secretlyatargaryen

[secretlyatargaryen]

Tumblr is always like "noooo you can't ship her with that bad man! That's abuse!" And then you watch the media and the man in question is some pathetic loser that she runs circles around in canon. Also yes, I do ship them.

[secretlyatargaryen]

A memory resurfaced today of an intersex character on Everwood who, as soon as they were revealed, promptly moved away and was never seen again. I googled it only to discover that the character was a boy who Delia briefly made friends with in season one, which is funny because I had mistakenly remembered the character as being Bright's love interest, Hannah.

[secretlyatargaryen]

one of the most frustrating things about the neil gaiman situation (and others like it) is people who were fans immediately moving to a different person to idolise ('well, at least we still have x author' or 'please tell me y author is still a good person') and in this situation specifically, 'terry pratchett would be furious'. no!!! you do not know!!!you have no idea whether terry pratchett or any author you like was/is a predator! you cannot take a situation in which a man's public persona as a feminist and supporter of women allowed him to prey on vulnerable women without suspicion and then look at all the other men who portray themselves as good people and say 'well, these ones are still okay though.' just stop idolising celebrities!!!!!!!

[secretlyatargaryen]

how people (re: radfems) continue to act like somehow the nature of the sex activities themselves are what make a sexual encounter violent baffles the mind. the idea that neil gaiman was allowed to rape so many women for so long because "liberals pressure women into being kinky for #Feminism" and not that he was rich and powerful and was taking advantage of very specifically poor women who were relying on him for housing, food, etc disgusts me in a way i cannot articulate. how is this relevant? how did "sex positivity" allow gaiman to do the same thing many many many men before him have done (leverage their higher social and economic class to coerce and silence victims)?

this is a disgusting attempt to drag very real victims experiencing the very real consequences of a world when men have the social and economic standing to control women and their bodies in the ways they please into the typical garbage radfem bullshit about how BDSM is evil and scary and bad and #normalizes violence. heres the thing you dipshit, sexual violence against women has been normalized for centuries and it certainly was not under the guise of Kink or Freedom of Speech! and had gaiman not had access to this language, he still would have sexually abused women because he was a rich man in a position of power to do so. that's it! it's a very simple material reality! no amount of "sex negativity" will do fucking anything to prevent sexual violence. god.

[secretlyatargaryen]

What are some good alternatives for idiot/dummy/etc? I want to be able to make fun of fictional characters without using ableist language

so far all I've found is stuff like dunderhead, blockhead, doofus, birdbain / featherbrain, numbskull, dimwit etc etc but I don't know if they're actually any better. What are some of your go-tos? thank you so much

Hey,

Any insult that makes fun of someone's intelligence will fall into the same trap, there's no real difference between "dummy" and most of the alternatives here.

Personally, as long as you're not calling an actually intellectually disabled (or not ID but otherwise significantly developmentally disabled) character an idiot/moron/imbecile/r-word (since these terms, specifically, are historically charged) I don't care like at all.

The only time I'd be actively offended by an abled character being called any of these is if it was either the R slur or just the term "intellectually disabled" being used as an insult, which it isn't.

An incredibly high amount of insults in English come from words surrounding or implying disability. "Lame" used to mean physically disabled, "moron" was invented by a eugenicist for eugenics reasons, then you got "crazy" and "insane", "smooth brain" if we are talking about modern insults (it is real disability called lissencephaly), "braindead"... List goes on.

Basically, not using words of ableist origin is a great goal (no sarcasm intended) but changing "stupid" to "small brained" just isn't much of a change. As a rule of thumb; if it got to do with either brain or skull it's probably just the same thing. Ableist terms do need to be phased out, but it's the sentiment that's the problem, not the actual word (in most cases, at least). Otherwise it's just a constant semantics treadmill that changes nothing and helps no one.

As I said, I don't really care if anyone is calling their abled blorbo an idiot and I feel pretty comfortable saying that most intellectually disabled people I know also don't. But if you want to use words that do actually avoid having an ableist basis then they need to insult something else than intelligence - preferably actions or opinions.

Hope this helps,

mod Sasza

[secretlyatargaryen]

it will just kill you

[secretlyatargaryen]

Really what it boils down to is one could very easily interpret what happens to Calliope as a story about abuse of power, rather than about abuse of a person, and if you're wondering how someone who could write that could justify doing that to another human being, that's why.

I wish people would stop bringing up the Calliope plotline in relation to what's going on with Neil Gaiman. I know this is the piss on the poor website, but "depiction doesn't equal endorsement" works the other way around, too. Because ultimately there is no way to judge someone's morality based on what they write. Which doesn't mean there isn't any correlation at all, but that that correlation isn't 1:1, and that goes both ways.

Just because what abusive men do to Calliope is condemned, does not mean that Gaiman understands the full horror of it. In the story, the power that these male writers get from abusing Calliope is very real. There is something deeply uncomfortable in that narrative that still exists even though the abuse itself is condemned, that fits with society's conceptions of women as gatekeepers of male desire, doors to be unlocked or invited in or broken through by force, rather than real human beings. Sex as something magical and powerful that can be gained from a woman with or without consent, instead of an action that happens between two people.

Calliope's captivity is portrayed as horrific, but it's also horrific within the context of the story in part because Dream loves her, and not necessarily because no one deserves that. Morpheus is also subjected to humiliation and powerlessness in captivity, but he isn't repeatedly raped, and that isn't portrayed as something that his captors would have had something to gain by doing.

This isn't one of those "we should have known" posts, by the way. My point is that you never know. An author's work is not a litmus test for whether or not they're a good person. I get people feeling like the meaning of the Calliope story is compromised now, but it's also not like Gaiman would have been incapable of writing it and still doing what he did.

[secretlyatargaryen]

I wish people would stop bringing up the Calliope plotline in relation to what's going on with Neil Gaiman. I know this is the piss on the poor website, but "depiction doesn't equal endorsement" works the other way around, too. Because ultimately there is no way to judge someone's morality based on what they write. Which doesn't mean there isn't any correlation at all, but that that correlation isn't 1:1, and that goes both ways.

Just because what abusive men do to Calliope is condemned, does not mean that Gaiman understands the full horror of it. In the story, the power that these male writers get from abusing Calliope is very real. There is something deeply uncomfortable in that narrative that still exists even though the abuse itself is condemned, that fits with society's conceptions of women as gatekeepers of male desire, doors to be unlocked or invited in or broken through by force, rather than real human beings. Sex as something magical and powerful that can be gained from a woman with or without consent, instead of an action that happens between two people.

Calliope's captivity is portrayed as horrific, but it's also horrific within the context of the story in part because Dream loves her, and not necessarily because no one deserves that. Morpheus is also subjected to humiliation and powerlessness in captivity, but he isn't repeatedly raped, and that isn't portrayed as something that his captors would have had something to gain by doing.

This isn't one of those "we should have known" posts, by the way. My point is that you never know. An author's work is not a litmus test for whether or not they're a good person. I get people feeling like the meaning of the Calliope story is compromised now, but it's also not like Gaiman would have been incapable of writing it and still doing what he did.

[secretlyatargaryen]

there is truly very little i dislike more than fans using “this woman deserves better!! #feminism” as a cover and excuse to essentially pretend that a female character doesnt exist so they can dedicate approximately zero thoughts to them and their character. no, u are not being more #feminist by taking them out of the way of your toxic fanon yaoi and basically erasing them because female characters being put through negative experiences is misogynistic apparently. bad things happening to women is #unwoke! 90% of time it isnt about combatting and subverting tropes pls u r just not interested in them. y do u all act like u dont express ur love towards fictional characters more by thinking, writing, and discussing about them, and letting them take a substantial role in a text like u constantly do with ur orangutan johnsons, but by protecting their mental health lmao. lovingly put women in saw traps too!

[secretlyatargaryen]

the thing about having your joke posts Corrected is that it's like. posting is literature and I am actually employing time honored literary devices. like these are not unheard of ways of using language. I learned about literary devices in school in sixth grade. it is not actually beyond the pale to have an expectation that the general public will have some understanding of e.g. hyperbole or metaphor. every time people talk about this phenomenon they're like "well it's the autism website of course people are taking you literally" HELLO I AM ALSO AUTISM. HAVE YOU TRIED KNOWING MORE FACTS ABOUT THE USE OF LANGUAGE?

[secretlyatargaryen]

also this might be an unpopular opinion, but i think MOST people are actually completely able to "consume" a piece of a media without anaylzing it through a shipping lense, but i just think they than aren't likely to be posting that analysis on archiveofourown. i think for the most people what's happening is that people are like. going on fandom websites and communities and getting really annoyed they're seeing too much yaoi or whatever, and it's like there's alot of fast food at mcdonalds too, i'm sure the people eating there don't have anything else going on in there lives either

[secretlyatargaryen]

I love blocking people I've never interacted with based off their replies on some random popular post. Wow random user on a post with 50k notes with the worst take ever, I hope I never meet you and will make sure we never do

[secretlyatargaryen]

tywin and stannis being treated like the masculine ideal of stoicism in certain parts of fandom and official creators re. "lion does not concern himself with opinions of sheep" when tywin's entire deal is desperate and pathetic grasp at image and legacy and ultimately failing so bad he shitted himself to death and stannis spends id say 90% of the books bitching about how people dont like him

[secretlyatargaryen]

whenever people talk about working in an office i never even consider what their office does. they work at Business doing Business Things. have Meetings and Drink Coffee. you are a cartoon character to me

[secretlyatargaryen]

So many people live in such fear of being called a bigot they literally refuse to have opinions or state harsh truths even if it’s at the expense of peoples lives. Some claims of bigotry are not true and will be used as a deflection it’s not the end of the world if someone wields this against you if you genuinely believe it not to be true you can say that. Put your big boy pants on and stop living in terror of having a Yourfaveisproblematic wiki page because you denounced genocide

[secretlyatargaryen]

"There are no [insert hated nationality or ethnicity here] cilvilians/noncombatants" is standard genocidal rhetoric, by the way. If you are saying this, you are giving a standard justification for genocide. It's right up there with the related tactic of insisting that all members of [insert hated nationality or ethnicity here] are guilty of some collective crime. I want to be clear here. These are both always very wrong, very bad, and very dangerous. It does not matter if you think you are right this time, and the people you are fighting are really evil and deserve it. Everyone who has ever said these things has believed that too.

[secretlyatargaryen]