i’m online and ready to look at a picture!

riverdale erasing jughead's (a)sexuality pisses me off for a number of reasons but esp since like. the show leans really really hard into jughead being an outsider to the point where he is literally the narrator who exists both inside and outside the narrative but this alienation is rooted in the way comic!jughead is an outsider in his own friend group - his own genre, even - due to not being in the polyclue his disinterest in romantic and sexual relationships his (aromanticism and) asexuality are literally the bedrock upon which he and his narrative which is ultimately the show's narrative are founded upon. but they still decided not to make him (aro)ace and instead put him in one explicitly sexual relationship after the other.

one thing i love about helly in severance is that she really drives home how gender conformity is learned, not innate. like she's dressed as a professional woman, in heels and a skirt and makeup, but her voice and body language, all the little ways people perform gender, don't match it. she doesn't modulate her voice higher or modify her speech to be less blunt. she's got her shoulders up in a very tense, afraid posture (bc she IS tense and afraid) and she walks with a very purposeful stride. helly is helena without the years of training to be quiet and compliant, without years of being taught how to perform gender, so she just...speaks in her regular voice. has the posture of a scared little animal because that's what she is. it's gender non-conforming but it's not masculine or anything to do with her personal gender identity. she's just being a person, having realistic human reactions to the situation she's in. and so much of gender non-conformity for women is like this. you don't have to deliberately wear menswear to be seen as unfeminine. you can just not wear makeup or not shave your legs, just exist in your unmodified body and speak with your unmodified voice, and that's enough. i sometimes see art of helly in more masc clothing or trying on mark's suit and it's cute but i think reading her lack of "appropriate femininity" as a desire to present masculine kinda misses the key point that she is not acting like a man or a woman. she is simply existing as a human being

the idea that a sex scene in fiction is fundamentally useless/simply for audience titillation UNLESS they’re fucking infodumping exposition while they bone or something is so funny and myopic to me. like, you really genuinely believe for real that there is NOTHING to be gained about your understanding of a story or characters simply from how they approach and engage in sex? really for real?

saying this as mildly as possible but the anti ai posting tenor on this website (not last post, but in general - i have been biting my tongue for a long long time) is one generally oriented towards a maximal amount of self-righteousness. in my experience, self-righteousness only ever produces martyrdom and a punitive desire for "justice" that can never quite be quenched. none of it is actually conducive towards good politics around the matter in question, least of all ai, which is frankly poorly understood and thought about on here. a little more compassion and thoughtfulness and a little less solipsistic self-absorption perhaps is in order.

i just don’t get it. where are all the women. where are all the women in your fanfictions. are they all out of town? did they all go on vacation together? do they all have a dentist appointment at the same time?

i feel like we really don’t need a million pride flags. it gives hogwarts houses and sweatshop temu accessories. it gives sense of identity through consumerism. it gives those pic art avatars fuckk whatever they’re called from 2019. and most importantly its unchic

the big man is the masculine dom and the dom is the top and the little man is effeminate and transgender but fully passes as a cis man and has top surgery but since he doesnt have bottom surgery he literally has to be a bottom theres no way for someone with a vagina to top and the bottom is the sub and they are both uncomplicatedly homosexual with zero positive emotions for women and they both have adhd and autism but only the kind of autism that doesnt actually disable you and they also crossdress but in a specifically humiliating way (why would a MAN wear a DRESS??? 🤪🤪 etc.) and they live together in a big house that they can both effortlessly afford and they're married and have 2 kids a dog and a cat (because Big man is dog coded and Little man is cat coded) and neither of them have jobs or lasting damage from canon events they've been through or physical disabilities or PTSD that I cant turn into Angsty Ship Content and the sun has a big smiley face and birds are just V shapes on the paper it doesnt have to be more complicated than that you dont have to flesh them out. you dont have to. and if you think about it wouldn't it just be soooo much effort to draw a whole bird?? youre just having fun its mean to ask you for detail. and my teacher lives at the school and the bus driver lives in the bus and everything is exactly the same :)

the style of writing is not the problem, not the genre, not the subject matter, not even the words themselves. the SINGLE defining issue with the “Tumblr Prose” style i was trying to tackle is that it’s front loaded with imagery and metaphor and completely lacking in sense, reason, symmetry, motion, conveying information. i agree that plenty of writing can sound good and feel good to read when it’s all metaphor and visceral images but it needs to have a baseline that can carry it through or else the tail wags the dog and it’s all cool “quotable” lines and no substance, nothing to read between the lines, no character