Aurora Australis

I live in a very flammable part of the world and last 4th of July, I had to resort to both Psychological and Chemical Warfare to keep the local morons from setting the neighborhood ablaze.

So, in terrible news, Trump's trying to pull some strings to pass this massive internet censorship bill, featuring all the kinds of internet censorship we're terrified of, including mandatory ID for accessing basically any website, specifically to crush state regulation of AI, because apparently this man will always see the moral bottom of the barrel and start digging.

6/14/2026

They will then violently insist that this version is superior to the canon one and act like they "fixed" them and it's like. Buddy that's not the same character anymore. That's just your own oc commiting identity fraud. Like. I get the desire to experiment with different interpretations of a story. But first of all it's okay to just make an original character if that's what you really want to do. And second of all, are you even really a fan of the character you "fixed" if they're a completely different person afterwards?

Two examples. First; a lot of people ship Frodo/Sam or Legolas/Gimli (or more obscure gay ships like Maedhros/Fingon), and some people say stuff like “well, Tolkien was catholic, he clearly didn’t intend for these characters to be gay.” But Tolkien himself says that he doesn’t write Christian allegory, in fact he despises all allegory. What he does is write about the rich and varied human existence, and when he did so he drew on the experiences of the likely closeted gay and bisexual men he had met over his life! And he synthesized this as just a way people behave, not as ‘representation’ but reality. And we can recognize that while in the early twentieth century, the 15% of people that identify as bisexual in the current generation (gen Z) would likely have married people of the opposite gender, that doesn’t mean they didn’t have same-gender relationships that had romantic elements even if they were never consummated.

A second example; in Tamora Pierce’s the Song of the Lioness Quartet, Alanna, the main character, dresses as a boy and trains to be a knight. As she grows up, she has to re-learn to connect with her femininity in secret with the few people who know who she is (thus making her a paradoxically-apt role model for both trans men and trans women, depending on which parts of the narrative one projects oneself onto). But Alanna never feels truly comfortable as a woman, either, and constantly has to assert both her masculinity and femininity to different people once she becomes a knight and reveals the secret. Tamora Pierce has since stated that if Alanna were born in the modern day, she would likely identify as genderfluid. But these books were written in the 1980s, and while there were people in that time period who were exploring the language of nonbinary and genderfluid identities, it wasn’t really a widespread notion, and while I can’t be sure Tamora Pierce didn’t encounter that language I sort of doubt Alanna was intended from the beginning to fit that identity. Instead, Pierce wrote a character based on the people she knew in life, who perhaps uncomfortably chafed at their assigned gender, and wrote a character who really believably would be genderfluid today, despite (plausibly) not knowing what ‘genderfluid’ was!

Im.. Soft 🥺🥺🥺