#meanderingstream

i think i explained this before but i cant seem to find it TT but don't worry, this time i will provide pictures

this post does a great job explaining what happened just before and why dan flying home so fast was kinda Crazy.

so obv phil's birthday is always a huge thing where dan gets him a cake with something stupid written on it and 2023 was no exception

when these photos dropped. holy shit it was nuts. first off, the pinof homage shacket. insane. next, the emojis dan uses in his tweet. like, the heart cake emojis were in everyones twitter display names for weeks. the cake is obv funny and incredibly phil, and the coffee mugs in the back of the second photo??? have little heart latte art???????????? fucked up!!!!????? this alone could have fed us for the rest of the year.

so a few days pass, dan is doing promo for the european leg of WAD yadda yadda. unfortunately, the iceland show gets cancelled, and this is significant because dan was really hyping up this show like it was meant to be the final show of the tour. and we also find out that pj, sophie, and phil were meant to meet up with dan in iceland and explore and see the northern lights, pj talked about it in stream (i cba to find the link rn but i will edit this post when i do)

dan then posted this story on instagram:

he was clearly going thru it, there were already issues with the show in nz, he was kinda hemorrhaging money and his management was really screwing him over a little bit. a bunch of ppl on twitter decided to get the hashtag #weloveyoudan trending just as a little like, hey man we see you and we're here for you. my very good friend sar @editingzone made a joke in one of her groupchats that if phil had access to the nuclear launch codes, nobody would be fucking with dan like this. and that ended up starting the hashtag #giveamazingphilnukes which phil tweeted about and posted on his ig story 😭

they didn't directly acknowledge the one for dan, but these two hashtags clearly went together so they both knew and heard their audience's support and were grateful (see dnptwt isn't all bad yall)

the next day, presumably as part of phil's bday week, they go to an apex legends competetive gaming event and post it on their ig story x

we thought aww it's cute that they're posting about their lil date, and keep in mind we were kinda getting crumbs in terms of dnp content at this point, like dan was just doing tour promo obv and phil i don't think had posted a video yet that year? it wasn't full radio silence but you know how phannies get when they don't post for two days lmao so this was a nice surprise

and then. the shoe pic.

and you might be thinking "but mr. yonpote, this is just a silly image of dan and phil pressing their shoes together." and you're right but i can't explain how life-changing this moment was for me. this was peak roomba-feeding at the time. just this little crumb of like, in the uber back home from their fuckin gamer date, took a silly photo of their shoes, probably wasn't even gonna post it on socials but then they just do. keep in mind, this was solo-dan era. this was when a lot of us thought that dan and phil™ was over or at the very least we would only get it sporadically. i genuinely didn't think the gaming channel would ever come back, and the way dan framed it in Why I Quit Youtube, it really seemed like dan was just gonna do his own thing and maybe show up on phil's channel every now and then like he'd been doing throughout 2021-22. so to me, this felt like a catalyst for the rest of 2023. phil kept hinting at the gaming channel and bringing up dan like, way more than he had since the start of the hiatus in 2018. and, ok this is just me speculating, but this felt like the moment dan was like, "ok what do i wanna do with my life right now? i kinda just wanna be with phil." at this point is when they start posting more of them just doing shit together again. there was a silly video on twitter of them just on a seesaw in IOM, they posted a bunch of photos from their trip to japan with bryony, like it felt a little bit more like oh we're seeing real dnp.

Also, a song I recommend is gathering of spirits by Carrie newcomer. I kinda a associate it more with young justice than this story, but I really like it as a song.

“Cathy Mueller seemed . . . bothered, today,” Clark decides to lead with after he’s dropped off all the supplies from the hardware store in the barn and greeted Ma and Pa in the house and been asked “how was town?” Conner’s not on the farm–hopefully not off chasing any girls with boyfriends or pestering the cheerleaders, but Clark’s not going to bet on it after that conversation with Cathy–so it seems like the best time to have the conversation. “She said to tell Conner ‘they all’ said hello.” 

“Oh, that’s thoughtful of her,” Ma says, already frowning in concern. “Did she tell you what the bother was?"

Clark really did not think that explanation was subtle, especially by Midwestern manners. 

“Conner was the bother, Ma,” he says with a sigh. “She brought him up out of nowhere while she was ringing me up, talked about him like he’d kicked her cat, and then basically stormed off without so much as a ‘goodbye’, much less a ‘thanks for your business’.” 

[Give me a pairing and a word/phrase, and I'll write you a drabble]

Leia stares down at the hippos pensively, chin tucked over the railing and feet braced against the bottom bar.

"'Soka?" she asks with the same little crease between her eyebrows that Anakin gets when he's considering something that's definitely stupid.

Ahsoka tries not to frown, glancing over at Luke, who is becoming worryingly preoccupied with the little machine offering commemorative pennies. "Yeah?"

"Did mommy pack my swimsuit?"

Ahsoka, despite the ninety degree heat, feels a wave of cool trepidation flow over her. "No, she didn't."

Leia hops backwards off the railing, sticking her bottom lip out. "Hm. Okay. I'll go swimming anyways."

Ahsoka looks down at the hippos, recalling every horror story she's heard about them breaking people's arms and skulls between their jaws, and pales visibly.

"No swimming."

Leia's face drops. "Please, Aunt 'Soka?"

: Breathe if you think I’m awesome.

Donna

: …

Josh

I read your post about how sodomy was sort of a lesser sin that someone should fast with bread and water for, especially compared to like magic and stuff, and I was wondering if you knew anything about how medieval Muslims viewed it? Like at a similar magnitude, or not a problem or highly frowned upon? I’ve read fics all over the spectrum, so I’m wondering if you have any actual historical/research insight you could bring?

Thanks! 💜

Thanks so much!

I will say that I work on gender, social, and queer history in medieval Europe, so by nature I know more about medieval Christian views on sodomy, but I do know something about medieval Islamic views as well. I answered this ask, which has a fairly decent list of scholarly work on queer premodern (and some modern) Muslims. (It also has a list on Muslims in medieval Europe more generally.)

I will also reinforce that obviously the views of sodomy as a sin in medieval Europe changed over time, but at the time period that I most often get asked about in regard to TOG (i.e. the First Crusade/eleventh century) it was indeed a fairly venial sin that wasn’t singled out above others. This changed as the twelfth century went on, and it became more harshly stigmatized, at least in ecclesiastical and clerical opinions, but this doesn’t necessarily coincide with a broader social stigma. (See Peter the Chanter complaining bitterly about how much queer stuff is happening in Paris at the end of the twelth century; the continued valorization of homoromantic bonds, which got even MORE valorized as chivalry developed; etc). There was never a time where medieval people we would identify as LGBT were accepted uncritically at all levels of society, but there sure as hell aren’t any times now either (and modern homophobia is often a lot more stringent, explicit, and exclusionary than any medieval variants thereto).

Anyway, about Muslims. Khaled al-Rouahyeb has written a very interesting-looking book (which I note I have not personally read yet, but I want to) entitled Before Homosexuality in the Arab-Islamic World, 1500-1800, which argues essentially that the category of “homosexuality,” i.e. specifically male/male sexual activity and identity/orientation, didn’t really exist in premodern Islamic sexual polemics and ethics, at least as we would define it. Instead, the narrative centered on whether the sexual partner was active (penetrating) or passive (penetrated), and like other cultural taboos around mlm sex, being the active/top partner in penetrative sex (since you were the phallic/manly partner) was generally okay, but being the penetrated person coded you as female and therefore inferior and suspect in your manhood. (Obviously, in mlm anal sex, someone has to be penetrated, so someone always ends up as the morally suspect half in that scenario.) This fits with medieval Islamic attitudes toward sex more broadly. The ghazals, or Arabic love poems, often contain intensely homoerotic images and themes as well as male/female ones. Probably the most notable in this regard was Abu Nuwas, an eighth/ninth-century Persian poet who has occasionally been viewed as a little TOO risque for general consumption. This doesn’t mean, again, that queer activity was a-okay across the board, but it existed in a complex and culturally and literarily negotiated sphere and there were certainly areas where it was practiced rather openly, just as it was in the medieval Western world. As I talked about in the long ask I answered, the twin cultural correlation of “Saracens” and “sodomites” (just like “Muslims” and “gays” in right-wing paranoia today) in medieval Europe also reflected a belief that the Islamic world was more accepting of non-heterosexual behavior, and that this was therefore, in the Catholic Christian institutional view, a Bad Thing. I take care to specify that since as we’ve seen, plenty of medieval Europeans themselves didn’t give a rat’s ass what the church said and carried on being queer anyway.

Also, Sultan Mehmed II, the conqueror of Constantinople in 1453, was pretty openly bisexual; he slept with both men and women, and one of his lovers was allegedly Radu the Fair, the brother of Vlad Dracula. In other words, at least for a late medieval Ottoman sultan, he could do whatever he liked in the bedchamber, with whoever, and judgments on the gender of his partners didn’t really enter into it. This gave rise to a certain brand of hysteria in Western Europe. The propaganda surrounding the fall of Constantinople contained an element of painting Mehmed as even more of a threat because of his liberate sexuality. In short, to put it bluntly, it was “the scary Muslim sultan will rape your children, including the boys,” which is pretty recognizable from its almost exact use in right-wing fearmongering about the evil pederastic gays today. Mehmed’s identity as the Muslim conqueror of the most important Christian city in the world, and someone who was known for being flexible in his sexual preferences, made it very easy to construct him as a hysterical boogeyman.

Obviously, most Arab/Islamic countries today have strict legal and official policies on homosexuality, but that doesn’t mean gay Muslims don’t exist (quite the contrary) or that these attitudes are universally accepted just because they happen to be the law. (Just like Americans disagree, often vehemently, with their government’s official policy.) Nor does it reflect anything about the complexity of homosexuality or mlm acts in the premodern Islamic world. (Anyone who calls medieval Islam “barbaric” has absolutely NO fucking clue what they’re talking about, take it from me.) So basically, Joe, as a queer/gay Muslim, experienced the same broad spectrum of attitudes, texts, and views on his preferences that Nicky would and did as a western European, and there was plenty of room for tolerance, tacit acceptance, literary celebration, or clerical condemnation of such, depending on when and where we’re talking about, and this varied by culture, society, and geography.

that’s hilarious omg thank you!!

--

To be fair, the young woman working at the ice cream place was having a particularly boring day. Who would have blamed her for eavesdropping a little on her clients’ conversations? Plus, it wasn’t like she could have expected to serve ice cream for half of a group of immortal warriors.

“Are we buying something for Andy?” Nicky asked, studying the flavors.

“Yes, maybe something for her and Quynh,” Joe nodded, but then added, “Nothing for Sebastien le Traitor though.”

Nile couldn’t help but chuckle. However, she had her own opinions, “Oh I’m not bringing anything to Andy. She doesn’t deserve it! She almost got killed last week, twice!”

The employee of the place was mindlessly listening to a group of friends bantering, possibly talking about a grumpy house cat that put itself in danger too often by going outside.

“Go easy on her, Nile. She’s not used to being mortal,” Nicky explained, as if it was a normal sentence, and then turned toward Joe with a smile, “Should we share something?”

“Of course,” Joe placed a quick kiss on his husband’s cheek and turned to Nile and shrugged, “Besides, we don’t mind dying for her once or twice on a mission, you know?”

The girl on the other side of the counter was doing her very best at keeping a straight face and focusing on the ice cream, just focus on the ice cream. But then, of course, Nille added, “Well, yeah, I’ve lost count of how many bullets I’ve taken for Andy. But then she goes all ‘Oh no, my wife had to drown millions of times so I won’t let her die ever again!’ and she goes and risks her life like an idiot.”

“She’s scared Quynh’s time might come without a warning. Though we know it’s not about how many times you die,” Nicky said thoughtfully, also wondering why the lady working behind the counter sometimes stopped moving and frowned at the ice cream.

“It’s not about the way we die either,” Joe scratched his beard, “Between all of us we’ve survived everything from knives and swords, bullets and explosions, drowning and fire, poison and even the ocessional random heart attacks.” He shrugged, and accepted his ice cream order from the trembling hands of the girl that was desperately avoiding his eyes.

“Yeah,” Nile sighed, “I wish there was a way to know more about why we are like this.”

“Give it a few years, Nile,” Nicky smiled, passing the youngest member of the team her order, “Maybe in a few hundred years you’ll make peace with the uncertainty of it all.”

I’m 23 and I have no idea what you’re talking about. I checked the notes half expecting this to be a shot post like the time someone made up fake best tumblr controversies of the decade

there are different versions but this one is my favorite