Sometimes, I say smart things.

“IT’S LIKE A SALAD BAR BUT WITH PIE”: in which Kassie is catching up on the last two weeks in SPN:

Sam is conflating Dean and Hallucifer.

Lucifer — if he’s in anyway the real Lucifer, which I choose to believe he is until proven otherwise — is deliberately playing into Sam’s brother-issues by saying the same things as (or similar things to what) Dean says.

And season five spent so much time and energy building up the DEAN = MICHAEL / SAM = LUCIFER parallelism.

gkrghdfgergkh.

Oh my GOD. This is so nifty, I could write a thesis.

Okay, so…

Preemptive trigger warning: discussion of mental illness and ableism directed at non-neurotypical people, in general and specifically from my mother.

The other day, on my way home from lunch with one of my high school friends, I stopped at Borders to check out their going out of business sale. For one thing, I love books. I’m like a dragon, except that instead of hoarding gems and shiny things, I hoard books and absorb the knowledge contained therein. For another thing, I’ve been shopping at Borders since my mom was pregnant with me. I’ve been going to the one by my parents’ house since I can remember. And… I have a lot of feelings about Borders going out of business. Almost all of them involve flailing and crying and screaming about how it’s not fair.

There is a reason why this is under my “gpoy” tag.

Anyway, so. I had to check out the graphic novels, obviously, because if everything’s 10-40% off, you can bet I’m going to be getting as much Batman stuff as I can. And I did. I got Arkham Reborn, The Dark Knight Returns so I’ll be able to stop borrowing it from people… and I picked up a “memoir as graphic novel” called Psychiatric Tales. I love the Bat-Family, and I have a huge fondness for things like Glen Duncan’s Lucifer series, Gaiman’s The Sandman (which I actually need to go back for, just in case Borders hasn’t sold out, since… I am stuck in a position of constantly borrowing them but not owning my own copies, except of Endless Nights and the official Sandman companion)… but despite all of my more conventional comic interests, the genre I really love is the “memoir as graphic novel.”

I think it started when I read David Beauchard’s Epileptic for conference work in spring of my sophomore year, but… I love more than just his. Like, Persepopolis, his memoir of his nightmares, Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, and Art Spiegelman’s Maus… About the only way I could love some more conventional comics more would be like… if someone wrote a Bat-Family and related villains memoir. (I’d kill for it to be Jonathan Crane’s graphic memoir of something or other, or Barbra Gordon’s or Jason Todd’s, just because they’re kind of my favorites. But that’s besides the point.)

…So one of the books I picked up was one of my graphic memoirs — Darryl Cunningham’s Psychiatric Tales, which is a collection of short stories centered on his experiences working as a nurse on a psychiatric ward, with chapters/stories about self-harm, schizophrenia, suicide, and all sorts of other things. And just… oh my god. I’m almost done with it. I have one story left to read, the last one in the book. And this book, you guys. This book. I recommend the Hell out of this book. It’s probably going to be triggering for some people, so I’d also recommend exercising caution with it. I’d also advise that Cunningham’s style of art can take some getting used to, because it’s rather minimalistic and at a first glance, it’d be easy to think something like, “my six-year-old cousin could draw batter than that” … but if you give it a chance, the drawings really are gorgeous.

And then, just… a favorite quote of mine: “Depression is more than just the blues. It’s a serious illness which can kill. / A mental illness is a brain disease. Just as a stroke or a brain tumor is a brain disease. / There is no justification for separating out mental illnesses from other brain disorders. / Yet many people still believe mental illness to be a result of failure of character and self-discipline.

HUSBAND TO WIFE: “Pull yourself together!” / This attitude only compounds the difficulties that sufferers have to endure.”

I’m seriously tempted to get a post-it note and write a message for my parents on it, then put the post-it note on the book, or otherwise just make my parents read this book. Because, most of the time, my dad gets what I’ve been living with for most of my life and the fact that it’s all fairly horrid… but my mother doesn’t understand. More often than not, she doesn’t even try to understand. And, well… I don’t know. Maybe reading it in a book that has a lot of positive reviews from respectable sources and was written by someone who’s acceptable in her eyes (because he’s educated, and a former nurse, and from his presentation of himself in the book, he’s not especially objectionable on any count), despite also being an ally of mentally ill people and basically advocating, “hey, guys, the mentally ill people ARE PEOPLE TOO, WHY DON’T WE TRY LISTENING TO THEM AND HAVING SYMPATHY AND NOT BEING DICKS” throughout the entire book.

Which is an issue, since my mother believes things like… “well, the opinions of parents of autistic kids matter more than those of autistic people, because the parents are normal and don’t you know how much it sucks to have to take care of an autistic child.” My answer to that is something like, “…yes, thank you for reminding me once again that I ruined your life, mom. Putting up with me is such a chore, isn’t it. Yeah, thanks for that. I just love being reminded of how much of a burden I am to you and how you want to cure me of several aspects of my personality, regardless of my feelings on them.”

so what I’m getting from this is Rarity/Applejack.

Every time I look at you, I don’t understand why you let the things you did get so out of hand. You’d’ve managed better if you’d had it planned. So why’d you choose such a backwards time in such a strange land?

Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, who are you? What have you sacrificed?
Jesus Christ, superstar: do you think you’re what they say you are?

So, like. An explanation for this. My “100 songs Glee should cover but probably won’t” project got derailed a while back… mostly because I have the attention span of a gnat or one of Charles Muntz’s dogs and went, “OOO SQUIRREL!” and got diverted.

But I was playing around in photoshop tonight on something I’ll share in a little bit, and my ipod’s troll-tastic shuffle function followed Yo-Yo Ma and Allison Krauss’s version of “Simple Gifts” with the OBCR version of the title song from the Tim Rice/Andrew Lloyd Weber classic, Jesus Christ Superstar, which was always on my list and… I don’t know, I felt inspired to come back to it.

Anyway. I chose the song mostly because it’s one of my favorite favorites (I’d confess how many plays my ipod has listed for it, but I think I’m losing enough pretentious liberal arts institution graduate street cred as is for: a. involvement in the Glee fandom, and b. my lifelong love affair with Andrew Lloyd Weber), and because Glee’s already been allowed to do “Don’t Cry For Me Argentina,” which was FANTASTICALLY done on both Chris’s and Lea’s parts, so I have trouble believing that Tim Rice and ALW wouldn’t let them use “Superstar.”

(…even though this is a hypothetical situation, exercise in fannishness sort of thing, I think that paragraph right there is probably a good piece of evidence for the, “Kassie might be more Slytherin than Ravenclaw” theory.)

And I chose Sam and Quinn to sing it because… well, partly it’s some selfishness on my part. I love Quinn and I constantly want more of her… but Dianna, in all fairness, has a very difficult voice to pick songs for, and she can be kind of hit-or-miss on a performance level, on top of that. Even when she gets something that works in the context of the show and she sings it pitch-perfectly, she occasionally gets so wrapped up in the technical parts of the song that the passion and the acting part of things takes a backseat. (See, “Keep Me Hangin’ On,” where she hits all the notes just right… but all of the acting only comes in when you have the visuals. When it’s just the music, she sounds kind of angry, but more detached, which… doesn’t really fit with the lyrics or with what Quinn is feeling in that moment.)

And the female vocal part of “Superstar” is both in her range and mutable, in terms of how its performed and in terms of meaning. I’ve heard it sung fiery and angry, or detached and spacey, and… well, let’s just say that, despite being a play that calls Jesus and everything that’s widely believed about him into question left, right, and center, Superstar still regularly gets performed by churches and religious schools, so the meaning of lines like, “Who are you, what have you sacrificed?” and, “Do you think you’re what they say you are?” are very, very open to interpretation.

That means, for Quinn, that Dianna can get pretty much any direction, sing them any way she’s told to, and any option is pretty much guaranteed to work with the song somehow. And I picked Sam to go with her because, on an out-of-character level, I just really like how Chord and Dianna sound together. “Lucky” is one of my least favorite Glee tracks, granted, but that’s mostly because I don’t like the song to begin with and I really didn’t like Sam going, “hey, girl I don’t know very well, let’s sing THIS song about being in love with your best friend~” and Quinn just going along with it. …but Chord and Dianna complement each other really well, and… again, selfishness.

Now, on an in-character level: of the characters who openly subscribe to some kind of religious belief — the two of them, Puck and Rachel, and Mercedes — Sam and Quinn are the ones who have the most reason to sing this song. The context of “Superstar” in the show is that it’s being sung by Judas, shortly after his suicide, and he’s singing it to outright call Jesus to the carpet and make him explain himself — for instance, why did he have to die, why did things happen the way they did (what with the group surrounding Jesus falling to pieces, Jesus’s messy death and Judas’s role as traitor, etc.), what good came out of anything, and so on. Now, Jesus never does so because immediately following “Superstar,” we get the crucifixion and Mary Magdalene grieving and end show.

But to really understand the emotional impact of the song, you have to understand how Judas gets portrayed in Superstar. First of all, he’s one of the show’s big roles. In terms of getting songs, he, Jesus, and Mary Magdalene are about even — and considering Jesus spends most of the second act silent, I think Judas and Mary might actually overshadow him. Granted, the supporting cast gets a lot of recognition and some badass songs — see, the total show-stealing “King Herod’s Song,” and Pontius Pilate, who gets to count off 39 lashes while Jesus is whipped, and Caiaphas, who’s always sung by a deep, deeeeeep bass and is a magnificent bastard extraordinaire — but the center of the show is the Judas/Jesus/Mary Magdalene love triangle. And Judas, more than the other two, is the protagonist and emotional center of things.

Rather than being a two-dimensional, “well, he betrayed Jesus and that is BAD” version of Judas, the way the canonical gospels portray him, Rice/ALW’s Judas is a complicated and tragic figure (not entirely unlike the Judas of the gnostic Gospel of Judas, though there are some important differences between them). One of the Twelve Apostles, and ostensibly Jesus’s favorite (c.f., “I’ve been your right-hand man all along” from the show-opening song, “Heaven On Their Minds”), he’s been with Jesus’s movement and ministry for three years, and he really, earnestly believes in the mission they had when they started, which was just trying to help the poor, the sick, the downtrodden, and so on. One of the early scenes features him going, “uh, excuse me what, GTFO, hooker” at Mary Magdalene when she tries to wash Jesus’s feet with gratuitously expensive oil that, as Judas points out, was bought with money that could’ve gone to things like feeding hungry people. And Jesus first rebukes him, then totally blows him off. Then proceeds to spend most of the rest of the first act (and the pre-arrest second act) blowing him off. This is basically douchebag!Jesus.

And when Judas betrays him… I mean, YMMV, but for me? When Judas betrays Jesus, I’m torn between cheering for him and wanting to cuddle him, because here he is, having to choose between his best friend and his ideals, and Jesus has been a serious dick, so it’s like… he has this coming to him. And Judas doesn’t even want to get paid for the betrayal because he KNOWS how bad it is, but the Council insists, manipulating his desire to help the poor by reminding him what 30 silver pieces could do for them, and later throwing it in his face that he got “pretty good wages for one little kiss.”

And as the play reminds us, there are some serious Unfortunate Implications when people try to throw blame on Judas if everything’s supposed to be preordained (which Jesus and others argue it is), since… Judas does his part not quite willingly, but without trying to deny that it’s going to happen (Peter) or trying to chicken out (Jesus). And moreover, Judas sacrifices his friends (since everyone spends the post-Last Supper part of the play going, “ew, it’s Judas, GTFO, Judas,” except for Annas and Caiaphas, who are still dicks to him) and his loyalty to Jesus because he wants to go back to helping people in the here and now, rather than going on and on about Heaven and salvation, whereas you get the sense that Jesus just kind of dies because Daddy said he had to and he’s too tired to question that.

(Yes, you read that right. Spoilers if you haven’t seen Superstar, but the entire point of Jesus’s prayer song in “Gethsemane” is that he’s trying to chicken out and go, “But, Daddy, I don’t want to die, make someone else do it!” c.f.: “I only want to say, / If there is a way, / Take this cup away from me / For I don’t want to taste its poison. / … / Listen, surely I’ve exceeded expectations, / Tried for three years, seems like thirty. / Could you ask as much from any other man? / … / Why I should die? / … / If I die what will be my reward?” … I will grant that it’s a very moving song, but compared to Judas, it still stinks of cowardly self-interest.)

(And while I have your attention, I’m going to quote TV Tropes’s page on Superstar to explain why I hate Simon Peter. “Karma Houdini: Betray Christ once: suicide and eternal damnation. Betray Christ three times: become the first pope.” Granted, I hate Paul of Tarsus more because he took the Christian movement and went, “LA LA LA I AM GOING TO ADD SOME APOCALYPTICISM AND A BUNCH OF BELIEFS OF REALLY DUBIOUS RELEVANCE AND KIND OF TAKE A DUMP ON WHAT JESUS WAS ACTUALLY TRYING TO DO NBD,” and so many people treat him like the definitive word on things, which just makes me go, “uhm. Excuse me. Being any kind of Christian means that you WORSHIP JESUS. NOT PAUL. JESUS. YOU ARE DOING IT WRONG.” …but back to my actual business here.)

So, “Superstar,” in the context of the show is SO charged with emotion. There’s no other way to sing it. There are different ways to interpret the emotion and what it means in the show as a whole, but there’s still a lot of it there: betrayal. regret. anger. resentment. confusion. bitterness and irony. desperation. love. Because Judas has been through the fucking wringer in this play, and he doesn’t even get a reprieve in death. Because all of it happened out of his love for Jesus, his concern for Jesus and for their movement, and in the end, sure, he and Jesus both die… but nothing’s resolved. Nobody gets what they want (except the people who wanted to see Jesus die) because everybody gets equally shit on by God (except the people who wanted to see Jesus die).

Now, like, bringing things back to Glee… Puck always seems pretty solid in his Jewish faith, when it comes up; and ditto Mercedes for whatever brand of Christianity she belongs to (probably Baptist because in Hollywood, black people don’t have any other religious beliefs); and for Rachel… well. I get the sense that she believes, kind of, but that, for her, it’s more a Thing About Rachel Berry That Is Interesting And Unique And That Means Rachel Berry Is Interesting And Unique And HEY EVERYBODY LOOK AT RACHEL BERRY DID YOU KNOW NATALIE WOOD WAS JEWISH.

But Sam and Quinn believe, they even go to church together — and they’ve also taken some pretty substantial hits to their faith. Quinn with the pregnancy and with Beth, and with the pretty horrible year that followed (which, if you ask me, looks like some serious postpartum depression but this is fanon, so…). Sam’s hits came with moving and being the new guy, the hassling that followed him joining Glee club, a very literal one when he took on Dave for Kurt, and finally, when his dad lost his job and the clan Evans lost their home and had to move into the hotel.

So, you know… I think Sam Evans and Quinn Fabray have a lot to be upset about, and considering that Quinn at least has described her faith as “turning to God” (in “Grilled Cheesus”)… I wouldn’t be surprised if both of them had some confusion and bitterness and questions for a certain Mister Yeshua ben Joseph ha Nozri (Jesus the Christ of Nazareth).

depressingfacts replied to your post: …okay, someone please tell me I’m not the only person who sorts Dean Winchester into Hufflepuff.

So I’m not the only one who sees that Snape was somewhat of an asshole and Lily was right in leaving him? Or am I misinterpreting what you said?

Oh, no, you’re not. Severus is my second favorite character in the series (…and the fact that Barty Crouch Jr. beats him because I really empathize and identify with his story probably says really not-that-great things about me)… but I love Severus because of how flawed he is, and I think he was totally an asshole. Some great fan essays that pretty much sum up my thoughts on the matter: ~randomneses’s In Defense of Lily Evans and their follow-up to said piece.

Basically… I love Snape. And I believe that he really did love Lily. But I also think she was completely in the right for going, “well, fuck you, then, Severus. Bye.”

I mean… best friends since childhood and ostensibly unrequited secret crush or not, he was running with a really bad crowd, one that espoused Blood Purist beliefs, which all basically came down to (with regards to Lily), “be as talented and intelligent and hard-working and awesome as you want, Evans; you’re still trash.” His friends pulled him into that and not only did he fail to go, “hey, guys, that’s racist and really fucked up,” he took part in dehumanizing other Muggleborn students and, when Lily called him on his bullshit, went, “but I don’t mean it about YOU because you’re better than everybody else.” …which I’m sure he thought was nice and all, but because Lily had her head on right, she went, “uh, it’s still racist and fucked up, Severus, you should, like, STOP IT. :|”

Now, I think he had a lot of REASONS for why he did what he did. Above all other potential reasons, I blame his parents and his home-life. JKR didn’t give us a lot of concrete information to go on, but the intimations are all pretty nasty and involve varying degrees of abuse and neglect… My personal canon for it is that Eileen Prince Snape came from a social-climbing, Fullblooded (better than Half, but not quite Pure) family, one that wasn’t exactly healthy either (since, well, she fell into an abusive marriage with Tobias) and that pretty much disowned her when she went, “hey, mum and dad, I met this great guy and we’re madly in love… just, well, he’s a Muggle.”

But since that’s not the officially JKR-condoned version… well, we still have the intimations of a very not-nice environment, and given how crappy life with Tobias and Eileen at Spinner’s End is implied to have been, and how, in “The Prince’s Tale,” Lily seems to be the only person who actively cares that much about Severus… yeah. When he wound up in Slytherin House and suddenly had a “gang” to run with (to borrow Sirius’s word for them, from GoF), I can understand him being torn between Lily (longtime best friend, possibly the first person who cared about him, undoubtedly the more emotionally significant relationship) and Mulciber/Avery/Wilkes/the “gang of Slytherins” who all went on to join up with Voldemort (less emotionally significant, but I think that, to Severus, they represented acceptance on a larger scale than he’d ever known — and one that had more power and totally condoned his interest in the Dark Arts — which would’ve been even more important to him after Sirius and James made it their mission in life to make his existence awful).

So… I understand why he did what he did. But it was still wrong, and Lily was still in the right for ditching him, and like… I love Severus, but there’s no excuse for how he acted when he was younger. Or, Hell, even for some of the shit he pulls as an adult. Like the blatant sadism he shows with Harry and Neville. Is it understandable? Yes, and I think the layers of motivation and emotion that underscore his behavior make him a much more powerful… but he still basically goes, “oh look, it’s an eleven-year-old who looks like the jackass who made my life Hell in school and then married the woman I loved, and the eleven-year-old who SHOULD have had his parents killed instead of the Potters because then Lily would at least still be alive… if possibly driven to insanity by Bellatrix and Barty Junior — I INSTANTLY DISLIKE YOU, ELEVEN-YEAR-OLD CHILDREN, AND I SHALL TORMENT YOU NOW.”

…and he’s my second favorite because of his objectionable behavior, really. On the one hand, I like how his ~redemption story doesn’t magically make him not an asshole, since… that’s more realistic, to me, than “LOL CHARACTER #4 HAS BEEN ~REDEEMED AND NOW LOVES PUPPIES AND RAINBOWS AND CUTE LITTLE BABIES” kinds of stories. On the other, I love picking apart all of his complicated, subtle little layers of motive and emotion. On the third… I kind of have a problem of attaching to characters who, by all rights, are evil, or assholes, or sociopaths, or some combination thereof, especially when they have tragedy and angst in their backstories. So, personal preference in fictional characters and all.

…and I’m terrible to him because I love him. Because, unfortunately for any fictional character I will ever attach to and write about, I really take Kurt Vonnegut’s eight rules for fiction writing to heart… and my favorite is, “Be a sadist. Now matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them — in order that the reader may see what they are made of.”

…which sort of makes their lives suck, but it makes me happy as a writer and I usually give them some happiness, just because I can’t handle complete and unrelenting DARKNESS!!^TM … but, y’know. I will still try to figure out what the absolute worst thing that could happen to them is and then make it happen. …sorry, fictional characters. >__>

weebleroxanne replied to your post: Okay, guilty confessions of the night, then bed.

I totally love Harry/Tom. But I’m totally okay with Tom being ‘Voldemort’. Not all snake-face-y, but still the man who killed Harry’s parents because of all of the angst. I have a thing for those coming-of-age-secretly-bonded-to-your-enemy fics.

*nods* …I could be down with that kind of Harry/Voldemort, yus. Just… not so much with what I’ve usually seen, which is less plotty, more rape-y. Even in the AUs where Voldemort, like, adopts Harry in an attempt to raise him not to be The Chosen One, or something. Granted, given the whole father/son element to that idea… rape-y possibly kind of goes without saying. Unless Tom isn’t really involved in raising him and he gives the job to, like, Bellatrix and Barty. Or Narcissa, since she already has a baby and can do maternal things and, frankly, Voldemort never really seems to like Lucius. I could see him not really thinking about Narcissa and just going, “Lucius, you are a disappointment to me, YOU GET TO DEAL WITH ANOTHER CHILD AND YOU HAVE TO KNOW THAT ITS MOTHER WAS A MUDBLOOD AND IF YOU ABUSE HIM KNOW THAT I WILL MAKE YOU MY CHEW TOY LOLOLOL KTHXBAI. :D”

…this is actually an AU I’d love to see Draco/Harry in, too. Usually, I’m not all that into them, but the whole, “it’s like we’re brothers but we’re not, so is it taboo, it FEELS taboo, but sdkfjwrghe I DON’T KNOW D:” element would be really interesting, if done sensitively.

Okay, guilty confessions of the night, then bed.

1. I love Harry/Cedric. I kind of really love it. I also really love the meta lulz of RPattz being Cedric AND Edward Cullen, and the idea of Harry finding some magically still alive Cedric, who is living in Forks and pretending to be a sparklepire. I sort of want to see it written in a happier way than the one I did a while back, but I don’t know how you’d do it. Finding Harry/Cedric that’s written well is enough of a fucking chore, as is.

2. I don’t really like David Tennant!Barty Crouch Jr. I love David. I love that he made the best out of the character assassination that the GoF screenwriters did to my baby. I love the random bit of Severus/Barty sexual tension when Sev is all GRR I POKE YOU IN THE CHEEK WITH MY WAND TO KEEP YOU IN PLACE, and Barty is all CACKLE CACKLE TROLOLOLOL TONGUE FLICK. …but just. sdkghe, the things that the movie people did to my baby, both in the screenwriting and directing departments. It breaks my heart more than is reasonable. …okay, this confession isn’t really guilty, but the next one is.

3. I have a serious fondness for Harry/Tom Riddle. Like. Not Harry/Voldemort. Harry/Voldemort squicks me out a LOT, and sometimes, I’m in the mood to be squicked out, but mostly… just no. But, like… for instance, Harry/diary!Tom, in some AU where Harry doesn’t meet diary!Tom when he is freaking twelve (because… squick). Or an AU where wibbly wobbly timey wimey stuff happens and teen!Tom gets dumped into the modern day.

Or my personal favorite: an AU where Tom never became Lord Voldemort for some reason or another — IDK, maybe he got adopted by some nice people and had a happy childhood and wasn’t conceived in really horrible circumstances or something — and now he’s a professor, and he and Harry have a May/December thing going on, and Harry is all ~lol snarky, ~lol flirty, and Tom is like, “Harry, I am too old for this shit right now,” and the only drama they have is relationship problems, like Harry feeling kind of weird for being 25 and in a committed thing with one of his old teachers while his friends are still being young and partying, and Ron/Hermione + Neville/Luna + Ginny/someone else (or, better yet: Hermione/Ginny/Luna + Ron/Neville + idk, Pansy/Lavender and maybe Draco can come too ~~if he comes, there is Theodore/Draco or Blaise/Draco because yum~~) and/or James/Lily being like, “Harry, we’re really happy for you, but your significant other could be your grandfather and don’t you find that weird… :\ “

And there’s no “blah blah saving the Wizarding world as we know it” stuff, just… domestic-ness and snarking and arguing. …I just think it would be really awesome, okay? And I got the idea from a fic that I’ve kind of misplaced, which I remember having a fun version of this premise but needing a better beta job, and sdkwjrgh, I just really like it. I also have a lot of feelings. This has been a post.

HOGWARTS: FIRST CLASS

colouredwithkisses:

captain-jamie-kirk:

kal-ella:

itsbradleyybitch:

prof-plum:

bitterbrokenbones:

“Us turning on each other. It’s what they want. I tried to warn you, Albus! I want you by my side…we are truly brothers. Together, protecting each other, for the greater good…we want the same thing.”

“Oh, my friend…I am sorry. But we do not.”

Note

oh my god

this is beautiful

Can this be real please!? K thnx bye.

and of course they both just happen to be ridiculously good looking

This and/or original founders stories please and thank you, J.K.

…I don’t know why we need the ~official JKR version~ for this, though. I mean. Fandom’s written a TON of these sorts of fics since 2007 and ~canon Dumbledore/Grindelwald, and… just my personal opinion? Fandom’s versions are usually going to be better than JKR’s, overall. The writing may not be better, since… well, I think that, for all the fabulous writers in fandom, who really care about making the stories great, we also have a ton of “meh” or “so-so” or outright bad writers who… care about other things that I don’t know.

But, more importantly, fandom’s not really constrained by the standards that an editor and a publisher would enforce on a book that JKR would actually write, and the really good writers in fandom tend to be more… not really enlightened, since I hate the way that sounds, but… they tend to be more educated about and sympathetic to the issues of characterization that come up in fics, especially when writing slash fic, which I find infinitely preferable to the attitude JKR’s expressed about Dumbledore’s sexuality before. Which, whether she intended to come off this way or not, has been kind of like, “yep, he’s gay! …but he had his heart broken by Grindelwald and spent the rest of his life celibate, lol.”

And I take issue with that idea, which… they’re her characters, sure, she can do what she wants. But it’s also a concept that I find really problematic for various reasons, which is why I don’t really want JKR to write this kind of fic for Dumbledore and Grindelwald. I totally encourage more fandom people to write it, and I love Joanne Kathleen Rowling with a great deal of my heart, but… no. Just let fandom handle this one, Joanne. Please. It’ll be okay.

#Can we be called the faggot junkie generation #Generation Y is really uninspired

Well, I can see why people might not be okay with that, but… uhm. I kind of am. I mean, between Lou Reed and The Golden Girls, I think I’m pretty much fucked on the whole “faggot junkie” front. …maybe I’d word it differently. “Faggot junkie” rolls off the tongue pretty well, but it’s also sort of like… reclaiming “queer” and “dyke” always feels pretty okay to me, where trying to reclaim “faggot” feels like… “no, folks, it’s way too soon for me.” …I dunno. I have a lot of ~thoughts and feelings, but I don’t really understand most of them. And I wish I could bake them into a cake made out of rainbows and smiles and we could all eat it and maybe get some idea of what the Hell I think I’m talking about.

twigvicious:

ethanprice:

Reblog if this was one of the most depressing moments of your childhood.

Is it bad that I didn’t give a damn about Bambi’s mom, but I was (and still am) so distraught about Mufasa’s death?

It’s not bad at all. The thing about Bambi’s mom is, I think, that she’s a classic “women in refrigerators” moment from non-comic book media. …and with animated talking animals, not superheroines, supervillainesses, the girlfriends or female family members of superheroes, et al. …but, like, when she dies, we haven’t really gotten to emotionally connect with her or Bambi, yet. It’s just supposed to be a Scary And Sad Moment that is Scary And Sad; it’s cloying and emotionally manipulative, and it’s founded not on feeling the actual loss of a character, but on the presumption that, since everyone in the audience will have a mother, everyone in the audience will fear the loss of their mother and be really sad when Bambi loses his.

Mufasa’s death is more emotionally poignant, though, because rather than trying to play the audience’s heartstrings like a cheap harpsichord, we’ve gotten to see Simba and Mufasa as characters, and we’ve gotten to see how much Mufasa means to Simba, and on top of that, we know why Mufasa died and Simba doesn’t. Simba’s just like OH MY GOD WILDEBEESTS WHAT WHAT ASKDSGJHG WHAAAAT, but we have knowledge of what Scar is up to and how damn evil he’s being, and that he’s intentionally ruining a little lion cub’s life because of some giant beef he has with his big brother. And sdkfwrhw, ALL OF THE FEELINGS. TL;DR: Mufasa’s death is more meaningful than the death of Bambi’s mom because it had better writing.

Out of all the ND kids who would you have be genderqueer/trans*?

Anonymous

Interesting question, nonny. And it’s kind of hard to say. Partly because of the way genderqueer and trans* mean a lot of different things, and encompass a lot of different identities. (Trans* actually includes genderqueer, to most people. Don’t worry if you didn’t know that, though; I had to have it explained to me before, too.)

Then it’s sort of hard to say because I’m gaga for plot bunnies, and these sorts of questions make me go, “OH MY GOD THAT WOULD BE SUCH AN AWESOME FIC I SHOULD WRITE IT.” (Which totally isn’t a faux pas on your part or anyone else’s, by the way. It’s just kind of a side-effect of how I roll. Like one of my friends, her significant other wrote a My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic fic — Dash’s Secret, which seriously, I cannot recommend enough — and I read it last night and aside from making me feel better when I was down, it was just AWESOME. …Anyway, I wound up going, “oh god, I want to write crossovers with SPN and Glee and My Little Pony now… Dean pony would be the cutest pony ever…”)

(Incidentally, I don’t know if you’re my Santina anon or not, but… if you’re out there, Santina anon. I’m working on your one-shot. It kind of grew seven heads, and then it wanted to be part of my hunter!Santana verse, and aksfsfdh, I hope that’s okay, that it’s taking a while.)

ANYWAY. THIS QUESTION.

I’d believe it most with Tina or Brittany, I think. To be specific: I think both of them would make sense as identifying as genderqueer for various reasons. I’m trying to think of a way to articulate them, and sort of failing at it, but… they’re the two I’d be most of convinced of as genderqueer. Santana or Quinn, I could see as more generally trans* (though now that I think about it, I could also see genderqueer!Quinn or Sam pretty easily).

If Quinn were trans*, she’d obviously be more likely to be a trans man, since she got pregnant, but… a lot of the logic for why I believe in lesbian!Quinn could also mean trans*!Quinn. Especially considering how a big thing she does is a sort of, “repress all of her potentially Not Normal desires and traits and so on, hate and deride people who have them,” and in early episodes, some of her insults for Rachel are pretty trans*phobic — like, “man hands,” “treasure trail,” “Rupaul,” “that thing” and calling Rachel an “it”… so. I think the writer of said fic would have to be more sensitive than you’d need to be in any other trans* character fic, just because negotiating around a lot of Quinn’s plots would be difficult and thickety, like Quinn herself is a difficult and thickety character… but I think it could be done, and I think it would be awesome if done really well.

As to Santana, I could see her being a trans* woman OR a trans* man, but I think Santana as a trans* woman would make more sense, especially in light of how conflicted she is about her lesbian identity. There’s a lot of social stigma against trans* people to begin with, and trans* people who are also homosexual (so trans* women who are lesbians and trans* men who are gay)… they get told things like, “A lesbian trapped in a man’s body? GIVE ME A FUCKING BREAK,” or, “But if you transitioned just to be gay, why couldn’t you just stay a girl,” or similar.

And given Santana’s canon resistance to coming out — which is hard enough for any queer woman, believe me; it’s like Naya said once, girls try to come out and people tend to objectify them, and be like, “well, you’re a girl who makes out with girls, that’s so hot” and then react negatively when… female sexuality isn’t all about the observer. Like a picture I will link to, but I’m not posting here directly because it’s so nauseating: here it is, in all its fatphobic and homophobic glory. For those who don’t want to click, it’s a demotivator-style graphic; the picture is two fat women kissing and embracing each other; the caption is, “Fat Lesbians / Please don’t… please… really… c’mon, stop.”

So, y’know. It’s hard out there for everybody in the queer community, but there’s a lot that queer women have to deal with that guys don’t, that trans* people have to deal with that cis* people don’t, and I think if Santana were a trans* woman… that canon resistance she shows to coming out, to even admitting how much she’s in love with Brittany? That’d be so much more of a problem for her, and sdkgrhes, my heart hurts just thinking about it.

And I want to nip this thing in the bud, since I’ve seen it around more than usual in the past few weeks: there can be a penis in femslash and that doesn’t make it suddenly not-femslash. Implying otherwise, even if you just think you’re complaining about how you don’t like girl!peen/futanari kink fics, is really trans*phobic because, writ short, it implies that non-cis* women “aren’t real women.” If you only want to read femslash between two cis* women, fine. Whatever. That’s your prerogative and it’s okay — but please, for fuck’s sake, don’t act like any kind of non-cis* femslash isn’t femslash, or like any kind of self-identified woman is less of a woman because she might not be cis*. Please. When you do this, you are hurting people. Thus, my asking you to stop doing it.

And for everyone’s reference, I once again link to Dash’s Secret, written by the boyfriend of ~rebootingfromstart, one of my best friends in the whole world. It’s a fabulous fucking fic, and Rainbow Dash’s discussion of her sexual orientation with Rarity is very, VERY relevant to this discussion. In case anyone is still confused… maybe putting it in terms of really cute ponies will help.

And in terms of things I think aren’t really indicated by any canon, but seeing them in a fic would make me happy… trans* or genderqueer!Sam or Puck or Dave. Especially Puck, considering his nickname opens up all kinds of possibilities for supernatural AUs where he’s part-fae or a shapeshifter or something, which could be used to open up and explore some gender issues.

But… basically, I’ve seen the argument made for Kurt possibly being a trans* woman, and I think it makes a kind of sense, and I think that having one of the more traditionally “masculine” guys exploring gender things in fic would be awesome because it breaks the belief that all trans* people conform to the stereotypical behaviors of the genders they identify as. Some do, and they don’t have any responsibility not to, if it’s what makes them happy; but some don’t, and they get met with a lot of disbelief and resistance and other bullshit because they don’t fit into the dominant narrative of the trans* experience, which wasn’t even written by trans* people.

So… I think it’d be cool to see fic where Puck or Sam or Dave is a trans* girl. Or a trans* guy who acts really traditionally masculine when he doesn’t really WANT to, it’s just how he thinks he has to act. Or something like that.