doubleboyfriend

[doubleboyfriend]

i have understood so many things about online leftist culture by the fact that when i said "your local community has people you will morally and politically disagree with but you cannot lock them out of accessing any tangible service you’re organising" one of the tags responding said "this isn’t about proshippers in here you’re not welcome" like. folks. focus with me. some of us are homeless here.

[doubleboyfriend]

......suddenly struck by the idea for a piece of worldbuilding of "fae don't like iron bc it is the most stable element*"

*as in elements higher you can extract energy via fission and lower you can extract energy via fusion but iron itself there is no excess binding energy to extract at all

[doubleboyfriend]

Remember, history was awful. Never trust the romantics.

[doubleboyfriend]

short post version, reblog to encourage your mutuals to donate to @save-mohamed-family here now. this family needs your help.

[doubleboyfriend]

remember when steve from blues clues was upset that people thought he died in a car crash, not because people thought he was dead but because they said he was driving a dodge charger and "that's a cop car"

[doubleboyfriend]

i am going to *remembers suicide jokes are detrimental to my mental health and relationships* make it through this year if it kills me

[doubleboyfriend]

that feeling you get when you see a popular post from pre-2013 tumblr and you go on their blog and see that op is still posting regularly......hotel california ass website genuinely

[doubleboyfriend]

Me reaching what looks suspiciously to be the end of my rope: oobh i got plany off rope

[doubleboyfriend]

i love her so much

[doubleboyfriend]

these photos I took while living in San Francisco feel like a little postcard collection now! so strange

[doubleboyfriend]

Feeling incredibly sick and angry about everything. I’ll go about my day and try to be normal and then it just ambushes me and honestly the only people keeping me sane rn are the Arabs who’ve voiced similar experiences and are staying the course and being vocal despite all the attempts to basically blame everything that’s wrong with this country on us

[doubleboyfriend]

being a writer leads to a genuinely helpful but also very stupid kind of mindfulness where you'll be having a sobbing breakdown or the worst anxiety attack of your life and think "okay, I really need to pay attention to how this feels. so I can incorporate it into my fanfiction."

[doubleboyfriend]

2024 is a terrible year to be a henchman. The word "minion" is barely usable and you can't even say "goon" anymore.

[doubleboyfriend]

I understand that atla is a show that reflects liberal sentiments in many ways, even if the narrative ostensibly centers anti-imperialist revolutionaries, but that doesn’t make the manner in which this fandom frames the fire nation – both implicitly and explicitly, in an uncomfortable majority of discussions – any less appalling. as someone who first watched and loved this show as a child, I accept that the target demographic is not primed to understand the nuances of dialectical materialism, but a) the majority of active atla fans today are either around my age or older, and b) it should still be taken a given that an attentive audience pays attention to the basic, surface-level themes depicted in the text itself.

I want to cite a post I happened across this morning, not because I think it’s the most egregious example of the phenomenon I’m referencing, but because I consider it microcosmic of this particular discourse, and I see value in properly unpacking it and dissecting the underlying implications of a seemingly innocuous joke. (and this goes without saying, of course, but I am intentionally obscuring the poster’s url, so please do not attempt to track them down and harass them in any capacity. I want to discuss the contents of the post itself, not the motives behind the specific person who wrote it.)

for context, if anyone is somehow unfamiliar with this meme, it’s a reference to the cult classic nbc (and yahoo screen) show community, in which the tragically un-self-aware white feminist britta proudly proclaims, “I can excuse racism, but I draw the line at animal cruelty!” to which her friend shirley (a black woman) responds, “you can excuse racism??” and britta realizes her mistake moments later, horrified by what she just said. it’s good joke within the show because it reflects britta’s well-meaning obtuseness. she does not generally consider herself someone who tolerates racism (despite the fact that she is often obliviously racist herself), but like most white progressives, she does nonetheless consider animal cruelty more egregious than racism, and in that moment, she unthinkingly admits it. it’s no wonder that this moment has become so widely memed. after all, it is a genuinely insightful and well-crafted joke. but by generating “incorrect quotes” that bastardize the source of the joke entirely, it no longer lands.

now, it should be obvious to anyone that not a single component of this repurposed quote actually works within this particular context. not a single piece of context that has been replaced here accurately reflects the circumstances presented in atla. for one thing, the fire nation does not “draw the line at misogyny." for another, the fire nation does not simply “excuse” genocide. and moreover, there are plenty of people elsewhere in their world who do.

the fire nation is a violently patriarchal state. every prominent character depicted from the fire nation, whether man or woman, boy or girl, reflects this ingrained patriarchal logic in their behavior. this fact should be obvious to anyone who understands how patriarchy functions beyond buzzfeed-style liberal feminism that equates women inhabiting traditionally masculine roles ("girlbosses," if you will) with actual liberation from patriarchy. but it’s not merely that so many people are incapable of recognizing and critiquing explicitly patriarchal systems, but that by falsely attributing the fire nation with being a more progressive and liberating state for women than the peoples they have colonized, it plays into a harmful narrative that is perpetuated beyond the realm of fiction, that attempts to justify imperialism in the real world through the rhetoric that foreign intervention and/or colonization is necessary as a liberating force. it is the very logic that so often enables imperialism – such as in the case of mccarthyist fearmongering (see: the necessity to “liberate” countries from their communist regimes) or homonationalism (see: justifying genocide by citing the notorious homophobia of the targeted population). and it is especially egregious in this instance, because the work of fiction that portrays this society does not even attempt to sanitize the fire nation in this capacity. it is made apparent to the audience time and time again that the fire nation is patriarchal, that the fire nation is not remotely egalitarian by any metric. yes, the issue of sexism in the water tribes is more pronounced within the narrative, but that does not mean that the fire nation is somehow less oppressive, not only in its blatantly harmful imperialist foreign policy, but domestically as well.

which brings me to my next point: saying that the fire nation merely “excuses” genocide is obviously incorrect. britta’s claim that she “excuses racism” is funny specifically because she considers herself someone who doesn’t. but the fire nation doesn’t merely “excuse genocide,” it enacts it. it perpetrates it, and then justifies it. diminishing the intention with which they carried out these horrific acts plays into the rhetoric that genocide is merely an unfortunate byproduct of a larger national project, rather than a deliberate tactic to maintain and exert power in a violent disregard and/or explicit antipathy for human life. if you live in the imperial core, you should consider it your moral responsibility to care about the genocide your tax dollars are currently funding. this isn’t up for debate. perhaps you are not the one directly supplying (e.g.) israel with weapons, but you are complicit by virtue of your position in the world, and if you avert your gaze to this reality, then you are, in fact, “excusing genocide.” do you understand the distinction?

finally, it is simply untrue that “literally everyone else” in the world of atla finds it appalling that the fire nation ostensibly “excuses genocide.” shirley is appalled by britta’s claim because britta is her friend, and hearing someone you trust claim that they can excuse violence at your expense is legitimately upsetting, even if shirley isn’t exactly surprised by britta’s hypocrisy at this point in their friendship. but it’s untrue that everyone else in the atla world considers genocide inexcusable. the ruling classes in the northern water tribe and earth kingdom do turn a blind eye to the violence of fire nation imperialism until it is too late. the northern water tribe remains stubbornly isolationist and refuses to send aid to their southern brothers and sisters until the siege forces them to experience a fraction of the suffering the south has faced for the past century. the aristocracy in ba sing se maintains the lie that their city is a perfect haven even as countless refugees escape occupation to live in abject poverty behind the illusion of safety their walls maintain. the earth king not only ignores the genocide of the air nomads and southern water tribe and the occupation of much of his own territory, but is entirely ignorant to the fact of fire nation imperialism whatsoever. the ruling class is more interested in maintaining a facade of power than it is in confronting the violence their own kingdom is facing. even kyoshi island remains largely isolationist and uninvolved in the war until the fire nation arrives at their shores and forces their hand. atla presents this grim reality explicitly, particularly with long feng. while oppressed peoples across every nation have no choice but to fight (nothing to lose but their chains, one might say), the ruling classes consider themselves safe in their bubbles of precarious safety, and do, in fact, ignore the reality of this global conflict for the sake of preserving their own personal comfort. it’s easy to ignore this fact if you lack class consciousness, as so many of you obviously do, but the text itself does not. so all I ask, truly the bare minimum here, is to pay attention to the facts of the plot as depicted in the show. I really don’t think following the political nuances of a Y-7 nickelodeon cartoon should be this difficult.

and yet...

I know this post is more aggressive and hostile than most of my posts on this blog. and I certainly don’t want anyone to think that this singular post is what sparked my entire rant. it’s the accumulation of fire nation excusing, trivializing, and even romanticizing discourse I’ve seen over the many many years I’ve been engaged in this fandom, as well as the accumulation of real-world discourses of liberalism that I can no longer engage with in good faith. if you consider this post overly harsh, I ask you to reflect on why you may be personally offended by my arguments. and if you can spare it (which I’m sure many of you can), please donate to the sameer project, which is a donations-based aid initiative led by palestinians to supply emergency shelter to families in gaza. it is more difficult to dismantle empires in real life than it is in children’s cartoons, but the least you can do is not turn a blind eye to your fellow human beings in their unfathomable suffering. do not, as they say, excuse genocide.

[doubleboyfriend]

‘Crop Circle Forest’ in Japan is the result of an environmental experiment that began in 1973 to measure the effect of tree density as they grow.

[doubleboyfriend]

WRITE IT ANYWAY!!! EVEN IF YOU DONT THINK YOURE GOOD ENOUGH!!! WRITE!!! IT!!!! ANYWAY!!!!!!!

[doubleboyfriend]

if you're worried about the new ToS for AO3, please remember that you are primed to distrust because of the way politics are intertwining with the internet right now. remember to look into definitions yourself, fact check, and look through the logic lense before jumping to conclusions.

AFAIK right now, the update clarifies terms that have already existed. it's not changing as much as it is clarity-rewriting. i'm still looking through the legalese (law student, i'm learning as I go) and I will be checking in again later, but don't despair.

however, don't get lax. download fics, connect with the authors, build out your communities. comment and bookmark and save, and please don't stop writing.