you won't make yourself a name if you follow the rules

This afternoon, azurelunatic was reading Red, White, & Royal Blue by Casey McQuiston. Azz convinced me to put a library hold on this fluffy m/m romance novel by detailing the potentially-reelection-campaign-derailing scandal the first female US President would face the moment certain events became known. This scandal, should it materialize, was expected to be headlines for weeks.

The PR lady dressing down the President's son over this potential scandal is apparently, in the same scene, witness to the visual pun of the English prince stumbling out of the President's son's closet, halfway into a borrowed pair of boxers.

Yep. The President's son is not straight, and a visiting diplomatic-type guy got into the President's son's pants.

That's the news story the PR lady, with (to all appearance) good reason, thinks will scandalize the American public for weeks. Nothing involving breaking laws, nothing involving hurting anyone, and no expectation of anything more significant chasing it out of the news cycle in the next month, never mind the next day.

I asked how much it would cost to move to that America.

so seekingferret made a Disney's Peter Pan vid for Vividcon

I will not attempt to speak to the vid's quality bc my audio processing is shit today so I have approx 0 notion what is going on in that audio track; I will observe that seekingferret is a consistently stellar vidder, which I fully expect is reflected in this vid too, and the rest of this post reflects on seekingferret not at all

so I'm trying to watch the vid, right, and the visuals are screaming wrong wrong wrong at me

special highlights to Peter vs Hook and to every bit with Wendy

...then I realized

my headcanonical Peter

is the title character

of Austin Chant's Peter Darling

(spoilers for that delightful volume: Peter's deadname is Wendy, and Peter/Hook is endgame)

I can't sleep so I read Knit One, Girl Two by Shira Glassman

It's a f/f contemporary romance novella starring two Jewish women, one's a small-batch yarn dyer and the other's a painter with stuff in art shows, Florida is practically a character in its own right here, they're fannish

Sweetest return on a two-buck investment I've seen in quite a while

Eeeeeeeee

oh and if the yarn dyeing thing interests you

Also re #ownvoices: Glassman is Jewish, and clearly it matters to Glassman that she's Jewish. So of course the Jewish cast are all treating each other's Judaism with the deepest of respect. And I'm not Jewish? But I'm also not a member of the locally dominant religion in the US? And—having in American lit characters who are not Christian being treated respectfully wrt religion by the narrative and the other characters? It just hit me how rarely you get that. With respect to my own (much smaller) religious tradition, I hope to write the sort of story that Glassman wrote here with respect to her Judaism.

(Jesus Haploid Christ I hope either she doesn't see that or she finds it complimentary—it's meant complimentary but that doesn't mean the transposition will be taken that way)

And! Explicitly trans characters exist and are treated respectfully!

...yeah so I'm already taking notes for what to nominate for Yuletide 2018 :P

OH AND! the sisterly relationship! *_* and the leads explicitly respect each other's agency and consent