BURY THE LIGHT

we're the restless dream system & our part-time job is the sole source of income for us & our partner. we're both disabled & chronically broke due to that. i havent been able to find a full-time job and my partner, @gemteeth, has not been abke to find any job - and they've been applying to everything they can for the past six months.

where we live isn't particularly safe, but it's all we can afford.

except that our rent is going back up after a grace period, and at the moment we can't afford our bills and groceries. we do not have a car. at the i have a little saved for rent, but it's not enough. i only have $18 in checking and i can't touch what i have in savings.

please, please rb this. anything at all will help.

ca/vnmo - transdankovsky

this 12 year old girl’s family is suing meta over this exact phenomenon I described above.

So some fanartist drew a “sexy” (read: booby) version of a (cartoon) character who is traditionally very non-sexualised. Fans of the character got mad about it because it’s kind of groundbreaking how that character is written and portrayed and this art totally ignores the entire point of the character. They demanded the art be deleted. In response to that other people said, well what the fanartist did may be distateful but they have every right to draw what they’re into. The two sides fight for days and each starts a harassment campaign and even report their “opponents’” accounts.

So far so typical. But things eventually come to a head and they decide that this will be settled by votes - not through a poll. Through donations to a children’s education charity via each side’s portal. Whoever can get the highest amount of donation wins.

i don't think there's anything inherently wrong with drawing or writing boy characters as girls or liking those kinds of fanworks, in fact sometimes i do it myself and quite enjoy it. i also recognize that a significant portion of fandom creators are female and/or lesbian, and are in part likely seeking to project their own identities onto the characters comprising the main yaoi ship (often some of the strongest and most-developed characters from the source media). however when this becomes widespread as a phenomenon i personally cannot help but think of it as a version of (largely) sfw a/b/o - of trying to subvert or vent about the struggles of misogyny via fanworks without addressing the underlying misogyny in the space itself; a way of achieving "women without women".

this is why the fact that these interpretations are usually contextless genderbend alternate universes and rarely explicit specific trans headcanons is particularly significant to me. in my mind, an obvious way to imagine "what if this male character was a woman" would be not to necessarily create an entire alternate universe where this cisgender male is her cisgender female "opposite", but instead to consider the implications of the idea that she was a closeted woman all along, and what effect this would have had on the narrative. however, this necessarily involves confronting misogyny and specifically transmisogyny in the text and in fan spaces, something that many genderbends seem unwilling or unable to do.