Things and Stuff!

It has been literal years but every time I see Martin’s tweets posted somewhere and his word is shared as truth while her post is not shared it sort of reiterates the fact that we trust men to speak about feminism more than we believe women who experience it. 

Adding screenshots of her post. His whole post is there without needing a link. Hers should be, too.

Hyacinth told her, when asked, that she had slept for a long time.  That she had been found by their scouts, collapsed before a barricaded door that had long been broken into when they found her. She had been damaged, her armour scarred, by orc weapons from the look and had somehow lost consciousness in this attack. The ones inside, that the war forged must have fallen protecting, were small and only bones now, littered with rags.    The scout party, a group of Halfling Arvoreen keepers had been checking out the abandoned Dwarven hold that loomed over their lands, after decades of it standing empty.

They had expected to find orcs, taking refuge in the great mountain, perhaps goblins, maybe a few baubles or tapestries to carry home. The trinkets they would find would not be their objective however. Keeping their lands safe, keeping them clear of danger and their people protected was worth more than any gold or jewel. Hyacinth smiled at the war forged now in their keeping, dragged from the keep, once inactive, now awake and seemingly bewildered at the Halfling children climbing its massive copper body like ants over an apple.

It seems they found a little of both.

It had taken little time and more than a little research into getting the war forged up and going, something Hyacinth, as the villages resident scholar was quite willing to do, for such a puzzle and such a reward.  To find the being sentient and comprehensible, despite its preference for few words, upon waking was more than hyacinth could dream of, though, informing the sentinel of the fate of its people, the ones it had promised to protect had been surprisingly difficult. Hyacinth had read of some war forged who had something of a soul, an awareness beyond battle and some who became attached to the ones they were made to protect but she did not expect the tears, almost ghostlike trails of pale green fire to pour down the helmet of the being. she didn’t expect that at all. and there was a time where the war forged may as well have been an ancient set of armour, stood lifeless and empty in the corner of her workshop, so deep in its grief it was.

But the children helped.

far right region: harem anime series

middle region: potential for a story which values women as equals

character sheet commission of Gin the Tabaxi druid for @baergin!

so, in honor of pride month: please remember that ‘queer’ has been a fully reclaimed, non-slur identity for decades now, and queer studies is a legitimate academic term, and it’s only been in the last decade that TERFs have pushed to reclassify it as a ‘slur’ starting in online spaces. 

because ‘queer’ is such a broad and flexible term, it’s much harder for bigoted, trans-exclusive, bi-phobic, a-phobic people to interrogate the queer community and try to divide it into who deserves respect and who deserves to be expelled. the queer community is extremely diverse, extremely accepting, and it’s entirely opt-in. no one can say you’re not really queer, because if you say you’re queer, you are. 

this is extremely frustrating to terfs, who want a very narrow and rigidly policed LGB community (minus the T, A, and Q+, of course), so they have been working to reclassify queer as a slur. they target young isolated girls online, and take advantage of their earnest desire to be helpful and unproblematic, and they get them to repeat ‘queer is a slur’, and it’s incredibly sad and frustrating for us queers to deal with.

lesbian, gay, and queer are all slurs. they’ve all been used to insult us. and they’re all reclaimed. people that don’t want to be called queer don’t have to be, but tagging posts with q*slur is an insult to everyone who identifies as queer. breaking into posts where queer people call themselves and each other queer and refer to the queer community of queers who call themselves that to let us know that ‘queer is a slur’ is itself bigoted, TERF-aligned behavior. 

if someone asks me not to call them queer, absolutely 100% i will not do so. i would never call someone queer before i knew that was their preferred identity. that would be disrespectful. 

but if someone tells me not to call myself queer where they can hear it, because they’re uncomfortable with the word i use to identify myself, then i will tell them to get the fuck out of earshot. 

demanding other people change who they are and how they present and what words they use to describe themselves, just because you don’t like what you’re looking at or hearing, is the very height of disrespect. 

queer people don’t need to exist in a perpetual state of apology for being something that makes people uncomfortable. if that’s the only way to be polite, then fuck polite. if that’s the only way to be acceptable, then fuck acceptable. why is it on us to be accommodating of everyone else’s desire for us to shut up and play nice? the world is full of personal trauma and a hell of a lot of queer people’s personal trauma is in being told, over and over and over, to stop being queer. 

me in 2010: i dunno that seems like a caricature, surely that would never happen

My first D&D character redraw🐉

illustration commission of The Geologist for Auri! 💎