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Realm of the InterNutter

Thoughts, stories and ideas.

Tropes That Annoy Me: Bury Your Gays

Here's the link to educate yourself, but if you don't want to be bothered with the wiki walk: It begain in the Heteronormative 40's and 50's when people realised that women (a) actually do have sex drives, and (b) those spinsters sharing a house and a bunch of cats were doing way more than knitting and watching television together.

This is around about the time that Tragic Girl Romances began to come out in the pulp zines1 in which the heroine of the peace had a FORBIDDEN ROMANCE with another girl. These were never allowed to have a happy ending and the heroine learned the error of her ways with the Right Man(tm) or her "gal pal" died a tragic and agonising death. The latter happened WAY more often.

The same sort of thing happened with gay men, but the romance side of it is less emphasised.

But dead gays pop up more often than any living in a fulfilling, long-term relationship.

If you're a Queer character on television [here using Queer as an umbrella over all the LGBTIA+ variants] you do not get a happy-ever-after. You do not get to marry your crush. You do not get to sail merrily through all the fictional hazards like the straight whites do.

...I'll be covering Kill the Black Guy later on...

Most recent and annoying instance of this is the way Steven Moffat keeps finding ways to fake-kill the latest Doctor Who companion Bill(and her love interests), who has the double sin of being both black and a canonical lesbian.

Think about it:

  • Bill's first episode - she sabotaged one crush and then watched another one die and leave her forever
  • Bill's second episode - lived through the whole thing [Moffat didn't write it]
  • Bill's third episode - Oh no she's dead! Psyche! She's really okay.
  • Bill's fourth episode - Dead but not really dead girlfriend (and then we never hear from her again)
  • Bill's fifth episode - Oh no she's dead again! Psyche! It wasn't real.

That's four dead lesbians in five episodes. That's something of a kill streak. If this happens AGAIN, I might just make a stink about it.

The simple way to end this trope is just no do it any more. Kill the straight white temporary protagonist, but not for manpain. It will shock more members of the audience.

  1. Zine (n): Old-school fandom shorthand for 'magazine'. ↩

Challenge #01610-D149: Long Live the Leader

A single powerful person who is convinced of their own Rightness with no thought of introspection or means of restraint is dangerous, moreso to others than to themselves. -- Anon Guest

Jack didn't just believe in the Leader. He had a firm and unwavering Belief in the leader. Jack was wont to Believe with all his heart and soul. Though he still prayed to the God of the holy works, the Leader was the next best thing to a foretold coming. The

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Drama Llama, go away...

So let's recap on some of my most recent stressors:

  • Chaos falls over and bumps her tooth
  • Grandma wouldn't shut up about how this would definitely lead to a lifetime of mouth abscesses
  • The rising population of right-wing nutjobs who want to make a certain group of religious devotees illegal, thus playing into the hands of..
  • The rising population of pseudo-religious devotee nutjobs who want to blow everyone else up
  • My own mother sending me a "non-complimentary" beta-read instalment... and then insisting
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Challenge #01609-D148: We're So Much Better Now

There are pieces of Historical Machinery, there are Collections of Musical instruments and some lucky souls get to care for them, keep them running and in the case of stringed instruments take them out and play them so they sound right. -- Anon Guest

They say the Archivaas collect everything and never throw anything away. This is very close to the truth. Most Archivaas know the impossibility of saving a physical version of everything and keep digital plans, instructions, or copies. The

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What do I do to myself?

Roughly 12:30 AM, this morning. I wake up to the sensation of Beloved getting up in the literal middle of the night to go do something. I even heard the bedroom door open and close.

So after half an hour of trying to get back to sleep, I send Beloved a "WTF" text and really work at trying to slumber. In another half hour I roll over to discover Beloved by my side as if they had always been there. Sound

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Challenge #01608-D147: Repent Now...

[Name] sighed and turned back to their paperwork. In the scant few minutes they’d been talking with the other person, the paper seemed to have multiplied. It was breeding. There was a giant paperwork orgy going on right on their desk, and it was all they could do to fill out forms faster than they were produced. -- RecklessPrudence

They say paperwork is hell. They don't have the half of it. Imagine the largest offices in the world. Floor after floor

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Achievement Unlocked:

Figuring out how Sections and resettable page numbers work in Pages. All this necessary so that numbers don't turn up on the preface pages of the print version of Kung Fu Zombies. When that's done, I get to do all the jiggery-pokery necessary to make sure my name and the book's name is actually legible on the spine.

And only THEN can I shill the fuck out of this noise and hope that more than one person buys it. [Dear lovely person

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Challenge #01607-D146: Hermit Permit Pending

"To be honest, I hadn’t planned on the whole Dark Lord thing. It just sort of happened." -- RecklessPrudence

It's not easy being a hermit. Especially not when random adventurers get lost and mistake your cave for a dragons' lair or the entrance to the goblin caverns or something of the ilk. I had to learn a few spells just to protect what little I have from their greedy hands. It takes days to make a decent bowl. And the rogues

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Tropes That Annoy Me: Hypergendered Fat

Think about all the overweight people represented in our media. Now think about all the overweight main characters. What do they have in common?

Well, if they're not Jack Black, who can actually get away with the Overweight Antihero, then they are excruciatingly well-dressed. Neat as the proverbial pin.

The ladies (far rarer than the men) are aggressively cute. The stand-out example is Penelope Garcia from Criminal Minds. She is the girliest of girly girls, despite being in a STEM discipline. Every

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Challenge #01606-D145: Miss Handling

"You place too much trust in me, I think."

"Until you can place more trust in yourself you may rely on mine in you." -- RecklessPrudence

Rael got the shock of his life just being invited to someone else's home. Five seconds inside the door, he got one big enough to turn his entire body silver.

Officer Lyr Marken, Subchief of Security for the JOAT sector of the Elemeno, had just handed him her infant daughter. With nothing more than a negligent,

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Smol Dramas

Once again, I have to rant about a few things because life is hellishly inconvenient and everything costs too much and I slightly want to scream.

First up - ISBNs.

So I was thinking that once you got an ISBN for one book, you could use the same ISBN for the SAME CONTENT. I couldn't find anything about this on Lulu, but Smashwords insisted on one, so I thought I'd better check with Lulu just to be sure.

And dummins me went

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Challenge #01605-D144: Articles of Beauty

Us humans have skin lotions and hair straighteners/curlers - what do other species do to improve the Outer Alien? -- Anon Guest

There are things you can sell anywhere. Popcorn, for example, is the only known deathworlder food that is so inoffensive that it can be sold to Havenworlders. Many more things change uses between species.

"What is this liquid?"

"We call it 'varnish'. It's a clear polymer coat that adds shine to static surfaces."

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Prompts remaining: 15 Submit

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Tropes That Annoy Me: I Have Brothers

It's usually a feature of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, but sometimes your Action Gal explains her usually manly feats with "I have brothers". The brothers are almost always older, and numerous, and our female lead has learned to hold her own against them as some form of survival skill.

Sometimes, there are no brothers, the mother is usually out of the picture1, and the father "didn't know how to raise a girl" so did all the boy stuff with her.

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Challenge #01604-D143: They Grow So Fast

How about one where Aliens are stunned at the absurd growth rate/ regenerative properties that humans seem to have. Either for something as small as fingernails or hair needing constant maintenance, to 'how did that child grow a full METER in the ten years I was absent?!' -- Anon Guest

Human Steff had reproduced. Live birthing was trauma enough for most of the crew, but the idea that humans could be small and fragile was overwhelming. These mammals had to be

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Tropes That Annoy Me: The Fighting Fucktoy

If you want to know all about the Fighting Fuctoy, you won't find much about it on tvtropes.org at all. Nope. For that, you have to go to sites written by, and run by exclusively female authors.

Or you could absorb this picture:

[Artistry care of Kate Beaton of Hark, A Vagrant! fame. Link leads to her Strong Female Characters series collation]

Any attempt to put this sort of thing up on tvtropes results in, I presume, a phenomenally unbelievable amount

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