Revenge for yameyela on artfight! Ended up going a bit overboard and taking some artistic liberties, I really enjoyed working on the textures and details! Thanks again for the attack!
btw if u don’t wanna be a girl u can just not be a girl. if u don’t wanna be a boy u can just not be a boy. likewise for being a woman or a man or any gender that has ever existed.
there’s no test you need to pass or license u need to hold to trans your gender - you can just decide one day that u feel like doing something different. if ur waiting for permission, i’m giving u permission. go be happy.
For my transition, the idea “I would be happier living my life as a man” was far more helpful to my journey than the question “am I truly a man in my very soul” or whatever. It doesn’t have to be that deep. Your body is yours. Do with it what you want. Be who you want to be. Less pressure on “who you were made to be” as if that is some kind of immutable force. If you think that way you’ll never stop questioning yourself.
escapist media in general is an ongoing fascination for me. media written with escapism as a main priority typically requires very little thought from the reader - the whole point is to kick back and live vicariously through a fun story, after all. they’re narratives written to prioritize reader comfort.
but because they are written to be as unchallenging as possible, they often come with a set of underlying assumptions that can be just fucking fascinating to unpick. like yeah, why IS it assumed to be escapist and indulgent to enjoy colonial wealth without thinking about it in regency fiction. why IS the self inserty female protagonist, who is assumed to be as universally relatable as possible, written to be sweetly naive and sexually inexperienced. why does this “queernorm” contemporary world replicate patriarchial structures exactly but just with Gay People Allowed. why are these ideas assumed to be easy and comforting? can the writers not imagine anything better than the status quo but except maybe with more gay people and poc if you’re lucky?
the fact of the matter is that “unchallenging” fiction tends to just simply replicate dominant cultural narratives as a point of comfort. we won’t challenge the reader, so we won’t think about the way we write certain things. everything we think of as comforting and safe are, of course, universal, and could not be founded on any harmful ideological assumptions. there is nobody who could be alienated by this.
and that’s the sticking point to me, in terms of escapist fiction: it’s always necessary to ask whose comfort is being prioritized. you’ve got to interrogate who gets to escape and the mechanisms by which that escape happens. escapism can be good and necessary to survive the current world, but it does not exist in a vacuum separate from the real world, even if it pretends it does!
people fighting over music genres and whether subgenres “count” as part of the main genre is so much funnier when you can’t tell genres apart for the life of you. like i know the things u all are arguing about are not the same but this entire debate is in simlish to me
I’m 25 and sometimes it still hits me that I can do whatever I want.
Me: man I wish I could go to the zoo.
Me:
Me: …wait.
please go to the zoo if you want I’m a zoo docent and I love talking to grownups who are visiting the animals and want to know all about them.
You can buy yourself stuff in the gift shop too, if you have the money. Don’t need to ask a grownup or anything. If you want that toy gorilla it’s yours.
wait corn is built similarly to raspberries there’s a solid core covered in pockets of sweetened substance meant to be eaten to spread the seeds inside i know in culinary terms they’re a vegetable but taxonomically speaking are they a fucking fruit. is that a berry.
