#^ just went on an unhinged rant about two characters that literally only exist within the confines of one single discord channel

[nintendont2502]

chat I fear I may be losing it

[freifraufischer]

An interesting sports/politics observation:  

I’ve been following the dumpster fire at USAG for quite some time now and became deeply interested in following the sport of gymnastics in more than a 4 year fan way around the time that the Larry Nassar scandal broke.  

The post mortem on the US women’s gymnastics team results in Tokyo was honestly starting around Olympic trials in June.  The US women have never traveled much internationally for decades so they compete less than other international gymnasts.  The argument has been that the travel takes away from valuable training time.  What was little became none because of COVID and the bankruptcy filing of USAG to deal with the lawsuits arising from the abuse scandal.  

It was known that the US women were also being domestically over scored by judges at home.  Domestic overscoring is not unique to the US but most countries that have it also complete internationally so their athletes have a real sense of how international judges will evaluate their routines.  There have been alarm bells for at least three years that the US women were not going to get credit for elements and face deductions in international competition that they weren’t facing at home.  Just this year one of them was literally used in a pictorial example of a international judging document for something that should be deducted--the fact that current athletes are used this way is a whole other horrible kettle of fish.  I should add that the discovery that routines that were being scored highly in the US would fail at the olympics isn’t even new.  Famously the reigning world champion missed out on the all around final at the 2012 games because she wasn’t given credit for connections and series that were overlooked at home.

Now the job of bringing domestic meet scoring into line is on the national team staff and the job of advising and strategizing is that of the “High Performance Director” for the women’s program.  This is the job that was held (under the title National Team Coordinator) by Martha Karolyi with an iron fist before 2016.  She was replaced (after fits and starts) by a man named Tom Forrester.  Forrester’s defining qualities for the job have been that he is nice.  Literally the bar was that low.  He has demonstrated a rather alarming lack of knowledge about what international judges deduct for (after Junior World Championships he expressed surprise that they deducted for dance elements--something that happened again in Tokyo to US gymnasts), did not understand the Olympic selection criteria for individuals, and appeared to have a very very faulty understanding of the rights of athletes with an ongoing abuse complaint (more on that later).

He was relatively removed from the culture of high level elite coaching for the last few decades and the athletes considered him nice.  The last time he had been deeply involved in senior US gymnastics politics was the mid 1990s when several of his gymnasts were passed over for the 1996 Olympic Team because injured athletes were petitioned on to the team over those that competed at trials.  Mind you this was a time when the Olympic team had 7 members and the people petitioned on were the 1992 Olympic Silver Medalist Shannon Miller and 1995 National Champion Dominique Moceanu.  It would have been literally insane not to have them on the Olympic team.  But it has become apparent that Tom Forrester felt a great injustice was done to his athletes and the the worst part of US gymnastics team management was that Martha Karolyi picked favorites.  

This year he denied the petition of a former world champion to Olympic trials (she likely wouldn’t have made the team but her exclusion is... questionable) and after the fact justified it by saying she had failed to meet a criteria for the petition that he never told her existed.  At trials the team was chosen (by a committee that he had essentially full control over) took the top all around finishers in order of how they did at trials (as he would have liked them to have done in 1996).  This was in willful defiance that the format of the olympics now demands not all arounders but strategic use of team building for the best score possible.  The US did not bring the highest potential scoring team to the olympics because of one man’s wounded pride from 25 years ago.

And before you might be tempted to tell yourself he did this because he wanted to support the athletes let me tell you about the fact that he allowed a coach that was under investigation for abuse to come to a camp where one of the athletes that had filed the complaint against her was also in attendance.  His wife, who has a history of unhinged social media rants, claimed he didn’t have the authority to send home an athletes chosen coach.  In reality Louie Hernandez had the legal right not to have to be there with her.  That coach would later be banned for longer than anyone else has ever been banned in USAG history.

So in June anyone following the details of this knew that Tom’s strategy was entirely “we have Simone and so we will win.”  Because that kind of pressure and stress couldn’t possibly have any terrible consequences on an athlete.  Spoiler:  It did.  

People within the sport were warning about this before Simone Biles lost herself in the air during that vault in Tokyo.  The fact that we were all lucky not to watch one of the greatest athletes of a generation break her neck can not be overstated.  It was so scary that one of the most famously bitter angry and terrible human beings of Gymnastics that has been saying awful things about Biles for years kept telling Russian media that she made the right decision to pull out.  That was pigs flying territory.

Forrester left the athletes to face the press alone after the final.

So with that backdrop I want to give this observation:  Dominque Moceanu, an olympic gold medalist who has an abuse story so horrific with villains so cartonishly evil that if it was written as fiction the author would be told it was over the top, wrote a book about the culture of abuse in in the sport and USAG in 2008.  She was called insane, living on another planet, and apparently sent hundreds of emails by those within the sport that she was ungrateful for what her abusers had done for her (emails that she has apparently kept and I’m telling you I’d love to read more then the few I’ve seen).  Moceanu was a figure out of greek legend, Cassandra doomed to tell the truth and be called mad (and attention seeking).  In light of the fall of the Karolyis and the Nassar scandal Moceanu has become a more respected figure as someone that has been speaking out about abuse for a long time.  She has also been someone that other victims went to over the decades to talk to before they could come forward.  A weight that no one should have to bear.  

I had been joking that the only way people would start to trust USAG was honestly trying to reform was if they put someone like Moceanu in charge (Aly Raisman’s name is floated but even she points out that she’s not qualified).  Moceanu is.  But the old guard of the sport have spent two decades telling people that Moceanu is crazy.  I didn’t think she’d take the job and I didn’t think USAG would ever hire her.

But here is the interesting thing .... her social media presence radically changed character in the last three months.  Starting around the time of US Nationals and continuing though trials and the olympics between posts supporting team USA athletes and raising a voice to support Simone Biles and the need for a cultural change in the sport were digs at Tom Forrester and about the need for transparency in that job.  

And this:  “Would someone be kind enough to notify me if the U.S. women’s high performance coordinator position opens up? Asking for a friend.”  (x)  At the same time (literally the same day as one of those tweets) she launched a youtube channel that is essentially a political fluff piece about her as a change agent in gymnastics coaching.

She’s auditioning for that job.

There are a bunch of other interesting elements of her online behavior and some other telling notes about things she’s said ... but it’s interesting to notice something like that unfold.

[stina-is-a-punk-rocker]

stephen king’s ‘it’: a rant-review

Alternatively titled: an almost verbatim account of the 12-page rant I wrote in my diary after being driven to a catatonic rage by the 1100+ page monstrosity that was IT.

WARNINGS: spoilers, blood and gore, violence and general icky stuff, death, suicide, demeaning descriptions of women, both adults and underage, mentions of child pornography, my two brain cells trying to make me sense of this damn book

I fell in hate with IT the way you fall asleep; slowly, then all at once. The beginning reeled me in- it was great, that perfect first sentence all writers strive for- it’s got a compelling start, and it gradually gathers momentum onwards. The writing’s good, nice diction, nice use of words, a bit too much exposition, but what’s a few hundred more pages of ultimately worthless crap if it keeps you engaged?

And then it starts to go downhill.

The book’s too long. I got really, really bored by around page 800, because the book was dragging on for way too long and there was no sign of it ending anytime soon. There’s so much extra crap you could’ve straight up cut out from the story and it wouldn’t’ve made any difference to the final outcome.

The back-and-forth between the past (1957) and the present (1985) was pretty interesting- I much preferred the past accounts to the present ones, admittedly.

There’s a fuckload of characters the book could’ve done without. Way too many people my lizard brain couldn’t keep track of; yeah, sure, you can include the people Pennywise made a meal of by name- but you could easily lop off a few pages’ worth descriptions of characters that don’t play a bigger role than becoming clown chow in the course of the story.

The Losers are pretty much your everyday group of misfits: you’ve got the ringleader William ‘Stuttering Bill’ Denbrough, Stan Uris, Richie Tozier, Ben Hanscom, Eddie Kaspbrak, Beverly Marsh and Mike Hanlon- alias the self-insert, the Jew, the guy who makes offensive jokes but gets away with it because ‘that’s just the way he is!’, one of the few characters in this entire book that I don’t want to punch the living daylights out of, the hypochondriac, the tiddies and the black guy.

It’s painfully obvious that Bill’s a self-insert. Everyone and their grandma know that the moment there’s a character in a book who’s an author, they’re going to be the self-insert. Middle-aged cis het white male author? Now, whoever could that possibly be based upon, Mr. King?

And hey, despite all my mediocrity, I’m guilty of doing the same. I’ll write a story about someone who likes to write, and then suddenly the character’s a woman with dark hair and brown eyes and horrible myopia.

And yet, there’s something about Bill that makes it impossible for me to like him. I liked him well enough as a kid; he had a very Peter Pan role with the rest of the lost boys + person with boobs, and everything he did was a bit too perfect (because Big Bill- yes, they really called him that- had ALL the answers) for me, but I’m willing to let that slide.

(I’m not, I’m really not. Please give me flawed characters, not Characters with One Singular Flaw Who Do Everything Else Perfectly.)

I don’t think calling Bill a Mary Sue would be too far of a stretch. Also, he cheated on his wife with Beverly- big surprise there, I called it way before it happened- and characters who cheat will never be redeemable for me.

And then we have Stanley Uris. It’s been a couple of months since I last read IT and I’ve already forgotten what greater purpose Stan served for the story. I might be wrong- remember, lizard brain, goldfish memory- but I honest to god cannot, for the life of me, remember what Stan meant for the plot. Except, well, to die a couple pages in.

(According to my quick Google search, his suicide was sacrificial. As a wise woman once said, “Wait… what.”)

Richie’s actually not a character I hate, despite what I said about him. He’s comic relief for the most part at the beginning, and there are loads of things he says that would immediately cause #RichieTozierIsOverParty to trend on Twitter had he existed in 2020, but he’s an interesting character all the same. He’s got some amount of depth to him, more personality outside of being just another kid who encountered Pennywise.

I have a soft spot for Ben, I’ll admit. I’ve been the Designated Ugly Fat Friend of every friend group I’ve been in, so maybe I’m a bit biased, but I find him a lot more likable than a lot of the other characters I encountered in the book.

About Eddie, I’m not actually sure what there is to write. I remember more about him than I do about poor Stan, but aside from Eddie marrying a woman who’s a caricature of his overprotective mother, there’s not much that comes to mind. I’ve heard that Eddie and Richie had some #moments- my dumbass didn’t notice while reading, I’ve read IT only once and I’m awful at reading between the lines- though the boys more or less ogled Beverly all the damn time (poor girl couldn’t even wear a pair of shorts, but I’ll get to her later) so I hadn’t really considered the possibility of them being anything other than Raging Heterosexuals.

Beverly is straight out of r/menwritingwomen- if I took a shot every time her breasts were brought up, I’d have passed out midway through the book. I find it interesting (no, I don’t, I find it demeaning) how every time there’s a female lead with ‘flaming red hair’ in a group with mostly men, she’s described as this fierce, bold, brave Bad Bitch whose actual Badness doesn’t get half as much as screen time as her boobs. And I get that Beverly’s attractive, you don’t have to constantly remind us that BEVERLY MARSH IS FUCKING HOT OKAY GET THAT IN YOUR HEAD SHE’S A GODDAMN SEX SYMBOL WITH HER FIERY HAIR AND VIRIDESCENT ORBS AND GIGANTIC ASS AND BOOBS SO BIG THEY MIGHT AS WELL BE CALLED UDDERS SHE’S THE HOTTEST WOMAN YOU CAN IMAGINE ONLY LIKE A GAZILLION TIMES HOTTER DON’T YOU DARE FORGET THAT BEVERLY MARSH IS HOT (DON’T FORGET THE GIGANTIC BOOBS).

I think we got that the first time around.

And the constant sexualization isn’t just adult Beverly. As if every man in her vicinity staring at her wasn’t enough to drive the point home, we are treated to delights the likes of eleven-year-old (!) Beverly’s ‘budding breasts’; ‘milky white skin of her flat stomach’; ‘her long, coltish legs’; ‘shorts barely long enough to cover her panties’ (which were yellow, in case you were wondering about the underwear choice of a literal child); amongst other lovely descriptions of someone who literally just passed the fifth grade. She’s sexualized by her own father, and I know those things happen in the real world, but what with all the sexualization we already have of Beverly, it doesn’t sit right with me. I think it’s just creepy and unnecessary.

Also, cis woman to cis woman out here, but those ‘sweet pains of womanhood’, am I right?

Mike’s the final one in the trinity of Losers I don’t hate with burning passion/completely forgot about. The fact that he has such a big role in the story but we don’t meet him properly until we’re hundreds of pages in confused me, but he’s an okay enough guy. He didn’t seem like too much of a Token to me, but maybe I missed it. His backstory’s pretty interesting, too. I would’ve preferred him as a main character- his interludes, though unnecessary and adding more weight to an already obese book, were intriguing- and I liked him better than Bill, sue me.

And then we have the Big Bad, Pennywise the Dancing Clown, It, whatever the fuck it is. After all the terror, the Teenage Werewolf, the Crawling Eye, finding out that ‘It’ was essentially a pregnant, mutant Aragog… I can’t be the only one who went, “That’s it? That’s It?”

After Pennywise being Its most common form, it was jaunting, but in a bad way, to find out that It was just some Daddy (Mommy?) Long Legs who was Fucking Shit Up. An invertebrate, a measly invertebrate, was Its ‘Earth Form’? Was there some symbolism, some subtext there that I missed before Pennywise embodied the spirit of the Other Mother from fucking Coraline?

Apparently not, according to yet another one of my quick Google searches. I tried to see if there was any sort of hidden meaning behind the cosmic clusterfuck in IT, but came up short. Maybe I watched too much BEN 10 in my Youth for aliens to scare me.

I’m gonna get really nitpicky here, but: judging by the huge fern forests the kids saw during the arrival of It, It must have arrived at some point in the Paleozoic Era. To my understanding, It is essentially a Boggart-Dementor hybrid; It manifests into your fears and feeds on that. But humans didn’t appear until the Cenozoic Era, if my memory serves me correct. How did It survive until then? Does It have the ability to feed off of animals and their fears? So many questions, Mr. King, and so little answers.

Pennywise was sinister enough as a killer clown. Giving It a completely different ‘final form’ was unnecessary. No one cares, Mr. King, just finish the damn book. Some ideas are best left unwritten.

Henry Bowers was genuinely one of the best-written antagonists I’ve ever read about. He evoked a visceral rage within me, but I was also downright terrified whenever he popped up, because that motherfucker was unhinged. He was even better of a villain than It, because It killed to survive. Henry was insane.

Also, Mr. King, too much blood. He really dumped it in bucketloads- the first few times were scary, but afterwards, whenever ‘dripping blood’, ‘pools of blood’, etc. came up, it felt contrived and like a tacky fairground horror house.

The Losers’ final battles with It (both as children and as adults) confused me. Maybe I’m too much of a simple-minded fool because some of that cosmic galactic science-fiction bullshit went right over my head. And I don’t mean grazing the top of my hair, I mean several thousand miles above it.

I won’t go too deep into it because I’m still not sure what happened exactly, but it came off like a last-minute addition to the book, because it just doesn’t fit in with the mood of the rest of the story. At most, I expected some contrived demonic exorcist bullshit on par with The Conjuring films- instead, I got some weird outer space (?) opera. I’m confused too, dude, but let’s just roll with it.

I didn’t get the metaphorical tongue-biting; I could only imagine a repulsive French kiss. Who the fuck was the turtle? Why did it choke on its own vomit? What were the deadlights? What the fuck went on in those last few scenes? Am I just stupid- don’t answer that.

And then we have The Scene. The biggest fucking yikes I’ve ever yiked. I’ve read my fair share of fanfiction with scenes of questionable morality, but this was just… ugh.

It’s child pornography, that’s all there is to it. I refuse to believe that Stephen King ‘didn’t think too much of it’ while writing, and I’m disgusted by people who say, ‘it’s just one scene, it’s not a big deal’. That’s easily the worst thing I’ve ever read in a published book, and it amazes me I the worst kind of way when I see people who think it’s excusable. It’s not, it’s really not.

For the people I’ve seen arguing that ‘it’s just a couple of paragraphs’… that doesn’t erase the fact that it happened. You might argue that it has some deep metaphorical connotations about ‘the Losers growing up’ and ‘Beverly taking her sexuality into her own hands’… they’re eleven, you cunt. They’re literal fucking children. Sure, they’ve been through crap no one, not even adults, have been through. And that sucks. But how does that justify an orgy between ELEVEN YEAR OLDS?

And we get a nice little tidbit about the boys’ dick sizes; thank you, Mr. King, I really wanted to know which fifth grader had the biggest penis. The constant sexualization of child-Beverly was bad enough without that scene- that was just the nail in the coffin.

To sum it up: the writing’s good, the pacing’s geriatric, the characters are horrible, the story’s meh, and I’ll probably never read it unless I’m at gunpoint. On second thought, maybe not even then. Stephen King can suck my dick.

[tundrainafrica]

Im honestly so done with aot fandom wars really. I now let people spew whatever shit they want. It gets toxic in the end. I started hating so many characters because of this irritating fandom till I realized that a bunch of teenagers dont have the right to steal my love for this story away from me. Theyre so ridiculous really it looks like a bunch of kids decided to watch AOT and miss the point entirely. Yams wrote a beautiful story that gets more interesting when you reread it. I wasnt even aware of shipping wars till I finished the manga only to realize its hellfire here. I just assumed oh Erwin loved Marry but chose the corps how sad. Shadis had a thing for Carla. Bittersweet. Oh Ymir and Historia loved each other. Tragic. Reiner is a historia simp great. Oh Levi and Hanji are closeted lovers who just cant accept they're into each other. And thats it. But I went online just to see wow manga discussions yaaay and I ran into middle school children shipping Levi with Eren/Mikasa I mean are you ok? Are you not unhinged? Do you need therapy? Seriously guys wtf? Levi/Erwin? WTF? They're literally brothers wtf? Hange/Moblit, WTF? Are you even aware of the concept of friendship and loyalty that runs in the army? Do you think everyone in the army is in love with each other wtf is this logic Im sorry Im so done with this fandom. AOT deserved better fans who'd appreciate the story and its depth. Apart from a few plotholes that made no sense. (Especially hanji's useless fking death, dude she could've lived ok its so unfair. Anyways) I also can't stand it when people start making Yuri and Yaoi ships of two clearly straight characters. I don't mind if you ship characters within a show that have some sort of legitimacy FROM THE SOURCE MATERIAL. But literally changing everything about characters just so they can fit your idea of a stupid ship is pathetic. A character is so much more than someone you ship with someone. Grow tf really.

Anyways, I just wanted to rant really. Im so sick of this fandom and the toxicity it holds. And sadly its just growing.

Hi anon,

Feel free to rant about it here haha. Given what's been happening recently and yeah even before that, I have seen a lot of toxic parts of this fandom. Stuff which make me wonder if people actually have lives outside the fandom because the amount of effort people go to just to be angry is just amazing.

There are parts I don't agree with though. Personally, I just think that people can ship whatever they want, they can hc whatever they want, they can write whatever they want, they can draw whatever they want.

Like I'm not a fan of other ships in AOT, as much as I am of Levihan but what just irks me about the overall fandom is this need to police everything and this need to push preferences on other people.

Fiction is powerful. Fiction can be a reflection of reality but a lot of people like to use their own strict preferences as some means of putting themselves in a higher plain of moral existence. Lmao, news flash, the best determinant of how 'moral' someone is is for one, how they treat others and how they navigate morally gray situations.

A person’s fandom preferences is not a good indicator of their moral compass.

And I just hate this general need to attack Levihan and the Levihan fans just because one has other preferences, attack peoples favorite tropes or hcs just one has different 'favorites.'

Let's just stay in our own backyards and just enjoy our own food??