残念ですが、さようなら

in aotearoa, june isn’t our pride, it’s theirs. marsha p johnson and sylvia rivera are their historical figures, not ours. the phrase that “you owe your rights to Black trans women” is true there, but here we owe our rights to (mostly) Māori historical figures. i have the freedoms i do because of the legacy of an entirely different set of people operating in an entirely different context at entirely different times.

But because of american cultural imperialism, most queer people in Aotearoa don’t even know our own queer history. Carmen Rupe, Ngahuia Te Awekotuku, the Dorian Society, Gillian Laundon, Georgina Beyer, and the Wolfenden Association are some of our queer history. We should know their names! we should know what they did for us! but because of the power of the american imperial machine, we don’t.

our national pride month should be july, the month that the Homosexual Law Reform Act passed in 1986. our two largest cities hold their pride festivals in february and march, respectively. american queer history has very little (or nothing, depending on who you ask) to do with our queer history. anecdotally, from my own queries, queer youth in aotearoa know more about american queer history than our own.

My nephew is very allergic to eggs, peanuts, tree nuts, and sesame. Last year my sister discovered all hot dogs and hamburger buns now contain sesame. Not "may contain", but listed in the ingredients. This year basically every brand of sliced bread also now contains sesame, making it very difficult to find bread items he can eat.

They're just adding it to their products, so they can just list it as an ingredient and not bother with worrying about cross contamination. And they aren't even bothering with telling anyone. Capitalism is going to kill us all.

"Which brings us back to Kellogg’s. Back in 2016, the company found a way around the added burden and expense of complying with the FSMA: they simply began adding trace amounts of peanut flour to their cracker products. Doing so allowed them to list peanuts as an ingredient of the product, freeing them from having to prevent cross-contact.

ngl, I'm kind of surprised that I've seen a few people take issue with asgore going "wow. the way flowery is treating me is kind of a wake-up call, I need to back the fuck off of toriel," talking about it like it's a false equivalency, when it's really obvious that flowery's actions towards asgore are a direct parallel to how asgore has been living his life

like, obviously there's not the same undercurrent of misogyny / entitlement. that is a point of distinction. but everything flowery is doing is still built around the idea of recapturing a Better, Happier Past that has since been lost. he's not "asgore's new best friend" or "asgore's favorite flower," he's Asgore's Best Friend From College (not actually true). he goes out of his way to hide Kris and Ralsei from asgore, and it's hard to see this as anything but "trying to prevent them from getting in the way of our relationship." and while flowery's argument that the flower shop dark world has just as much right to exist as Castle Town is sympathetic, and not even untrue... he's not exactly searching for an equitable solution, is he? he's putting his needs first. and his needs are not "do literally anything about the roaring," they are "do what I have decided is necessary to protect asgore from his own feelings."

and yes, all this is motivated by sincere affection for asgore and a desire to Fix Things. but he can't fix things. he can only delude himself into thinking he's capable of fixing things. if he just solves the truth behind dess's disappearance makes all his stats 99, then he can make the problem go away. if he makes enough grand gestures of affection, then everyone will understand his point of view. his heart's in the right place. isn't that enough? it's supposed to be enough.