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I’m gonna say something….. controversial

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Current Mood: Crying While Watching Blue’s Clues Pride Song

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Zoya, running into the room: Sorry I’m late, I was, uh, busy. Doing stuff.

The Darkling: Oh that’s alright. What were you doin-

*sound of footsteps progressively getting louder*

Ivan, storming into the room, out of breath, and dripping wet: SHE PUSHED ME INTO THE GODDAMN LAKE-

The Darkling:

The Darkling: *deep sigh*

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I hate to talk about something so extremely severe but I just need to say it. I know the whole “why is nobody talking about this” thing is annoying but I really am starting to feel like I’m going insane over the fact that Tennessee recently passed a law (PASSED IT, not suggested it, not considering it, it’s FINALIZED) stating that businesses have to put up a WARNING SIGN if they are supportive of transgender people. A public warning sign stating that they allow trans people to use their facilities. And I’ve seen almost basically mainstream acknowledgment of it at all, anywhere. Just other trans people expressing their fear and anger. Can we maybe acknowledge that for like, how deeply horrifying that actually is.

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so do ivan and fedyor ever mix up their identical red keftas and don’t realize until they’re off doing their jobs or….

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shoutout to the people working for hours on content that only gets ten notes. i’m kissing you tenderly on the forehead as we speak

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So I found this caterpillar on my way to class

We’re bros

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Dude, there’s literal CIA documents on shifting. Seriously, it’s real. I can’t make you believe anything but telling someone to seek mental help over something they put their heart into is wrong. They’re not crazy. They just have their own dreams to follow. And I’d bet you seriously know nothing about it. I had really liked you before and your account but i’m just disappointed of you now. To some people, what you said would be like if someone told you to seek mental help or to go to a psych ward for being autistic. Again, you’re completely entitled to your own opinion, but you didn’t have to say it in a rude and ignorant way.

Dude, I never told anyone to go to a psych ward. Reality shifting is a lie created by internet influencers to take advantage of the mentally ill. And CIA documents? Show them to me and maybe I’ll believe you, but I know you won’t come off anon. Idgaf if you don’t like me anymore. I’m not going to believe in reality shifting and I stand by what I said for reality shifters to seek therapy. It’s not bad to tell someone to seek therapy. I’m in therapy. And it works. I know enough about it to make my own damn opinion. And my opinion is that it is preying on people’s mental health in a great time of trouble and need for escapism. I’ve seen people get incredibly distressed over things they’ve done in these alternate realities. Some people want to stay there. None of that is healthy.

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You know what? No. No, Hatsune Miku did not write Harry Potter.

J. K. Rowling wrote Harry Potter. And we need to accept that.

Harry Potter isn’t some pure unproblematic beacon of perfection that we can just choose to erase the scummy author from and enjoy without guilt. Harry Potter is very much rooted in Rowling’s view of the world. The blatant antisemitism in the portrayal of the goblins, the entire race of slave creatures that actually really like being slaves and Hermione’s attempts to free them are largely played off as a joke, the almost complete dearth of canon characters of color (and then when she does put canonical characters of color in, they’re… Nagini…), the complete lack of respect for other cultures (the Japanese wizarding school literally translates to “Magic Place” in Japanese, Cho Chang is not even remotely a proper Chinese name, don’t get me started on her usage of Native American folklore), the almost complete lack of LGBTQ+ characters, the “Dumbledore is gay!” baiting, the lycanthropy-as-HIV metaphor that involves one of the werewolves intentionally infecting as many people as he can, with a preference for targeting children, no less…

These are all very much present in Harry Potter. They’re not things you can just ignore. And they’re there because Rowling wrote them in.

I know you read Harry Potter as a kid and loved it. I know when you read Harry Potter as a kid you probably didn’t even notice how shitty all this stuff was. I certainly didn’t. But you can’t go back to that time. You can’t go back to when you were 10, when you were consuming this media and loving it uncritically without notice or regard for its more problematic elements. You can’t go back to being a kid again.

And that’s okay. It doesn’t mean you’re required to wholeheartedly condemn this important part of your childhood. You can still enjoy these books while acknowledging that they’ve got some really shitty things in them. You can enjoy Harry Potter as a mature adult. You don’t have to be a kid again to like it. And you’re perfectly allowed to hate on Rowling for her shittiness, past and present, while still loving Harry Potter.

So don’t say Harry Potter was written by Hatsune Miku. It wasn’t. It was written by J. K. Rowling, warts and all.

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friendly reminder that up until recent years, endometriosis was literally considered a "white woman's disease" and that's why it's so fucking hard for black people to get a diagnosis for it, even TO THIS DAY. specialists truly thought (and some STILL think) ONLY skinny, petite white women could have endometriosis and they NEVER branched out or thought to look into endometriosis for black people, because they thought black folk couldnt have endometriosis. that definitely explains why us black people downplay our reproductive pain and never really think to look into it because they never fucking listened to us/told us we were lying.

and its fucking true. 110%. just merely looking at the amount of white people diagnosed with endometriosis compared to black people says it all. hell, even 98% of the endometriosis blogs on here are ran by white folk and I have YET to find one where a black person is venting about their endo pain, I wouldn't be surprised if I'm the first.

comes as no surprise at all that white people are the face of reproductive health in GENERAL when they arent the only ones with reproductive illnesses/issues.

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“IT‘S A PROCESS AND YOU HAVE TO CHECK YOURSELF ALL THE TIME.“ “PLEASE USE YOUR HEAD YOU’D BE UNSTOPPABLE IF YOU USED YOUR PRIVILEGE TO AMPLIFY THE ONES WHO NEED AMPLIFYING”

Please fellow white people, it’s the bare minimum we can do.

I understand the ideas behind the zemenipearls post but can we not just have a nice fictional world? It’s not like the Kerch are made out to be a great nation of saintly people, it’s all fantasy for a reason. I won’t get started on their posts about my girl Nina and my dude Nikolai 😒

Okay... there’s a lot of ground to cover here so boot up cowhand I wrote a LOT

No matter how unlike-this-world a fantasy universe seems, it was still crafted by a real human who IS a part of this world. And humans put their own beliefs and experiences into their stories as the foundation for how ideal/ not-ideal they want the au to be. We use the environment around us as a stepping stone for our stories, and this DOUBLES if the author is saying “This World Is Not Like Ours At All”. The question authors answer of “What exactly is this au not like?” Rounds back to the place we are trying to distance ourselves from, because that is what this au is “not like.” And most often, authors craft these fantasy universes and bring the reader into a whole new world only to go back to a REAL theme of “This World Is Actually More Like Yours Than You Think.” Because that’s usually the entire point. We like fantasy because we want to see our nature mirrored in worlds unlike ours. We love that people can fly and cast spells, but we REALLY love when they’re as human as us in behavior/interests/ actions.

All that’s to say: you can’t actually write a racism-free world if you’ve never experienced a racism-free world. The ideals we want to portray will still be flawed and not 100% ideal, because the notion we have OF this ideal is fundamentally flawed. ESPECIALLY if we are still unlearning our own fallacies to these ideals. Grishaverse has anti-blackness threaded in the pages because there is anti-blackness on Earth and anti-black fallacies in the ideals Leigh Bardugo has internalized (like any other white person). If we can acknowledge the argument that meanings can be found in stories/art whether it was intended or not, then we have to acknowledge Leigh Bardugo wrote in her own prejudice or anti-black ideals into the grishaverse, whether intended or not. She wanted to write a story removed from the racism we know, and that in of itself isn’t a bad thing to imagine. But she still wrote tropes actively harmful to the minorities they represent.

“Why do you have to look for patterns that aren’t there and nitpick on characters? Why does everything have to be about race? Isn’t it enough that our heroes are TRYING to be good?”

When people say this, they usually mean “Why are you putting this in my face? We (the group not affected) were all doing fine until you decided to be grumpy about something, and I don’t want my ideals soiled by your criticisms.”

Imagine seeing the person who’s supposed to represent you and your identity be repeatedly trashed, ignored, dumbed down, dismissed, killed off, etc etc in canon and in the fandom, and when you finally get the courage to bring it up, the entirety of people not affected silence and threaten you for rocking their boat. You really can’t imagine how that actually feels unless you’ve felt it. When you write off the consistently abusive treatment of a community of people in a book as an inconvenient—and thus invalid— topic that “ruins” the characters or plots you want to root for, you’re acknowledging the privilege you have in being able to look the other way when these patterns have been brought to your attention.

There’s a lot you might not catch when you aren’t a part of the communities affected. If someone is gracious enough to extend their emotional and intellectual labor to point it out to you despite the all the gaslighting and harassment they face, the LEAST you can do is have an open mind and release the defenses and previous ideals you’ve cultivated for the characters you love. Black fans don’t owe it to you to spell it out, but they sometimes do! Despite how white fans treat them in return.

You said “it’s not like the Kerch are made out to be a nation of great saintly people.” Great! So we agree everyone should be praised and criticized accordingly? And when it’s pointed out that a character exhibits bigotry we can acknowledge that as a part of the environment they’ve lived in and thus a trait of themselves?

You can enjoy any universe or the characters that come with it in full capacity, and no one is asking you to discard stories entirely because of the mistakes. Nikolai meant and means a lot to me because of the ideals that I crafted in my head from 16 up. He’s a comfort character! He was my vision of a masc-presenting adventurer who got by with wit and charm and aesthetics. The people who love him see something of themselves in him, or someone they love. But he’s still a product of his environment. Just because I don’t want that to be true doesn’t make it untrue. Ravka is fantasy Russia but .*•*~more idealistic*.~*. This doesn’t take away the fact that the foundation is...still Russia. He’s still a privileged white king thats actively oppressing minorities in the story by upholding the kingship as it is, and if he continues the path he’s on, he’s not much better than his heritage. I love Nina to death but she��s still the jarhead kid in your algebra class ready to fight anyone who says her country merits basic criticism. The kingdom of Ravka would need to be entirely dismantled and recreated. Nikolai might seem more progressive than the kings before him, but he’s got a lot to be reprimanded for, and rebuilding can’t even start until he acknowledges and unlearns that. Which...he hasn’t, not fully, and there’s no written proof of him doing so as of now.

Before I made myself research more I got just as defensive of him and others. I’m sure I’ll get defensive over another story and have to relearn everything all over again. It’s a process and you have to check yourself all the time. But it’s a step towards the ideals we want to actually live in. If I want to imagine Nikolai a better man, I have to start from the scraps I’m given.

So yes!! You’re allowed to draw up your own themes and ideals from the stories and reimagine the characters to fit a narrative that makes your heart happy. But it won’t change the reality of the canon universe. Zemenipearls enjoyed the grishaverse so much she made a fan account for it, participates in fan-led events that celebrate the characters (and sometimes leads those events herself), commissions artists to make fanart, and has ongoing works that delve into the expansive universe that better represents her and what she wants for black characters in fantasy. And she STILL gets shit for imploring a conversation about what we all want to ignore away. Why would she put so much energy into this if she didn’t care or believe in this story too? If you also care about grishaverse that much, shouldn’t we be willing to uplift and reimagine by starting where the work needs it most?

Okay I’ve said a LOT SORRY HHHHH BUT TO WRAP UP: Ignoring a fictional character’s faults or repercussions is one thing, and I’m not about to waste energy on making people hold characters in a book accountable. We all see how people treat the Darkling.

But when you participate in or ignore the bullying and threatening that happens to REAL people, when people JUSTIFY that shit as if it merits denying a person their humanity, THATS the actual harm being done. (Not saying you’ve done that, but the mindset I’m seeing here is what feeds into that compliance.)

If we have the energy to protect and coddle our fictional white boys and let them burn the sandbox down, I KNOW we have energy to respect and protect black fans who have just as much say in how they see the story or how they reimagine it. If you have the energy to accept/tolerate the stuff alarkling fans promote, I KNOW you have the energy to put your pride away and acknowledge fallacies in your own ideals for characters. And regardless!!! of whether you “agree” with the criticisms or not, does that mean the person who spoke up about the issue deserves to be harassed?

I’m gonna ask the white ya majority reading this to be humble and open your hearts up to change the way you do for fictional edgy white dudes. Y’all have the SPIRIT but then it funnels into the WRONG IDEAS!!! PLEASE use your heads you’d be unstoppable if you used your privilege to amplify the ones who need amplifying. I promise Cardan BlackBerry and Alesksxxander Marigold aren’t gonna be disappointed in you 😔🙏

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Source: [x]

Follow Ultrafacts for more facts!

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i just think if u got jumped by any of them thats on you

rb prints | instagram | twitter

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Mona Alkurd , one of the Palestinians Israel is trying to kick along with 28 families out of their decades long homes in Sheikh Al Jarrah , the last Palestinian block in Al Quds ( Jerusalem ), to complete the restriction of the area to Israeli Jews .. simply an Apartheid by settlers.

“ Your posts and tweets are treasures to us “

Here a rough translation of what she said:

“ It falls on us and Palestinians and the honorable people supporting us with posts and tweets. You have no idea how much that means to us. Everyone who shares even one short post or tweet. Don’t feel like you’re doing nothing. Those posts and tweets are treasures to us. Help us get our cause heard. We are 28 families. 500 individuals. If we are removed, then there will be no Palestinians in Al Quds. And in the end, Allah is our hope. And it falls on us. And we will remain here to our last breath defending our lands and homes”

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Didn’t know that and yes, I’m fucking disappointed but grateful that I saw this. 

this is your not so friendly reminder that Gal Gadot has openly supported the IDF and posted a picture with the hashtags “we are right” and “I love the IDF” following a bombing of Gaza that left innocent Palestinians - including children - dead.

She directly and openly supports a genocidal state that oppresses and strips rights away from Palestinians on a daily basis.

So fuck her, fuck her “I want my neighbors to be safe” narrative that is simply untrue based on her past actions, and fuck white feminists for trying to paint her as this “girlboss!!!!!!” because she plays Wonder Woman.

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The Furbling

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“free Palestine” and “don’t use what’s happening to Palestinians as an excuse to spread anti-Semitism” can and should co-exist