rylescoe - Tumblr blog

[rylescoe]

what happened off-screen during banyue arc

wwe beefleaf 💪💪

[rylescoe]

i think villains in general provide better, more epic romances because they're allowed to go to extremes. they're allowed to put their love over the greater good. they're allowed to be selfish. the best a hero can offer you is number two, because their duty comes first. villains, though. villains will burn down the world for a last kiss goodbye.

[rylescoe]

so i just saw this and i’m not sure how i feel about it

feel free to explain - if you can? i’m still a little 🤔 abt it personally - in the tags

[rylescoe]

[rylescoe]

kith kith

[rylescoe]

Reblog if you're okay with receiving asks for backstory info on any/all of your fics.

If not all, specify which ones in the tags.

[rylescoe]

What are some chronic illnesses that can only occur in a fantasy setting?

[rylescoe]

Wait, isn't "anti" stuff more like "anti-pedophilia" and stuff? Like, you have a point about anti-porn attitudes, but from what I've heard just "anti" on its own means against stuff like kid porn and incest porn and legitimately f*cked up sh*t like that.

Okay!  So this, I think, is actually a great example of what I was talking about, and a really useful thing to understand.  (CW rape, child abuse, etc)

Smarter people than me have written much better essays about why policing thoughtcrimes is a bad road to go down, and I will probably reblog some of them next time they cross my dash for more context.  What I want to talk about is the trigger mechanism, the ‘oh, this looks like danger!!!’ immune response in how we look at different kinds of porn, and how that applies to anti culture.

Here’s the thing: I am anti-pedophilia.  I think that, for most people, that’s a stance that largely goes without saying!  Adults who prey on children are bad.  I’m also against incest; relatives who prey on their family members are bad.  Above all I oppose rape.  Sexual predation of any kind is bad.  In fact, I’d say that’s the most important item on the list.  There is plenty of room to argue about where the lines are between ‘adult’ and ‘child’ and how teenagers fit in the middle, and there’s plenty of room to get historical about the lines between ethically terrible incest, distasteful-but-bearable “aristocratic inbreeding” between distant cousins, and the kind of consanguinity that tends to develop in a small town where everyone’s vaguely related to everyone else by now anyway.  The core of the issue is consent, and it has always been consent.  Pedophilia and incest are horrific because they are rape scenarios where the abuser has far more power and their victim far fewer resources to cope, both practically and emotionally; because harm to children is, to us as a culture, worse than harm to adults, for a lot of very valid reasons; and because they constitute betrayal of trust the victim should have been able to put in their abuser as well as rape--but they are all rape scenarios, and that’s why they’re awful. 

These things are bad.  It is good for us to have a social immune response system that recognizes these things when they’re happening and insists we step in.  That is a good thing to develop!  It helps us, as a society.  It can help the people being victimized.  It’s the same reason educators and childcare workers in the US are all mandated reporters, why we do background checks on people working near kids.  These things happen, and they’re terrible, and it’s good that we try to be aware and prepared for them.  (Though obviously studies show we’re a lot less good at protecting the vulnerable than we’d like to pretend we are.)

The question is: why does that same social immune response trigger, and trigger so angrily, in response to fiction?

Anti culture is fundamentally an expression of that social immune response.  Specifically, it’s that social immune response when it is set off by a situation that, while it has some similarities to the very bad real-life crime of sexual predation including pedophilia and incest, is in and of itself harmless.

If you’re instinct is to flare up in anger or dismissiveness because I’m calling these things harmless, I want to ask you to just take a deep breath and bear with me for a bit longer.  What you’re feeling right now is an allergic reaction.

Humans tell and read and listen to stories about “legitimately fucked up shit” all the time.  It’s part of the human condition.  It’s part of how we process those things happening, not just to use, but to other people in the world around us.  It’s part of how we process completely unrelated fucked-up shit, playing with fears and furies and insecurities that we all have, through so may layers of fiction that we don’t even recognize them any more, playing with power dynamics in metaphor and making characters suffer for fun.  Aside from the fact that literally all stories do this to some extent or another; aside from the fact that drawing lines between ‘ok that’s good storytelling’ and ‘that’s too fucked-up to write about’ is arbitrary, subjective, and dangerous in its own right; aside from all of that, these stories are stories.  All of them. 

Even the ones about rape, about incest, about pedophilia.  They’re words on a page.  No real children were harmed, touched, or even glanced at in the making of this work of fiction.  This story, pornographic though it may be, is part of a conversation between consenting adults.  (And if a teenager lies about their age to consent, that is a different problem altogether.)

Stories in and of themselves, no matter what they’re about, are no more dangerous than a crate full of oranges.  Which is to say: utterly harmless, unless all you have to eat is oranges, all day every day, and you find yourself dying slowly of nutrient deficiency--which is why representation matters.  Or unless someone wields one deliberately, violently, as a tool to cause harm, and someone gets acid in their eye--which is the fault of the person holding the orange. And unless you happen to be allergic to citrus.

The key here is this twofold understanding:  First, the thing that hurts you can also have value to others.  Real, legitimate value.  Whether you’ve undergone trauma and certain story elements are straight-up PTSD triggers or you just don’t like orange juice, that story, those tropes, that crate of oranges may be somewhere between icky and fundamentally abhorrent--but we understand that that is still your reaction.  Even if you don’t understand how anybody could ever enjoy it; even if every single person you surround yourself with is as sensitive and disgusted and itchy about this thing that makes your eyes hurt and your throat stop working as you; that doesn’t make it true for everyone.  That doesn’t make oranges poisonous.  No real children were involved in the writing of this story.  It is words on a page.

But, secondly: the thing that has value to others can also hurt you.  Just because a story isn’t inherently poison doesn’t mean it can’t cause you, personally, pain.  That’s what a PTSD trigger is: an allergic reaction, psychological anaphylaxis, a brain that’s trying so hard to protect its own from a threat that isn’t actually present (but was once, and the brain is trained to respond) that it causes far more harm and misery than the trigger itself possibly could.  And no, it’s not just people with PTSD who sometimes get hurt by stories.  There are many, many ways a story can poke the part of your brain that says, this is Bad, I don’t like this, I don’t want to be here.  The story is still, always, every time, pixels on a screen and ink on paper.  The story causes no physical harm.  But it can poke your brain into misery, it can stir up your emotions, it can make you want to cringe and run away.  It can make you want to scream and fight and go after the author who brought this thing into existence.  It can make you hurt.

This is an allergic reaction.  This is your brain and body, your reflexes and instincts, trying to protect you from something that isn’t really happening.  And just like a literal allergic reaction, it can do actual harm to you if it gets set off.  This is real.  The fact that stories can upset you to the point of pain and mental/emotional injury is real, even though it’s coming from your own brain and not the story itself.  There are stories you shouldn’t read.  There are stories I shouldn’t read, regret reading, will never read, because they hurt me.  That doesn’t mean they’re the same stories that would hurt you.  That doesn’t mean they don’t have value.

And, finally:

If getting upset about stories is fundamentally an individual person’s allergic reaction, their brain freaking out and firing off painful survival instincts in the face of a thing that isn’t, in and of itself, a threat?  Then the anti movement is a cultural allergic reaction.

Fandom as a whole has a pretty active immune system, which doesn’t mean we have a good immune system.  We try very hard to be aware of all the viruses and -isms and abuse and manipulation and cruelty, both systematic and individual, that exists around and within our community.  We’re primed and ready to shout about things at all times.  The anti movement is that system, that culture, screaming and shouting and fighting at a harmless thing on a grand scale.  It wants to stop that thing, that scary awful thing that trips all of its well-primed danger sensors, at all costs.  It’ll swell up and block off our airways (our archives) if it has to.  It’ll turn on the body it came from.  It’s scared and protective and trying to fight, and it’s ready to fight and destroy itself.

Luckily, fans and fanfic and fandom and fan culture are a lot bigger and older than they often get credit for, and it’s not like these cultural allergies are anything new.  We could talk about shippers and slashers in the X-Files fandom in the 90s.  We could talk about the birth of fandom in the days of Star Trek.  We could talk about censorship and book burning going back centuries.  We survived that and we’ll survive this, too.

But god, does the anti movement my throat and eyes itch.  Man is it irritating, and sometimes a little suffocating, to realize how many stories just aren’t getting told out of fear of what the antis will say.  And that’s the real danger, I think.  What are we losing that would have so much value to someone?  What are we missing out?

[rylescoe]

Mads and Hugh at C2E2 2024

[rylescoe]

You should only write in present tense with extreme caution.

not because it's bad or anything but because if you do it even once you're going to be editing the bits where you shifted tenses out of your writing for the rest of your life

[rylescoe]

“My beloved is a brave, noble, and gracious special someone”

“我的心上人，是个勇敢的金枝玉叶的贵人“

This is Hua Cheng’s words to Xie Lian towards the end of the novel. I haven’t gotten that far into the story yet, but this line is so famous among Chinese fans that even I couldn’t help but know it lol. The original Chinese of this line is more nuanced and thus worth explaining, so let’s break down this sentence for a bit.

The word “beloved” in the original Chinese is “心上人”, which literally means “the person on my heart.” So “beloved” refers to someone that you cherish in your heart (and who’s always on your mind).

The Chinese phrase for “noble” is “金枝玉叶”, which literally means “gold branches and jade leaves.” The phrase was originally used to describe beautiful plants, but is later mostly used to descibe those of noble birth. High-born people are analogized to “gold branches and jade leaves” because in a class society, nobilities are simply deemed to have more worth than the common people.

So actually the word “noble” here doesn’t have the connotation of “having fine personal qualities and high moral principles,” it just refers to Xie Lian’s noble birth. But it also shows the high regard Hua Cheng holds Xie Lian in, because after so many years of being the dirt-poor God of Rubbish, after so many years of enduring the ignominy of being a failure and laughing stock, Xie Lian is still “gold branches and jade leaves” in Hua Cheng’s heart. Xie Lian’s image remains unmarred and unstained for Hua Cheng.

The phrase for “gracious, special someone” in Chinese is “贵人”. “贵人” could simply mean “aristocrat,” “nobility,” but it does also have the meaning of “special someone.” And a person is usually referred to as “special” (“贵人”) because they have given you pivotal help and support in a critical time of your life. So when you say “he’s the special somone in my life” (他是我命中的贵人), people would understand it as that this person has helped you immensely at some point. And this “special someone” who has given Hua Cheng immesurable help in his hardest times is Xie Lian.

So the sentence could somewhat be interpreted as “the person I cherish in my heart is brave and of noble birth, the special someone who has given me the help I most needed.”

[rylescoe]

Hualian baking au where they run a 1 star bakery bc xl is in charge of making the cakes and hc is in charge of writing happy birthday on them

[rylescoe]

"this meeting could've been an email" but instead it's "this ship war could've been a threesome"

[rylescoe]

Not that anybody asked, but I think it's important to understand how shame and guilt actually work before you try to use it for good.

It's a necessary emotion. There are reasons we have it. It makes everything so. much. worse. when you use it wrong.

Shame and guilt are DE-motivators. They are meant to stop behavior, not promote it. You cannot, ever, in any meaningful way, guilt someone into doing good. You can only shame them into not doing bad.

Let's say you're a parent and your kid is having issues.

Swearing in class? Shame could work. You want them to stop it. Keep it in proportion*, and it might help. *(KEEP IT IN PROPORTION!!!)

Not doing their homework? NO! STOP! NO NOT DO THAT! EVER! EVER! EVER! You want them to start to do their homework. Shaming them will have to opposite effect! You have demotivated them! They will double down on NOT doing it. Not because they are being oppositional, but because that's what shame does!

You can't guilt people into building better habits, being more successful, or getting more involved. That requires encouragement. You need to motivate for that stuff!

If you want it in a simple phrase:

You can shame someone out of being a bad person, but you can't shame them into being a good person.

[rylescoe]

I reread tgcf for the second time, soo

[rylescoe]

It's insane how Pei Ming slutted his way through life and slutted it up even more once ascended, banging mortal, god, ghost, and demon alike yet he managed to be known as The God of Love. People wish STDs upon his hoe ass and STILL pray to him for luck with romance. Meanwhile one unfortunate government mandated typo and poor Feng Xin is forever known as Thick Dick Daddy 27. Like how is that fair.

[rylescoe]

They should invent a falling asleep that is easy