Lesbians, Gays, Buy T-Shirts

Hello, ancientforever! I'm emeraldfox, representing Team EarthBenders this Review Day!

I liked this piece a lot. It showed that companies like FCKH8 pretend that everything is getting better for non-cisgender, heterosexual people, but the truth is that there is still so much intolerance for LGBTQ+ people, and especially towards the lesser-known and lesser-understood identities. Your piece was very personal and you clearly put a lot of your own emotions into it. You didn't have any spelling, grammar, punctuation, or capitalization errors.

The only thing that could improve this is to tie in FCKH8 earlier in the piece. If you talked about the company earlier, it would have made more sense at the end.

Great job on this! It was an informative, opinionated, yet personal work. You definitely deserve a *Like*!

"YWS is blue,
Our team is green.
We're the best reviewers
You've ever seen."
-@pendr for Team Earthbenders

Hey, yo, ancientforever! Strangelove here on this Sunday and I have a review for you.
This is the first review I've done in a while, so it might be hard for me to get the point across.
You focus on the ever great organization of FCKH8 as your basis, and I respect that. It's something 80% can agree to. But, that sadly isn't evident until the end.
This was solid for a spoken word. I enjoyed the emotion you put into this. It delivered the message (somewhat) and attacked. It was aggressive on delivering the message. It wasn't "UNDERSTAND THE DAMN MESSAGE", but pushed all emotion towards the reader, which is great. That's the way all the spoken words I like do. Could be kind of formulaic, but it wasn't.
Now, onto the part that I've been hesitant about. The message about consumerism.
This was a poem about how "t-shirts makes everything better", which is the motto that FCKH8 runs by. You ended it great, but maybe the message could be lost. It seems, if this was brought out of context beyond such, that it'll be lost in translation. "Oh, well, when the hell did t-shirts come into this?" is what it could be like. I didn't see much consumerism in this, but you still managed to hit all the right spots. Your works never disappoint.
Overall, great job.
Strangelove gives you..
8.3/10
Good job,
keep writing,
stay groovy, my friend.

Hello.

So I hit the end of this and went "that's a lot less consumerism than I was expecting for a poem that has consumerism in the title."

It Gets Better is such a generic thing, it's lost all its branding and lost all its connection to actual consumerism based charities. I was also expecting this to be a critique of bi-erasure and trans-erasure specifically (considering that's one of the biggest critique against fckh8) and instead it went into extremely personal territory, to the point the fact you're poly and trans is lost.

That's not exactly bad, because it makes the poem a very raw thing and a very personal thing and it's a painful window into life, but when you've got critique of consumerism and consumerist based help movements as the title, it's safe to say I was expecting something different.

I think you could fairly easily include the consumerism aspect because once you get older the world's shattered and capitalism takes over and you could add in this general sense of feeling commodified, of feeling like you're a prop for others to go "look I'm helping".

Overall, there wasn't really enough of the "buy t shirts" part of the title, and I didn't even really feel a sense that the "f hate" part was really in there. The whole "it gets better" thing was turned so introspective and treated as genuine, when for me the whole idea of "fck hate buy t-shirts" is the fact it gets better comes from a consumerism explosion that leaves the movement feeling hollow because it's all lip service, and nobody genuinely cares. You have the "nobody genuinely cares" part but it's very subtle, hinted at, and I was expecting it to be a lot bigger and more prominent.

You know where to find me.

~Rosey

a child on the brink of eternity with no reason to cling to the edge. You did it, ancient.