froggiest time of the year

commission for @likemonstersinlove!! i really hope you enjoy it! 

He thinks of his wife in the arms of the sun... DÓNAL FINN | HADESTOWN | EPIC II

it's never explicitly stated that steven and connie are in love or dating, or that stevonnie is nonbinary, we can tell because of how close the two of them always are and from stevonnie's androgynous traits and other characters using the right pronouns for them.

they never use the term 'lesbians' for ruby and sapphire, or pearl and rose, or say they are and were in love, but with how intimate they are with each other and how they talk about being together, it's impossible to miss that they are. and garnet's wedding isn't ever described as a 'lesbian wedding', it's just a wedding, we know the two characters getting married are lesbians.

No, I don't know how many countries. It is probably not 17.

The interesting thing is that they treat the (presumably) straight characters the same as the queer ones that way. Greg never calls his relationship with Rose anything specific outside of "when I started dating your mother." Vidalia says "It's just been me and Yellowtail for a while" while picturing her wedding ring.

And the people who DO use specific words for these relationships are often wrong, intentionally misleading, or assuming. Greg calling Alexandrite his wife in a ruse for the Maheswarans. Uncle Andy asking which of the "girls" has gotta be "the wife" when he sees Greg has a kid (and mistakenly identifying Garnet). Ronaldo condescendingly saying Connie gets to use Rose's sword because "she's your girlfriend." Steven loudly saying Kiki and Ronaldo are "involved in a romantic relationship" when they're lying about it to end the Restaurant War.

There HAVE been just a few instances of explicitly named relationships, like Shep being named as Sadie's new partner, or Ronaldo saying he has a girlfriend (who turns out to miraculously exist). But it's notable that they aren't tiptoeing around the queer relationships refusing to define them while having no qualms about using specific language for the straight ones. The show repeatedly lets love be the important part and just shows us the love. What we call it isn't as important as how they show it.

And as a bonus, some of the people in this show who do stuff like getting married and living together as one entity don't identify as women. They're she/her characters, and present in a way the audience will interpret as overall femme/female, but they aren't women and wouldn't have any particular connection to terms like "girlfriend" or "wife." No one ever says "lesbians," but no one ever says "straight" either. It's beyond words.

You're heading toward that fascist mindset, because the whole purity culture/anti-ship mindset is designed to do specifically that.

It's designed to make you feel like the Good Person doing the Good Things being the Good and Sensible One Standing Against all The Bad Things. And chances are part of it is because someone told you proshippers are pedophiles, or whatever - they might not have even said anything concrete and just let the implication hang there.

I'm not a fan of proship vs antiship just because stuff like that gets distilled down into very simple statements, and oftentimes simplicity loses the plot. But after a couple years I will say seeing "proshippers DNI" in someone's bio will cause me to either block them, or step back from them.

It makes me nervous because even if they're not actively being aggressive, they've got a foot on the slide and that's an easy slip. I've watched too many people go down that slide, and I've had my arm dislocated trying to help some of 'em.

And look, there's assholes everywhere. Every group, every ideal, every nook and cranny you can possibly find for people has assholes. If you're letting the assholes cause you to Other an entire group of people

You're On The Slide.

this is one of those things where it’s like. obviously this is not an instance of a systemic pattern of men subconsciously taking women’s inferior knowledge for granted. but if you sense that your friends regularly feel like you are being patronizing in conversation with them, it may actually be worth reassessing how you talk to your friends. no one likes being treated like they’re stupid or ignorant and if you are constantly appointing yourself teacher in conversations no one else wanted or expected to have a teacher, that gets aversive after a while.

1) Truly sucks how many people seem to assume that anyone who complains about your behaviour is ✨neurotypical✨ (an attitude which often shades into 'only I get grace in how I behave because I'm The Neurodivergent One'). Your friends have their own needs going on too.

2) Relatedly, there is a difference between 'masking' and 'being responsive to people's needs'. The thing is that when you're hanging out with friends, the success metric is 'are we both enjoying this interaction?'

Part of the issue with masking is that, in an ableist world, the enjoyment and comfort of 'neurotypical' people is all that's valued, and neurodivergent people are expected to sacrifice their own comfort and enjoyment in a social situation to facilitate that. That's bad. But also flipping the script doesn't mean you've created an even playing field - at best it's recompense ("we should stop coddling them"). But like. An actually positive social interaction is one that both parties get something out of, and when we're talking about friendship and not eg a working relationship, yeah sorry man you do actually need to consider whether the other person is getting anything out of it. They're not morally obliged to have a relationship that's entirely for your sake, and a relationship that's entirely based around only one party's social needs is a bad one.

Which. To be clear.

3) There are lots of reasons somebody might not like you infodumping beyond ableism, whether or not they're 'neurotypical'. For example:

as previously said - sometimes you're trampling over something they were excited to share or talk about, and they didn't get to do their infodumping

you may very well be being unintentionally (or intentionally) condescending, and treating them as if they know nothing and you know everything, which is not respectful or kind

sometimes infodumping is done at people not with them. my mum (autistic) has described some interactions with her sister (autistic) as feeling as if she could be replaced with a cardboard cutout without changing the conversation, because her sister is treating her as an audience to talk at, not as a partner in the conversation. I have had interactions with people in my life where I've been pulled away from a conversation when they're mid-infodump and they've turned to another person and continued their train of thought unbroken to them. This makes the person you're talking to/at feel like they're not being valued, because they're not being valued - if your goal in the conversation is to have someone to unload your thoughts onto and who it is is largely irrelevant, that isn't interacting with them as another equally important person.

Sometimes people are interested in exploring something you brought up, and you're steamrolling past their attempts to ask about it or brushing them off, so they never get to engage with the stuff that's interesting to them in what you're saying.

Sometimes people just want to get a word in edgeways

None of these, or many other issues to take with infodumping, are exclusive to allistic people, nor are they inherently ableist. Being actually engaged with, heard, and treated as an active participant with your own thoughts and opinions are all just normal social needs that pretty much everyone has.