grind me up coarse and call me kosher, i'm salty

09/04/2026 • every time @softinvasions writes a villanelle about how sonnets suck i write another suckful sonnet*. metrical malpractice!

bc like the way i see it she really did not need to pretend grace had a choice. those 3 hours she gave him were meaningless as far as the project itself and the fate of the world were concerned. and yes, it was in the hopes that he would come around on his own, but i don't think that was for grace's benefit. if anything, it probably would have been less painful for him if he'd never thought he had a say.

And then all the other Sesame Street character accounts joined in:

And now I’m thinking maybe we’re gonna be okay… 💗

"So, boss... I may have messed up."

"What did you do, Ray?"

"Well, I made a post for Elmo saying 'Hi, how's everybody doing?'"

"I mean, that's kind of what we pay you for."

"Yeah, but.... <sigh> it turns out pretty much everyone is hanging on by a thread, badly enough that they needed to tell Elmo."

"Oh."

"God help me, boss, I think Elmo needs to be there for them."

So random Eridian scientists are talking to Grace and are like, absolutely no disrespect intended, but very interesting Rocky overcame the cultural weirdness and sensory disgust of "hugs" and does them despite no benefit to himself because he cares for your needs! Its sweet!

Grace: actually Rocky freaks out if he cant press himself against my lungs and heart through the thinnest xenonite possible until he can hear every muscle cell in my body moving at least once a day.

by this i mean the problem with straight fiction is often that it doesn't consider itself straight, it simply is. by contrast queer is a choice (the old classic "straight, white, able-bodied, cis, peri, man" is a universal story, whereas anything else is specific to That Demographic).

it's important to read heterosexuality, because it's saying something specific about society. deconstructing universality (again, similar to any other of those above-mentioned so-called "universal" traits) makes heterosexuality and heteronormativity (not the same thing) a thematic choice that interacts with queerness more authentically than if one simply slots man a into man b (as it were).

it's also interesting because a lot of analysis that decouples from heterosexuality on this here webbed site, does so in a way that -- as many have said before and will again -- handily also tends to remove women and people of colour and queer people who aren't gay cis men. it's not really interrogating text, it's merely substituting one form of universality with another without changing the core biases of said text (substituting heteronormativity with homonormativity).

when i read characters and/or themes as heterosexual, it's because those themes have relevance to the text and i want to highlight them (even if said text thinks that they're universal). yes, sometimes a text isn't aware that it's making things queer, but sometimes fans have a tendency to make things gay (not necessarily queer) that aren't doing the text justice.

examples include: an angry straight man isn't necessarily or lbr primarily angry because he's secretly queer, but because straight men are socially raised to make anger a dominant emotion, burying other more healthy expressions and feelings. a storyline about that experience is interesting because he's straight.

a man and a woman being in a relationship isn't necessarily less interesting than two men in a relationship, and in fact the canon version may have way more substance than the one in which he leaves her (and she's angry but then accepts it every time) for a man. a storyline about this relationship is interesting because it may be challenging or modelling or deconstructing or playing with or simply presenting.

a man and a woman who have broken up isn't necessarily more interesting to read from the perspective of him having buried queer feelings that lead to [being a bad partner/being incompatible/outside forces making it the wrong time/etc], but can uncover a lot about heteronormative (AND amatonormative) cultural ideas about what a relationship "should be like" and how one can be more healthy in decoupling (ha) from those norms.

and also, these are interesting because of women. the angry straight man and his inability to emotionally connect with his partner leads them to break up says a lot about her role (and no, the narrative in question may not always be interested in her, but i can be) and how she exists in society and maybe also her flaws (is she someone who always wants to "fix" men? is she also holding onto toxic ideas about what a real man "should be"? does she not believe in better for herself? is she also angry all the time? does she want the relationship to fail? etcetc).

im not immune to "this makes no sense, gay be upon ye (regardless of gender jean harlow and myrna loy in libeled lady pls i believe you can do better)" but sometimes it does actually make sense and it's not sentencing a character to the straight salt mines of disinterest

also also, im always interested in how this interacts with queerness. are there queer characters in the thing? if not, where would they be? are there parts of the story that do read as queerer than intended and how do these clash with heterosexuality and heteronormativity in the text?

Fat Horse No. 2

It’s the year of the horse and I’ve always been a horse girl at heart, so I’m finally taking advantage of the excuse to fill the world with fat little horses! These felted friends are about the size (and shape!) of an apple, and if you happen to have any apples to share I’m sure they’d help you out!