Avatar

You've Heard Of Dykes On Bikes

@butchcatgirlthighs

Now get ready for girls on american curls
Avatar

Tears of the Kingdom is the first time the Zelda series has produced a direct, it's-the-same-Link-we-swear-you-guys sequel since 2007's Phantom Hourglass, so this is probably many contemporary fans' first turn on this particular merry-go-round.

Allow me to assure you: there is no great mystery, and there is no master plan. Every worldbuilding inconsistency and every bit of timeline weirdness between Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom is purely a product of the fact that the Zelda franchise's writers have the creative impulse control of a pack of squirrels, and don't give a single solitary fuck about continuity.

When you accept that this is true, and you see how cavalierly they're willing to treat continuity even between two games which are ostensibly direct sequels starring the same cast of characters and set just a few years apart, you may begin to understand why the timeline of the series as a whole looks the way that it does.

it’s hard for me to express how heartbreaking it is to see gay people, especially–but not exclusively–gay women, buying into this idea that the closet is an idyllic place to grow up as a trans woman. that we’re socialized–without complications–in the way that men are socialized, that we reap every benefit cisgender boys, teenagers, or men reap because of their gender.

like. gay women, do you remember growing up being told you were meant to find a husband, carry the children you have with him, support them and him first, maybe to the point of effacing yourself? and gay men, do you remember growing up being told you were meant to find a wife, get a good job, father children, and carry on the family name and everything that goes with it?

do you remember realizing that you could never be this? and that, at the end of the day, the thought of being it repulsed you? that you were fundamentally different–flawed, even–fundamentally wrong and that everything you needed in your life was immoral and unnatural, or at least a disappointment? do you remember that choice you made? between rejecting everything you’d been told was in your future trying to make something of that pain–and sacrificing a fundamental part of yourself trying to be something you weren’t?

do you think straight people go through that? do you think that, being told all the same things, they know what it’s like to feel that panic and alienation?

i don’t understand why they can’t see that our closets are like this too. that we didn’t grow up internalizing everything society prescribes for a man or woman–that we grew up full of dread, and horror, and constant questioning of what was wrong with us and how we could possibly exist in the world. that, even if we tried to fulfill those prescriptions, we did so at the cost of our bodies and personhoods. that, as women, we were reckoning with the confines and disenfranchisement of womanhood on top of this.

that denial of empathy and willful blindness is so painful, especially coming from people who share so much of our childhood traumas. like, that people are so inclined to see us as Other that they’ll look straight past their own experiences is so impossibly heartbreaking and demoralizing.

Avatar
Many trans people — especially those of us who were assigned male at birth (AMAB) — find that we are denied the closet. Instead of garnering expressions of sympathy and understanding for that period of our lives, we are often mischaracterized as having “had it easy” during our pre-transition years, with some imagining that we must have been “basking” or “reveling” in “male privilege” all along the way. […] People who employ the “male privilege” gambit against trans female/feminine people are clearly not using “privilege” as a teaching tool. Rather, they are wielding it as a weapon. In short, they are playing a game of “Oppression Olympics,” portraying themselves as uniquely or supremely marginalized, while painting those whom they dislike or disagree with as “oppressors” who are supposedly responsible for inflicting said marginalization upon them. Despite its popularity, Oppression Olympics is not activism; it is merely an attempt to establish or reinforce new hierarchies — I discuss this at length in my second book Excluded. It must also be said that wielding “male privilege” in this manner is a classic TERF move. […] This rhetorical maneuver — painting trans female/feminine people as entitled “men” who merely “appropriate” femaleness and femininity, and pose potential threats to “real women” — has long been a central strategy of trans-exclusionary feminism. So I find it astounding that some people who (at least nominally) consider themselves to be pro-trans cannot recognize this blatant tactic for what it is. […] When people raise the issue of male privilege […] when discussing trans female/feminine people, what they are actually doing is dwelling on a single (often exaggerated, and sometimes entirely imagined) aspect of our past, to the exclusion of our many other characteristics (including our identities and lived histories moving through the world as women, as well as our struggles with other forms of marginalization). This feels invalidating to us. It erases our lived realities. More often than not, it is an attempt to overtly or tacitly exclude us from the communities to which we belong, whether they be women’s, feminist, LGBTQIA+, or trans in nature.

All pairings were submitted! Here are some submitter notes:

Red/Blue (Time War):

oh the whole book is about how gay they are. it's about letters they write to each other fighting on opposite sides of a war to control the stream of time and every timeline and iirc by the end they fight against both sides of the war to carve out a space for themselves

Jedtavius:

the actors played them as if they were a married couple. and jed quoted brokeback mountain
Avatar

The new Zelda game was totally worth the $75 solely for the scene where Ganondorf turns to link and says "even after 100 years you're just as submissive and breedable" and then impregnates him with septuplets (a nice reference to the seven sages)

Avatar

I have a story that’s topical; I’ve told it before on tumblr, but it’s topical to this and thus worth repeating.

Back around 2005, I ran into a Baptist missionary who spotted my kippah and basically took that as permission to attempt to missionize at me.

I defended myself, using the basics of the knowledge I have of Christian theology and texts that I learned specifically to fend off missionaries.

We went back and forth and back and forth, and he wouldn’t leave me alone for… oh, probably the better part of an hour.

And then…

Then this part is seared into my memory. I have nightmares about it.

He smiled at me and said that, with my knowledge of the Gospels, I am sure to be one of the Elect when the time comes.

I asked what the hell that meant.

And he told me. He told me in a tone of utmost sincerity–even envy, because to his belief system, it was a good and enviable thing…

Because to be one of the “Elect” is to be one of the 144,000 Jews who accept Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior at the Apocalypse. This will happen when all of the Children of Israel have been Gathered in the Land of Israel; war will break out, the Assembled Jews will have the Gospels preached to us, and 144,000 Thousand–Twelve Tribes times Twelve Apostles times One Thousand–Jews will spontaneously convert to Christianity.

Once that occurs, all of the Jews die in the Apocalypse, but the Elect ascend to Heaven to be Jesus Christ’s personal escorts down to Earth for his Second Coming (the rest of the Jews go to hell for eternity, in case you’re wondering).

In short…

He told me that I existed to be a human blood sacrifice to bring back his god. I was not a person to him. I was nothing more than a means to that end.

And he was jealous. Jealous of the fact that he viewed my knowledge of his religion, something that I had learned specifically to fend him and his kind off, as proof that his religion was right and correct and inevitable. That in learning it, I had made myself more valuable to his worldview.

Jealous that, because I was more valuable, because I existed to die for his god, I would meet that god before him.

It was terrifying, to be told that I was to die… and he thought that it was a good thing.

This is how Evangelicals view death. Not as something to be avoided, but something to seek, something that is a positive, and not just for themselves… but for everybody.

They are the closest thing to a full-fledged Religion of Evil on the planet, and I say that without hyperbole.

When you guys say the US is being controlled by a death cult, you werent kidding!

It’s also worth noting that a significant number of premillenial dispensationalists (aka people who believe in the rapture - actually a pretty small minority of christians found almost exclusively in the USA) not only think the end of the world is good, they think they can rules lawyer their way into making it happen.

when I was a little kid I used to build nests out of sticks and leave them in trees, because I thought we’d get more birds that way. If I created the conditions in which I knew birds to exist, that would cause birds to appear. That is how a lot of evangelicals think armageddon works.

they’re surprisingly pro-israel, even by american standards in general, which seems off given how virulently anti-semitic they all are. until you remember that they think the twelve tribes gathering in israel is one of the conditions for triggering the end times. they don’t just hate palestinians because they’re islamophobic, they literally think them living in jerusalem is stopping jesus from coming back. (This is also how they justify the fact that most of them want all jews removed from america - they want to send them back to their ancestral homeland *cough*to be a human sacrifice for jesus*cough* so how could you ever think they’re antisemitic?!)

this also creates their extremely weird attitudes to the UN, which most of them think will be responsible for the antichrist (the apocalype of john says he will unite all nations - and never mind that we know who he was and he’s been dead nearly 2000 years now, and uniting all nations meant bringing them under the rule of the roman empire, which provably didn’t happen), which they want to happen because it’s a precursor to Jesus, but also don’t want to happen because wanting it would mean supporting satan and if they do that then they won’t be part of the group who get saved during the rapture.

(Also satan is definitely real guys, he’s really really real and 100% in the bible and not primarily a product of medieval pop-culture at all!)

and hand in hand with the ‘we can make the world end’ thing comes the belief that this is going to happen soon, any day now, so why worry about stuff like depleting resources or climate change or loss of species, because it’s all going to be destroyed within 1 generation maximum, probably next year, so who cares?

oh, and don’t forget that america is overwhealmingly calvinist, voted mainstream protestant theology most likely to fuck up your brain 471 years running! Basically Calvinism is founded on the idea that God knows in advance who’s going to be saved, and most people are actually on earth not to excercise their free will to attain grace, but just to suffer, because they were born inherently bad and god knows it and is basically fucking with them. You can never become one of God’s elect, you can only prove that you already were. On an individual level this is bad, but not that much worse than other christian denominations, you prove you’re one of gods elect by doing good christian things like prayer and charity, if you sin you might go to hell. It encourages more pettiness and rules-lawyering when considering sins, but overall, pretty standard stuff.

Where it gets really fucked, and the reason why John Calvin is number 2 on my list of Christian theologians to punch in the face if there turns out to be an afterlife (right after augustine of hippo), is that it encourages you to think of everyone who isn’t you as either good or inherently evil with hope of redemption. and since everyone wants to think they’re a good person, the criteria for inherently evil with no hope of redemption basically becomes ‘not like me’, or at least ‘not like the ideal my religious community holds up as an example’.

I would posit this is also why they evangelise in the way they do - they’re not actually trying to “save” anyone else, they’re trying to prove to their community that they’ve already been saved

so yeah, they don’t just look forward to death, they’re literally trying to end the world, and fuck everyone else, because anyone who isn’t exactly like them was born evil and can never actually be saved. and these people are in government in the most powerful nation on earth.

Horray!

I think that in splatoon world they don’t have gender but they did find out about gender from looking at old human stuff and have splooquizzes (splatoon uquizzes) that are like “are you a boy or girl?” And take them for fun and are like “oh you’re looking so boy today” or “so fresh! Very girl.”