#Frankly I'd start committing crimes if that was the punishment

[karniss-bg3]

So, I don’t mean this in a request way, bc I know those are closed, but I had a daydream where Tav is TERRIFIED of regular spiders of all sizes. They struggled really badly with the phase matriarch and the spiders in the goblin camp. But Kar’niss doesn’t spook them one bit!

So I imagined the group walking down the road and suddenly there’s a tarantula sized spider that crosses the path and Tav screams and dives underneath Kar’niss to be caged under his legs.

And everyone else laughs at the reaction, but Kar’niss is so confused????? Like “True soul, we are a DRIDER, and you are not afraid of us. Why do you hide from a small spider?” “KAR’NISS I TRUST YOU, NOT THAT SPIDER!”

Bonus: to speak to Tav he leans forward with his drow torso and looks at them upside down so he look really silly.

This scenario applies to a good portion of the Kar’niss fandom in general. I can’t count how many “Kar’niss has cured my arachnophobia” posts I’ve seen but I’m not mad about it. I suppose it helps when a humanoid is attached to the creature we find creepy or frightening. They can talk back and communicate their intentions. Spiders are a bit more...unpredictable.

I’ve never considered myself arachnophobic but Kar’niss definitely elevated my interest in spiders ten fold. I feel I have a better understanding of them now than I ever would’ve and I’ve come to appreciate nature’s pest control. I’ve fallen down a rabbit hole of watching jumping spider videos and I’ve become obsessed. I’ve even contemplated getting one as a pet but two things have stopped me from having a fuzzy friend.

1) I have a cat and if the little guy ever escapes she will activate murder mode and that’ll be the end of itsy bitsy’s whole career.

2) Jumping spiders tend to live one to two years on average. I don’t think I am emotionally equipped to handle that loss with such frequency. I’d become a blubbering, inconsolable mess for days on end mourning the eight legged pal I spent years bonding with. No can do.

I could imagine Kar’niss being perplexed by Tav’s fear of spiders for two reasons. One being the aforementioned situation that they are hanging around a drider willy nilly no problem. The second, Kar’niss comes from a society that worships and pampers spiders. To him they are as normal as dogs and cats are to us.

“True Soul, why do you fear the spider but not us?”

“The spider might bite me but you wouldn’t.”

“Erm—how much do you know about driders?”

Cue the bosom buddies to lovers story arc. Kar’niss learns to love himself and Tav discovers that spider bites aren’t as bad as they once thought. *wink wink*

Also the mental image of Tav getting sent to spider leg jail anytime they did something stupid does amuse me. Considering most of the Tav’s I make are classic himbo types they may as well situate their sleeping bag under him and get comfortable. Yet another moment where I wish I learned to draw.

Thanks for the ask!

[tenitchyfingers]

You do realize the Mormon church condemns child abuse, rape, and polygamy as pretty severe sins? Those who do those things are usually excommunicated or are part of the far right FLDS group. So while people may have done those things you are incorrect in assuming it’s something the church stands for or supports.

And yeah, the Killers may not be hardcore Mormons at all and their success may not be related to their religion, but there are a lot of Mormon themes in some of their songs. The song Human is very Mormon, for example.

Joseph Smith had 33 wives and one of them was 14. How do you feel about that? Does your Mormon denomination (which I'm assuming is mainstream LDS) reject Smith and dissociate from him or is it "complicated"? Because for example, not all Satanic branches associate with Anton LaVey, and I know of at least one which rejects him for his usage of Nazi imagery and social Darwinism (eugenics), and don't actually believe in Satan but are more of a philosophical group. Which is fair, because they could very well just say "well he was just trying to get attention and make others talk about him", or whatever but even if that was the case it's still not right and while I'm fully atheist and don't feel a need to associate to any group that even remotely associates itself with religion, and i frankly think Luciferians are just edgy narcissists who never got past their teenage phase, I can respect that at least.

So anyway, there is no excuse for Smith. Even "well it was a long time ago". Yes it was, but we're living in the now. If you don't practice polygamy, I'd assume you'd feel weird listening to what a polygamist who married a child had to say about anything, least of all morality. Which is why I left Catholicism by the way. I can't be part of a community ruled by an organization that did sexual assault and stole from the poor for centuries without taking its responsibilities. And them starting to clean up their act recently doesn't fix shit because people who are still alive may still be suffering from PTSD now, and especially for a while child molester priests were just sent to another parrish after getting caught and that's no way to take care of a community trusting the people you send. Priests who commit crimes should face the same exact punishment anyone else would, and that's a better way to address the issue. Also, a religion that should welcome everybody but then starts going "except gays/trans people/asexuals/aromantics, people who masturbate" etc is intolerable to me. Because either you welcome all people for who they are provided being who they are doesn't harm anyone, or you have no reason to say you welcome everybody.

If your branch doesn't follow Smith, helps the kids who were tactically abandoned by other LDS denominatons and sues its members who commit crimes against people, including but not limited to SA, doesn't try to bail them out and includes people of all ethnicities, doesn't control their bodily autonomy... then alright it's another discussion. Because to me, these things are the bare minimum.

[gwemmieee]

Yeah I'm with Patricia and valuigis on this.

If you think the point of any rights movement is to specifically throw people under the bus because you think they fit in less than you, congratulations on your gradual pathway to fascism.

If you need to find your own community then go find your own community.

I'm a transbian orphan from hell. I'd never met another lesbian, even a cis lesbian, until after I scrounged up all my savings and moved in with strangers across the country just to stop being in immediate danger for my life. I'm starting just now in my late 20s to go to therapy and unpack deep traumas that have kept me as immature as a small child. And yet I'm still finding love and community among my people, other sapphic folks who can understand me.

I don't need to police what the word queer is. I would *rather* expand the word queer to include everyone who can on any level understand the pain and marginalization that has dominated my life, because there are simply not enough good people out there to build community unless I do that, and "queer" is frankly the closest thing our society has to a term that can make us visible to each other. Unless I expand and stop being picky about who my friends are, as long as they understand my pain and share my commitment to not repeating that cycle of violence on others.

On an academic level, "queer" can absolutely include being black. I'm white and I can easily tell you that. It doesn't mean you have to identify as queer if you're black--none of this works if we aren't all free to choose and broadcast our identities without interrogation--but it is a fact that part of the black experience can often include similar kinds of objectification and devaluing someone's value as a person because their appearance doesn't fit society's sexual beauty standards. Black cis women literally get misgendered on purpose as a "punishment" for their appearances like every fucking day. There is easily so much overlap between queer people, black people, and women when it comes to those forms of oppression.

And yes, you are allowed to identify as queer because of being attracted to children or a corpse. There's a difference between sexual urges and actually acting on them in a way that hurts others. Are we practicing thought crime here on tumblr dot com? I'm absolutely on board with being mad at pedophiles. I fucking hate everyone who fits the word "predator". Having sexual thoughts in your head doesn't qualify you for that word, though--ACTIONS do. And every thought that anyone could ever have will have some sort of safe space where it can be voiced and worked through. That's why we have therapists and support groups. How about we stop crying pedophile every time we're scared of opening our doors up to too many weirdos ??? ever think of that? There are a lot of people out there who are just a good therapist away from leading happy healthy non-predatory lives and it's not fair to them to drag them through the mud just because Ron Paul DeSatan or whoever the fuck told a bunch of suppressed sheltered Christians that being trans makes me wanna fuck children.

i will repeat, for no reason in particular

taboo kinks are inexorably queer. as it stands, it is queer to grow up physically or sexually abused, to have your sexuality disorganized instead of understood and reinforced. it is queer to suppress your attraction to kids your age and instead develop a complex around your abusive parent that you feel weird about. it is queer to have notions of consent be corrupted by ritual shame and humiliation. we cannot all be perfect victims of cisheteronormative society, saying otherwise is placing your own feelings of disgust over reality.

[sophieinwonderland]

What's your stance on MAPs?

Host:

Sophie doesn't have much of an opinion on the subject. At least not a very informed one (no offense) so I'll take this one since it's a bit more personal to me.

I should probably toss up some trigger warnings for mentions of rape and molestation now. Maybe death too. Just be warned that this is not going to be a light post.

I was raised in the home of my grandfather who was a former child molester. And no, I was never harmed. As far as I know, those days were behind him. And even then, he never had a thing for boys anyways. It's the reason my uncle was spared. At least, as far as we know.

My mom wasn't lucky. She was abused for most of her childhood. Horribly so. Related to the system stuff, one of her therapists tried to convince her that she had DID at one point. She did spend a year going by a different name at school, and had very vivid imaginary friends who stuck around until she was 16. They had a falling out after they were unusually angry at my grandfather for something unrelated. It scared my mom, she told them to leave, and they never came back.

(Mostly. She later told me that she went through a phase in her 20s where she would start seeing images of them in her head and try to block them out, and was even obsessively writing their names down for comfort. But that's getting off-topic.)

That said, I don't think dissociating herself was actually her primary defense mechanism. Instead, what she told me is that it was like she had two dads. One who was kind and loved her, and one who hurt and abused her.

It's why, despite the abuse she endured as a child, she ended up moving us in with him whenever my grandma had a stroke.

I never knew the second side of my grandfather. I mean, sure, he could be a bit of an ass sometimes. But as long as I knew him, I only knew the man who I would stay up late talking to in the kitchen about whatever fantasy books we were reading. He was like a second dad to me. That makes it hard for me to think of him as this horrible child molester.

And at the same time, there's a part of me that knows what he did my mom, and hates him for it, and is glad that he's dead. And I have a hard time reconciling that. Because I do love the man that I knew, but I hate everything he did to her.

But I also know that he did cared about his kids. From what she's said, he tried to stop, and eventually did. And he hated himself for the things he did. He wasn't driven by evil. He was driven by sickness.

And I can't help but wonder things could have been different in an alternate universe.

Would he have done the things that he did if he hadn't been drafted into Vietnam against his will, been fucked up by everything he experienced there, and returned home without any support for his mental health? If mental health was affordable and available to everyone, and the stigma for this disease wasn't so severe that people who have it are afraid of seeking out therapy, would he have ever done this in the first place?

I don't know the answer to that question. Frankly, he was a bad father to his children in a lot of other ways besides just the sexual abuse, so it's possible that nothing would have changed.

But I'd like to think that, if we had a world where people who are attracted to minors felt safe seeking therapy and were able to get help before acting out anything, there would hopefully be less children who have to experience what my mom did.

The same actually goes for a lot of crimes. I mean, we talk about mental health every time someone shoots up a school, but we don't do a damn thing about it to make it easier to get.

We live in a society that likes to punish people for crimes after they're committed, because hurting "bad" people makes us feel good. But we don't like doing what it takes to prevent those crimes from occurring in the first place. We could lower crime rates so much by putting more funding into education in poorer areas, providing affordable mental healthcare, and restructuring prisons to focus more on rehabilitation instead of just punishment.

But we don't do any of that because we don't get the same warm fuzzies from seeing lower crime rates each year as we do from letting someone commit a crime and tossing them away for the next 20 years. It's easier to get voters on board with being tough on crime than it is to get them on board with putting money into a school system or mental health.

My stance (and Sophie agrees) is that I wanted fewer children to be molested like my mom was.

I'm not sure if this was the answer you were looking for. I don't actually know much about the MAP community, and we tend to stay far away from those areas.

Having said that, please, for the love of the gods, do not be like my mom and take your children around child molesters. Even if I wasn't hurt, I'm sure that's an exception to the rule. Kids shouldn't be around abusers. Period.

[maeamian]

Okay, so here's a response to this post I'm deleting because I don't want anyone looking in the replies and accidentally thinking this is a good point. This person has clearly fundamentally misunderstood several things here, first and foremost the central concept. Luckily for them, there's an excellent resource behind this link they could use to be less wrong, I'd suggest other people use it before clowning around on this post.

So, starting from the top, even if you grant literally every thing they're saying as fact, and you shouldn't, the conclusion doesn't follow from their premise. If this is a political weapon their argument is somehow for unilateral disarmament against people they openly admit are fascists by virtue of naming their foes. That is something that any decent, thinking person, can clearly reject in matters of power, particularly involving fascists.

However, they're not done being wrong simply by granting every point they make, because every point they make on the way to that obviously wrong conclusion is also wrong. Firstly, obviously right wingers know about this, all white juries have for years convicted black people of crimes they didn't commit and refused to convict white people of crimes they did. I don't mean to imply that the left is magically free of racism or white supremacy, but doing the work of white supremacists is a right wing action regardless of one's other political views and alignments. This is just one obvious example, there are many. Just because something can be used for evil ends does not mean it can't be used for good ends like it was in some cases against the fugitive slave act (like they would know if they'd done the fucking reading).

Secondly, as the resource they could've read also points out, this is not an antifascist position, this is an abolitionist one. They are two related and often coexisting political belief structures, but it's worth noting how badly they've flubbed the concepts here to make it fit into their specific anti-nullification framing.

Thirdly at no point do they offer any defense of the system Jury nullification is addressing, namely that sending them to prison, particularly the United States's for profit prison system which is blatantly immoral, is unlikely to make anyone a better person, and while you can go into your empanelment open to the idea that you may feel morally obligated to do so none the less for whatever personal moral reasons you have, related to the specifics of the case one would hope, this resource is about how you also have the right, and, it and I would argue, the moral obligation, to go in at least open to the possibility that you will be asked to involve someone in that openly corrupt system for reasons that may be technically true but are morally inadequate to the punishment they are set to receive, and in those cases it, and I, would remind you that you retain, at all times, the legal right to vote not guilty. That is your explicit legal right, their claim that this is lawless behavior is simply fundamentally not true.

Quite frankly, the more I consider this comment the less it looks like it's in anything resembling good faith, but even if it somehow was it was still completely wrong, and I would advise you to read the attached link if you found yourself thinking this was a decent point, but also if you didn't. It's a very useful link explaining in pretty great detail your right to vote Not Guilty in principle, history and, practice.

Got jury duty coming up? What better time than now to learn about the extremely cool and good things you can do on that jury if you get empaneled? (because learning about them after you've been empaneled is a crime)