coming back around
Aloha internets, I am back from holiday! We went to Cyprus for ~two weeks and encountered an extremely friendly cat and a suicidal chameleon, and then my father attempted to drive us along the edges of mountain cliffs in our shitty hire car and made fun of Mum and I for being disturbed by his attempts to climb and descend ~60 degree inclines with no barrier to a substantial drop a foot or so away.
And now we are back in England and it's pretending like the heatwave never happened and it's totally still April, complete with heavy rain and grey sky. Sigh. Oh country.
Also someone had left Fifty Shades Of Grey at the villa and Mum and I tried to persuade Dad and Bro to read it, for the lulz but also, at least on my part, so Bro could encounter porn from a woman's POV. I have no idea what other porn he has come across, or even if he's come across any at all (though LBR he's almost 20 so), but like, I feel like he should have maybe taken the opportunity to explore what het sex (which is what I presume he'll be having, and indeed may already have had) is like from the other side, as it were. That's not creepy, right? I mean with all this porn banning and The Effect Porn Is Having On Our Teenagers, it'd be nice if more boys considered what sex is like for their lady partners, and indeed that clits are a thing that should be paid attention to (though not hit with riding crops unless asked).
One of my holiday reading books was Seraphina (which, by the way: YES GOOD MOAR PLZ), and I'd like to go out on a limb and say the author is a) probably fannish, and b) likes Star Trek, though the latter may just be me projecting because obv the extremely-emotionally-repressed-and-logical race trope can exist without having been influenced by Vulcans, but. ANYWAY, my point is that I was on the author's website just now and she had a post talking about Twilight and then the comments started talking about Pern and consent and I realised that a lot of my more subliminal ideas about sex may well come from reading those books, and also that my knee-jerk reaction to people critiquing stuff I like is PLEASE NO BECAUSE THEN I'LL HAVE TO STOP LIKING IT FOR BEING TERRIBLE LA LA LA CAN'T HEAR YOUUU. This has generally only been noticable on tumblr with Harry Potter, because most other stuff like SPN I have managed to notice on my own and make the decision to continue being fannish while still acknowledging that wow, it can be problematic, whereas HP remains my favourite book series ever and seeing people yelling about WHY ARE THERE NO QUEER CHARACTERS (EXCEPT DUMBLEDORE AND WHY WAS HE ONLY MENTIONED AT THE END FUCK YOU AND YOUR HOMOPHOBIA JKR) or THE WIZARDING ECONOMIC MODEL IS UNSOUND AND ALSO SO IS THE WORLDBUILDING BECAUSE THERE'S NO LABOUR WARD AT ST MUNGOS AND ALSO SQUIBS PROBABLY GET KICKED OUT AND DIE OF MUGGLE DEPRESSION AND WHERE DO WIZARDING KIDS LEARN BASIC NUMERACY AND LITERACY ANYWAY makes me want to either punch stuff because not all books can be all things to all people, or curl up in a corner with the books hissing protectively because the world-building gaps you're filling in are making a horribly depressing universe that I don't want the stories I love to have any part of. I suspect that this is essentially the same personality trait that means I prefer The Avengers over The Dark Knight Rises, because the former embraces its Comic Book Science and is about triumph against odds and things being alright in the end even if they aren't the same, and the latter is about Deep And Meaningful Political/Social commentary and Dark And Gritty And Therefore Realistic superheroics. It also, I suspect, taps into that old argument about whether fandom is primarily a happy space or a safe space, and whether focusing on squee over social justice makes you a bad person, which is a thing I struggle with a lot.
This post has no fannish content, sorry; all I can offer is this article about gay (male) marriage and how it was totes happening a few thousand years ago.
And now we are back in England and it's pretending like the heatwave never happened and it's totally still April, complete with heavy rain and grey sky. Sigh. Oh country.
Also someone had left Fifty Shades Of Grey at the villa and Mum and I tried to persuade Dad and Bro to read it, for the lulz but also, at least on my part, so Bro could encounter porn from a woman's POV. I have no idea what other porn he has come across, or even if he's come across any at all (though LBR he's almost 20 so), but like, I feel like he should have maybe taken the opportunity to explore what het sex (which is what I presume he'll be having, and indeed may already have had) is like from the other side, as it were. That's not creepy, right? I mean with all this porn banning and The Effect Porn Is Having On Our Teenagers, it'd be nice if more boys considered what sex is like for their lady partners, and indeed that clits are a thing that should be paid attention to (though not hit with riding crops unless asked).
One of my holiday reading books was Seraphina (which, by the way: YES GOOD MOAR PLZ), and I'd like to go out on a limb and say the author is a) probably fannish, and b) likes Star Trek, though the latter may just be me projecting because obv the extremely-emotionally-repressed-and-logical race trope can exist without having been influenced by Vulcans, but. ANYWAY, my point is that I was on the author's website just now and she had a post talking about Twilight and then the comments started talking about Pern and consent and I realised that a lot of my more subliminal ideas about sex may well come from reading those books, and also that my knee-jerk reaction to people critiquing stuff I like is PLEASE NO BECAUSE THEN I'LL HAVE TO STOP LIKING IT FOR BEING TERRIBLE LA LA LA CAN'T HEAR YOUUU. This has generally only been noticable on tumblr with Harry Potter, because most other stuff like SPN I have managed to notice on my own and make the decision to continue being fannish while still acknowledging that wow, it can be problematic, whereas HP remains my favourite book series ever and seeing people yelling about WHY ARE THERE NO QUEER CHARACTERS (EXCEPT DUMBLEDORE AND WHY WAS HE ONLY MENTIONED AT THE END FUCK YOU AND YOUR HOMOPHOBIA JKR) or THE WIZARDING ECONOMIC MODEL IS UNSOUND AND ALSO SO IS THE WORLDBUILDING BECAUSE THERE'S NO LABOUR WARD AT ST MUNGOS AND ALSO SQUIBS PROBABLY GET KICKED OUT AND DIE OF MUGGLE DEPRESSION AND WHERE DO WIZARDING KIDS LEARN BASIC NUMERACY AND LITERACY ANYWAY makes me want to either punch stuff because not all books can be all things to all people, or curl up in a corner with the books hissing protectively because the world-building gaps you're filling in are making a horribly depressing universe that I don't want the stories I love to have any part of. I suspect that this is essentially the same personality trait that means I prefer The Avengers over The Dark Knight Rises, because the former embraces its Comic Book Science and is about triumph against odds and things being alright in the end even if they aren't the same, and the latter is about Deep And Meaningful Political/Social commentary and Dark And Gritty And Therefore Realistic superheroics. It also, I suspect, taps into that old argument about whether fandom is primarily a happy space or a safe space, and whether focusing on squee over social justice makes you a bad person, which is a thing I struggle with a lot.
This post has no fannish content, sorry; all I can offer is this article about gay (male) marriage and how it was totes happening a few thousand years ago.