Have you ever seen a twitter thread (or, in this case, two!) that so perfectly expressed everything you’d felt over months and months of harassment persistent? With all credit to @blackblobyellowcone, who is clearly amazing and completely gets it– not just why us women write and read the erotica that we do, but the history behind the censorship we, as a gender, have experienced. Bravo.
I found this screenshot cleaning up my desktop and holy shit I thought we as a society had moved past book burning but I guess antis just want to sound like radical right wingers
(submitted by anon)
Man that’s just… Kinda sad. This discourse really sucks because there’s absolutely nothing wrong with liking yaoi manga, yet this person has been convinced there is to the point of actually contemplating burning queer literatureI mean
Damn.
That’s just not okay.
But if op wants to send me all of their yaoi I’d take it gladly, someone should give it a good home. I sure as hell hope they didn’t fucking burn it.
“Should I burn these books because they’d be enabling someone else’s problematic behavior” is such a deeply
terrifying
thing to say
also
also
i am no doubt preaching to the choir buuuuuuuut.
fujoshi is a unique word in that it’s undergone the exact opposite of what the word otaku did when it hit english-language fandom (i won’t say american fandom, because i’m sure if i do one of the terrible children will see this and pop up like a damn mandragora about cultural imperalism instead of what i’m actually getting at)
now i can’t cite this in full, because i’m going off years of reading without taking notes and also conversations with a folklorist friend who, while focusing primarily on Chinese legends, hangs out with a lot of Fan Studies (yes, it’s a real discipline!) people, but. fujoshi was intended, initially, as an insult towards female fans invested in relationships between men. it was meant to be specific, something more targeted than otaku, because “it seemed obvious to everyone exactly what was rotten about a fujoshi.” women in fandom took it and claimed it as a gleeful self-descriptor, sort of a “ ‘rotten girl’, really? Y’KNOW WHAT. SURE. YEAH. I’M ROTTEN AS HELL, LET’S GO WITH THAT” thing.
y’know. like english-speaking anime fans did with “otaku”, which… k. like. idk if it still gets mentioned in fandom these days but “otaku” basically meant “REALLY OVERINVESTED FAN, LIKE THE LADY FROM ‘MISERY’ BUT ABOUT ANYTHING AT ALL” before we adopted it as a loanword for “anime nerd”.
so it’s just kind of funny to me, having been in fandom since I was ~13, seeing the exact opposite of that happen. kind of funny to see a word used by female fans to describe themselves, a turned-around insult, redefined as… just an insult, like it was in the first place. funny.
I LOVE THIS STORY SO MUCH, IT’S BEAUTIFUL AND CLEVER AND AMAZING AND I AM GOING TO WRITE ABOUT THESE CHARACTERS BECAUSE THERE IS JUST SO MUCH TO EXPLORE AND APPRECIATE
Or as we call it around here, GRANT DANASTY WEEK 2018.
(@castlevaniaweek2018)
“So it’s just always night around here, right?” Grant kept his eyes wide and scanned the sewers around him, which didn’t help when he placed his foot right on a loose rock and nearly fell over.
“It’s the magic of the castle,” the one leading them through the filth said absently. Alucard never missed his step, but that had to be easy for a creature that could see in the dark.
“Yes yes, and that’s all very well for you, I’m sure. And he can get along well enough,” Grant jabbed a finger at Sypha and the small ball of flame hovering over his staff and got what he hoped was helpful pained sigh in return, “but for me and him, it’s a big problem!” Grant pointed at Trevor, who just laughed.
“I’m surprised our climber is so ill-footed,” Sypha said. It drove Grant mad how he could never tell how serious the man was under his low, monotone voice. Was that a sarcastic jab or genuine surprise? It was impossible to guess! He settled for grumping along, since their resident wizard didn’t seem to want to share his fireball.
“I’ve been trained to fight in the dark, so it doesn’t bother me,” their actual leader added. “But Grant, you can ride on my back if it’s so dangerous.”
While that had definite comic potential, Grant certainly wasn’t going to accept it as charity. Bad enough he owed Trevor his humanity, he didn’t need to owe the hunter his ankles as well! “Seems a bad job to me,” he said instead, “fighting creatures of the night in the dark. Why not attack while they’re sleeping?”
“They’re hard to find then. You don’t hunt deer at night, do you?” Trevor was walking in front of Grant now, and not doing a good job of pretending he wasn’t sounding out the path.
“We used to,” Alucard called from the front. “There’s not much choice around here.”
“You hunted deer?” Sypha asked.
“Once.”
No one asked what the castle hunted now.
That brought the mood down so far Grant knew it was time to put his plan into motion. He dodged around Trevor and Sypha, bounced off a crumbling wall, and landed square on Alucard’s back.
“Wha- Get off! Off!” Alucard twisted and struggled, but Grant was used to holding on in the worst storms. The only way Alucard was getting out was by turning into a bat. Which he apparently didn’t want to do and settled for glaring at Grant out of the corner of his eye, getting nothing but a wide grin in return. He settled himself more firmly, one arm around Alucard’s neck and the other holding his daggers. That was the nice thing about vampires. Lots of cloth to hold onto.
He ignored the surprisingly vicious curses Alucard kept muttering as they went.
“Oh, that’s clever. You can both take care of enemies from a distance now.” As always, it was impossible to tell if Sypha was joking.
(Albéniz and Tárrega are both Spanish composers, Dark Night of the Soul is based of a Spanish poem and also sound fucking great in this list. Explanation over)
screaming into the void since '89 