you can click keep reading but I didn't put anything down there!!!!!

"It's a pity that soulmate stories have never–" Yes they have.

Every year there's a new fifty thousand note post by someone who thinks they're the first ever person to think of subverting a genre they don't read.

there will be a subreddit that exists for a show which you enjoy. you must never go there

truly some people have no genre savviness whatsoever. A girl came back from the dead the other day and fresh out of the grave she laughed and laughed and lay down on the grass nearby to watch the sky, dirt still under her nails. I asked her if she’s sad about anything and she asked me why she should be. I asked her if she’s perhaps worried she’s a shadow of who she used to be and she said that if she is a shadow she is a joyous one, and anyway whoever she was she is her, now, and that’s enough. I inquired about revenge, about unfinished business, about what had filled her with the incessant need to claw her way out from beneath but she just said she’s here to live. I told her about ghosts, about zombies, tried to explain to her how her options lie between horror and tragedy but she just said if those are the stories meant for her then she’ll make another one. I said “isn’t it terribly lonely how in your triumph over death nobody was here to greet you?” and she just looked at me funny and said “what do you mean? The whole world was here, waiting”. Some people, I tell you.

guys i dont know how many more "2 years between each 9 episode season" i can take

Imagine you're ilya rozanov and you bury your feelings because it's been more than a decade since anyone cared enough to ask you how you are

You throw yourself into hockey in a wholly new way at 12 years old because your mother used to watch you play, because it can get violent sometimes and you need that, you're carrying so much rage

You discover sex at 14 and it's a different kind of escape. It feels like rebellion. It's nice to feel something other than rage and sadness. You crave feeling wanted. You crave the temporary reprieve of loose limbs and heaving breaths.

You crave never having to be alone whilst simultaneously never being known. You may never be ready to talk about any of this.

And then you realize you like boys too, and that's more sex, but this time there's a dangerous edge. It's rebellion and risk and freedom and maybe some downright stupidity.

You've never wanted to die. Not really. But there have been many times you didn't want to live.

But then the momentum shifts and hockey isn't just an escape from grief but an escape route out of Russia and away from the bleeding remnants of your fucked up family

It's a good thing you're good at it. But you need to be the best. So that not a team in the world would turn you down. So you can get the fuck out.

You fuck, and you fight, and you play your way into a whole new life.

Your father calls you a traitor. He says you should be ashamed. And you're ashamed of a great many things but not the ones he wants you to be.

Your brother says they're all better off without you. That you abandoned the family. You think he doesn't understand the meaning of the word.

And then you develop a pointless little crush on a freckle faced prodigy that may be the only one in the whole world that can stand toe to toe against you.

He has a loving home and a strong sense of morality. He's in this for the love of the game. He eats, sleeps, lives, breathes hockey in a way you sometimes envy. You wished you could still love it that way, like you did when your mother was in the crowd.

And maybe if you just touch him. Just get this whole thing out of your system, get the upper hand. You want to challenge him in wholly new ways and want to rile him up because you can only imagine how he'd respond.

He sees you as a cocky, self-assured bastard who needs to chirp his way through life. That's fair. That's all you've shown him.

But you're unravelling at the seams. You fucked and fucked and fucked, and he's still there under your skin.

No one else will do.

He has somehow become your entire fucking world and you chased him straight into the arms of another. It was the one and only time you dared to get closer.

But of course he didn't want you. Who would?

if vampires existed in real life i think there would be shady companies advertising "organic blood" sourced from "willing donors" who are coincidentally all poor people being paid like $5 per blood donation. and like haughty vegan vampires who only drink a synthetic blood drink thats brewed in a way thats actively worse for the enviroment. and radical traditionalist vampires who go on tiktok and claim that true alpha chads have to drain and kill people and anyone who leaves their victims alive is a liberal cuck. enter the world of hypothetical insufferable vampire politics with me.

the thing is when people say a specific fanfic trope comes from supernatural they usually mean "it was invented by the supernatural fandom in a fanfic". on the other hand, when people say a specific fanfic trope comes from star trek, they mean "it was the plot of at least one star trek episode"

love is insane you feel like you’re always subtly asking “do you still love me even though i’m flawed” and the answer just keeps being yes

Svetlana knows that Jane is a man but also she definitely 100% knows it's Shane, and the more I think about it the funnier it gets.

Like she knows that Ilya gets weird when she brings up Hollander. And she knows that he watched that documentary about his house (maybe she even knows he watched it more than once). I bet she's caught the occasional interesting word on his phone screen when she's been over his shoulder, too.

But most importantly, she's obsessed with hockey. You know she watches every one of Ilya's games. You KNOW she's seen him and Shane glancing at each other and watched the way they interact, and you better believe she clocked when they were decidedly NOT glancing at each other and both playing like absolute shit.

it's one of those where you look at sinners as a film and it's fantastic. it's got a brilliant cast, a good storyline, a vibrant soundtrack, it's widely praised, and it should be sweeping the awards.

but then you realise it's a horror and horror films never do well in awards season. then you realise it's a heavily led black film and how racist the industry is. and then you need to sit back and sigh heavily.

I can't stop fucking thinking about Heated Rivalry this show has bewitched me body and soul I spend my free time rewatching the show or reading about the show or watching interviews of the actors from the show or reading fanfiction about the show or scrolling through memes about the show Jacob Tierney and Rachel Reid what have you done to me this fucking show has been laced with yaoi crack everybody be careful before you watch the gay hockey show bc you will get addicted FUCK

choosing to ignore my weirdly symbolic dream because i have a lot going on rn already

woo boy I am so glad that I’m only getting a brief glimpse from a distance of how insanely parasocial people online are getting over the heated rivalry cast. is it not enough just to see talented hot queer people succeeding? do you really need more than that? like, go touch grass lmao. take a walk. smoke some weed. get a grip.

I'm a little obsessed lately with the idea of The Retreat that shows up in so much gay media, in all its different versions. I'm talking about -- you know what I'm talking about? The use of some rural, remote location, varying degrees of isolation but always with some amount of visual attention paid to the physical beauty of it -- and how it's introduced as this almost-alive character that can shelter a pair of lovers, and typically is the *only* thing that makes their relationship possible.

The Mosaic is a Retreat. So is the compound in The Last of Us. Heated Rivalry has the cottage -- Our Flag Means Death ends in this remote island B&B retirement. Obviously the whole mountain in Brokeback Mountain is a Retreat, the existence of the Retreat and the impossibility of survival outside of it is the entire movie. Lavender Men uses it much less, but there's a motif of the log cabin that serves as an (imaginary) Retreat (I know that's a deep cut reference, but find and watch Lavender Men, it's exquisite).

I don't know, it's just interesting, because of course in reality it has typically been urban environments that provide shelter, and obviously that also has a film history, the city and queer culture is the way home in Queer As Folk, in Tales of the City, in Jeffrey, in I think a lot of older gay stories that were maybe more autobiographical.

You could certainly pick on The Retreat as a fantasy of escapism, a kind of pastoralist romanticizing of *not* be embedded in (or beholden to) a community any longer. Maybe it's just pessimism -- I mean, it certainly can be that (Brokeback etc), but I don't know, there really seems to be a lot of yearning behind it, too. The Retreat presents not just as an escape from homophobia, it's always distinctly *beautiful,* nourishing to the soul and not just a shield of privacy.

I think there's something buried in the trope about the anxiety of the Unnatural -- we're so saturated in these homophobic myths of queerness as cosmopolitan decadence, as a rejection of The Way of Nature in favor of some artsy, elitist urbanite corruption (the "metro" in metrosexual, right?) Maybe we're grasping after something by insisting (narratively speaking) that no, actually, *alone* with our lovers and our gardens and the noisy loon calls or what have you, is when we're most real, most ourselves. Queer love and queer joy as the part of us that's *most* at home on Earth, in these Edenic little slices of landscape.