#*erases your mind*

[thapunqueen]

THEY ARE CRASHING THE FREESIDE PRIDE PARADE !!!!!!!!!!!!

[unganseylike]

thought of the day: the way that everyone forgets noah and yet will be forever influenced by his presence in their lives is kinda appropriate for TRC as a coming of age story. do any of us truly, consciously know each person, event, or place that shaped us into the people we are today? though our consciousness forgets, their memory is inseparable from the way we go about life.

[animentality]

kinda funny how blowjobs are seen as an act of submission. like the person performing them is always seen as meek and yielding.

as if the receiver is not entirely at their mercy in every way.

[sukibenders]

It's really tiring to see, when people are having discussions about Nettles and how integral her plot is, about how wrong with would be to give Rhaena that plot while ignoring/diminishing the one she originally had, about so many of the black characters are done dirty and disrespected in comparison to their treatment in the book (though they were white in the original text) to have all these necessary conversations, only to be met with responses "Oh, It's not bad/serious, you're just complaining/making things up" or about how grateful we should be to just have these characters, as we if don't have the right to critique how they are portrayed. Like, at this point, if you don't have anything of value to add to the conversation, then just stay out of it.

[rhymaes]

The Untamed, Eps. 19, 20 // Red, Chase Berggrun

[bright-eyes-strawberry-lies]

I love that every time Percy sees a blond-haired, blue-eyed boy he goes "Luke?!"

Someone on your mind, Percy? 😏

[6ey6ish]

I think dunmesh fans should be feared actually. I’ve read two or three farcille fics (most of them) where they’ve really sold me on cannibalism as a love language.

[lunarharp]

"Found out" set in kind of a made-up chapter where the girls are in trouble, or something.

[cinammonelles]

(guy who is normal about traveler abroad voice) hey man how's it going

[tweedfrog]

As a matter of fact let's talk about it. Why the fuck did Eloise punish Cressida Cowper more severely for pretending to be Lady Whistledown than she punished Penelope for ACTUALLY being Lady Whistledown. AND CONTINUING TO PUBLISH???? Like?????

[nikoisme]

Hold on this is oscar to me

[tremendously-crazy]

just finished the aj raffles short stories after like 13 hours straight of reading. (spoiler warning) why didn't anyone tell me of the pain I was to endure at the end. am I simply to bear this burden alone. raffles could just be happy and steal stuff with bunny forever but nooo. you just have to go to the freaking second boer war and get shot dead don't you. I can't do this anymore bruh. for a supposed Holmes counterpart you sure are stupid raffles. do you just want to see me suffer. OK. I should go to bed.

[opera-ghost]

everyone stop what you're doing and look at this blocking from the LND US tour

[avariceaside]

me: wow that episode was crazy. I need to listen to some music and think about this

The Crane Wives: Say it. If it’s over say it. You know I'm loyal to a fault. I will sit hеre waiting for the axe to fall

me:

[nic-coughlan]

i'm going to fucking kill myself

[kyliafanfiction]

I sometimes feel like characters who do truly monstrous things while also having been victims of some pretty insane shit themselves are sort of an exercise in empathy. Or at least, should be seen as such.

Like, in real life, if a person who has been horribly broken by their experiences and failed by society than proceeds to rape someone - it's hard to feel the justifiable sympathy/empathy for that person (without excusing their rape, never do that) because well, you can look at this actual human person they hurt, or worse, and it feels gross and disrespectful to the rape victim.

And this is understandable. (And applies to more than just rapists/rape victims of course, that's just the most visceral one and thus picked for that reason)

But a fictional rape victim is... fictional. You can't 'disrespect' their trauma, and while obviously rape/whatever else is real, and people may related to the rape victim and thus see your comments about the rapist also being a victim as somehow being about their experience...

Well, it's not.

Because the rapist here, didn't actually hurt a real person. Fictional characters are objects. They're objects that often grab us by the throat and refuse to leave our fucking heads, yes, but they're objects. They are tools used by writers to tell a story, and readers to tell a story.

And one of the things fictional characters are good for is allowing us to consider experiences we never had, and imagine ourselves in other circumstances and lives. (Also just fun and fascinating and interesting to watch their stories).

It's very easy to feel for the rape victim in fiction, and rightly so. That's Level 1 Empathy there. Granted, some people IRL fail that, but that's not really what we're talking about here.

Advanced Empathy, hard Empathy is feeling for the rapist. Not for the rape, of course, even if they feel guilt about it, but if someone really was failed on multiple levels and was broken and damaged and went through the sort of psychological wringer that would leave most of us here on tumblr catatonic - they do deserve the same Empathy any human (any person) who went through all that.

Even after they also do the bad thing, critically they still deserve Empathy. And that is fucking hard. I very often have a hard time feeling bad for truly awful people who also deserve empathy and sympathy, real and even fictional (despite all this, yeah, I'm not perfect on this) for what they (separately) went through.

It also becomes even harder when what they went through is utterly bound up with what they did. How what they went through and experiences is in part responsible for what they did - because they still made a choice. The circumstances may have left them not in their right mind, may have left them feeling without choice, may have driven them to things they normally might not think of or do, but they still chose to do that bad thing. And that's not okay. They still hurt someone.

And yet - one cannot remove the action from the circumstances. So you can still feel empathy, and elucidate all the factors and circumstances as to what led up to their choices and why, and it doesn't change that they did the horrible thing. The rape, or the murders, or whatever.

But circling back - with a fictional character... they didn't hurt a real person. There's no one who is real that suffered. The things the character did IRL are bad because they hurt real people.

So you're not being disrespectful to the victim by feeling that empathy, or sympathy. By exploring the things that they were a victim for. Even by wanting to focus on those things - fictional characters should be compelling in all their aspects, if they're written well.

And yet, of course, if you do that empathy and do talk about what the bad person went through and all that context, people come at you. They call you evil, just as bad as the (again, fictional) character, or they say that you're treading dangerously close to the arguments people use to defend the real people who do these things in real life. Or you're disrespecting all the victims of these crimes IRL. Especially of course, if the person coming at you has a reason this comes close to home.

But again - fictional.

In an ideal world, we'd all feel sympathy and empathy when it's called for, regardless of what the person did. Even the worst most monstrous people deserve human treatment in prison. And if you don't have empathy, that's hard. Even if you do have empathy, that's hard.

So if you look at a fictional character (who doesn't hurt a real person by virtue of being fictional) that does horrible, vile things, but went through so much, and you still can't empathize or sympathize with them... I mean, it doesn't make you a bad person, not even close, this is still fiction, and there's people I should empathize with in fiction that I don't, but...

It's still a failure of your ability to be empathetic. And we're all humans. We're all failing at that, among other things, all the time. But... it's good to be aware of that. at least?

At the very least, bear that in mind when other people are talking about that context, and that victimization. And please, for the love of god, don't fucking pretend that the victimization didn't happen, that this person who did do terrible things (in fiction) suddenly didn't also (in fiction) experience awful shit, as if doing a bad thing erases all the bad things done to you.

Again - it doesn't necessarily make you a bad person, but like... the horrible state of prisons in our society is a real, actual problem. The way we as a society dehumanize people who do bad things is a real actual problem for a lot of reasons (not least because it creates an incentive for authority that wants to dehumanize a person or a group to expand the definition of 'did bad things' to make their dehumanization now acceptable, among other things).

So yeah. Fictional character who suffers but than also makes others suffer - that's a useful exercise in Empathy. And doing that doesn't make you or anyone else a bad person, or actually defending the sorts of crimes, IRL or Fictional, that this character did. Contextualizing is not whitewashing, empathy is not erasing, and humanizing is not disrespecting the victim(s).

So yeah, they fictional character did bad things. But there's more to them than that. And you can say but and talk about what comes after but without disrespecting the fictional victim. Because the fictional victim... is just as fictional. Just as not real.

Is it possible for this to end up being taken too far? Yes. But that's a reason to be mindful of yourself when it comes to real people, not to never do it. And when it comes to fictional people - again, fictional. Nobody was actually, really hurt.

(I really do want to make clear, before people read the tags, that this applies to all crimes these sorts of characters do, rape was just picked as the one to use as the example.)