#Authentic Pro

[thethiefandtheairbender]

my most underrated Kataang take is, I think, the inclusion of Katara's epiphany in The Fortune Teller at all. We've talked ourselves hoarse about how it's the clear turning point in how she consciously thinks of Aang (I will always mandate that she was just unknowingly down bad since the pilot because Look at her behaviour dear god) and how it's important that she has this epiphany even after knowing Aunt Wu's predictions 'aren't real' or necessarily set in stone.

What I want to talk about is why I think it's important that THIS is the moment she sees Aang in a new light amid his previous attempts to have her think of him 'differently' than she did at the beginning of the episode.

When Aang is being sweet to her (making her a woven accidental-betrothal necklace that she happily accepts), Katara is appreciative and responsive, but still says "he's just a good friend, a sweet little guy, just like Momo".

When Aang tries to flirt with her under Sokka's aloof guise, it falls flat. When he tries to get her attention in general (and when having parallels with Meng), it likewise doesn't work.

Finally, he tries the flower but it falls into the lava (symoblism, anyone?) and they have bigger things to deal with, like making sure the town isn't completely wiped out by the volcano. It's also worth noting that after Aang's conversation with Meng:

He never actively tries pursuing or wooing Katara in the same way. He's still kind towards and supportive toward her, of course. He, at some point (probably after the 2nd cheek or third cheek kiss) eventually starts to think (understandably) that Katara has feelings for him. But as of The Fortune Teller, he's stopped trying to have her see him in a new light or do a big romantic gesture.

And that's exactly when she does, consciously, fall for him.

Not when he's trying to woo her in failed, false personas, not when he's being his sweet romantic self, but when he's being the most himself all episode: Aang, "the bravest person [she] knows, who's done nothing but help people and save lives" since she met him (1x12).

He's not paying attention, he's not trying to impress her. He's just being a good, determined Avatar. A good, helpful person. A powerful bender, completely in control of himself and his element. Being himself.

Her Aang.

[bright-side20]

I'll never get over the fact that Elain is actually being treated like Blodeuwedd by a part of the fandom "Lulu deserves to be happy" etc.. , and it's just a further confirmation of this myth being the retelling of her story.

[stardestroyer81]

In the mid-1980s, animated adaptations of arcade games were commonplace— for example, Hanna Barbera's Pac-Man or Saturday Supercade's Q*Bert. Both of these shows, for lack of a better term, 'Americanize' the designs of the titular characters, so I got to thinking...

"What would a mid-1980s cartoon based off Rascal look like?"

Seeing as I've had prior experience in drawing faux animation cels, I decided to put that talent to the test and whip up not only a cel drawing but also a painted background for a scene for a hypothetical 1985 Rascal cartoon! 🍬🧡💙🧡🍬

(You can get a print of both the standalone cel as well as the cel overlaid on top of the painted background over on my RedBubble store!)

[v-is-for-vivienne]

"endos just make me uncomfortable" ain't the neutral stance some of y'all think it is. if we don't tolerate "otherkin makes me uncomfortable" or "x group of trans people make me uncomfortable" or "gay people make me uncomfortable" why do we tolerate this? those are people, with an identity they likely did not choose and would be rid of* in an instant if they could to get rid of the hate they receive for it. living, breathing people, with lives, who vary, and have different opinions and personalities, and many of which are indistinguishable from a traumagenic system if you actually spoke to them for a minute, especially without knowing.

endos do not make you uncomfortable, the idea of them do. I have a hard time believing any of you have ever spoken to or even seen one outside of the context of the content used to hurt them. shut up about being neutral and "just uncomfortable". nothing neutral about it.

*the endogenic or otherwise highly controversial origin, less so the being plural

[goldkirk]

When did the latest 1,000 of you follow me??? good lord hi and welcome, I should maybe pay attention to my notifications and activity page more 😭

[tulpagenic-culture-is]

First tulpa host make culture . Coming out little weird . But am happy ! Don't want change to be " normal " . ^ ^

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[the-enzyme]

I repainted my fan-art Ken Kaneki (MYou Bettina male) for the second time. I had enhanced the 1st face up I gave him previously. However, I decided to attempt painting him the way I learned to do 1:6 sculpts, form that one (15 episodes) tutorial I watched. I was impatient however, which I regret to no tomorrow. So, I was able to get most of the pigmented skin texture on there with mostly acrylics. Then I grew impatient, because I was taking too long (it was dumb of me, terribly so!). 

I am still super happy with how he looks despite using pastels and ruining the beautiful subtleness I had going on. I did take progress photos, but they ar more awful than these. I am of course heavily disappointed in my hair strokes -- my eyebrows and eyelashes are horrid. However, I am happy with how much more mature he appears, due to the heavy dark brows, so I’ll probably be keeping them for a while (before I start obsessing and repaint him again!). 

I need to get a new pointy brush, because I managed to already ruin the one I was using to paint my Sephiroth and Leon 1:6 head sculpts. Bettina has much, much larger eyes, and I was still not able to get not-so-clean, but kind of sharp lines like on Sephy. I wasn’t able to do a better job on Leon either, but he has tinier eyes and they were sculpted way off, so I kind of have to cheat with the way I shade his lower eyelid to make it look like they are a more accurate shape. Leaving me to having to pain the lashes on an area that is hard to do so (and yes, I also suck, so there’s that too!). 

Still, I am super happy with my Kaneki fan-art doll so far. I wish he had broader shoulders, and overall, more lean-young-male body proportions, like Kaneki has in the anime. Instead of noodle arms and child-bearing-hips. Besides the proportions, I am in-love with this tiny face! He’s so pretty and has great lips, as he as intended to be female, but can be a very versatile sculpt! (: Now I just need to start making some actual Kaneki inspired clothes and maybe a more accurate wig, as painful as that will be. I was thinking of this wig as his default one, but it makes him look cone-headed. Lol! DX

[kenobihater]

my dog woke me up at 5:30 😑 on the bright side, i checked to see if the extras of an in demand tarot deck i've been eyeing, the tyldwick tarot 10th anniversary edition, have finally gone up for sale and they have - only 200 copies! i snatched one up quick bc i've seen authentic versions of these puppies go for thousands of dollars and the deck is gorgeous and scenic and i love how dense the imagery is

[qmpy]

Same camera that takes crappy fried scrunched up pictures of cats when zoomed in without messing with settings

You know that thing where you see a gorgeous view (left) and try to take a picture of it, but your phone camera is a joyless fucking nihilist who refuses to see the beauty in anything and only sees this (right)

[taratarotgreene]

June 3rd rare parade of the planets

www.facebook.com/share/p/JRBHfMBZvH5mEq42/

[beatheprincess]

Very mentally tired today, an old friend wanting to reconcile after telling me they dont see the friendship working out ?? Yall all this confusion and negative people need to leave from my life, I pray to god each night but sometimes I do get tired of slow blessings. The middle of the week never works out for n I always get stressed whether that's college , life , trauma ect. I wanna look into some free counseling but I dont wanna cry ? It's tough now n ik I won't feel like this later its alot rn

[geekanoids]

iStorage datAshur PRO+C PIN Authenticated Hardware Encrypted USB-C Flash Drive

[theweeklydiscourse]

It does make me wonder how many people are being genuine in their belief that that it’s a problematic “ Colonizer x Colonized” ship. There’s a certain kind of anti shipper who will strongly dislike a pairing, but for whatever reason, can’t verbalize why. So, they default to (what they see as) the most reasonable explanation for their dislike and use it to justify why there should be “less” of that ship.

Not to mention how many people will go so far as to call it a “John Smith and Pocahontas” relationship or accuse Zutara shippers of liking race play (ugh). It’s the path of most (faux) wokeness that lets them pretend that their contradictory views have at least some legitimacy while often simultaneously using misogynistic rhetoric.

i'm convinced that the "zutara is a colonizer x colonized ship" argument is often an upfront to find a "reasonable" excuse to hate zutara because you can't say stuff like "you only like zutara bc you see katara as a self-insert and think zuko is a hot bad boy" without rightfully being calling misogynistic and it's very convenient to justify misogyny if you can paint your opposition as a bunch of ignorant white women who don't understand the repercussions of colonialism since many believe that misogyny is acceptable if it's exclusively targeted towards white women. what further leads me to this conclusion is that a great deal of zutara antis ship pairings that can be classified as "colonizer x colonized ships" and they often ignore the pitfalls bryke, two white men with a centrist liberal worldview, had in handling colonialism in their show. that isn't to say that poc can't be uncomfortable with zutara, but as a black woman who does ship zutara, i don't see how policing what i can and can't ship is creating a safe place for poc in the atla fandom.

[autistichalsin]

In retrospect, four years later, I feel like the Isabel Fall incident was just the biggest ignored cautionary tale modern fandom spaces have ever had. Yes, it wasn't limited to fandom, it was also a professional author/booktok type argument, but it had a lot of crossover.

Stop me if you've heard this one before: a writer, whether fan or pro, publishes a work. If one were to judge a book by its cover, something we are all taught in Kindergarten shouldn't happen but has a way of occurring regardless, one might find that there was something that seemed deeply problematic about this work. Maybe the title or summary alluded to something Wrong happening, or maybe the tags indicated there was problematic kinks or relationships. And that meant the story was Bad. So, a group of people takes to the Twittersphere to inform everyone who will listen why the work, and therefore the author, are Bad. The author, receiving an avalanche of abuse and harassment, deactivates their account, and checks into a mental health facility for monitoring for suicidal ideation. They never return to their writing space, and the harassers get a slap on the wrist (if that- usually they get praise and high-fives all around) and start waiting for their next victim to transgress.

Sounds awful familiar, doesn't it?

Isabel Fall's case, though, was even more extreme for many reasons. See, she made the terrible mistake of using a transphobic meme as the genesis to actually explore issues of gender identity.

More specifically, she used the phrase "I sexually identify as an attack helicopter" to examine how marginalized identities, when they become more accepted, become nothing more than a tool for the military-industrial complex to rebrand itself as a more personable and inclusive atrocity; a chance to pursue praise for bombing brown children while being progressive, because queer people, too, can help blow up brown children now! It also contained an examination of identity and how queerness is intrinsic to a person, etc.

But... well, if harassers ever bothered to read the things they critique, we wouldn't be here, would we? So instead, they called Isabel a transphobic monster for the title alone, even starting a misinformation campaign to claim she was, in fact, a cis male nazi using a fake identity to psyop the queer community.

A few days later, after days of horrific abuse and harassment, Isabel requested that Clarkesworld magazine pull the story. She checked in to a psych ward with suicidal thoughts. That wasn't all, though; the harassment was so bad that she was forced to out herself as trans to defend against the claims.

Only... we know this type of person, the fandom harassers, don't we? You know where this is going. Outing herself did nothing to stop the harassment. No one was willing to read the book, much less examine how her sexuality and gender might have influenced her when writing it.

So some time later, Isabel deleted her social media. She is still alive, but "Isabel Fall" is not- because the harassment was so bad that Isabel detransitioned/closeted herself, too traumatized to continue living her authentic life.

Supposed trans allies were so outraged at a fictional portrayal of transness, written by a trans woman, that they harassed a real life trans woman into detransitioning.

It's heartbreakingly familiar, isn't it? Many of us in fandom communities have been in Isabel's shoes, even if the outcome wasn't so extreme (or in some cases, when it truly was). Most especially, many of us, as marginalized writers speaking from our own experiences in some way, have found that others did not enjoy our framework for examining these things, and hurt us, members of those identities, in defense of "the community" as a nebulous undefined entity.

There's a quote that was posted in a news writeup about the whole saga that was published a year after the fact. The quote is:

The delineation between paranoid and reparative readings originated in 1995, with influential critic Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. A paranoid reading focuses on what’s wrong or problematic about a work of art. A reparative reading seeks out what might be nourishing or healing in a work of art, even if the work is flawed. Importantly, a reparative reading also tends to consider what might be nourishing or healing in a work of art for someone who isn’t the reader. This kind of nuance gets completely worn away on Twitter, home of paranoid readings. “[You might tweet], ‘Well, they didn’t discuss X, Y, or Z, so that’s bad!’ Or, ‘They didn’t’ — in this case — ‘discuss transness in a way that felt like what I feel about transness, therefore it is bad.’ That flattens everything into this very individual, very hostile way of reading,” Mandelo says. “Part of reparative reading is trying to think about how a story cannot do everything. Nothing can do everything. If you’re reading every text, fiction, or criticism looking for it to tick a bunch of boxes — like if it represents X, Y, and Z appropriately to my definitions of appropriate, and if it’s missing any of those things, it’s not good — you’re not really seeing the close focus that it has on something else.”

A paranoid reading describes perfectly what fandom culture has become in the modern times. It is why "proship", once simply a word for common sense "don't engage with what you don't like, and don't harass people who create it either" philosophies, has become the boogeyman of fandom, a bad and dangerous word. The days of reparative readings, where you would look for things you enjoyed, are all but dead. Fiction is rarely a chance to feel joy; it's an excuse to get angry, to vitriolically attack those different from oneself while surrounded with those who are the same as oneself. It's an excuse to form in-groups and out-groups that must necessarily be in a constant state of conflict, lest it come across like This side is accepting That side's faults. In other words, fandom has become the exact sort of space as the nonfandom spaces it used to seek to define itself against.

It's not about joy. It's not about resonance with plot or characters. It's about hate. It's about finding fault. If they can't find any in the story, they will, rest assured, create it by instigating fan wars- dividing fandom into factions and mercilessly attacking the other.

And that's if they even went so far as to read the work they're critiquing. The ones they don't bother to read, as you saw above, fare even worse. If an AO3 writer tagged an abuser/victim ship, it's bad, it's fetishism, even if the story is about how the victim escapes. If a trans writer uses the title "I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter" to find a framework to dissect rainbow-washing the military-industrial complex, it's unforgivable. It's a cesspool of kneejerk reactions, moralizing discomfort, treating good/evil as dichotomous categories that can never be escaped, and using that complex as an excuse to heap harassment on people who "deserve it." Because once you are Bad, there is no action against you that is too Bad for you to deserve.

Isabel Fall's story follows this so step-by-step that it's like a textbook case study on modern fandom behavior.

Isabel Fall wrote a short story with an inflammatory title, with a genesis in transphobic mockery, in the hopes of turning it into a genuine treatise on the intersection of gender and sexuality and the military-industrial complex. But because audiences are unprepared for the idea of inflammatory rhetoric as a tool to force discomfort to then force deeper introspection... they zeroed in on the discomfort. "I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter"- the title phrase, not the work- made them uncomfortable. We no longer teach people how to handle discomfort; we live in a world of euphemism and glossing over, a world where people can't even type out the words "kill" and rape", instead substituting "unalive" and "grape." We don't deal with uncomfortable feelings anymore; we censor them, we transform them, we sanitize them. When you are unable to process discomfort, when you are never given self-soothing tools, your only possible conclusion is that anything Uncomfortable must be Bad, and the creator must either be censored too, or attacked into conformity so that you never again experience the horrors of being Uncomfortable.

So the masses took to Twitter, outraged. They were Uncomfortable, and that de facto meant that they had been Wronged. Because the content was related to trans identity issues, that became the accusation; it was transphobic, inherently. It couldn't be a critique of bigger and more fluid systems than gender identity alone; it was a slight against trans people. And no amount of explanations would change their minds now, because they had already been aggrieved and made to feel Uncomfortable.

Isabel Fall was now a Bad Person, and we all know what fandom spaces do to Bad People. Bad People, because they are Bad, will always be deserving of suicide bait and namecalling and threatening. Once a person is Bad, there is no way to ever become Good again. Not by refuting the accusations (because the accusations are now self-evident facts; "there is a callout thread against them" is its own tautological proof that wrongdoing has happened regardless of the veracity of the claims in the callout) and not by apologizing and changing, because if you apologize and admit you did the Bad thing, you are still Bad, and no matter what you do in future, you were once Bad and that needs to be brought up every time you are mentioned. If you are bad, you can NEVER be more than what you were at your worst (in their definition) moment. Your are now ontologically evil, and there is no action taken against you that can be immoral.

So Isabel was doomed, naturally. It didn't matter that she outed herself to explain that she personally had lived the experience of a trans woman and could speak with authority on the atrocity of rainbow-washing the military industrial complex as a proaganda tool to capture progressives. None of it mattered. She had written a work with an Uncomfortable phrase for a title, the readers were Uncomfortable, and someone had to pay for it.

And that's the key; pay for it. Punishment. Revenge. It's never about correcting behavior. Restorative justice is not in this group's vocabulary. You will, incidentally, never find one of these folks have a stance against the death penalty; if you did Bad as a verb, you are Bad as an intrinsic, inescapable adjective, and what can you do to incorrigible people but kill them to save the Normal people? This is the same principle, on a smaller scale, that underscores their fandom activities; if a Bad fan writes Bad fiction, they are a Bad person, and their fandom persona needs to die to save Normal fans the pain of feeling Uncomfortable.

And that's what happened to Isabel Fall. The person who wrote the short story is very much alive, but the pseudonym of Isabel Fall, the identity, the lived experiences coming together in concert with imagination to form a speculative work to critique deeply problematic sociopolitical structures? That is dead. Isabel Fall will never write again, even if by some miracle the person who once used the name does. Even if she ever decides to restart her transition, she will be permanently scarred by this experience, and will never again be able to share her experience with us as a way to grow our own empathy and challenge our understanding of the world. In spirit, but not body, fandom spaces murdered Isabel Fall.

And that's... fandom, anymore. That's just what is done, routinely and without question, to Bad people. Good people are Good, so they don't make mistakes, and they never go too far when dealing with Bad people. And Bad people, well, they should have thought before they did something Bad which made them Bad people.

Isabel Fall's harassment happened in early 2020, before quarantine started, but it was in so many ways a final chance for fandom to hit the breaks. A chance for fandom to think collectively about what it wanted to be, who it wanted to be for and how it wanted to do it. And fandom looked at this and said, "more, please." It continues to harass marginalized people, especially fans of color and queen fans, into suffering mental breakdowns. With gusto.

Any ideas of reparative reading is dead. Fandom runs solely on paranoid readings. And so too is restorative justice gone for fandom transgressions, real or imagined. It is now solely about punitive, vigilante justice. It's a concerted campaign to make sure oddballs conform or die (in spirit, but sometimes even physically given how often mentally ill individuals are pushed into committing suicide).

It's a deeply toxic environment and I'm sad to say that Isabel Fall's story was, in retrospect, a sort of event horizon for the fandom. The gravitational pull of these harassment campaigns is entirely too strong now and there is no escaping it. I'm sorry, I hate to say something so bleak, but thinking the last few days about the state of fandom (not just my current one but also others I watch from the outside), I just don't think we can ever go back to peaceful "for joy" engagement, not when so many people are determined to use it as an outlet for lateral aggression against other people.

[the-enzyme]

I ended up not repainting my Myou Bettina male, but instead I “enhanced” his face a bit.  After staring at him in Photoshop for what seemed like years and doing a bunch of mock-ups. I decided that I wanted to try making him look more mature, by just shading him a bit heavy-handed and just add to the gloom. I love that he looks constantly pissed, petulant, somber all the time, but now it’s at another level, and I am really loving it!  I probably make all my dolls look that way, due to my eternal love of angry brows. However, they all work in the end, because of the characters I choose to recreate in doll form. 

I am still hoping to improve on my hair strokes one day, but this time I just wanted to add to his face. Instead of repainting him completely. I kind of tried adding two pairs of eyelashes to his tiny eye openings, so I need to fix those. I do enjoy the thick, full-lash-line. That’s what I always hope for with my dolls with applied top lashes. However, these don’t look that nice and one of them looks further messier than the other. Maybe I wouldn’t mind it, if both were about equally messy/clean, but I do mind this level of asymmetry. I had to trim some of the lash hairs, and now I am dreading finding if I ruined his “default” pair, because those were really nice lashes. I hope I didn’t damage those int he processes. 

I am happy with the way he looks overall; I can always try repainting him again fully, from zero next time! He is a beautiful doll, I only wish I was more talented (or had steadier hands!), to at least give the sculpt a tiny bit more justice. These turned out granier than ever, I am not sure what went wrong. My cell phone was at full charge, and I had the light blasting right on his face (if I put the light anywhere further, the photos become darkness themselves).  I suck! DX

[wetheurban]

Pro’s of Letting Go:

You create space for new beginnings.  

You eventually feel lighter and liberated. 

You reduce stress and anxiety in your life.

You empower yourself to live authentically.

You allow yourself to gain emotional clarity.

You validate your trust in yourself and your future.

You remove the heavy weight off of your shoulders.

You get to release the guilt of doing what’s best for you.