Asthiet

And No more ignoring the queerness of those in bi4bi relationships or those with nonbinary identity.

If you like these shows....

But want to see more queer identity and melanin in a YA adventure magical girl Romantasy...support The Three Tomes on Kickstarter. Episode 1 is already out on YouTube and you can check out comics and , illustrations and small animatics that expand the world beyond the pilot. And support the Kickstarter for episode 2.

Campaign launches JUNE 19th . Queer Vampires , Queer witches , 100% magical.

I think this might already be known but around April a Black Asexual, Ashabi (creator of Ace in Grace) (she/they), proposed a new Asexual flag. I think it would be nice to show them some support.

Here's links to the meaning of the flag: https://aceingrace.substack.com/p/new-asexuality-flag-final-updates

https://aceingrace.substack.com/p/its-international-asexuality-day (< this includes the meaning of the old flag and the reason she felt it needed some changes + an older design of their proposed flag)

Here's a link to her Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/_aceingrace_?igsh=dTdqMGZtMzI0MWxs

So I have no grounds to speak on the validity of anything involving a community I'm not in.

If you like These types of shows.

You'll like The Three Tomes! Check out the Animatic Pilot on Youtube and KICKSTARTER FOR EPISODE 2 LAUNCHES JUNE 19TH The disposable Black girlfriend, the undate-able Black girl, " why is a Black person in ( insert fantasy story) , that's unrealistic!". Let's smash these tropes into the dust. Tammy Harris was just an ordinary 17 year old girl in the 2010s midwest. Then one night while making a short horror film with her best friend Sia, she gains the powers of a witch from an ancient tome with spirits inside. Now she'll have to capture them and face off against a mysterious foe that sends its vampire minions after her and her friends. However...she'll have to try to not fall in love with two vampires along the way. Will Tammy and Sia’s friendship survive this supernatural summer, and will Tammy's romantic endeavors with two vampires be more than she can handle? A Bi4bi romance between teen two vampires and a teen witch, a sapphic romance between a human nb teen and a lesbian witch, a gay romance between two adult vampires. And an overall story about dealing with grief, and coming to terms with changes in your life as people come and go .. and grow. A queer YA coming of age story about a black magical girl witch , and vampire romance awaits. Check out the Trailer for episode 1/The Pilot now and give the full episode a watch if you like it!

Black Kids deserve to see themselves in every genre. Follow FLY on Kickstarter to help their stories take flight. Launching June 9th on Kickstarter

Your perspectives matter. Your representation matters. You are not bothersome for demanding equal treatment in fandom. It is not your responsibility to make fandom more welcoming and inclusive to you. It is not your sole responsibility to create all of the Black-centered content. You are not "ruining" anyone's fun for demanding better for yourself, and anyone who says otherwise can go fuck themselves. Any fandom worth being a part of should have no room for racism in it.

Black people in fandom, you are wanted. You are needed. You are loved and appreciated. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise.

"Well if it was important why didn't anyone say it sooner?" "if it was important, why didn't they say it was racist?" peer, a good 75-80% of what I might say to the white and/or nonblack people that offend me directly goes swallowed for the sake of my paychecks and running water, or God forbid to avoid a bullet. Or if I'm online (where that number shrinks significantly), to be left the fuck alone 🤣

Here is an entire youtube playlist by Mannof1000Thoughts with a ton of indie animation videos AND a livestream he did where he watched some with the creators!!!

For games, there are TONS of lists out there like these:

How many cartoons can you name where a Black boy is the hero? Not the sidekick, not the comic relief, but the center of the story, the one who gets to dream, to fall, to grow, to save the day. For too many Black boys, the first time they see themselves reflected back isn’t in a world of imagination it’s in headlines, obituaries, or mugshots. That kind of visibility shapes how the world sees them, and how they begin to see themselves.

FLY exists to shake up that narrative.

So, I wanna be clear: I use this page to platform fundraisers specifically for people and causes of Black African descent. We often don't even consider that Black people exist across the globe, and have to deal with the same suffering and political conflicts in tandem with pre-existing antiblackness. Sudan, Congo, Haiti, Cuba, Palestine, etc. I want to use my position to amplify their voices, to give them the spotlight and space to be seen in a world that often neglects their existence.

That being said!

My peers (of all backgrounds) and I have been sharing fundraisers for Gaza for at least three years. And I recognize that that's a while, but folks being tired of hearing about it doesn't prevent suffering from occurring. It doesn't stop people from experiencing horrors under genocide. So often I get asked on my personal page, why no one is listening or helping, and I don't have anything to tell them. I don't know what to say anymore.

Because I see what they're saying, I do see how it feels like my peers and I are basically circling fundraisers between ourselves at this point. I see how the world treats them, and I don't know what more I could possibly say to convince people to care, after everything we've witnessed. What could I possibly say, if that's not enough?

We could use your help. But much more importantly, the people of Gaza could use your help! Even if you can't donate, reblog a campaign post shared by your peers every now and then. Pick one family's campaign and commit to sharing that one, if nothing else. Anything is better than nothing. Everybody on here claims to have some sort of marginalization and struggle that they wish to be witnessed and acknowledged, so I know you understand and empathize.

The conversation of privilege, and who has access to privilege, is one of the conversations that tumblr seems to be the worst at having, so let's talk it through!

A lot of people have the misconception that privilege works like an on/off switch. Either you 100% have it, or you don't.

But privilege works less like a switch, and more like a mixing board.

(ID: a mixing board with many toggles, sliders, and dials)

Privileges interact with each other in different ways, and different privileged people may have more or less access to those privileges if they face oppression in other ways.

A white man and a Native american man may both benefit from male privilege, but a Native american man does not have the same access to male privilege that a white man does. A gay man does not have the same access to male privilege that a straight man does.

A disabled white person does not have the same access to white privilege that an able white person does. A white transgender person does not have the same access to white privilege that a white cisgender person does.

A cisgender Black woman does not have the same access to cisgender privilege that a white cisgender woman has.

While a post op masc presenting trans man with 10 years on testosterone may benefit from male privilege a closeted, fem presenting transgender man does not have that same access.

Privilege does not exist in a vacuum. Misogyny, racism, transphobia etc are not just individual acts, they are SYSTEMS of oppression, and those systems intersect with each other.

Intersectionality was coined by Black american activist and author Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989 to describe the relationship between anti-Black racism and misogyny and the way that intersection impacts Black women. Feminist scholar Moya Bailey would later coin the word misogynoir to describe this specific intersection in 2008. Transmisogyny, coined by white american feminist author Julia Serano in 2007, is another example of one of these crucial intersections, and describes the deadly intersection of misogyny and transphobia that transfeminine people face.

Tumblr gets so hyperfocused on individual forms of oppression that we forget to consider intersectionality, and the way that our individual experiences of oppression and privilege interact. This is not serving any of us. It's on each and every one of us to learn about our privileges and find a way to use them for the common good.

Some forms of privilege, like white privilege or class/wealth privilege are near universal, and can override some forms of oppression. Consider how often white wealthy autistic men have their bad behaviour excused and explained away, in a way that would not be done for a poor, racialized autistic woman. Looking at you, Elon!

In the americas wealth and whiteness are privileged above all else. If you're a white marginalized person, you need to be aware of the ways that your white privilege lifts you above the racialized members of your community.

I'm First Nations, I experience oppression and racism based on my Indigenous background. I'm also light skinned, and I have a white mother. Even though I'm not (fully) white, I have more access to white privilege than visibly First Nations people because of my partial white ancestry, and my mother's white privilege. When I was young we were very poor and often utilized the local food bank. The resources were limited, and sometimes people were turned away due to low supply. If there's not enough to go around, who do you think is more likely to be prioritized: a brown Native mother with Native kids, or a white mother with Native kids? I materially benefited from HER white privilege.

Privilege is also not static. It may change as a person's circumstances or identity change. As a child I was darker skinned than I am now. As I aged, spent less time outdoors, and became lighter skinned, I gained more access to white privilege. I also used to need mobility aids 24/7, as my health has improved and I gained more mobility I also gained more access to the privilege that able bodied people have.

My being a light skinned Native with partial white ancestry means that non-Native people are more likely to listen to me than they are darker skinned Natives. This gives me an opportunity to share information about my people and our history that other natives may not get. That's privilege.

Your homework is to think on your specific intersections of privilege, (and we ALL have some kind of privilege) and consider the ways that you can use those privileges to lift up less privileged members of your community.

Thanks for reading.

[large text: Writing Intellectually Disabled Characters]

Something that very rarely comes up in disability media representation are intellectually disabled characters. There is very little positive representation in media in general (and basically none in media meant specifically for adults or in YA). I hope this post can maybe help someone interested in writing disabled characters understand the topic better and create something nice. This is just a collection of thoughts of only one person with mild ID (me) and I don’t claim to speak for the whole community as it’s just my view. This post is meant to explain how some parts of ID work and make people aware of what ID is.

This post is absolutely not meant for self diagnosis (I promise you would realize before seeing a Tumblr post about it. it’s a major disorder that gets most people thrown into special education).

Before: What is (and isn’t) intellectual disability?

ID is a single, lifelong neurodevelopmental condition that affects IQ and causes problems with reasoning, problem‑solving, remembering and planning things, abstract thinking and learning. There is often delay or absence of development milestones like walking (and other kinds of movement), language and self care skills (eating, going to the bathroom, washing, getting dressed etc). Different people will struggle with different things to different degrees. I am, for example, still fully unable to do certain movements and had a lot of delay in self-care, but I had significantly less language-related delay than most of people with ID I know. Usually the more severe a person’s ID is the more delay they will have.

Intellectual disability is one single condition and it doesn’t make sense to call it “intellectual disabilities” (plural) or “an intellectual disability”. It would be like saying “they have a Down Syndrome” or “he has autisms”. The correct way would be “she has intellectual disability” or “he is intellectually disabled”.

Around 1-3% of people in the world have intellectual disability and most have mild ID (as opposed to moderate, severe, or profound). It can exist on its own without any identifiable condition or it can be a part of syndrome. There is over a thousand (ranging from very common to extremely rare) conditions that can cause ID but some of the most common are;

Down Syndrome,

Fragile X Syndrome,

Fetal Alcohol Syndrome,

autism,

Edwards Syndrome,

DiGeorge Syndrome,

microcephaly.

Not every condition always causes ID and you can have one of the above conditions without having ID as long as it’s not necessary diagnostic criteria to be met. For example, around 30% of autistic people have ID, meaning that the remaining 70% doesn’t. It just means that it’s comorbid often enough to be counted as a major cause but still, autistic ≠ intellectually disabled most of the time.

A lot of things that cause intellectual disability also come with facial differences, epilepsy, mobility-related disabilities, sensory disabilities, and limb differences. A lot of, but not all, intellectually disabled people go to special education schools.

Intellectual disability isn’t the same as brain damage. Brain damage can occur at any point of a person’s life while ID always starts in or before childhood.

“Can My Character Be [Blank]?”

[large text: “Can my character be [blank]?”]

The difficulty with writing characters with intellectual disability is that unlike some other things you can give your character, ID will very directly impacts how your character thinks and behaves—you can’t make the whole character and then just slap the ID label on them.

Intellectually disabled people are extremely diverse in terms of personality, ability, verbality, mobility… And you need to consider those things early because deciding that your character is nonverbal and unable to use AAC might be an issue if you’re already in the middle of writing a dialogue scene.

For broader context, a person with ID might be fully verbal—though they could still struggle with grammar, what some words mean, or with general understanding of spoken/written language to some degree. Or they could also be non-verbal. While some non-verbal ID people use AAC, it’s not something that works for everyone and some people rely on completely language-less communication only. There is also the middle ground of people who are able to speak, but only in short sentences, or in a way that’s not fully understandable to people who don’t know them. Some might speak in second or third person (although that’s rare).

Depending on the severity of your character’s disability they will need help with different tasks. For example, I’m mildly affected and only need help with “complex” tasks like shopping or taxes or appointments, but someone who is profoundly affected will probably need 24/7 care.

It’s not infantilization to have your character receive the help that they need. Disabled people who get help with bathing or eating aren’t “being treated like children”, they just have higher support needs than me or you. In the same vein, your character isn’t “mentally two years old” or “essentially a toddler”, they are a twenty-, or sixteen-, or fourty five-year old who has intellectual disability. Mental age isn’t real. Intellectually disabled people can drink, have sex, smoke, swear, and a bunch of other things. A thirty year old person is an adult, regardless of disability.

An important thing is that a person with ID has generally bad understanding of cause-and-effect and might not make connections between things that people without ID just instinctively understand. For example, someone could see that their coat is in a different place than they left it, but wouldn’t be able to deduce that then it means that someone else moved it or it wouldn’t even occur to them as a thing that was caused by something. I think every (or at least most) ID person struggles with this to some extent. The more severe someone’s disability is the less they will be able to connect usually (for example someone with profound ID might not be able to understand the connection between the light switch and the light turning off and on).

People with mild intellectual disability have the least severe problems in functioning and a lot are able to live independently, have a job, have kids, stuff like that.

What Tropes Should You Avoid?

[large text: What Tropes Should You Avoid?]

The comic relief/punching bag;

The predator/stalker;

The “you could change this character into a sick dog and there wouldn’t be much difference”;

…and a lot more, but these are the most prevalent in my experience.

Most ID characters are either grossly villainized (more often if they have also physical disabilities or facial differences) or extremely dehumanized or ridiculed, or all of the above. It’s rarely actually mentioned for a character to be intellectually disabled, but negative “representation” usually is very clear that this who they’re attempting to portray. The portrayal of a whole group of people as primarily either violent predators, pitiful tragedies, or nothing more than a joke is damaging and you probably shouldn’t do that. It’s been done before and it hasn’t been good once.

When those tropes aren’t used the ID character is still usually at the very most a side character to the main (usually abled) character. They don’t have hobbies, favorite foods, movies or music they like, love interests, friends or pets of their own, and are very lucky if the author bothered to give them a last name. Of course it’s not a requirement to have all of these but when there is no characterization in majority of disabled characters, it shows. They also usually die in some tragic way, often sacrificing themselves for the main character or just disappear in some off-the-screen circumstances. Either way, they aren’t really characters, they’re more like cardboard cutouts of what a character should be—the audience has no way to care for them because the author has put no care into making the character interesting or likable at all. Usually their whole and only personality and character trait is that they have intellectual disability and it’s often based on what the author thinks ID is without actually doing any research.

What Terms to Use and Not Use

[large text: What Terms to Use and Not Use]

Words like: “intellectually disabled” or “with/have intellectual disability” are terms used by people with ID and are generally OK to use. I believe more people use the latter (person first language) for themselves, but i know people who use both. I use the first more often but I don’t mind the second. Some people have strong preference with one over the other and that needs to be respected.

Terms like:

“cursed with intellectual disability”,

“mentally [r-slur]”,

“moron”,

“idiot”,

“feeble-minded”,

“imbecile”,

“cretin”,

are considered at least derogatory by most people and I don’t recommend using it in your writing. The last 6 terms directly come from outdated medical terminology specifically regarding ID and aren’t just “rude”, they’re ableist and historically connected to eugenics in the most direct way they could be. To me personally they’re highly offensive and I wouldn’t want to read something that referred to its character with ID with those terms, period-accurate historical fiction aside.

(Note: there are, in real life, people with ID that refer to themselves with the above… but this is still just a writing guide. Unless you belong to the group i just mentioned I would advise against writing that, especially if this post is your entire research so far.)

Things I Want to See More of in Characters with Intellectual Disability

[large text: Things I Want to See More of in Characters with Intellectual Disability]

[format borrowed from WWC]

I want to see more characters with intellectual disability that…

aren’t white,

aren’t men,

are adults (and not just 18-25 either, middle-aged people and seniors with ID exist),

get to have a different role in the story than just “annoying little brother”,

are allowed to be angry without being demonized, and sad without being infantilized,

are not described as “mentally X years old” as a fact/objective metric,

are respected by others,

aren’t “secretly smart” or “emotionally smart”,

are able to live independently with some help,

aren’t able to live independently at all, and aren’t mocked for that,

are in romantic relationships, have crushes, or are someone else’s crush (interabled… or not),

are non-verbal or semi-verbal,

use mobility aids and/or AAC,

have hobbies they enjoy,

have friends and family who actually like and support them,

go on cool adventures,

are in different genres: fantasy, romComs, action, slice of life… all of them,

have their own storylines,

aren’t treated as disposable,

aren’t there just to be a mascot/motivation for an able-bodied character,

don’t die or disappear at the first possible opportunity...

…and I want to see stories that have multiple intellectually disabled characters.

I hope that this list will give someone inspiration to go and make their first OC with intellectual disability. This is just a basic overview to motivate writers to do their own research rather than an “all-knowing post explaining everything regarding ID”. I definitely don’t know everything especially about the parts of ID that I just don’t experience (or not as much as others). This is only meant to be an introduction for people who don’t really know what ID is, or where to even start.

Talk to people with intellectual disability (you can send ask here but there are also a lot of other people on Tumblr who have ID and I know at least some have previously answered asks as well if you want someone else’s opinion), watch/read interviews with people who have ID (to start—link1, link2, both have captions) and try to rethink what you think about intellectual disability. Because it’s really not that rare like a lot of people seem to think. Please listen to us when we speak.

Good luck writing and thank you for reading,

WAVES IN 30 MINUTES!