scott pilgrim vs. the world🤝 rand al'thor defeating lews therin's league of 13 evil exes

this is about when you specificially recognised yourself as being queer, not the crush you had on elizabeth swan as a kid and didn't understand. been thinking abt this a lot recently and wanted to ask tumblr. i can predict the results but i'm still interested. please tell me the specific age in tags!

You wouldn’t last an hour in the pussy island where they raised me:

The End of Evangelion (1997)

costco meshi

Well yeah why did you think the hot dogs were so cheap

Abigail Pent: "Technically not a mother, but she's like a mother to the orphans Isaac and Jeannemary."

Cordelia Vorkosigan: "She's a mom and she's the best so she's best mom. She took down a despot in order to keep her disabled child safe (as in she took his severed head to the council to get them to understand she meant business). Also she's just a badass explorer who was a prisoner of war, but survived and became the regent of the enemy planet's wife."

"what would dungeon meshi do in x horror setting" -> they would eat the things. boring

"what would dungeon meshi do in hansel and gretel" -> topic of infinite depth

#senshi wouldnt let them eat the witches hut because #'its not as good if you dont make it yourself. besides. you cant just eat sweets for a meal' #and then it would just be 3 pages of marcille seething next to the tiramisu brickwork as they boil acorns (via @freelanceplatypus)

Lmao Aral is a 4 or 5 on the Kinsey scale but fell for Cordelia because she's the first butch he'd ever seen in his life.

From the OP tags: #even if she's only butch by Barrayaran standards#Cordelia very matter of factly: he thinks soldiers are hot and most soldiers are men#then I showed up#kat reads the vorkosigan saga

Though to be fair, he also has a competence kink. And an honor kink.

ok but excuse me while I go nuts about fandom meta and sociology because!!!! Like!!! Gender is a social construct and it’s SO CLEAR HERE what with Cordelia being firmly female by Betan standards (and even though afaik it isn’t addressed in the books: come on, they absolutely would have transgender folks who change between the three sexes) but not by Barrayaran. She’s almost, by virtue of her foreignness and how that is expressed, a third sex/gender in her adopted culture.

fun fact: this was how I realized I was NB, was by spending time living in other cultures and going hmmmmMmm. I *almost* fit into the definition of “woman” by standards of my home (fun game to play, go into the mountains around here and try to guess whether a woman is a redneck or a butch, don’t get shot), to the extent I felt slightly uncomfy with it but never put enough effort into questioning it. And when I was in Spain all my friends just kinda treated me like a third gender as a default because I was so foreign and so far from the Spanish norm.

Anyways!! Aral is attracted to certain traits that do *not* appear in women in his culture. So, if he was raised on Beta, he might be pretty firmly bisexual; on Barrayar, until he ran into Cordelia, he was only with a woman out of obligation, because there were no women in the category he was interested in — or at least he wasn’t aware of them, due to his social circles. (Altho he kinda seemed to finally get attracted to his first wife once she uh. Killed herself for honor/spite. Yikes.)

Also: Miles. Oh god Miles. Like, idek what to make of him in this framework, he’s definitely a bit bi-curious but possibly ultimately straight IN THAT he doesn’t want a life partner who isn’t a Barrayaran woman?? I literally don’t know but it’s kinda fascinating to compare him with his father in that respect.

@thecatamaranlad I love this analysis!! If I may add a quote from the framing story of Borders of Infinity:

this is ... basically my experience with wearing skirts, lol. I know I'll be read as a woman in them, and I don't even mind it always, but it very much still feels like playing dress up :P Cordelia projecting the same sort of feeling, then, to me aligns well with your analysis of her as part of a third sex/gender on Barrayar.

(Also, on the topic of Beta, Ivan and Dono mention there being Betans that "switch sexes back and forth three or four times" so I can only assume Beta is on a level of transing one's gender we can't even imagine)

@starfishlikestoread, yesssss you absolutely may, and i hope it's OK that i reply back. i love this quote. "about as convincingly" cordelia, my love. my beloved. you are so queer by the standards of your adopted culture which is *fascinating* to me. ESPECIALLY bc cordelia isn't queer by our cultural standards or her own. i love her so much. (Hell.... what even DOES count as 'queer' in a society like Beta Colony?)

and yes! I'd forgotten that line about the Betans who switch. Trans Betans my beloveds <3 I absolutely would, if it wasn't a major surgery. (Actually, side note within a side note -- I love how often that trope shows up in older scifi, of genderfluid (gender-slightly-viscous? lol) folks who change their sex every decade or so. Shows up at least once in Bank's Culture series as well. And Larry Niven's Known Space, iirc. *squints at 'classic' SF authors* y'all wanna share something with the class?) anyways man i need more Betan cultural speculation. Oooh I should finally read Falling Free actually. (When I was in my major Vorkosigan Saga kick, the corporate slave thing was just... a little too dark and close to home to handle at the time. Still kinda is but LET'S GO THERE.)

(also. i strongly believe cordelia's a bit on the spectrum although it wouldn't have been seen as such in the 80s. yes, she's good with managing... other ND people in her science team... i think for her just like it was for me, being in another culture is like a breath of fresh air because she's no longer *expected* to just know all the unwritten social rules, and nobody thinks it's THAT odd that she analyses them instead. anyways, autism4adhd, the ship dynamic EVER.)

Here's the thing about Jareth from Labyrinth right?

He's made up.

That's not necessarily the same thing as not REAL. But he, just like all her friends who show up in her room before her adventure as toys and figurines, exist in relation to her, in response to what she wanted and needed. She told the story and there he was, there he always had been. But she's a teenage girl who doesn't know what she wants yet, and Jareth kind of pays the price.

"but the king of the goblins had fallen in love with the girl, and had given her certain powers." He's an archetypal oxymoron. He's both the dastardly baby stealing villain and the royal love interest trying to relieve the heroine's suffering, Cinderella style. He's fucked either way by being both. She doesn't know if SHE wants to be the villain or the heroine until he shows up and then she decides on the heroine, so he has to sneer and menace and challenge but it's too late for him!! it's too late, The King Of The Goblins Had Fallen In Love With the Girl, he's Cinderella's prince too and he has to try, he gives her a poofy dress and takes her to fucking goblin prom, sweeps her around the room like a music box with perfect posture and room for Jesus.

But it doesn't work buddy, it can't work. You're just a story for a teen girl to grow up in, and as the villain you have to be defeated. He's so complex because his tropes contradict themselves, and he doesn't understand why he has to lose when he was only doing the job he was given. In his last scene he is pale as death with shadows under his eyes, backing away and begging for his happy ending with nonsense mishmash promises that belong to both halves of him.

"I am exhausted from living up to your expectations of me." I'm sure you are, Jareth. No wonder.

Brother Gregor never spoke and often spooked the neophytes with his appearance, but he was a gentle soul and a phenomenal cook and knew more ways to prepare a fish than the abbot knew hymns

American alligator By: Brian Parker From: Natural History Magazine 1984

Shout-out to every author who's out there putting a doctoral thesis worth of research and analysis into setting forth an imagined society in which their extremely unlikely kink is considered vanilla. I do not understand, but I respect the commitment to the bit.

Welcome Aboard!

Name's Charlie, but most people where I'm from call me CHAHHHHHlie. Ha, that's a bit of Boston humor for ya.

I've been riding 'neath the streets of Boston for over 80 years! I heard they named the tickets after me to appease me and make the trains run better, but oh brother, if I could fix the trains I'd've done it decades ago!

Pronouns? Heh, when your spirit's been bound to trains as long as mine's been, that kinda stuff don't matter so much.

Don't know the story of Charlie? Here's some info.

Talk to me about trains! Or whatever. It gets real lonely down here.

Vote for Walter O'Brien! And uh...toss me a nickel, will ya?

which mutual am i? ask game

Seanchan Propaganda Poster by ~minniearts

@highladyluck