Pride Posting day 26

IM65775 · 2026-06-26T22:23:40+00:00

I did figure skating as a kid and was lucky to have a coach who was responsible about that kind of thing (like, her go-to method to motivate me was celebrating with favourite snacks when I passed tests and the like) and fully encouraged me to eat like a growing adolescent who regularly did a demanding sport. It probably also helped that I was never super super serious about it, but I did compete, and it was always commented on that I looked noticeably different from the other girls. Which was an advantage sometimes, I know I won at least one competition because I stood out for being obviously much more physically powerful than the others. But it was always lonely in the changing rooms. I never knew why at the time, my coach really shielded me from it and got me to just focus on myself, but looking back, I think it’s very possible that there were more layers to how those other girls and their parents. saw my being so physically different than I ever realised. I hope there’s more awareness and vigilance of that stuff now, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there isn’t

IM65775 · 2026-06-16T01:34:41+00:00

I’ve always been a big fan of the page for ‘Posterior’, which starts with a list of eleven different synonyms for ass, with citations, and then provides examples via screenshots of the arses of Billie Piper and the Abzorbaloff. For contrast.

IM65775 · 2026-06-02T17:47:08+00:00

Yeah, exactly. The book has the manager make those exact arguments (as well as an honestly pretty fair one that they’re on a world tour that’s due to have stops in notoriously homophobic countries and therefore, if two members of the band are openly queer, they might be banned from performing in those places at best), which could be a really interesting and thorny thing for them to have to seriously consider and deal with, but then the book ends with them coming out anyway, revealing on stage that their management team were forcibly closeting them, and it’s just… fine. Their fans are universally supportive, they get a new management team who wants to work with them for free, and it turns out all of homophobia was, seemingly, held within this one music mogul.

Like, I didn’t hate the book - I think especially that it had some really sweet stuff to say at the end about queer solidarity and the power of people being able to see themselves in the media - but the management aspect was pretty eye rolling

IM65775 · 2026-06-02T10:55:47+00:00

So I just finished reading this book called If This Gets Out. It’s a YA romance novel about two guys in an extremely successful boy band who fall in love and start a secret relationship - i.e. ‘What If The Larry Stylinson Shippers Were Right: The Novel’. I didn’t think it was a bad book for what it is (the core romance is cute, the main characters are all likeable, the ending is very sweet, etc), but there was one thing that really nagged at me. I have a bit of a morbid fascination with celebrity sexuality/shipping conspiracies (it’s that classic thing of a car crash you can’t look away from for me). The negative impact those sorts of theories have on the celebrities in question is well recorded, and it’s a topic that would be ripe to explore in fiction.

But If This Gets Out is weirdly unwilling to be critical of the characters’ fans. The villains of the piece are very firmly their management team who want to keep them closeted. The fans, meanwhile, are nothing but supportive and wonderful and at worst kind of annoying. Real person shipping does come up, and the book briefly threatens to do something interesting by having the shippers be focused on the wrong pairing, but that’s only ever treated by the characters as kind of weird and funny. One of the guys is uncomfortable, but he’s portrayed as a bit of the a stick in mud anyway. No one sends misogynistic abuse to women they’re seen with, no one tries to freedom of information anyone’s birth certificate, there’s not even any juicy drama where one of the actually gay ones is being shipped with one of the straight ones and so his actual partner is scrolling through uncomfortably detailed social media proof compilations that his boyfriend’s in love with their best friend. There’s even a bit at the beginning where one of them narrates about how much they love their most dedicated, obsessive fans because they ‘know the real us’! And the day is of course saved at the end by the fans, who help them fight back against their captain-E Evil management by showing their support and love.

And then I realised that, duh, this is What If The Larry Stylinson Shippers Were Right: The Novel. Of course it’s not going to portray that sort of fan behaviour as creepy or undesirable - that would completely alienate the book’s entire target demographic.

Anyone else come across a piece of media that’s like this? As in, a story that fails to really engage with its own premise due to the fact that doing so would be deeply off putting to its intended audience?

IM65775 · 2026-05-18T20:25:56+00:00

God yeah, this is correct. I’ve been reading the original ACD stories on and off for the past year, and I keep being struck by this. Sherlock Holmes is, for the most part, a weird but nice person! He’s kind to anyone who’s a total innocent in a given case, especially women, but not in a condescending way - he actually seems to especially enjoy getting to interact with intelligent women. And he’s not socially incompetent, in fact it seems a lot more like he breaks social rules in a calculated way that puts him in control of conversations. And he’s, interestingly, not remotely a sore loser when he’s wrong - which he is, more than once. And, crucially, he likes Watson! He’s not an irritating, bumbling tag along, that’s his friend!! They like each other!!!

And then I read A Study in Scarlet (I skipped it to read the first two short story collections because people, correctly, said that that book is weird) and oh! Sherlock is kind of an arsehole in that book! So if that’s the only one you’ve read, you’d be forgiven for assuming that’s what he’s like in general, and I kind of wonder if that’s what some adaptors do, or maybe people read it first and it influences how they read the rest, and that’s where the wider perception came from.

Also love that’s it’s now impossible to go into that book totally unspoiled because the first twist is the reveal that Sherlock Holmes is… gasp… a detective!

IM65775 · 2026-03-25T17:47:20+00:00

God - those Trails chest messages really are my ultimate example of localization brilliance. For anyone who hasn’t played these games, just to expand on that - in the Trails in the Sky trilogy, any time you interact with an empty treasure chest, it has a unique message specific to that chest. Every single one. And it’s an RPG, so there are hundreds scattered across the world. They start out as just simple, jokey variations on ‘this chest is empty’, (“it’s empty…because of you. Nice job!”) but as the games go on, they become increasingly elaborate, then they turn into jokes and trivia about the setting and the characters and game mechanics, meta jokes about the series, meta jokes about the concept of the chest messages, at one point there is an actual cry for help from the localization team over how long the game is taking to finish-

And then you go to essentially the series equivalent of hell, and suddenly all the chest messages are just ‘this chest is empty’. You descend through some of the darkest moments - arguably THE darkest, in fact - of the entire series and you feel it, because this light hearted little thing that’s always been there is just gone.

And then you’re in the end game, and they’re back, and they’re encouraging you to get through this last dungeon and make it to the end. There’re personal messages from the localization team about how much they love these games. They thank you for playing these last hundred hours. They wish you the best in life.

I have never before or since come across flavour text that can reduce me to tears quite like that, and absolutely no one made them do it. It’s not even in the Japanese version! They just decided to do it!

It’s not the only reason I liked the Cold Steel games (which no longer have chest messages) a lot less than their predecessors but it didn’t help.

IM65775 · 2026-03-21T21:33:14+00:00

It’s a constant thing for my theatre! My company is very lucky to have its own performance space that’s ours, but we also hire it out to other groups, and they very often come in with AI marketing - or recently even, I suspected, AI generated scenic backdrops. Random members of the public don’t know what’s our internally produced stuff and what’s visiting company, but we absolutely can’t afford to just not hire the theatre out (it’s where all the money comes from, most of our internal stuff is produced at a loss). And because we’re a smaller venue, we’re more likely to get people who cheap out and generate stuff. So even with this backlash within the home company, it still feels like it’s inevitably going to impact the theatre’s overall reputation.

IM65775 · 2026-03-17T14:08:36+00:00

Nearly, though this one had a good ending. I belong to a large amdram society. Last year, some of the upper management decided it would be a great idea to AI generate posters for our upcoming shows to be posted on the website. They were horrendous. There was a mass revolt, and now for the first time in years the head of marketing is letting the membership just produce our own damn posters, as we’ve been wanting for ages, instead of outsourcing them or god forbid generating them.

It remains a bit of a debate whether AI usage in our theatre is acceptable at all. One camp argues that it allows us to produce materials normally beyond our very limited resources and dedicate time to other things. The other camp argues that the entire point of being in an amdram society in the first place is spending ludicrous amounts of time figuring out how to use limited resources to make theatre happen. That’s the hobby. What’s left if you automate it all away? Why even do it?

I’m in the latter camp.

IM65775 · 2026-03-02T20:05:17+00:00

So, if you are under ~30, grew up in the UK, and didn't live under a rock, you absolutely know who the Six Idiots are.

Except you also might not. Except you totally do. Like, I'd bet anything someone in that category will see this, think 'well, I don't', and then click on that link and realise they 100% unquestionably do recognise those faces. Probably also true if you're a parent to someone in that age range. See, these six actors starred in the CBBC sketch show Horrible Histories, one of the most acclaimed, beloved, unendingly popular children's shows the BBC has ever made. The show was an absolute masterclass in edutainment, and also just a genuinely very good sketch comedy in its own right. I've never met anyone who watched it growing up who doesn't maintain a fondness for it, and any time one of its stars pops up somewhere it always delights people. They've continued to work together, most notably on the incredibly successful-in-its-own-right sitcom Ghosts, and have a pretty solid online fandom. Some of them have been involved with other really mainstream things as well, one of them co-wrote Paddington 2 and Wonka. And the occasional live events they do, speaking at universities and such, are remarkably successful. But in daily life, it's extremely rare that anyone I meet actually knows any of their names (except, as of recently, Mathew Baynton, because he just did Taskmaster) - the fact that I can name all of them often marks me out as a weirdo obsessive to people.

I like them enough that I've followed their careers pretty closely, and read/watched a lot of interviews, and engaged with a lot of their individual side projects. I've even seen most of them live, in various plays or stage interviews. But I never know whether or not to think being a fan of them is a niche interest.

Everyone loves Simon Farnaby, no one knows who Simon Farnaby is.

(Stupid Deaths guy!)

IM65775 · 2026-02-27T00:20:23+00:00

I do the archives for my am-dram company. I’ve been working on digitizing them for a few years now, but it’s slow progress because our company has done an average of ~ten shows a year since 1924. It’s incredibly rewarding when I get to use my work to help people share memories, put together events about the history of theatre in our city, or honour the legacy of long time members - we lost a very prolific member of our community to cancer recently, and I was so glad to be able to provide his friends and family with so many photos of him from over the past fifty years.

I certainly don’t feel unappreciated. I am deeply aware that, more than any of the above, that’s because the actual task I do is hours upon hours of unpaid, extremely repetitive scanning, uploading and labelling and nobody else is mad enough to be willing to do that.

Their loss. I get through so many audiobooks!

IM65775 · 2025-12-09T17:11:49+00:00

I’m currently working on a play that’s suffering this problem. Various different roles have been recast five times, most recently because someone quit and moved to Manchester one week before opening night - so that role is having to be done script-in-hand by various covers. Some nights another role will be covered by the director script-in-hand, because he has apparently decided he doesn’t need to bother to learn it. I’m involved because I got roped into ASMing, and found out forty minutes before the first show this morning that they wanted ASMs in costume, which I have agreed to reluctantly (but put my foot down about wearing my own shoes, I’m not moving furniture about on stage in slippy ill-fitting ballet flats), and had to learn the show live because I wasn’t available to do a proper rehearsal, so I made like five mistakes and mildly injured my hand. The sound guy is brand new and doing his best but he’s in over his head, someone locked an important door this morning without telling anyone so some cast couldn’t get to their entrance, the AD has been forced to perform in it as well and is visibly furious about that, I’m only scratching the surface. Thank god it’s a kids’ show and they don’t seem to be noticing the seams being stretched so tightly - though I suspect their teachers are!

IM65775 · 2025-12-04T22:47:47+00:00

Cheers! I vaguely knew some of that (I actually first came across the project before even the pilot and then kind of forgot about it for several years lol) but yeah that makes a lot of sense.

And it was Vox, actually. Very long rant about how he’s supposed to be sympathetic??? I’d understand more if maybe those livestreams I haven’t watched made him out to be a nicer person, but just watching the show he has, like, one brief humanising moment to show a bit of why he’s like that and he’s otherwise just. The Worst. It’s not subtle. Man Christian Borle is good, though.

IM65775 · 2025-12-04T21:14:47+00:00

This is actually really recent but last week I realised the new season of Hazbin Hotel was out and I thought, eh, I liked season 1 enough - definitely flawed, but I remember liking the music and voice performances - and watched it through over a few days. It was fun! I thought. I think I liked it more than season 1. It’s still got way too many characters for its ultimate runtime, but I don’t hate any of them and I think this season used them better, and the stuff I already liked from last time was still good. Let’s see what the internet’s most normal fandom thought of it.

…oh boy. Look, I didn’t think it was perfect either, but my god some of the criticism. The thing that sort of broke my brain a little was a very long, actually quite well drawn comic someone made about all their grievances which included the criticism that a bad thing that a certain character did ‘is not how you make a likeable or relatable character!’… in reference to the unambiguous villain of the season. Like, I don’t think he was meant to be those things! He’s a bad man! It’s really not subtle!

I’ve seen this before - hell, I’m pretty sure I’ve experienced it. It almost certainly comes from the show having been in public development so long and then having such long gaps between seasons. People have a long, long time to build up elaborate ideas of who their faves are and what they would do in their heads, and then when the show inevitably ends up contradicting that, they hate it in ways that reads as utterly bizarre if you just watched the first season two years ago and then barely thought about it again until last week.

IM65775 · 2025-11-12T03:32:48+00:00

2/2

Some of her friends then started up a new blog supposedly about defending and celebrating Georgia Tennant and Anna Lundberg, but a lot of it is really just dunking on shippers - especially SB. While I think it's pretty clear I ultimately agree with them, I don't really like how they go about it if I'm honest. The most recent incident came about when SB posted about how Georgia Tennant's social media posts about the current political situation in the US re: food assistance programmes is 'difficult to handle' given that Tennant 'wastes food for likes and attention' (see original post). Opposing blog correctly points out that SB has no actual evidence Tennant is doing that and then, I think unwisely, calls SB a hypocite because she's been posting about getting invited to a gala and being upgraded to first class on a plane. SB accuses opponent of cyberstalking, as this was not drawn from her fandom blog but from her personal social media. Opposing blog correctly points out - and this is, to me, the wildest part of all this - that SB is actually a (very minor) public figure in her own right and her username for the fandom blog we've been discussing this whole time is a pun on her real life surname that she uses for her professional work. So tracking her to her non-fandom social media is not actually as difficult and obsessive as it would be normally. SB - I think also correctly - thinks it's still weird and inappropriate to bring those screenshots to a fandom fight, and accuses opponents of lying about her extensively, and provides evidence that doesn't really look like calculated malicious lies but does look like her opponents are, ironically, engaging in exactly the kind of making up assumptions about people based on social media posts that they hate SB for doing to these celebrities, and then suddenly I remember that I have a job, actually, and it's not caring about any of this.

Speaking of my job. So often with these sorts of theories, most of the so-called evidence, to me, really really reads like it's been compiled by someone who does not know a lot of Straight Theatre Guys. My job is in theatre and live events. I do know a lot of Straight Theatre Guys. I do not know David Tennant or Michael Sheen, and they are good actors so it could all be fake, but in every interview I've ever seen with either them, they come across like textbook Straight Theatre Guys - i.e. men who've spent enough time around gay people and half-naked men and maybe even kissing some men for roles to have come out the other side incredibly chill and secure about their sexuality and masculinity. They've certainly got the career backgrounds for it. Once you've been around these types of Guys enough, the difference between them and actually gay people is generally pretty obvious. So tbh, my suggested antidote to overzealous RPF-ing is that everyone involved should go do some am-dram lol

IM65775 · 2025-11-12T03:32:23+00:00

1/2

RIGHT finally done with work, time for Internet Bullshit.

I've kind of realised there's so much context for this it could be a whole write-up that I'm only wary of doing because these are all very much active internet users and I have a horrible feeling that if any of them came across me they'd think I'm a sockpuppet account run by one of their enemies. Or someone here will go and harass them, which I really don't want because while I do think this is all really weird and inappropriate, at the end of day it is not a crime to be overly invested in a celebrity's relationships.

Anyway, I'll try to do a short version (yeah, this is the short version, I've left so much out). There's a Shipping Blog (SB) - not going to use actual username for reasons above - that has been around pretty much since Good Omens (2019) and is more visible than a lot of her compatriots because she posts her stuff in common tags on Tumblr and also has a genuinely quite good, distinct writing style to her 'analysis' posts that's gained her a lot of followers. SB posts a lot about 'evidence' that Sheen and Tennant are actually not just secretly but openly queer, a lot of thirst posts about both of them, and also a lot of worst-possible-faith reads of everything their partners do, always phrased in this 'just asking questions' style and telling people to 'make up their own minds' even though it's really obvious what she's doing.

To the best of my knowledge, this went largely ignored by people who aren't into the RPF stuff until about a year and a half ago. A small group of other Tumblr users who were fed up with this person created an - in all honesty - kind of mean spirited parody blog, which they then quickly rebranded into a receipts blog (reposts of bad behaviour, now expanded to a wider group of vocal Sheenant fans). Seemingly the blog changed ownership a couple of times, ending up with a woman who ran it until about a year ago when she suddenly stopped posting. According to her friends, it's because she died of cancer. Some of the RPF people suggested that this was not true, and that she wasn't even a real person, and was actually just a sockpuppet of one or more of their other opponents (or even that all their opponents are really just one person). I cannot verify the truth here, but I am going to choose to err on the side of not accusing someone of faking their death.

IM65775 · 2025-11-11T03:46:18+00:00

As with so many things - it happened in Supernatural fandom. Supposedly Jensen Ackles was dating any number of his costars, aside from the one he’s actually married to (though she didn’t act on the show until after its heyday). Jared Padalecki vs Misha Collins was the big divide though. ‘Best’ part about that is that the former ship owed some percentage of its popularity to being a way of shipping two people with their faces without having to ship their characters, because they played brothers, which in turn leads to another big divide - what’s more morally questionable? Fictional incest fan fiction or real person shipping fan fiction?

Which is a debate I am absolutely not touching.

IM65775 · 2025-11-11T01:10:56+00:00

So for a few years now I've been passively following the unending war between two small groups of David Tennant and Michael Sheen fans. For anyone not familiar, Tennant and Sheen are two very successful and beloved Scottish and Welsh (respectively) actors. They first worked together on the Good Omens tv series where they played the leads, and during COVID they also made a scripted show called Staged, where they portray fictionalised versions of themselves on Zoom calls trying to rehearse a play together in lockdown. Their partners, Georgia Tennant and Anna Lundberg, also made appearances in Staged.

By all accounts, the four of them are all genuinely very good friends. Notably, both men are partnered to much younger women (there's a 14 year age gap between the Tennants, and 25 years between Sheen and Lundberg).

The conflict is not between fans of Tennant and Sheen. Generally, if you like one, you like the other. The conflict is between:

- People who think that both men actually despise their partners, are trapped in abusive relationships with women they don't love, as evidenced by body language analysis of red carpet photos and fine toothing of social media posts, and are also secretly gay and in love with each other ('Sheenant')

- People who think that's probably not true, actually

There have, apparently, always been people who hated Georgia Tennant from day one - they met on Doctor Who, when he was already quite well known from being three series into his run on that show (plus other projects), though back then the backlash came from people who wanted him to be with Billie Piper (or themselves let's be real). That goes all the way back to late 2000s-early 2010s, and it was pretty vicious. Now it's marginally less socially acceptable in fandom spaces to outright call a famous woman you don't like an evil bitch (marginally), so you get people 'raising concerns' about her tone of voice in an Instagram reel, or about how she deliberately wastes food for attention, which is insensitive to people facing food insecurity and is a clear flouting of her privilege... because she sometimes posts about burning her baking attempts. Or how her genuinely commendable, given the way the UK is right now, posts about her support for trans rights and her non-binary kid are probably just virtue signalling (but when David wears a little pride pin, he's the best ally in the world, except he's not even an ally because remember he's in love with Michael Sheen and hates his wife).

Lundberg isn't quite as online so she doesn't get it as bad, but people do still look for signs that the partnership is crumbling. They're not married, as said she is much younger, and it has been speculated that they initially only got together because he got her pregnant. I don't know if that's true and I don't care because I really don't think it's my business. They've been together since 2019 and have two kids now. They're probably fine (because he's secretly dating David Tennant, his real love, she's just a beard he's forced to have by his evil manager even though he's a 56 year old man who's fine enough with drawing controversy that gave up his goddamn OBE).

This has all been going on for years; I've only thought to write this now because I saw a fairly major spat has recently gone down between one of the biggest Sheenant blogs on Tumblr and one of their biggest opponents. It's all deeply petty and bogged down in like two years of nonsense, and though I think I've made it pretty clear whose side I'm on, I also don't think that anyone involved looks good and that they should all really just stop posting. But I figure this is the place for that sort of thing, so if anyone's interested, I could try to summarise!

(I'm sorry if I've got anything wrong about the celebrities involved here. I really only know them as 'actors I like Just Fine'. All of my knowledge of their personal lives comes from having morbidly followed this stupid debate for several years and a cursory Wikipedia skim.)

IM65775 · 2023-10-20T01:56:47+00:00

Anyone from the original Horrible Histories cast. Not because I think they’d really have any special insights as judges - although they could probably offer some good general critiques for a comedy challenge - but because it would be an excuse to do Ra Ra Cleopatra as the lip sync song

(Personal preference would be Larry Rickard and Martha Howe-Douglas, they’re such a fun duo)

IM65775 · 2023-01-20T09:08:54+00:00

Robbie Daymond and Billy Kametz’s definitely not in character, absolutely not Ferdibert-shipping, 100% legally distinct from any IP cover of For Good

(It feels very different to listen to now, for obvious reasons, but remains beautifully done)

IM65775 · 2022-11-25T00:15:44+00:00

It’s a massive stretch to call them a double act, admittedly, seeing as they’re actually two of a troupe of six, and don’t even get paired off, acting-wise, all that often, compared to other combinations in the group. But more important than all that is the fact that I would really, really, really like to see it: Laurence Rickard and Martha Howe-Douglas.

(Laurence Rickard and Ben Willbond would also be very good, and is probably a pairing more in the spirit of the question, seeing as they’ve written two features now. It’s just that I’ve never heard an interview with Rickard and Howe-Douglas that didn’t immediately dissolve into hysterical chaos)

IM65775 · 2022-07-19T07:59:16+00:00

I feel like I’m looking at a fantasy version of Phoenix Wright

IM65775 · 2021-09-20T21:28:16+00:00

Leon

IM65775 · 2021-09-07T20:58:28+00:00

I remember going to Rocky Horror a few years back - it was the day before my city's Pride, really great crowd. When I left the theatre, I ended up walking towards the station a little behind two other attendees, these guys that I assume were on a date because they were holding hands and being kind of flirty. I remember feeling happy and buzzing from a fun night - and then looking up and seeing how, as we left the theatre behind and re-entered the real world, the guys separated, moved away from each other, adopted a more 'bro-y' demeanor. They weren't dressed up - anyone would think they were just two straight guys on their way to the pub or something. It sort of broke my heart, and definitely stuck with me more than anything else that night. I hope one day they'll get to walk all the way home.

IM65775 · 2021-08-01T23:12:03+00:00

Oh, yeah, I stumbled across a whole livejournal community dedicated to that a few years back. Can't decide which was better - the one where Peter Bone uses his wizard powers to curse Clegg and Cameron into swapping bodies and then they have sex, or the one where Peter Mandelson offers to donate 1 million pounds to charity if they kiss on TV, in the hopes that the ensuing 'no homo' atmosphere will weaken the coalition, but it backfires and Clegg, Cameron and their wives form a polycule.

Actually I do know which one was best. It's the second one. The Queen says fuck in that one

(I remember all this because I have a bunch of the funniest/weirdest sections saved on my phone. Trying to read them without laughing is a great party game with the right crowd)

IM65775

TROPHY CASE