Avatar

going the long way around

@bendingsignpost / bendingsignpost.tumblr.com

Ben is a writer engaged in fandom life when mental health allows. His works are specifically aimed at a queer audience but hopefully enjoyable for most anyone. If you would like to support Ben and his writing habit, click the Patreon link below!
Avatar
Avatar
mossworm

everybody is drooling for the blond guy from dungeon meshi. that guy is 100% real and I know like six of him, what you are looking for is a marine biologist

1. spends a long amount of time doing something weird far away from society

2. will not stop talking about their animal

3. has definitely eaten their animal and has strong opinions on how to cook it best

Avatar
Avatar
biggaybunny

I don't care about Dungeon Meshi otherwise but "Tallmen" is SUCH an elegant solution to placing humans in a fantasy setting that it's still blowing my mind. Just the term itself is enough to instantly recontextualize humans. They're no longer the default race. They're those big goobers with long legs, striding about all the time. I can so easily envision much more interesting relationships between humans and non-humans because of it. Like perhaps "tallmen" are stereotyped as shepherds by other races because they can watch over their flocks better, or as vagabonds because they are better suited to long travel on foot. And of course, they don't *literally* have to be taller than everybody else, they were just the tallest around whenever the label became the norm, or something like that. I just feel like it's so much better than what I've seen in settings like D&D that go "and humans are the... adaptable, generalist people :)!"

Avatar
Avatar
bettedavisgf

it is so jarring and weird when a fantasy book is like “ok let’s go around the circle and have each character talk about which lgbt umbrella category they identify with” like ok your fantasy world doesn’t have to be feudal europe but can it not be 2023 twitter please

Avatar
zarohk

On the exact opposite end of the spectrum, one of the most elegant examples I saw of showing that a character was trans, was that a member of the protagonist team named Maia had stolen some important document that was an editable text file about experiments, and when the other characters read the file, it kept referring to “states of maiaer” and “antimaiaer”. One of her teammates realized that someone must’ve gone through and run automated find-and-replace on “Matt” to “Maia”.

I was just going to reblog this for "none pizza left queer" but "states of antimaiaer" is somehow even funnier

Avatar

Oh, hey, hey there! Hello! Sorry to bother you. Yeah I'll be out of your DMs in just a second. Yeah it's just I was passing by and realized the way you're expressing your gender or sexuality really doesn't cohere with the way that my extremely insular groupthink faction of the internet thinks gender and sexuality should be expressed. What you're doing is really problematic actually, given how much it really doesn't gel with how my group thinks gender and sexuality need to work. I just wanted to give you a friendly heads up and give you the chance to change before I do anything like call you out publically.

Oh what's that? If you change what you're doing to satisfy me, then a completely different extremely insular groupthink circle of the internet will be mad at you instead? Yeah that's completely true. Luckily this is easy! My groupthink's group-think is the correct and progressive one. Their groupthink's group-think is really problematic and narrow-minded. I hope this helps?

Oh you're still doing what you're doing. :/ Okay man it's just that there's kids in my group, you know? Teens. They're literally kids, and you're making them super uncomfortable because we told them to be uncomfortable. Won't you think of the kids? This argument has never once backfired on a member of the queer community.

Oh. Okay. Well, I mean I was being really polite and respectful and you've just been rude so. Tell you what. If in 5 years from now the narrative has shifted such that the common queer community now supports what you're doing, I'm gonna act like I actually always supported this and have always been on your side. That's a good compromise right? Cool.

Anyway, I think that's totally fair of me. I'm gonna go warn everyone I know about how you're an unsafe person to interact with. This is for protection of the queer community. I'm a very good person.

Avatar
Avatar
boreal-sea

If you (like me) want 3rd party candidates to be an actual viable option in USA elections so you no longer have to vote for Democrats OR Republicans as your first and only choice, then what we need is Ranked Choice Voting. In order for that to happen, we as voters have to do two things:

  1. Vote Democrat this fall, because Republicans fucking hate Ranked Choice Voting, and in several Republican-run states they have outlawed it. So if you want it, you have to keep Democrats in power in your state.
  2. Lobby for and then vote for Ranked-choice voting in your state!Many American states have already adopted Ranked Choice voting and several more are set to do so in 2024. The ball is literally already rolling on this, we just need YOU to help it along.
Avatar
reblogged
Avatar
prokopetz

Reposting my single favourite piece of official Star Wars media for no particular reason.

Avatar
fiendfifofum

His face in the last panel is KILLING me. Like he's holding in a fart and if he laughs it's gonna happen. He can't. It's against the code.

Avatar
Avatar
prokopetz

The question of whether party members in console RPGs even like each other becomes a lot more complicated in a long-running series where the same protagonist acquires a new supporting cast in each instalment, then bails for parts unknown at the end. Literally all interactions are filtered through and mediated by this one person who single-handledly serves as the glue keeping this fractious pack of traumatised weirdos from killing each other, then once the quest is done, off they fuck, never to be seen again. Have you ever seen a real-life friend group messily splinter because the one person who actually knew how to play diplomat has exited the picture? Imagine that, except everyone involved has access to weapons of mass destruction.

Avatar

A problem trope that both Stargate and Star Trek has that I find very annoying is when one character says, "You guys, I know this is crazy, but I think I'm (seeing ghosts/hearing dead people/jumping dimensions)" and their friends - who have dealt with being possessed, body swap, time travel, time loops, monsters, demons, telepathic aliens, etc - all say, "You're probably just tired, go take a nap."

If you're in a scifi world and your friend says, "Guys, I think my dead grandpa is in the corner," you go DEFCON 1 and lockdown your base/starship and quarantine your pal until you know what the hell is going on.

Avatar
Avatar
ariaste

listen ok so i made some good jokes yesterday about Lestat having an onlyfans but i am back today with a new essay and this one is entitled

Why The Invention Of Social Media Is Going to Permanently Save Loustat's Fucking Marriage

come on this journey with me.

ok so on one hand we have Louis, who does not like to leave the house except when he absolutely fucking has to and even then he resents it. my man wants to be at home with a book 100% of the time and he's so fucking valid for that. When he leaves the house, bad things happen to him. He has learned this and honestly i can't fault his evidence. it sucks out there. it truly incredibly sucks out there.

the problem is that sometimes he is married to lestat, who starts clawing at the walls if people aren't paying attention to him for 12 consecutive seconds, and being Out Of The House is the best place for him to go foraging for People To Pay Attention To Him. my man once had a rock star career the way that some people get addicted to meth brewed in a trashcan in someone's garage. Louis, through no fault of his own, is simply not capable of filling this psychological need no matter how hard he tries, except he should not even HAVE to try like that, because no one can do it, because Lestat is fucked up and like wasn't hugged enough as a child or something

this imbalance in their relationship is the core source of all their marital problems since day 1: THIS man's idea of a good time is chilling on the sofa in silence and maybe staring contemplatively at the wall for a while, and THIS man starts self-destructing at a truly astonishing rate if no one is making eye contact with him. If you make Louis go outside and socialize with people, he's miserable and sulking and whining about "are we done can we go home". If you make Lestat sit in silence in a chair for five minutes he starts crying and claiming that No One Has Ever Loved Him, Ever, Ever, And No One Understands Him, And He Hates Everyone In This House and He Is Being Actively Neglected And Cruelly Mistreated Right Now And No One Even Bothers To Feel Sorry For Him, This Is BASICALLY Domestic Violence Against Him Personally, If Only Anyone Knew About The Quiet Hidden Tragedies Of An Unhappy Marriage, and then he breaks some furniture and a window and isn't seen again for six weeks and comes back like "you will not believe what just happened, i [checks notes] met Merlin and also a dragon who gave me three wishes, brb i'm going to write another book about it :))))"

all you fucking have to do to fix their problems is to hand Lestat a cellphone and say the words "do you know about social media? you can say whatever shit you want and there's always someone awake in some time zone to talk to you." Suddenly Lestat is now very interested in sitting quietly on the couch, Lounging Alluringly and posting thirst traps on instagram and finally getting emotional fulfillment from all the likes and comments of "omg???? omg this is the hottest man alive". he does not have to leave the house anymore to get his attention meth. His yawning abyss of neediness is being fulfilled by having parasocial relationships with millions of strangers online who all think he's sexy and don't have to experience how fucking awful he is up close. he can flirt pointlessly with 200 people at once which is FINALLY ENOUGH FLIRTATIONS FOR HIM TO SATISFACTORILY JUGGLE

Meanwhile Louis is 3 feet away, vaguely reflecting to himself that HE is feeling all emotionally fulfilled because they're spending this great Quality Time together in perfect silence while he reads his book and Lestat plays on his cellular telephone and only OCCASIONALLY giggles to himself or says "louis which of these photos do you think is sexier, the one with four buttons undone or the one with five buttons undone" Louis is feeling like his Opinion is being Valued, Louis feels like he is being Consulted on Matters that are Important To Lestat. He has opinions about the photographs. It is not that much trouble to be interrupted from staring philosophically at the wall to spend five seconds looking at a photograph and then saying "that one". Finally he is experiencing Cozy Domesticity. he is so horny about it. lestat is surprised and bewildered about the sudden sharp increase in the amount of sex he is now getting but before he can make any vaguely mean comments about it (bc he's confused and vaguely defensive and worried that it's going to stop out of nowhere and he doesn't know any other interpersonal skills for expressing a thought) his phone pings about how he's just broken 5 million followers on instagram and he totally forgets to even mention the sex thing, which means that he continues getting the sex instead of inciting an argument about the sex and going through his 800th divorce from Louis

all their friends are extremely confused when a whole month, and then six months, and then a year goes by without another Loud Divorce happening and no one crashing through their front door like "I HAVE TO SLEEP IN YOUR GUEST COFFIN FOR THE NEXT MONTH, HE IS INTOLERABLE". They are worried. they are concerned. what is going on over there. are they both dead. no, they can't both be dead, Lestat just posted another tiktok of him sucking on his own fingers, which he would not be doing if Louis were dead. there is an ecosystem collapse happening in the groupchat and it's because the main Drama Vectors have been neutralized

Avatar

[ID: Tweet by Fiona Robertson ♿️ @FionaSNP “I am loving that #DisabilityTwitter is using ‘are you helping or are you just buttering the cat’ as a phrase for ‘is this a useful accommodation.’ And a friend recommended the Tamarian ‘Jorts, his fur unbuttered’ for ‘this person’s access needs have been met.’ @JortsTheCat”]

Avatar
alexseanchai

the source tweet quote-tweets how disability activist Fiona Robertson wrote a whole essay on this!

also a free digital zine entitled Your Life Is Not Over: A Book of Apocalypses and How To Survive Them (A Guide for Newly Sick and Disabled People; link is downthread of this announcement tweet

check out the JortsTheCat Twitter too, is vast fun

...I love this and hope it doesn't get forgotten.

Avatar
booskerdu

A new one!

This is my new lock screen!

Avatar
Avatar
prokopetz

“Generically medieval”, by which we mean our peerage is French, our castles are German, our weapons are Italian, and everybody speaks English.

you can have religion in one of 2 flavors: “woo hoo aesthetic garnish” and “Sinister State Control in Bad Allegory for Problems in Modern Christianity”

Also, the latter is aesthetically French Catholic, theologically German Protestant, and has the institutional structure of the Church of Scientology.

not to mention that this land is simultaneously inhabited by thinly modified northern vikings (Nordic pre-medieval/9th century), travelling mongols (European medieval/13th century) and a wealthy italian merchant family with a house full of oil paintings (Southern European renaissance/15th century). the dance of the day is waltz (refined German 18th century country dance).

Avatar
marietheran

But it will only actually be called inaccurate if an adaptation chooses to add a Black person.

You are using an unsupported browser and things might not work as intended. Please make sure you're using the latest version of Chrome, Firefox, Safari, or Edge.