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Achilles and odysseus taking care of their respective children x)

the header is tablet-woven linen, with the linen weft for the band used as the warp for the rest of the piece on a warp-weighted loom, which you can see in the photos below (there is also a previous post with more process photos here). the reverse is a negative mirror image of the front, since I wove this as double-weave pickup rather than tapestry:

additional details below the cut:

Both these movies are such love letters to the characters, the best they've ever been adapted onto screen in live action with such humanity.

Meanwhile you see Mike being soft with Will most of the time, looking more like a kicked puppy during these arguments and taking full accountability for them later on:

They really do give this:

A lot of analyses propose that the overwhelming predominance of male/male ships over female/female and female/male ships in fandom reflects an unhealthy fetishisation of male homosexuality and a deep-seated self-hatred on the part of women in fandom. While it’s true that many fandoms certainly have issues gender-wise, that sort of analysis willfully overlooks a rather more obvious culprit.

Suppose, for the sake of argument, that we have a hypothetical media franchise with twelve recurring speaking roles, nine of which are male and three of which are female.

(Note that this is actually a bit better than average representaton-wise - female representation in popular media franchises is typicaly well below the 25% contemplated here.)

Assuming that any character can be shipped with any other without regard for age, gender, social position or prior relationship - and for simplicity excluding cloning, time travel and other “selfcest”-enabling scenarios - this yields the following (non-polyamorous) possibilities:

Possible F/F ships: 3 Possible F/M ships: 27 Possible M/M ships: 36

TOTAL POSSIBLE SHIPS: 66

Thus, assuming - again, for the sake of simplicity - that every possible ship is about equally likely to appeal to any given fan, we’d reasonably expect about (36/66) = 55% of all shipping-related media to feature M/M pairings. No particular prejudice in favour of male characters and/or against female characters is necessary for us to get there.

This is certainly one large factor in the amount of M/M slash out there, and the first reason that occurred to me when I first got into fandom (I don’t think it’s the sole reason, but I think it’s a bigger one than some people in the Why So Much Slash debate give our credit for). And nice point about adding female OCs.

When it’s a male-female buddy show, all of the failed relationships are usually, canonically, because the leads belong together. (Look at early Bones: she dates that guy who is his old friend and clearly a stand-in for him. They break up because *coughcoughhandwave*. That stuff happens constantly.) Male-male buddy shows write the central relationship the exact same way except that they expect us to read it as platonic.

Long before it becomes canon, the potential ship of Mulder/Scully or Booth/Bones or whatever lead male/female couple consumes the fandom. It’s not about the genders involved. Rizzoli/Isles was like this too.

If canon tells us that no other relationship has ever measured up to this one, why should we keep them apart? Don’t like slash of your shows, prissy writers? Then stop writing all of your leads locked in epic One True Love romance novel relationships with their same-sex coworkers. Give them warm, funny, interesting love interests, not cardboard cutouts…

As in, people gravitate to the characters given the most depth, complexity, and satisfying interactions for their shipping needs, because those characters are most human, and we want the realest characters to play with.

In a lot of media, the most depth gets handed to male characters.

And, oftentimes, even when the screentime and depth and interactions are granted equally well to female characters, there can be a level of, for lack of a better word, dis-authenticity to those female characters: they are pared down, washed out, or otherwise made slightly less themselves than they could be, in the interest of making them decorative, or likeable, or “good,” or keeping them from upstaging or emasculating their male companions, or just that the writer whose job it is to write them doesn’t know how to write women the way they write men.

And you get the characterization equivalent of that comparison chart where so many animated female characters have the same facial features because the animators and designers are so worried about not letting them be ugly.

When you have a group that’s allowed to be themselves, warts and all, and another group that has to be decorative at all costs, the impression given on some level is that the decorative quality is making up for a shortcoming. That they wouldn’t be enough in their own right.

And sometimes that cost is authenticity. The interesting, striking, awe-inspiring, bold and glorious unapologetic selfhood that draws the viewer most particularly to those characters who are unapologetic in their particular existence, standing clear of the generic and bland and unchallenging “safe” appearances.

It is authenticity, not beauty, which powers subjectification. The love for a character, not because they are perfect, but because they are them.

They can be pretty, sure. They can be sweet. But being pretty and sweet is not a replacement, and too many female characters have been written by writers who think it is, while the interest—in appearance, in personality, in interactions, in plot development—goes to the men.

You have to do so much of the work yourself, because the canon left them unfinished, with huge gaps or unexplored contradictions that you have to somehow resolve. Every female character you decide to integrate into your fanwork in some major role constitutes an undertaking in her own right as you patch together an understanding of her sufficient to model a consistent set of reactions and priorities &c.

The dudes just get handed to you. Even the ones whose canon is a mess have properly developed character cores.

Can I say something?

I think that, objectively speaking, wlw representation is much better than mlm (as a bisexual woman)

I've seen posts online of both sides complaining each side has the worst and other has it better, but really, gay and bi men have legit reasons to be resentful

When that post of yours has you probably agreeing with that:

>>> I've noticed that too with MLM media; it's not so much that entertainment companies make more shows about gay men because they hate lesbians. Instead, gay men are only allowed to be main characters in shows that are specifically marketed as LGBTQ+. That way, homophobes can see what's being advertised and easily avoid it. 

>>> Meanwhile, WLW representation is more prevalent in shows for general audiences because they're typically considered the "safer" and less risky option when it comes to LGBTQ+ representation. The same applies to children's media; it's why there's so much more WLW representation in animation than any MLM

If you say yourself that there's more wlw rep mainstream games, when you agree there's not a lot of meaningful mlm rep in children's cartoons and that show for general audiences tend to have wlw rep over mlm. While mlm rep tends to be relegated to media that's marketed as "lgbt" from the start or romance targeted towards women

Don't you agree that objectively speaking wlw representation is better than mlm rep?

I've even seen a man response to a comment from a video "Why do women love gay media?"

@VideosOfRandomContext As a gay person I'm so bored of seeing gay representation from men perspectives tho Where the lesbians attttt??? Genuinely I don't see a ton of lesbian shows/movies anymore it's always gay men/

@Blue_Peppermint-m The thing is that as a gay guy myself, lesbians and bi women have been getting way and I mean WAY WAY WAY TOO MUCH representation in non romance media, video games, animated tv shows etc etc, especially western high profile tv shows and movies to the point it's starting to get annoying. Like what do us gay men get? Representation in low quality romcoms/romance shows? Yeah sure alright i guess....... way too much gay male representation" i suppose.....

And in a comment in reddit

u/MinatoSuizenji

Not OP, but you can easily find other examples like The last of Us or Pluribus.

Gay men can only be protagonists of "gay" franchises, where the intent is to deliver a gay product and the sponsors, audience, etc know they are getting into something gay. There is no such limitation with female protagonist, you can have your AAA videogame or next big hit TV show have a lesbian protagonist.

Heated Rivalry is a gay love story for people who want to see gay love and advertises as a gay TV show.

Pluribus is... a bunch of things that happen to feature a lesbian as the main character.

And I think both are correct in their observations, I wish there was more action adventure media where the male main character could have a compelling romantic storyline with another guy

Meanwhile I've seem a lesbian woman complaining that a fan ship is more popular than the canon saphic ship(I'm talking about JayVik vs CaitVi), and I was like "Really, dude?"

I think they're centering themselves in something that shouldn't be about them, because Arcane has a straight sex scene and a lesbian sex scene, straight couples and a main front and center lesbian couple, the people that should be complaining about this is gay men

Yet some women talk as If most popular ships in AO3 being MLM is somehow opression

Do I think that wlw rep is better than mlm rep? I can’t answer that objectively. There’s no one definition of “better.” People want different things from representation.

Maybe wlw rep is easier to market, but ironically it’s due to misogyny. Show execs are less uncomfortable with wlw because they’re less of a threat to the heteropatriarchy; it’s easier to dismiss two womens’ romance when women are socially conditioned to be platonically affectionate. Mlm are villainized and mocked due to them not upholding the heteropatriarchy.

As for complaints about mlm ships overshadowing wlw ones: that’s a very real phenomenon, because media still has a woman deficiency problem. There are fewer female characters, fewer possible ships with women, and fewer opportunities for wlw ships. Plus, it can get tiring for people to bring up yaoi in a wlw-centric space.

See here: https://thealexchen.tumblr.com/post/806295060101595136/totallysilvergirl-headspace-hotel

Re: part 2- it’s not wrong to want a wlw version of Heartstopper (a sweet fluffy YA romance) and Heated Rivalry (a show that celebrates queer joy and sexuality), mostly because we haven’t seen a wlw show become such a cultural phenomenon yet. Maybe you could view it as wlw getting to exist in genre shows that aren’t only romance, but it’s frustrating to see a romance-centric wlw show not achieve those same heights yet because straight women aren’t gonna show up for a wlw romance the same way they will for a mlm romance. Then you look at something like Pricefield, and the bias is once again due to… misogyny in the games industry. Statistically, Yuri is less popular than yaoi. I have watched Fear Street! It was excellent and I recommend it, but these wlw shows get cancelled because of executive decisions and possibly lower viewership. You can’t blame wlw audiences for not watching something they didn’t know existed due to poor marketing or other factors. Wlw shows have to compete with mlm shows that already get a boost from mostly female romance genre fans. So it’s all up to wlw to uphold their own media representation? Come on, that’s not fair. Even if every sapphic woman in the world watched one specific wlw show, the sheer numbers could not compete with mainstream series. The biases and numbers are real.

Re: part 3- I agree that Byler was treated horribly and it is queerbait. I think the behind the scenes stuff was also pretty sus. But it’s not like Vickie and Robin got much either- they had an ambiguous offscreen breakup with no closure. Also, they’re side characters. It’s easier for audiences to ignore a queer subplot when they’re not onscreen as much as Mike or Will. Wlw being more “palatable” isn’t actually a net positive; it all traces back to misogyny and women being objectified and sexualized.

A lot of analyses propose that the overwhelming predominance of male/male ships over female/female and female/male ships in fandom reflects an unhealthy fetishisation of male homosexuality and a deep-seated self-hatred on the part of women in fandom. While it’s true that many fandoms certainly have issues gender-wise, that sort of analysis willfully overlooks a rather more obvious culprit.

Suppose, for the sake of argument, that we have a hypothetical media franchise with twelve recurring speaking roles, nine of which are male and three of which are female.

(Note that this is actually a bit better than average representaton-wise - female representation in popular media franchises is typicaly well below the 25% contemplated here.)

Assuming that any character can be shipped with any other without regard for age, gender, social position or prior relationship - and for simplicity excluding cloning, time travel and other “selfcest”-enabling scenarios - this yields the following (non-polyamorous) possibilities:

Possible F/F ships: 3 Possible F/M ships: 27 Possible M/M ships: 36

TOTAL POSSIBLE SHIPS: 66

Thus, assuming - again, for the sake of simplicity - that every possible ship is about equally likely to appeal to any given fan, we’d reasonably expect about (36/66) = 55% of all shipping-related media to feature M/M pairings. No particular prejudice in favour of male characters and/or against female characters is necessary for us to get there.

This is certainly one large factor in the amount of M/M slash out there, and the first reason that occurred to me when I first got into fandom (I don’t think it’s the sole reason, but I think it’s a bigger one than some people in the Why So Much Slash debate give our credit for). And nice point about adding female OCs.

When it’s a male-female buddy show, all of the failed relationships are usually, canonically, because the leads belong together. (Look at early Bones: she dates that guy who is his old friend and clearly a stand-in for him. They break up because *coughcoughhandwave*. That stuff happens constantly.) Male-male buddy shows write the central relationship the exact same way except that they expect us to read it as platonic.

Long before it becomes canon, the potential ship of Mulder/Scully or Booth/Bones or whatever lead male/female couple consumes the fandom. It’s not about the genders involved. Rizzoli/Isles was like this too.

If canon tells us that no other relationship has ever measured up to this one, why should we keep them apart? Don’t like slash of your shows, prissy writers? Then stop writing all of your leads locked in epic One True Love romance novel relationships with their same-sex coworkers. Give them warm, funny, interesting love interests, not cardboard cutouts…

As in, people gravitate to the characters given the most depth, complexity, and satisfying interactions for their shipping needs, because those characters are most human, and we want the realest characters to play with.

In a lot of media, the most depth gets handed to male characters.

And, oftentimes, even when the screentime and depth and interactions are granted equally well to female characters, there can be a level of, for lack of a better word, dis-authenticity to those female characters: they are pared down, washed out, or otherwise made slightly less themselves than they could be, in the interest of making them decorative, or likeable, or “good,” or keeping them from upstaging or emasculating their male companions, or just that the writer whose job it is to write them doesn’t know how to write women the way they write men.

And you get the characterization equivalent of that comparison chart where so many animated female characters have the same facial features because the animators and designers are so worried about not letting them be ugly.

When you have a group that’s allowed to be themselves, warts and all, and another group that has to be decorative at all costs, the impression given on some level is that the decorative quality is making up for a shortcoming. That they wouldn’t be enough in their own right.

And sometimes that cost is authenticity. The interesting, striking, awe-inspiring, bold and glorious unapologetic selfhood that draws the viewer most particularly to those characters who are unapologetic in their particular existence, standing clear of the generic and bland and unchallenging “safe” appearances.

It is authenticity, not beauty, which powers subjectification. The love for a character, not because they are perfect, but because they are them.

They can be pretty, sure. They can be sweet. But being pretty and sweet is not a replacement, and too many female characters have been written by writers who think it is, while the interest—in appearance, in personality, in interactions, in plot development—goes to the men.

You have to do so much of the work yourself, because the canon left them unfinished, with huge gaps or unexplored contradictions that you have to somehow resolve. Every female character you decide to integrate into your fanwork in some major role constitutes an undertaking in her own right as you patch together an understanding of her sufficient to model a consistent set of reactions and priorities &c.

The dudes just get handed to you. Even the ones whose canon is a mess have properly developed character cores.

i mean, the season 4 california plotline still makes no sense outside of setting up the possibility of byler endgame, though i think they were always operating under the idea that they could set it up but never knew with certainty if they'd be allowed to make it pay off.

but stranger things 4 blew up even more than the first season did in 2016 or any subsequent season, breaking streaming records of all kinds and launching into a full cultural landmark (x). we're talking kate bush resurgence and eddie obsession, merchandise-able everything: hellfire club t-shirts and surfer boy pizzas and immersive experiences and, and, and.

look. we can't really talk about stranger things without talking about the greater context of netflix in the streaming wars circa 2022.

in 2022, netflix was losing subscribers for the first time in a decade (x). netflix begins cracking down on password sharing, offering tiers with ads, desperately trying to keep up their lead in the streaming wars even while competitors like disney+ and hbomax were starting to catch up (x).

in other words, when stranger things 4 came out as a smash hit - it was already a crucial pivot time for netflix. frankly, all they had to leverage was their successful ip. and the more they merchandise everything, the more it grows into a star wars/hp level honest-to-god franchise, the more netflix depends on that revenue stream---the more they absolutely would not risk potentially upsetting the masses with a queer story like byler. or, ultimately, with anything all that daring or unexpected when it comes to ending their biggest flagship show.

then we have the duffers recently saying in an interview that they might return to stranger things "in 20 years if we’re all broke and need some money ... We’ve all talked about it; this is our safety net.” (x)

they sold out. plain and simple. stranger things grew bigger than them and bigger than just the story it wanted to be, into a major cultural and (more notably) FINANCIAL chess piece to be manipulated by the powers that be of netflix. it has the kind of potential for theme parks and spin-offs and reboots and tie-ins for decades to come and they simply couldn't risk that by canonizing byler. they make weak excuses about this being how the show was always going to end, say it's going "full circle" simply by not having let any of 4 seasons of development influence the story's ending from what they did in the very first season, effectively erasing years of character development, particularly for el but also for mike and will.

they pussied out. end of.

Just wanted to make a fic recommendation masterpost :)) Because I get a lottt of asks for fic recs and yeah here you go!

Byler Fic Starter Pack

My Fav Fics of all Time!!

Secret Relationship

Cleradin Fics

Fluffy Established Relationship Fics -> Developing Relationship Fics

Byler being strangely obsessed with each other Fics

Predominantly Miwi Fics

Spicy Byler but they're Sweet and Tender

Explicit Byler Fics

Byler Dad Fics

Jealous Mike Fics

Fluffy and Funny Byler Fics

Lesbyler Fics

Bravebyers/Wheelerwise Fics

Will Byers was Never Found AU Fics

Churchgate Fics

Season 5 Rewrite Fics

Historical AU Fics

Mike Wheeler Heavy Angst Fics

Willel Fics with BG Byler

Fics where Byler reunite

Bottom!Mike Fics

Jealous Will Fics

Time Travel Fics

Spidey Will Fics

Fics where Byler communicate in Morse Code

Apocalyptic Fics

Platonic Madwheeler Fics

Conformitygate Fics

Fics similar to the Power Outage Fic

Friends with Benefits Fics

Merbrave (Mermaid Byler) Fics

Surfsahoy Fics

Band AU Fics

First I did some design ideas for her, since she's supposed to be a woman made of glass. Then after we chose the best design, I moved into making a color pallete for her.

After all of that was settled, I did her finished sprite, that will appear when you talk to her.

After that, a friend made her low poly 3D model and asked me to do her texture.

AND THEN IT'S FINALLY FINISHED!! AFTER 5 DAYS OF HARD WORK!!

It has been an intense start to the new year.

I jumped headfirst into the world of indie game development, starting with a volunteer-run organization focused on creating fun, free-to-play games: P1 (Player First).

I've always wanted to participate in a game jam, and P1 seemed like the perfect opportunity. The group was highly organized, fostering an engaged community and a fast-paced, sprint-style development schedule. It was an intense experience, balancing daily meetings with organizers and development teams with actually completing game art. It was a lot to juggle, especially as a volunteer contributor.

My time with P1 was brief, as I joined towards the end of their last sprint. Organization changes had been brewing, and while there's not currently any official oversight with the group, the strong community they built may ensure its future as a hub for collaborative indie game development. I'm hopeful the former P1 will continue to thrive.

Fortunately, before P1 dissolved, I was able to join Heavenly Realm Studios as a 2D artist! This has been an incredible experience, full of challenges and opportunities to develop both my personal and professional goals, including my big objective for this year: FINISH. PROJECTS!!

Right now, my main objective is to restore some work-life balance. This will allow me to revisit some of my own passion projects. I'm determined to complete my Mermay postcard series before this year's Mermay challenge begins. I also want to continue developing my animation projects and circle back to other ideas that got sidelined in the new year shuffle.

Looking forward to sharing more, especially as things continue to progress with Heavenly Realm Studios game!