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Tigers Make Everything Okay

@stevebadgers / stevebadgers.tumblr.com

💜Meow, bitch.🖤
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I follow the "leave nothing but footprints take nothing but photos" rule of state/national parks yeah because conservation. But also because when I was 11 i read a short story about a girl who went to a museum and stole a bandage flake off a mummy on display with the mentality of "im just one person one piece won't be missed" then at night she was visited by the mummy and it plucked a single hair from her head and then the next night a different mummy took another hair and she realized that there were only so many pieces to her before there would be nothing left and that story was forever wedged in my brain. Anyways leave cool rocks where you find them or the mummies will get you

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Before January ends, I’m going to magically and extremely be blessed by the universe.

not gonna risk scrolling past this

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Anonymous asked:

I don't think it's necessarily strictly to do with LGBT people being into LGBT content when it comes to fujoshi discourse but the idea that people cannot relate to or want to write about experiences that differ from their own and thus a woman cannot possibly understand or write for any experience that is male regardless of any other aspect of her identity. I see the same parallel when people talk about PoC characters, disabled characters, trans characters, etc.

I agree completely.

There is certainly a problem with outsiders of a community portraying its members without any knowledge at all, only based on stereotypes, and not listening to critique from those members. That’s a pitfall that a lot of BL has fallen into, as well as media about all sorts of minorities made by outsiders.

BUT

That is no excuse to refuse to portray these characters at all, or to claim that members of each group can’t relate to or empathize with each other. That’s the same argument that reactionaries and gatekeepers use against diversity in media. And it’s certainly not impossible that straight women can relate to people and characters who are not also straight women. They’re not lacking any essential trait or mechanism that queer women or people of other genders have.

Side note: there’s an argument to be made that most BL doesn’t actually portray gay men at all—the characters in BL who explicitly identify themselves as gay/bi/pan/queer are a minority. Now that the LGBTQ+ movement has more public recognition, more people view these characters as queer men, but fictional characters don’t necessarily hold a real-life identity. (But I won’t get too into this subject, because it’s its own can of worms.)

Gay men tend to have a knee-jerk reaction to the idea that straight women can relate to our experiences, and vice-versa, because a lot of homophobia centers around invalidating our masculinity and thus categorizing us as “womanly”. It’s certainly a widespread and hurtful misconception that gay men are “failed men” or just like straight women, but I believe that many of us end up accidentally maligning women and femininity in an attempt to defend ourselves.

It’s hurtful to call gay men lesser, but “woman” shouldn’t be a synonym for “lesser” in the first place.

I talk about queer people—especially queer women—in the context of BL a lot, because they have a history in the creation of BL since its first precursors, and their identities are continuously erased or dismissed in the Western attempt to re-frame BL as an exclusive property of homophobic straight cis girls. However, I don’t mean to diminish straight women’s contribution to the genre, or imply that they have any less of a right to write stories about men.

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Yes!

I think bisexuality gets erased from these conversations a lot in the sense that I, as a bi woman, relate most to bisexual characters, but I really don’t care about gender nearly as much.

To say that I’m “stealing” from “gay men” (as a lot of tumblr does) is telling me that gender is more important than orientation when it comes to how you identify and that this is required to be true for all humans. It’s also saying that bi men are the same as gay men and that gay men should speak for both.

(Not that bi men couldn’t object to bi women speaking for them, but this isn’t actually the argument I see put forward on tumblr very often. Bisexual spaces offline tend to be fairly mixed gender and mostly interested in proving that bisexual men actually exist. Ladies being thirsty for bi dudes is not usually something people are upset about because it’s comparatively rare.)

Once we move into the fanfic space, there’s the added dimension that many, many, many of the popular characters for fic are presumed straight in canon. Is a straight woman writing m/m about Captain America “stealing” from gay men or straight ones? (I mean, “stealing” is a stupid way to look at it in the first place, but even so: this is not actually a queer icon that’s being reworked in a fanfic.)

The actual “problem” with fujoshi-targeted media has nothing to do with BL itself. The actual problem is a lack of queer media or a lack of queer media the speaker likes and can find.

I am (somewhat) sympathetic to guys who want to hang out exclusively on Tumblr and who like tropey media similar to what is found in BL, danmei, slash fanfic, m/m romance novels, etc. If you want that flavor of media but exclusively by and for men, you’re going to have a hard time.

OTOH, while queer media is sadly rare as a percentage of all media, quite a bit does exist, and a hell of a lot of it is by and for men. I wish more of tumblr would go explore what media does exist.

I don’t think most of tumblr is going to like that media–it’s too depressing or too purely about sex or uses completely different tropes–but I wish people would explore nonetheless. It would give them more perspective the next time they’re angry that fujoshi are the ones who make the media they like.

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The fabulous Target Troll strikes again!

The last one was great!

FRITO-LAY COMING FOR BLOOD OMH

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pokefan211

Who else thinks Frito-Lay wrote a big book of comebacks just to deal with these idiots

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yo-its-matt

what is it about me sitting in my little corner of the Internet and saying “I actually don’t hate myself as an adult now and I want to be nice to people and that’s my entire thing” that makes these anons start foaming at the mouth

I’ll be perfectly honest, I’ve spent the better part of a decade wishing I weren’t fucking alive and beating depression off with a caveman’s wooden club. If I get to a point in my adult life after all that shit where I can finally say “I don’t want to see myself dead anymore, I like who I am” and you have the gall to tell me I have too much self confidence now, I’m gonna take the club I killed my depression with and I’m gonna start beating you with it

Basically,

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