I tag pretty obsessively. (Usually plural, i.e., "cats" instead of "cat.")
Blog runs on a queue from 4pm-midnight CST/CDT everyday, so just because I post doesn't mean I'm here. This is also why I just reblogged your post from a month ago.
My drafts bin has 15k+ posts in it, and sometimes I go through it. This is why I just reblogged your post from 5 years ago.
I'm an adult who sometimes posts adult content. This is your warning.
Leftist. Anti-censorship. Anti-SWERF and anti-TERF. Anti-racist. I don't really believe in DNIs, but this blog is not a friendly place bigots.
Fandom list + art tags under the cut.
Fandoms you'll see here frequently (March 2025 edition):
Star Trek (TOS, DS9, TNG, VOY, SNW, LD)
The Simpsons (especially Sideshow Bob)
Gravity Falls (lots of Stan Pines)
Beetlejuice
Anything Alfred Molina-related, but especially Doc Ock & Chocolate
HBO's The Penguin
Fandoms you'll see here occasionally:
Pokemon
Deadwood (please watch it so it can finally have the Tumblr moment it deserves)
Various video games (Disco Elysium, Mouthwashing, SDV, Cult of the Lamb, Harvest Moon FoMT & AWL/DS)
Hannibal
Twin Peaks
The X-Files
Golden Girls
Fullmetal Alchemist
Horror books and films (esp. Ari Aster, Jordan Peele, Chuck Tingle, Grady Hendrix)
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
â Live Streamingâ Interactive Chatâ Private Showsâ HD Qualityâ Free Actions
Free to watch ⢠No registration required ⢠HD streaming
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
â Live Streamingâ Interactive Chatâ Private Showsâ HD Qualityâ Free Actions
Free to watch ⢠No registration required ⢠HD streaming
Alan Turing basically won WWII for the allies, and they still chemically castrated him for being gay. Respectability politics don't fucking work. Stop throwing other queer people under the bus just because you think maybe then the allocishets will lighten up off the gas long enough for you to escape. We are all tarmac.
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
â Live Streamingâ Interactive Chatâ Private Showsâ HD Qualityâ Free Actions
Free to watch ⢠No registration required ⢠HD streaming
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
â Live Streamingâ Interactive Chatâ Private Showsâ HD Qualityâ Free Actions
Free to watch ⢠No registration required ⢠HD streaming
i'm going to say something insane. i think the overall pronounced fandom cultural slide away from complex plotty violent work and towards kidfic and coffee shops AUs and cozy domestic romcoms is a symptom of fascism.
Reblogging this for the term "neopastoralism", because I think that's fantastic.
Coffee shop AUs are, like... fine. They're not my thing, but they're hardly going to end the world. We don't need to have a moral panic about people enjoying coffee shop AUs. I'm also not about to come for anyone seeking escapism in the current hellscape.
However, I do think it's interesting to examine the tendency within these AUs to project a sort of idyll onto the coffee shop: here is a whimsical place where you can spend time with your friends and potentially meet your true love; here is a world where the greatest dilemma you may face is choosing the right coffee syrup for a new beverage or sneaking your number onto that to-go cup without being obvious.
The fantasy of the coffee shop AU is divorced almost entirely from the reality of an actual coffee shop. There are no abusive, creepy customers or bosses; there is no mention of the barista's wages; we don't see the dishwasher sweating at their station, the cashiers' aching feet; the person whose job it is to clean the (customer-only?) toilets. These topics are Political and Depressing and Must Be Avoided, because Political and Depressing things are antithetical to this kind of escapism.
The coffee shop AU exists, not in a world without capitalism (because this is a setting where commerce is actively happening) but in a world where capitalism has no teeth: a world where capitalism somehow works. In order to be convinced and soothed by this fantasy, you must suspend your disbelief and avert your eyes. You must filter the coffee shop through a neopastoralist lens.
I've made this observation before, but there's a distinct and strong correlation between "wanting simplistic, saccharine, and morally binary media" and "authoritarianism". It's not a 1 to 1, which is where a lot of people seem to misunderstand things; it's not "If you like fluff, you're a jackbooted authoritarian." Very much not. This is a pattern that grows up out of thousands--hundreds of thousands--of individual interactions, out of culture, out of a shift of perspectives on what is seen as the norm and what is seen as outrageous.
Individual people liking cutesy fluff? Not a problem. Thousands of people insisting that fluff is the only acceptable option and if you dare make them think and consider, you're the problem?
That's a Problem.
It's the shifting of norms in culture, and fandom is not an isolated bubble--it's a representative of larger trends. And the trend right now in our larger culture, especially in America, is authoritarianism. Authoritarianism that has gone past "creeping" and is now "prancing", "dancing", "galloping", or dare I say goosestepping. Of course that's going to have an impact on the cultural scenes, including fandom!
And there's a correlation in societies that want saccharine fluff and their own authoritarianism. I can point to numerous examples--Victorian England with the censored stories for children. The USSR with an entire kitschy style of stories and art. The USA before the rise of Trump with Thomas Kinkaid's art. And that's just scratching the surface.
The main point in bringing this up is to be aware of the trend, not to take it as a personal attack for enjoying fluffy stories.
And I think the way to keep this from pendulum-swinging into âfluffy stories badâ (because we know this does happen with any observation of problematic trendsâsee: feminist critiques of objectification turning into puritanical sex-negativity, critiques of appropriation turning into enforcing cultural âpurityâ, etc) is to shift the focus from the presence of this kind of fiction to the proportional absence of the alternative.
Obviously, the presence is easier to spotâyou can actually see something that is present, but you canât directly see something thatâs absentâso it makes sense that this is the first piece of evidence in building this critique, but the critical thing that makes this an issue is the absence of engagement with challenging works, not actually the engagement with unchallenging ones.
Positive emotions and things that make us feel safe and cared for are as important a part of the human experience as for the negative. And safety-seeking can be as much a response to the rise of fascism to get away from it as an indication of people falling into it. We just canât only have the safe, unchallenging stuff. Because it is that censorship and cutting out of fundamental parts of human experience that feeds into the social conservatism & puritanism of authoritarianism.
And I think the way to keep this from pendulum-swinging into âfluffy stories badâ (because we know this does happen with any observation of problematic trendsâsee: feminist critiques of objectification turning into puritanical sex-negativity, critiques of appropriation turning into enforcing cultural âpurityâ, etc) is to shift the focus from the presence of this kind of fiction to the proportional absence of the alternative.
This whole thread is incredible and you're encouraged to read it all and share it. But if you read nothing else after the opening, let it be the above.
