guards! read me my bedtime yaoi

my liege if you keep having all of the guards come to your bedroom to read you bedtime stories, there will be no one to actually guard the castle during that time!

any intruders are welcome to join us for story time

my liege the enemies to lovers yaoi is affecting your perception of the danger of real enemies.

when will it be my turn.

holy fuck

Kate Beaton may have moved on, but it's good to know Brave tumblrers exist to carry the flame u_u u_u u_u

that post reminds me: you know what i haven't seen in years? a spocked fiver

used to be (especially back working in retail in the middle of uni towns) i couldn't go a month without seeing one of these

now? nothing.

i miss them

I do wish that "oppositional sexism" was a more commonly known term. It was coined as part of transmisogyny theory, and is defined as the belief that men and women, are distinct, non-overlapping categories that do not share any traits. If gender was a venn diagram, people who believe in oppositional sexism think that "men" and "women" are separate circles that never touch.

The reason I think that it's a useful term is that it helps a lot with articulating exactly why a lot of transphobic people will call a cis man a girl for wearing nail polish, then turn around and call a trans woman a man. Both of those are enforcement of man and woman as non-overlapping social categories. It's also a huge part of homophobia, with many homophobes considering gay people to no longer really belong to their gender because they aren't performing it to their satisfaction.

It's a large part of the reason behind arguments that men and women can't understand each other or be friends, and/or that either men or women are monoliths. If men and women have nothing in common at all, it would be difficult for them to understand each other, and if all men are alike or all women are alike, then it makes sense to treat them all the same. Enforcing this rift is particularly miserable for women and men in close relationships with each other, but is often continued on the basis that "If I'm not a real man/woman, they won't love me anymore."

One common "progressive" form of oppositional sexism is an idea often put as the "divine feminine", that women are special in a way that men will never understand. It's meant to uplift women, but does so in ways that reinforce the idea that men and women are fundamentally different in ways that can never be reconciled or transcended. There's a reason this rhetoric is hugely popular among both tradwifes and radical feminists. It argues that there is something about women that men will never have or know, which is appealing when you are trying to define womanhood in a way that means no man is or ever has been a part of it.

You'll notice that nonbinary people are sharply excluded from the definition. This doesn't mean it doesn't apply to them, it means that oppositional sexism doesn't believe nonbinary people of any kind exist. It's especially rough on multigender people who are both men and women, because the whole idea of it is that men and women are two circles that don't overlap. The idea of them overlapping in one person is fundamentally rejected.

I think it's a very useful term for talking about a lot of the problems that a lot of queer people face when it comes to trying to carve out a place for ourselves in a society that views any deviation from rigid, binary categories as a failure to perform them correctly.

If I can add, oppositional sexism is a cornerstone of evangelicalism and honestly a whole bunch of other forms of Christianity. The idea women and men exist for different tasks is deeply religious but specifically in the US and I assume for the majority of tradwives evangelical/conservative christian dogma. So even when ppl who proport to be somewhere feminist start up divine feminine shit they're regurgitating the same talking points the religious right started doing.

Yep. I believe they refer to it as "Complimentarianism".

Robert Jordan in a fucking nutshell.

The history of the idea's a bit more complicated than this and even today you can see trans- and trans-inclusive new agers who use the term. For most of it's history(which I'd draw back to the 60s in US culture?) "the divine feminine"(not always with THAT term) was often a critique and attack upon gender-essentialism and an argument for gender-freedom and non-duality; the idea was that Divinity, being Everything and Transcendent, must contain femininity as well, and that, since every person has a spark of divinity within them, ever person naturally has both masculine and feminine traits, and traits that mesh and transcend both.

In the 80s and 90s conservatives made a huge deal out of attacking and mocking this idea, as part of their general resistance to Feminism and Queer-Liberation. When media from that era mentions feminine or masculine "sides", talks about "getting in touch with my inner goddess", or refer to god as "she", or anything that sounds even vaguely like that, this is invariably what was going on(and conversely, you'd see ally-filmmakers from those times portray the idea positively, as Kevin Smith did in Dogma).

Having said that, there IS a big push going on right now by conservatives pushing the gender-essentialist use of the term(I dont pay attention to new age stuff directly, but I DO watch asmr videos, and you see it popping up there). Which: given how deeply cons established themselves in new age spaces during Covid via vaccine conspiracism, isn't terribly surprising; just as conservatives growing up in (initially)fringe internet-spaces adopted the language and symbology of those leftists-outsiders while maintaining their parent's shitty fascism(4chan nazis and Gamergate), and just as conservatives in fandom, queer, and social-justice spaces have used OUR language to cause all manner of havoc within OUR spaces over the last decade(too many incidents to recount), so too are conservatives, recently-established in new age spaces, using it's language and concepts to push the same shitty fascism they're always pushing.

Furthermore: Ditto on Robert Jordan |:|

Colton Valentine, “Against Queer Presentism​ | How the Book World Neglects the Archive,” The Drift, October 25, 2022.

its good to know the extremely apt name for this subculture i guess

Cringemobile

It’s so weird that we’re rapidly approaching an era of 100-year-old pop culture in a new way. Like if you were a 90s kid there was no such thing as a 100-year-old movie (or at least, not one more complex than “horse runs” or “the arrival of a train).

We have lots of songs that are over a hundred years old, but few recordings of them that are intelligible. The oldest popular genre music goes back to about the 30’s.

Even musicals! Theater is obviously an ancient art but the musicals in the modern sense we imagine them (in which speech and song are combined and both progress the plot) weren’t popularized until relatively recently.

Point is when my mom was growing up she was not exploring media (except for books) that was 100+ years old. When I was growing up at the turn of the century, I wasn’t either. But the crazy thing is that my kids will.

If I were to have a kid in 2023, here are some things that will be 100 before they turn 18 and will likely still be culturally relevant.

My favorite part of reading Dracula with tumblr was people loathing Dracula. I was prepared for everyone to be all swoony and reverent and “oh, he’s so awful, drain me, Daddy”

instead?

Pure vitriolic hatred. Loathing. The swooning was, as it should have been, firmly placed on Jonathan. Mina’s husband. Mina’s soulmate.

If you had told me that the prevailing sentiment on my dash at the end of the year would be “Fuck Dracula, all my homies hate Dracula” back in May, I would not have believed you.

Also, pour one out for Quincey Morris. Amen.

After Dracula Daily, I do not understand how vampires generally and Dracula specifically transitioned to become sex symbols in modern media. It’s such a massive reach from how everyone responded that I am very confused

carmilla came out 26 years before dracula and set a sexy passionate vampire precedent

[…]

Also: Dracula was very quickly theatricalized, and the character played by a string of really hot actors, and ours is not the first generation to look at an extremely attractive person fake-murdering another and say “Slay me, daddy uwu”

pop culture intertextuality is just so damn *fascinating*

today a parody movie (50 shades of black) comes out, based on the 50 shades of grey movie, which was based on the 50 shades book, which was based on twilight, which was somewhat based on interview with the vampire (which anne rice based on an earlier short story she wrote), which was based on Dracula and other vampire stories, which originally came from Dr. John Polidori’s The Vampyre (even though Vampires were a thing in folk tales before then, he was the one who made them all classy, etc.)

so really, like so many things, this is all Lord Byron’s fault.

It is kinda funny how two different staples of the horror genre (the vampire and the mad scientist/monster combo) both have their origins in the horrifying experience of being trapped in a cabin with Lord Byron.

Computer programming comes from the horrifying fear of your daughter ending up a poet like her father, Lord Byron

god imagine being an egyptologist before they found tutankhamun and not having to see his name everywhere I wish that were me

I love Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland but I loathe how edgy subcultures have turned it into some one dimensional thing associated with psychedelics and other drugs.

Like, I wanna talk about the recurring presence of logic and mathematics, the cross language (primarily French) puns, I want to talk to people about their interpretations and thoughts but everyone’s so stuck on “haha yeah she’s on shrooms” like come on there’s so much going on don’t let it just be the easiest, weakest response, you’re smarter than that

It’s probably one of my favourite books and I have the exact same problem

My favourite take: Alice in Wonderland adaptations all all dysfunctional because both stories are a hellish amalgamation of victorian pop culture. 

Turns of phrase, tourism in-jokes, children’s songs, academia at the time, popular figures in media, all of these are huge contributing factors to the characters and world of alice in wonderland/the looking glass. Reading the Annotated Alice is a trip and a half. Most of it isn’t actually nonsense, it’s an out-of-the-box joke on things most people when the book came out would have instantly recognized. They’re comedy pieces. Even as a modern reader it can get me to laugh, and the more I learn about what the time period was like when the book was released, the funnier it is. Caroll’s vicious deconstruction of mathematics was simply him cracking one one amongst many.

AiW adaptations are always going to be empty products unless you’re entirely willing to either double down on the time period or update it for modern times with commentary on things instantly recognizable to the modern audience. 

AiW adaptations with modern settings are like “what if it’s a DYSTOPIA and the animals are all HUMAN and it’s DARK and FOR ADULTS” like…we still have animated movies starring animals? Kid media is more identifiable for the whole family than ever?? There’s a better way????? Turn the dancing mock turtle into a ninja turtle who paints masterpieces you cowards

I like this take. 

So what you’re saying is that Alice in Wonderland is basically Victorian Shrek

Actually, yeah, kinda. There’s no real way to say, it’s never been fully explained by Charles Dodgson, it’s all truly interpretation. But in the way it’s written, I’d be willing to call it a literary version of Shrek. It has layers.

Oh…. so that’s why they all have fucking triangles.

TIL

An epic arms race

3 angled blue is literally the most influential artist to ever grace 4chan

and of course, his magnum opus: /v/ versus cancer

http://dis.4chanhouse.org/comic/res/21.html

This is a fucking true modern epic

HOLY SHIT THEY HAD A NAME????????

The most emotional moment in Ready Player One is when Gandalf the gray, and Gandalf the white, and Monty Python and the Holy Grail’s black knight, and Benito Mussolini, and the Blue Meanie and Cowboy Curtis, and Jambi the genie, Robocop, The Terminator, Captain Kirk, and Darth Vader, Lo-pan, Superman, every single Power Ranger, Bill S. Preston, and Theodore Logan, Spock, The Rock, Doc Oct, and Hulk Hogan all came out of nowhere lightning fast and kicked Chuck Norris in his cowboy ass.

I hope they keep that in the movie.

Trolls are my favourite mythical beings cause you can literally draw anything you want and call it a troll and nobody cares as 

A friend of mine on FB wrote this and, with their permission, told me that I could share it. I got more than a bit choked up reading it. Enjoy.

Read the fuck out of this of the day.

it’s like a time capsule from hell