[glass him]

[image description: a three page comic starring ness and Paula from earthbound. they are beneath a grave yard. In the first page, paula snaps her fingers to ignite PK fire and says, “yes, got it!” once it ignites.

in the second page, Ness looks at the PK in wonder and says, “woah.” Paula says, “Ness, you’ve seen me do this a hundred times.” Ness replies, “and it’s still super cool!” Paula uses the pk fire to get a fire going while Ness asks, “say, how’d you find out you had PSI?”

Paula says, “so I’ve had telepathy for a while, right. But I thought that was normal. Like, people talk to their pets all the time. So I thought they understood them too.” She is seen holding up a cat. When she says I love you, the cat says love you back to her.

On the third page Paula says, “but on my 8th birthday, my parents couldn’t find anything to light the candles on my birthday cake. So I was thinking, we’ll, ‘I wish we had fire for the candles.’ And I lit the table cloth on fire.” The panels feature a younger paula who panics at the sight of the fire. The present paula asks Ness, “what about you?” Ness replies, “Well, I watched Air Bud and made my dog float on accident.” End ID]

This is actually a really good bit of coverage of it (if only part 1 of 2, I don’t think part 2 is up yet) from a scientifically critical, trans-affirming perspective, if you’d like to know what the TERFs are aiming at transmascs these days without actually having to like

read that shit

because it’s fucking horrible.

And like, I absolutely recommend reading that article, because this shit permeates the discussion about trans ppl, especially in the UK and on Twitter.

That Book was recently (like, this past week) included in an American Bookseller’s Association promotional ‘white box’ sent to independent booksellers in the US, and trans ppl and our allies got understandably really pissed that a book of unscientific, nasty-ass anti-transmasc propaganda that’s been out for a year is like… in a promo box. So they took the ABA to task for it.

The ABA put out an apology (full of passive language, like these things just happened rather than that someone did these things, which is pretty fucking rich for a bookseller’s association, like they thought that the kind of extremely literate people who run independent bookstores wouldn’t notice) and so like… the book is receiving renewed attention from the same sort of First Amendment transphobes who love to screech about censorship when their favorite bits of propaganda get pushback. You’ll probably see a lot more of the ideas this book pushes in the near future.

So, like, yeah. It exists, and people are talking about it a lot, so knowing what kind of garbage is in it and what we’re up against?

Unfortunately necessary, IMO.

ok, so Gildenstern is played by a deaf actor, Nadia Nadarajah. he* signs all his lines, and either Rosencratz interprets for him, or the person he’s talking to says something that makes it obvious what he just said, depending. how each character reacts to Gildenstern is completely in-character and often hilarious

Claudius and Gertrude are intensely awkward around Gildenstern. they obviously don’t know BSL so they just gesture emphatically but aimlessly when they talk.

Hamlet, who of course is friends with R&G, *does* know BSL. he starts off by signing fluently whenever he’s talking to them but, as his distrust of them grows, he signs less and less until he’s only signing the equivalent of “fuck off” whenever he talks

Polonius just shouts really loud whenever he tries to talk to Gildenstern

it’s all brilliant and adds another layer of humor and pathos and you should all watch it

and the best part of it was, by the second half of the play, you were so used to it, that you didn’t even blink anymore when watching him and listening to the spoken words come from the interpreter - you just watched the actor playing Cornwall and let the words come from the other guy, but the guy kind of fades into the background.  it didn’t hurt that the actor for Cornwall was one of the tallest on stage, and had bright red hair - it was easy to watch him, instead of his interpreter.

which is why it was so shocking and so perfect when the interpreter is the one who kills him.

See, they folded the character of the servant who kills Cornwall into the person of this character who had been such a non-entity that you almost forgot he was on stage - until you realize, no, this is another person, and he’s been here, watching all this the whole time, and he finally gets to the breaking point where he can’t stand by and translate anymore, he has to do something to stop the cruelty he’s seeing, and it’s not just a random guy who comes in for the scene and sees them blinding Gloucester, it’s the man whose been by his side for the entire play, the man who was his voice who finally has a line of his own.  who finally speaks on his own behalf to say “no.”