tired.

WHY is the fucking AIR out here TOUCHING ME

Well I don't like how it feels. I don't feel cleaner without body hair. I don't prefer not having body hair. But who will advocate for women like me, but me? For women who do like hair removal, they are advocated for every time they step out of the house and see 99% of the female population also conforming to that standard, or when they watch a movie and see all the shaved actresses, or view an advertisment, or open a magazine, or watch a music video, or scroll through social media, or walk down the streets without receiving insults and glares for having a completely normal bodily feature.

Like people make fun of middle aged women for not getting married or being divorced or "always the bridesmaid never the bride" and all like "oh she's desperate! No one wants her! Old maid!' but they become straight up hostile and upset when you tell them you never want to date.

The core wound of this demographic is being rejected and being relentlessly asked to stop your bullshit relative to romance and sex, and to get back in the ranks. The aroace definitely qualify.

And since being rejected is obviously a veeeeery common trauma in the queer community, and people tend to reenact unhealed patterns, it's not rare to see queer people rejecting other queer people with shit like biphobia, being picky with who "qualify" as trans, dismissing aroaces etc...

And yet! He's arguably THE significant figure in the ritual liberation of ancient orcish souls on KoTher'ai's opening night! As a player, Liam/Halandil rolled "Producer checks" to see how well he'd readied his whole cast and crew for this, but by all reason Lash was also rolling the Performance check of his life. He and all the other troupe-members were rolling, oh, Wisdom saves to not be intimidated by the Creed luxes in the audience. None of them know they're making an enemy of House Tachonis by freeing an afterlife with this, but they DO know they're making an enemy of House Halovar, which is a much more imminent threat - and every one, stage crew and special effects team and actors with Lash leading as the Heretic, the Renegade, of KoTher'ai - is still here rolling their best Performance checks to say, We are the Rungjani and this is our story. Now we are free, and we will continue to free ourselves and each other.

Because a rebellion isn't, can't be, just 13 significant characters. It's 350 soldiers who believe in a cause but still need to feed their families, so you get a donation and set up discreet soup kitchens. It's a theater troupe of renegades, it's the Faerie diaspora living in the shadows, it's maids and merchants and noblewomen all picking up their rocks. It's ancient Elvish enemies talking in the woods together. It's all of us. Everyone is significant.

I would be reluctant to use fridging in this exact context, because this isn't some imaginary scenario to generate manpain for a white hero, this is a much more common experience of Native American and First Nation people, having their wives and daughters and sisters (in particular, but not exclusively) go missing. And never getting answers, never learning what happened, and not being believed that there's a problem in the first place.

This is like how being rescued from a tower by a prince is not particularly empowering or affirming to cis physically able straight thin perisex white women and girls, but can be for basically anybody else. Particularly black girls and women, who do not get a lot of cultural messages that treat them as people who are so valuable and precious, who may not have the strength to save themselves, or may wish that they didn't fucking have to save themselves (and everyone else) all the time.

White men have this story so often happen that we have a trope name specific to one specific and particularly egregious version of this, but you don't often see men who look like Robbie dealing with this type of story in fictional settings, even though it happens for men like Robbie in real life with horrifying frequency.