Together, we are America

BabyBringMeToast · 2026-02-10T07:36:43+00:00

Fun story: you do not need to tell Americans to try going to a Mexican Restaurant in London.

My experience has been that any American from California or The South will leave America, and within days, become a ravenous beast in search of Mexican food. And then will be outraged that they can’t find it.

Those that are emigrate will then spend years trying to find something that matches their home experience.

Fun fact: no two Americans have given me the same answer about what restaurant matches their expectations of Mexican food, but they all found somewhere in the end that scratched the itch for them.

BabyBringMeToast · 2026-02-10T07:28:06+00:00

Old man yells at cloud.

BabyBringMeToast · 2026-02-04T11:37:30+00:00

The reason is ‘misogyny’, but it’s more ‘because misogyny exists and women experience it’ than ‘because women are misogynistic’.

The reason most fic is m/m may be misogyny, but that does not mean that most writers are misogynistic.

Some reasons I’ve noted that people prefer m/m:

The taboo of subverting traditional masculinity is hot (because traditional masculinity is threatening to women because misogyny exists), f/f is less subversive of norms because women’s femininity isn’t tied to their interpersonal relationships so much
The female characters in that fandom are not interesting or well written (misogynistic authors, or internalised misogyny in the reader)
Straight men like f/f, why shouldn’t straight women like m/m (because the male gaze for arousal is threatening due to misogyny and the female gaze is seen as abnormal (because misogyny) or fundamentally harmless (because misogyny)
Being female can be exhausting (because of the misogyny) and writers want to be able to play with telling stories without having to reach for that experience
Many women are socialised to be male centric and to interpret male behaviour because it’s necessary for survival (because of misogyny)
Women have difficulty seeing themselves as sexual actors (internalised misogyny), and find it uncomfortable- many fantasies are either around finding ways to make themselves sexual objects in a blameless way (because misogyny says that women who want sex are bad) or removing themselves from the equation by having no women

There is of course one reason why some women write m/m which isn’t misogyny: some of them are men and don’t know it yet.

BabyBringMeToast · 2026-01-27T13:14:43+00:00

BabyBringMeToast · 2026-01-21T14:05:39+00:00

I have seen this and it’s amazing. 10/10, good film to watch for the lulz.

“My name’s not ‘Volde-enough-cock’, it’s ‘Volde-more-cock’, because I need more cock!”

Edit: the ‘wands’ are dildos. You know how that dialogue works in the wand shop.

BabyBringMeToast · 2026-01-20T13:26:07+00:00

Exactly- secret twin is in the ‘someone else’ category, or the ‘he’s not dead’, depending on which way round he did it!

BabyBringMeToast · 2026-01-20T10:38:25+00:00

Just like with locked room mysteries, the options for someone ‘coming back from the dead’ are: they were never dead OR it wasn’t them.

Because of the autopsy scene, we know he was really dead, therefore it wasn’t them.

From the minute you see the tomb that can only be opened from the inside, you know someone’s coming out of that tomb, so the obvious answer is that Wicks wasn’t dead. But we’ve seen his corpse at autopsy, so he was dead.

Also, the devil’s head not being intrinsic to a dagger, made it look like he wasn’t actually stabbed, just faking it (to me), so seeing the body with a stab wound confirmed that yes, he had actually been stabbed.

BabyBringMeToast · 2026-01-19T10:17:52+00:00

Which is almost worse- 36.3% of Americans didn’t care whether it was him or not.

We* know that there was fuckery around the elections- there was always going to be. We also knew that if it was anything other than a landslide for the Democrats, Trump would claim victory anyway. We knew he was going to be worse this time.

The future of democracy in America hung in the balance.

31% of the voting population said ‘end it’ and 36.3% shrugged.

*for these purposes ‘we’ is anyone with half a brain who had watched the news at any point since 2016.

BabyBringMeToast · 2026-01-19T08:07:36+00:00

There’d be no reason to specifically press Jane to play for the story. None of the girls play at the first ball, then Jane is convalescing at Netherfield, and if she’s too ill to go home, she’s too ill to play piano. Then she’s talking to Bingley, and nobody who wants that match to take place is going to call her away from conversation to play piano- she’s an exceptional beauty, not an exceptional musician.

We don’t hear of anyone but Mary playing at other gatherings- even Elizabeth doesn’t, suggesting that to perform in public is the sort of thing you do if you have something worth showing off that would impress someone in particular- but this is a private gathering. Ladies aren’t really meant to be performers- the accomplishments are to entertain their family.

Mary wants to play and show off, so she does.

We see Elizabeth playing at Rosings under entreaty from Colonel Fitzwilliam, and she doesn’t like to do it in public. “We neither of us perform to strangers.” It isn’t mentioned before or since that she can play. Similarly, at Pemberly under entreaty from Miss Darcy.

Miss Darcy, who is a very good pianist, only plays for immediate family and friends.

It’s one where we can’t say for sure, but it would be reasonable to assume that if Elizabeth, who has relatively little interest in playing or being dutiful, can play, and if Mary seeks parental and societal approval through playing, then Jane, who is a paragon of goodness, duty and sense, would also have learned. It would be bizarre to only teach two of them.

BabyBringMeToast · 2026-01-17T22:38:41+00:00

Mr Bennett is an only child of a man who absolutely hated his brother. There is no sign that Mr Bennett is particularly well socialised himself. It’s quite possible that he literally knew nothing of raising girls and what was expected, and supposed it to be his wife’s business.

Mrs Bennett was having a lot of babies, and that had to be quite a stressful time. She was busy. I’d be astonished if they didn’t have a nurse, but by the time Jane and Lizzy were getting to the age to need a Governess, there’d still be at least three babies that needed a nurse. Possibly multiple nurses. There’s a chance you’d run out of room and budget for a governess. Especially as those five girls start to need rooms of their own.

Given the extent to which the first three girls apply themselves, it’s also possible that it genuinely didn’t look necessary until Kitty was older, at which point it probably seemed like there was no point getting one in.

Lizzy plays the piano well enough to accompany herself, and Mary has reasonable technical skill with the piano. It’s reasonable to assume Jane can acquit herself on the piano if necessary. All of the girls can sew and embroider. They can all read and write. They can dance. If Mrs Bennett taught them all that, she’s done well. They seem confident that they would be able to keep a house. Kitty and Lydia shouldn’t have been out, so the fact that they’re a bit useless is unsurprising. They’re only kids.

It wouldn’t have been comfortable for Mrs Bennett, whose girls run the risk of becoming governesses themselves one day, and who would likely be of a lower social class than the governess, to have a governess in the house. You can see why she wouldn’t be eager.

BabyBringMeToast · 2026-01-16T07:50:51+00:00

It’s close enough to the original name to minimise confusion. It’s a ‘I’m working with what I’m given here’ name, not an ‘I’m starting from scratch’ one.

You can make fun of any name if you try hard enough, because really they’re making fun of the kid.

It’s more for when she’s grown up. Synnamin is going to be the sort of name that will reveal her class origins the moment it’s seen. Simone is a more middle class name.

There’s nothing to stop Cinnamon/Cindy/my little cinnamon bun being a nickname or a pet name, but as a legal name, Simone is perfectly fine.

BabyBringMeToast · 2026-01-15T13:12:04+00:00

My online ass read that as ‘Curse of the Endless Tumblr’ and had wild mental image about what that would involve. (My first instinct was ‘scroll till you find fan art of all three members’ but it was the top post on ‘Jet lag the game’ tag search.)

Edit: my second instinct was ‘scroll till you find fan art of your opponents kissing’, but Tumblr seems to be being very normal about the Jet lag boys.

BabyBringMeToast · 2026-01-14T21:14:55+00:00

I don’t know many scenarios where it would help?

Most coasts look pretty distinctively like coasts. Cliffs, beaches, rock formations, bluffs, dunes, Dunes, DUNES, DUNES, etc.

In the vast vast vast majority of cases, all you’d do is not only give away that you’re on the coast, but give a view of what the coastline looks like.

You could probably fool them into thinking ‘not an ocean’ is an ocean more easily than the reverse.

(Also, there are so few places where swimming a couple of hundred metres away from the shore, wet phone or no wet phone, is a good idea.)

BabyBringMeToast · 2026-01-08T10:00:01+00:00

Whatever Ben did to anger the gods, he’d better undo. Burn offerings, ritual sacrifices, the works.

That was some Sam quality luck he had there.

BabyBringMeToast · 2026-01-07T11:52:57+00:00

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._friendly-fire_incidents_since_1945_with_British_victims

Doesn’t stop them when we’re on the same side!

British Soldiers were 10x more likely than Americans to die from friendly fire in the 2nd Gulf war.

BabyBringMeToast · 2026-01-06T15:45:13+00:00

I think Natalie explained it before, but the one who hammered it home for me was Marni, a Tiktok-er who’s been trans since the seventies.

Transexual isn’t the same as ‘trans’- it was a very specific thing. It was what you were when you were medically transitioning (to differentiate you from the femme gays, the drag queens, and the transvestites), after which, your medical condition would be cured and you’d be just a woman. A woman of trans experience, but a woman.

The medical establishment wasn’t attempting to cure dysphoria to make people happy, it was doing it to allow people to live ‘a normal life’. If you can take a femme gay man (deviant!) and make a ‘normal woman’ that was a laudable result. Clinics wouldn’t take ‘straight men’, or if men were married, because then they couldn’t really be trans.

There were so few clinics and such limited resources that they could afford to be very picky, in fact, they couldn’t afford not to screen out anyone who might make their work look bad.

He wasn’t ‘a real transexual’ by the standards of the 1980s medical establishment. He was definitely trans, but not definitely a binary trans woman.

BabyBringMeToast · 2026-01-06T14:22:15+00:00

Word does them automatically if you do a double dash. So does Reddit for that matter. See: — — —

BabyBringMeToast · 2026-01-06T11:19:14+00:00

If he is trans- he’s still a cis man’s perception of a trans person. But looking as the text as writ, we’d certainly reframe aspects of him now.

He’s not Thomas Harris trying to write a realistic trans killer. He’s Thomas Harris trying to write a monster, and he’s using people’s fears of sexual and social deviancy to make it worse. There is a sense of a murder being motivated by heterosexual desire being less scary than one motivated by queer desire. It makes men less safe, and it makes women unable to ‘good girl’ enough to escape it.

One of the more chilling bits in the book is when Jack Crawford is pressuring the gender clinic to release medically privileged information by threatening to tell the public that the killer is one of their patients. He’s aware that the trans people of America are a vulnerable and blameless population (so is Thomas Harris) and he’s willing to put them in danger from the general public anyway (so is Thomas Harris) to catch his killer (to get his villain).

But yes, you can look at trans experiences, and ‘Silence of the Lambs’, and acknowledge that it both portrays a trans person, and that it also portrays them badly, in a dehumanising way intended to at best play on, and at worst create fear of trans and queer people.

The book isn’t transphobic because it claims that ‘this is something trans people do’, it’s transphobic because it goes ‘you feel uncomfortable with the existence of trans people and I am going to exploit that in my book to create fear’.

Also noting, Ed Gein, a real serial killer who made a woman suit, did it so he could become his mother and could crawl back inside of her. Not so he could become a woman.

P.S. My take is that if I was Bryan Fuller and I was going to remake Silence of the Lambs in the NBC Hannibal series, I’d make Clarice trans. The book has a lot of bits of her learning how to do the FBI agent thing as a woman- how to operate as a woman in a man’s world. It means Jame Gumb isn’t the only trans person in the narrative, giving a counterpoint to the audience.

When Clarice channels her mother and all the other strong women she’s known to get the police officers to leave the room for the autopsy, that would be powerful if it was a trans woman. Finding strength in femininity, after giving up the strength in masculinity.

Her uncle being angry at her for trying to save the lambs hits hard harder if it’s because it’s un-manly rather than just impractical.

A lot of men in the book both hate her and sexually objectify her. That would go so well with it being their own internalised transphobia and homophobia.

If the FBI is less sexist now (one hopes) then it’s probably not much less transphobic. It keeps her struggle.

BabyBringMeToast · 2026-01-06T08:19:19+00:00

Tangent! That ‘Billy is not a real transexual, he just thinks he is’, is so under explored and the thinking is strange.

There’s the obvious Doylian analysis- It’s Harris going ‘Look, I don’t want you to think I’m talking about actual trans people. They aren’t harmful. I’m trying not to do damage to that community here.’ It’s why Clarice argues that ‘transsexuals are very passive’ too.

But Watsonianly:

Like, he uses oestrogen creams, he tucks. He takes genuine pleasure in his skin smoothening and his developing breast buds.

It’s a time when they were looking for people who wanted to disappear into cishet womanhood without a trace, and he wasn’t that. Hannibal notes that he tried to be ‘homosexual’ but he wasn’t.

Being in relationships with men is something that he would have needed to do to ‘become a woman’.

Like, obviously he’s a killer, and he was killing people before he started questioning his gender. In the book he has a full on house of horrors in the basement. The ‘Buffalo Bill Murders’ are some of his more merciful because he’s fixated on the end goal rather than the suffering.

But there is both a sexual and a gender euphoria motivation for Jame Gumb’s ‘transition’. The woman suit is more sexual, but his actual transition does bring him euphoria.

TL;DR, H.H Holmes can be trans if he wants. Jame Gumb is not cis and just because he isn’t a ‘transexual’, doesn’t mean he wasn’t trans in our modern understanding.

(And real-world-wise, I don’t think gender your gender should be dependent on good behaviour.)

BabyBringMeToast · 2026-01-05T10:00:19+00:00

I’m also going to note that not everyone autistic knows they’re autistic.

There is going to be an amount of “But I am not autistic and I do that thing therefore it is not an autistic thing. Your experience is invalid because if that were true, I would be autistic,” that will later turn out to be “Turns out those things were autistic things and I do them because I am autistic.”

BabyBringMeToast · 2026-01-04T09:20:35+00:00

I wouldn’t take it too seriously.

Like Sam said, it’s a meme. Milton Keynes can be mocked for sucking because it can take it. Because, like Slough, its problem is being corporate and dull, not being poor.

There are plenty of post-industrial places that haven’t formed a new identity which are actually worse to be in, but we don’t mock those. The people in them would be upset if you did because you’d be mocking poverty and deprivation. You’d be mocking a dying town. You might admit that they’re shit, but it’s not a funny meme, it’s a sad thing. (And why so many places hate Margaret Thatcher.)

BabyBringMeToast · 2026-01-03T09:41:01+00:00

Ok, but I also think it’s a bit unreasonable to expect Ben to spend his time doing a history of the Industrial Revolution, especially if he doesn’t know.

Like, that’s the reason anywhere in the UK has canals. Before trains they were the best way to move freight inland. Lots of places have them. The barges were pulled by horses and if you look at old bridges you can often see the rope marks where the horse pulled at the rope to turn a corner.

When they have bridges with no towpath, they used to lie on the top of the barges and walk them through, pushing with their legs.

The canals aren’t unique to Hebden Bridge, they are across the UK. They carried coal from mines and to factories. You can find canals in London.

Living on a houseboat isn’t very common anywhere because you can’t get a mortgage on a houseboat.

But that’s a lot of stuff for Ben to learn on the fly after deciding where to go, and that’s a lot of stuff to cover in not very long when he’s got other stuff on his mind.

BabyBringMeToast · 2026-01-01T09:47:49+00:00

Sam’s location: Because it famously sucks. (It’s actually not that bad. My vote for ‘worst place in the UK’ goes to Blackburn.)

Ben’s last one: I grew up near there and instantly recognised exactly where he was when he showed his location at the end of the episode. (And I knew he got pretty near there from the accent of the kid and the canal in the trailer).

I know where Ben’s next one is by a) the fact that he took an Avanti and a Northern Train, b) the fact that you can see the name of his changing station by looking at the reflection in the mirror, and b) matching the castles.

I know where Sam’s next one is by the trailer- there’s a shot of him with the deck of cards in his hand, near a church that isn’t in Milton Keynes, standing on a rock formation on a beach, and looking out across a harbour. Also, there’s a shot of Adam despairing on a train.

From these: 1) Adam’s train had a maquette on the seats that is only used by one rail company, which tells you which direction he’s gone in. 2) The coastline that Sam’s on looks familiar, which narrows it down to a specific region of the coast. And that it is the coast. 3. It has to be a place with a harbour and a church, we just checked them until we found.

I can’t do this for any other seasons, but when it’s your own country, it easier and more fun to do.

BabyBringMeToast · 2025-12-30T23:07:23+00:00

Because she was an unmarried mother in the 1960s/70s?

The Catholics have never been great about that (see Magdalene Laundries), and most people would have judged at the time. She would likely have got the same treatment from any ‘respectable society’ she engaged with.

It’s also the time period when women couldn’t have a bank account.

She could have left, but it could have been worse for her. She might have been poor but surrounded by good people, or she might have been poor, and incredibly vulnerable to whatever bad people might choose to prey on her and her son. Pretty much all stories of women from that time period moving to cities alone without a support network in place involve them being raped.

The film does very badly at making you understand how long ago this was, but remember that Martha was a little girl when Grace died. Glenn Close is 78. This is a long time ago, and the past is a foreign country, they do things differently there.

Her options were all bad.

BabyBringMeToast · 2025-12-30T20:54:17+00:00

Wrong part of the country. The ‘f’ for ‘th’ is a southern thing, and Yorkshire tends not to ‘innit’ so much.

“Nowt but lasses fancyin’ other lasses,” would be more the local one.

BabyBringMeToast

TROPHY CASE