read Never Mind My Bruises on ao3

syrupmap:

The Eleventh of March speech

But make it even more EPIC

Happy Eleventh of March everyone!

Song: Silence and I by the Alan Parsons Project

This is my first 11th of March as a part of the due South fandom and GOSH the ways this little blog has changed my life for the better!! I love being here and I love being a part of this sweet little fandom that has lived and thrived for thirty years. Love you all!!

HAPPY 11TH OF MARCH!

syrupmap:

It’s our day Due South fandom!

HAPPY ELEVENTH OF MARCH, MY FRIENDS

(via dirtyzucchini)

kal-i-fee:

Happy Eleventh of March, everyone! I have written a fic in celebration!

Baggage (14926 words) by Kalifee
Chapters: 3/3
Fandom: due South
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Benton Fraser/Ray Kowalski
Characters: Benton Fraser, Ray Kowalski
Additional Tags: Romance, Angst, First Time, Bondage, Light Dom/sub, Wax Play, Post-Episode: s04e12-13 Call of the Wild (due South), Ray is very unhappy and talks about death a lot, But we already know there’s a happy ending, Brief mention of Victoria
Summary:

Set during & after episode S4E13 Call of the Wild.

Up in the frozen Canadian wilderness, Ray knows that he can’t survive without Fraser, and feels like he’s little more than baggage.

I’m a writer for DC PRIDE 2025!

Wildly honoured to be writing stories for MIDNIGHTER AND APOLLO and CONNOR HAWKE’S GREEN ARROW!! Drawn by Derek Charm and Phillip Sevy. I cannot BELIEVE.

• Out June 4, 2025
• 96 pages of Gay Drama and Laughs
• Words by Vita Ayala, Jude Ellison S. Doyle, Maya Houston, Sam Maggs, Tim Sheridan, and Josh Trujillo
• Art by Don Aguillo, Vincent Cecil, Derek Charm, A.L. Kaplan, Giulio Macaione, Skylar Patridge, Emilio Pilliu, Max Sarin, Phillip Sevy, and more
• covers by Julia Reck, Kris Anka, and Jack Hughes

SEE YOU FOR PRIDE!!

gjdraws:

line in the comic script: “Fraser smiles”

translation to comic: FOUR SEPARATE PANELS OF FRASER’S FACE

Me @ me: INCLUDE MORE DETAIL IN SCRIPTS

unnamed-form:

not a wolf, not a dog, but a secret third thing

(via portlandwithyou)

gayvecchio:

out of context

(via gjdraws)

capispaghetti:

After SEVEN HOURS, I have finished my silly little due south edit ❤️

The song is “One Big Beautiful Sound” by Johnny Manchild and the Poor Bastards

VOX MACHINA: STORIES UNTOLD is out TODAY!!

Sweet Critters, you can read my gay as fuck Kimallura story and other incredible works by powerhouses like Kendra Wells, Aabria Iyengar, Izzy Wasserstein, and so many more. Foreword by Liam O’Brien himself!!

I hope you enjoy sapphic angst because THAT’S WHAT I BRING FOR YOU MY FRIENDS

thebud:

sammaggs:

3x03 I Coulda Been a Defendant | Wink

This is America, pal. Everybody wants to be on television.

sammaggs:

sammaggs:

3x04 Strange Bedfellows | Moonlit

C’mon, Fraser! We gotta get up early.

And oh my god, Fraser, keep that tongue where it belongs.

Benton Fraser Checks Out His Boyfriend [One] [Two] [Three] [Four] [Five]

Not to reblog myself to navel gaze even further, but these two are going home together, right?

You know I love to pull a scene apart for context clues and I just. So much here. There’s so much!!

I mean logically it’s the wee hours of the morning here, the precinct is completely empty. Ray and Fraser stopped Orsini from being shot at the end of an evening date; it’s dark when they drop him and Stella off at home. By the time they’re done with statements and getting a protective detail set up and are back at the station it has to be well after midnight for the 2-7 to be that empty.

They have to be at Orsini’s suburban mansion by 7am, which means Ray would be picking Fraser up, what, in a few short hours? For him to get probably little to no rest at the Consulate because you just know Turnbull is there at like 5am (relatively) bright-eyed and bushy tailed. Nah, there’s no way.

PLUS “We gotta get up early”? Not, say, “We have to be at Orsini’s early” or “we have to be at work early” or “it’s gonna be a long day tomorrow” or “I’m picking you up early.” No. WE GOTTA GET UP EARLY. HELLO???

We haven’t even touched on the insane way they shoot this scene like could it possibly be any more intimate?????????? Anyways stare at him more and wrap your whole body around him to use the printer, Fraser, normal behaviour

TL;DR Fraser sleeps on Ray’s couch this night and I think it’s maybe not even the first time, given the relatively casualness with which he treats the whole thing.

dirtyzucchini:

sammaggs:

4x02 Easy Money // 3x01 Burning Down the House // 3x02 Eclipse | Rift

Something that always strikes me about Ray’s moment of reconciliation with his father (in a show that might as well be subtitled Fathers Kinda Suck Huh???????) is the way this scene in particular is shot.

They focus especially on Ray’s bracelet as he extends his hand:

Which isn’t the only time they’ve focused on Ray’s bracelet during Important Character Building. There’s of course, his intro in Burning Down the House,

The close-up on the similarity with Marcus Ellory’s bracelet in Eclipse,

And a bunch of other moments over seasons 3 and 4 that basically use the bracelet as a quick visual stand-in for “Ray Kowalski’s a little bit different.”

It’s something Ray Vecchio would never wear; hell, it’s something most cops would never wear. It’s a little bit, as Ray Kowalski would say, queer.

And so is Ray Kowalski.

The decision to focus on this bracelet during the exact moment he offers his hand to Damian as a peace offering is therefore, to me, worth considering. I personally read this as an indicator that part of the reason for Ray’s rift with his father was his queerness.

And the first thing Damian says to Ray after they shake hands?

He compliments Ray’s experimental hair! He mentions another “queer” element of Ray’s physical appearance—one his father has likely given him a lot of grief for—and accepts it. Metaphor!!

It is, of course, understandable that Damian would have wanted better for his son than to be a cop, and this isn’t to say that there isn’t a world where that might have been enough to cause Damian to lose meaningful touch with his son for a decade. It certainly made sense for Ray Vecchio’s father, who was likely involved with low-level mob business. But it does seem pretty extreme for Damian!

There’s also the beautiful scene where Ray tells Fraser about his family in the precinct mess. At the very end, it really does look like he has something else he wants to say… but then Huey interrupts.

Now I am, of course, aware that Ray was dating or engaged to Stella at the time he graduated Academy. So what could his queerness possibly have to do with anything?

Well, as much as many of us wish it would, your queerness does not disappear when you enter a straight-passing relationship. I’ve even seen interesting ruminations in fic that some of the early hardship in Ray and Stella’s relationship—remember, they broke up for a while during her college tenure—might have been due to the fact that Ray was interested in (or even caught) experimenting with men.

A personal anecdote, if you’ll indulge me: I was in my mid-twenties, four years into a relationship with a man I thought I was going to marry, and tormented constantly by the idea that I was, probably, queer. I had no way of finding out while I was in a committed monogamous relationship. When I told my own mother that I thought I was bisexual, she told me it was all right—but also to never, ever tell my father. Even though I was in a relationship with a man, the knowledge of my queerness would have been enough to potentially cause a rift between my father and I that I don’t know if we ever could have repaired. [editor’s note: i’m a lesbian now and my dad and I have a stellar relationship ftr but i did have to marry a whole man first so] [editor’s note: i am also the editor]

Ray gets caught with a man while Stella is in college? Or Stella knows and tells Ray’s mother while they’re drunk on wine one night? Or Ray’s parents find a magazine… or a photo… or a stamp from the wrong club… anything. There’s a million reasons why Ray’s queerness could and may have come up even while he was with Stella, even while he was monogamous. Because he was still queer.

I know there’s a certain element of “sometimes the curtains are just blue, dude, chill” to all of my meta, but when it comes to this show in particular I very much operate in my analyses from a place of "everything is intentional.” Small details really do matter; the way scenes are shot matter, the words that are used matter, there’s intentionality behind it all. We can’t know or understand authorial intent, of course, but we can read our own interpretation of that intent into it. (The author is dead but Paul Gross thought Callum Keith Rennie was hot, so)

This is, after all, another episode directed by George Bloomfield, who also did Burning Down the House and is responsible for that “love at first sight” moment in Say Amen, so the direction here is in the hands of someone who is clearly in lock-step with Gross around the inclusion of queerness in the latter seasons of the show.

This moment is interesting to me in particular when considering intent because I actually would prefer to see Ray and Damian’s faces in this moment! I want to know what Damian is thinking, or if he frowns. I want to know if Ray looks nervous or concerned. We don’t see that at all.

Instead of seeing them over the GTO, we get the close-up on the hands and the bracelet over the rebuilt engine.

Rebuilding!! They’re doing it.

And that makes my little queer heart pretty happy.

Big huge yes to ALL of this from the bottom of my queer little heart, PLUS! Look at what Ray’s mom says when she and Ray meet:

“Your father and I fought from the moment we left the trailer park in Arizona. Fought right across the country. "He’ll have changed,” your father said, “changed utterly.” “Damian,” I said, “that’s impossible. He’s our son!” Look at you! You’re exactly the same as the moment you came into this world!“

This last sentence is such sweet and loving nonsense, and it is exactly the kind of thing a mom would say to reassure her queer kid, just like the rest of it describes exactly the way some people feel when a loved one comes out to them.

COULD this be about Ray’s work? SURE! Is it likely to be about his work? NOPE!

The way she says all this implies that Damian expected Ray to have changed in a way that would be visible right there in the parking lot, and that simply isn’t the way being a cop would change a person. BUT when you come out as queer, SO MANY people to expect you to turn into a stereotype over night. They fear that men will burst into explosions of pink sequins and women suddenly sprout plaid and corduroy from their very bodies, and that’s why I absolutely think this whole thing very much is about being queer.
[DISCLAIMER: Anyone should dress how they like and there’s NOTHING wrong with corduroy or sequins! The "fear” aspect is homophobic and sexist as hell, but that is how it feels to some people.]

And for the record, I too would have liked to see their faces during the handshake. Was this hard for either of them? Awkward? Are they happy about this? WHAT GIVES???

Lastly: look at the way Ray smiles when his dad compliments his hair. This has ABSOLUTELY been An Issue between them.

(via sammaggs)

sammaggs:

dirtyzucchini:

sammaggs:

WHY is Ray sitting so close to Fraser that their thighs are pressed together and their knees touch

WHY is Ray sitting so close that he’s in the MIDDLE of the couch cushions

WHY is Ray sitting so close that Fraser has to sit on TOP of Diefenbaker

WHY is Ray sitting so close that their arms brush

THERE IS AN ENTIRE EMPTY RIGHT SIDE OF THE COUCH

They LIVE IN EACH OTHERS POCKETS

If anyone tries to tell you this is about what fits on the screen, point them to all that empty space to the right that’s visible in these shots. Dief could sit between them and they’d still fit into the frame comfortably. This is deliberately set up to show that they do indeed live in each other’s pockets.

I was just trying to figure out how to say this but @dirtyzucchini came through on my behalf - there’s SO MUCH ROOM next to Ray on the couch. It would be objectively funnier and more visually interesting to put Dief between them on the couch (which, again, there is room for). They’d have shot it like that scene in Harding’s office where all four of them are watching TV on the couch (where, again, Fraser and Ray are all pressed up against each other). This is a choice and not an aspect ratio thing or they would take up the entire frame!

(via sammaggs)