Thinking about the opposite ends of whatever the hell spectrum this is

Vampire fuckability in the 1970s? Amount of cunt being served? Anyway Angel was eating rats while Spike was eating pussy

the glorious imperfection of our flag means death

One of my favourite pieces of media criticism is Everyone Is Beautiful and No-One is Horny, by RS Benedict. 

In this article, Benedict details the hyperreality(1) of bodies present in most modern films and the distinct uneroticism of those within the Marvel machine — where glorious, robot-like bodies make motions towards human sexuality but never quite get there. 

Heroes have rock-hard abs and are six foot four, and heroines long blonde hair — if they’re funny, and brunette — if they’re smart. There’s not a single freckle out of place, and not a single belly — unless someone on screen has really let themselves go for comical effect, of course.(2)

And it’s boring. 

“No one is ugly. No one is really fat. Everyone is beautiful.” Benedict writes, “And yet, no one is horny. Even when they have sex, no one is horny. No one is attracted to anyone else.”(3)

Desire is not felt in most modern cinema — and it is hardly observed. The camera does not take an active interest in the proceedings, but rather slides between them; watching gleaming couples kiss and then panning away, or observing a meaningless rut on a couch where two people grip at each others faces and kiss no further south than their belly-buttons. There’s no interest, and no climax, and we’re all left feeling unsatisfied.

Which is why I quite liked Our Flag Means Death.

Our Flag Means Death is HBO’s queer pirate rom-com, and it definitely deserves a second season. It’s not a sex-filled show (in the sense that no-one is actively fucking on screen, like in Euphoria and the like), but sexuality and romance do come up quite a bit, y’know, like they do in real life.

And also because it’s a rom com. 

From Black Pete (Mathew Maher) and Lucius (Nathan Foad) having a moment in the galley, to Jim (Vico Ortiz) and Oluwande (Samson Kayo) reuniting, and Stede and Ed staring at each other longingly, romantic moments in this show are charged with desire and implicitly important to the narrative. For once, the intimacy is wrapped into the narrative and treated as something important and beautiful, not thrown into the work out of obligation, as a “homoerotic nod” to a more heterocentric narrative.(4)

Framing queer love with warmth and emotion is a key aspect to the filmography of Our Flag Means Death. The camera is a partner in this equation, not voyeuristically looking upon queer moments, but watching them with joy.

Ed (Taika Waititi) and Stede (Rhys Darby) wake up together in the crow’s nest together after a night of revelry. It’s dawn, the light on them is warm, and though they’re not aware they’re in love — yet — the composition of the shot shows us that they are. Beats alone in the dark on the ship, or hiding under golden oil lamps all hold similar moments of intimacy, and a homoerotic sword fight just adds to the overt emotion.

Even in moments of mild peril, like the one below, warmth floods the screen in the form of soft fabrics and tender gestures. Prolonged moments of fond eye contact direct the action, and a lot of scenes are slow, without intense narrative pace, allowing for honest, sweet reactions and (apparently somewhat) improvised dialogue.

This show has very little active sexuality; we certainly don’t see any more nudity than a bare chest, or any more sexuality than a kiss - but it contains a clear sexual tension that runs through the thread of the show until the credits roll on Episode 10. 

It’s obvious, it’s prevalent, and it does not let up.

It is also very, very new.

We do not see a lot of people like this on screen, and we especially don’t see a lot of queer people like this on screen. It is an implicitly queer romance, too — one that steps beyond the endless homoerotic cop-out of “they’re just good friends” and shatters the heterotopic world we so often see. (5) The queerness is in their bodies, in their mannerisms, in their words — it is woven into the work.

While the actors in Our Flag Means Death are all attractive folk, they’re not attractive folk in the sense of Hollywood perfection. 

Gone are the glistening abs of the Hollywood superhero — born from three days worth of dehydration and extremely restrictive diets.(6) Gone are the Eurocentric, heteronormative ideals.

The characters in Our Flag Means Death are built more like people we see in our day to day lives. 

They’re lean, they’re hairy, they’re broad, they’re fat, they have lines on their faces or dark spots or limps. They smile, and they don’t necessarily all have perfect teeth. Maybe their hair or beards aren’t coiffed within an inch of perfection. They’re real people, and I think that’s where the drawcard is.

Real people hold an eroticism that’s far more interesting. Maybe their kissing is a little messy, or their desire a little fraught, but it’s imperfect in its existence, and that’s where we find the beauty in it.

(Believe me, by the look of my Tiktok feed, every single person is drawn to the less-than-idolized-perfection beauty of Our Flag Means Death. You would not believe how many fan edits I’ve seen of a five second clip where Taika Waititi’s character, Ed, shows his belly. Or the casts’ beards. Or their stubble. Or their hands. Or literally anything.) 

These characters are not portrayed as anything other than what they are — people existing in their own skin, relishing in their own bodies, living and loving as people who aren’t perfect cookie-cutter clones of themselves. There is never any body-shaming, nothing that suggests that any of these folk feel obliged to drag themselves to fit their looks into a certain box (barring the period-typical bigotry, which the show itself does challenge profusely). 

That in itself is also queer — a transgressive act that tears through our Euro-centric, heterocentic and inhumanly perfect body standards and allows for audience identification on a much more intimate level. 

It’s beautiful, it’s glorious, and it’s hot.

Fuck, it’s so good to see.

 — 

1 —Wikipedia contributors. (2022, May 13). Hyperreality. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperreality

2 — Plotz, B. (2020). The Funny Fat Body: Slapstick and Gross-Out. In Fat on Film: Gender, Race and Body Size in Contemporary Hollywood Cinema (pp. 128–174). London,: Bloomsbury Academic. Retrieved May 23, 2022, from http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781350119390.ch-005

3 — Benedict, R. S. (2021, April 23). Everyone Is Beautiful and No One Is Horny. Blood Knife. https://bloodknife.com/everyone-beautiful-no-one-horny/

4 — Tsika, N. (2015, May 9). Blue transfusions: internet porn and the pirating of queer cinema’s sex scenes. Taylor & Francis. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23268743.2016.1174074

5 — de Lauretis, T. (2011). Queer Texts, Bad Habits, and the Issue of a Future. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 17(2–3), 243–263. https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-1163391

6— Rense, S. (2017, March 8). Hugh Jackman Put Himself Through a Hellish Regime for Logan. Esquire. https://www.esquire.com/lifestyle/health/news/a53724/hugh-jackman-logan-workout/

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Announcing SPBB 2022

Like the coackroach (Deadpool?) that just won’t die, the SPBB will be back again in 2022 - with a few changes!

Timeline: The event will run from February to August of next year.

Sign-ups: Sign-ups for both writers and artists will open in February (Exact dates to be confirmed, so make sure you follow this page for announcements over the next few months!).

Writers: Writers will be required to have a 50% draft ready on sign-up, so there’s plenty of time between now and February to dust off that unpublished WIP laying forgotten in your Google docs, or finally put to page that niggling plot bunny that won’t shut up.

Artists: The mods have been working hard to best implement the feedback and suggestions following last year’s event, and we will be releasing a more robust artist guide ahead of the event. Our suggestions page remains open.

The FAQ, Schedule and About will be updated in the new year so keep an eye out for notifications!

The SPBB Mods MsCaptainWinchester and Nimohtar

its so shiddy when u have to convince yourself to do your hobbies. like, its fun, you like it, why cant you just do it. do it. do it. but what if…. mindless media consumption instead….

im so sorry to the seven thousand of you so far who relate

upset at the accuracy of these tags

true or false, everyone should be making their best effort 100% of the time, it’s lazy to do otherwise.  

excellent! now true or false: leisure time is only valuable if you spend it productively. if you are not creating something or enriching yourself, you are just wasting time.

terrific work!

so logically, you can stop feeling guilty about “wasting” time on “useless” things, because it’s neither wasteful nor useless if you enjoy it.

no!!!! no that is not the message you are supposed to take from this! Bad tumblr!!!!

I know this to be true but the tiny capitalist that sits on my shoulder whispers that it’s false.

I HATE that capitalist

I used to not have that guy as a kid, but then I found the little bastard hiding in the box for some board game. He hasn’t given me a break since

when you turn 18 the IRS sends you a little poltergeist in a gift box that looks exactly like this

“Ship means something you want to see happen.” Bitch, no it don’t. This weird-ass modern culture of lobbying show-runners to make your ship canon didn’t emerge until the advent of social media. (And recent social media like twitter, not shit-you-forgot-existed like MySpace.) Shipping and fandom in general have been around much longer, so you can stop acting like “this is the way it has always been uwu” right the fuck now.

Until relatively recently, most fans I’ve known have been perfectly okay with their ships never being canon. I, personally, would be actively offended if certain ships of mine became canon. That is not why I ship them. What I want from canon and what I want from fandom are often entirely different things that only intersect on the margins.That is why fanworks are called “transformative” ffs.

This exactly.

I’m so glad someone said this. A lot of my fav ships I specifically have no desire to see become canon, especially since they’re often in shows that don’t really do much with romance and I PREFER them that way. Shipping and fan fiction are separate things for me.

“What I want from canon and what I want from fandom are often entirely different things”

shipping isn’t always romantic idealization either which is an annoying recent mindset in fandoms, mainly its liking the dynamic of two characters and wanting to explore it in fanwork whether it be for sappy cute reasons or horrible awful unhealthy reasons, whatever is appealing/interesting to you about the pair.

My husband’s job primarily employs adult men but there is one (1) teenage girl and my husband said originally he worried she might be a bit of an outcast but instead every man on the crew was like “huh guess I am a dad/older brother now.”

She was in a car crash on the way to work one morning and called my husband to let him know she’d be late and he was like wtf guess I’m gonna be late too because I’m coming to pick you up and then he told his team and they were like I think you mean WE are coming.

Imagine you are a teenage girl probably rushing to get to work and you crash your probably new car and feel absolutely miserable and now you’ll be late to work but then suddenly in the distance a car full of all the adult men you work with just pulls up and is like “we came all the way here to pick you up” the mental image right now is fr.

Apparently she tried to call her dad but it was 3am and he was obviously sleeping so she called my husband and he not only came to find her but fished her glasses out of the hood of the car (she’d dropped them while looking inside), drove her to the hospital, and told her to take the day off. She insisted on coming back to work so he used his lunch break to watch TV with her to make sure she didn’t doze off (concussion risk).

You’ve heard of the Mom friend but my husband is very much the Dad friend. He said when he answered the phone she said “hey please don’t be mad” and he’s never felt such powerful Fatherhood energy in his life.

Girl: *calls for aid*

Every single dad packed into the car:

This is possibly my favorite response to this post

This girls father: Thanks for helping my daughter out guys

Your husband and all his coworkers:

Edit: Filled in like 2 seconds, you mad lads!

If anyone can find me the Team Red or Avengers version of the "Would You Fuck a Clone of Yourself?" meme, I will personally write you 500 words of weird smut, or do a quick paint of your pet.

Marvel would rather die than have a canon queer m/m relationship

requested by les-diaboliques

lovely 5 ep

Female Loki drama aside, I’m glad that an age appropriate actress was chosen to play her and not the usual early 20 something we usually see.

It’s just a mere 3 yr age difference between Hiddleston and Sophia *chefs kiss* and I’m here for it.

hot take: the reason Lord of the Rings doesn’t go much into Aragorn’s tax policy is bcos Lord of the Rings is not about Aragorn. Lord of the Rings is about hobbits.

more specifically, lord of the rings is about Frodo’s journey. it starts with him getting the Ring and ends with him leaving middle earth. what Aragorn did as king is not expanded on in detail bcos it’s of 0 relevance to Frodo on account of he sailed off to the Undying Lands.

the majority of the societies visited are not described in detail and have an ‘unreal’, story-book quality compared to the Shire bcos our point of view characters are the hobbits and we are experiencing these places as they do. the Shire, their home, is in contrast very real and grounded and detailed.

#i love this post bcuz its just a direct drag of george r r martin

yes that’s exactly what it is

Stop saying the dwarves of Khazad Dum ‘dug too greedily and too deep’ DWARVES DIG. IT’S WHAT THEY DO. I did’t see any of you popping over to let Durin VI know that he’s on top of a Balrog, how was anyone supposed to know! Saying it was ‘too deep’ or ‘too greedy’ is just Sindar propaganda, as if yall weren’t super content to sit pretty and huff weed in Menegroth while everyone else did the heavy lifting. Maybe if you’d done ANYTHING during the first age there wouldn’t BE a balrog under there in the fIRST PLACE!!! EVER THINK OF THAT? CELEBORN?

This is the real tea right here

[Image description in Alt Text.] [ID: Red, block text on a transparent background. The text reads: ‘Fanfic Author PSA’. The dark red Archive of Our Own logo is depicted on either side of the lettering. End ID.]

Many people who read fanfiction also require the assistance of text-to-speech or audio description software. Blind and visually impaired people are very much present in the fanfiction and fandom communities, but are so frequently disregarded or forgotten about.

If you are writing a work and like to utilise paragraph breaks, please do not use combinations such as the following:

[Image description in Alt Text. I have used an image to avoid what I will describe below.] [ID: Four examples of punctuation and icons that are disruptive when used as line breakers. The first line is a series of O letters. The second is a series of asterisks. The third is a series of dots, circles and stars. The last is a series of tildes. End ID.]

The software will read these combinations out loud letter for letter or symbol for symbol. For example; it would read to the user the word ‘asterisk’ six times in a row, or the word ‘tilde’ five times in a row.

This is unpleasant, confusing and often irritating for blind or visually impaired readers. If you would like a similar sample of what it would sound like, enter one of the above combinations into Google Translate and use the audio button.

Here is a post by @ao3commentoftheday​ that also details this difficulty and provides links to downloadable audio transcribers and fanfiction audio readers. These are also helpful for if you simply wish to listen to fanfiction but can’t find a podfic of the work.

Screen Reader Friendly and Screen Reader Compatible are AO3 tags that help visually impaired readers track and access fanfiction that is consciously created with their needs in mind. Please consider adding these tags to your works in order to expand the range of works that visually impaired readers can safely and confidently access.

Alternatives to these are:

Reminder: ‘liking’ this post does not spread awareness.

sometimes people are absolutely WILD about comments, acting like the idea that they shouldn’t be a jerk is a violation of their first amendment rights 

last week i read a fic i HATED. it was well written and highly recommended and i wish i had never read it. hours of my life i will never get back. 

i disagreed with: it’s interpretation on canon, it’s take on mental health, the social contract between loved ones, recovery, trauma, boundaries, and … more tbh

i could NOT stop thinking about how much i disagreed with it. me and this fic have philosophical differences so large i could give a ted talk and i was still super irritated about it days later. 

so you know what i did?

i called up my friends and was like “you guys have no context but i’m going to bitch about this fic you haven’t read in this fandom you haven’t consumed for the next thirty minutes” and they were like “okay sure it’s a tuesday night, we’re in a pandemic, i have nothing better to do”

what did i not do? 

leave a comment on this person’s fic because i’m a human person

^^^^^THIS VAGUEBLOG ABOUT IT LIKE A FUCKING ADULT

Title: Ducks!

Author: Devral

Artist: Lord Avon

Rating: PG-13

Warnings: Swearing, Deadpool Thought Boxes, Some Disturbing Imagery

Word Count: 7.9K

Posting Date: February 20th, 2021

Summary: After a fight with Peter, Wade goes stomping through Central Park. He stumbles upon something extremely unexpected. He’s not ready to be a mama!

Teaser Excerpt (under the cut): 

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