pansexuwhale

Poochyena vs. Professor Birch tug o’ war match for today’s peachtober prompt, “rope”💥🐕

Plus a bonus doodle for the Birch enjoyers 🫡

There was one episode with a trans woman getting different gender-affirming operations, including breast implants. It showed the procedure, and (what I found so fascinating that it's stuck with me for decades), as soon as the doctor put the implant in, a censor blur popped up on the nipple.

And you just know there was a meeting between the TLC lawyers and the editors and producers of the show to discuss what the difference was between a "man nipple" (can be shown) and a "woman nipple" (no no must obscure, 'tis naughty). And they decided that as soon as the implant goes in and the nipple has more mass behind it, that's the moment when it becomes a woman's nipple and must be hidden to comply with TV rules.

But it's the same nipple. On the same person. I know what it looks like; I just saw it. But TV and obscenity rules are rules, and the rules say woman nipple = sexual and therefore explicit, but man nipple = neutral, just fine.

so if you try to be a good internet citizen and just block and ignore them, at some point you will miss the memo on why everyone is really annoyed by specific headcanons. or even worse, you're a new fan of the thing and you don't know anyone's history.

like (to completely make up an example bc I don't want this to be about anything specific) maybe I like to headcanon a character as bisexual, bc as someone who is bisexual I think it's fun and sexy to be bi. and because I blocked them two years ago I don't know that Fandom Blowhard has been running around telling people they MUST headcanon character X as bisexual and anything else is WRONG because "one time she dated a man and now she dates women so she must be bisexual, it's like you didn't even watch the show oh my god people are so biphobic." and when people politely tried to tell this person why that's a shitty reason to insist a character is bisexual (comphet exists!), Fandom Blowhard wrote thousands of words doubling down and accusing everyone of having secret biphobic motives, hating character X, and being bullies.

and then either A) an old fan with a curated blocklist who has been kept blissfully unaware of sexuality discourse or B) a new fan pipes up to say "yeah I like to think of character X as bisexual!" and a bunch of people get really suspicious of them, or take what they're saying in bad faith, or outright get mad at them. which is! baffling and upsetting!

and A might be able to check in with fandom friends to figure out what the hell is going on, or just throw up their hands and leave the fandom. which is a huge shame because ideally polarization would not completely ruin the ability to talk about anything. but B is probably going to be approached by Fandom Blowhard who tells them "yeah this fandom has a HUGE biphobia problem, don't trust anyone" and then experience what is essentially a radicalization pipeline but about bi headcanons.

unfortunately as far as I know there are no effective solutions to this because it's an emergent behavior of large groups of people. there will always be Fandom Blowhards and people annoyed by fandom blowhards. the rest of us might just be stuck in the middle.

"After they overheard that ICE was at the courthouse to arrest someone, they improperly accessed court databases to determine who was not born in the United States," a DOJ detention filing says. "They then snuck every suspected illegal alien who was at the courthouse out a back door, where ICE, who was waiting in the parking lot for their target to leave the building, could not see them."