Wrong John Silver.

The reason the sidhe are always seen as oddly androgynous is because they are literally the stuff of dreams. Dreams aren't gendered. They're much more interested in being beautiful, than in being male or female.

A lot of people know about the very first piece he did when he left the post which was the The Problem We All Live With which depicts Ruby Bridges walking to school under federal protection.

But I don’t think enough people know about Murder in Mississippi which depicts three real civil rights activists who were murdered by the Ku Klux Klan and sherriffs. The magazine ran the sketch instead of the finished piece because they felt it had a more striking statement to accompany the article. Norman Rockwell would finish that version after publication which is here

Rockwell’s legacy is sanitized because he decided to maintain his job at the Post for so long despite his frustrations with not being able to express himself. The civil rights movement was just his final straw to change what he could with the little time he had left. Look magazine received a lot of hate for Rockwell painting these as well.

Another favorite piece of mine is The Right to Know which depicts an integrated populace questioning their government. In 1968, the year of Vietnam and the year the Fair Housing Act only just got signed in months prior:

But I think it’s important to include the caption Rockwell originally wrote for the piece as well. I think it represents how a 74 year old Rockwell felt about the America he believed in and the people in it:

Also for LOOK magazine, but leaning on his themes of youth and suburban life. Expressing both hope for the curiosity and open-mindedness of children, and the bitter recognition of the suspicion of adults towards racial integration (see the face peeking out of the window in background). It’s notable that this is what he wanted America to be, too. He hoped for a better future.

Like "You have to venture into the scary insane asylum!" VS "You're a patient who was admitted by force to an asylum, and you are very clearly in real danger, but everyone is pretending that you're just deluded, and are essentially leaving you to die because they don't really see you as a person."

It's been interesting to see what media people are recommending based on the first post alone. A lot of recommendations for games/franchises like World of Darkness, Carrion, Kill All Humans, Among Us, etc. It's interesting because these are games that put you into the shoes of the violent other that has to infiltrate, without actually challenging the idea that the other is a threat. They actually parrot the ideas of the other as violent.

Funnily enough, the people recommending the comedy game Octodad understand the post much better than most of the people recommending horror media. A few mentions of Am I Nima, which isn't finished yet but does look like it could be what I am describing, so brownie points to the people recommending that.

But everyone saying stuff like "This is just being Trans/Autistic/Etc" really gets it, like really really gets it. Horror always communicates the fears and anxieties of the people who create it, this post was basically: "What if instead of communicating the fear of the other, we communicated the fears of the others, which are actually vastly more legitimate than the dominant groups fear of the other. We should recognise that it is overwhelmingly the others who are the ones who actually suffer and die, all for the perceived "saftey" and "comfort" of the dominant group."

This idea is about transphobia, it is about ableism, about anti-imigrant rhetoric and white supremacy, about queerphobia, it's about all of it. It is horror from the perspective of minority groups. It is the twisting of a trope built upon reactionary fears and narratives in order to critique them, it is a direct allegory for all those experiences you are describing.

Also, you can find tropes of this kind of horror (first and second part) throughout the SCP Foundation. Plenty of stories are not about trying to contain the Big Evil Nasty, but the arbitrary nature of containment for itself.

In fact, that was a theme in my SCP-001 WJS Proposal ("Normalcy"). What is deemed normal is, ultimately, whatever you choose it to be, and I try to look at what that means from both sides of the issue: what it's like to be the odd one out, and what it's like to be the one choosing what's normal. There are horrors where no matter what you choose, you're denied. This is the horror of whatever you happen to choose, it's correct. Why do you dare deny normalcy to anyone?

Via Paul Byrne at Bluesky: "Taken after their translunar injection burn, there are aurorae at top right and lower left, and zodiacal light at lower right."

Alt text: "That's us."

(ETA: here's the image's home, with EXIF data, at the NASA image site: https://images.nasa.gov/details/art002e000192)