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I'm reading an article in The New Yorker about potential plagiarism in romantasy land and they talked to a number of authors to provide context. Including . . . . Cassandra Clare.

I just . . . you talked to CC in a story about alleged plagiarism in fiction? I have passed away from a terminal case of irony.

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my friend took in a stray and she’s the cutest kitty ever but he named her oil so whenever he sends a picture of her me and my other friends look like we’re roleplaying as the US military

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one of the more valuable things I’ve learned in life as a survivor of a mentally unstable parent is that it is likely that no one has thought through it as much as you have. 

no, your friend probably has not noticed they cut you off four times in this conversation. 

no, your brother didn’t realize his music was that loud while you were studying. 

no, your bff or S.O. doesn’t remember that you’re on a tight deadline right now.

no, no one else is paying attention to the four power dynamics at play in your friend group right now.  

a habit of abused kids, especially kids with unstable parents, is the tendency to notice every little detail. We magnify small nuances into major things, largely because small nuances quickly became breaking points for parents. Managing moods, reading the room, perceiving danger in the order of words, the shift of body weight….it’s all a natural outgrowth of trying to manage unstable parents from a young age. 

Here’s the thing: most people don’t do that. I’m not saying everyone else is oblivious, I’m saying the over analysis of minor nuances is a habit of abuse. 

I have a rule: I do not respond to subtext. This includes guilt tripping, silent treatments, passive aggressive behavior, etc. I see it. I notice it. I even sometimes have to analyze it and take a deep breath and CHOOSE not to respond. Because whether it’s really there or just me over-reading things that actually don’t mean anything, the habit of lending credence to the part of me that sees danger in the wrong shift of body weight…that’s toxic for me. And dangerous to my relationships. 

The best thing I ever did for myself and my relationships was insist upon frank communication and a categorical denial of subtext. For some people this is a moral stance. For survivors of mentally unstable parents this is a requirement of recovery. 

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i have issues with the conclusion of this post and i continue to have issues with fandom. (the tag ‘fandom is for yt women’ applies here.)

it’s one thing to want to project your emotional issues on someone vastly different and more privileged that you for personal comfort/catharsis reasons

but your personal, cathartic reasons for focusing on the angsty white male character don’t make fandom or media consumption any more welcoming for the people who are hungry for and deprived of direct and actual representation but receive little, and it’s worse when the little that they receive is completely overshadowed in fandom by the yt male characters to the point that these more marginalized (read: nonwhite and often non-male) characters may as well not be there.

it’s not about ‘you are not allowed to id with yt male characters because it feels safer.’

please.

id with whoever you happen to. i can’t control that. it’s about ‘how are you conducting your fandom business so as to protect the most marginalized in your fandom?’ ‘what gross erasure/avoidance/stereotypes are you perpetuating by focusing all your attention on some overrated yt dude character?’

fandom, especially transformative fandom, should welcome the chance to pull in these marginalized characters (read: characters of color, esp. women and nb of color) to the center, give them the lead roles, give them struggles to overcome or successes and fun to explore in a narrative that is weighted in their favor. whether in a safe environment where these weighty issues of autonomy or bodily integrity or whatever can be carefully explored or just ignored for more lighthearted material.

transformative fandom, which could be termed ‘cathartic fandom’ without losing much accuracy, does not have to be centered on the yt male experience, and i don’t trust people who insist that their favoring of these yt male characters is not their own choice—that it’s the ‘best source material’ and if only better, more empowering stuff was out there being written for white women and people of color of all genders, that they’d pay attention, or that they’d feel safer to project onto them.

that’s patently false.

the media creators and the media consumers all have the same biases that feed into each other in a spiraling effect. media creators check what gets consumed and talked about and try to feed the demand (to an extent). media consumers are greatly informed by the media they’ve grown up seeing and their choices are not made in a vacuum. your catharsis is not innocent or uncontaminated by these things. you were trained to project things onto yt men, you were trained to believe that they are the only ones worthy of having stories about them. and so many people ignore or flatten or villainize the characters of color EVEN IF THEY ARE CENTERED IN THE NARRATIVE and then go around talking up the yt dudes whether or not they are the mains, that it’s patently ridiculous to make these sorts of claims about how fandom and fandom foci for (yt) marginalized people just so happens to be or should be invulnerable to criticism.

“make your peace” with how you’re focusing on the top of the pyramid to the neglect of everyone below, esp. on the bottom. i can’t stop you. but i am asking you not to try to excuse fandom-wide behaviors like that as ‘just a personal choice.’ it’s not. it’s systematic and oppressive, and it’s rude.

not everyone has that privilege of being able to id with yt dudes so easily. please don’t trample us out of these so-called ‘cathartic’ or ‘transformative’ spaces.

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white ppl have no concept of the pain of finding a community that you belong to and then discovering the deeply entrenched racism in said community

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if you’re a white creator and your brown/black characters are always sassy, reckless, aggressive or cold and your white characters are always soft, demure, shy and introverted you should think about maybe why you did that

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we put your girl of color in the fandom and they made her a big buff amazon mommy with a hair trigger temper. yeah she only exists to attend to the emotional needs of and/or step on a dainty white lady character now. sorry.

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Funny how white mcu fandom is going "It's Disney, Disney doesn't care about marginalized ppl!" when Black fans point out how they're oddly quiet about Phastos being gay in Eternals, as if they weren't fully prepared to suck Disney's balls dry had they made a white character gay instead

Like, it's just inchresting when y'all choose to care about the harm of corporations. I recall yt fans doing the same thing when, like, Princess and The Frog came out and you treated Black fans like ignorant children for being excited about Black characters

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"acab includes fandom police" "acab includes bossy people" "acab includes-" no it doesnt. no it fucking doesnt. there is a way for you to express your disapproval of a group without equating it to the government sponsored institution that loves to torture and kill black people

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tbqh i think part of the reason why people are so against the lgbtq acronym is because lesbian is first.

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fatphobia and ableism is so insidious. You can look up like, food, and it'll say "eating a lot of food causes diabetes" and you're like oh dang what? I thought we didn't know the cause of diabetes. So you look up what causes diabetes and it says "we still don't know what causes diabetes" bruh they're just making shit up to give people eating disorders

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Every time I see white queers complain about the MCU (of all places) not giving queer rep I laugh because you had a gay superhero, who was badass, married with a kid and was a fucking genius, but they pretend he and his family don't exist because Phastos is black, dark-skinned, and fat, his husband is brown and Arab, and their baby boy is black.

They didn't like that, but let their favorite straight white man dare to share a screen with his friend or look at another man while having a conversation, and it's queer baiting. Lmao

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I am neutral to furries but the horniness and desperation with which white queer people talk about them as if they are the last bastion of self expression is so... You and Pawprint need to get down to the nearest soup kitchen, immediately.

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people on this website be like “it’s actually school’s fault that i don’t know how to read because i wanted to write my essay on the divergent trilogy and that BITCH mrs. clarkson made us study 1984 instead. anyway here’s a 10 tweet thread of easily disproven misinformation about a 3 year old news story and btw, who is toni morrison?”

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No offense but if you find yourself in a situation where you feel you can't say anything in order to "keep the peace", the peace has already been broken, you've just decided that your peace isn't worth fighting for