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everyone you know is gay

everyone you know is bisexual

everyone you know is trans

Historically it was made from murex snails and was hugely expensive and used by royalty, but chemically it’s similar to indigo so the class was able to create it in the lab without snails.

Jonathan Joss was an Indigenous, gay man who was murdered on the first day of Pride month as well as Indigenous History Month. He died protecting his trans husband. Homophobia and racism aren’t marks of the past, and this is a heart breaking reminder of that.

In 2011, the novel Fifty Shades of Grey was published and over the next two years became a bestselling novel in the erotic thriller genre. Telling the story of nobody cares and it doesn’t matter as they not gunna check, the book was successful on an unexpected scale, prompting critical reviews and then an examination of the success itself. Fifty Shades of Grey put its author, one EL James, into the Forbes’ list of highest-earning authors, and resulted in a highly publicised, successful movie trilogy. As of date, it’s made over one and a half billion dollars.

The examinations of Fifty Shades of Grey involved bringing to light its origin as a Twilight alternate-universe fanfiction on a fanfiction forum, published weekly from 2009-2011. It is one of the most successful examples of a new web creator, where someone made their own transformative fanfiction, it gathered an audience, that audience then were enough to propel the form into the attention of conventional publishing, and that publishing drew in and solidified that existing audience, then used its greater access to propel the work to higher and higher stages of what we typically call ‘success,’ because people paid money for it, and money is what we use to fill our souls in a capitalist system.

This success seems completely decoupled from critical reception, which was, it seems, overwhelmingly negative. I have yet to find someone wholeheartedly speaking well of any of EL James’ actual work as a writer, now that the fanfiction version has been deleted off the forums it was being posted on. The world we live in now is one where it isn’t hard at all to find people willing to present a new, interesting examination of Fifty Shades of Grey, having read it all, that has to establish that whatever else it has going on, the book series is quite bad. Criticising it, though, automatically brings with it the possibility of being seen as anti-smut, or anti-woman, or anti-Twilight (which is a good thing to be), and there is therefore a typical critical perspective that in order to engage with Fifty Shades of Grey, one cannot merely watch a scene and respond to it, or hear the idea and react to that, but instead, one must completely examine the text, read the books, the notes, and the movies, and then, armed with references and citations, explain what they already knew, at the start, that this book is as bad as they thought it was, and in fact, it was worse.

This is a huge task! It’s not enough to react sensibly to a thing you know, then, the impetus is that you have to understand it deeply and thoroughly. One must eat the entire elephant.

This isn’t about Fifty Shades of Grey.

This is about Megatokyo.

I want to introduce you to my elephant.

Spoiler Warning, and Content Warning, and Size Warning. I’m going to spoil the entire plot of Megatokyo in this article. I’m also going to talk about ideas like racism and misogyny and transmisogyny in a largely PG-rated webcomic. Finally, at the point where I’m writing this paragraph, this text is sitting around 15,000 words. I’m going to do what I can to make it more approachable, but this is not a breezy little read. There’s also a Table of Contents below this point, and each section has a ‘back to table of contents’ link for your convenience in reading. If you’d like to watch this article as a video instead, it’s available on Youtube, here.

Heyyy this is an announcement of the next installment of the novella series, SEASONS. WAKE UP! is the winter novella and all my books deal with queer and trans themes, but WAKE UP! is my book with the most explicitly trans characters/concerns. This story in particular is about gambling.

It's an unconventional trans-noir literary (???) thriller, following a middle-aged-ish trans lesbian at an uncertain point in her life. Her lot gets thrown in with a compulsive gambler; a dirtbag trans dude who worships a strange photograph and doesn't give a fuck about anyone, or anything beyond making a killing off of illegal underground games. Not long after she reluctantly takes him in, she is abducted one night to witness him play in a dangerous, high-stakes match.....

If you like a shorter read with trans characters where their transness is not the main tension of the story, if you're one of the five people on the planet who are like FINALLY THE TRANS MAHJONG THRILLER I'VE BEEN WAITING FOR, or if you know nothing about mahjong, and crave something a little more unpredictable with Lynchian elements, give it a go! The book will come out March 31st and is available to pre-order as a special-print paperback, a cheaper mass paperback. Once the book is out, the ebook will be free on Itch. <3 Thanks, all!! ^^

So from then on whenever one of us called something problematic, he would make us talk it out until we could name the “bad” thing we were hinting at. In this particular class, 7/10 it was some type of oppression, and the remainder was like, “I’m uncomfortable because this is very new/confusing/pushing boundaries that made me feel safe.”

Once we stopped calling things “problematic” and stopping at that, class got way more interesting and... we all had to say, like, “that’s racist” or “that’s misogynistic” or “ew capitalism gross” out loud, which a lot of us had never done in a classroom before. Or we had to be like, “Uhhh... I’m not sure what’s so bad?” and confront our own beliefs and that was maybe even more useful.