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Reblogged antiqueanimals
Happy Caturday!
Abyssinian and Indian cats from a painting by William Luker, Jr., as reproduced in The Book of the Cat (1903).
View more cats in Biodiversity Heritage Library's Flickr album with the digitized illustrations from The Book of the Cat.
Reblogged
I was clearing out my phone photo album for the new year and realized I have way too many screenshots of queer Dani stuff, so let's talk about it.
Danielle Moonstar and Rahne Sinclair are a duo who stand out to me, even among all the many "this is clearly meant to be gay" characters and pairings that populate the X-Men, because of how explicit it is? They are not the only Claremont women to call each other their "soul mate" or "soul-mate," but they are the ones still doing it into the modern day.
They have a psychic rapport with each other which is constantly used to advance the plot. The fact they specifically can find each other is important to their stories... Here, you can even see Warlock pondering the nature of their relationship, though whether he is speculating on them being gay "I know what you are"-style or still learning about the concept of love in general is up to interpretation.
They smooch! They hug! They cuddle!
They go on date-like activities together! Dani won her a teddy bear!
I feel like you could have them be a queerplatonic thing and/or a romantic gay gay homosexual gay thing - either works - but it feels kind of silly to me that we've hit 2024 and these two are still not officially life partners in some form...
... though I do feel like there's a third person worth mentioning here too.
When Kate Pryde ran out on Xuân Cao Mạnh, doing her signature move of "abandoning a Sapphic relationship right when it gets serious," Danielle Moonstar was the one who showed up to replace her... Literally. Xuân Cao Mạnh was getting her college diploma and Dani literally showed up to take her seat at her graduation.
Dani brings Xuân back to Xaiver's Academy, with her becoming one of the main teachers at the academy for that era. Rahne, at this point, was busy going through a "What if this Good Christian Girl... went BAD?!?!?" phase and the less spoken about that the better, but Xuân and Dani got to be the main duo for a bit.
Xuân was already an out lesbian by now, so there's a weird subplot where Dani meets a lesbian barista and tries to set Xuân up with her in a "I know two lesbians, therefore they should kiss" way.
It's weird, but feels relatively realistic as something for a closeted queer girl to do to her openly-gay BFF in the early 2000s... also the fact that Dani claims to be straight to Prodigy, bisexual icon who knows everyone's sexuality because of his superpowers, is very funny to me.
Xuân and Rahne don't really have much going on between each other specifically, but you can take this panel from the first issue of New Mutants out-of-context and make it look like they do... Like, this is gay werewolf culture in a way, right?
It also probably merits mentioning that, in the modern era again now, the Infinity Comic Karma in Love had a fake-out where Xuân thought that Dani was hooking up with her girlfriend, Ellie Diwa AKA Galura...
And in the latest New Mutant series, Karma, Galura, Dani, and Rahne are the leaders and have big dad energy... all four of them are the dads. I stand by this characterization.
ANYWAY. Point being. Dani and Rahne should be able to kiss on-panel on the lips by now and maybe Xuân and Elle can join from time to time too... They're cute. They're fun. They were explicitly gay in the movie. This one feels really overdue.