folks are REALLY pitching a fit over 17776 being compared to homestuck but uhh heres the thing: homestuck is the biggest (and, as far as i am aware, the first – definitely the first of its scale) longform multimedia internet narrative. and 17776 is doing a lot of the same things homestuck did, particularly wrt how it handles dialogue and establishes character voice. its also following multiple groups of characters each pursuing their own seemingly-unrelated plot threads that you can expect will eventually intertwine, which is absolutely not a structure that homestuck invented but its interesting that the two works have it in common
finding commonalities in works from the same time period and especially when those two works are feeling their way around an entirely new medium and way of storytelling is to be expected. i have no idea if jon bois is familiar w homestuck but if he isnt thats even more reason to talk about those overlaps – these are tropes already being established in a genre that barely exists!
anyway 17776 is very good and made me laugh in real life and i am eagerly looking forward to seeing how it unfolds
i’ve been calling it post-homestuck, since while—as you’ve covered—it’s very similar to homestuck both thematically and tonally, from a structural perspective it goes places homestuck was only barely touching at the very end.
For example, the “text chat” conceit from homestuck has been turned into an actual, living breathing real-time chat in 17776—you can see characters hesitate, delete what they were typing, and pause in ways that homestuck never could express in the pesterlogs.
Or take the very first chapter, with the calendar sequence. in 17776, jon bois, designer tyson whiting and developer graham macaree have taken the infinite scrolling website and turned it into an entirely new art form—one that for sure takes tons of cues from homestuck, but is also about discarding some of the limitations homestuck set for itself and really breaking new ground in what is possible with web-based storytelling.
I mean, comparing a work to its predecessors and contemporaries within its medium is one of the foundations of critique? Whether 17776 is directly or intentionally referencing Homestuck or not is important to analyzing it and being upset that people are making the comparison is beyond silly. 17776 shares a deep cultural DNA with Homestuck even if its just in how it is constructed and being presented in a way that I haven’t seen almost any other piece of work on the internet. Even most currently running web comics are deeply rooted in the conventions of conventional comic forms, both news print and comic books. They are structured with discrete panels, linework, dialogue bubbles and a fairly strict left to right (in western comics) reading progression. Even comics that make use of animated panels and gifs are just taking the implied motion of a standard comic and making it literal.
The only other comic I have seen that approaches comics in a similar multi-media way is Prequel (now on a two year+ hiatus). There is a reason that 17776 and Homestuck have been so quickly and deeply embraced by people who have grown up on the internet and I think there is a ton to be learned by looking at how each one has been tailored to internet culture and the conventions, expectations, tools, and opportunities they have utilized as somewhat freeform narrative works.
For what its worth, reading 17776 yesterday, I was struck with the same kind of feeling I got in early Homestuck when Hussie started throwing flash games and videos into it, or the first time I clicked the ==> button and the entire RSS of his website changed to match the sudden shift in narrative perspective, including retooling the ad bars to be extra panels to the comic. For better or worse, Homestuck radically expanded the way people thought an online narrative could be told and conveyed and 17776 has handily picked up that particular torch and run with it, perhaps even places that I don’t think Hussie would have. Which is great! I can’t think of a better thing for a new medium than people willing to push it beyond its current constraints and see how far they can take it. There is a reason people compare Homestuck to Ulysses and at least part of that was Hussie’s willingness to use his readers’ expectations of narrative norms and subvert them as a way of creating metatextual tension that then fed back into the internal narrative arc of the comic. 17776 does a lot of the same and I am super excited to see where it goes.
anyways hermione is a cutthroat bitch and her demonizing divination is due to the fact that she literally #cannot with emotional forms of magic. quidditch? which requires an emotional partnership of trust with the broom? nope. divination? which requires an emotional openness and willingness to forego logical conclusion at the whims of fate? are u fuckin kidding me. patronuses? which require not just technical skill but also a deep connection with your own emotional core? uhhhhh we’ll just let harry handle that one.
movie!hermione, w/ her advanced emotional intelligence and absolute willingness to meet each and every emotional need the boys have, should have of course been good at emotional magics like divination. shes fucking superwoman. but book!hermione? who destroyed a girls face without mercy because she ratted out the DA? who erased her parents memories so she could fight in a war? who solved dumbledores’ mysteries using ancient runes, an art that is practically the math of magic? book!hermione will destroy you and she will do it armed with the cold hard facts and the cold hard facts alone. book!hermione doesn’t give a shit. instead of getting a regular pet, book!hermione was drawn to a magical cat who is self-serving and intellectual and helped her gather clues rather than serving as an emotional companion. i mean fck.
full offense but hermione is so hardcore and logic-driven and she literally could give a SHIT about ur feelings
I was gonna counter this with the fact she gave the boys emotional advice on their love lives, but even then she did it in a very cold, logical way. “Cho is feeling x because y therefore you should have done z.”
17776 is about humanity, immortality, purpose, and football — told from the perspective of three sentient space probes wandering through outer space. but when you think about it, the space probes don’t… need to be there. i mean, why? it’s a story that uses football as a concrete way to dig into the issue of boredom in immortality. even if jon bois really, reeeaaally wanted to sneak in a subplot about a computer becoming sentient, it could have just been an abandoned laptop in a forgotten part of chicago or something. so… why pioneer nine? why space probes at all?
the answer is: narrative lens.
and yes, that’s a pun.
17776 is designed at the beginning (with the disintegrating article and then the calendar format of chapter 1) so that a reader could potentially feel nine’s distress as nine slips into sentience. after that, the story is designed so that the reader explores the far-future setting through nine’s questioning of their fellow space probes. if the author had simply immersed us in the dialogue of the durazos without any context, we might have eventually picked up on the setting and themes, but because nine is an outsider, nine’s perspective allows questions to be asked that would otherwise have gone unanswered. for example: “what is this?“ “football!” “don’t humans have better things to do?” “nope!”
(side note: yes, i’m aware that literature profs tell you you’re not supposed to make claims about what the reader feels, but i’m attempting to approach 17776 as a designed product bc that seems most appropriate right now. see also: me typing in lowercase.)
additionally, and this may be already obvious, but the predicament of nine, ten and juice serves as a useful parallel for the predicament of the humans. the july 8th upda7e makes this clear:
and just a few moments before this, nine says: “All these people seem so normal… But in some ways, it’s like they’re broken.” note the word choice; this is a word you use for machines, not people. since nine is a machine, it’s the only way nine knows how to process this experience, and it furthers the development of the immortality->purposelessness theme.
so 17776 has established the comparison that humans without suffering are like broken machines. but then, in the next chapter, we see nancy reflecting on the same issues that the space probes were discussing, and it doesn’t end on the same dissatisfied, negative note. she tells her companion about her inability to make a mark on the world, and she says: “There’s nowhere left to write. I think I’m just a bookmark.”
and he responds:
cool, huh?
this brings me to my last point. why a space probe, specifically? why not a time-traveler, or some other kind of computer, or an alien species?
it’s been argued that every work of fiction, whether it’s about suburban america or a far-off fantasy universe, whether it’s about the past, the present, or the future, all stories are nevertheless grounded in the here-and-now. we wouldn’t be interested in reading about nine and ten and juice if we couldn’t relate to them as humans in the early 21st century. so even though speculative fiction is ostensibly used to look outward, we inevitably end up looking inward instead, because it’s the only thing we know how to do.
that applies to 17776 as well. this may be a story about the far future, but it interests us because it asks questions about the here-and-now: why do we seek entertainment? what gives us purpose? does death make us human? 17776 is a narrative lens that aims into the fictional future in order to explore the real present, just as nine is a space probe — a lens made for looking outward — that finds themselves looking inward instead. nine isn’t just the main character or useful outsider POV. nine symbolizes the function of speculative fiction in our society.
and that’s my ridiculously long, severely lame, analysis-filled pun about 17776 and narrative lens.
@spiralingintocontrol reblogged the post I made about brain freeze at my last job with a link to a blog post they’d written about the same thing that struck eerily true. And if it’s anywhere near as widespread as it seems to them, I – this is worrying??? (bolded mine)
You’re isolated. You’re not talking to anyone about your work. You don’t really want to talk to anyone about your work, and as days pass, you want to less and less. Why? If you talk to someone about your work, they’ll realize you’ve been banging your head against the wall for weeks. They’ll know.
For now, though, it’s enough to make you miserable that you know: You’re not getting anything done. Your goals don’t make sense to you, you’re not sure what direction to go in, and you don’t really have the power to move the project in any particular direction. You get a few things done each day, but feel demoralized by their sparsity and their insignificance. And the longer this goes on, the less you want to ask for help or input of any kind.
Some people call this a symptom of impostor syndrome. I don’t think so. To call it “impostor syndrome” implies that it arises out of a mistaken belief, when, in truth, it’s not mistaken. You’re not wrong to think that you’re not getting things done, and that you’re not very good at your job. Of course you’re not—yet! You’re very new to it, and being good at your job involves plenty of soft skills you didn’t pick up before your first (or perhaps second, or even third) professional programming job.
For another thing, this isn’t all because of you, either: Your supervisor isn’t prompting you to ask questions, and isn’t bothering to get more detail from you on what’s going well and what isn’t. They’re not making sure you’re not blocked, or spinning your wheels.
The trouble arises when you get into a cycle: you feel bad about not knowing what to do next, so you don’t ask for help, so you try to do everything yourself; you don’t have a lot of success, so you still feel bad and don’t want to ask for help; next thing you know, it’s been a month and you haven’t spoken to another human being, except to tell your boss “Things are going okay,” with a glossed-over description of your progress so far.
This is not healthy.
anyway this is a good post and the subsequent advice is also good.
My boss talks a lot about “psychological safety” (he’s such a nerd… I love him) which is basically feeling like you can ask questions, even really “stupid” questions, and be vulnerable in front of the group in that sense without feeling judged, or preferably you should actually feel REWARDED for doing this. Because asking questions not only helps you, it also helps other people on the team to understand what you’re working on, which helps them as well. Or maybe they don’t even know the answer, but you can find out together and BOTH learn something. And this is the most important and key thing you can do for the productivity of the team, is to cultivate that environment. I agree with that blog post like, if people habitually shut you down and act put upon when you ask questions, or even if no one else seems to ask for help ever so you don’t feel like you can… you should get out of that situation asap. Not only is that bad for both your professional growth and your mental health, it also means your team is probably shitty and unproductive because everyone’s wasting time feeling individually miserable trying to figure everything out by themselves. It just doesn’t work.
You spend 20 years in school being conditioned to do everything on your own or you’re Cheating, and the people in authority actually refuse to tell you things that they know because you’re supposed to “figure it out”. This is all bullshit that needs to be unlearned as quickly as possible. Real grownup people who are actually trying to Get Shit Done WANT to tell you the things that they know so that together you can Get Shit Done twice as fast. Anyone who feels like you’re wasting their time by asking questions is honestly not very good at their job, cause… that means they think they don’t need your help, and it just ain’t so.
to my surprise, i was actually praised the other day at my studio for just this. “i love roach,” the instructor said, “because they say everything the rest of you guys are thinking. i always know when you’re lost because roach raises their hand and says so.”
my studio skews towards the young and the male: kids just out of highschool, and men who don’t want to look dumb, and the minority population of girls that really really REALLY don’t want to look dumb. but i’ve been out of college for six years and am comfortable being seen as a clueless amateur, so i ask the instructor to clarify points and repeat demonstrations all the time. and pretty much no one’s exasperated or contemptuous of me: everyone, even the instructor, appreciates it.
it’s really tough, initially, to risk looking dumb in front of other people, but it’s worth it. after awhile you learn that asking questions is pretty much a public service, not a personal humiliation.
Back when I thought I was straight I would go on dates with boys. The boys would usually want to kiss me. I disliked kissing, but I thought that their preferences deserved to count as much as mine, and I reasoned that they probably liked kissing more than I disliked kissing. So kissing was a morally good thing to do. I also reasoned that if I told them I disliked the kissing then they’d feel guilty and enjoy it less. So I did not tell them.
I am certain I was making some kind of critical error but it has taken me a long time to figure out what it might be.
ii.
I like cuddling. I know some straight girls who like cuddling with their straight female friends but don’t want to cuddle with people who might be attracted to them because it makes them uncomfortable. But they don’t want to explicitly tell me this preference because they’re worried it’s homophobic. Ever since I learned that this dynamic was present in at least one friendship of mine I have not cuddled with any straight girls because there’s a plausible scenario in which I’d be making them uncomfortable and they wouldn’t tell me.
avatar was like the highest grossing movie of all time and yet its only impact on culture was to confuse people talking about the last airbender
I watched Avatar late – like, really late, more than a year after it stopped showing in theatres – and remember thinking, wow that’s gorgeous… and that was all. And then realized that, money aside, the movie was a total flop. It was the most expensive animated black-light poster ever made, and designed to have absolutely nothing get in the way of the breathtaking graphics.
Nothing. Not even bad plot and dialogue. They weren’t good (there were a lot of cliches), but they weren’t cringe-inducing bad, either.
And I thought, “Cameron’s really done something incredible here – he’s got a movie with aliens with their own language, body-swapping, telepathic animal control, group mind-merging, soul-bonding, FLYING WILD DRAGONS, gorgeous and dangerous flora & fauna, evil space patrol, and levitating rocks. And fandom DOES. NOT. CARE.”
I had seen no pictures other than one or two screencaps of the aliens with grumbling about “yet another ‘what these people need is a honky!’ plotline.” Had heard no quotes from the movie. There’s no notable amount of fic. No usericons on LJ (which was big at the time). No meta, other than acknowledgement that this was another “white dudes rule” movie. Nada.
He managed to extract millions of dollars from the American public without making the smallest dent on their psyches, and that is an impressive talent. Biggest shared experience of modern America – more people saw it than the Avengers – and nobody remembers more than fragments of it, and nobody cares about that.
so on the subject of stolen property, i’ve seen various arguments on this point but it is in fact true that inheriting something from a relative, when you know full well that it was stolen, does not make it yours.
this clearly goes doubly so for powerful magical artifacts, and especially for artifacts which are strongly implied to contain part of their creator’s soul!
you can talk about consequences – maybe the artifact in question has benefits for you, maybe you’re not convinced its rightful owners would use it responsibly – but talking about the consequences doesn’t erase the fact that whatever benefits you think you’re getting are achieved through wrongful means.
which is why i, too, think Frodo should have given the One Ring back to Sauron. thief.
Hahahahaha here comes the law student nerd ready to complicate your wonderful post, op.
(Really this is just pretext for me to study for my property final in a week, so thanks yeah)
Because according to the principles of common property law, the matter of who actually owns title to the One Ring becomes really complicated really fast.
Buckle up babes for the pedantic law lecture no one asked for.
The best part of this is: trust me I guarantee Tolkien knew this much about the Common Law (English mediaevalists end up knowing ridiculous amounts about both Common Law and mediaeval Catholicism whether we want to or not), and indeed if you look at the text, this was relevant to the story.
It’s part of the reason that Sauron is as terrified of Aragorn’s potential claim on the Ring as he is of Gandalf’s or Saruman’s or Galadriel’s – if not more. Because in Middle Earth this shit matters. This is a world where a broken oath will literally bind your unhappy restless soul to the earth in spite of the dictates of the literal creator of the universe (who designated humans as Passing Beyond The World when they die). This is a world where a damn oath is responsible for Everything That’s Wrong With The First And Second Ages.
Oaths, ownership, duties, rights, things owed and owing: this shit matters.
And sure Aragorn is also direct line from Lúthien, but so is Elrond, and so are Elrohir and Elladan. So is Arwen. But what none of them have that Aragorn has? Is a rightful claim to ownership of the Ring.
So much of what Aragorn spends his time in the second and third volumes doing is Establishing Claim – establishing that everything that Isildur owned, he now owns. Why? Because it means he has power that is absolutely needed. “Isildur’s Heir” isn’t a woo-woo floofy-high-concept thing: it’s a literal matter of rights, duties and authority.
When he takes the Palantír from Gandalf and uses it, his companions are aghast, but he reminds them that he has both the right and the strength to use it – and the Right is actually important. Saruman was, face to face, stronger than Aragorn (never doubt that) and Sauron completely pwned him, but Saruman had no right to the Seeing Stone, no more right than Pippin.
But the Palantíri belonged to Aragorn: he’s not only Melian’s ever-so-great-grandchild, he’s also Fingolfin’s ever-so-great-grandchild, and since the Fëonori died out with the poor Ringmaker, the only competition Aragorn could have for ownership of the Stones are Galadriel and Elrond. (And that’s only if you are going right back to the maker-rights, and ignoring the establishment of the Stones as the property of Elros’ line rather later).
It matters. It changes how power works and doesn’t work. Aragorn’s status as the Heir is in fact grounded in these ideas, which play a hugely powerful part (in fact the fight over who rightfully owns the Silmaril Beren and Lúthien brought out of the dark is part of the bloodshed that makes it so that in the end the Silmarils themselves actively reject the last two living sons of Fëanor, negating their claim). Because Aragorn is the rightful inheritor of everything Isildur ever had, he can use the Palantír. Because he is the rightful inheritor of everything Isildur ever had, he can summon the Dead. And because he is the rightful inheritor of everything Isildur ever had, he stands equal to two of the Ainur, to the oldest member of the Trees-blessed Noldorin royal house, and to his own much more powerful (straight up) relatives as a potential claimant of the Ring.
And that is why Sauron is willing to take the chance to catch Aragorn, and (he thinks) ensure his capture, rather than attacking him earlier on when there’s a chance that (even if Aragorn can’t possibly WIN) he could still escape and then bide his time before the next Ring-War and learn to use the damn thing.
But. It’s also important when it comes to Frodo.
Frodo uses the Ring twice, and lays open claim once. Both of the times he uses it are on Sméagol, both times overwheming him and in the second case cursing him (“if you ever touch me again you will be thrown into the fire”). We get both moments from Sam’s POV, where the physical reality of Frodo is replaced by an image of him as a much larger figure, alight from the inside, robed in light, and with a “wheel of fire” at his breastbone.
Frodo does not have any genetics (so to speak) more special than any other hobbit. It’s not like Aragorn vs most humans, where there’s actually a legit difference because most humans were not, at that point, descended from a Maia. Frodo’s just this guy.
The only thing that’s really special about Frodo in terms of the Ring is that, like Aragorn, he’s the other person who has a viable claim. It would, as it were, have to go to the judges to figure out whose claim is better.
And this is why in the moment that he claims the Ring, in the Mountain, Sauron is fucking terrified. It’s why he drops everything else, even the issue of trying to keep his mindless drone-fighters going, even the maintenance of his actual control of weather, of light, of whatever fight he and Gandalf have going, to get his best servants back to the Mountain now now now now.
Because Frodo having an actual rightful claim on the Ring means he can, in fact, use it. Not well, which is why Sauron can paralyse him for that moment it takes for Sméagol to strike (and carry out both Frodo’s demanded oath – “save the Precious from Him” – and his Curse – “if you touch me you will be thrown in the fire” – at once), but he could. This tiny little person is a threat to Sauron, in the heart of his own home, because he has the right to have and use this Ring.
The tricky thing about Tolkien is that whatever his flaws (and he has many), the one thing he’s never unclear of is that the concept of right and might are actually separate. Just because you are strong enough to do or take a thing doesn’t mean you have any right to do it; and just because you aren’t strong enough to enforce your right, doesn’t mean it goes away.
What really sucks about the way Joss Whedon writes is that he sort of has this idea that if he writes about women being strong and confident, that is all it takes for women to appreciate his work. Like, even if the villain constantly belittles a woman for being a woman and people are constantly harassing her and sexualizing her, it’s okay because she’s strong and she can take it.
The biggest difference between Whedon’s version of Wonder Woman and Jenkins is that in Whedon’s version Wonder Woman is A Woman. She (and the audience) must be constantly aware that she is a Woman, that she is Sexy, that she is overcoming incredible odds because she has the terrible disadvantage of Being Born A Woman.
Whereas in Jenkins’ film Diana simply exists. There are some points made by other characters about her being a woman, like when Steve won’t sleep with her because he feels it’s improper, or when his secretary says, “Oh yes, put specs on her, like after that she won’t be the most beautiful woman you’ve ever seen”, but Diana is almost completely unaware of her status as a Dreaded Woman. Her excitement over a baby? She’s literally never seen one before. Her little makeover seen? Spends the whole thing looking for something comfortable she can fight in. She basically never mentions the difference between men and women, never even says that women are better or whatever because she was raised by them.
Joss Whedon would have never let Wonder Woman forget she was a Woman. She would have constantly been making comments about it, wether positive or negative, as would everyone around her. In Whedon’s heyday that might have flown a lot better, but now women seem to be a little sick of grrrrl power. They just want power. They just want to exist, both on screen and in life, without constant reminders that they are Women and that they must pay for that at every turn.
now women seem to be a little sick of grrrrl power. They just want
power. They just want to exist, both on screen and in life, without
constant reminders that they are Women and that they must pay for that
at
the reason male comic book fans work themselves into a frenzied rage over “fake geek girls“ is because they think they can’t get a girlfriend because of their love for comic books (a.k.a nerdiness). if they accept that geek girls genuinely love comic books, then they’re left with the cold harsh reality that it’s not their nerdiness that makes them unattractive to women, but the fact that they are misogynistic condescending dickbags who need to be avoided AT ALL COSTS
It goes beyond just geek girls, too. There’s this recurring thing in male-dominated nerd circles where they reach a certain level of dependence on the concept that they are shunned rebels in an unjust world, and they just cannot fucking let go of it. They break their own communities into factions to ensure there’s always someone to judge and feel cheated by. Look at the gamer variety’s arguments over consoles, or how much they enjoy complaining about ‘casuals’ and ‘care bears’.
This is why the idea that women are invading male nerd’s happy places is at it’s core bullshit obfuscation that cannot be defended by the excuse that oh they just don’t have good social skills. They don’t want to get away from their issues with pals they can trust. They want to feel wronged. They want to feel like someone has stolen their victories from them. They are kings dethroned by rabble, and the only thing left is to live in the wilderness with their objectively correct opinions while the cruel and stupid masses devour themselves. Clinging to that scornfully righteous feeling of being hampered by society’s foolishness and betrayal is their driving goal, no matter how small the group they’re defining as society has to be to get it. So long as they manage that, the world is simple and they have no reason to grow or learn anything.
Women undeniably catch the most shit from this. Basic american misogyny has done half the work for them, making women both easy targets and easily otherized. The vulnerability that comes from desiring anything that might reject you threatens their narrative of uncomplicated and unquestionable superiority, so women must be EVEN MORE out to get them than most people! The thought that someone so perfect to act as the face of the enemy might be in the same position as them is anathema.
Essentially, they are really fucked up.
As OP said, avoid at all costs.
this is the best and most insightful commentary anyone has ever added to this post, let this version get the next 100k reblogs
As a nerdy gamer girl, you took all of my feeling that I couldn’t describe over the years and out them into words. Thank you.
disclaimer: i’m not a historian or a sociologist only a person who has read things and observed and interpreted by my own understanding. i expect it’s all been said before. i’m writing it down because if i don’t i’ll go on overthinking it and arguing with myself until i am a semiconscious blob. ANYWAY
in 1894, Lord Alfred Douglas published an undistinguished poem called “Two Loves” that would have faded into (deserved) obscurity but for the phrase “the love that dare not speak its name.” even that would have passed with a yawn except that it was quoted at Oscar Wilde’s trial as a secret code for homosexuality. Wilde denied this, but it’s now generally accepted that that was its intended meaning.
so time passes, the world changes, there’s struggle, and a group of people can now speak its name, not always safely, not always freely, but there is the sound of voices. when we are acquiring language, we call the names of things–milk, truck, mama– and especially we say our own names over and over. we tell the stories of ourselves to ourselves and later to others with increasing refinement as our vocabulary grows. in adolescence and youth the imperative seems to be to fight for one’s own identity, to distinguish ourselves in the world so we can survive as individual personalities and paradoxically as part of a culture. we call our names and if no one listens, we call more loudly; we learn and invent new words so that we are known to and for ourselves, and listen for others using the same words so we know that although individual, we are not isolated.
i feel like right now things are changing massively, importantly, and that we’re in the adolescent stage of a new social identity; we’re inventing language daily to define ourselves and acquiring the power and volition to express it because now we can when we couldn’t before. i don’t think this power is always used effectively or with discrimination and consideration, but that, in my experience, is pretty typical of adolescents. there are metaphorical and actual cliques and in-fighting and kids who sit at the cool table in the cafeteria and a lot of labeling and angry flailing as a growing generation becomes more articulate and invents itself as it has to in order to survive and effect change.
in the struggle to define ourselves, we’re going to come up against people taking different ways through the same process, and people who feel they’ve substantially passed through it and are in a different stage of development. attacking “others” is a harsh part of self-definition, declaring who you are by pointing out what you are NOT. every generation does it because every generation goes through a social-change adolescence, which is a pretty good thing for people to remember when they start condemning other generations.
in a way this is my defense of “millennials” as well as my consideration of dissension within the LGBTQ+ community. it’s too early in our current struggle for change to start criticising people for using language when they haven’t acquired a lot of skill with a massive new vocabulary that is in flux itself; you have to live with it and practice it and say it until it becomes a part of the world. you can’t blame people who have felt silenced for yelling when they can. It’s part of a process that i believe will result in better things as a cultural body moves into its maturity. i believe that REALLY HARD.
just moving along like everyone else 