• any target
• churches in texas
• abandoned 7/11’s
• your bedroom at 5 am
• hospitals at midnight
• warehouses that smell like dust
• lighthouses with lights that don’t work anymore
• empty parking lots
• ponds and lakes in suburban neighborhoods
• rooftops in the early morning
• inside a dark cabinet
playgrounds at night
rest stops on highways
deep in the mountains
early in the morning wherever it’s just snowed
trails by the highway just out of earshot of traffic
schools during breaks
those little beaches right next to ferry docks
bowling alleys
unfamiliar mcdonalds on long roadtrips
your friends living room once everybody but you is asleep
laundromats at midnight
what the fuck
galeries in art museums that are empty except for you
the lighting section of home depot
stairwells
•hospital waiting rooms
•airports from midnight to 7am
• bathrooms in small concert venues
I just got the weirdest feeling I swear
OK LISTEN THERE ARE REASONS FOR THIS!!!
A lot of these places are called liminalspaces – which means they are throughways from one space to the next. Places like rest stops, stairwells, trains, parking lots, waiting rooms, airports feel weird when you’re in them because their existence is not about themselves, but the things before and after them. They have no definitive place outside of their relationship to the spaces you are coming from and going to. Reality feels altered here because we’re not really supposed to be in them for a long time for think about them as their own entities, and when we do they seem odd and out of place.
The other spaces feel weird because our brains are hard-wired for context – we like things to belong to a certain place and time and when we experience those things outside of the context our brains have developed for them, our brains are like NOPE SHIT THIS ISN’T RIGHT GET OUT ABORT ABORT. Schools not in session, empty museums, being awake when other people are asleep – all these things and spaces feel weird because our brain is like “I already have a context for this space and this is not it so it must be dangerous.” Our rational understanding can sometimes override that immediate “danger” impulse but we’re still left with a feeling of wariness and unease.
Listen I am very passionate about liminal spaces they are fascinating stuff or perhaps I am merely a nerd.
I, for one, appreciate your passion for liminal spaces and thank you for explaining it to the rest of us.
it’s literally the best thing ever?? you can have two characters traveling the country?? learning more about themselves?? learning more about their friends??
you can literally apply this to any couple. otp?? no problem. ot3?? hell fuckin’ yeah. ot5?? you may need to rent a bus for that.
driving shitty rental cars and living off of gas station food and going way too fast down highways with the radio up
alternately: “hell no you cannot survive off of gas station candy I’m taking us to a real restaurant”
getting lost on the way to the restaurant and having to ask for directions at a remote little souvenir shop
going to tourist traps just to buy shitty souvenirs for each other and compete for the most tacky ones.
traveling to super crowded cities and taking a couple of days off just to enjoy the feeling of being lost. driving down winding country roads and opening all the windows because it’s like being found.
which member of your otp wants to go to super sophisticated cities and which one wants to visit the world’s largest ball of yarn?
staying in shitty motels, okay? the kind of creepy-not-quite-real aesthetic of neon lights and soft linen and staying awake all night listening to the other person breathe.
alternately: you literally get the chance to write the scenario where the characters trade off seats during the night and the driver keeps looking at their sleeping companion and getting distracted because of the way the moonlight bounces off of their face and ugh
taking turns deciding on the next destination and characters declaring things like “oh my god, I hate the countryside” but they wind up loving it
car karaoke. someone probably owns the complete collection of disney cds. they probably take it very seriously.
characters who keep making more and more detours because they want it to last forever even though it can’t.
i feel like the fundamental ideological divide they’re using for civil war is that steve is reacting to the winter soldier while tony is reacting to age of ultron
steve is afraid of being controlled, of being forced to take action or inaction even when his own moral code disagrees, or when he’s not given all the information (this ties a lot into bucky’s arc but that’s a whole other post)
tony is afraid of himself, of what he could do or who he could become without something restraining him, of being the merchant of death with no accountability all over again
steve does what he does because he’s certain that what he’s doing is right; tony does what he does because he doesn’t trust himself to make that call anymore
Yes! I think that, in the end, it comes down to the question of who do you trust more, individuals or institutions?
And there isn’t really a correct answer to that. Both people and institutions are flawed; there’s no perfect solution. And Tony and Steve both have really compelling reasons for thinking the way they do.
In showing his support for the Sokovia Accords, Vision suggests that superheroes inspire supervillains. That has absolutely been the case for Tony. In Iron Man, the bad guy was Obadiah Stane, an individual who utilized (stole) Tony’s inventions for war profiteering and to make his own Iron Man suit. In Iron Man 2, Vanko was sitting quietly in Russia until he saw footage of Tony, and that provoked him into creating his own suit and rushing off to fight. His original inspiration was also based on his family’s grudge against Tony’s father, so even that was inspired by an individual. Iron Man 3 included a flashback to when Tony dissed someone at a party who ended up becoming the Mandarin. And in Age of Ultron, Tony literally created the supervillain himself, just as he blithely created weapon systems for years before his abduction in Afghanistan.
So, Tony has every reason not to trust individuals, especially himself. He created Ultron, he created weapons, he inspired all these supervillains, obviously (in his mind) someone needs to keep him in check. It’s very sad, but his point of view absolutely makes sense based on his experiences.
Steve, however, has had a radically different experience. In Captain America, he fought against Nazi Germany, an excellent example of how institutions (in this case, the German government) can become corrupted and usurped by evil. He also fought against HYDRA*, an organization that proudly boasts that for every individual leader you kill, the institution will grow threefold.
(*I’m ignoring the “Steve secretly works for HYDRA” thing because a. it’s stupid and b. I’m talking about the Marvel Cinematic Universe, not the comics.)
After coming to the 21st century, Steve ends up fighting HYDRA once again in Captain America 2–and this time, they’ve infiltrated the institution of SHIELD.
With all this in mind, it’s no surprise Steve doesn’t trust the United Nations to lead the Avengers–if SHIELD was controlled by HYDRA, how could the UN be trustworthy? They’re not any less likely to be corrupted by evil, whether secretly like HYDRA or openly like the Nazi Party.
Also worthy of note is the fact that these institutions predate Steve’s being Captain America. In stark contrast to Tony’s villains, Steve did not inspire the Nazis or HYDRA (according to Agents of SHIELD, HYDRA has been around for centuries or even millennia).
These villains existed independently of Steve and needed a superhero to rise up and oppose them. Conversely, Tony’s villains were created by the hero rising up.
No wonder they have such different opinions! Everything they’ve experienced has led them to such completely opposite conclusions. And neither is wrong. There are perfectly legitimate reasons to trust an institution before an individual and perfectly legitimate reasons to trust an individual over an institution.
Perhaps Natasha’s idea of combining institutional control with individual control (keeping one hand on the wheel) is the best, but good luck getting Tony and Steve to compromise their moral codes.
If anyone tells you that there are 2-3 sexes in the world I want you to just go ahead and slap them.
I was making a chart this morning, but by the time I got to the twentieth configuration of primary sex characteristics, I got bored and angry, so just fucking slap them. Don’t bother giving them a chart, it’s a pain in the ass to produce anyway.
Here’s some non-chart-form lists.
Primary sex is defined by taking one or more item from each list (roughly, because just as there are double dominant intersex conditions there are double recessive ones too and it’s a whole thing). All potential combinations of these options can be said to constitute their own primary sex category.
Chromosomes:
XX
XY
X/X0
Mosaic
XXY
XXXY
XXX
XYY
Others (there are so many, like I think you can live with up to five chromosomes? So many)
Hormones
Estrogenized
Androgenized
Double dominant (high levels of both estrogenic and androgenic hormones)
Double recessive (low or no sex hormones)
Gonads
Testicle/es
Ovary/ies
Ovotestes
Gonads
Testicular agenesis
Gonadal dysgenesis
Probably more, I’m not a professional here
Genitals
Penis
Vagina
Pseudovaginal pouch
Clitoromegaly
Micropenis
Hypospadias
Diphallia
Definitely more but I am Tired™
There’s like at least several dozen primary sexes, and that’s before secondary characteristic development comes into play and the point is biological sex is a fucking mass hallucination. Slap anyone who says otherwise.
(This is not a professionally sourced and cited resource post please do not treat this like it’s some kind of all powerful reference work I literally just made it in a fit of rage in abt ten minutes based on stuff I already know I didn’t even research it be careful use google etc and so forth)
It so is? Like it’s just ridiculously confusing and complex.
WHICH IS WHY PEOPLE WHO SAY IT’S SIMPLE AND COMES DOWN TO “MALE OR FEMALE”/”MALE, FEMALE, OR INTERSEX” NEED TO SHUT THE FUCK UP AND ACCEPT THEIR SLAPPING PEACEFULLY INSTEAD OF SENDING ME DOZENS OF ANGRY LETTERS
This has gotten more attention than expected so I figure I will put it here as well.
My favorite is that there’s a good chance that people so insistent on the existence of a binary may be intersex and never know unless: they don’t get a first period, develop unexpected secondary sex characteristics during puberty, or struggle with infertility later in life, or GET KARYOTYPED
These are also very human-centric! There are vertebrate animals that don’t use chromosomes as their sex-determination system (reptiles and some birds can also use the environment to determine sex) and there are vertebrate animals that use different chromosome arrangements.
Birds for example, don’t use XX/XY, they’re ZW/ZZ. In birds, the egg determines the sex (not the sperm) and females are the heterogamous sex (with ZW chromosomes). There is plenty of room for variation, too – a ZZW bird who presented as female successfully laid and hatched her own eggs (x)
Platypuses, meanwhile, have a system that resembles both XX/XY and ZW/ZZ in function, but the form is a little baffling. Platypus males are XYXYXYXYXY, and females are XXXXXXXXXX.
Clearly, there is nothing perfect, universal or holy about XX/XY – and anyone who insists there is has demonstrated that they don’t know anything about biology.
And it’s a fluid system even once you grasp the idea of chromosomes – we know that you can hack sex in lizards to create “superfemales” (by incubating an egg with “male” chromosomes at a temperature that hatches “female” babies). Superfemales present as females and can lay viable eggs. You can do it with lizards that happen to use the XX/XY system, and hatch fertile males with XX chromosomes. You can do this with chickens as well – take a “genetically male” fertilized egg and incubate it at the perfect temperature, and you can hatch a “male” chicken that will lay eggs for you. The difficulty is that this only works some of the time in chickens – the cooler temperatures that hatch female chickens tend to kill the male embryos that don’t transition, which is wasteful. Otherwise, this would revolutionize the poultry industry.
So now we know that XX/XY is like the Windows 7 of sexual determinism (lots of people use it, but would be silly to call it the only operating system in the world) how fixed is “sex” anyway? Well, most of us know that clownfish can change sex – if there are changes in their social structure, the dominant female can transition from a reproductively functioning egg-fertilizing male to a reproductively functioning egg-laying female. Bio textbooks say that clownfish “don’t have” sex chromosomes, but I think it’s more likely that they do, but that they don’t have any function. At any rate, the change is down to hormones, which change in response to the social environment the fish is in.
So are hormones, then, the Thing That Totally Definitely Determines What Men and Women Are? Not really. Before puberty, human children don’t have many sex hormones circulating in their bodies, and human children are often quite clear about their own gender. Humans who have had ovaries removed, or who go through menopause, no longer have waves of “female” hormones sloshing around – but we still call most of them “women.” Humans who have had their testicles removed or their androgens depleted (usually because of testicular or prostate cancer, which can feed on hormones) are usually still called “men.” And ovaries produce natural levels of testosterone quite happily, because they need to – just at lower levels! Pregnant humans often have particularly high levels of testosterone. Weirdly, “male” partners of pregnant people often drop to lower levels of testosterone than usual – their pregnant partner’s hormones influence their own biology. But a cisgender father of a fetus does not stop being a male just because he has less testosterone.
Pregnancy gets weirder, too – decades after the fetus has moved out, a pregnant person who once harbored an XY fetus will have XY cells in their body and brain. If you looked at, say, Molly Weasley, you’d be able to find “male” tissue in her brain – where her body traded for some fresh young stem cells from her fetuses, and used them to replenish her own older tissues. So a cisgender person born XX can exhibit microchimerism later in life and never know it. But having XY tissue in your brain doesn’t make you a man.
Okay, so what about gender roles? Surely those are clear – surely those are necessary for sex and sexuality and the Natural Order and all those things?
Well, we also know that animals practice a range of gender roles. Again, a lot of it is more obvious in fish, reptiles and birds, partly because sexual dimorphism tends to be more pronounced in these animals. But there are plenty of species in which you get multiple “types” of sexes. The most common is the territorial/satellite male arrangement, in which there are multiple distinct types of males, with different genetics, behavior, life history, physical appearance and courtship strategies.
Ruffs, a type of sandpiper, have distinct territorial and satellite males, plus “faeder” males that were only recently discovered to be male; faeders are identical to females in appearance and most behavior, and plenty of previous sightings of lesbianism in ruffs were probably faeder/female matings. Satellite and territorial males top faeders, but as faeders also top satellite and territorial males, researchers have interpreted this as “ruffs are perfectly aware that faeders aren’t the same as females, and none of them give a shit.”
Above are some different forms of masculinity in ruffs. The bird on the top left is a female; the birds below are the different male types. In the picture on the right, the independent and satellite male are vying for the attention of the female; the faeder is the brown one on the left. The territory belongs to the territorial male, who will defend it from other territorial males, but he doesn’t attack the satellite and faeder males, because they aren’t in competition. (Imagine your OT4.)
Outside of that, gender roles aren’t as important as humans pretend they are. There isn’t really a Breadwinner/Housewife divide in the animal kingdom because most animals don’t practice capitalism. Performative masculinity only benefits species that gain an evolutionary advantage from it. Non-human mammals don’t find mammary glands to be sexually arousing. Mostly, animals just try to survive in complicated, complex environments that are constantly trying to kill them. The rules are: 1) adapt to changes in environment by being resilient, adaptable and diverse; and 2) successfully pass on the genes that succeed in your environment. You don’t need to be “fit” or fierce or have lots of bright plumage – those are not your objectives and may, in fact, distract you. You don’t even need to mate, or be fertile, or have children of your own – you just need to make sure that your traits survive, and hopefully help your species after your death.
There is nothing in the rules about the superiority of special genital configurations, which animals are allowed to touch the color pink, and who gets to grow a beard.
Tl;dr : every time a human tries to come up with a hard-and-fast rule about what “sex” or “gender” or “male” or “female” means, there is a bird somewhere that has quietly devoted the past 2 million years of its existence to proving that person wrong.
everyone here secretly harboring a massive science!crush on elodie raise your hand now plz
kototyph 