I said I wouldn't, but then I did

My feelings about queernormative worlds in SFF is that I can often enjoy it, but I rarely believe it.

Almost everything surrounding gender, sex, and sexuality, and all the different social norms and expectations that different cultures build up around them, derive ultimately from the various realities of sexual activity and pregnancy: who can have it, who can’t, for how long, who does have it, who doesn’t, and what that means for society. I’m not being bioessentialist here, because human bodies are all quite different and different cultures develop different ways to react to that, and rates of and reactions to fertility can be different, and what different sexual and gender roles mean in different cultures and who can and can’t embody them can get extremely different. (Hell, how pregnancy itself even works can be different depending on where you live, what your lifestyle is like, and what your diet consists of!) But like, the reason gender even matters, historically, has been because of reproduction. And the reason reproduction matters, in agricultural societies anyway, has very often been because of property ownership and the need to work on farms.

So I’m totally here for queernormative worlds. But to interest me you have to answer the questions of: okay, but how does your culture work though, and how is kinship structured, and how is reproduction seen, and how is property inheritance understood, and how does gender fit into all this, for me to feel like you’ve actually tried. (And don’t say that there ARE no norms, so no one falls outside of them. There’s no culture where that’s true.)

Sci-fi worlds can get away with this easier than fantasy worlds, imo. Partially because they can posit that it is our future but we’ve gone through all of the Social Justice Struggles already and solved them, but also because technology can really alter all of these topics. The Vorkosigan Saga, for instance, makes it clear that Beta Colony is as gender-egalitarian and free-love as it is because of contraception and uterine replicators, which FULLY decouple “the ability to have children” from “the need for anyone to be pregnant.” This is huge, and the Vorkosigan Saga treats it as appropriately so! Ancillary Justice is another one that thinks a lot about how the genderless culture that decenters romance as a core social organizing principle works. But I read so many low-ish-tech fantasy worlds that are happily queernormative and gender doesn’t matter and they just feel shallow. I don’t believe this world. I don’t dislike it, exactly, I just don’t believe it, I don’t believe people would be like this because you’ve put no effort into imagining a world that works like this makes any sense.

Which is totally fine for people’s D&D games and cute oneshot comics and personal works and such, but when you want me to take your worldbuilding seriously, you’re going to have to convince me! And a lot of it is not convincing.

A little boy just looked at me and went “woah! That girl is so tall!! I didn’t know girls could get that tall!” To his grandpa.

Grandpa talked to him about how he had tall women in his family and how pretty tall girls are and the boy said he should ask me out 💀 so grandpa was like “she’s probably already married”

Listening to this exchange was so cute and so gender affirming bc not once did either of them imply I was actually a man I’m gonna cry this was so sweet.

Just like. Grandpa didn’t try to “um actually” correct him about me being trans just went instantly into giving him respect women juice lmfao

I was bracing for the kid to get corrected on calling me a girl but when it didn’t happen i felt such a relief instantly. At no point did it become A Problem for me to deal with, grandpa just gently had a convo about how women come in all sizes and how the boy has really tall family members too and I’m just sitting here trying not to cry (positive) bc gender euphoria mixed with it just being such a cute convo to listen to.

I’ve been having a lot of anxiety lately as someone who “doesn’t pass” but who’s also extremely Visible due to being 6’2” and having a very distinctive style, but every time I have a younger queer or kid look at me with stars in their eyes because some facet of me that I refuse to hide is amazing to them, it makes me so fucking happy. Like, to this kid I wasn’t some tranny, I was just a Giant Woman and he didn’t realize that was possible until he saw me. 🥹

A giant woman :)

If you're in the US military or National Guard, and are given an illegal or unconstitutional order, the GI Rights hotline (1-877-447-4487) is there to help give you the support you need to do the right thing by refusing it. It would be good to think about this now before it becomes a live issue for you and it would be smart of you to memorize that number.

from their website https://girightshotline.org/:

Mr Marcurio Skyrim. First companion character I ever had a crush on (and figured out how to make carry an infinite amount of cabbages)

Part of a sacred Aboriginal woman's site was excavated as part of a rescue archaeology program for an impending rail corridor. Research and consultation with Traditional Custodians found some 1500 stone tools produced over 7000 years. This demonstrates thousands of years of cultural continuity that continues to this day.

Excavations of women's sites are rare, as knowledge of them is restricted and not shared with the uninitiated. Protecting these sites under cultural heritage laws requires breaking cultural protocol to share knowledge with strangers.

“Ocean Clean Up”

by Toby Nicol

2024 Siena Drone Photography Awards

Maybe it's just me as a Filipino who has lived through a murderous dictatorship and oligarchies in a queerphobic country controlled by the rich who brutalize grassroots pro worker movements all under the military abuse of US imperialism but...

You just gotta keep showing up. Support each other. Don't just fight for yourself. The work is hard, but you just gotta keep doing it. You'll always see results, even if they're not always the ones you want, or as big as you want them to be.

All your work always matters. Even if it doesn't feel like it at first. It always matters.

12 years of murderous and plunderous dictators but fuck it we ball

I forgot to update this when it happened but Duterte was arrested by the ICC because people, especially women in the Philippines, never stopped working to bring him to justice. Dr. Raquel Fortun examined the bodies of drug war victims and the evidence she found is being used in the case. Photographers like Raffy Lerma and Ezra Acayan took photos of the many killings by police.

People like Jude Sabio, Antonio Trillanes, members of the Magdalo partylist, and Leila de Lima, submitted the case to the ICC, then activists and family members of the victims led by the National Union of People's Lawyers also submitted documents to the ICC.

People like Patricia Evangelista and Maria Ressa continued to bring his crimes to light internationally.

People like Risa Hontiveros have never stopped representing the people instead of corruption in the government, even with the dangers.

All this, alongside the continuous work of activists, is what helped us get to this point. Sara Duterte in impeachment proceedings because of her corruption as Vice President. Rodrigo Duterte in the ICC awaiting trial. After 7 years, because they never stopped working towards justice.

The work always matters.

screwballs were really onto something… even the mid ones…. they’re just doing so much with gender dynamics that’s truly so fascinating, and also doing so much with the institution of marriage. like hollywood really worked to cement heterosexuality as the baseline (to the extent that women were essentially only in movies if they had a heterosexual plotline of some kind) but at the same time filmmakers were deliberately making very ubiquitous satires of marriage. i’m esp thinking of bluebeards eighth wife and palm beach story, where marriage is framed as essentially a monetary transaction that can be gamed and bartered for and exploited to allow women access to more power. so so fascinating

I've already said that my number one piece of writing advice is to read.

But my number two piece of advice is this: be deliberate.

Honestly this would fix so many pieces of bad writing advice. Don't forbid people from doing something, tell them to be conscious and deliberate about it. This could help stop people from falling into common mistakes without limiting their creativity. Black and white imperatives may stop a few annoying beginner habits, but ultimately they will restrict artistic expression.

Instead of "don't use epithets": "Know the effect epithets have and be deliberate about using them." Because yes, beginners often misuse them, but they can be useful when a character's name isn't known or when you want to reduce them to a particular trait they have.

Instead of "don't use 'said'" or "just use 'said'": "Be deliberate about your use of dialogue tags." Because sometimes you'll want "said" which fades into the background nicely, but sometimes you will need a more descriptive alternative to convey what a character is doing.

Instead of "don't use passive voice": "Be deliberate about when you use passive voice." Because using it when it's not needed can detract from your writing, but sometimes it can be useful to change the emphasis of a sentence or to portray a particular state of mind.

Instead of blindly following or ignorantly neglecting the rules of writing, familiarize yourself with them and their consequences so you can choose when and if breaking them would serve what you're trying to get across.

Your writing is yours. Take control of it.

It probably sounds like I'm preaching to the choir here because most of my mutuals are already great writers. But I'm hoping this will make it to the right people.

Badass ladies

Well fucks? Get to it!

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one big thing i think people outside fandom (like, all fandoms, fandom in general, not any particular one) tend to misunderstand is they know it's a subculture of people who are weirdly deeply invested in fictional media, and they hear about drama caused by people in those subcultures being unhinged in not-fun ways, and they think the unhingedness comes from the fact of being overinvested in works of fiction.

which is a natural assumption, but in my experience that's not really the case? like in my experience the drama llamas in fandom are usually not the ones who are just genuinely very deeply into the fiction. i've known people who are basically thinking about star trek or x-men comics or supernatural pretty much 100% of their free time and ime that type of person is usually very nice and surprisingly functional in their regular life. when someone's a constant nexus of fandom drama it's usually not that they are obsessed with the actual work of fiction the fandom is about, it's at least one of the following:

and very often you get the same person doing 2 and sometimes even all 3 of these, and that's where the trouble really starts

holy shit I've never seen this articulated but OP is EXACTLY RIGHT.

All of this, but also, sometimes people are just abusive/manipulative/vindictive in general, and they are like that in all of their life (online and off), and if they happen to be fans they will pull that shit in fandom too, and calling it "fandom drama" is true but also it's not caused by them being in fandom, it's caused by the fact that they would be that sort of asshole no matter what community they were in.

I love that the pandemic actually definitively proved a lot of those "hard" questions for us. Masking up reduced cases of the flu to almost nonexistent numbers and we had zero flu deaths for a time. The welfare and social service and unemployment programs helped keep people living paycheck to paycheck out of poverty, and those stimulus checks some folks keep complaining about actually massively benefitted the common man and the economy. Individual personal travel was so extremely restricted on a global scale that we basically have concrete proof that individual restraint in terms of driving cars or travelling means absolutely nothing by comparison because the mass pollution is coming from the fisheries and the corporations with private jets and container ships. Working from home actually has massive benefits for a company like productivity boosts and better mental health of employees while also saving gas

and we're just. Willingly going back to how everything was before. We were shown how to do things better and the people in charge said "that's nice but we just want to get everything 'back to normal' :)"

we’re not willingly going back to how everything was before. we are being forced back into it by members of the ruling class who found out that making things better for almost everyone else made them feel bad.

Let's not forget about any of these things. Let's reblog and schedule this post to pop in in the future to remind us of what we may have forgotten a little.

Do not forget.

My primary takeaway from COVID was "The first thing people did when they had free time from work was they started demanding a better world. The next time this happens the executive ruling class will literally let everyone in the labor class die before they let them have 3 months free time ever again, because they cannot allow that better world to come to be."