Bill And Ford As An Old Married Couple

Fantasy High is so funny to me. Rather than seeing 6 teenagers end up in one giant love triangle thing, we instead get 6 random teenagers meeting in detention, becoming best friends and then becoming siblings by law because all their parents start fucking.

Former Minnesota Vikings punter, Chris Kluwe, who was blacklisted from the league for standing up for marriage equality, speaks at a city council meeting where he calls Trump a Nazi. He is subsequently arrested and carried out by police.

Tips from a Beta Reading Writer

This one's for the scenes with multiple characters, and you're not sure how to keep everyone involved.

Writing group scenes is chaos. Someone’s talking, someone’s interrupting, someone’s zoning out thinking about breadsticks. And if you’re not careful, half your cast fades into the background like NPCs in a video game. I used to struggle with this so much—my characters would just exist in the scene without actually affecting it. But here’s what I've learned and have started implementing:

✨ Give everyone a job in the scene ✨

Not their literal job—like, not everyone needs to be solving a crime or casting spells. I mean: Why are they in this moment? What’s their role in the conversation?

My favourite examples are:

The Driver: Moves the convo forward. They have an agenda, they’re pushing the action.

The Instigator: Pokes the bear. Asks the messy questions. Stirring the pot like a chef on a mission.

The Voice of Reason: "Guys, maybe we don’t commit arson today?"

The Distracted One: Completely in their own world. Tuning out, doodling on a napkin, thinking about their ex.

The Observer: Not saying much, but noticing everything. (Quiet characters still have presence!)

The Wild Card: Who knows what they’ll do? Certainly not them. Probably about to make things worse.

If a character has no function, they’ll disappear. Give them something—even if it’s just a side comment, a reaction, or stealing fries off someone’s plate. Keep them interesting, and your readers will stay interested too.

On the issue of the ‘q slur’...

So, yesterday, I got into a rather stupid internet argument with someone who was peddling what seemed to me to be a rather insidious narrative about slur-reclamation. Someone in the ensuing notes raised a point which I thought was interesting, and worrying, and probably needed to be addressed in it’s own post. So here we go:

The word ‘queer’ itself seems to be especially touchy for many, so let me begin to address this by way of analogy.

Instead of talking about “queer”, let’s start by talking about “Jew” - a word which I believe is very similar in its usage in some significant ways.

Now, the word “Jew” has been used as a derogatory term for literally hundreds of years. It is used both as a noun (eg. “That guy ripped me off - what a dirty Jew”) and as a verb (eg. “That guy really Jew-ed me”). These usages are deeply, fundamentally, horrifically offensive, and should be used under no circumstances, ever. And yet, I myself have heard both, even as recently as this past year, even in an urban location with plenty of Jews, in a social situation where people should have known better. In short – the word “Jew”, as it is used by certain antisemites, is – quite unambiguously – a slur. Not a dead slur, not a former slur – and active, living slur that most Jews will at some point in their life encounter in a context where the term is being used to denigrate them and their religion. 

Now here’s the thing, though: I’m a Jew. I call myself a Jew. I prefer that all non-Jews call me a Jew – so do most Jews I know. “Jew” is the correct term for someone who is part of the religion of Judaism, the same way that “Muslim” is the correct term for someone who is part of the religion of Islam, and “Christian” is the correct term for someone who is part of the religion of Christianity. 

In fact, almost all of the terms that non-Jews use to avoid saying “Jew” (eg. “a member of the Jewish persuasion”, “a follower of the Jewish faith”, “coming from a Jewish family”, “identifying as part of the Jewish religion”, etc) are deeply offensive, because these terms imply to us that the speaker sees the term “Jew” (and by extension, what that term stands for) as a dirty word.

“BUT WAIT” – I hear you say – “didn’t you just say that Jew is used as a slur?!?”

Yes. Yes, I did. And also, it is fundamentally offensive not to call us that, because it is our name and our identity.

Let me back up a little bit, and bring you into the world of one of those 2000s PSAs about not using “that’s so gay”. Think of some word that is your identity – something which you consider to be a fundamental and intrinsic part of yourself. It could be “female” or “male”, or “Black” or “white”, “tall” or “short”, “Atheist” or “Mormon” or “Evangelical” – you name it.

Now imagine that people started using that term as a slur.

“What a female thing to do!” they might say. “That teacher doesn’t know anything, he’s so female!”

Or maybe, “Yikes, look at that idiot who’s driving like an atheist. It’s so embarrassing!”

Or perhaps, “Oh gross, that music is so Black, turn it off!”

Now, what would you say if the same groups of people who had been saying those things for years turned around and avoided using those words to describe anything other than an insult?

“Oh, so I see you’re a member of the female persuasion!”

“Is he… a follower of the atheist beliefs? Like does he identify as part of the community of atheist-aligned individuals?”

“So, as a Black-ish identified person yourself – excuse me, as a person who comes from a Black-ish family…”

Here’s the fundamental problem with treating all words that are used as slurs the same, without any regard for how they are used and how they developed – not all slurs are the same.

No one, and I mean no one (except maybe for a small handful of angsty teens who are deliberately making a point of being edgy) self-identifies as a kike. In contrast, essentially all Jews self-identify as Jews. And when non-Jews get weird about that identity on the grounds that “Jew is used as a slur”, despite the fact that it is the name that the Jewish community as a whole resoundingly identifies with, what they are basically saying is that they think that the slur usage is more important than the Jewish community self-identification usage. They are saying, in essence, “we think that your name should be a slur.” 

Now, at the top I said that the word “Jew” and the word “queer” had some significant similarities in terms of their usage, and I think that’s pretty apparent if you look at what people in those communities are saying about those terms. When American Jews were being actively threatened by neo-Nazis in the 70s, the slogan of choice was “For every Jew a .22!″. When the American Queer community was marching in the 90s in protest of systemic anti-queer violence, the slogan of choice was “We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it!” Clearly, these are terms that are used by the communities themselves, in reference to themselves. Clearly, these terms are more than simply slurs.

But while there are useful similarities between how the terms “Jew” and “Queer” are used by bigots and by their own communities, I’d also like to point out that there is pretty substantial and important difference:

Unlike for “queer”, there is no organized group of Jewish antisemites who are using the catchphrase “Jew is a slur!” in order to selectively silence and disenfranchise Jews who are part of minority groups within Judaism. 

This is the real rub with the term queer – no one was campaigning about it being a slur until less than a decade ago. No one was saying that you needed to warn for the word queer when queer people were establishing the academic discipline of queer studies. No one was ‘think of the children”-ing the umbrella term when queer activists were literally marching for their lives. Go back to even 2010 and the term “q slur” would have been basically unparseable – if I saw someone tag something “q slur”, like most queer people I would have wracked my brains trying to figure out what slur even started with q, and if I learned that it was supposed to be “queer”, my default assumption would be that the post was made by a well-meaning but extremely clueless straight person.

I literally remember this shift – and I remember who started it. Exclusionists didn’t like the fact that queer was an umbrella term. Terfs (or radfems as they like to be called now) didn’t like that queer history included trans history; biphobes and aphobes didn’t like that the queer community was also a community to bisexuals and asexuals. And so what could they possibly say, to drive people away from the term that was protecting the sorts of queer people that they wanted to exclude?

Well, naturally, they turned to “queer is a slur.”

And here’s the thing – queer is a slur, just like Jew is a slur, and no one is denying that. And that fact makes “queer is a slur so don’t use it” a very convincing argument on the surface: 1) queer is still often used as a slur, and 2) you shouldn’t ever use slurs without carefully tagging and warning people about them (and better yet, you should never use them at all), and so therefore 3) you need to tag for “the q slur” and you need to warn people not to call the community “the queer community” or it’s members “queer people” or its study “queer studies” – because it’s a slur!

But the crucial step that’s missing here is exactly the same one above, for the word “Jew” – and that step is that not all slurs are the same. When a term is both used as a slur and used as a self-identity term, then favoring the slur meaning instead of the identity meaning is picking the side of the slur-users over the disadvantaged group! 

If you say or tag “q slur” you are sending the message, whether you realize it or not, that people who use “queer” as a slur are more right about its meaning than those who use it as their identity. Tagging for “queer” is one thing. People can filter for “queer” if it triggers them, just like people can filter for anything else. Not everyone has to personally use the term queer, or like the term queer. But there is no circumstance where the term “q slur” does not indicate that you think queer is more of a slur than of an accurate description of a community.

If I, as a Jew, ever came across a post where someone had warned for innocent, positive, non-antisemitic content relating to Judaism with the tag “J slur”, I would be incensed. So would any Jew. The act of tagging a post “J slur” is in and of itself antisemitic and offensive.

Queer people are allowed to feel the same about “q slur”. It is not a neutral warning term – it is an attack on our identity.

Art under the cut for spoilers for chapters 13 and 16 of Then it becomes, it becomes, it becomes a problem by @tempusedax-rerum on ao3. (Along with transcriptions) Are you a fan of cleverly worded chapter titles? Do you like your fair share of references to the real world? Do you want to see Bill Cipher face the horrors of self introspection and painful awareness??? Then you should read this fic! Cause it does all that and so much more, and it's a total blast babes: check it out if you're 18 or older and the tags don't bug ya! (yes, every time I post fan art for this I'm going to make a sales pitch, it's a good fic and I like the sound of my own voice (cough EGO-)). I've actually been holding on to these drawings for a while; figured I'd post them when we've got only ONE chapter left?! What! I'm not ready for it to end!!! Nevertheless, consider it my sweet goodbye for the time being, as I put the most effort into this out of everything. I'm not done with fan art for this, mind, just busy at the moment. I'm not even caught up, haha, I haven't read chapter 25 yet (and it's driving me nuts). More rambles about the art under the cut. (I'm a gabber! ¯\_(ツ)_/¯)

Transcription for the doodles (Guys honestly my handwriting usually sucks butt): Image 4: Meanwhile 'Is my boyfriend going to implode?' Image 5: Bill: "Aw c'mon, I haven't even seen her yet-" Ford: "Bill. Yes or no?" 'How do I help her? Will she die? What happened? Is she ok? This was a mistake. Let me be wrong about you. What did you do?' Bill: "...Ok so maybe I sent her mind to hell-" Ford: "WHAT" Image 6: Bill: "Finally, everything's comin' up BILL! Dumb ol' Jan-Jan's out of the picture, the gang's come back, and Sixer loves me again! What could possibly go wro-" Ford: "Now hold on-" Image 7: Stan: "HEEEERE'S STANLEY!! and Fids!" Ford: "Hm."

Ok so for the big fancy one, it's actually the first fan art I made for this fic and what pushed me to actually draw any at all, because the moment I read Ford getting all flusters at the thought of his and Bill's future I just lost it! This silly guy, getting excited by getting to do science! I saw it so clearly in my mind and just had to get it on paper. (digital paper that is)

I also drew all of these before I figured out my coloring style, so I was experimenting with this one. Yellow, as pretty as it is, is very frustrating on its own, particularly in dark values. I have mixed feelings about the final look.

The doodle of guilty Bill, I stopped reading the chapter to draw, haha! Once again, the vision was so clear, I just had ta! Rushed it though, since I had to get back to it and read the rest, but I'd like to come back to this one and touch it up sometime.

These are old drawings, so back around those chapters I was wondering if Stanley and Fiddleford showing up. Those last doodles were my joking prediction of how that'd happen. I have no clue honestly how the story is going to end and if that's even still a possibility. (Probably not, I mean, oh my god how would that work out, but I swear if that's happened in the latest chapters and I don't KNOW-) (don't tell me if it did or not)

I love the henchmaniacs, we should all draw them more I think.

WHOOO ONE MORE CHAPTER LEFT HOW WE FEELIN' TIBIBIBAP GANG?!

I think she’d respect his methodology

Admit it,

You'd miss me.

I draw a scene from book of bill

Billford comic that I've made some days ago of my au where they dated in the past <3