“wow, this lore sure goes places”
written by… uhhhh…
(best read on desktop)
This story happened a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. It is already over. Nothing can be done to change it.
It is a story of […] the death of dreams. It is a story of the blurred line between our best and our worst.
It is the story of the end of an age.
A strange thing about stories—
Though this all happened so long ago and so far away that words cannot describe the time or the distance, it is also happening right now. Right here.
It is happening as you read these words.
[…]
This is the twilight of—
— Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith (2005), by Matthew Stover
I’m going to tell you a story. It’s a long story, and not always a happy one. It’s also, very likely, a story you’ve heard before, one way or another. But I’ve never told it before. Not my version of it, and not the whole thing. It’s a story I’ve been sitting on for longer than I can remember now. Nothing is to be gained by waiting any longer. I’m as ready as I’ll ever be, so now’s the—
I. Time
Let’s go back in time. Today is January 15th, 2025.
One of the big new features that’s held up the next Wall of History update is the timeline — a single, giant timeline for the entire BIONICLE story, not unlike those you see on BS01 or the Great Archives.
Wall • of • His•to•ry: An online archive of BIONICLE story media, including comics, movies, novels, and more, compiled into an accessible, easy-to-read format. I run Wall of History, mostly by myself. You’re technically on Wall of History right now!
Wall of History, of course, is not quite like those sites, and serves more as a straight archive of materials rather than a summarization of them. Rather than create a timeline from scratch, in my own words, I just wanted to take the handful of official timelines released over the years and merge them together. This seemingly simple task was complicated by the fact that these timelines don’t have the same “present day,” meaning for them to be coalesced properly, I had to precisely determine the offset between them.
On the night of January 15th, 2025, I started working to reconcile two of the timelines — the first, from the March/April 2007 issue of LEGO BrickMaster, and the second, from the reference book BIONICLE World, also released in April of 2007. Let me walk you through how that went.
Okay, so the “present day” of the BrickMaster timeline sees the Toa Inika journeying down to the sunken city of Mahri Nui. The World timeline has no present day, ending on the Matoran returning to Metru Nui “one month ago.” In the BrickMaster timeline, Metru Nui is rediscovered “less than one year ago,” while one month ago, Turaga Dume revealed that Mata Nui was dying to the Toa Nuva.
So there we go. The offset between these two timelines is the span of time between the Matoran returning to Metru Nui and Turaga Dume revealing Mata Nui is dying. So we just have to figure out how long he waited! Easy, right?
I started by revisiting Island of Doom, the novel in which Dume tells the Toa about Mata Nui. According to paragraph three of the introduction, the Matoran had been rebuilding Metru Nui for “the past few weeks” on the day Dume says his thing. That’s a good start! It’s actually a great start, because… okay, this is gonna require some context.
For those of you who don’t know, Greg Farshtey, the author of most of the BIONICLE novels, has spent the better part of the last two decades and change answering fan questions on the Internet. He’s probably answered tens of thousands by now. And there are a lot of fans who take these Q&As… really seriously. Like, religiously seriously. And the most serious of those fans can be found on BS01 and in the Discord server for the Great Archives.
And it just so happens… that a few months prior to this, someone in the Great Archives Discord pointed out that a BS01 user, Dag, had determined that any time Greg uses the phrase “a few,” he means three. Exactly three.
And how did he come to this conclusion?
Well, on a couple occasions, Greg used the phrase “a few weeks” to mean just short of a month, and a month is about four weeks (the shortest month is exactly four weeks). What’s just short of four? Three. Greg also used the phrase “a few days” to describe how long it would take the universe to end if Mata Nui did die, a process he later specified would take “roughly” three days.
I would say Dag’s logic here is sound, but… I would like to see if there’s any evidence for a more specific timeframe.
Okay, so in the novel Legacy of Evil, the Piraka Zaktan has an extended flashback covering the last several (thousand) years of his life, while he’s descending the 777 stairs to hopefully claim the Kanohi Ignika. Helpfully, the different chunks of this flashback are timestamped, and the last of these is set one month before the present day. So one month before descending the 777 stairs, Zaktan and the other Piraka were raiding Mangaia, the lair of the recently deceased Makuta. It is important to note here that, at this time, Hakann claims the Matoran are returning, present tense, to Metru Nui. So Dume will be revealing Mata Nui is dying a “few weeks” after this.
We also have exactly one month passing between Dume revealing that Mata Nui is dying and the Toa Inika descending to Mahri Nui, per the BrickMaster timeline. Now, things get a little muddy here, but bear with me. The Toa Inika follow the Piraka down the stairs almost immediately. It’s 777 stairs, which is a lot, but that’s not really… a journey, right? They reach the bottom, they fight Vezon and get the mask, it flies back up to the surface and falls into the ocean, and a “short time” later, the Inika start down the cord to pursue it.
Do you see the issue here?
If we assume, I think reasonably, that at most a few hours pass between the descent down the 777 stairs and the Toa Inika descending the cord, then the Matoran were on their way to Metru Nui and Dume revealed Mata Nui was dying about one month ago, with maybe a few hours offsetting those “one month ago” timestamps — not a few weeks. That’s not… great, but it’s potentially an avenue to putting this all to bed — because the offset between these two timelines can now also be approximated by determining how long that “short time” was.
Could a “short time” be a few weeks? I mean… maybe? But the Inika are on a pretty urgent quest, right? The universe itself is on the brink of literally dying. Do we really think they’d just sit around doing nothing for weeks before going after the Mask of Life? I don’t. But wait, the BrickMaster timeline implies the Toa Inika are in the middle of their descent “currently,” and we don’t know how long that actually took them. Maybe it was a “few weeks”! Their journey is never defined in any detail, as the book that was supposed to cover it, Invasion, was cancelled. So yeah, maybe that’s where we can find the discrepancy between those two “one month ago” timestamps. The Toa Inika took an unknown amount of time descending the cord, which happens to line up exactly with the span of time between the Matoran returning to Metru Nui and Dume revealing the Great Spirit is dying.
So can we figure out how long that journey down the cord took?
Well, you might want to step off that rug, because I’m about to pull it out from under you. According to Greg Farshtey, everything the Toa Inika/Mahri did, from Voya Nui to Mahri Nui back to Metru Nui, took about a day.
A few weeks is approximately three weeks, but it’s exactly… one single day.
…
Why do I… care about this?
II. Lightning
Let’s go back in time, again. It is 2017.
Why does this website — Wall of History — exist?
It’s been said, time and time again, that BIONICLE was “lightning in a bottle” — that no reboot could ever truly satisfy the lifelong fans, because it could ever recapture the feeling BIONICLE gave us way back in 2001. And to an extent, that’s true — we’re all adults now, and we’ll never be able to experience this story for the first time again. But there are lots of people out there who haven’t experienced it at all, and for those people, I wanted to make a compendium that was as authentic as possible. To perfectly encapsulate the soul of BIONICLE.
Wall of History exists for my friends. My partners. Anyone else who missed out on this story twenty-something years ago. Maybe no reboot could catch lightning in a bottle again, but maybe — maybe with a lot of time and effort — I could capture everything that made it work the first time. Freeze that moment in time, so anyone could at least experience it once.
Maybe this is just because I spent years overthinking it, but this turned out to be a Herculean task. A Sisyphean task. There was always more. I was dissastisfied with the story compilations that preceded me because they were all Google Docs or PDFs. They lacked the animations, and the movies, and the games — all things I thought were vital components of BIONICLE, that a compilation was simply incomplete without. So I created Wall of History, where I could incorporate the comics, novels, movies, games… everything, right?
Well, I did that, but it still didn’t feel like I was done. So I added more. I integrated things like the BIONICLE Encyclopedia, and online character bios. But it still didn’t feel like I was done. So I started working on the Waybonk Machine, integrating things like the official BIONICLE web pages. But it still didn’t feel like I was done. So I started adding advertisements. The BIONICLE experience couldn’t be complete without the commercial, right?
And now I feel like I’m… almost done. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to say I’m done, but I’m realizing I’m riding an asymptote. Maybe it’s not possible to freeze a moment in time.
I wanted to show them something that wasn’t an illusion. Something that was real. Something that they could see and touch.
— John Hammond, Jurassic Park (1993)
In an era of three-hour “deep dive” video “essays” that just explain the events of a story to you, as if it’s a history lesson about some made-up place… I wanted to create something real. I wanted to create a place that anyone could experience the story for themselves, as it was meant to be experienced. Yeah, a nine-hour YouTube video might be easier, but…
My favorite Star Wars novels are the Star Wars novels about the Old Republic. No, I have never read any of the Old Republic novels, but they are my favorite.
[…]
My brain is filled with all of this important Star Wars lore. Important Star Wars information. And I am truly proud — truly blessed — truly humbled — it is my destiny to feed the Internet and its travelers with endless Star Wars knowledge that I read off of Wookiepedia into a microphone and then make — chaching, chaching — money by simply talking about CliffNotes that I read on a CliffNotes website rather than fully reading the substance where the CliffNotes derived from. After all, the most important information in a story is the CliffNotes. I read the Wookiepedia entry, I read the CliffNotes, I speak the CliffNotes into a microphone and I make a slideshow for the Internet. I am a conveyor of information. I am a huge Star Wars fan. I am a lightning rod for those who do not want to read the substance of things and do not even want to read the CliffNotes of those things of substance for themselves, but would rather have me read them, for them, into a microphone with a slideshow. I am a PowerPoint presentation with lightsabers. I am a PowerPoint presentation.
— HelloGreedo, “Ultimate Guide to Star Wars - Star Wars Canon Deep Dive - Part 1”
The nine-hour DuckBricks video is this — a story with the soul drained out of it.
Wolk
Medium bluish violet Marker
James
And Wall of History exists to be… the anti-this. Because BIONICLE isn’t a history lesson. It’s a story. And not just the story told by the words on a page, it’s now the story of all of us — everyone reading this. The story of you, and… of me.
Me.
III. Nostalgia
The vulture is a fascinating, terrifying triumph of evolution. Feeding almost exclusively on animals that have already died, their stomach acid is some of the most corrosive in the animal kingdom, able to purge their meals of bacteria as deadly as anthrax. They’ll eat and eat and eat until they can barely move. And when the sun is beating down on a hot day, they’ll stay on the ground with their wings spread, letting the heat bake the bacteria and parasites off their feathers.
As I’ve gotten older, indulging nostalgia has felt more and more like eating rotting meat. Seeing others do it has started to inspire the same revulsion in me that a vulture eating a deer on the side of the road does. The obsession with… franchise slop, remakes, references… Doesn’t it feel like eating the same thing over and over again? Picking bits and pieces off the same corpse over and over again, long after it’s given you all the sustinence it has to offer?
We’re no vulture. We can’t sustain ourselves on old meat — on meat that’s started to rot. We can’t spend forever nibbling at the past, yearning for a little taste of the flavor that used to be there. We can’t grow eating like that, because we’re no vulture. We’ll stunt our growth eating like that.
I’ve spent years on Wall of History now, and only about half that time has actually been spent… ya know… programming. A lot of the time I’ve just been thinking. Thinking about the perfect way to capture a moment in time. How best to preserve its essence. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the… the shape of it. What is the shape of a story, exactly?
I’m still not exactly sure. Maybe it’s just an unattainable goal — perfectly encapsulating any moment of the past. And despite all the people telling me I’m “doing God’s work,” or that I’m a “legend”… the more of my ever so finite time I’ve sunk into this, the more it’s just felt profoundly sad. This lightning struck when I was three years old. Even I don’t fully remember it. I’ll get glimpses of it, every once in a while — remember some aspect of it I’d mostly forgotten about, something that feels important to its vibe, but so many of those memories are just… fleeting.
And I’ve spent years on it now, chasing these fleeting memories. Living in the past. And I can’t really understand why. Why do I need to solve this infinite puzzle? Will I be able to move on when I’m finished? And can I even be finished? Perhaps… Perhaps it’s not even really about BIONICLE. Perhaps at the root of it all is an entirely different question…
Why am I so dissatisfied with the present in the first place?
And I spend my life
watching it go by from the sidelines.
— “Sun Bleached Flies” by Ethel Cain
You spend your days inside, in front of a computer screen. You see a thousand lives play out while yours does not. But, if nothing else… you become very well acquainted with the life you wish was yours.
. . .
There’s something wrong with me. Something inside me that I cannot put to words. Something that cannot be conveyed to another. But something that I long to be nonetheless.
I am turning into something no one else can understand.
IV. 繰り返し
A strange thing about stories—
Though this all happened so long ago and so far away that words cannot describe the time or the distance, it is also happening right now. Right here.
It is happening as you read these words.
— Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith (2005), by Matthew Stover
Like I said… this is a story you’ve heard before.
The first time it was told has been lost to time. The first time most of us heard it was in 2003. And those of us who’ve stuck around… We’ve heard it again.
Where does “Tamaru is Trans” come from?
There’s this fairly old theory that Tamaru is trans, and I’ve never really understood it, nor can I find a good explanation of it. I’ll just get to my 2 questions right off the bat:
- Is the theory that Tamaru is MtF or FtM?
- What inspired this theory?
These questions purely come from the position of not knowing what’s going on, why everyone wants Tamaru to be a girl, or what that really means for the character. I just want to understand what this is all about.
And again.
The Bionicle to trans girl pipeline is the funniest real phenomenon i know way too many people who fit the description and it never ceases to be hilarious
— 🦇 Holly 🦇 Bsky: @teridax.dev (@TeridaxDev) April 3, 2021
And again.
Again.
Again.
Again.
“You know who you are.”
The "bionicle to trans pipeline" joke was funny, but...
I ask that people read this with an open mind, I mean this out of genuine care for the community here. I enjoyed the meme for a while but after seeing genuine confusion from some users, I feel the need to raise this:
Bionicle can not make you trans. If you feel that your assigned gender is not right for you, that is your decision to make, and yours alone. Please do not let memes on reddit dictate how you should perceive yourself.
Take the time to consider what your gender means to you, without any outside influence, and then decide for yourself. That is where your destiny lies.
You know who you are. Nobody else does.
To all my trans friends on here and elsewhere, i know life is tough, keep powering on.
“Nobody else does.”
V. Change
hand on the throttle, thought i caught lightning in a bottle
[ … ]
and it was written, i got cursed like eve got bitten
[ … ]
change the prophecy
Today is August 31st, 2024. I send my partners and friends the letter.
i.
I don’t exactly know where to start with this.
There are a lot of places I could start, and they all came to me fairly easily. It’s not that I don’t know what I’m trying to say here — it’s just that there’s no way to start talking about it that won’t make it immediately obvious what I’m getting at. And that’s a problem for me, because I feel like then… I’d feel like a fraud. And I know none of you would say that. But I’d feel it. So I need to do this in some way that makes y’all understand the full scope of it.
Maybe I’m not actually doing it for y’all. Maybe convincing y’all isn’t the issue. I know at least one of you has already had your suspicions. Maybe I just need to convince… myself. Maybe if I lay it all out, and I still feel this way at the end… Maybe then I’ll know it’s real.
ii.
I have had a disconnect with the concept of gender for some time. I still have a vivid memory of the first time I heard the word “pretty.” I was four or five years old, in the living room with the twins, my parents, and my mother’s parents. We were getting ready for some kind of event, and my mom said my sister looked “pretty.” I asked her what that meant, she explained, and then I asked if I was pretty too. She, of course, said something to the effect of, “No, you’re a boy, and you don’t say boys are pretty. You say they’re handsome.” This didn’t make sense to me at the time — I had no concept of prettiness sixty seconds prior, and already I was being cut off from it, over something I also had no real concept of.
Even as I got older, and got a better sense of how the world treats boys and girls, it still didn’t make sense to me. I accepted it for a while, but I still thought it was dumb. It was an annoying distinction to bother with.
There were similar incidents at school. Most of my friends were girls, and one day at lunch — I was maybe in first or second grade — a teacher actually berated me for sitting at the “girl’s table” (the tables weren’t even officially gender-segregated, they just happened to end up that way). She then berated me a second time for complaining about being made to sit at the “boy’s table.” Little annoyances like this continued to pile on over the years.
iii.
The need to shave was probably the first thing that made me feel what could genuinely be identified as gender dysphoria. I hated it. I still hate it. I hate seeing my stubble in the mirror more than anything. I hate how quickly it grows back after I shave it off. I hate that the only real alternative, epilating, takes hours of intense pain, for maybe a week or two of solid results. I hate that I can’t get rid of it without cutting myself. But I haven’t pursued laser hair removal or anything like that, for fear that one day I’ll decide I just need to live as a man, and that my face might not be appealing in the long run without hair covering the bottom half of it.
iv.
In high school — maybe around the end of junior year — I started identifying myself as agender, exclusively on Tumblr.
Having grown up in a vaguely religious, mostly right-wing household, I didn’t let myself think much about gender or sexuality until the end of middle school, when the culture shock of leaving the Vestavia Hills school system led me to quickly reassess much of what I believed and thought of myself. Realizing I’m bisexual was straightforward (if somewhat painful), but gender was more… complicated.
I don’t recall ever having much of an issue with trans people — I didn’t really think about them much at all until joining Tumblr my freshman year, and promptly meeting several. The first trans person I ever talked to was named… Sammy, I think. I think he wanted to be a man. I think he followed me because I made a funny joke about the new pope, and we DMed about his gender stuff for a little bit, and then he suddenly deleted his blog. I never heard from him again, but the fact that he was so open about how he felt left an impact on me. While it took me a long time to accept homosexuality, and then even longer to accept my own, accepting transgenderism (of others) was quick and easy.
Two or three years later, I was deeply embedded in Tumblr’s transhumanist/biohacker community, and the “faceless, genderless biohacker” Lepht Anonym was pretty much my idol. At this point, I was still fairly uncomfortable thinking about my own gender presentation, but the decision to label myself agender was pretty easy. I guess because I felt like I was doing it for philosophical reasons — sex and gender are arbitrary constructs of human biology, so they, like all the restrictions of biology, should simply be discarded. And that’s what I did! For a while, anyway.
As with most aspects of my life, it couldn’t survive hitting the [E] wall.
I don’t remember exactly what she said. It was in my bio for months before she said anything about it, despite her being on Tumblr constantly. We were driving up to the Summit when she brought it up. She said something like… “I mean, you’ve got that thing in your bio. If you want me to call you [they/them], I will.” And I know that sounds supportive on paper, but the way she said it… I knew her heart wasn’t in it. So I just said, “No, it’s fine,” and sometime later, changed my bio back to “he/him.” And for a while, that was that.
v.
I didn’t really think about any of this again until… 2019. It was around then the whole “femboy” craze was picking up, and I felt this sort of… tug. Yearning. Jealousy. I saw other boys going outside in skirts or dresses, and wanted to do that myself. I told [S] about it one night while we were driving to the apartment they lived in with [A], and they said they’d support me. Which was nice.
We got to the apartment, and did whatever it was we were going over there for. And as we were about to leave, [S] said to [A], very matter-of-factly, “James wants to be a femboy.” In their defense, I didn’t tell them this information should be a secret. So that’s on me. But what happened next was [A] got visibly uncomfortable, and just awkwardly laughed at me. Really loudly.
And that’s when I started rotting.
I don’t know how else to describe the way I’ve been feeling for the past few years. Rotting. I only have so much youth left. Trans people on /tttt/ will tell you it’s too late to transition if you’re out of your teens — and now I’m twenty-seven.
I’ve just been caught in this… feedback loop. Or maybe it’s a vicious cycle. I don’t know. I feel like I’m too old, and I should just accept I waited too long, and live the rest of my life as a man. But the other side is begging me to do it anyway — yeah, you’re getting old, but this is still the youngest you’ll ever be. If you’re gonna do it, you need to do it now.
If you’re gonna do it, you need to do it now.
If you’re gonna do it, you need to do it now.
If you’re gonna do it, you need to do it now.
If you’re gonna do it, you need to do it now.
IF YOU’RE GONNA DO IT, YOU NEED TO DO IT NOW.
Over and over again. This endless back-and-forth. One part of me that wants to live a certain way, repressed and rotting away. And the other part of me petrified by the thought that no one would take me seriously. If it was too late for me to be taken seriously in 2019, it’s definitely too late now, right?
[S] has tried to convince me that I shouldn’t let that night influence me. They’ve always done their best to support me in spite of it. But it’s not so easy.
vi.
I don’t think I’d work as a girl.
My height is an issue (oh, for those of you who haven’t met me in person, I’m 6’4”), but it’s not the issue. One night, also around five years ago, I was in Walmart — and just for a moment, I saw a girl who was as tall as I am. I obviously can’t assume, but I think she was cis. And she was truly breathtakingly beautiful. And that gave me some hope. I’m not opposed to the idea of being a tall girl.
But reality is more complicated, isn’t it? They don’t make clothes for girls as tall as I am. Not a lot of them, anyway. I’ve bought clothes for girls, but on me, most of them just look… off. I’ve been able to find a handful of skirts that fit me around my waist and cover everything, but I’m still just so… long.
I know working out more would help. If I could work out my legs more, and get them a bit thicker, I wouldn’t look so disproportionate with my legs out. But that’s only one part of it. I still have a man’s torso. I’ve got a man’s stomach and chest. And I can barely look at myself wearing anything other than a shirt that covers all of it. And my face. I don’t think it’d work as a girl’s face. With my big, crooked nose, and my lips, and my jaw. I’m revolting as a man, and I’d be even more revolting as a woman.
And that’s where I’ve been for the last few years. Rotting away in the knowledge that it’s too late to do anything about any of it. No one would take me seriously as anything other than a man now. And sure, I’m revolting as a man, but men are at least allowed to be revolting. No one really cares if a man doesn’t look quite right.
Part of me wonders if all this is just crazy. Maybe I just have crazy body dysmorphia. Maybe my face is mostly normal. Maybe if I worked out more, I could make my proportions a bit more feminine, and that would be good enough. Maybe if I ate healthy and did all the right workouts, if I learned how to do makeup really well, if I bought clothes that flattered what worked and hid what didn’t, I could be a solid 7/10. Maybe I’ve just been letting all the /tttt/ doomposting get to me. I don’t know.
for tomorrow—
for tomorrow, i’ll be ready.
tomorrow, i’ll change
tomorrow
tomorrow doesn’t wait for me
vii.
August 7th is the day the dam broke.
I was on a road trip. A thirteen-hour drive. I’d exhausted all the music I like, so I decided to get caught up on my YouTube watch later playlist. It was mostly video essays, so I could just listen to them. One of those videos, the first one I listened to on this drive, was this video by RickiHirsch. I didn’t (immediately) listen to the rest of my watch later playlist. I went to Ricki’s channel, and listened to this video. Then this one.
I won’t make y’all watch all those videos, nor will I waste time here summarizing them. What matters is that after I was done with them — after I’d listened to these trans girls talk about their own experiences for a little over three hours — I knew I couldn’t avoid any of it any longer. Something had to give. Too much added up. Too much of what they said was familiar. I don’t think there’s much room for doubt left anymore.
I started to think about what I’d say. I started thinking about writing this. At the time, it felt like it could be something… beautiful. The videos I listened to were. They were painful, but beautiful. And I thought if I could write something like that… maybe anyone who read it would get it. Maybe that would be
enough. But now it’s been several weeks, and I don’t remember all of what they said. All I have now is how it made me feel. I’ve started reading Wandering Son, the subject of the first video, and it’s painfully familiar too. It made me feel the same way. Pain for all the wasted time. Dread for what’s to come. But something like hope underneath all that.
It wasn’t the first time I’d felt all that. A few weeks prior, I’d watched I Saw the TV Glow, a horror movie that is overtly about the repression of transgenderism — and doesn’t have a happy ending. It unsettled me. Seeing someone feel more and more like a stranger in their own life, slip out of their reality, and wither away as time sped by faster and faster. I don’t want that to be me. But it is me. I don’t know if I can stop it now. I don’t know if I can grab time and stop it, and make myself myself again. Maybe I’ve never been myself in the first place. Maybe all this time I’ve been locked in a room, and I was finally losing it in there, and trying desperately to kick through the door.
viii.
Before I even got to where I was going, I texted [S] and told them what I wanted to do first. I wanted to go to the thrift store and get a bunch of girl clothes. I wanted them to come with me, so if anyone gave us weird looks, we’d have plausible deniability — they could just assume we were shopping for [S]. I told them I would go crazy if I didn’t try. If I didn’t at least see. I told them I’d die.
I was probably a bit melodramatic in retrospect. But [S], of course, said we would. And we did! And it was certainly an experience.
I’ve got a Pinterest board of feminine outfits I’ve liked over the years. But we were shopping at a thrift store in Alabama. Everything was… tacky. Nothing was quite what I wanted. It wasn’t quite my style, and of course, almost none of it was gonna fit me. But we found a few different things for me to try.
A few days ago, I saw a trans girl on Twitter describe gender dysphoria as “wanting to vomit blood when you see yourself in the mirror.” And yeah, that’s kinda how I felt looking at myself in those clothes. Not because of the clothes themselves, though — because I could see my own body underneath them. And it was obviously, painfully the body of a man. And I didn’t know what I could do about that. Is it too late?
Maybe. Maybe not. But I think I’ll go insane if I don’t try anyway. I don’t think I can accept “too late” any longer.
ix.
This letter’s been a lot of doom and gloom so far. That wasn’t my original intention. The doom and gloom wasn’t what prompted this — what prompted this ws hearing other people describe exactly what I feel. What prompted this was the… vindication… of hearing someone describe the same puzzle
I’ve been trying to solve, and hearing that the pieces might really fit together the way I’ve been thinking they might.
I don’t know what exactly I am, or what I’m supposed to do. I can’t do what I want to do. I can’t be exactly what I want to be. But I know I don’t feel right being what I am. And I know that when I’ve tried to be something else… When I’ve caught myself in the mirror like that, at just the right angle… I’ve felt… free. And I’ve felt, briefly, like I’m not a stranger inhabiting something that isn’t really mine.
All that to say… I might be some kind of girl.
x.
I don’t know if I have it in me to do HRT. Part of me really wants to, but another part of me is afraid of the… permanence. What if I’m wrong? What if my body changes, and then I dislike the outcome even more?
Or… what if I’m right, and every passing day I don’t is another day wasted? Another day my body changes in the wrong way? In ways that’ll get harder and harder to reverse?
I don’t really know what I should do. I guess I might try being genderfluid. Or bigender. Baby steps first. Just be a girl… some days. Dress like a girl some days. Try some makeup some days. Maybe if I can whittle myself down to something more androgynous… then I’ll know the right way to build myself back up.
Maybe after five pages of bitching and moaning, that’s anticlimactic. But I can’t hold it all in any longer. Or maybe I just don’t want to. And maybe having others know will help me know. Maybe having someone else call me “she” every once in a while will help me know.
VI. Grind
Today is August 10th, 2026.
It’s now been almost two years since I started HRT. In some ways, it’s been a bit of a struggle. Lot of anxiety. It’s a big change. But in other ways, it’s been freeing. I feel everything more strongly now. It’s like I was living under a fog before, and now I’m seeing the world in full color for the first time. And now I see myself in the mirror, and I’m mostly satisfied. Sometimes I’ll be struck by a flash of panic, about whether or not I really made the right choice, or whether or not I’ll be safe like this… But I know, deep down, that it had to be done. I could not spend the rest of my life pining to be something else. Not when I have the means, and the freedom, to be that something else.
“The Future is a Foreign Land”
Ghost
Seven Inches of Satanic Panic
If you’re trans, you don’t need me to tell you there are dark times ahead. We all know already. Despite constituting less than 2% of the population across all age groups, and despite the fact that transitioning has again been found to be the most effective treatment for gender dysphoria, trans people are, for some reason, the target of widespread legislative prosecution in the United States, and things don’t seem to be going much better anywhere else — not with that whiny hag in the UK, that’s for sure. If you’re trans, you don’t need me to tell you that, and you probably don’t even need me telling you that if you’re not trans, because if you read through this whole letter and you’re not trans (but you’re not someone I know personally), I’m guessing you’re one of these.
If you’re in the latter group, you’re free to go now. I highly doubt I’ll change your mind, and I don’t care to. But if you’re in the former group, I will tell you what I do need to tell you: you have to live anyway. No matter what. You have to live. You have to assert yourself, and you have to keep living, no matter how bad it feels.
There will be times when the struggle seems impossible. I know this already. Alone, unsure, dwarfed by the scale of the enemy. Remember this. Freedom is a pure idea. It occurs spontaneously and without instruction. Random acts of insurrection are occurring constantly throughout the galaxy. There are whole armies, battalions that have no idea that they’ve already enlisted in the cause. Remember that the frontier of the Rebellion is everywhere. And even the smallest act of insurrection pushes our lines forward. And then remember this. The Imperial need for control is so desperate because it is so unnatural. Tyranny requires constant effort. It breaks, it leaks. Authority is brittle. Oppression is the mask of fear. Remember that. And know this, the day will come when all these skirmishes and battles, these moments of defiance will have flooded the banks of the Empire’s authority and then there will be one too many. One single thing will break the siege. Remember this. Try.
— The Trail of Political Consciousness by Karis Nemik
You have to learn how to hold your own. Learn how to get the things you need even if others stop giving you permission (and if you have the expertise, help others do it). Learn to lie. Learn to hide, whenever necessary, and to live shamelessly, in the Sun, whenever possible (unfortunately, touching grass is good for you). Buy a gun (I like this one), and to learn how to use it. Get good at using it. You have to get used to doing whatever it takes, and get used to the fact that it might not always be savory. But whatever it takes, you’ve gotta live.
Our victory is nothing more than the freedom to live as we choose, and so every day you live, we win, and they lose.
I’m fighting in the wake
Unfettered, so maybe flowers
Will bloom for me again
The mirror in my face
She’s screaming for blood and violence
But it’s my time to pretend
— “Surviving on Defiance” by Poppy
The odds may feel insurmountable now, but we’ve been here before. If you were born in the previous century, there’s no doubt you recall that only a couple short decades ago, what all the nutjobs were obsessed with was gay marriage. “Straight” Republican politicians yapped on and on about it, pulled anything out of their ass they could to stop it, to make the gays shut the fuck up — and none of it mattered, because they lost. That’s not to say that things are sunshine and lollipops for gay people right now, but what matters is the simple, crucial, inescapable fact that these people don’t have it in them to be obsessed forever. The wolves aren’t hungry for you, they’re just hungry. And if you hold the door closed long enough, they’ll move on to something else, or eat each other instead.
The freedom to live your life on your terms cannot die. It can be suppressed, it can be ranted and raved and whined about, for a while — but if you choose to grasp that freedom, and do whatever it takes to hold onto it, it cannot be taken from you, in life or in death.
This is Master Obi-Wan Kenobi. I regret to report that both our Jedi Order and the Republic have fallen, with the dark shadow of the Empire rising to take their place. This message is a warning and a reminder for any surviving Jedi: trust in the Force. Do not return to the Temple. That time has passed, and our future is uncertain. Avoid Coruscant. Avoid detection. Be secret… but be strong. We will each be challenged: our trust, our faith, our friendships. But we must persevere and, in time, I believe a new hope will emerge. May the Force be with you, always.
VII. Ruby
I have now spent the better part of a decade toiling away at this website. And I suspect I’ll toil at it until the day I die. I enjoy doing “God’s work.” It’s been nice to… create something. Something that so many other people have enjoyed. It’s oddly gratifying to go on eBay and see randos using my scans of BIONICLE comic covers for their listings. It’s nice to be a part of something bigger than myself, even if it’s this stupid, dying community surrounding a stupid, dead toyline. It is gratifying, sometimes, to toil.
“Purpose is Glorious”
Natalie Holt
Loki: Season 2, Vol. 2 (Episodes 4-6)
But I know that I… need to spend less time toiling. That’s
not a self-dig at my own software engineering skills, even if those
could use some work (believe it or not, I started and
basically scrapped this update twice
before you got the version you’re seeing today
and I still haven’t fucking finished it). It’s just that toiling for so long… It’s exhausting.
[You], you kept toiling senseless, [and] what did you get?
You are exhausting [yourself with] ceaseless toil,
you are filling your sinews with pain,
bringing nearer the end of your life.
— Utanapishtim, Shūtur eli sharrī / Sha naqba īmuru / the Epic of Gilgamesh
And, more importantly… I don’t want to live in the past anymore. I’ll always come back to Wall of History, and always try to make it better… but updates are gonna be less frequent from here on out. Because now I’m awake. I know what kind of life I want to live. And I’ve accepted it, and all the pain and joy and loss and adventure it will bring.
It is said that all endings are merely beginnings waiting to be born. My beginning was much the same.
— Mata Nui, BIONICLE: The Legend Reborn
I need to be who I want to be, in the present, and in the Sun.
— Ruby / James / Whatever
“History is Now”
Natalie Holt
Loki: Season 2, Vol. 2 (Episodes 4-6)