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if you're interested in her as a character, and you think she's queer, you'd write that story, you know? you'd write about her stuck in that marriage trying to breathe, and you'd write about her faltering weird intense friendships with other women, and you'd be interested in the woman she finally leaves her husband for. but that story doesn't exist. instead, you get a throwaway line or two in the story about her husband or her boyfriend or her best friend with romantic tension, who doesn't love her anymore.

so you gotta think: this is a story where the writer wanted to break up or desexualize or deromanticize this relationship between a man and a woman, but they're not a dick, so they don't want to character bash her, so instead of writing her being an evil bitch*, they go "it's okay, she's a lesbian," and then that gives them the out. like her being a lesbian is a get-out-of-jail-free card for the writer, who no longer has to worry about how she fits into the story—don't worry, fellas! she's a lesbian. she's out of the picture. case closed.

and that's also a way of defanging the flaws of the man in that relationship, you know? he's not an asshole for ignoring her or cheating on her or forgetting about her, it was all just a big misunderstanding. he's gay, she's gay, they can be Best Friends (who somehow never get much page time, and if they DO, it's all her absolving him of wrongdoing and encouraging him to go after his man.)

i do really hate the conversations they have where The Newly Out Lesbian tells the Man Who Now Suspects He Might Be Gay that he's just being so stupid and why doesn't he just talk to the other guy and if he weren't so oblivious he would have realized sooner that there's never really been anything between them. I hate it when she holds his hand like he's a little baby and then hits him gently on top of the head with a rolled up newspaper. don't worry, she's beyond his power to hurt! She's not a person who can be wounded by her partner falling out of love with her, she's a Lesbian, and Lesbians exist on a higher plane that is mysteriously beyond the story's power to really pay attention to. why are you flattening both of them out like that??? isn't it better to just acknowledge that he did something that hurt her, regardless of whatever their sexualities are??

anyway i'm much more interested in stories about infidelity where the cheated-on partner is actually getting their heart broken, you know?

i don't want to see this cheated-on woman smile beatifically and say "it's okay, it's better this way, I'm going off with my Companion who you've never heard me mention before and we'll live down the block and meet every day for coffee at Central Perk," I want her to throw a vase at his head and then still have to coparent with him afterward. I want her to get to be sad!! I want her to get to be angry!! I want him to have to deal with having hurt her!! I want him to deal with the consequences of having hidden the truth or made this discovery!!

I'm not interested in configuring events such that the guy cheating on his wife never did anything wrong, I'm way more interested in just letting him have done something wrong. You can hurt somebody and still be following your heart! You can hurt somebody and save your life at the same time! and that's juicy, that's interesting, that's messy and a problem and a story I want to read about.

and then if she turns out to be queer after all, I want to read the story about that. maybe he cheats on her and that's awful and in the disillusionment afterward she goes and cries on her best friend's shoulder and says something about how she's through with men, absolutely through, and her best friend kisses her temple and promises to kill him, if she wants, and later she goes to the bathroom and looks at the smudge of lip gloss on her forehead and it makes her stomach do a flip. maybe she starts having a crisis and then six months later she's supposed to be having a custody discussion with her cheating ex and instead they end up getting drunk together while she asks him how he did it, how did he figure it out, and he lifts his head up from the bartop, hopeful as a kicked dog and is like does this mean you're considering forgiving me, and she's like no! fuck you. buy me another drink. is it different, being with him versus being with me? and if it's different, how is it different?

do you see what i'm saying??

Her example was in call centers, where an agent might take 1 difficult call in 10, which is stressful, but the person has the 9 easy calls to offset that stress and recalibrate their nervous system. But when 'AI agents' take those 9 easy calls, you, the human, are left with 100% difficult calls. What used to be a small, unpleasant portion of your day now becomes your entire day, all day, every day.

And to make things worse, your boss fired all the other humans, so rather than spreading out the bad amongst a team of people who could commiserate and provide support, it's just you, absorbing the stress, alone, forever.

A teenager cannot get body modifications. But a parent can pierce a baby's ears.

A teenager (or even a 20 year old) cannot buy cigarettes. But a parent can smoke in places where their toddler is forced to be.

Body Modification is largely the same though. Infants might get ear piercings by parental request, but if someone pierces a 17yo without parental consent, they are getting in trouble.

schizospectrum disorders do not make someone inherently dangerous. people still believe this firmly. our fight isn't over we still have to continue to speak about schizospec people and how unfairly we are treated. we are dehumanized instantly the second people find out about our conditions. we are treated like ticking time bombs. people openly admit that we are scaring them when we talk about our psychosis and how it affects us.

people tell us to calm down and that our delusions aren't real and that we're overreacting. people give reality check us and force us to try to think in ways that scare us. people refuse to trust our own accounts of our own lives and what is happening to us, even when we are not actively delusional or hallucinating. people infantilize us and treat us like we're stupid and have zero autonomy.

This isn’t mentioned in Brotherhood, but the reason Roy and Riza came to Resembool scouting out the Elrics is because someone fucked up the ages on Ed and Al’s file.

Literally Roy and Riza are riding in the back of some horse-drawn carriage into Resembool chatting with the driver like “yes we’ve heard rumors of two alchemist brothers here, Ed and Al Elric ages 31 and 30 respectively. Do you know where they live?” And the driver pretty much answers with “lol what? Those kids are like 10.”

Except now Roy and Riza are already THERE so they decide “Fuck it. Let’s pay a visit anyway.”