#[warning: long]

[random-thought-depository]

One of the thoughts I had while writing that post on Barbara Ehrenreich's Blood Rites, anti-predator defense, and the origins of the male gender role is if that model is correct it implies Larry Niven got the relationship between a sapient species's diet and culture/values pegged wrong, at least as far as the Kzin are concerned. Courage is the virtue of a prey species that engages in collective defense; a smart predator attacks the weak, avoids fights against strong opponents, and is quick to retreat from any fight in which it loses the advantage; a sapient species with a long evolutionary history of being big game hunting carnivore apex predators would probably value/honor courage less than we do, so Kzin biology and implied evolutionary history is actually kind of an awkward fit with the kind of assholes the Kzin are. Asshole aliens with a long evolutionary history of being big game hunting carnivore apex predators might be sneaky raiders with an unapologetic "if they outgun us, trade, avoid, or appease, if we outgun them, raid and pillage!" mindset, or something like that; they probably wouldn't have the prideful machismo, hotheaded aggression, and disdain for restraint of the Kzin (you could argue calling it machismo is an anthropomorphism because Kzintosh aren't men but lbr human machismo is very obviously what the Kzin attitude is modeled on).

I wouldn't go so far as to say it's unrealistic for the Kzin to be the way they are, cause Kzin values could plausibly arise from intra-species competition and my rationalization for why the Kzin are as they are is a mix of that and "the Kzin are like that because their right-wing authoritarians won their history and got to shape their culture." But, as I said, I think the kind of assholes the Kzin are wouldn't logically flow directly from their ancestral subsistence strategy/ecological niche.

Which makes me wonder: if as a spec-bio exercise I tried to make a species which's biology would predispose them toward becoming approximately the kind of asshole Proud Warrior Race the Kzin are, what traits would they have?

Here's what I came up with:

First obvious thing is to give them a "harem" social system like gorillas, elephant seals, certain ungulates, etc.. This lends itself well to a species with a highly competitive male hierarchy in which male social and reproductive success is contingent on being able to make credible costly signals of being strong and badass.

One major obstacle to a species like that becoming a threat on the interstellar scale is control by a single dominant male is a pretty hard cap on group size. I propose that this species has overcome that by developing a social system with dominant bull coalitions, so instead of being limited to groups of one to three dozen individuals controlled by a single dominant male, they can have e.g. groups of a few thousand individuals controlled by a few hundred dominant bulls and so on; this eventually scaled up to an interstellar empire with billions of subjects and probably at least a few hundred million dominant bulls in loose coalition (that big dominant bull coalition is the empire's warrior-aristocrat class).

Unlike the Kzin, in this species the females will definitely be sapient and have lots of soft power; all the internal male social competition and external war and imperialism is largely about impressing them.

Another major point of difference from the Kzin: this species definitely should not have much evolutionary history of cooperative big game hunting. Pack hunting strongly incentivizes and rewards cooperation and solidarity (I suspect this plus the smaller group sizes of carnivores is why you see "harem" social organization more in herbivores), whereas I think to get aliens that are assholes in approximately the way the Kzin are we want a social system that's highly internally competitive. This probably implies a mostly herbivorous diet, though there might be some supplementation with small game; the important thing is this species has had basically no selection pressure for being effective predators of animals strong enough to require cooperation to take down.

Related and important point: the evolution of sapience in this species was more-or-less entirely driven by social competition and sexual selection, and they got too big to be tempting targets for the predators of their ancestral environment long before they developed sapience. So this is a species with no recent evolutionary history of being a prey species.

I guess we're maybe looking at something like a mix of gorillas and elephants here; maybe ancestrally browsers of the savanna and open woodland (though they'd gradually switch toward eating more richer food such as fruit, tubers, young shoots, meat, etc. as they developed more efficient food production). If we're doing the Mass Effect "more alien-looking than Star Trek forehead aliens but still implausibly humanoid" thing some kind of big beefy horned minotaur-looking humanoids would be a pretty appropriate look for the dominant bulls (with the subordinate males being more slender and the females being more slender and substantially smaller - this would be a species with way more sexual dimorphism than humans), not sure what I'd make them look like if I went the route of making them more realistically alien-looking.

Organized violence (i.e. war) developed in this species partly as a mating ritual. Large-scale battles gave males the same kind of opportunities to demonstrate strength and courage that fitness signalling duels did, but the much more complex tactical environment of a large-scale battle also offered opportunities for males to conspicuously demonstrate intelligence and cooperation. The switch from duels to battles as the primary arena of fitness signalling was a major selection pressure driving the evolution of sapience in this species. Originally the ultimate aim of war in this species was group fusion in which the dominant bull coalition of one group would defeat the dominant bull coalition of another group and the two groups would merge with the victorious dominant bull coalition being the dominant bull coalition of the combined group and the males in the defeated dominant bull coalition being either killed or demoted to subordinate status with their new lower rank being rubbed in by bullying and humiliation rituals. As the species developed bigger and more sedentary social groups this developed into territorial conquest with conquered communities remaining in their old homes under the rule of viceroys. But the thing where wars were partly giant mating rituals meant often neither side was particularly in a hurry to finish off their enemies as no more enemies to fight would mean diminished opportunities for social mobility and impressing females; there tended to be a "we have always been at war with Eurasia/Eastasia" dynamic where the conflict itself was effectively treated as having social value and actively maintained and subject to various forms of ritualization that limited its destructiveness so it could be kept going longer.

So, this is a species that's gotten lots of selection pressure from intra-species competition and violence, but has no recent evolutionary history as cooperative predators of animals with comparable size and strength to themselves and has no recent evolutionary history as a prey species. This species will have instincts and intuitions about violence totally optimized for intra-species violence that's mostly a mix of coalition politics propaganda of the deed and male fitness signalling rituals (and, of course, their culture will build on those instincts and intuitions and the dynamics that selected for them). I think this would lead plausibly to people who share one of the defining traits of the Kzin: being aggressive imperialist warmongering swaggering bullies who endlessly congratulate themselves on their ferocious warrior spirit and supposed mighty warrior prowess and supposed right to rule derived from that but are not actually all that good at war compared to a species like us that has been shaped by hunting and being hunted.

The thing about intra-species violence that's mostly a mix of coalition politics propaganda of the deed and male fitness signalling is it simultaneously incentivizes restraint more than inter-species predator/prey violence and incentivizes aggression more consistently than inter-species predator/prey violence.

On the restraint side, intra-species violence means potentially violence against relatives or potential mates, and in a social species violence against potential helpers. This obviously creates an incentive for restraint. Violent intra-species competition is where you get natural weapons and combat set up to probably not do too much damage (bighorn sheep knocking each other on their hard blunt horns instead of stabbing each other in the fleshy flank or face with sharp horns), notions of fair and honorable fights, "why don't you pick on someone your own size?," chivalry, rules of war, boxing gloves and rules against hitting below the belt, etc.. This post touches on some of the dynamics I'm talking about here.

I think plausible cultural development of this species might enhance this. A highly competitive "harem" social system means at least the males of this species are likely to be less cooperative than humans, and a less cooperative species will have a harder time forming effective equalizing coalitions. This species never got our probable evolutionarily significant period of living in mostly relatively egalitarian societies; compared to us their males at least are likely to be less wired for cooperative coalition-building and more wired for trying to individualistically climb their way up viciously competitive hierarchies; again, it seems likely this would make the formation of effective equalizing coalitions harder. The females are a bit of a wild card here, not sure what'd be going on with them, but considering they find aggressive, violent, domineering males sexy, I can see them not having instincts terribly promising for forming effective society-wide equalizing coalitions either. A species that's not very good at forming effective equalizing coalitions is likely to be not very good at coming up with ideologies of equality; equivalents of liberalism, democracy, socialism, anarchism, etc. may not exist at all in their philosophical tradition, or if they exist are likely to be obscure and marginal. The implication may be the political landscape of this species was a pretty dismal picture of oppressive oligarchies everywhere for pretty much the entire existence of their species. Like I said, I expect this species would develop a lot of practices to limit the destructiveness of war and focus its destructiveness on direct combatants. Defeat of a community in war would likely mean little change in the social or material conditions of most of the community's members; one oligarchic dominant bull coalition would replace another, and the only real change for most people would be a change in the names and faces (or scents or whatever they primarily recognize each other by) of their masters. Plausibly, the females of a conquered community would even approve of the change, seeing their community's new ruling dominant bull coalition as having proven themselves more desirable breeding material by winning. All of this would tend to encourage a sensibility that wars are basically social games between males and the only thing important at stake in them is the personal social and reproductive success of the direct combatants.

On the aggression side... Violent coalition politics involves lots of costly signalling, bluff, and martyrdom. The kind of violence a species like the one I'm describing here engages in is probably going to include a lot of violence that's basically an implicit statement of "I am exceptionally strong and brave and badass and would be an exceptionally good subordinate or ally, please give me a promotion!" And when it comes to male violence done as male fitness signalling to females, well, sperm is cheap and ova and wombs are expensive; in a "harem" social system demonstrating your mere viability will probably not be enough to impress females into mating with you, they are likely to require a costly signal of exceptional excellence before perceiving you as a desirable breeding partner, and if you die trying to make that costly signal, well, rolling the dice on a 65% chance of getting killed while young and a 35% chance of getting to breed might easily be selected for over contenting oneself with dying childless at a ripe old age.

Basically, I think you might plausibly end up with a species with bone-deep intuitions that:

- Violence is a performance, it is primarily communicative, using it to send a message to your opponent and/or to witnesses is at least an important secondary consideration and may even be more important than the actual concrete outcome of the fight. It is not enough to simply defeat your enemy, you must do so in a way that effectively communicates what you want to communicate.

- The most consistent purposes of violence are to show off your own strength, bravery, and fighting prowess and to terrorize and humiliate your opponent into submission.

- War is basically a game played among males. It's not a trivial game, it's literally deadly serious for the males involved in it and your society is largely organized around it, but it's fundamentally a game; the only people who have really big stakes in it are the direct combatants, and having fun and displaying good sportsmanship and putting on a cool performance are important secondary considerations and may even be more important than the actual concrete outcome. If you've ever read Ian Banks's Player Of Games, Azad (the game and the institutions and culture around it) in that book is the best analogy I can think of for what war would be to these people.

- Your enemies will be basically following the same rule book you have.

When these people develop interstellar travel and meet other sapient species, they'll apply the instincts and cultural institutions they developed for intra-species competition to those other sapients. I.e. they'll turn into nasty imperialists. Conquered aliens would get incorporated into their society in about the same social position as weak males. In their society weak males with little hope of rising to dominant bull status are kept around for labor and to assist with the care and education of the offspring of their female relatives and have a social status roughly equivalent to serfs; this would be the obvious niche to put conquered aliens in, with some modifications, e.g. conquered aliens would be expected to keep reproducing with each other.

Combine what I said in the previous paragraph with how much these people's social instincts would revolve around volatile male hierarchies reinforced by bullying and humiliation rituals, and I expect being a conquered subject of them would tend to be unpleasant to horrific. Being a primarily herbivorous species, these people wouldn't occasionally eat their slaves like the Kzin, but I could totally see the dominant bulls occasionally casually caving some poor slave's skull in out of a combination of some petty irritation and wanting to remind everyone who's boss.

Let's say we want these people to get approximately the same nasty surprise when they attack humans that the Kzin did. Model favorable to that:

In this setting, the most common pathway to sapience is through social and sexual selection. Sapient species usually evolve in environments without big predators, e.g. isolated islands, because serious predation pressure tends to prevent the very strong commitment to a long-lived slow-breeding very K-selected life strategy that leads to sapience. Sapient species usually do not have recent evolutionary history as big game hunters (the typical sapient is a physically not very strong omnivore, often primarily an eater of fruit, tubers, seeds, insects, and small animals, though also a lot of sapient species started with an ecological niche roughly equivalent of fish-eating birds that nest in large rookeries). Species that evolve sapience through this pathway usually have strong social and artistic intelligence, but lack instincts and institutions of organized violence (they aren't always peaceful, but if they do have significant intra-species violence it's murder, done by individuals or very small groups, not war).

When the warmonger aliens I've spent most of this post describing meet species like this it usually goes similarly to what happened when the Maori met the Moriori, or at least like that event as described in a book I read once. The warmonger aliens will roll up and be like "Yo, what's up, losers! You are now our slaves! We're awfully fond of presents called 'tribute' which you'll be giving us regularly from now on, and you'll be obeying our orders from now on! You can start by performing these humiliating submission rituals to acknowledge our superiority!" and this will be kind of an OCP to their victims, who will usually either basically surrender immediately or try to resist but fold pretty quickly cause they aren't well-equipped for war psychologically, culturally, institutionally, or materially. The warmonger dominant bulls honestly find it kind of boring, to the point that they fight a lot of highly ritualized flower war style conflicts among themselves as a mix of oligarch class dispute resolution, bloody enrichment, and live fire training to keep their warrior skills sharp.

Basically, the galaxy is full of weedy theater kid nerds, and these warmonger aliens are the meathead jock bullies of the galaxy going around shoving those nerds into lockers and stealing their lunch money.

The exceptions to this pattern the warmonger aliens met before us were a mix of 1) other species like themselves, 2) sapient species with a long evolutionary history of being big game hunting carnivore more-or-less apex predators (who are basically sneaky raiders). The warmonger alien dominant bulls tend to hate the latter and bitch endlessly about how they "have no honor," but savor tangling with the former in a "finally, worthy opponents!" way.

Then they met humans.

Humans have a long enough evolutionary history of big game hunting that this may have subjected us to significant selection pressure for increased cooperativeness that the warmonger aliens didn't get. But that isn't special in this context, the warmonger aliens have tangled with sapients descended from big game hunting carnivores before.

The thing that makes humans relevantly special is our relatively recent evolutionary history of being a prey species that engaged in collective defense, and the instincts we have that formed in that context but can be activated in other kinds of conflict.

Going back to that "real fights" thing earlier:

"but how often are you ever going to be in a fight where you’re willing to rip the other guy’s cheek out, gouge out his eyes and so forth?"

A fight against a predator that wants to eat your child looks like that.

If you're fighting a member of your own species, the entity you're fighting might be a relative, potential mate, or potential helper, so there's an incentive for restraint.

If you're a predator hunting, well, a carnivore species needs their prey species, that's their food source; smart lions wouldn't want to wipe out their prey species, they need their prey species, they would prefer their prey species thrive and be abundant and healthy; again there is an incentive for restraint; very plausibly one of the first lessons a sapient carnivore species would have to collectively learn after becoming sapient is restraint, learning that it would be all too easy to use their new, better weapons to kill too many of their prey and that they need to consciously avoid doing that.

Prey defending themselves from predators are the ones who'd have more-or-less zero incentive for restraint. If you can hurt or kill the lioness that's trying to eat your child, there is basically no reason to not go for it except self-preservation. Predators need their prey, but that's not symmetrical; prey don't need their predators, and sapient prey smart enough to do birth control and cull any dumber competitor species would probably be unambiguously much better off if all their predators dropped dead (Pleistocene humans could have done semi-reliable birth control by abstinence, outercourse, and lactational amenorrhea).

Humans are a slow-breeding species. A pride of lions could easily gradually eat a small early human band into extinction, and would have little incentive to avoid doing so cause humans aren't even their primary prey so when they ran out of humans they could just eat more of the antelope and so on that are already most of what they're eating anyway. The warmonger aliens have no evolutionary history of conflicts so existential.

The warmonger aliens have an idea of self-sacrificial heroism, but their version is entirely oriented (in an "adaptation executor, not fitness maximizer" way) toward burnishing the reputation of surviving close male relatives by association and thus increasing their reproductive success. They would have nothing in their recent evolutionary history like the experience of standing between a child and a hungry lioness. They would not grok "get away from her you bitch!" (that essay talks about the role of males in anti-predator defense but, yeah, women would have this too, who do you think would be the last line of defense for the children if a predator got past the male defensive ring?).

(The warmonger aliens definitely think it's a bit weird that we have mixed gender armies, not so much in a conventionally sexist way - they're inclined to see the size and strength differences between human men and women as obviously trivial compared to the much bigger sexual dimorphism of their species - but in that the idea of females caring enough about the outcome of a war to fight in it is alien to them. It's not that weird to them though, the big game hunter ancestry carnivore sapients they've encountered have mixed-sex armies and unwarlike sapients that try to resist conquest usually form them when they scramble to put a military together so it's got precedent in their experience.)

Like, yeah, the warmonger aliens are exactly the kind of people where some human commander would draw some of them into a clever trap they wouldn't anticipate cause prioritizing actually winning over looking heroic is alien behavior to them and then the comrades of the ones who died getting punked would bitch about how "dishonorable" it was of us to fight to win instead of obediently lining up to get slaughtered like cattle in some set-piece battle because that'd be the "honorable" thing by their definitions.

But also, something a lot like Londo Mollari's little speech about how brave the humans were in the Earth-Minbari war but it's some warmonger alien dominant bull describing the resistance we're putting up against his people and instead of admiration it's spoken with a tone of queasy puzzlement tinged with fear, irritation with our "irrational" resistance mixed with fear of the possible implications for what might happen if we start winning, it's alien behavior to him and he's admitting that it scares him.

Also, turns out species that have been strongly selected for solidarity (that's us!) are good at building equalizing coalitions and creating memes to coordinate them around, so not only are human ideologies of equality such as liberalism and communism effective at supercharging our resistance against imperialist conquest in a way that's an OCP to the warmonger aliens, they also turn out to be really disruptive to the warmonger aliens' shitty empire when some human chaos agents have fun spreading them around in it.

[turtlemagnum]

here's some of the lore adjustments i'm going to make when i buy the star wars franchise:

recanonize hutts being able to biologically trans their gender for purposes of having kids. jabba can be trans if she wants to, ok

i think it's fucking stupid that twi'lek women are god damn gorgeous and the twi'lek men look like fucking freaks. therefore, i'm gonna be making the men look as pretty as the women. it's only fair

give the devaronian women horns. you make a species of devil lookin guys and you TAKE AWAY their HORN's??"? shame!! shame upon your houses. also i'd make the facial variation a bit more diverse so we still get the freaky lookin guys but also we should be able to make hot guys too with them i think.

in general i'd get away from that weird sexual dimorphism thing common to a lot of fantasy stuff where the males of a species are all monstrous but the women are all sexy and curvy and such. as such, either all of the people of a species are gonna be sexy and curvy like the women, or they're all gonna be monstrous like the men. them's the rules

revan would be made canonically transmasculine, though i'd wanna do it in a very low key way. it just makes sense!!!

droids can use the force, and everyone has a little bit of force in them so if you train hard enough anyone can become proficient. also, since the cool thing about the force is that it's a very soft kind of magic and is generally just whatever the story needs, i'd go Ever So Slightly Anime about it. like not full on but i'd definitely wanna stretch the physical elements of it slightly more than the movies tended to

yoda's lightsaber should be longer than average, actually. dude's little, he's gonna need the extra reach

the society of star wars is like, fairly straightforwardly a human supremacist one, right? how would that impact the beauty standards and gender identities of the other sapient guys? like what if a rodian got surgery to have a body more appealing to the human gaze? what if one of those secretary droids intentionally designed to look like a shapely woman turned out to be transmasc and got robo-top surgery? conversely, what if a transfem B1 battle droid got robo-breast implants to feel more like a woman?

anyways, speaking of rodians. i want you to imagine the face of a rodian (for those unaware, the guy we see han solo shoot at the beginning of a new hope (greedo) is a rodian). imagine what that mouth do. like, vacuum type shit. literally inhuman degrees of head game. think about it

slugthrowers!!! i'd wanna completely overhaul them, there's this one bit of lore That I Hate that is like "heh... slugthrowers are so much more reliable than blasters, which are actually unreliable as hell if you really think about it..." and it's like. No. That's Not How That Works. if blasters were less reliable than more conventional weaponry, they'd never be widely adopted. that's how weapons work. if it ain't reliable, nobody's gonna fucking use it!!! you need (and i mean NEED) the thing to go bang (or pew, in this case) every time you pull the trigger!! if it doesn't, then no military is gonna adopt it, and since civilians will very frequently go for stuff that has some degree of military pedigree, that's kind of fucking important. so, here's how i'd make blasters better than slugthrowers: more accurate, more reliable, easier to mass produce cheaply and effectively, higher ammunition capacity, and not impacted by varying gravity (at least not as much as Real Bullets, y'know). i'd also make the advantages of slugthrowers that they hard counter jedi (can't reflect metal with a lazer sword, you'd just melt it and now you have molten lead hitting your body at somewhere between mach 1 and 4!!!), and have more potentiality for stealth since you can suppress em silent if you know what you're doing. it is canon that jedi are often killed by assassins with explosives, and since slugthrowers are essentially a form of explosive, this is just an extension of that. so, that's why blasters would be more popular, because How Often Is A Normal Person Gonna Fight A Guy With A Lightsaber, so blasters are just Better in almost all situations but slugthrowers have Just Enough Of A Situational Benefit to still be around for like, at the very least people who are like, bounty hunters that specifically go after jedi or sith, y'know. And No, Jedi Cannot Just Catch The Bullets With The Force, That's Stupid.

anyways, i'd either make padme as young as anakin was when they meet (about 9) or i'd make anakin about the same age as padme when they meet (about 14). that way it's Not Quite As Weird, y'know. i'd probably spring for the latter since that'd be easier to cast good actors for

i'd decanonize the sequels since i have my own ideas for them, but i'd keep certain elements (like bb8 droids and porgs and the live slug reaction guy)

luke is ace but has romantic attraction. again, relatively low key but yeah. also mara jade is canon

i'd make jar jar hot. i'm not gonna elaborate because i wanna keep some things a suprise

[gongyussy]

"i would know her by reformed body alone... i would know her in death"

also... there's official art

[egophiliac]

looking at next month's schedule and between the end of 7-12 and the wishing lantern event it's like

February is officially RIDDLE MONTH, brace yourselves to be absolutely blasted into ashes everybody

[comicaurora]

how do you infinite scroller webcomic people DO IT

[cookinguptales]

So I’ve been enjoying the Disney vs. DeSantis memes as much as anyone, but like. I do feel like a lot of people who had normal childhoods are missing some context to all this.

I was raised in the Bible Belt in a fairly fundie environment. My parents were reasonably cool about some things, compared to the rest of my family, but they certainly had their issues. But they did let me watch Disney movies, which turned out to be a point of major contention between them and my other relatives.

See, I think some people think this weird fight between Disney and fundies is new. It is very not new. I know that Disney’s attempts at inclusion in their media have been the source of a lot of mockery, but what a lot of people don’t understand is that as far as actual company policy goes, Disney has actually been an industry leader for queer rights. They’ve had policies assuring equal healthcare and partner benefits for queer employees since the early 90s.

I’m not sure how many people reading this right now remember the early 90s, but that was very much not industry standard. It was a big deal when Disney announced that non-married queer partners would be getting the same benefits as the married heterosexual ones.

Like — it went further than just saying that any unmarried partners would be eligible for spousal benefits. It straight-up said that non-same-sex partners would still need to be married to receive spousal benefits, but because same-sex partners couldn’t do that, proof that they lived together as an established couple would be enough.

In other words, it put long-term same-sex partners on a higher level than opposite-sex partners who just weren’t married yet. It put them on the exact same level as heterosexual married partners.

They weren’t the first company ever to do this, but they were super early. And they were certainly the first mainstream “family-friendly” company to do it.

Conservatives lost their damn minds.

Protests, boycotts, sermons, the whole nine yards. I can’t tell you how many books about the evils of Disney my grandmother tried to get my parents to read when I was a kid.

When we later moved to Florida, I realized just how many queer people work at Disney — because historically speaking, it’s been a company that has guaranteed them safety, non-discrimination, and equal rights. That’s when I became aware of their unofficial “Gay Days” and how Christians would show up from all over the country to protest them every year. Apparently my grandmother had been upset about these days for years, but my parents had just kind of ignored her.

Out of curiosity, I ended up reading one of the books my grandmother kept leaving at our house. And friends — it’s amazing how similar that (terrible, poorly written) rhetoric was to what people are saying these days. Disney hires gay pedophiles who want to abuse your children. Disney is trying to normalize Satanism in our beautiful, Christian America. 

Just tons of conspiracy theories in there that ranged from “a few bad things happened that weren’t actually Disney’s fault, but they did happen” to “Pocahontas is an evil movie, not because it distorts history and misrepresents indigenous life, but because it might teach children respect for nature. Which, as we all know, would cause them all to become Wiccans who believe in climate change.”

Like — please, take it from someone who knows. This weird fight between fundies and Disney is not new. This is not Disney’s first (gay) rodeo. These people have always believed that Disney is full of evil gays who are trying to groom and sexually abuse children.

The main difference now is that these beliefs are becoming mainstream. It’s not just conservative pastors who are talking about this. It’s not just church groups showing up to boycott Gay Day. Disney is starting to (reluctantly) say the quiet part out loud, and so are the Republicans. Disney is publicly supporting queer rights and announcing company-supported queer events and the Republican Party is publicly calling them pedophiles and enacting politically driven revenge.

This is important, because while this fight has always been important in the history of queer rights, it is now being magnified. The precedent that a fight like this could set is staggering. For better or for worse, we live in a corporation-driven country. I don’t like it any more than you do, and I’m not about to defend most of Disney’s business practices. But we do live in a nation where rights are largely tied to corporate approval, and the fact that we might be entering an age where even the most powerful corporations in the country are being banned from speaking out in favor of rights for marginalized people… that’s genuinely scary.

Like… I’ll just ask you this. Where do you think we’d be now, in 2023, if Disney had been prevented from promising its employees equal benefits in 1994? That was almost thirty years ago, and look how far things have come. When I looked up news articles for this post from that era, even then journalists, activists, and fundie church leaders were all talking about how a company of Disney’s prominence throwing their weight behind this movement could lead to the normalization of equal protections in this country.

The idea of it scared and thrilled people in equal parts even then. It still scares and thrills them now.

I keep seeing people say “I need them both to lose!” and I get it, I do. Disney has for sure done a lot of shit over the years. But I am begging you as a queer exvangelical to understand that no. You need Disney to win. You need Disney to wipe the fucking floor with these people.

Right now, this isn’t just a fight between a giant corporation and Ron DeSantis. This is a fight about the right of corporations to support marginalized groups. It’s a fight that ensures that companies like Disney still can offer benefits that a discriminatory government does not provide. It ensures that businesses much smaller than Disney can support activism.

Hell, it ensures that you can support activism.

The fight between weird Christian conspiracy theorists and Disney is not new, because the fight to prevent any tiny victory for marginalized groups is not new. The fight against the normalization of othered groups is not new.

That’s what they’re most afraid of. That each incremental victory will start to make marginalized groups feel safer, that each incremental victory will start to turn the tide of public opinion, that each incremental victory will eventually lead to sweeping law reform.

They’re afraid that they won’t be able to legally discriminate against us anymore.

So guys! Please. This fight, while hilarious, is also so fucking important. I am begging you to understand how old this fight is. These people always play the long game. They did it with Roe and they’re doing it with Disney.

We have! To keep! Pushing back!

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Just your average male living space.

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[kyra45]

Scammer pretending to be in Palestine v2

This post has been remade with better info! Please go to this one:

Got an ask from someone claiming to be in Palestine needing mutual aid? Unfortunately there is a scammer going around and it’s likely the ask you got sent is the same one being sent by multiple accounts who target users interacting with Palestine posts. These blogs use the text/images off a real fundraiser and then post it here pretending to be the person it’s made for. Their accounts are usually only a few days old and they don’t interact beyond the ask/follow. Lately they might make the link to their PayPal account in different colors or claim their GoFundMe is pending so you will assume the real one is theirs. They don’t have any GoFundMe’s set up. They steal from them. If you need proof of something being stolen, searching the text of their post in a search engine should pull up the source. If you know how to report PayPal accounts, please report those used by the scammers.

(Moved to new list)

Below is a growing list of fake/stolen names used across the accounts:

Nour Samar | maryline lucy | Fred Odhiambo | Jeff Owino | Valentine Nakuti | Conslata Obwanga | JACINTA SITATI | David Okoth | Martín Mutugi | Daudi Likuyani | William Ngonyo | Fred Agy | George Ochieng | BONFACE ODHIAMBO | Sila Keli | John Chacha | benson komen | Alvin Omondi | Jacinta Sitati | Daudi Likuyani | Noah Keter | Faith Joram | Rawan AbuMahady (any PayPal’s using this name are scammers who have stolen it off a real GoFundMe. The real person does not have a PayPal account that they post on tumblr.) | Asnet Wangila | Remmy Cheptau

Keep in mind this post isn’t saying all accounts asking for mutual aid in Palestine are scams. Rather, this post is meant to bring awareness of a scammer stealing money from those who really need it by pretending to be a person in Palestine. To report scams, use this:

Report -> Something else -> Illegal uses or Content -> Phishing

(Please do not use the comments section to ask for gfm sharing if someone’s asks or DMs are closed. Thanks.)

[parisoonic]

Demo has had many careers - tattoo artist isn't one of them.

[random-thought-depository]

Reading William Hope Hodgson's "The Night Land."

Oh, cool, I found a free copy of William Hope Hodgson's The Night Land online! It sounds like very much my kind of thing! I'm a little bit more than halfway through the book so far. I read a bunch of the fanfiction on the Night Land website before I found it, so I thought it'd be interesting to see how the actual novel compares to the fanfics. I'm a little more than halfway through the novel now, and so far I'm finding that it fits significantly better with my sensibilities than the fanfics, which is interesting cause the latter were presumably written by people much more culturally similar to me (2000s and early 2010s going by the publishing dates on the website vs. the original novel being published in 1912).

The language and style used are intended to resemble those of the 17th century, though the prose has features characteristic of no particular period, such as an almost complete lack of dialogue or proper names.

This gets cited as one of the big barriers to getting into the novel, and I've seen comments on the Night Land website to the effect of "Yeah, the setting's cool, but Hodgson was not a good writer on a technical level" and a lot of people quit reading the book when they see the first chapter or so. Admittedly, I skipped the framing section and went straight to the parts about the far future sunless world... But I don't have this reaction! Like, yeah, the lack of dialogue and very minimalistic characterization is weird (we don't even get the far future viewpoint character's name, fans often call him X), but it's an interesting and cool kind of weird! It feels like I'm reading a text from a different culture with different literary conventions, which is very appropriate! The lack of dialogue gives the narrative a sort of Temple Grandin thinking in pictures feel.

My immediate quibble with the setting based on reading the description of the novel and some of the fanfics was it feels like a waste of the potential of the premise if the big danger from the Night Land is creatures. This is a perpetually dark world where the sun is going out! It would logically kill you with cold and hunger! It would need no assistance from space vampires and mutant yeti orcs and whatnot to kill you! In fact, being in any kind of danger from an animal outside the Redoubt implies an implausibly human-friendly environment for a world like that; its surface would logically be colder than Pluto and kill any unprotected animal instantly (I rationalize it as the Night Land's sun isn't quite dead and still has significant output in the infrared + the Redoubts are in a very deep lowland that's warmer than the rest of the planet; the Night Land has a ground cover of "moss bushes" in places and there's even a forest, which would fit with that if its plants have evolved to photosynthesize using infrared light outside the range of human vision).

The actual description of the crossing of the Night Land in the novel feels congruent with how I'd approach the premise of such a world. Cold is cited as a hazard of the Night Lands. When X finds Nanni, she is starving ("And I opened my left hand, and lookt at the hand within my palm, and surely it was utter thin and wasted"). There are dangerous creatures, but it feels ecological, not Manichean. X isn't primarily a combat-oriented hero; he's fought a few monsters so far but mostly he avoids them and tries to not be noticed by them, y'know, as a smart member of a prey species would. He calls them "evil," but it feels like plausibly basically an emotionally loaded way of saying hostile/dangerous to humans. His journey through the Night Land is mostly just walking

Night vision goggles are apparently a lost technology to the people of the Redoubt, because X's armor doesn't have them. There's a section where he has to cross a place of complete darkness, where there are no volcanoes to provide dim natural light. He has to cross it blind (I suppose he can't use a flashlight or electric lantern because of not having any with batteries that would last through the journey and/or fear of attracting attention from Night Land predators - Hodgson may have simply not anticipated electric lights with portable power sources?). At one point he takes a dangerous fall, and after that dares not walk in that darkness; he crosses that country crawling on his hands and knees. When he comes to a place with a source of natural light (so he can walk normally again) he describes the light as something like "marvelous" or "wonderful."

Another thing I like about the novel is it takes the same approach I talk about taking to fiction about a generation ship here. The fanfics tend to situate the Redoubt firmly in the context of a longer history, but in the novel (you can notice it from reading the excerpt here) it feels like by X's lifetime humanity has lived entirely within the Redoubts for so long that they have only a very dim cultural memory of any other existence. They have a cultural memory that the Redoubt was built, that humans existed before it, that there used to be a sun, but it's been so long that feels to them like

“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.” - Genesis 1 (King James Bible).

When X gets his past life memories back at 17 he thinks of a line from an ancient poet of the Redoubt who describes some slow-moving monster as something that has been there since the beginning of the world and he goes like "No it wasn't! I now remember a time when that was not part of the world!"

"I would time and again dispute with our learned men; they being in doubt as the verity of that olden story of the Days of Light, and the existence of the Sun…"

Sounds like lot of the people of the Redoubt (a lot of the most educated people, even) don't think the sun was real!

"In the Bright Days there was a thing called the Sun, it was like a great lamp in the sky, and it gave light and warmth to the whole Land, so the whole Land was like the Fields, and humans could live everywhere in the Land. But in time it dimmed, and humans built the Redoubt to be a place where they could continue to have light and warmth and food as in the Bright Days, and retreated into the Redoubt to dwell only therein till the end of the world, and the sun dimmed until it ceased to give forth light, and the Land became the Night Land."

I think to the people of the Redoubt that might sound a lot like:

"In pain you shall bring forth children..."

"... cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life;

Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee...

In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread..."

I can totally see there being a treatise in the Redoubt's records titled something like "Against the proposition that human inability to see in darkness is evidence of the past existence of the Sun," arguing that humans might have started out as a Night Land species and then lost night vision after building the Redoubt because abundant artificial light removed selection pressure against night-blindness.

There's an interesting tidbit from one of the website's essays: all the food of the Redoubt is vegetarian, and when X and Nanni are out in the Night Land it does not occur to them that they might hunt and eat animals. From the novel, and I interpret this as the thought of the seventeenth century guy we're ostensibly getting X's narrative filtered through:

"And here, as it doth occur unto me, I do ponder how it did be that we had no thought to slay any small creature for our food; but, mayhap, we had no knowledge of this way; for surely, they did not this thing to my knowing in the Mighty Pyramid. … in verity, [X] never saw … meat in all the time of that far Life that I do wot of."

X so far seems to have sustained himself on his expedition entirely with highly concentrated low-volume expedition rations he brought with them from the Redoubt. Naani, who is starving, has been eating "the moss upon the rocks, and odd strange berries and growths" to prolong her survival in the Night Land, but it did not occur to her to hunt and eat an animal.

I think these people have no cultural memory of human carnivory. They just don't have an intuition that animals can be food for humans.

In one of the fanfics a couple of Redoubt humans are given meat by an entity of the Night Land they've allied with, and initially object in terms of something like "eating something's flesh is almost as bad as consuming its soul," but I like to imagine that if a human of X/Nanni's time was offered meat they'd be reluctant to eat it in a more primal following mother's wisdom kind of way, which they might articulate in terms of morality or propriety or hygiene but would really be at its core a "that is not food, I don't want to put that in my mouth!" reaction (I suspect eating meat would sound pretty gross to a human who's old enough to grok the concept but hasn't been accustomed to the practice by acculturation and/or experience).

"Kill an animal to eat its corpse? As... as a creature of the Night Land would? A human can do that without being harmed? A human can be nourished that way? Aren't animals dirty and full of bacteria?"

One of the essays on the Night Land website said that the novel's perspective on sex and gender "apparently combines the worst sugar-sweet Victorian idealism with the philosophy of John Norman's Gor," so I was braced for something pretty rancid. I'm only halfway through so maybe the bad parts are still ahead, but, uh...

Maybe I'm being a poster person for how sexism can go down a lot easier if it's benevolent, maybe I like "the worst sugar-sweet Victorian idealism," but, uh...

X is not at all the kind of guy that statement led me to expect! Like, yeah, X may have some somewhat concerning attitudes about sex and relationships and women if I take his words at face value, though I'm inclined toward the reading that we're not actually getting a direct view of X's ideas and attitudes, we're getting X's ideas and attitudes as interpreted by the seventeenth century British man he was in a past life who's ostensibly the actual viewpoint character. I don't mean to suggest that the people of the Redoubt couldn't have gender ideology and gendered practices that would be distasteful or disturbing to modern liberals, but given that they're a hyper-urbanized high-tech society (the ultimate urban society, the Last Redoubt is literally all one building!) I don't think it makes sense for them to have a gender system like trad patriarchies (since the latter reflects the material conditions of primarily rural societies centered on agriculture with high child mortality rates and relatively inconvenient birth control) and I think they'd probably have relative gender equality (since I think relative gender equality is kind of a natural consequence of low birth rates and mechanization and the Redoubt's society is so old it's almost certainly in equilibrium with its material conditions). If I had to pick the sexism that shows up that I think is most likely to be authentic Redoubt society sexism, it'd be the thing where only men are allowed to leave the Redoubt; "sperm is cheap so men may be expended, fertile wombs are precious so women must be protected" seems likely to be a long-enduring kind of sexism that may exist across societies with many technological conditions. Anyway, my point is, uh...

X reads as a fundamentally really sweet and good person!

"Now, while Naani did sleep, I stript off mine armour, and took off mine under-suit, which was named the Armour-Suit, and a very warm and proper garment, and made thick that it should ease the chafe of the armour. And afterward, I put on the armour again; but the suit I folded and laid beside the Maid; for, truly, she was nigh unclothed, by reason of the bushes and the rocks, that had rent her garments all-wise. And I stood watch for the Maid, the while that she did slumber; and surely she went ten long hours. And I walked upon this side of the fire-hole and now upon that… … … For she did wear the Armour-Suit, and surely it was loose upon her; but yet very pleasing, being close-knit. … and her little feet be bare, and so that they made my heart new tender to look upon them; for truly she was utter lost of foot-gear… Now, before that we should do aught beside, we must contrive that Naani have some gear for her feet; and to this intent, I did make a sure search into the pouch, and surely I found that there did be a change pair of inner shoes, that were made to go within mine own shoes of the grey metal. And at this I was wondrous glad, and did make the Maid to sit upon a little rock, while I made a fitting of the shoes. And, surely, they did be utter big and clumsy upon her little feet; so that I was in surprise to know how great is a man, beside a Maid. But in the end I had a cunning thought, for I cut off all the side of a strap, throughout the length of the strap, very thin and careful, and so had a lace to tie the boots around the tops, which were soft and easy for such a purpose. And after that, I stood away to look at the Maid, and neither she nor I were truly pleased; for, indeed, she was too pretty to be so hid and muffled. Yet we were glad otherwise; for now she might go without hurt to her feet. … And we went twelve great hours in the bed of the olden sea, and did eat twice in that time. And surely the Maid did grow utter weak and weary; for she was not come proper unto her strength; yet she did make no odd saying to tell me of this thing. But indeed, I did know; and I stopt in the thirteenth hour, and took her into mine arms, even as I should carry a babe; and I went forward with her…"

Daaawwwww! :qq: He's adorable!

I actually found it kind of refreshing after the fanfics, which tend to have less likable protagonists. I feel like actually reading the novel pegging The Night Land as dismal and grimdark gets it wrong; in its assumptions about human psychology it's actually pretty noblebright. I think it's actually arguably an example of what the "hopepunk shouldn't be about utopian settings, it should be about hope in dystopian settings" people want.

Like, I get it, this is extremely played straight knight/damsel stuff, but, uh, you can model X as not particularly sexist and it would still make sense for him to relate to Naani this way as a function of compassion. He has protective clothing, a weapon, wilderness survival gear, food, is well-nourished, and has a living city to go back to. When he meets Naani, she is the last survivor of her people, she has spent the last IDK month or three watching her world be destroyed and then slowly starving alone in the dark, she seems to be more-or-less just be walking around in regular civilian clothes with no special equipment to help her survive, she has inadequate thermal protection in a difficult climate, and and she's malnourished. X doesn't have to be a sexist to treat her as a vulnerable and needy person, she is a vulnerable and needy person!

I think you could flip the genders of that section and with a little tinkering (e.g. the shoe size difference being read as a racial difference instead of a gender difference) it would have psychological verisimilitude and fem!X would also seem quite endearing to me! Actually, maybe I should try writing such a gender-flipped version of some of X's and Naani's interactions, it might be an interesting short writing exercise!

Speaking of X being unironically a very good boy, the book also pretty much explicitly tells us he's good about consent! Though, of course, it articulates it differently than a modern author would...

"Yet she did turn her mouth from me, and did put her hand above her face to ward me off, the which did grieve me; for truly, I did heed alway that I should never thrust my love upon her in her lonesomeness; but only let it be to her for a shield and for all comfort unto her heart."

"And presently, I felt her to stir in mine arms; and I loost her somewhat; for I did be always very mindful that I impose not upon her dear liberty of maidenhood."

And, like, not to talk shit about some old webmaster who's been dead since 2014, but TBH the guy who wrote that essay honestly gives me worse vibes than X does when it comes to how he talks about gender and sexuality and women. Like, he could have just pointed out that Naani surviving what she went through is easily as or more impressive than X's journey through the Night Land and that she is a vulnerable and needy person compared to him for very concrete material reasons that don't inherently have much to do with gender, he didn't need to go on a tangent about how he thinks action heroines are a dumb idea that included unironically using the term "alpha male" for a human man. I don't remember X using "slut" as a derogatory term for a woman or talking about a woman's virtue in terms of her chastity, but those are things that show up in that guy's writing. The crowning moment of awesome he gave the heroine in one of his stories was trying to look dignified as she got gruesomely killed, which feels like a horrific on the nose parody of patriarchal gender expectations for women (properly decorative unto death...) but I got the impression he just unironically thought that was a cool heroic death for her.

He also says that Naani "is a dummy, a picture, an ideal without guts, with no character whatever ... This is the great flaw in the heart of The Night Land, and must be addressed," and I really don't agree. I mean, she doesn't get a ton of characterization, but nobody in this does; this is a book where the protagonist doesn't even get a name, it's actually not obvious to me that she's less characterized than X. And I get a definite sense of a personality from her behavior! She's a lot like X! Her having survived alone in the Night Land as long as she did implies cleverness and psychological strength (OMG for real this poor woman was probably so scared and felt so alone and is probably so traumatized...), this is a "similar people attract each other" dynamic. Their interactions make me think of that "and so, they were both bottoms" meme. They are both people who have self-sacrificing acts of service as love languages, and they're kind of having a contest of doing self-sacrificing acts of service at each other and trying to argue each other into accepting the better deal. But they are also pragmatic problem-solvers who want positive-sum outcomes, which keeps this from becoming toxic, they will come to compromises e.g. "we'll take turns wearing the cloak" and "this is stupid, let's just share the blanket and both be warm." As a person who's like this, I find this very relatable, and it it's also very endearing to me!

As a person who's never seen a low support needs autism symptom list that didn't make me think "that's me!" this novel reads to me as a very autistic text. The way the unusual format evokes a kinda thinking in pictures style of storytelling, the way people are characterized by their concrete actions, the very concrete acts of service oriented love languages of the protagonists...

These barely characterized people feel relatable to me, in the way I talked about here, where I feel more represented by people who think like me than by people I just happen to share a race, ethnicity, or gender with.

After X has a monster encounter (with a dangerous creature called a "Great Grey Man," I get the feeling the Night Land fauna is more than a little All Tomorrows-ish) and is victorious:

"And I turned me then away, and went off into the night, going swift and cautious, and bearing the Diskos cunningly and almost, as it were, with a love for that strange and wondrous weapon that had so befriended me, and slain the foul Grey Man with one stroke. And I had a feeling that it did know me, and had a comradeship for me; and I doubt none will understand this; save, it might be, they of the olden days that did carry one strong sword always. Yet was the Diskos more than the sword; for it did in truth seem to live with the fire and the flame of the Earth-Current that did beat within it."

Yes, yes, object personification in autism...

I think one could make a really neat animated film adaptation of The Night Land! I have some ideas for how I'd do it if I could that I think I will post tomorrow. To try to approximate the atmosphere of the novel, it would be in the format of an old silent film, without dialogue, mostly just images and music, with some use of cue cards to establish context (the trick would be to come up with a stylized form of animation that gives an impression of the darkness of a sunless world while still allowing the viewer to see the action). It would develop Naani's side of the story more, making it an equal symmetric companion narrative to X's - and, in service of that, it would take some liberties with the original text, trying to really bring out the dramatic potential of the fall of the Lesser Redoubt and drawing inspiration from Nigel Atkinson's excellent fanfic A Mouse In the Walls of the Lesser Redoubt, though I wouldn't precisely follow that narrative either. I do very much prefer Atkinson's take on the abandonment of the Lesser Redoubt, as a kind of mass suicide by people who knew they were doomed and preferred to get it over with quickly; I think that's got more drama and verisimilitude and is kind of more respectful to the people of the Lesser Redoubt than the novel's version, where it's just "some Night Land gribbly got into their heads and made them walk out into the dark." An element I would add, original to me, is that the people of the Lesser Redoubt did have a plan for survival, albeit one they knew probably wouldn't work but undertook in desperation: to walk en masse in a caravan across the Night Land to the Great Redoubt, the location of which was known, though no-one had made the journey in a million years, and hope their distant cousins would take pity on them and let them in...

Maybe in five or ten or twenty years I'll be able to actually make this thing with some Sora-descendant program...

I know something that would make good music for it:

[pumpkajelly]

The danger is still present, in your time, as it was in ours.

[tardxsblues]

Because you and Mr. Fell don't ever talk to each other. We talk all the time. We've been talking for millions of years. Bla-bla-bla-bla-bla-bla-bla-bla-bla. I say something brilliant, and he says something unintentionally funny back. It's great. You never say what you're really thinking.

[ministarfruit]

look alive, 2025! femslash february prompt list drop, hot and fresh from the oven. sorry it's late everybody but we are yuri-ing out this year again don't worry ✌️

full prompt list under the cut!

FEMSLASH FEBRUARY 2025 (THEME: CHECKLIST)

I want you to:

See me

Heal me

Kiss me

Hate me

Kill me

Love me

Hold me

Leave me

Feed me

Trust me

Be me

Find me

Treat me

Save me

Please:

Forget me

Ruin me

Marry me

Remember me

Sing with me

Dance with me

Bring me to life

Trick me

Fight me

Understand me

Lie to me

Sit with me

Be here for me

Be mine

For anyone clicking into this who is not aware, Femslash February is a month of creating content of women loving women! Anything can be made for any day and there are no restrictions as long as it's sapphic. Please make sure to tag warnings and R18 content appropriately. That's all! Thank you! See you February!

[starry-bi-sky]

on a completely separate note; shizun luo binghe with a disciple shen yuan who fell into the abyss??? *thinks about LBH canonically stealing SQQ's corpse for 5 years* he'd hallucinate i think. like, like visual and audial hallucinations.

Keeps thinking he's seeing SQQ in the corner of his eyes, or wandering between the trees, amongst a group of disciples. Thinks he hears him calling for him, but its just the wind or another disciple.

Gets Xiu Ya reforged but patently fucking refuses to make a sword mound. Because his disciple Is Not Dead :))) There was No Body. He's Not Dead. And If You keep Insisting That He Is, He's Gonna Skewer You :). He's holding onto Xiu Ya so he can return his most favored disciple's sword when he returns. It's on his hip right next to Zheng Yang where it's supposed to be.

Also this motherfucker?? does not sleep btw. He has the image of SQQ, wide eyed and hysterical and standing at the mouth of the abyss burned into his fucking eyelids. Can't use the dreamscape to escape it either because he keeps trying to save him and either he does and it's an incredibly cruel trick to wake up to, or he doesn't and he gets his heart broken in several different pieces again.

There is no convincing this man that Shen Qingqiu is dead. Absolutely nothing at all. He is buried so deep in denial that moles would be jealous of how deep he is. He keeps making tea for two in the bamboo house only to remember that it's just him. SQQ's fans are hiding everywhere, little reminders of his presence. He goes to wake up SQQ on the mornings he sleeps in-- only to find the room empty.

[kyra45]

Scammer pretending to be Palestinian v5

This post is intended to be a reference to check on when you get an ask that looks suspicious and you want to be sure it’s not a scam account. Asks from blogs with GoFundMe links are not scam accounts so you won’t find them on this list. Accounts who are listed here are scams. For more information, please read this post.

As of 7/13/2024, here is the currently known scam accounts impersonating Palestinians needing aid. Here is a list of commonly used names for these scams as the post would be too long if I included them. Please don’t donate to any blog that’s here and warn anyone sharing their posts.

thoughtfulpersonpersona | karldrogo2 | gaziianaliifatmaah | supportdeeanaah |

—

None of these accounts are verified as real, are vetted as real, or have been confirmed as real no matter what their post tells you. If you want a list of verified fundraisers, please check out this post. Searching usernames should also help with seeing if someone has already been verified but please be aware that it takes time.

These scammers listed above are taking their posts from real Palestinian fundraisers and passing it off as theirs without linking to the real one. They make names to impersonate actual people and always use a donation pool link for their posts often hiding it behind a linktree link passing it off as a GoFundMe link. These scammers are not on any of the masterlists regarding verified fundraisers if you search.

If you search the scammers asks, you’ll usually find they’ve been at this for almost 3 months now and have been reusing the same asks since with very few changes.

To report scam posts: click the three “…” then select Report -> Something else -> Unlawful uses or content -> Phishing and explain how the account is not legitimate.

[mita-vittua-olivia]

was about to go to sleep, remembered this parallel. rip hammer you will always be famous