I Deserve To Take Up Space. I Am Worth Being A Part Of My Friends’ Lives. Advocating For Myself Is

Truly one of the best side-effects 😭

Heck that’s honestly just one of the effects lol, no side- about it!

I love the fact that I can cry like Mary in a pietà for whatever reason now, good or ill.

Now see, the big brained strategy that I’ve employed to combat this is to transition to the point where I’m forced to come out as a formality.

🫂

So much of my gender is wrapped up in what I can do for others. What I can be for others. My gender is anything before it is my own; the helpful young man holding doors open for strangers, the caring grandson visiting his grandmother in the hospital, the protective older brother, the son trying and trying and trying to be perfect for his mother.

I am the son trying to be perfect, and the best thing I can do for my mother is be a daughter. What else am I supposed to do, other than try my best to be a daughter? My gender is a man whose only purpose is what he can do for others, and that means I must be a woman.

I heard someone say, once, that men are taught that our value comes from providing for those around us. We're taught that being a man means taking care of a family, but we never learn that being a man means taking care of ourselves too.

Do I matter too? The best thing I can do for my mother is be her daughter, and the best thing I can do for me is be her son. What am I supposed to do? What's more important? My gender is about taking care of my family, providing for them, and my gender has never been about doing anything for myself.

It’s collaboration like this that makes me love my community lol 🖤

Also L’s outfit works WAY too well for it not to have been pre-meditated and hidden in the back of her closet.

Light answers a tough question

Couples therapy for the lot of ‘em I say!

The relationship between Elpheba and Glinda is contentious for kind of the opposite reason that Harrow and Gideon’s relationship is.

Elpheba and Glinda have self-regard, they have faith in themselves and stand up for themselves, which causes conflict when neither of them back down.

Harrow and Gideon, by contrast, value themselves very little, a big part of the tension in the second half of GtN and HtN is how they’re both so desperate to sacrifice themselves for the other.

For years, the TV in my parents’ house had a greyscale Fox News logo burned into the bottom-left corner of the screen due to how often that channel was on.

I used to think it was funny back before I started questioning myself. Now I’m just glad I don’t have to look at it anymore.

This isn’t really meant to be a comic trashing my dad.

I do truly appreciate his commitment to education.  I do truly have a soft spot for his style of humor, which certainly influenced the development of my own.  I appreciate how he had this VHS-C camera that he was always bringing out and would let me use, sparking my love for movies and starting me on a path that led to me going to film school.

All those good things about him were real.

But so was the colossal amount of damage he caused.

If you happen to be a parent and are reading this right now, I’m going to ask that you consider this suggestion from a childless thirty-six year old:

You need to consider how you communicate with your child, and how communication doesn’t just mean the words that you use.

You’re telling your kids something with the foods you eat, the activities you engage in, etc…

…you communicate to your children with the media you consume.

The rhetoric against the trans community wasn’t as much in the spotlight when I was growing up, but every time my dad turned on the radio, he’d have my sister and I listen to the likes of Rush Limbaugh, or Sean Hannity, Mark Levin, etc…  One of the topics that’d come up frequently was queer people. 

Issues about Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, gay marriage, gay boy scouts…

The “gays” were an issue.  More than an issue really, they were a problem.  If someone was queer, these radio hosts were quick to villainize; “this teacher is going to turn their students gay,” “this troop leader is going to abuse his scouts,” you don’t want your kid to end up like that, do you?”

My dad would listen to these folks non-stop and nod along in agreement, all the while his extremely queer and aware of it child was sitting right behind him, listening to how she was some kind of monster.

So I hid. 

There could be no sharing about aspects of myself.  My parents would be listening to 770am or Fox News all the time.  If I share that I was queer, I’d be finished.  How couldn’t that be the case?  Every day they chose to listen to people that hate me, so they hate people like me. 

So I can’t let them know me.  I won’t let them know me.

Even though they never said that they hated queer people with their own words, they told me that they hated queer people every day with the media they chose, and in turn forced me to consume.

So again, if there are any parents reading this right now, consider my words.  Hate is a choice you make, and hate can be communicated with more than just words.

If for no other reason, you never know if that kid in the back seat is listening, listening to how you hate them.

Come Alecto the Ninth the absence of gender norms is likely going to come back to bite everyone in the form of a resurrection beast manifesting itself as a terrifying physical embodiment of dysphoria covered in blue hair like fuzzy dice. Mark my words!

i love the way the way the locked tomb does gender. like gideon is butch, undeniably, but also can you really be gender non conforming when there’s no real image of gender to conform to in the first place? palamedes and pyrrah aren’t NOT trans in nona; their souls are trapped in different bodies, and those bodies ARE the wrong gender but also that’s literally the least of their problems. ianthe is pretty firmly in the box we would label “femme” and she’s simultaneously the princess of ida and a tower prince. but that’s also the least of her problems she’s literally puppetting a dead body around. nona experiences dysphoria about her body (harrow’s body and the barbie body) but that’s because she’s literally the soul of a planet trapped in a meat prison. any shaped meat prison would be bad.

like i wouldn’t call the locked tomb a “post gender” world, but they seem to all basically have the attitude of “i don’t have time for gender right now we’re trapped at the murder mystery dinner party from hell and someone stole god’s sperm we have bigger problems”

YEEEEEEEESSSSSSSS 🤘

Spent all morning distracted by what an amazing needle drop moment it would be at the end of a Gideon the Ninth adaptation if the outro was War Pigs by Black Sabbath.

Hear me out

The instrumental intro of that song is pretty long. What if we slow it down a tad. Make it a tiny bit moodier. Jod does his whole monologue about not being able to save Gideon, about the need for Lyctors like Harrow. Then the song starts in its normal speed/sound.

“Then rise, Harrowhark the First.”

🎶 Generals gathered in their masses

Just like witches at black masses

Evil minds that plot destruction

Sorcerer of death's construction 🎶

The both look out the window at a fleet of imperial ships massing at the edge of the system.

🎶 In the fields, the bodies burning

As the war machine keeps turning🎶

The scene fades to the bloody and abandoned mess of Canaan house, to the skeletons scattered everywhere, rubble from the building, the bloody spikes of the railing. It transitions to the house coffins in some hanger on the ship.

🎶 Death and hatred to mankind

Poisoning their brainwashed minds

Oh lord, yeah!🎶

Screen goes black, credits start the rest of the song plays on.

For me a lot of the horror lies primarily in the fact that the culture, traditions, and tactics of the nine houses stem almost entirely from the mind of one eccentric depressed nerd with a (literal) vengeful god complex.

Like, John lives in a space station where the walls are coated floor to ceiling in the corpses of people who have died serving him over the span of 10,000 years, one of his houses is a literal army of cloned child soldiers sent to the frontlines like a slaughterhouse conveyer belt, and the entire toxic necro/cav dynamic is based entirely around him being unable to trust his closest friends to stay by his side without emotional manipulation.

This entire universe is built on the hypothetical what-if of what would happen if someone was allowed to reshape the universe to their liking at the expense of everyone else, and that someone happened to be terminally online.

It’s like when authors jokingly say they’re terrible people for what they put their characters through but in this case, John’s fanfic is real. It’s like if Paul Atreides had a Tumblr account.

For me, I guess, the locked tomb is really superficially a good story and has lots of aspects that are good in isolation and appeal to a wide variety of queer readers but I think this series would have been better and more satisfying if Ms Muir had leaned more into the gothic and away from the internet humor. In my mind there’s no reason why each House wouldn’t be entrenched so deeply in things we consider taboo and repulsive that it’s unpalatable to most readers. Instead it’s like if Homestuck 2 was good

Bleak, but accurate.

Reread wicked again. I love the musical with all my heart but the book has something really special to it. It goes against the whole chosen-one trope and instead details the lives of children, students, adults moving through the world while facism rises around them. And like regardless of what their views are- they’re pretty powerless to stop it. They can only experience it.

I understand that this may make the plot seem slow or oddly paced but it’s not really about the hero’s journey, it’s about ordinary people’s lives. Elphaba is NOT the hero, or even the anti-hero. We might agree with her morals over other characters but she actually accomplishes very little. Almost every moral crusade she undertakes fails. She dies as just one of the many symbols of the resistance. The most productive rebellion we hear about comes from the Vinkus allyships and that happens in the background.

Wicked isn’t a book about good saving the day, or about compassion unifying the country.

At the end of the book, Elphaba and Glinda are divided by morals, Fiyero died for a cause he was never that much a part of, and Boq and the others have retreated into the background to protect their own. The wizard leaves yes, but he leaves behind a society in political turmoil. Munchkinland is facing re-annexation, the Vinkus is under attack, the Animals and the Quadlings have been shoved almost out of existence. The wizard can’t even be called the true Villain because his leaving does miraculously turn society back to “good”.

Wicked is about radicalism and facism can very quickly become the norm for a society through a series of tiny and almost ignorable steps for those not directly affected. It’s about waking up and realizing that all of a sudden you can’t remember the last time you saw an Animal walking free through the city.