With these eyes of gold

The stagehands in their mismatched black clothes roll the squeaky library set onstage while the piano vamps. A book falls off a shelf; the lanky Beast picks it up and presents it to Belle with a gruff and panicked flourish. She smiles because he loves her and it doesn’t have to be perfect; he just has to try.

High schoolers giving their all to heathers or ride the cyclone. The backstage TikToks and videos where everyone is in character and being silly.

A fifty year old hamlet crying over his thirty year old dad after ‘remember me- I have sworn’t’. After some time, Horatio, an eager lad of sixteen, pulls him from those treacherous cliffs and mouthes the cherished lines to his sweet prince where he thinks I can’t see. Word perfect for the rest of the night. I still don’t know if this was stage business or a missed cue but it was beautiful.

guys busting out of fishnets and glitter makeup and having a ball bc they’ve got their whole family seated front row throwing toast at them for rocky horror.

Every little shop of horrors with big lunged urchins who can’t blend and a gigantic plant puppet that knocks the rest of the set over

I’m in the splash zone for swan lake. The music is tinned and it’s raining. This will never happen for me again

An ebullient four year old giving extra pizzazz and inner life to the role of ‘tree’ in the wizard of Oz

Hermia and Helena are making out a lot more than Shakespeare thought they ought in the fifteenth dream you’ve seen this midsommar. And yep! It’s set in a cult, we’re all outside and I’ve been given a pie to eat.

When the stage manager turns the house lights back on, Cinderella’s rags will be transformed.

I remember seeing my brother in a pretty low rent Our Town (cast bc he was tall) and stunned at how he was holding back tears by the end. He didn’t want to say goodbye yet and it was closing night.

You don’t often get that connection at the pro level. You don’t get to see people you love like that all the time.

It doesn’t matter who corpses or who blanks or who misses their cue

you have to go and be open to whatever happens.

"This is Ankh-Morpork, you know. We've got extra pronouns here."

"Female? He told you he was female?" "She," Angua corrected. "This is Ankh-Morpork, you know. We've got extra pronouns here." She could smell his bewilderment... "Well, I would have though she'd have the decency to keep it to herself," Carrot said finally. "I don't think it's very clever, you know, to go around drawing attention to the fact." "Carrot, I think you might have something wrong with your head," said Angua. "What?" "I think you might have it stuck up your bum."

Sir Terry Pratchett - "Feet of Clay"

This is CARROT being the asshole. Carrot who has, throughout all the prior books, been depicted as basically the best of all possible people. He is noble, brave, considerate, kind. He is the good guy in the entire City...

... and yet, he grew up dwarf, and has picked up their more conservative views on gender identity.

Discworld dwarves start out in the books as basically a people without visible gender differences (thanks to the woman growing beards just like the men) and using "he/him" pronouns as their default. Anything else is seen as breaking the most basic of social conventions. (Dwarf dating is described early on as being two dwarves who like each other spending an inordinately long time trying to find out, as tactfully as possible, what gender the other dwarf is)

Carrot does immediately adopt the "she" pronoun for Cheery, which is but wishes she didn't make such a fuss about it. He's prepared to tolerate her choices, but he doesn't APPROVE of them, and thinks that that is enough.

Carrot, because he IS Carrot, does learn to open his mind on this subject, perhaps his final frontier of bias, but I do love that it's addressed as something he has to work on, and succeed.

1) I don't have the book to hand, but when Cheery comes out she changes her name to Cheri, because "sometimes, when you shout who you are to the whole world, you need to do it quietly." It's such a beautiful expression of coming out being a process, and one that needn't be undertaken all at once.

me: yeah i know, they’re all primary colors, it’s perfect

When you go for an MLS (Master’s of Library Science, which is a thing, and which is usually required for “professional-level” library work [which is also a weird and contentious concept that I won’t go into here]), one of the things you study is the organization of information. This deals with how to determine what a book or other material is “about"—a concept we tongue-in-cheek call “aboutness"—and how to convey that to a potential user of the item and make it easy for them to find. Things like keywords and subject headings, do I put this book about how often wild birds attack aerial drones in with books about birds or with books about technology, if its a fictional novel do I put fantasy in it’s own section or mix it in with all of the other fiction, so on and so on.

OP is organizing books by how they would look for them. OP’s partner is thinking in terms of aboutness. This is a system that works for OP because it’s their personal library: they know basically what books they own and they only own books that are relevant to them, and if they know what the book looks like, that can be a quick way to find it.

In a library that assumes the public (or people who do not own that particular collection of books) are using the collection, that doesn’t work. Books are often re-issued in multiple covers, or re-bound in new covers when they get worn out, and if the user doesn’t know what the book looks like or is expecting a different cover, they’re lost. That’s why non-personal libraries used standardized cataloging systems like the Dewey Decimal System or Library of Congress System to organize a book by what it’s “about”, and then put books about the same or similar topics together, marked with labels and signage so a person unfamiliar with the book or collection can find their way to it.

Basically, OP’s system works for their own personal library, because it’s best suited to how the primary user—OP themselves—looks for books. OP’s librarian partner is coming from a background of thinking in terms of a public-facing collection, where aboutness is the key criteria and communicating it to a user unfamiliar with the collection is the priority.

The absolutely pervasive mentality that unwanted criticism or critique shouldn't be given and should be ignored is why fans of color don't stay in fan spaces.

And I am not going to mince words here:

A lot of you are racist. A lot of your fan works are racist.

That might have been difficult to hear. And if it was, you should probably reflect on why that was.

"Fandom etiquette" has created a space where fans of color either bite our tongues and eventually leave or say something, get dogged on, and then eventually leave.

If I say "I am uncomfortable with fandom's tendency to write trans men as feminine and submissive" I do not mean "I think every person who writes feminine submissive trans men should be chased with pitchforks". I don't even mean "any cis-person who writes feminine or submissive trans men should be chased with pitchforks". I mean "I would like writers to seriously think about why this is so common, why they write that, and if it fairly and genuinely engages with what it means to be a trans man, or if they just think it's hot when submissive people have vaginas and didn't want to write omegaverse of m/f".

Similarly, when people say "fandom is systemically less interested in black characters, less willing to give flat black characters rich fanon than flat white characters, and less interested in black characters in ships", the response is not to explain why you, personally, just happen to like popular white guy in that fanon. Your job is to look at yourself and ask if you tend to "just happen to be more interested" in the popular white guy across fandoms, be honest, and start unpacking that. Sometimes it's easier to love the flat character who's already getting 10,000 fics with headcanons and art and meta.

If somebody says "I wish there were more gluten free options at the potluck. I hate always showing up and not finding anything I can eat*", they are not asking you to throw your cake in the trash and weep. They do not want to hear your long speech about how actually this is your grandmother's recipe, and you've tried it with rice flour actually, but it just didn't work. You think about what you can do, and you listen to how they feel.