themacklemorebrothers: In honor of Janelle Monáe coming out I put together a lil graphic about bi & pan identities! This is based on my own experiences within the community as someone who uses both terms. It of course does not … Continue reading →
One thing I always bring up that straight writers obviously don’t understand but every gay person ever can attest to is that queer people stick together. Like, every queer person knows like 15 other ones and those 15 know even more.
Like, having only One in your story completely misses the point of how we organize and stay safe, in addition to completely missing the point on being progressive (ie, having A Single Gay in your story isn’t special anymore and hasn’t been for decades now)
It is a fundamental misunderstanding of how marginalized people act bc straight people are allowed to be solitary and they don’t understand any other way of Being
Hijacking this post to talk about something interesting! There’s a lot of criticism in fanfiction circles of yaoi or yuri fanfiction where ‘everybody is gay’, and it’s almost always by folks who haven’t been involved in queer communities. If you’re queer, you really do surround yourself with queer people – so ‘everybody is gay’ in a character’s social circle actually makes perfect sense!
this exhibits itself in other ways too, for example, when there’s one queer sibling there’s usually more – often because one sibling will bring the definitions home and the other will use that to explore their own identity!
Another weird phenomenon I noticed is this happens a lot even before people realize they’re Not Straight ™. Out of my close friends in high school, most of us turned out some form of LGBTQA, and I’ve heard other people say the same is true for them. So people saying it’s “unrealistic” that everyone in the same social circle would gradually discover they’re Not Straight ™- yeah, it is totally reasonable and even likely.
I have to wonder if maybe THIS is where straight people got the term “catching the gay”… You know?
My mother was so concerned when I moved to CA for college that I would “catch the gay”, and I was just like “???????? pretty sure it’s not something you catch like a cold, mom.” And ignored her.
It wasn’t until I started making friends in the LGBT community and spending time with them and loving them as people that I slowly became aware of the fact that I might not be straight. And after years of talking to LGBT youth and living in a city that embraces that culture, I found myself realizing that I was ALWAYS like this, but never realized it.
It’s like… you could go your ENTIRE life having the choice of eating raisin bran, bran flakes, or plain cheerios for breakfast. And that’s pretty much the only choices you’re offered. But then. THEN! You walk into a supermarket and see an ENTIRE AISLE of a billion cereal choices, and you realize “wait, I…are…are you telling me that I could have had LUCKY CHARMS for breakfast?!”
And OOOOHHHHHH BOI lemme tell you a thing, when you see your buddies eating captain crunch and lucky charms, and you realize you can ALSO have that?
Well, then – if “the gay” is contagious, then you’d better lock me in quarantine.
the first pokemon that pops into your mind (right now) is your new forever partner, your ash-and-pikachu-level pal. your main pokemon companion who will accompany u thru everything. who is it?
why dont white haired anime boys just dye their hair to change their fate
i just have the mental image of a plucky redheaded anime best friend getting through to the final episodes and then suddenly dying
and as he dies the red dye seeps out of his hair and the protagonist best friend is like GOD DAMN IT DUDE WHY DIDN’T YOU WARN ME YOU WERE A WHITE HAIRED ANIME BOY THIS WHOLE TIME I COULD HAVE PREPARED FOR THIS
‘ah’ whispers the dying boy ‘i guess i couldn’t escape my roots’
It’s amazing how the SW Villain Discourse gleefully embraces the extent to which the Imperials are Space Nazis, and completely ignores the much greater extent to which they’re Space Americans.
Watch the Jedha market battle in Rogue One.
Space Iraq under American occupation.
Palpatine’s power grabs and his justifications behind them during the last days of the Republic were a pretty clear send up of the George W. Bush administration’s terrorism and national security policies.
Hitler subverted a brand new and very weak democracy of questionable legitimacy in the eyes of the German people, formed after the fall of an empire in a cataclysmic war, using his personal paramilitary as much as the ballot box to gain power, a situation that has more in common with the First Order than with Palpatine.
Palpatine subverted a venerable, complacent republic fractured by powerful moneyed interersts, by claiming to be protecting the freedom and security of the people, using the pretext of war to amass ever greater power, preparing carefully for the final overthrow of the regime that brought him to power.
In short, while the Empire uses the asthetics of the Nazis and also to a lesser extent the Soviet Union, those are all just trappings. The First Order are space Nazis, but the Empire are space Totalitarian Americans.
LOL more like Space Regular Americans, given that the Ewoks are the Viet Cong, Leia’s cinnamon buns were always based on that of a Sandinista revolutionary, and the only country to use a superweapon in the real world is the USA.
THIS. This this this this THIS.
As an American who came of age post-9/11 (I was 11 when it happened, and just shy of 13 when the buildup for the Iraq War was announced), it’s downright uncomfortable – in the best possible way, the way that renders art so piercing and so powerful – to watch the Jedha scenes in Rogue One. “The Holy City,” mined for resources by a foreign power. The clear Middle Eastern influence stamped on every inch of the design. Riz-Ahmed-who-once-played-Shafiq-Rasul stumbling through the desert with a bag over his head. Urban warfare between insurgents and an occupying army, simmering tension in the streets, civilians caught in the crossfire. It’s scarcely even subtext; remove the aliens, and you’re watching a news broadcast from my teenage years. I am frankly gobsmacked that anyone can view those scenes and NOT have their brain jump straight to Iraq, which I guess is a testament to how good human beings are at seeing what they want to see.
My own impression of the prequels (though I’d have to watch them again to be sure) was always that they were drawing more conscious inspiration from the late Roman Republic than from the Bush years…but then, the late 20th/early 21st century United States bears some striking historical resemblance to the late Roman Republic. Far more so in many ways than to 1930s Germany, as noted above. In fact I’ve long said that I suspect part of the problem with the prequels stems from this strange sort of…narrative shyness they seem to have, about looking their critique of empire in the eye. The central plot is basically a political intrigue. It’s a much twistier one than the fairly straightforward bildungsroman of the originals. And yet, for movies in which the systemic corruption and ultimate collapse of a representative government plays a huge role, they’re really eager to represent the Republic as the good guys and the Separatists as cartoon villains, in a way that allows them to toss out nuanced politics for battle scenes. Maybe that’s what they thought their audience wanted to see. But it leaves the viewer with a story that is fascinating and moving and complex if they care to look even a centimeter below the surface – and a narrative that seems to have almost zero willingness to engage with the complexities of that subtext. And it screws the pacing and characterization all to hell, because they try to cram a politically and morally complicated story into the archetypal Good-vs-Evil Pure-Farmboy-vs-the-Death-Star structure of the originals.
Like I said, maybe that’s more about what they thought their audience wanted to see than it is about subconscious discomfort with the Empire’s resemblance to Space America, but I’ve always thought there’s a bit of tension in Star Wars (and quite a lot of other American movies, actually) between the young-scrappy-and-hungry rebels – which American culture tends to celebrate and identify with (I mean, just check out who’s sporting a British accent in the originals, and who isn’t) – and the imperial reality that’s closer to America’s actual role in the world over the past century or so. It was great to see Rogue One make that so explicit.
Use the Walgreens Brand which is pretty cheap and it does wonders and doesn’t leave me with a white cast. And I’m dark as hell so I hate looking ashy but not all sunscreens are made equally and it’s one of the better ones I’ve used.
Wait cocoa/shea butter and coconut oil don’t protect you from the sun we really do need sunscreen??
Yea fam. All that “we don’t need sunscreen” shit is a myth. Combine that with the fact that most dermatologists don’t know how to spot skin cancer in Black people and it’s a nasty combination.
Yeah, it’s harder for us to get it but when we do it’s deadly. I know two people who died of skin cancer, both were Black.
“While incidence of melanoma is higher in the Caucasian population, a July 2016 study in the Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology showed it is more deadly in people of color. African American patients were most likely to be diagnosed with melanoma in its later stages than any other group in the study, and they also had the worst prognosis and the lowest overall survival rate.”
Sorry about the link, I’m on mobile. But this is from August 2016, which I know isn’t the most recent but it’s still SUPER IMPORTANT. Y’all please wear sunscreen. With Google it’s even easy to find smaller, Black-owned brands.
This is not a tumblr. 