Advice For Your Local Fantasy Knight

do it.

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foggy morning // Bass Harbor Head Lighthouse

Now, I’m not saying romantic relationships are inferior, or that they’re useless, or that you being in one or that you shipping some characters romantically is Bad or something off the walls like that. What I’m saying is that two people (or characters, since we’re talking shipping here) can be just as devoted to each other, love each other just as deeply, mean just as much to each other while being in a platonic relationship. The end point of caring about someone doesn’t have to be romance.

Friendship isn’t a stepping stone between strangers and romantic partners, it’s a different path. And you can follow that path as deep into the wood as a romantic one if you want, and neither is inferior to the other, they just have different views.

Answering every single personality or future life quiz that had questions about relationships or what I found most attractive with whatever my best friend would put down. Or whatever I looked for in a friend

tell me you are aromantic without actually telling me you are aromantic

I believe you

Fuck you. This is the coward's way out. This train will not bring you back in time.

It will not take her arm, or his eye. It will not gift your cheeks their stubble. It will heave its way through English fields and English woods and English towns and English rain, and our mother will sit in that compartment with you.

Have you considered that? Mother, who looks at you as a chicken beholds the fox beneath the fence, as a farmer beholds the wolf by the gate, mother, who has long since washed all colour from her face.

Mother, who is grey and damp as the rain.

Hours in a locked tomb. Hours with her. What will she say? How will she sit? What things will she drag from your mouth?

Will she pin you, with those tired eyes, with those faded hands, to the fabric of your seat, to take from you the answers we have been keeping from her for years?

And how could you ever tell her? How could you dare?

Mother, your little boy has died. Mother, your little girl has seen battle. Mother, your children have commanded armies. They've sat thrones and mourned children. They've lost their people.

Twice.

Mother, you are tired. You are weary. You would not understand.

By the lion, you'd despair.

Mother, a witch has spelled your son when his ears still stuck out and he missed your husband with all the violence of a schoolboy. She took him, pointed nails and pearl-teeth, god, she carved flesh and bone and sinew until that paper-thin skin held nothing at all.

Mother, the son you sent to the countryside with the world digging into his shoulders has died. In tiny pieces, at first, and then all at once, as a trickle turns first into a stream and then into a raging river.

Until finally, it spreads into the sea.

Your child lies buried in every decree, every law, and- Christ, who are we kidding, the Narnian soil. The golden boy you wanted so desperately to protect lies in pieces next to the witch, rotting into the earth.

We cannot return him to you.

Will you tell her, I wonder, about the razor blades underneath your floorboards? Will you bare your neck and show her all the mess you've made of the soft skin there when the nights were long and the tremors were terrible?

What of the knives under our little ones' pillows?

Fuck you.

When I was born, I had you. When I was little, I had you. Those terrible, wonderful years - I had you. How am I meant to go on without you? Brother, I don't know how.

Already my lungs are refusing their work. Already my stomach turns. My teeth are aching, my bones have chilled. My cheeks are stained - big red streaks of salt.

Of blood.

I have carved a way for myself through the chalk and the limestone and the mud. With my hands and my teeth, on the last bit of hope I could still heave up in between the cigarettes and the whiskey, I dug my way to sunlight. For days, for months, for years.

With my bare fucking hands, brother.

And you? You've never put the sword down. You've never looked at the dirt. You can't, you say. You're not made for it. Your mouth is the wrong shape and your eyes want nothing to do with the ground.

Instead, you've spent your time picking out the perfect mortician, the right funeral shroud. The coffin. Instead, you've drawn maps and routes into a home that has long been plundered.

Brother, where has your hunger gone?

It is deeply, deeply beneficial to TERFs if the only characteristic of TERF ideology you will recognize as wrong, harmful, or problematic is "they hate trans women".

TERF ideology is an expansive network of extremely toxic ideas, and the more of them we accept and normalize, the easier it becomes for them to fly under the radar and recruit new TERFs. The closer they get to turning the tide against all trans people, trans women included.

Case in point: In 2014-2015, I fell headlong into radical feminism. I did not know it was called radical feminism at the time, but I also didn't know what was wrong with radical feminism in the first place. I didn't see a problem with it.

I was a year deep into this shit when people I had been following, listening to, and looking up to finally said they didn't think trans women were women. It was only then that I unfollowed those people, specifically; but I continued to follow other TERFs-who-didn't-say-they-were-TERFs. I continued ingesting and spreading their ideas- for years after.

If TERFs "only target trans women" and "only want trans women gone", if that's the one and only problem with their ideology and if that's the only way we'll define them, we will inevitably miss a vast majority of the quiet beliefs that support their much louder hatred of trans women.

As another example: the trans community stood relatively united when TERFs and conservatives targeted our right to use the correct restroom, citing the "dangers" of trans women sharing space with cis women. But when they began targeting Lost Little Girls and Confused Lesbians and trotting detransitioners out to raise a panic about trans men, virtually the only people speaking up about it were other transmascs. Now we see a rash of anti-trans healthcare bills being passed in the US, and they're hurting every single one of us.

When you refuse to call a TERF a TERF just because they didn't specifically say they hate trans women, when you refuse to think critically about a TERF belief just because it's not directly related to trans women, you are actively helping TERFs spread their influence and build credibility.

I FINALLY FOUND THIS POST