pastryjay

[pastryjay]

just found the most fucked up plane

[pastryjay]

thomas lawrence was not made for the world of conclave he’s for the girls and the gays and was supposed to use his life writing romance novels while keeping chickens in his garden and kissing a man but instead he ended up being the couples therapist for the worlds most toxic polycule (the vatican)

[pastryjay]

when zheng said “girl how ARE you” and stede thought about it and said “bad” i felt that

[pastryjay]

There's something really interesting (and annoying) that keeps popping up whenever OFMD gets dragged into discourse, and it's this pervasive idea that, somehow, OFMD counts as "less" of a queer show precisely because the story explicitly centers around a canonically gay couple who wind up together in the end.

You can think whatever you want about stories where the queerness always remains subtextual, unrequited or more focused on the pining than actually getting together. I don't find them satisfying, personally, and that's just my taste. I don't like that I can so easily name dozens of stories off the top of my head where the queerness is either all subtext, relegated entirely to unrequited or unresolved pining, or one character confesses feelings to another only to automatically die. I don't like that this seems like the default for queer stories.

It's okay to like those stories, it's okay to like the unresolved tension. But OFMD isn't somehow "less queer" than those stories because it's a romcom where the main characters get together. It's not less queer because it's a story that loves being explicit about how queer it is. Would you also turn on any Hallmark romance and get annoyed with how much "fanservice" it had for the straight couple to get together? At its core, OFMD is a queer romcom, and you can't get talk down to it for being what it is and expect to be taken seriously.

I just don't like the implication that there's something more queer about our pain than our love and success. I don't like the implication that the "truly" queer stories are the ones that don't get satisfying conclusions, that queerness is at its most pure when it's relegated to subtext or heartbreak.

In conclusion: if I see one more take about how OFMD is "hetero-coded" or whatever nonsense because it ends with the main couple happy, together, and in love, I'm going to start biting

[pastryjay]

Cracking one of these bad bois open & sharing with my mutuals

'Tis the season

[pastryjay]

just so you know 'jfc' (which you use in a lot of the tags on your posts) is an abbreviation for jesus fucking christ and you probably shouldnt use it if ur not a christian

I can't believe I read this with my own two eyes

[pastryjay]

Edward Teach (S02E06 - Calypso's Birthday)

[pastryjay]

So it seems like there are two possibilities:

One possibility is that the person who did the shooting changed his jacket right before the shooting- but into a different jacket that was remarkably similar (a puzzling choice!), then executed a plan so well thought out that the police had pretty much no leads, but was then caught (with both the murder weapon and a manifesto conveniently on his person!) at a small town McDonalds five days later thanks to a random person recognizing him (and is a random McDonald's employee thinking you appear similar to a partial photo of a criminal enough to get you detained?)

OR

A police force with a budget bigger than many country's entire military, in a country notorious for having corrupt policemen who routinely lie and believe themselves to be above the law, realizing that it would be supremely embarrassing to have no leads, and likely facing immense political pressure to make sure the public doesn't think people can get away with this kind of crime, feeling motivated to peruse the many many records available to their giant counter-terrorism unit and using it to find someone who was in the vicinity, with an established online record of extremism, who has a jacket that is reasonably similar, and straight up planting some evidence on him so they can wrap this up with a neat bow and all of the ceo's who run the politicians who run our country can breathe easier?

As a random person on the Internet I will never find out the truth but some of this is not really passing the sniff test, and if there is one thing you can count on in this country it's that cops lie and cover their own asses. If he mysteriously dies in prison from "suicide" then we will know it's definitely not him

[pastryjay]

[pastryjay]

it will always be telling when something like this happens & so many self-proclaimed activists will skirt around concrete statements of judgement & guilt UNTIL an arrest is made. then all bets are off. The most recent arrest for the UHC CEO Assassination was made under suspicion, and yet I'm still seeing people refer to him as "the shooter" without a second thought. So many people are purporting & accepting the alleged guilt of someone simply on the account of an arrest being made-- a form of violence often directed towards people of color and other marginalized populations time and time again. Newsflash: The Police just arrest people, even when a crime hasn't been committed. The idea that 'arrest = guilt' both ruins and ends lives; better to kill the cop inside your head than to uphold systemic violence that kills thousands upon thousands.

[pastryjay]

[pastryjay]

got my wrapped

[pastryjay]

I can't stress enough how much the John Green debacle was an early example of how cancel culture and purity culture combine to make people feel righteously justified to engage in harassment.

John Green, during his time on tumblr, committed the heinous sins of...being neurodivergent and talking openly about it, earnestly interacting with fans in a very direct and unfiltered way, and writing about teenagers navigating first love and sexuality while he himself was an adult. The worst things he ever did were be a little cringe or misspeak, for which he was always prompt to apologize (often whether he really needed to or not).

Yet despite the former two being things tumblr claimed to love and the last one being true of 99.99% of YA authors, in this case a large segment of tumblr users steeped in the early 2010s resurgence of purity culture decided that these things were suspicious and predatory, and used that as an excuse to justify some truly awful behavior.

Which is really all that cancel culture is: the normalization and even celebration of the process of misapplying morality or ethics to dehumanize someone for the express purpose of justifying whatever pain and suffering you want to inflict upon them. Basically, deciding "this person is bad, so I am exempt from affording them basic respect and human dignity, and am allowed to cross any and all otherwise uncrossable lines in order to punish them without damaging my own moral or ethical standing."

Contrary to popular tumblr lore, the infamous "cock monologue" was not the sum total of the harassment, or even the worst of it. Callout blogs issued long lists of "receipts" about how terrible John Green was, most if not all of which were either taken out of context or completely refutable. His works were torn to shreds by people who'd never read them, as evidenced by much of the criticism being obviously and blatantly counter to the actual contents of the books.

Not that it mattered. Once the John Green hate party reached a certain level of critical mass, it became less about who he actually was or what he'd done, and more about proving you were a good person by hating him. That's the natural conclusion of cancel culture, after all: virtue signalling by identifying yourself in opposition to the cancelled parties. They're bad, and I'm good, so I hate them! Or, more often: They're bad, and I hate them, so I'm good!

Before it was over with, John Green had been accused, with no evidence, of being everything from a Nazi to a pedophile and subjected to hate mail and death threats. He eventually left the site for the sake of his own mental health, and because he no longer felt comfortable engaging directly with fans in the same way he once had.

Yet even now, with the benefit of hindsight, and even among those who ostensibly reject purity culture and condem bullying and harassment, very few on tumblr take what was done to John Green as seriously as it should be taken or condemn it as thoroughly as it should be condemned. Which I think is something we need to at least consider doing, given the increasing rise of purity and cancel culture online, and given the recent influx of professional creators eager to interact with fans on a more direct level than they have on other social media.

And my concern is not purely, or even primarily, for the Mike Flanagans and Lynda Carters of the world. I'm far more concerned, actually, for the small, independent or self-published creators in this space, and how much even a very small level of visibility gives too many people a feeling of carte blanche to engage in harassment.

I myself have less than 3k followers on here, a handful of popular posts, and zero notoriety or consequence outside of tumblr whatsoever, and I've been repeatedly told to kill myself for saying such innocuous things as "I don't think censorship is the cure for the world's evils" and "maybe learning the history of communities you want to participate in would be a good idea."

Thankfully, all it took for me to stop the harassment that came my way was to block those few individuals. But there have been many instances over the years of small creators or just random tumblr users that got a bit popular being stalked, doxxed, swatted, and harassed to the point of leaving the site and dealing with serious mental health issues as a result. It has never been just John Green. John Green isn't even the worst example. And tumblr has never learned its lesson.

[pastryjay]

Not thinking too deeply about it, but I think Pete worked with him for a few days at most and was so useless and unremarkable that BB's crew accidentally left him behind at a port. They forgor he was there, and well... they barely even noticed him in the first place tbh. But Pete thinks he was soooo so so so helpful and cool.

No nuance, pick a side, stand and fight.

[pastryjay]

[pastryjay]

its fucking dember.