Hello & Welcome

Happy International Asexuality Day! 🖤 🩶 💜 Sending joy to all my ace pals out there. You all rock! 😎

idk what your all talking about tiktok rules

[video description: a mouse puppet wearing chainmail while sitting at a table. On the left side of the table, a bowl of two avocados pushes in. On the right, there is a small chalkboard, which the puppet turns to show that it reads "2 for $10." The puppet sings a parody of running up that hill. It sings "if I only could, I'd make a deal with God, two avocados for ten bucks. He'd say 'that's not very good.' I'd say 'yeah but you're God. Isn't money kind of beneath you?' he'd say 'it's the principle.' I'd say 'do you want avocados or not?' the video cuts out. End description.]

OK I'm just paused to gas up so can't fully elaborate BUT:

Consituational inability to lie/feint/disemble as the critical personality difference between feanor and fingolfing & maedhros

still don't have the brain to elaborate on this except

This is possibly the only area in the feanor fingolfin manwe melkor brother relationship parallels where feanor and manwe are in the same alignment

some hyper famous artists like Van Gogh transcend overratedness and become underrated because they're so normalized. Like I'll look at a van Gogh and I'm like wait this really is amazing you guys don't get it

What they don’t tell you about speaking multiple languages is that your brain does not in fact have a box labeled Spanish and another one labeled German. Instead it has a box labeled “Not English” and sometimes when you’re talking or writing in one of the languages you speak it will just start pulling random words from that box.

I know most people don't care about anything unless it has to do with the U.S. but can we please start talking about the Canadian election.

Please don't vote for Poilievre. He's basically the Canadian Trump and plans to put in place laws that harm trans youth, and lots of other shit.

Please vote istg this is the only way anything will get better. Poilievre has been kissing millionaires and billionaires asses. He'll make life even harder, and he loves Trump.

Reblogs are appreciated, especially if you aren't Canadian.

It’s a content warning to you. To me it’s the reason it’s on my reading list

obsessed with these tags actually

(via @fatkidnogo)

I wish it wasn’t a hot take that a story in which two characters of any gender prioritize their purely platonic relationship over any other romantic or sexual interests they might have is a textually queer story

A lot of people really don’t understand amatonormativity as another dimension of “there is a right way to love people” that we have to dismantle.

Amatonormativity 101: Amatonormativity, a term coined by Elizabeth Brake, is the very prevalent idea that there is one relationship type that is above all others. This relationship is an exclusive/monogamous, committed, romantic and sexual relationship.

According to amatonormativity, this specific kind of relationship:

• Is something everyone wants (or should want)
• Is the most fulfilling relationship it is possible to have
• Takes precedence over all other relationships in your life

This goes hand in hand with heteronormativity, which says that this ideal relationship also has to be straight. But if you remove that part, all the normative forces of amatonormativity still exist. And they suck for just about everyone! Amatonormativity says aromantic and asexual people will never experience the “highest” form of love. It says single people are inherently less happy than people in a romantic relationship and should always be actively looking for one. It says sex without romance or romance without sex are both lacking a fundamental part of an ideal relationship. It says polyamorous people are failing to choose the one person they can be fully devoted to. It says that your monogamous, committed, romantic/sexual partner is the most important person in your life—more important than your family, your best friend you’ve known all your life, etc.

I hope we can all agree that is something queer people, and also people in general, would benefit from dismantling!

Now let me talk about an example of what I was referring to in the original post.

If you’re not familiar, Elementary is a TV series based on the Sherlock Holmes stories. It’s a modern day adaptation featuring Sherlock Holmes, consulting detective for the NYPD, and Joan (rather than John) Watson, his sober companion and eventually detective partner.

Sherlock has many casual sexual relationships with women throughout the series, while Joan has a string of romantic relationships with men. Neither of them is textually queer (although Sherlock feels very aromantic-coded, if unintentionally, and I personally think an aro reading of both characters has merit).

However, the two of them share a relationship that defies amatonormativity. Sherlock and Joan share almost every part of their lives together—first because Joan is monitoring Sherlock to help maintain his sobriety, but soon because they have actively chosen to remain in each other’s lives. They eventually become partners as detectives but are also functionally life partners, living together, sharing their resources, taking care of each other emotionally and physically. At multiple turning points in the story, they express their love for each other. Throughout this progression, their relationship never becomes romantic or sexual. While Sherlock continues to have casual sex and Joan continues to go on dates, it’s clear that Sherlock and Joan remain each other’s most important person.

This relationship defies amatonormativity, and in my opinion that makes it queer. Queer as in breaking boundaries, defying norms, challenging the idea that there is any right or wrong way to love someone.

Now it’s time for my real hot take. There is a reason I used Elementary as an example, instead of the many other pieces of fiction that have a very similar dynamic between two characters of the same gender.

Those stories—stories that center a platonic relationship between two characters of the same gender, a relationship that remains platonic but is deep, devoted, and prioritized over other relationships in the character’s lives—are textually queer. They are not textually gay (although yes, many of them are subtextually gay). But that does not stop them from being queer stories.

If you want to read into whatever subtext might be there and interpret that relationship as a gay romantic/sexual relationship, that's great. But I wish more people shared my opinion that this is not making a previously normative story into a queer one. Usually, it’s trading heteronormativity for amatonormativity, creating a relationship that defies different norms.

I’m not saying that one or the other interpretation is more valuable (in general—which one is most meaningful to you is a personal preference). I think they’re both queer interpretations of the story. However, given how often stories like the ones I’m describing get accused of “queerbaiting” or simply “not being canonically queer,” I’m pretty sure my opinion on this is not widely shared.

In conclusion: Queerness is a much broader set of concepts than just gay romance. We should consider amatonormativity another dimension of oppression that queerness is in opposition to. Ship or don’t ship whatever is more fun or meaningful to you but please don’t assign moral righteousness to one kind of queerness while erasing another. Also, please be nice to aro and ace people, we already have enough to deal with. I wish none of this was a hot take. Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

I've gotten multiple responses to this post that are basically along the lines of, "I mostly agree with this, but calling close platonic relationships 'queer' still feels weird to me. That's not what 'queer' usually means and I don't know if I'd use it to describe relationships like this."

And like. I appreciate that people are listening to my point and being receptive to it, even if it feels a little Out There to them! I genuinely appreciate the folks who aren't sure they get this but are hearing me out.

But I also keep wanting to be like. Yeah, that's my point!

We don't use 'queer' to describe platonic relationships but I think we should. (Or at least, should be able to, when it fits the circumstances!) I know, and I acknowledge directly in the post, that this is not a widely accepted usage of the term. I am arguing for an expansion of the term.

I can only make guesses as to what people with this kind of reluctance are feeling, but my best guess is that they're used to "queer" (or at least "queer relationship") being used mostly in reference to gay/lesbian/same-gender love and attraction. A lot of people mostly associate the word "queer" with gay romance. And while that's a big subset of queer experiences, honestly, I think it's a shame that it's often the only type of queer experience that gets talked about.

Queer is an umbrella term for a reason! Is there any reason "queer relationships" shouldn't include, say, friendships between queer/trans people? Or romantic/sexual relationships that could be considered straight, but include one or more trans people? Or, as I make the argument above, relationships that are breaking down the normative ideas of what kinds of relationships a person is "allowed" to have, regardless of whether the people involved are themselves queer?

Maybe that last one is a leap for some people, and you think that a relationship can't be queer if the people in it don't identify with any of the LGBTQ+ labels. I understand that reservation, but honestly, I think that there's so much social pressure against non-normative relationships that people who break them should get to be considered queer / in a queer relationship if they want, and that we should get to apply queer interpretations to characters in that kind of relationship as well.

(Also, like, a lot of people in non-normative relationships are in fact queer, especially aromantic and asexual. But if we aspecs can have fun with our queer friendships and queerplatonic relationships, I don't see why anyone else shouldn't be able to!)

Anyway, all that to say that if this is pushing your definition of queer a little bit, good! That's what I was trying to do! And I hope people come away from this a little more open to the idea.

If you still aren't really convinced, that's okay. If it doesn't change what you personally use the word "queer" for, I hope you still get something else out of this post—like learning about amatonormativity and starting to see it around you, or considering friendships in media through a queer / anti-amatonormative lens of analysis when it feels relevant. (Or just being more chill about aro and ace people in fandoms who don't ship your ships. Please. We would really appreciate it.)

And I just want to say, while I'm here: Thank you for the incredible response to this post. It's just over 10k notes as I'm posting this and I'm so happy that so many people are interested in this topic & my thoughts on it (and so grateful that the response has been 99.99% positive so far). To all the aspec folks who have told me I've put something into words that you never could—thank you, I'm truly honored and I love you all 💜💚. To all the people who have told me I've opened their eyes to something new—thank you for being curious and willing to learn! And to all the people who still don't get it but are here anyway—thank you for listening to what I had to say. I'm glad you're here.

made this into a cross-stitch pattern to share ₍ᐢ. ༝ .ᐢ₎⋆｡°✩

(This post is brought to you by the fact that tumblr are, hilariously, claiming that 50% of current users are gen z, and i wanna see how accurate claim that is.)