#aprilwitching

the haunting of hill house,

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This is on my TBR in an extremely lowkey way that’s like ‘hmmm maybe I will read this at some future time’. I feel like it’s the kind of thing where you wait until the Impulse Takes you and then you sit down and read it in one sitting so we’ll have to see when the impulse takes me. 

house of leaves,

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I have had a feeling I might enjoy reading this for about ten years? and yet haven’t? what can I say except that a bunch of that time fell during my No Fiction phase, in which I decided that I couldn’t handle the hallucinogenic intensity of reading any fiction except either locked room mysteries or Paul Auster. 

the house on mango street

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the cover for this has the kind of jaunty text I usually find offputting but the wikipedia page makes it sound maybe worth reading, so you know. Are you asking me about it because it’s good or because it’s another book with ‘house’ in the title? You know what I really liked, the first few seasons of House where it was just unremittingly bleak in a way that felt - and was - Unsustainable, just because there was no way to keep prolonging it; it was a tv series about death and being ready to die in a basically meaningless universe. In, like, a really gay way. 

Anyway, I might give this one a go some time

fingersmith

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I spent ages trying to write up why I find Sarah Waters so Extremely satisfying to read but like, I don’t know how to express this. I know that there were periods of my life in particular when her books were Very Important because they made me feel situated Within literary history, and like I wasn’t super untethered and unrooted which was what I felt a lot of the time. 

And I suppose I don’t feel that need so urgently any more? Like I think I’m both more confident about telling queer/gay history and also at the same time of existing in a space that is still comparatively undocumented and unwritten. But maybe also it was being able to read a bunch of Sarah Waters books when I Really Needed Them that helped me to get to this point, you know. 

ender’s game

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Apparently the really long and boring war games in HPMOR that pretty much signalled that it was done being an amusing take on ‘what if someone pointed out that the Harry Potter universe makes no sense’ and had commenced being a really wearisome take on, I guess, the importance of cryonics - anyway apparently those parts are a tribute to Ender’s Game. If there’s one thing I am sure I’m never going to want to read, it’s a book that’s just loads of teenagers’ pretend war manoeuvres. I realise I said earlier that I wanted to avoid making embarassing predictions about my future behaviour and/or preferences. But still, though. 

pregnesia

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A brief google search led me to an article about “26 Reasons PREGNESIA is the Best Book in the History of Pregnant Amnesiac Romance” and who am I to argue with google.

the secret history

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The origin is that lovecraft based his first appearance on Tesla lol

thus spake me, lia aprilwitching, a woman totally known for her perspicacity in analyzing human motivations, personalities, and psyches. totally. 9_9

replied to your

post

:

God I am so tired of people just unilaterally...

To be clear, when I say I hate the split attraction model that’s always in the context of people trying to apply it to people who aren’t asexual and normalize concepts like “heteromantic homosexual” (aka “really bad internalized homophobia”). i think that’s where virtually everyone who says that kind of thing is coming from. It’s venting; not meant to tell asexual people they aren’t allowed romantic feelings

@aprilwitching tbf this post wasn’t necessarily about you (I don’t actually think you’d hold any of those opinions!); I was just Reminded. (if it was about you I would have commented at you, for better or for worse; I kind of assume you’d listen, even if you disagreed.)

And that’s fair - I do appreciate the clarification. (I do think that it’s quite possible that people could have mismatched orientations, but I do get that that can also be Super Internalised Homophobia/Biphobia Time, so I’m not quite sure where I fall on that, other than ‘don’t tell someone that their orientation is inherently internalised homophobia/biphobia’ - again, not I think you’d do that, but that that is a thing that people do and it’s particularly upsetting to me. Partly because people say that a lot about asexual lesbians, and I would like them to stop.)

A bunch of Ace Discourse for a long while over here has actually been that the split attraction model is ~inherently homophobic~ no matter how you slice it, and We Asexuals should just Accept That We Are Straight (by which they mean aroace? somehow that’s straight now?) or that we are gay/bi with Internalised Homophobia and should just Accept That And Stop Pretending - so that’s kind of where I’m reacting from here; the constant pressure that either I’m a flawed lesbian who should get over it and fuck already, or that I’m an aroace pretender who should stop appropriating lesbian culture and stop getting inappropriately attached to girls.

(That’s nowadays, along with the ‘are aces queer’ nonsense; when I was on tumblr back in like 2012 as a baby gay ace, the Discourse at the time was that aces could never get into relationships unless they were prepared to be poly or to fuck their partner anyway, because otherwise it was horribly unfair to their partner and depriving them of a human need and you couldn’t have a relationship without sex anyway and you should just deal with it and fuck people whether you wanted to or not. something something ‘tricking people into relationships’ something something ‘withholding sex’ something something.)

So like, I do agree that most people who aren’t malicious assholes criticise the split attraction model because they think it gets exploited to excuse(?) internalised homophobia, but also there are an unfortunate amount of malicious assholes and I am somewhat sensitive about them right now.