Eyeteeth

everybody: cool!

author: also half the army is female

everybody: cool!

author: and a lot of them are poc

everybody: makes sense

author: also several of the characters are not straight

you know what really fucking pisses me off about the whole “GASP ADULTS WRITING ABOUT KIDS” discourse

you know what really fucking pisses me off?

hi. i grew up in the bible belt of the midwest. as a young queer slowly coming to terms with being Super Not Straight, I grew up a town where there was one grocery store and eleven churches. on nice sunny days, before real summer heat set in, the chances of well-dressed smiling proselytizing boys with free copies of their holy books showing up at your door approached 100 percent. in my high school, there were to my knowledge about four queer kids, myself included in that number, and one of them was terrified to come out or even be seen with other boys because he grew up in the kind of household where you would absofuckinglutely be thrown out for being gay.

i did not have a queer childhood. this was just as the proliferation of the internet was starting to become a thing, but your best bet to get on a computer would be to go to the local library. the librarian, btw, was a devout christian and was part of the baptist church across the street. so the idea of using free resources to reach out or research what the fuck it meant to be queer was literally not an option.

i did not get queer literature. i did not get queer media. i subsisted on fandom, because it was the only type of content i knew that talked about being queer, that was positive about it, and was often created by adults who would point you to resources to help. this was before scarleteen and teen vogue and other sites.

fandom was my queer community, because i had zero alternatives. society gave me no alternatives.

and now I am looking at all these fearmongering puritanical moralizing shitheels go on and on about how any adult who writes about younger people is a predatory pedo

I did not get a fucking queer childhood. And if I want to sit down and write or read a story about queer teens who get a better shot, who do find love and feel comfortable experimenting with their sexuality instead of treating it like a potential death sentence,

you do not get to sit there and tell me what a fucking terrible human I am. I was a fucking kid too, and these are my stories too. they, in fact, are the stories fucking owed to me by a world that taught me to be afraid. and that part of my history as a human did not get erased when i passed some arbitrary milestone of time.

Society already stole the upbringing I should have had and locked me in a fucking closet until i was in my mid 20s, and you puritanical myopic shits have the fucking audacity to say me reaching back to try and remember something better makes me a pedophile, you dogwhistling dumbfucks.

you are literally on the same side as the people who made my best friend afraid his dad would beat him to death for coming out. that is where you stand. you use the same tactics and the same scripts. “oh if you are interested in these things…… that means you’re Wrong and will probably go to Hell :( why do you want to be such a bad person when you can be Straight And Pure?”

Warmest regards,

People are tan because their ancestors either A) lived closer to the poles but still close enough to the equator to need darker skin tones or B) they lived on a coastline and fish was a huge part of their diet.

People are light because their ancestors lived very close to the poles and did not have a large seafood diet and needed lighter skin to absorb more sunlight so they can produce the essential Vitamin D.

That’s right. Your skin tone is because of an essential need for Vitamin D. The more sunlight you get, the darker your skin gets. The less, the lighter.

So an elf can be darker skinned because every world has a fucking sun and elves need Vitamin D too.