Horizon's end

It has apparently been ten years since the time one of my professors pulled me aside to tell me I had to clean up after making out before going to class because my lipstick was everywhere and I realized "actually my tapdancing group decided we all had to dress like the Joker for our performance" was an infinitely worse explanation so I just said I was sorry

the weirdest fucking thing to me is how men will be like "it's so hard being a man. no one cares that i'm sad. the loneliness we experience could NEVER be understood by a woman" and then also be like "btw i never talk to my friends and i don't know their names and i love hanging out with men because they don't talk about their stupid emotions all the time. women could never understand a bond like this." like ???

These aren't contradictory, they're both just symptoms of gender roles and toxic masculinity. Most cis men aren't socialized to know how to care for their friends and be cared for by them in turn. They are taught it's not appropriate to express their emotions to friends. They're taught that caring deeply for male friends is gay and wrong. They assume their friends would react negatively if they asked too many personal questions or offered support or even hugged them for a bit too long, so they don't. They think talking about their problems and feelings is feminine and wrong so they don't.

There's a really interesting book about this I'm trying to find, I'll reblog again if I do. But often men in minority groups double down on these in response to the degradation our society can put onto them.

Strict gender roles are bad for everyone. Acknowledging that isn't anti-feminist, it's an important step in dismantling these for all of us.

Only one thing y’all can take from trans women. Notes.

i hope all of these girls have a great day and i love the girl who forgot her wig but the sis with the hijabi damn near made me cry sob i love this <3333333

Another thing abt this video: nearly every beauty involved is Indigenous or Black, the two minority groups of trans women that frequently get left out of discussions when it comes to highlighting trans women and their beauty, and the two groups at the highest risk of violence while trans. These women deserve love and praise just like y’all’s favorite white women do. Show up for Black and Indigenous trans women.

guy who is definitely not about to fall into a surprise midday nap with an aftermath worse than a hangover: it seems like a really good idea to lay in bed and get cozy under the blanket as part of my plan not to fall asleep. I do not know why.

To recognize TERFs, anti’s, fash, incels and other internet shitstains, one pattern you need to recognize is this:

A simple example:

Like, when you take a tiny step back, it becomes clear that the jump from ‘adults watch high school dramas’ to ‘they all want to fuck teenagers’ is absolute moon logic.

This logic only works if you assume the absolute worst possible things about the group you’re talking about. This logic works if the only lens you can see a group through is ‘predator’ and you do not acknowledge that they are completely humans who can just do non-predatory things like ‘enjoying stories’.

And assuming the absolute worst possible things about a specific group while denying their complexity and humanity… well, that is absolutely key to what TERFs, anti’s, fashos, incels, etc. do.

Someone asked me in private why I grouped ‘TERFs, anti’s, fash, incels’ together. Do I think anti’s are as bad as fash?

Short answer: no, anti’s are not as bad as fash. They’ve done some pretty despicable things. Spreading false accusations, doxxing, suicide baiting, trying to get people fired, stalking, etc. But they’re not trying to gain political power in order to commit genocide. So on the shitstain pyramid they’re a few tiers below fash.

I grouped these in a row here not because they’re all exactly the same amount of terrible, but because they’re groups to watch out for. If you’re a queer person trying to exist safely online, you do not want to interact with any of these groups. If you do not enjoy being brainwashed into a hate group, you do not want to interact with any of these groups.

It’s also notable that TERFs, incels and anti’s all have a tendency to fall down the fash radicalization pipeline because they already share some basic ways of thinking. Assuming the absolute worst possible things about a specific group while denying their complexity and humanity is an example of that shared way of thinking.

Ok, here;s my attempt: ‘Anti’ is a term that emerged in fan fiction communities to describe a group of people who felt that some forms of romantic or erotic fan fiction should be off limits to write. Stuff like:

Ignoring the fact that exploring unethical and potentially unethical situations is an essential part of what fiction is for.  Fan fiction has always been a realm through which people, especially teenagers and young adults , explore their relationship to harm, to trauma, to ethical grey areas, to taboos and to forbidden fantasies. It’s where a lot of teenagers and young adults learn that what is hot in their fantasy isn’t what they want in real life, which is an important part of sexual development.

But according to Anti’s, writing of any romantic or erotic scenario that would be unethical in real life, makes the author itself unethical. This is then used as a reason to cyberbully a person, harass, spread horrible rumors and in some cases stalk, doxx, try to get them fired, to to get them to commit suicide, etc.

Over time the term ‘Anti’ came to be used outside the fan fiction universe as people noticed that the same people doing this stuff were also campaigning against stuff like kink at Pride parades. Anti came to be defined by stuff like:

Now most Anti’s are just ‘protect the children’ pearl clutching conservatives who are very online. Most probably spend their younger years being online bullies and their later years campaigning against sex-positive sex education in schools and driving the new satanic panic or some shit like that. But a notable number of Anti’s have gone from these positions towards becoming a terf or a fascist. Turns out that people in a ‘protect the children’ panic mode who see predators everywhere are quite vulnerable to fascist ideology. No big surprise there.

I found another one! Obviously bad faith take of the day: “Ancient vampires lusting after teenagers is a trope pushed by pedophiles to normalize age differences”. Like, no. That’s more bullshit.

Fictional vampires are often interested in teenager girls because the primary readers/viewers of vampire stories are teenage girls, who like imaging themselves as the object of desire. And why do you think teenager girls like reading about magical monsters who desire them? Well, because:

These stories about monsters who desire teenage girls appear again and again because they meet the needs of teenage female readers. It’s simple as that. We do not need to invent a sinister hidden agenda to explain why these stories are popular.

And it’s fine to comment on how weird some of these fictional relationships are. I love that What We Do In The Shadows joke. But the moment we start looking for a sinister agenda behind the fact that teenage girls like reading about vampires who like teenage girls, we’re on the weird conspiracy slide. 

Okay but the weirdest thing about the whole "Brotherhood is better you should skip 03" discourse that's become commonplace now, it sort of forgets the world Brotherhood came out in and why you should watch the original Fullmetal Alchemist. When Brotherhood came out, the original Fullmetal Alchemist was one of the most beloved and most watched animes of all time. Brotherhood assumes you the audience have already seen it because of course you have, everyone has seen it, so it skips important information and speeds the story up because it doesn't want to bore you with things you already know. Have you ever wondered "hey why does the first episode of Brotherhood kind of suck, and why am I being introduced to like 50 new characters, and why are they acting like I know what the hell an alchemist is?" It's because Brotherhood thinks you've seen 03.

The first 7 or so episodes of Brotherhood constitute dozens of chapters in the manga, and the first 25 or so episodes of the original Fullmetal Alchemist. The Nina Tucker episode in Brotherhood, in FMA 03 takes up nearly three episodes. Yoki gets a backstory in 03 and it's genuinely one of the best episodes and taken directly from the manga and Brotherhood glosses over it because: duh, you've already seen it. And so if you skip the original you miss out on dozens of really great character building episodes like Ed and Al meeting Hughes for the first time and getting to spend a whole episode helping him free a train from terrorists, or Ed and Roy having a duel that expands on the relationship they have, or episodes where the brothers just help out random people in towns before the major story gets going.

The original also paces itself quite a bit better than Brotherhood and is more in line with the mangas storytelling. In the manga we don't find out about The Gate until nearly two dozen chapters in, and the same goes for the original anime. Like, that's a twist reveal in those stories, and it's weird that the most watched series is the one where they tell you all about The Gate in the first two episodes because they assume you've already seen the original show.

What's more, people don't know that Hiromu Arakawa helped write for the anime while she was still in the middle of writing the manga, and as a result was inspired to write scenes in Brotherhood that the anime did first. That scene of Edward getting impaled by a falling beam? Directly inspired by a similar scene in the original anime. There's a lot of little instances of that and they're great when you can recognize parallels and things in Brotherhood that are direct references to the original anime, but people don't notice any of that anymore. Because the original anime is just an automatic skip these days, and it's a bummer because people don't realize what a giant it was back before Brotherhood was released. They treat it as *bad,* not realizing it was one of the most beloved anime of its time and the problems people take issue with have a lot more to do with personal taste than any kind of actual flaw in the writing. Brotherhood was never meant to dethrone it, and the original anime was always supposed to be part of the viewing experience which is why those first few episodes of Brotherhood are so fast paced. So like, please stop telling people Fullmetal Alchemist 2003 is a skip, or it's bad, or you don't need it because Brotherhood is better. Regardless if you think Brotherhood is better or not, the original wrote Brotherhood's check. It was huge, it was beloved, and Brotherhood is *banking* on the knowledge you've seen all of it and loved it. And trust me when I say there is so much to love about the original series. It's still my favorite branch of the FMA franchise, and it's worth your time, I promise you.

St. Paul's Cathedral, London (by George Ciobra)

I was thinking "nah, why would they? not the right vibe" and was going to just assume the answer was no, but...

...I was very surprised to learn that in fact, they did. (close by, that is)

Essentially yes - it's a small "sister" town, but it was the same school district - though they mispronounced the town name.

AND they had an episode nearby that town, like 15-20 minutes away, too.

harrys and kimmys...

XIX century Library at Marienburg Castle, Germany

Or a cool old look for your TARDIS.

It's a rare thing to be able to drive the Kineema, even rarer after almost committing vehicular manslaughter against your Satellite Officer

Warsaw, Poland (by Anna Holodna)

the quiet show of support from kim despite his own nerves... the playful ribbing between the two of them... the image of kim lending a crying harry his handkerchief, doing what he can to dry this broken man's tears....... these moments are really making me feel some type of way alright

Rain for My Parade 🌧️🌱🌿🌹🌷🌼

part of my cloud petticoat series~

Dutch forests

albertdrosphotography

listen LISTEN kim being amused by/going along with harry's dumb bullshit is so so important to me okay i want to them to spend the rest of their lives being silly IDIOTS together thanks

Bonus: