#(( people have been nothing but kind to me ))

[idolomantises]

I was just complaining about Dandadan fans being weirdly against shipping but after seeing the BNHA fandom's behavior uh. i get it now.

[navree]

Incorrect, the fact that Biden has dropped out and a candidate with history of supporting medicare for all and being more receptive to a ceasefire in the I/P conflict has made me go from "I cannot morally support the Democratic nominee" to "I am voting for the Democratic nominee despite the fact she isn't perfect in every respect." I'm really happy this played out. The Dems for the most part abandoned the old Obama platform and it feels like its possible an actual progressive agenda could come to pass in my lifetime.

Kamala 2024!

If you weren't going to vote Democratic in this election before Biden dropped out you're a dorkass loser who does not care about any of the issues you're yammering about here and also a fundamentally bad person, and I hope you get run over by a bus.

But you got one thing right in all of this gibberish, Kamala 2024.

[vaguely-concerned]

seeing people claim that lucanis is 'bad representation' is hilarious to me because in so many ways he's really the closest anything has ever gotten to capturing my own personal experience. sorry for being bad real life queer and mental health/neurodiversity representation folks 😔 I'll take time to reflect and do some work on myself and try to do better in the future

[hazel2468]

"UWU op defends Israel UWU"-

Have I not made it clear enough what I think of the Israeli government? Have I not made it clear enough that what infuriates me the MOST about all of this shit going on is that neither government gives a damn and civilians will CONTINUE to die because Hamas and Netanyahu are cranking that war machine for their own benefit? Have I not made it clear that I think what the Israeli government is doing is fucking horrific, a war crime, murder, a violation of human rights?

Why do I even need to MAKE that clear? Why is it that you can talk about LITERALLY anything else, any other country, and people don't rush to fucking accuse you of personally supporting the government when you discuss the wrongs committed against a people, but the SECOND you're a Jew you have to justify your stance about Israel?

Why is it that I cannot even be angry about the slaughter of MY FUCKING PEOPLE. Innocents. Civilians. Fucking CHILDREN. The slaughter of the Palestinian people. Innocents. Civilians. FUCKING CHILDREN.

Without one of you absolute fucking monsters deciding to slap some shit on an unrelated post about how "uwu op defends an apartheid state just ignore that"? Do you have to make it part of EVERYTHING I do? Do you consider everything I put out there tainted somehow because I don't support your joy, your cheering, your unrestrained GLEE at the murder of Jews? Do I need to publish a fucking thesis on my stance on Israel, Palestine, and their respective governments like a fucking disclaimer any time I want to talk about myself, my oppression, my experience as a Jew, or a disabled person, or a queer person, because you fuckers cannot for five seconds be NORMAL about Jews?

To decide to slap something about Israel and Palestine on a post I made about MY oppression, about how people will oppress you no matter who you actually are- it all depends who they think you are. It's a bit ironic, isn't it? Doesn't QUITE fit, but it's funny that someone would read that post, agree with it, and then think "Ah yes, THIS is the place to put some tags about how OP, a Jew who has been reeling for the last couple of weeks about the violence, who has been checking on their Israeli friends every day to make sure they aren't fucking dead, who is dealing with vicious antisemitism from people who they thought were friends, who watched as the people claiming to be progressive supporters of human rights on this hellsite and others OVERWHELMINGLY reply to the murder of their people with good they deserved it fuck you, is CLEARLY a defender of an apartheid state and that makes them a bad person because something something I don't know what nuance tastes like and I am a bigoted ass."

I am TIRED.

[robindaydream]

Pyromancers

[fossilizedhysterics]

guess who finished tlok tonight and immediately had this come to him in a vision!!!!

[arom-antix]

Hey, just wanted to reach out to say that I found you pointing out and calling this person was really great and you shouldn't have apologized. It was incredibly true what you said, and to be honest it seems out of touch with the reality of a great deal of the japanese fandom, the nuances and their culture. Also, it was as you pointed out, extreme and may I say rude. I want to mention too that the way it was written, as if entitled of the knowledge and the 'explanation' made it all worse in context of the 'fucked up'. The original poster always gets away by using the 'well-written academic'' statement of their 'metas' as an excuse to do or say and make everyone else agree and if not, uses victim narrative and discourses exactly selecting wording for people to agree on it or feel bad.

I don't know if they tagging you in the way they did made you reblog and apologizing/backing up, but no one thought bad about you pointing it out. On the contrary, a lot of people had been bullied and discriminated by this person when they called them out/disagreed going onto lenghts of sending their friends to harass people, and the other persons can't even defend themselves because they are effectively blocked. To quite a few people in the fandom has been done, even accusing them as 'acephobes' (when they're not) or even Nazis by spreading lies. So yeah, I just wanted to say that. I think you were right to call them out publicly.

Thank you very much for this ask. To be completely honest I agree with everything you said here and don't actually feel bad about pointing anything out. I mainly apologised because I didn't want any potentially poor phrasing from my side to cause unnecessary hostility and because I myself have gripes with this person's behaviour but didn't want to cause a scene.

My honest opinion is that they have a serious issue with taking accountability for their own mistakes and highly overestimate their own intellect. If you're reading this, @thegirlwhorideslikeasamurai, sorry if I seem harsh, but it's true. I saw your post lamenting how you're the only academic meta writer / fan in the fandom and I didn't interact then because I honestly do not care enough to start that drama but with the information Blonndiec has just given me, I think it's necessary that someone calls you out.

You're not an academic. You're not beyond the mental capabilities of other fans. You're actually incredibly childish in your metas and analyses and I am not kidding when I say that I was halfheartedly writing essays more academic than every analysis I've seen from you when I was barely a teenager. I don't know how old you are and I frankly don't care. You're not as clever as you think you are.

Also, don't think I didn't notice that you didn't reblog my correction (link here to my correction and here to their "response" for those who didn't see that exchange) of your post so that you could control what your followers saw of the exchange. You're the opposite of an academic. You control information to tailor the narrative, you don't cite your sources properly if at all, you don't format your posts in anything close to how an academic analysis would be, you make unbased claims, you reference posts and canon material without in any way indicating where that information is from, you reference your own (equally unacademic) metas and your conclusions from them without indicating what post it's from or that it's your own theory this new one is based on and instead present it as a common fact, and I could go on and on and on. Your posts are also riddled with logical fallacies and you talk in absolutes and opinions when there's no canon basis to claim such things. I'm sorry, but that's not academic in the slightest.

To be clear, you don't have to be an academic to post on the Internet. You don't have to be anything at all. You could up front be a genuine idiot with no remorse and that's fine. But when you claim to be an academic and also put down the rest of the fandom for not being on your level, you have to be able to back that up. It'd still make you sound like a prick but at least your arrogance would have a basis. It currently does not.

I haven't personally seen the discussions that Blonndiec is referencing and I'm not going to claim anything definitive (because that would be unacademic of me, take notes) but if what they're saying is true and did happen as described, which I have empirical, if anecdotal, evidence to believe could very well be (a friend of mine has personally been blocked by you after they criticised you without actually mentioning your name which I of course can't prove is the reason for the block but the timing is awfully convenient), you should know that you should be ashamed of yourself.

If there's context missing, feel free to enlighten me and call out any incorrect accusations. You have every right to defend yourself. However, I encourage you to cite your sources since you're such an academic. If you don't, then it's just your word against Blonndiec and anyone else who might comment's word and that doesn't prove anything. Don't misunderstand, acephobia and nazi rhetoric should absolutely be called out but only if it's actually happening. False accusations can ruin lives. I hope you know that.

I'm not a fan of calling people out publicly and, again, thank you for this ask, Blonndiec. But considering many of the issues I've personally seen and those I've been informed of by second hand sources were posted publically, I don't really feel bad about calling this out. I could do a full breakdown of just the insulting "academic" comments alone and how there's no academia to be found in said academic metas and, Samurai, if you give me reason to, I will show exactly what I mean point by point (and academically just to give you an example of even low level academia).

If you respond to this, do it in a reblog. That's what a real academic would do. If I'm wrong and you can prove it, you'd have no reason to not show my post in your rebuttal. If I'm right, you'd have every reason to be upfront about your mistakes and how you intend to rectify them. There's nothing wrong with being wrong but there's a lot wrong with refusing to admit to it in a way that lets others peer review you (academic thing, look it up) and come to their own conclusions about the situation. That's what you did when you just @'ed me instead of reblogging my response. A true academic wouldn't hide a peer review. You'd know that if you were one.

I swing in many academic spaces and yet that doesn't make me any kind of expert and I don't claim to be one because I'm not. But since you want to be one so badly, reblog this with a response and show us all how smart you are. I'm dying to know what your academic take on this is.

[the---hermit]

oral exam tips

I have at least one other post on exam tips, but they were mainly focused on giving tips on history exams. To me oral exams in academia have been the norm since high school, but I know that in other countries that might no be the case, so I decided to write down a list of advices coming from someone who is quite used to this kind of tests.

If you aren't used to having oral exams, you might need to change your study method, or at least add a few steps. I recently made a post entirely dedicated to my study method, which might be useful for this, but what I suggest is to add a step in which you review things out loud. What I would do is to just sit down with your notes or your materials and pretend to give a lecture on everything. Even better if you have a friend or family member to listen to you, because by having an active listener you will be forced to not skip stuff and have clear explainations, and they might ask you questions or clarifications. Those are always good because that might happen during the exam as well, but also it will help you memorizing those things. I recommend reviewing out loud multiple times. This way you will get more comfortable with the exposition of the topics you will be tested on, and you'll have a chance to find your own "voice".

by finding your own voice I mean finding a good compromise between using your own words to explain things, while still using the correct specific vocabulary of whatever topic you'll be tested on. This is fundamental. You are not there to recite a poem by heart, you are there to show you have understood the topic, that you sat with it and made it yours. You have to show you know how to clearly explain things but also reflect on it, making links with other things, and so on. At the same time there's some academic and specific vocabulary you want to include, because you are not in fact discussing the topic with a friend. So practicing out loud before the exam is good to find a good compromise between these two things.

I kind of mentioned it already, but it is absolutely fundamental to show that you understood the topic and not just memorized it. Whatever you do do not learn things by heart. It's better to be slightly insicure about a specific date, than to repeat your book word by word. And if you practice enough, and are comfortable enough with the informations in general believe me you can work around those things you can't remember perfectly well as you are being tested. Moreover your mark on the exam will be much higher than if you just learn things by heart.

on the very delicate topic of not remembering something specific you have been asked. Don't panic, you can still kind of save it. Whatever happens do not stay silent. There are several things you can do depending on whatever the question is, and I will later tell you a very specific example of something that happened to me. As I said do not panic, surely you will remember about some context on the topic so start by talking about that. As you are giving the context you might start to remember additionals informations, or you might build up enough informations to be able to logically guess whatever you are not remembering correctly. If you are half sure about something go for it, even if it's the wrong info if you contextualise it well enough you'll show you knew about that and it might just be read as a slip of you confusing two things. Now there might be situations in which the question is so direct that you can't do much, it happened to me once during my Greek history exam. I was asked the specific date of an event, and I could not for the love of the gods remember it. You know what I did? I told the professor, I cann't rememebr the exact date, but giving certain informations (that I then explained) I can tell you it was more or less in this half of this century. What I did was admit a fault, but while doing that I showed her that I knew what we were talking about it, I had enough informations on the matter to logically place it on the chronological line and contextualize it, and showed her that I can in fact work with the informations I studied. And at the end of my exam the professor complimented me on those exact things, saying she appreciated seeing me use my brain instead of midlessly memorizing informations I didn't understand.

So whatever happens do not stay silent. Anything is better than that.

Another potentially bad thing that might happen, and believe me it happened to me multiple times, is panicking so bad that you cannot get the words out, or confuse things. You know what happened everytime I found myself in that situation? The professor clearly saw me panicking, and told me to calm down, wait a couple of minutes, get my ideas in order and try again. And I got good grrades despite that in the end. You are under a lot of pressure, because you are giving an exam, and you have to be quick and ready instead of being able to reflect like with a written exam. Professors know that, and they keep it in mind, and they can tell when you are mixing things up because you are nervous, and not because you don't know things. I once had a professor look at me in the eye after i mixed up numbers on two dates twice in a row, and told me I know you know them take two deep breaths and try again. And I did. I have so many personal stories from my previous degree in which professors saw I was nervous and told me that it was okay I just needed to take a minute and breathe, and honestly that was exactly it. It was okay and I really needed to breathe, and then the exam when well.

The best tip I can give on answering questions is to balance the actual answer of the question with additional informations. You want to give context and add more infos to whatever has been asked to you, but you should also try not to lose focus on what was being asked. My personal way of doing this is to structure the answer in three parts: 1. general context that works as an introduction to the actual direct answer 2. the actual answer 3. further additions like more context, comparaisons and links with other topics or informations you had to study. This way you show off you know things, you make sure to show the professor you are not just rambling because you don't know the answer, and finally show you are comfortable enough with the informations to reflect on them and link them to other things. Ideally the professor will stop you while you are speaking, that in my experience is the best possible sign, because they are satisfied with your exposition and want to move onto other things.

So always build up on the answer to the question you have been asked. Never stop at just the information that serves as an aswer. You studied, it's your time to shine and make yourself proud.

Contextualizing your informations is absolutely fundamental no matter what, again because it shows you have a clear idea about what you are talking about. This can mean making a small introduction on the time and place, if you are an historian like me, or maybe give an introduction on the person you are talking about (whether they are an historical figure or a scholar you are talking about). Adding the little informations you weren't asked about is great. You are briefly mentioning an even and know the date? Add it in. Everything is a good addition.

Again I have definitely already mentioned in previous points but showing you are capable of reflect on the topics you are talking about is always a bonus. Make sure that when you are giving personal options or personal reflections you are stating this is your thought, but that is usually appreciated. After a good exposition of a topic you might even get the professor asking you your opinion on certain things. It happened to me multiple times, often I was asked to give an opinion of books I had to study for the exam, and that always prooved as an oportunity to add more informations and as I said show that I could make reflections of my own.

Last thing, that again kind of came out from other points, is that you want to show you are comfortable enough with the topic to be able to jump from one point to the other while reflecting on things or making comparaisons.

I am pretty sure I have forgotten something, but once again if you have specific questions I am happy to help, my inbox is always open. I know people who aren't used to oral exams are very scared of them, but as long as you try to approach it like a normal conversation on the topics you had to study, and you have practiced, things will be fine. To be quite honest with you after years of experience I'd say I very much prefer oral exams to written ones, because you can in a way shape the conversation and bring it to the topics you liked the most, know best. I hope this post was somewhat helpful to someone out there, and good luck if you are about to take an exam!

[lunarharp]

played dragon age 2...just simple scribbles

[kelocitta]

The last thing I'll say, and I'm saying it because it applies broadly- is that there is very rarely a perfect victim OR evil mastermind and everyone needs to get better at recognizing and responding to that fact. Victims of legitimate crimes or horrible acts can be aggressive, or bitter, or biased or a dozen things that make them 'unappealing' to listen too. They can have willfully exposed themselves to content or been in circles they really shouldn't have. They could have been given warning signs that they missed or outright ignored. They might exaggerate or misremember their claims. That does not mean they are no longer victims. If you completely missed the red flags and were taken advantage of- you were still taken advantage of. If you exposed yourself to harmful content that was upsetting or distressing, you were ultimately still exposed to harmful content. Maybe it is "your fault" for being there, but you were still there and it still happened. Especially in terms of online, its just shockingly very easy to end up in places where you are in danger of harm- and its shockingly easy to not notice that you may have put yourself in that position until its too late. If you want to be supportive of victims, you need to recognize that very often victims did things that were inappropriate themselves, put themselves in harmful situations, didn't back out when they should have, missed "obvious" signs... and are still a victim in the end. Likewise, abuse ranges from the intentional to the neglectful. Sometimes an abuser can even do both at once. People do harmful things completely on accident- even repeatedly. It can be mental illness or stress, it can be a dozen things- but yes sometimes people have patterns of behavior that are harmful and destructive that they either aren't aware of, in denial of, or don't get how bad they are about it. That does not erase the harm those behaviors cause. If you handle a situation poorly, it could just be that you handled it poorly- you didn't think through your actions or their implications. But from the receiving end, it doesn't matter how accidental it was, its going to often read as intentional, or a pattern, or whatever. And ultimately the harm is still done regardless of what it was. There is a world of difference between harm done intentionally and harm done through stupidity, neglect, or plain old mistake- but it not always easy to identify which is which- and harm is still done in the end. Sometimes people are harmed because someone saw an opportunity to do so, and sometimes they're harmed because no one stopped to question if it was even a risk. Both of those still ultimately result in someone getting hurt. The point of this is that if you are ever going to analyze situations critically you can not be looking for just "the good one" and "the bad one". You can't just weigh initial impressions on a scale and hope one side tips further and call it a day. Believing victims doesn't mean you need to throw caution to the wind, but likewise bad actors or misinformation doesn't mean your reaction should be that there couldn't possibly be victims. Be very mindful of how you interact in situations where someone was potentially hurt. Being 'critical' can easily boil over into disregard for harm- both the harm the involved might have done to each other and the harm you yourself do in how you respond to it.

[burst-of-iridescent]

not to beat the "sokka's misogyny" disk horse even further into the ground, but while i agree with the take that sokka being sexist logically doesn't make sense, i would go further to say that the water tribes themselves being sexist is both illogical and thematically contradictory.

the flaws of each nation in atla have always been linked to their element, and specifically what those elements represent. fire is the element of power; power, left unchecked, leads to imperialism and authoritarianism. earth is the element of substance and stability; stability, prioritized too highly, creates and justifies the rigid class system and rampant corruption of ba sing se. air is the element of freedom; freedom, taken too far, becomes irresponsibility and abandonment.

meanwhile, water is the element of change... therefore the water tribes cling to antiquated ideas about gender roles instead of adapting with the times (especially when the times involve a fucking war going on).

not only is this unrealistic, it also breaks the thematic pattern of the nations' flaws being virtues taken to extremes, and how this dovetails into the show's overall message about the importance of balance. if we're keeping with the pattern of virtue and vice being two sides of the same coin, then the flaw of the water tribes has to be related to change. and here is where some of the (badly executed) ideas in the comics and legend of korra could have come into play: change, left uncontrolled, can lead to progress... but at the cost of tradition and spirituality.

(imagine a nwt cut off from the world and forced to rely solely on itself, ingenuity and creativity flourishing out of sheer, desperate need. imagine a nwt where waterbending is nothing more than a tool, used to build and defend and maintain a fortress always at risk, its spiritual origins slowly lost to time. imagine a nwt more military than community, whose architecture and technology far exceed anything the world has ever seen, who look down upon their less advanced sister tribe, and see no need for the avatar - after all, where was he when they had no one but themselves for the last 100 years?

when warned that the fire nation is coming, they show no fear; they have held strong on their own for the last century, bolstered by their weapons and wits, and will continue to do so. you need the spirits, aang implores, and is met with derision, for there is no place for spirits in a society always chasing more, greater, better. the spirits have not helped us before, avatar. why would they now? we are all we need.

when the moon spirit falls, unprotected and forgotten in an abandoned, rundown spirit oasis - so do they.)

not only would this fit better thematically, it would also ensure that the nwt's flaw plays a role in its own downfall. where the fire nation's warmongering resulted in the poverty and suffering of its own people, and the earth kingdom's corruption led - at least in part - to the fall of ba sing se, the misogyny of the water tribes is never shown to negatively impact them in any way. the north isn't defeated by the fire nation because they relegated half the population to healing. the south doesn't suffer raids or lose their waterbenders because they (supposedly) didn't let women fight. this lack of narrative punishment means that - outside of a few girlboss moments for katara - the sexism of the nwt isn't significant to the overall story whatsoever.

furthermore, while the ba sing se arc last almosts half a season, and the fire nation's actions drive the entire show, this supposed systemic oppression of women shows up for one episode in the first season before disappearing entirely. pakku is reminded of his lost love, magically turns into a feminist, and somehow the entire tribe follows suit? no one else protests, not even the other students or the chief?

and yet, though there are still no female waterbenders other than katara, or agency for kanna in her relationship, or any indication that women stopped being forcibly betrothed - the entire issue is simply swept under the rug and never brought up ever again in the show. i understand this was a children's cartoon made in 2005, and that even having female characters openly speak about and challenge misogyny was a radical feat for the time and genre, but the reality of patriarchy is that it's structural, sustained and immensely difficult to resist - if the show was going to depict that resistance, it should have done so with greater depth and nuance, as it did for many of the other difficult topics it tackled.

ultimately, handwaving misogyny away like it never existed is far more disrespectful to katara's character, her fight against injustice, and the girls who saw themselves in her, than simply toning it down or removing it could ever be.

[hero-of-the-wolf]

listen hear me out—

what if eow takes place after the original loz?

[delilahmidnight]

Bro genuinely all they have to do now is have Lisa say something about being Carla's safe place or safe space (and mean it) and that is it, I will literally combust and shatter into a million fragments of lesbian transcendence. You will not be able to kill me in any way that matters

[thedreadvampy]

sometimes I forget that my experience has been. um. not 'your experiences are not universal' vibes but more like 'your experiences are EXTREMELY atypical'

[starryalpacasstuff]

LITBC ep 3 & 4: When they're homophobic but you love them

It took me a while to finally watch the third and fourth episodes because it's been diwali season, but having finally watched them I think I can quite confidently say that this part will probably end up as my favourite of the four. I've been having a really hard time trying to figure out how to express my feelings about this episode, because frankly I'm not even sure what those feelings are myself.

I think, surprisingly enough, this section actually hit me harder in the show than it did in the book. The book definitely had more teeth to it and felt far darker than the show, and this may seem counterintuitive, but I think it was because the show continues to be more grounded in the present that the story that it felt more visceral. As a few people have already noted, in the book the reader not only follows only Young's perspective, but there's also Young's bitter hindsight that colours his retelling of the story. Even when he acknowledges how enamoured he used to be with Hyung, it's again accompanied by his resentful commentary. In contrast, with the show we experience Go Young's emotions right along with him: love, confusion, disappointment, desperation, heartbreak, and everything in between. And as @lurkingshan notes here, this makes it all the more brutal when it all comes crashing down. Something else is that, while these episodes did not afford Go Young's mother and Young-soo the same sympathy the previous episodes did for Mi Ae and Nam Gyu, it's true that the wider lens and absence of Young's bitter monologue helped me, as the audience��how do I say this—see the two characters as their own people rather than just characters in Go Young's story. It emphasizes the greyness of morality in the characters. Young-soo is no doubt a bastard, but he's also a product of the environment he was raised in, and everything about him is a cry for help; help he will not accept. And Go Young's mother is an overbearing religious zealot who, when she realized that she couldn't 'fix' her son, resolved to pretend as though her son wasn't gay for the rest of her life; a social contract I am intimately familiar with. But she's also a single mother who braved a patriarchal society to bring up her son and she loves him in ways she will never express to him. The grey morality of the characters allows the audience to see why Go Young loved them and in turn, feel their loss along with him. I feel incomprehensibly sad when I think of the way both characters ruined their relationships with Go Young because they couldn't (wouldn't?) understand. Because he loved them, even though they were homophobic, but their relationships could never be the same after he knew.

Being constantly surrounded by homophobia is suffocating and exhausting, and it's something I know well. Even when it's not being discussed, sometimes just the knowledge of the way the people around you all hate 'people like you' can be incredibly overwhelming; it weighs you down. Go Young having to work through the complexities of loving people who were homophobic, people who hated an integral part of him felt so real to me because it's real life for me. Him going back to Young-soo over and over again even when he was rapidly becoming aware of Young-soo's beliefs. The quiet way in which both mother and son skirt around his sexuality. His brief happiness when he sees the scrapbook his mother made, and the photo that she returned to him. I'm just repeating the same words over and over now but the emotions felt so visceral; it made me feel seen. Go Young seemed so tired whenever he was around his mother and I don't think I need to say anything about how Young-soo's parting words affected him. It's something that hit way too close to home for me; that dawning realization that even more of your world stands against a core part of you than you'd thought, and that you love it anyways.

[mamawasatesttube]

i wish it wasn't so normal for people to complain about unfinished wips or fics that take a long time to update. because sometimes i think i have a really fun idea for a fic but it'd take a while for me to write, and i like talking about my work as i do it and i don't like writing entire fics over like 20k without sharing, because i lose steam. so if i were to write and post that cool fic idea, it'd be as a wip. and then i think about all the people who just refuse to engage with wips, or all the other people who would just go "update pls" all the time, and of how people only really comment in the first 24 hours something is posted and then it's lost to obscurity, and then i just go "actually whats the point in going through the effort writing this out? i'll just daydream about it now and then and be done with it." and then i don't write it. alas!