to all the queer kids who have parents who aren’t openly homophobic but still not Nice about their queerness. Its okay to feel mad about it. Just because you’re in a physically safe place doesn’t mean that it can’t be frustrating and heartbreaking to not be accepted. to feel like you have to shove yourself into a box to be loved. your feelings are valid. you deserve all the proud acceptance in the world
The five bi love languages are memes, personalised book recommendations, artisanal sourdough, handwritten love letters, and pointing at random animals and saying “that’s you.”
One thing that pisses me off a lot is the fact that the world is not made for single people. Ignore the fact that everyone and their dogs think it’s wrong not to want a partner, I’m talking about practical things.
I’m talking about rent and mortgage in a city like London with only one salary. Yes, it’s exactly as hard as you can imagine. Not easy on a single salary unless you’re senior management level, want to commute two hours each day, or you are lucky enough to have your landlady be your best friend. Or you don’t mind living in a shoebox pretending to be a studio. Otherwise, you’ll be in a shared house.
I’m talking about holiday and travel, where either you go to hostel dorms of pay double price for a room in most hotels. And there are no packages for one, or barely any, and they are in singles holidays where the objective is not so much travel but stop being single.
I’m talking about doing shopping and producing more food waste than I’m comfortable with because everything comes in bigger portions than one person can reasonably eat. Even with freezing more than half of everything there will still be something that goes off because you were too slow to eat it if you do shopping once a week. Or you have to go shopping every couple of days and eat the same those two days.
It’s not enough to have all media telling you you’re wrong for not wanting a relationship, the entire world will try to push you into forming one by making it too expensive to be single.
systematic arophobia
I feel like the alternative to this _ought_ to be creating shared communal situations with friends but that is harder than it looks and there are a lot of societal things that make it even harder than it needs to be… and, especially for women, there are a lot of very legitimate reasons not to want to share certain kinds of spaces with strangers and it can be really frustrating that it’s so hard/expensive to NOT do that..,
As a polyam person and also just a leftist nerd, yes, I agree that it should be easier to live communally with large groups of people! That would be great! You could live with your four best friends and be happy, or with your partner and your best friend and their partner, or with your entire polycule, et cetera! Great!
But it doesn’t change the fact that you should be able to live alone if you want to, for any reason. If you’re fresh out of college, with your first job, and no partner? You should be able to live alone. If you recently got divorced? Ditto. But this particular issue is hardest on aromatics, because while anyone may want to live alone, most alloromantic people will consider that kind of living arrangement temporary. When people call this systematic arophobia, it’s because the issue disproportionately effects and targets people who intend to live alone forever. Marriage in the United States is subsidised. Literally. The tax benefits gained by being registered as married is a government subsidy to an amatonormative system that, while also hurting poly people, overwhelmingly hurts aromantics.
Marriage being a union between two people hurts polyam people. Marriage being financially beneficial hurts aromantics.
Non-partnering aros exist, and should be able to live in this world without having to pay more for lodging, food, and in taxes.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen an aro/poly solidarity post before and I’m here for that unconventional team-up. :D What I’m not here for are all the ways, big and small, that the world tries to tell us a relationship or a life needs to look like one particular kind of thing. There are so many beautiful paths to pursue happiness, on our own or together, and it’s aggravating when the ways are blocked and we’re all funneled through a common route that may not suit us. Let’s keep lifting each other up, reminding each other the things and people that bring us joy are valid, and supporting each other in our not necessarily one-size-fits-all lives.
i just learned so much in a single tumblr post nice
shout out to Leigh Bardugo for making homosexuality a totally chill normal thing in her fantasy world. something that all fantasy authors are completely capable of doing since they can worldbuild their stories from scratch however they want, rather than being unoriginal and unimaginative as fuck by basing it on societies that have already existed (read: usually Western) which were influenced by the real world’s major religions.
@ other authors: you’re literally creating a fictional world (and/or religion) from scratch, there’s often very little need imho to make your magical fantasy land homophobic.
I’ve realised that what I miss about fantasy is it being truly escapist. I miss it depicting places where I would actually want to go.
Every dang kid I knew waited for their Hogwarts acceptance letter. Reading the books and seeing it on screen gave you this warm, fuzzy feeling and a feeling of longing, even when they were in danger and fighting monsters and evil wizards, you want to be there.
You want to go to Middle Earth, see hobbits and elves and dwarves and run through this land of incredible beauty, mysticism and magic.
You want to be in the TARDIS, seeing the universe.
The more recent trend of fantasy is this gritty, dark realism and places where you would just never want to go. I don’t want to go to Westeros. I don’t want to be in The Hunger Games, I don’t particularly want to be in The Witcher universe. I’m living in the world of Black Mirror and I hate it.
Fantasy used to say “hey our world kinda sucks but here’s a cooler one”, but now it says “hey our world kinda sucks, but here’s an even worse one.”
That isn’t to say that the above are bad. They’re not.
But I miss beautiful, escapist fantasy that gives me a break. That takes me somewhere magical, somewhere otherworldly and gives me messages of hope and optimism in the face of darkness. I really, really miss that.
As a great man once said, “Fantasy is escapist, and that is its glory”. If I want to live in a world full of injustice and suffering, I can just watch the news.
Same fam tbh.
“I have claimed that Escape is one of the main functions of fairy-stories, and since I do not disapprove of them, it is plain that I do not accept the tone of scorn or pity with which ‘Escape’ is now so often used. Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls? The world outside has not become less real because the prisoner cannot see it”
J.R.R. Tolkien
“[M]y friend Professor Tolkien asked me the very simple question, ‘What class of men would you expect to be most preoccupied with, and most hostile to, the idea of escape?’ and gave the obvious answer: jailers.”
Quoted by C. S. Lewis. "On Science Fiction"
Just because it’s “escapism” doesn’t mean you’re not running to something.
Sometimes it blows my mind that there are people that don’t wear glasses/contacts. Like they can literally see with no aid. Like they wake up and just be out here seeing. What a wild concept.
And people say stuff like ‘lol don’t you hate it when you look up in the middle of the night and see a spider on your ceiling’ like bitch (!!) i could have Nicholas II last czar of Russia hangin from my ceiling fan and i would be none the wiser
