So…

…I was thinking about the fact that somebody said they weren’t behind lesbian Carol Danvers because they saw the relationship between her and Maria as queerplatonic.

Both are actually pretty well supported by the text, esp. if you bear in mind that the movie was set in the 1990s and they were both mil types, so…late 90s and 00s kids, you don’t understand how much tighter the closet door was back then. If they were a couple and it came out, Mar-Vell might not have been able to save them from a dishonorable discharge.

Then my thoughts went to a different relationship in the movie.

The relationship between Danvers and Fury.

This was the obvious place to put the Obligatory Heterosexual Romance, and they didn’t. A decision I honestly applaud. The last thing this movie needed was an Obligatory Heterosexual Romance.

Some of the criticisms of the movie are that it “emasculated” Fury. Mostly because he does the dishes.

But it got me thinking about the character of Nicholas J. Fury as presented in the MCU. (We’re ignoring the comics here).

Up until this movie, we’ve seen Fury mostly as the ruthless, competent spymaster. He treats everyone as assets. He values people by what they bring to the table. He doesn’t care who you are or what planet you are from as long as you can do your job.

This movie was Fury’s origin as well as Captain Marvel’s. They explicitly show Carol as why he feels that way.

Except that there’s no indication he actually felt differently. All he needed was to expand his horizons. Perhaps part of it was being a black man in intelligence.

But at no time in the history of the MCU have we seen Fury look at a woman in a sexual manner. The dish washing scene was the intimate moment where the kiss would have happened in the Obligatory Heterosexual Romance. Instead, it was rendered explicitly platonic.

And hello, headcanon:

Fury isn’t straight.

It is absolutely supported by the text and never contradicted: Nicholas Joseph Fury is not attracted to women.

So I mentally ran another analysis based off of the hypothesis that Nicholas Joseph Fury is, thus, gay.

And that didn’t fit either. The MCU has never been afraid to queer code (and I suspect if it wasn’t for Chinese money and censors we’d see more overt queerness). Furthermore, I don’t see Samuel L. Jackson as being at all uncomfortable with a bit of homosexual tension.

Now, it makes a good amount of sense to set the “ruthless spymaster” archetype aside from romantic entanglements.

But combined with the fact that he doesn’t look at Carol’s breasts once, this has led the text to inadvertently support a different analysis:

Tl;dr: The MCU has had an aroace character from day one. It’s Nick Fury.

And you can pry this headcanon from my dying hands, as I’m pretty sure we are never going to see him romantically involved with anyone…

Aight here’s that aro writing

Leave some feedback?

Glenn had been fidgeting around for days. It wasn’t very obvious, the dark mage had a very thick mask and usually composed demeanor. No, it was hardly noticeable at all. But he’d acted strangely since Zyrus had hugged him at night and the latter couldn’t help but find this change in behavior to be unnerving. He waited for a few more days, seeing how Glenn’s miene slowly turned into a distressed grimace and couldn’t sit still for a minute. It scared him to seeing his friend like this. Glenn was the only human friend he had and they were so incredibly close, he didn’t want to lose that. He was scared of being left alone again in this hostile world. He finally decided to ask him about it in the evening and anxiously waited for dusk to drench the world in red.

The wind rustled in the trees, playing the melody of a dying day and the light made Glenn look ethereal, eyes like blinking rubies. He slowly extended his hand to hold onto the one on his shoulder and took a deep breath. His voice was hoarse when he finally found the courage to speak. “I love you, Zyrus.”

The assassin sat there in stupor, unable to react. He blinked at Glenn, the sensation of the others hand on his and the intense scarlet gaze burning into his memory.

“What do you… Mean… By that?”

He sounded broken and insecure, ever so unlike his usual self. He was torn between the need to hold onto Glenn and to flee, run far far away where he’d never hear his answer. The mage just stared at him, shaking like he could be carried away by a strong gust of wind. “What do you mean? What does that mean??” Zyrus voice took a shrill and panicked tone as he desperately clawed into Glenn’s shoulder. “Glenn what does that- What do you-” He started to tear up as well and buried his face in Glenn’s shoulder. “I don’t- I can’t-” He’d seen the couples on the side walks. Seen the families. How they laughed, confessed, kissed and embraced and repeated that one word over and over again, he’d even heard it when others had confessed to him before, be it in a lustful, drunken haze or stuttered words accompanied by a pink blush. And he’d rejected them all. He couldn’t understand what they wanted or figure out how to give it to them. He didn’t want to give it to them. His stomach churned and twisted whenever he even just thought about it.

He willed his head up and locked his watery gaze with the others. Tears still dropped down on Glenn’s marred skin and glowed golden in the dying light. “Please I can’t… I can’t lose you.” He was begging now, begging for it to not be true, begging that Glenn didn’t mean it, begging to the gods that Glenn wouldn’t be taken from him. Because all he knew was to run from those who loved him and the thought of leaving Glenn broke his heart. Wordlessly, the mage pulled Zyrus against his heaving chest and held onto him like it was their last embrace. He buried his face in the others messy locks and started to rub Zyrus back. He tried to sound soothing when he finally opened his mouth and his voice came out hushed. “That means I care for you. You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to. I won’t… I won’t leave you. I couldn’t take that. Just let me… Let me care for you.”

He shook harder when Zyrus finally managed to slip his arms around his waist and subconsciously tightened his hold on him. He raised his head and felt his breath hitch at how his friend looked in the light of the dying day, completely drenched in fiery, red light. He sounded hoarse and exhausted. “I- I’ll- let you…” He wanted to smile but didn’t find the energy to. Tired, he fell back on the mages chest, who looked at him like he’d just grown a tail, until a wide, soft smile started to settle on his features. “Thanks.” He leaned forwards and placed a little kiss on the others mop of hair, pulling him into a better position to place a cloak over them. The sun disappeared fully on the horizon and made place for the gentle, blue hues of a clear night. “Sleep well.”

it’s time for your yearly reminders, everyone!

Sorry for all this, but since I’ve been blocked I can’t actually directly respond.

It’s great that you think that A became Asexual from Ally when AVEN forced the issue, but… AVEN formed in iike, what, 2000?

I can personally remember A being Asexual in the 90s, before that event.

My partner remembers it from the 80s, and points out that sometimes there were two As (Asexual and Ally) and sometimes two Qs (Queer and Questioning).

I know Marsha P. Johnson and Silvia Rivera were influential in the late 60s and early 70s, but they did not start the community.  They were organizers IN the community that already existed.  And they were in NYC.  The communities in the midwest and California were not entirely identical back in the before times.  Hell, the lesbians and the gays couldn’t always be in the same room with one another and stay polite.

The internet has homogenized this stuff some, but back in the 80s and 90s things weren’t quite as consistent as they have become.

The ‘X’ that Kinsey discussed were absolutely part of the existing queer community, even if they weren’t calling themselves ‘ace’.  Same people.

I can’t remember citations, but I’m pretty sure if you go dig up some of good old Magnus Hirschfeld work that you’ll find that pre-WWII queer community in Berlin (ie, the San Francisco of Europe at the time) included discussions of people we would recognize as Asexual.

History is long and complicated.  It’s a great story that Aces and Aros are cishet and straight and not part of the community, but it’s a story. It’s revisionist history.  It disagrees with my lived experience (I’m old).

The thing that really cheeses me off about this whole conversation is that back in the 80s and 90s you had this exact conversation, except it was about the ‘B’ or the ‘T’.  Not the ‘A’.  Now, the people making these kinds of exclusionary statements are excluding the ‘A’ from the LGBT.  And they use the same kinds of arguments.  B people are either straight (and therefore not part of the community) or confused gay people (in which case they were fine).  T people aren’t ‘really’ women, so they don’t belong in lesbian spaces.  Really they’re just gay men who like dressing up or they’re straight men who don’t belong in the community because they’re some kind of fetishist.

It’s always about peeling off some of these queer identities and reducing them to the ‘actually gay’ part (who are okay, if strange, and part of the community) and the ‘actually straight’ part (who are our oppressors, and don’t belong and are evil and sneaky and trying to horn in on our community and make us unsafe and doing it for attention).

It’s a conversation that makes us poorer every time we have to go through it. 

So I was leaving the movies after seeing Captain Marvel and there was this group of friends behind me and some girl insisted that Carol and Maria were a couple so she said “you don’t mourn like that for a friend” and this dude from their group says “well Captain America mourned like that for Bucky” and the girl almost screams “THAT’S BECAUSE THEY WEREN’T FRIENDS EITHER” 

Actually I’ve found interaction with the aro and ace communities to be pretty exhausting lately and I think a lot of that is feeling like I have to pick a side between my two identities.

I know that there’s going to be growing pains as the aro community tries to distinguish itself from the ace community, but I feel like a lot of aros are treating the issue of distinction as much more black and white than it actually is while a lot of aces have been responding to the aro communities concerns with a large amount of condicention and I’m not really a fan of any of that. It’s like being pulled in two different directions.

Idk, maybe this is working for aroaces who feel very solidly attached to one community or the other, but I’ve always kind of swapped between the two and while I’ve deffinatly been more aro focused lately because that’s where I see the most growth happening, I don’t want to pick sides (and I deffinatly dont want to pick sides when both groups are being really dismissive of eachother). Idk sorry for ranting, I’m sure things will start to even out sooner or later but I really just find this whole thing to be very tiring.

Im salty and y'all have to deal part 2

My main issue that i was trying to get across before was that aro people are either forced into using the SAM, or else forcibly labelled as aroace, thus treating aroace as the default for aro.

Obviously, this isnt true, but you also shouldnt have to label your sexuality to call yourself aro. Aromantic means aromantic. Not aromantic asexual. Not aromantic and allosexual. It means you don’t feel romantic attraction, that is all. If someone only uses that, they dont need to label anything else. Acting and treating it like we do is arophobic as hell.

Before i wasnt trying to say aroaces are co-opting the community or whatever, but the aroaces who interact more w the ace community than the aro one have a tendency to force us to be aroace or aroallo.

I mostly wanted to simply say that people need to fucking stop treating aroace as the default, and also stop assuming someone using aro without the SAM means theyre ace, but also if someone says they aren’t ace and just aro, that that’s not an invite to go “so what else?”

Aro can be the only label useful, the most important label, or even just the label someone is most comfortable with, and trying to make aros label their sexuality, thus making aroace and alloaro communities separate, is not helpful, and needs to fucking stop.

Edit: same as last, reblog this shit.

we really need allies right now, and I know seeing this on people’s blogs could be comforting to other Jewish people.

I’m sure this was common knowledge or w/e but a/rok/ai (the awful rad//fem) is now c/a/tra/co/re and still posting edits and pride things so be careful

Reading about nonwhite cultures and their history irritates me because they made so contributions that white people get credit for.

I was reading about a Persian Muslim scientist named Al-Tusi who wrote a book discussing about the concept of evolution DURING THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY. He discusses about evolution almost 600 years before Darwin and never had I heard about him until I decided to dive into the depths of the internet.