relegated to incel forums that received much derision. Covid hadn't happened. Q-anon hadn't happened. The economy was "good" insofar as it was pre-inflation, and you could get a job if you focused on the "right" degree, and the whole market wasn't hung on the clothesline of AI.

It wasn't perfect of course, by no means. And the seeds of most things I listed above did exist. But the snowball of things which have mounted since then has been... horrific, honestly.

"Hey Chrissy wasn't this post about Mob Psycho 100?" It is, and it's actually about narratives of young men lost in life trying to figure out how to grow up "right." Between 2016 and now, I've probably seen glimpses of a hundred forgettable anime where the young male protagonist learns how to achieve this--and learns how to do it by becoming strong, by becoming strong enough to crush the enemies that threaten your loved ones (which enemies? who is an enemy? never mind that. there is an enemy. they want to crush what belongs to you. you are a protector.) It's about becoming Powerful Enough to hurt evil, and Powerful Enough to protect your woman, and Powerful Enough to harm harm harm (the correct target).

And that narrative is not new either, of course!!! But that narrative just has gotten stronger, and more salient, and more commonplace in such a reactionary cultural time. More individualistic. More fearful. More distrusting. You have Enemies!! We have so many Enemies who are trying to Take What Belongs To You! And you stop that by becoming Strong; a Man Becomes Strong, A Man Destroys Enemies, A Man Protects.

And it feels so... heartening. So nice. To pick up Mob Psycho 100 again 10 years down the road with our typical coming-of-age young man protagonist. And he's a loser, and girls don't notice him, but he's secretly powerful. He's so powerful he could crush all his enemies in his grip.

And with every single breath the narrative takes it says, "No, he won't harm people with his powers. Because powers are like knives, and you don't point those at people." It says "He refuses to believe his powers make him special. He wants to grow as a person in other ways, and specifically in ways that challenge him, and ways he's not good at, because he refuses to take his gift as a carte-blanche pass for being important." It says "Even if you have powerful and violent abilities, you alone can't manufacture any of the things you use in your daily life. We all rely on everyone else to make our world work."

And there IS real kindness in the world, in the places Mob looks for it and chooses to believe in it. Even as a loser in school, his classmates aren't cruel and terrible. They're nice to him when they interact! They're just people living their own lives. The Body Improvement Club are the strongest boys in school, but they adhere to their code stronger than anyone. Their muscles aren't for fighting. They don't leave members behind. They adore Mob, no mind at all for the fact that he started at the bottom. And this is masculinity! This is what a man should be. Strong, sure, but mindful, compassionate, principled, cooperative, disciplined, and upstanding.

The con-man who is using Mob for his powers is also the one who set Mob on the path of trusting he doesn't have to hurt people. Usually you'd expect the message to be that a young man has to step up and fight and protect his loved ones, but No, Actually, It's Okay To Run Away.

Let an adult help. Share your burdens. Believe you are important but don't believe you're more important than others. Believe that people can change. Believe you can change. Don't be goaded into violence. Don't get taken by hatred. You are the protagonist of your own life, and so is everyone else, remember that.

[memories]

someone grab me a #plants beverage to go with these posts.

[bauliya]

so women are supposed to grin and bear the books, the comics, the movies, the plays, the tv shows, the stories, the sci-fi, the translated ancient poems, the fucking millennia of men writing about their self inserts torturing women and it being declared as High Art by other men, we’re supposed to read it in our free time, study it in classrooms, include their styles in our own writing, accept their cultural influence as natural, watch it in the cinema, write about it, talk about it, accept it, aspire it, but men can’t tolerate three seconds of female wish fulfilment of a woman snapping the wrist of a creep without feeling personally kicked in the balls.

[darkshrimpemotions]

This reminds me of something I observed in college while I was doing my honors thesis on women in modern horror films. I watched a LOT of horror during that time as part of my research, and sometimes that was done with my family around.

And my dad and brothers? Were deeply disturbed by the movie Jennifer’s Body. I was flabbergasted. It’s not scary! It’s not even that gory. But they were horrified by it. These men who grew up on 70s slashers were legitimately shook by 90 minutes of Megan Fox eating a few teenage boys, mostly off-screen.

Similarly, my all-male reading panel for my thesis? Were so disturbed by my synopsis of the film Teeth that they couldn’t even talk about it. One of them said he couldn’t look at his wife for a week after reading it.

Again, grown-ass men who study and teach media for a living. Who definitely watch and enjoy horror movies. One of whom was a huge Tarantino buff. We watched and read worse in his intro to mass media class! But one movie about a girl whose vag could bite was enough to haunt him.

Then of course you have things like the Gone Girl backlash–men yelling that Amy Dunne is evil and women clamoring to assure everyone that they know she is not someone to emulate–the backlash against Carol Danvers, and, more recently, the griping from MRAs against the upcoming film Hustlers, which is about strippers scamming their Wall Street clients.

My conclusion? Most men–at least most straight, cisgender men, who are both my sample population and most of the ones whining that Carol is a “villain”–are perfectly fine with, and desensitized to, media where men do violence to women (horror movies), or men do violence to men (horror and action movies). They’re even sort of fine when women do violence to women (“ooooo cat fight!”).

But they get intensely uncomfortable when women are depicted doing any kind of violence to men, especially in films that tilt the balance of power to the other side of the m/f gender binary beyond a single moment or scene.

So woman as flesh-eating monster with men as her preferred cuisine? Woman who responds to unwanted sexual contact by biting it off? Woman who frames her cheating husband for murder? Woman whose response to harassment–behavior that many of the loudest whiners know is both creepy and reflective of their own thoughts/actions–is to break something?

Too scary. Unacceptable. Disturbing. These men hate being presented with the idea, even in fiction, that their position of power is socially constructed, that it could easily be flipped the other way. It terrifies them.

In feeling that terror, they experience a tiny modicum of what living, existing, moving, being perceived as a woman in the world is like.

And they flinch every time.

[tzikeh]

Here have a newspaper comic from 1993

[stitchlingbelle]

Ok, I'm not done with my Vorkosigan rants for tonight, sorry. But. I feel like a lot of people overlook the reason Aral proposed to Cordelia.

Like, yes yes, we love this bisexual disaster falling for the first tomboy he's ever met. Even Cordelia says it. "I've never bothered explaining to him that it was his compulsions leaping up."

But! I think the most important sentence in Aral's proposal isn't the "first sight" bit. It's "By the time we finished burying your officer, I knew."

What had he seen of Cordelia that was so convincing by the time they finished burying Rosemont? That she was clever, resourceful, brave under fire, sure. That she stood up for her beliefs even when they might cost her.

But I truthfully think the moment he decided he loved her and wanted her for the next Lady Vorkosigan was when she looked dead at him and said, "It must be like living among cannibals, to be a Barrayarran."

THAT'S it. That's the moment. Because if you listen to his stories on that trip, and the description Padma gives of his rantings, Aral is a man who knows that his society is incredibly fucked up. But he's surrounded by people-- even people who have deep principles-- who at best think it's unsolvable and more frequently think that Barrayar is fine. That it's problems are all external, or all because of one or two madmen.

Cordelia listens to him repeat the same belief that some lives are disposable that he's heard all his life and says that's fucked up. It shouldn't be like that. And to Aral, a man who desperately wants to do the right thing but who has been fed the most toxic definition of that imaginable, who has been struggling to go beyond it-- her clarity is like the sun coming out.

Aral fell in love with Cordelia not because she was the first woman soldier he'd ever met, but because she was the first person to vindicate his growing vision of what honor, what doing good for others, truly meant.

[fae-they]

so are we keeping our glasses on or off during sex

glasses on or off during sex

on

off

i do not wear glasses (u better rb this)

Remaining time: 2 days 13 hours

[concerningwolves]

i am so so gently asking abled storytellers to try this little exercise: consider that maybe the main character doesn't miraculously get through traumatic event number 8277 with minor injuries. maybe they don't make a full, narratively-convenient recovery. there are tangible, long-term effects on their health. they are disabled. there are lots of ways to be disabled, and you can pick whatever makes the most sense. the point is that because they're the main character, they have to stay at the heart of the narrative. what happens to your story after that? just for the sake of this exercise, you're not allowed to have them spiral into helpless depression, or collapse under self-loathing, or turn their story into a quest for a cure or an uplifting recovery narrative. think it through instead. how can you tell this story with the character's disability? what needs to change? are there any reasons why these changes can't happen?

at the end of it, you might change nothing. but I think this is worth doing, because sometimes you'll find that the reason you didn't want your character to have a limp, or lose a limb or sense, or have some kind of SFF-appropriate fantasy disability is because of internalised biases. those are worth challenging & i truly believe that creators miss out on richer stories when they view disability either as a fate worse than death or as nothing more than a catalyst for tragedy.

[omtai]

scone butch... The person for all your pastry and lesbian needs

[uberfluss]

first 5 faceless emojis are how your summers gonna go

[thesebonesbite]

Magnus Archives fan I see

[partywithponies]

THIS IS SO FUNNY I'M SORRY

[renariontea]

sıllıes