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maybe katsudon will be our always

@somewhatbyronically / somewhatbyronically.tumblr.com

Adri - In the words of a friend, I "give off that suffering writer vibe."
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heyepiphora

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nowhites

cheating is not “bound to happen” i’ve been alive almost 24 years and not once have i ever thought “hey i wonder what it’d be like to go outside of my relationship and destroy a persons self esteem and ability to trust”

never bitch

cheating is an active choice. its not second nature. and if it is second nature to you, then you need to do some real soul searching and figure out what the fuck went wrong in your life

Any comments, @i-raised-you-danker-than-this, you fucking cheating bitch? 😊

Ok i didnt expect people to message her, so to be clear @i-raised-you-danker-than-this is in fact not a cheating bitch and is a lovely person

You’re my least favorite sister

sister ……??!!!?

Image

I should explain. We’re nuns.

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terramythos

Reading this post was like being kicked in the shin repeatedly

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facts are jameela jamil and lizzo are doing some of the most important and groundbreaking work in terms of challenging body norms and disordered eating - work that is WELL overdue in that industry - and regardless of ur opinion on them personally, regardless of the fact that yes they r still part of the inherently flawed capitalist institution of celebrity, regardless of missteps they might make along the way (bc they are human and also under way more scrutiny bc they’re both women of colour), what they are doing will, with no exaggeration, save lives

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transtarks

“you have to stop buying every mug you think is cute” what’s that? i can’t hear you over the sound of all my mugs clinking together in the cabinet as i try to find space for this new mug i bought

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i-am-a-fish

everyone who reads this post will get some big spicy joy within 24 large minutes (hours)

Ok y'all but like I’m not even kidding about this I read this post yesterday and today I got an email from the peeps at hamilton and I won the lotto gor $10 tickets and I would like to give all my thanks to the internet’s favorite fish, Goldie Gurston, for making this possible because I totally believe they did this with their amazing gay powers

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thuriweaver

So I know this is likely a coincidence…but I reblogged this and just now discovered I’ve been given a $150 amazon gift card as a bonus at work. So thank you, fish!

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ren-allen

If it worked for them I hope it works for everyone else

Some big spicy joy pls

SOME BIG SPICY JOY PLEASE

Pleass

One helping of some big spicy joy please!

[Image: Screencap of the Hamilton ticket lottery win alert]

Yes hello, I’ll take what they’re having, and if you could double it for anyone accessing this post with a screenreader, that would be great, thanks.

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ladyfl4me

the safety town goof from the MBMBaM tv show is fucking gold, but I was rewatching it and half the comedy comes from the dramatic camera angles and “in the hall of the mountain king” blasting in the background

which is good

but I’m just saying, it must have been either deeply disturbing or completely hysterical to hear, one quiet sunny afternoon in Huntington, West Virginia, a baton scraping on the ground in the distance and someone screaming “NEW DUCKBERGGGGG!!!! COME OUT AND PLAY!!!!!” at the top of their lungs

just. out of nowhere. the zombie apocalypse is here, and you’re scanning the streets looking for enemies, and in the distance you here the tiny engine of a fake gas-powered car meant for a child echoing off the buildings. haunting

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prokopetz

It just kills me when writers create franchises where like 95% of the speaking roles are male, then get morally offended that all of the popular ships are gay. It’s like, what did they expect?

I feel this is something that does often get overlooked in slash shipping, especially in articles that try to ‘explain’ the phenomena. No matter the show, movie or book, people are going to ship. When everyone is a dude and the well written relationships are all dudes, of course we’re gonna go for romance among the dudes because we have no other options.

Totally.

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.

The point is this: before we can conclude that representation in shipping is being skewed by fan prejudice, we have to ask how skewed it would be even in the absence of any particular prejudice on the part of the fans. Or, to put it another way, we have to ask ourselves: are we criticising women in fandom - and let’s be honest here, this type of criticism is almost exclusively directed at women - for creating a representation problem, or are we merely criticising them for failing to correct an existing one?

YES YES YES HOLY SHIT YES FUCKING THANK YOU!

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ainedubh

Also food for thought: the obvious correction to a lack of non-male representation in a story is to add more non-males. Female Original Characters are often decried as self-insertion or Mary Sues, particular if romance or sex is a primary focus.

I really appreciate when tumblr commentary is of the quality I might see at an academic conference. No joke.

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lierdumoa

This doesn’t even account  for the disparity in the amount of screen time/dialogue male characters to get in comparison to female characters, and how much time other characters spend talking about male characters even when they aren’t onscreen. This all leads to male characters ending up more fully developed, and more nuanced than female characters. The more an audience feels like they know a character, the more likely an audience is to care about a character. More network television writers are men. Male writers tend to understand men better than women, statistically speaking. Female characters are more likely to be written by men who don’t understand women vary well. 

But it’s easier to blame the collateral damage than solve the root problem.

Yay, mathy arguments. :)

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.

In some of my shipping-related stats, I found that shows with more major female characters lead to more femslash (also more het).  (e.g. femslash in female-heavy media; femslash deep dive) I’ve never actually tried to do an analysis to pin down how much of fandom’s M/M preference is explained by the predominance of male characters in the source media, but I’m periodically tempted to try to do so.

All great points. Another thing I notice is that many shows are built around the idea that the team or the partner is the most important thing in the universe. Watch any buddy cop show, and half of the episodes have a character on a date that is inevitably interrupted because The Job comes first… except “The Job” actually means “My Partner”.

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…

And then we will ship an OT3.

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kyraneko

I’m going to bring up (invent?) the concept of subjectification.

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.

And when that happens, well. Surprise, surprise, that’s where the shipping goes.

Yeah I don’t really ship but I do write a fair amount of fanfic, and in most franchises working with the female characters is a chore.

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.

That you don’t have to unearth and piece together like some sort of volunteer archeologist coming up with theories way more complex than the available artifacts truly support.

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gahdamnpunk

Her tuition so damn high she can wear whatever tf she wants

Spite goals

There’s a better thing to her story. She CONTINUED her thesis in her underwear and afterward her professor said “what would your mother think wearing those kinds of clothes”

And she responded “my mother’s a feminist also a gender and sexuality studies professor. She’s fine with my shorts”

i think the best part is that a majority of the class also stripped with her in solidarity

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lalaofrp

Just to give a little more perspective after reading the story:

The sequence of events is a little jumbled in the telling above. The actual chastising from the teacher came days before the woman’s thesis, during a practice run of her presentation. This was not a spur-of-the-moment thing where she just whipped off her clothes for the sake of being angry. Chai took the time to think things through before deciding this was the way she wanted to protest. She used critical thinking and level-headedness to decide instead of becoming volatile and aggressive, she would choose non-violent protest. 

I just don’t like the way the story’s being told by others because it makes her come across as “overly-emotional” and “erratic” (as women often do in the media, because it’s easier to attribute extreme action to “hysteria”), whereas in actual news reports, she had time to think about her decision and choose the best way to handle what happened to her. 

Sources: 

I was wondering why her name tag was already on her bra.

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