Anghraine

Being an ace lesbian can be a hell of an experience sometimes.

#super fun to be in the crossfire! #or tacked-on afterthoughts whose opinions and experiences don't really matter to anyone. also fun!

An anon said:

Hi! I’m kinda curious about your mentioning OSC, do you like other books of his? Cheers!

I replied:

I read Characters and Viewpoint religiously (as it were) as a teenager and enjoyed a lot of his fiction until I discovered the … everything.

Quora sent me a response about Aragorn’s claim to the throne that heavily downplayed the Stewards while completely overlooking some very salient elements of the original claim (like, Arvedui claiming to be the rightful king of Gondor under a misrepresentation of Númenórean law while his father was alive)

And then the first annoying response came from

Orson Scott Card

Tagged: #i mean. i already despised him but apparently he's on lotr threads on quora now #he wrote my favorite writing book as a young closeted lds writer so i'm very ADJKFKJADFK;ADFJKAGHHHH about him generally #WILL I NEVER BE FREE

Pet peeve: “[X] is only popular because women think he’s hot!!”

I mean, it’s fine if that’s why a given person likes the character. But as a lesbian who often finds it easier to align myself with male characters, it’s this sweeping heterocentric (and frequently misogynistic) generalization that is just … constantly frustrating.

Tagged: #i mean it's also because my ~femaleness~ feels so purely socialized and non-innate that i have a lot of hang-ups #around the pressure to ID with cis female characters #unless they trigger 'wow MY TYPE' in my brain instead of 'ack gender feelings red alert!' #like. these things are messy! you don't know people's lives /unless they tell you/

I feel an unexpected solidarity with straight men and other men attracted to women who play games as hot women, because I also do this!

I mean, I feel my, uh, tastes in hot women are rather better than many of theirs (to go by their character creation choices, lol), but I was thinking about how I make characters I find attractive and interesting more than characters I want to be, even if Who I Am As a Person bleeds through (I feel so bad about taking people's stuff, even if it's not marked as theft...). They're not really idealized Elizabeths.

At the same time, I was thinking about it some more, because I was talking with a (cishet male!) friend of mine about how he doesn't really get the link a lot of other men have between their sense of gender as men and their attraction to women—for him, these things feel completely separate. But that's not the case for me. Insofar as I have a sense of alignment with womanhood, it's tightly bound up in my attraction to women. I'm most comfortable presenting as wholly female when I can present as the kind of woman I find attractive. My "womannness" does feel pretty purely like an artifact of socialization and convenience, to be sure. But while being ... female-adjacent rather than female per se can feel a bit uncomfortable at times (I definitely don't feel like I have an internal, intrinsic gender, just a sort of affiliation by force of habit), I'm most comfortable with it in a specifically lesbian context.

IDK where this is going, just something I've been thinking about, mostly via BG3 and my disinterest in playing as someone with my own wobbly sense of gender.

Not to be all rah rah rainbow capitalism (though I'd certainly take it over the norms of my youth), but I finally got a proper shirt with the bars of the pride flag on it. It's actually mostly grey and the bars are pretty subtle, but my tastes are fairly basic, and it's very soft and comfortable. Success!

Some spoilers under the cut, though probably unsurprising ones:

( Read more... )

something good ... happened ... ?

#a 6-3 vote too!

I have a Facebook account that’s almost entirely for interacting with people I know from grad school or who share academic interests to some extent, but some of the people I’m friends with use it a lot more generally, and … uh.

Well, I’m glad that people who are attracted to men are able to express it more openly, but I am really really really not one of them.