#I don't necessarily think it was the intent

[jukashi]

I know when this sort of thing gets posted there will be replies going 'I'm just venting' or 'Men don't need any more coddling' or 'oh so we need to stroke men's egos by saying only nice things?' and so on. So, I want to add: sexism against women will always exist so long as there is sexism against men, and vice versa.

It would perhaps be nice to disassemble gender completely, but in the meantime the majority of human cultures assume most humans are either man or woman, and even if acceptance of nonbinary identities became magically universal they would remain a minority, so most people would still assume most people are either men or woman. When people think 'people who are not men' they think first of women, and when people think 'people who are not women' they think first of men.

So, statements like 'men are violent' necessarily implies 'non-men are not violent', drifting to 'women are not violent', implying 'women do not fight', and so 'men are violent' leads to 'women are weak'. If you convince people men are selfish, you will convince them that women are servile. If men are monsters, women are victims.

Besides that... making broad negative statements about any group that someone can't opt out of being a member of never improves anything, because there's never any actual intent to improve anything. When sexist societies said women were emotional and stupid, did they reward women who demonstrated discipline, who educated themselves? No, it was punished. At best it exiled you from your identity, made you Not A Woman, at worse you got 'taught your place'. You got worse than nothing for trying to defy the expectation. If you played into it, you got an excuse for mistakes and misbehavior. Insulting women as emotional only encouraged many to be emotional, made it part of the identity, made them go: well! I'll be emotional then! But I will say it better - that I am nurturing, kind, passionate! Good things, things to be proud to be identified with instead of ashamed, but in a sexist society they were code words for being a manipulable slave, which served the real masters of that society perfectly well.

Saying women were emotional, saying women were stupid, never encouraged them to be disciplined or to educate themselves. It was never meant to.

How do you think describing men as violent and dangerous will encourage them to be gentle and safe? The ones who defy the expectation are punished. At best they will be Not-Men, at worse being half-trained dogs, used and abused but never trusted, never let in. A man will never get anything from people who say men are bad by trying to prove them wrong. Insulting men as violent and dangerous only gives an excuse, reinforces it as part of the identity, encourages many to be violent and dangerous, to go: well! I'll be violent and dangerous then! But I will say it better - that I am powerful, capable, tough! Good things, things to be proud to be identified with instead of ashamed, but in a sexist society they are code words for being a tool to be used, which serves the real masters of society perfectly well.

This isn't a moral argument. It's not an argument about what's virtuous, not an argument about what beliefs make someone a good person or a true member of the approved group. It is an argument of method, of how to achieve a purpose.

Saying men are evil only ever achieves the opposite of everything that anyone who describes themselves as a feminist claims to want.

really cannot emphasise enough that "All Men Bad" and "masculinity is inherently violent, dangerous, and evil" are load-bearing pillars of radfeminism and these ideas cannot have a place in any truly progressive queer theorising.

[simonsbalaclava]

John MacTavish is a man known for his particular charisma, but not for his patience. Sure, he was a good guy — impulsive, but not necessarily ill-intentioned. However, when it came to Simon Riley, John pulled out all the patience he didn't have and waited. He waited and waited, patiently, perseveringly, because he understood that Ghost had his secrets, his defensive walls and his own fear. Yet, John had a limit. Tired of being ignored, he would not be afraid to confront him, only to receive a "You don't know what you're asking for." "What am I supposed to be asking for then, Simon?" He blurted out. "Look, I just want to understand you.... I can't fix anything for you, or erase your pain altogether, but let me hear you. Let me see you."

I know I mentioned that I like to see Ghoap as a rather mellow couple, but I also think they had their fair share of conflicts early on. Just think; Ghost suffered a lot of things and all at once, a tremendous impact on his mental health and not only that, on his trust in others — He might be considered someone not worth knowing, because of his actions, his attitude, and his past. But Johnny doesn't care about that, because they've both stained their hands with guilty and innocent blood; But what happens when Ghost closes himself off, denying anyone access to his heart, afraid of losing it again?

...

Yeah, Johnny's not going to let that happen. Persistent Scotsman.

based on these two particular panels of Batman and Superman that I saw around.

Also, if you made it this far, the question box is open to requests for drawings of these two or any other Cod member/ship/character. :3 (I need practice lmao)

[elwenyere]

I've been reflecting on the parallels between 1.07 and 2.09 (as visualized in this beautiful GIF set) and what I take away from the placement of these scenes in the overall structure of the show: specifically the way both of them occur right after Cassian has taken part in one of the big set pieces for resistance (the raid on Aldhani and the massacre on Ghorman).

Echoed in the conversations with Maarva and Bix are two recurring desires for Cassian: (1) he wants to be able to choose how when and how he leaves, and (2) he wants to reaffirm to himself that he has everything he needs to take care of the people closest to him. On the level of the psychodrama/individual-character origin story, I can see how both of these responses are entangled with what happened to him as a child on Kenari, and then again when he's incarcerated after Clem's death (having his choices taken away by a force larger than him and thus being unable to protect his family). On the level of Andor's meta-narratives about what organized resistance requires, I can see how both of these desires speak to difficulties in navigating between individual and collective social consciousness (we have to fight knowing we will not see the end of the fight, and we do that because we recognize we need each other to be free, and no one's free until everyone is).

I think there are a number of ways to read what claims the show is making by staging a recurrence of 1.07's "I'm walking backwards into my narrative; I was trying to walk out" structure in 2.09, and YMMV on which you find most satisfying: (1) trauma is necessarily repetitive and cyclical; (2) the commitment to collective struggle is not a one-time decision but rather must be remade continually; and/or (3) it's vital to the mode of resistance Cassian embodies that he never achieves total certainty - not only because, historically, people working for justice never know in the moment whether what they're doing is going to work, but also because, diegetically, his doubt will be as important to his resistance work as his conviction.

With regard to claim (1), I think it's really interesting that in 2.09, the same episode where Cassian is expressing his intention to be done with Luthen and Draven and to leave to Rebellion, he describes himself to Mon as one of the last "survivors of the raid on Aldhani." He doesn't say "we pulled off the Aldhani heist" or "we were on the Aldhani crew together"; he frames himself as someone who survives larger actions when other people don't. There's an echo there to how he describes himself as "one of fifty survivors" at Mimban and the way Maarva describes him as the sole survivor from Kenari - of the look on his face when Melshi asks him how many men he thinks made it out of Narkina and Cassian says "not enough."

And for me it's that learned link between being subsumed by a larger unit (the family, the prison, the militia, the Rebel Alliance) and being prevented from doing something individually very consequential (like going back in time to save Kerri or Maarva or Brasso) that forms the hinge connecting the interiority of explanation (1) to the more structural and ideological levels of (2) and (3). Cassian is a character who's had major choices about how to live his life taken away from him, both in ways that are idiosyncratic to his own trajectory and in ways he shares with a huge number of people living under fascism; and Andor demonstrates how embracing the collective struggle against the latter involves a renegotiation of the need for individual agency sharpened by the former. For me, a central effect of the show's decision to sustain the tension between those desires rather than resolving it is the suggestion that both qualities (Cassian's willingness to give his all in pursuit of collective liberation and his value for individual autonomy) end up being crucial to the decisions he makes in Rogue One. Without his commitment to the cause, he would never have been in the position to help get news to Yavin about the Death Star plans. Without his need to exercise his own judgment and make/allow for autonomous choices, he wouldn't have been ready to buck the chain of command and help lead Rogue One to Scarif. In other words, I think it's possible to read Cassian's behavior in arc three of season two both as a personal trauma response and also as another stage of a dialectical, always-unfinished struggle to navigate the poles of individual agency and collective action. Andor tells a story about how all the things Cassian gathers along the way - everything he already feels and knows, as Maarva says via Brasso - prepare him to be a force for good, including the impulse to set aside more abstract objectives to refocus on the need to protect the person in front of him.

[clockworkspider]

I don't think the judgement of whether something is art should lie in the complexity but the intention.

If a set of GIF's primary purpose is to simply document/excerpt an existing work in a more accessible manner, then I wouldn't necessarily consider it art, just as I wouldn't necessarily call an excerpt from a book its own literature. Even if there is craftsmanship in the editing/enhancement.

If the set recontexualize its subject, like showing the various moments a character respond to grief from separate parts of a show together, or taking something out of context as a meme, then I'd consider it art cause it creates meaning in an intentional way, even if there is minimal/no editing involved.

We ask your questions anonymously so you don’t have to! Submissions are open on the 1st and 15th of the month.

[ahsoka-in-a-hood]

/Murderbot thoughts

I've been thinking about murderbot's emotions vs robot emotions today. What i mean by that is that murderbot very much identifies it's own emotions as coming from it's cloned human neural tissue, not from it's computer programming, and it probably is correct about that - though not necessarily, and that's a whole other tangent that I might come back to later. But it meets other bots who display what we can (and generally do) call emotions, and it frequently ascribes emotions to the bots it meets. (I'm actually tempted to accuse it of anthropomorphizing. Especially with the flirtatious language.)

So human emotions, which it suffers from, which come from the fleshy chemical signals of a human make-up. Bot emotions, which are a super interesting concept- a bot or an AI is fundamentally something created by, and inevitably modeled on, humans. A bot with a social role will be interacting with humans a lot, and integrating that experience into it's code. It is not an unnatural consequence that it will, itself, end up experiencing something not entirely unlike what we experience as emotions. A bot is not an alien- it's code is inextricably linked to the human experience. But it does NOT have the same kind of brain.

The series is a fun romp that's already exploring a lot of themes, so I don't particularly expect or need it to get into the guts of human vs bot emotions. But I think if it did it would slap for a number of reasons.

-For one just being a series that has a human-bot hybrid that feels things because of human tissue but there also being bot bots that are described as feeling things naturally brings up concepts and ideas

-The way that part of what makes the humans think of it as a person is connected to it's feelings.

-The whole internal dialogue about Mikki and it's agency/relationship with Donna Bena

-ART is right there

-ART needed MB as an interface to interact with media in a new way. MB doesn't hesitate to ascribe completely human emotional states to it later.

-MB isn't consistent in how it talks about bots at all.

-Themes of humanity and emotions and AI can all be interlinked here.

-Murderbot being a bridge of sorts. Since it's both.

-That other theme Martha B Wells was talking about in an interview about the pre-determination of a construct- humans can't be engineered to be a certain way without eugenics, but bots inevitably are by their very nature. Every code is written in a deliberate way for a purpose. (Even 'what if we wrote a free code that can do whatever' is an intention. You can't code without intent). If a bot has something we can call emotions because a human programmed it that way, or a step removed from that, if a human programmed a bot to program itself but it also programmed it to be with humans and interact with humans and it ends up programming itself to have emotions-

- well, what does that all mean

- does it have free will?

- do you think a bot without emotions can be a person?

- well, do you?

So those have been my thoughts today.

[scribbled-entity]

Alright that's it, you know what? I'll just shove a crap ton of my related headcanons of the object shows I like, into one silly continuity, which in itself, may have AUs based on whatever I crossed over with it (may or may not be hinting on something in the works hah)

I'm calling it Restirred AU for now, because I can't think of anything else. I'll probably retag some older posts too for convenience

With that out of the way, here's the official 'first' post for Restirred AU.

The Questionable Influence Duo, Nickel and Taco

I like to think they ended up becoming friends in a way. Frenemies? It's complicated.

What do you do when you meet someone like you but you don't really like yourself all that much? But at the same time is trying to learn to be kinder to not just everyone, but also yourself?

You hate them mainly because you hate yourself, and because you know they can do better and should do better, just like how you know you could too. Yet you're all too familiar with how difficult it actually is.

Anyway, more rambling under the cut.

(Some of these are copy pasted from the stuff I typed out in Bluesky but I added a bit more.)

I'm not sure if I'm making any sense, or if I'm even articulating all this right, but wjdjfjrdjdr object show hyperfixation go brrrrrrrrr

Obviously these are just my personal headcanons, you're free to think differently.

I like to think they don't always hang out, but when they do and have the same goal, they make for an annoying force to be reckoned with. Otherwise they're competitive and often insult each other.

It certainly took a while to actually warm up to each other. But once the two did, they ended up getting along well enough, even if it doesn't seem like it. Their ability to shrug off each other's scathing insults and blatant aggressive honesty is something the two value from each other.

Though they definitely also can feed on each other's worst flaws in bad ways. Luckily, Both have other support systems to turn to and keep the two from essentially spiralling into an echo chamber of mutual spite of things they both hate. (Like I think if they were each other's only friends instead? I imagine there would've been a chance where they only strengthen each other's problematic views, both forcing themselves to only ever have each other, and only worsen their bad behavior. Being too alike that they only sink each other down sort of thing.)

They're both objects who did horrible things to others with genuine malicious intent and selfishness. Both have an innate distrust of others, critical and pessimistic opinions of everything.

Who are both trying to be better, because and with the help of those they grew to care about.

I personally think they'll make for a fun friendship dynamic. They both keep each other in check in a way, They both can feel somewhat comfortable knowing they've both struggled with similar problems and behaviors and acknowledge the issues with that and work on controlling it and coping healthier.

There's nothing quite like having someone who has gone through the same thing and thought the same thoughts to turn to. Sometimes it's not necessarily the comfort or sympathy that you need, but instead someone who understands what it's like and to process it with.

[ongreenergrasses]

hey I hope you're having a good day! I really enjoyed the latest chapter of Serafina and it's made me wonder how you imagine Career training in d4 to work? Like what does that process look like, and what aspects of the Career mindset felt most important to include while writing?

I feel like we don't get a lot of info in canon on why the Careers volunteer/why those programs exist (besides Katniss's basic explanation of honor and fame) so do you have any thoughts on why d4 trains kids to begin with?

loving the story! <3

hi!! day is going well, new chapter is up so I felt it was a good time to hit this ask 💜 thank you for your kind words and I’m so glad you’re enjoying!

I think for me the most important thing to include in terms of the mindset was that these kids believe they’re protecting the less fortunate with their volunteering, and they don’t see that as a sacrifice, necessarily. they see this as them supporting and helping their district by removing such an oppressive source of fear and having better odds for a win which will make sure the district’s fed and as comfortable as they can be for another year. the terms they’re fed around it are duty, honor, and service, which is why those come up a lot when the kids talk about it, but that’s what’s the underlying feeling and motivation. they justify everything they do by seeing it as protecting their people, who they see as inherently vulnerable, and simultaneously doing a service to their country (especially when it comes to their sacking/murdering “criminals” as part of training). so the propaganda element and mindset was to me the most important part, that was why I pulled out specific events that showed Annie’s interiority and the depth of her indoctrination in the last chapter.

In terms of why 4 trains kids to begin with, I think they approach it from a much more service oriented mindset than 1 and 2 do. I hc 4 to have a more collectivist culture, and while I think the desire for glory and representing the district well absolutely comes into it, I think training by the time Finnick and Annie come around is based in that idea to protect and serve their people. (yes, this is very akin to the mentality in the military. that was intentional.) as for how training started, I’m sure that the goal was to just keep kids alive. I think it started to take on a life of its own and become more grounded in moral ideals sometime around the first Quell, after the atrocity that was having those kids voted in. I think that Quell was very eye opening and the trainers in 4 would’ve seen the fact of the other districts probably sending in the weakest kids, as opposed to 4 sending in prepared kids, as an indication of how 4 protects its people and they would start to spin that as an honorable thing - because in a twisted way, it is.

(Fun fact. In my head, Robin, Annie’s mentor, is the victor of the first Quell.)

I would talk about the process of training but this ask would get enormously long if I did, so maybe I’ll make a separate post about it, lol. thank you for reading!

[randomidiocyncrazies]

sigh. i can't say i'm confident in the writing choices of the creators when handling this topic (and tbh T3 gave me the feeling that they're going for shock value more than nuanced social commentary, with Fuuta's accusation of us doing the same thing as him seemingly being dropped for the cult plot), but i guess we'll see how it shakes out.

i know Yuno hates being voted innocent bc she perceives it as, like, us/Es not caring about her enough to raise objections to what she's doing, but i personally am wary about this framing because nothing she did was 'unforgivable' (she didn't even cause the death of a person like, say, Kazui could be argued to have done, not to mention some of the others); in fact i think it's the responsible thing to do when she 1) doesn't seem to actually want a child in her life when she got the abortion and 2) don't really have the means to take care of a baby*. I guess she could give birth and then give the baby up for adoption or whatever, but that doesn't necessarily give the baby a good life either. (I strongly believe that one should only have children if they actually want children and want to care for them.) *i guess her family could help with the child, but while they seem close we still don't know how they're gonna react to Yuno's pregnancy/sex work to know if they'd be willing to help take care of the potential baby

she's probably influenced by Mahiru dying in front of her, and i'm not against her feeling conflicted or feeling regret because some women do regret their choice, but her arc seems to be going in a direction that we are encouraged to condemn her 'sin' of getting an abortion while doing compensated dating/sex work (and maybe for even doing sex work in the first place without a 'good/justifiable reason' for it) because it's the only way it'd get through to her that Es/we care about her and that she's worthy of caring about. I'm not sure of the creators' personal politics so idk if it's just meant to be a very specific case in which the person who got an abortion regretted it, or if it's leading to the implication that "women should not get abortions, at least not without a 'good' reason" (not really helped by the fact that Milgram counts abortion as 'murder' in the first place).

i really struggle with the fact that Milgram counts abortion as murder/'hitogoroshi' (which should at the very least involve the loss of life of a person). It'd be hitogoroshi if she gave birth and then caused the child to die, but that doesn't seem to be the case here. Milgram has extremely lax definitions of hitogoroshi but i struggle to define the fetus as a person the same way Kazui's wife or Fuuta's callout victim were. It's at most the potential of a person.

I'm guessing it's cultural barriers at play here, but yeah i genuinely don't know the intention of the creators and am a bit wary (and not to be an asshole but afaik both of the creators identify as cis men, so I guess i'm like. extra paranoid about it when it's about something that neither of them will experience? I know one of them has written queer themes in his other works so that's at least something, but not being homophobic/transphobic doesn't necessarily map onto discussions about reproductive autonomy)

[bbuzz28]

Fiddleford is a liar.

He contextualizes his lies as being for the greater good-but he still lies.

I think people sometimes overlook this trait. Outside of calling him a two timer on his wife (Emma-May, I would treat you so much better, run away with me), it’s all pretty much treated as a joke. "Silly little banjo playing Fiddleford who goes crazy by scrambling his brains like eggs in a skillet after a monster attack." It's a very convenient compartment to slide him into without digging much deeper.

However, I think it runs so much deeper than that. To lie so effortlessly and all the time, it takes practice. I think he has been lying probably for his entire life-so much so that he doesn't even consider it to be lying. The entire foundation on what he eventually builds his cult is "helping" the townsfolk by "protecting" them from the "terrible" truths that surround them in Gravity Falls.

Only a practiced liar would invent something like the memory gun. Because at the end of the day, when you are lying all the time, you are able to convince yourself of the lies for a little while-but not forever. (If you are not a narcissist, which of all the things Fiddleford is, he is not that.) You will wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat and remember what you did or what you are trying to cover up. The aspect of control over what at the time seemed controllable with a few false words now causing your heart to race, your breath to hitch, your head to ache. So, then you lie more, to cover up all the loose threads that would lead to what you've done. Eventually, you have dug a hole so deep, there is no end in sight.

The answer is simple-tell the truth, right? It would be the "right" thing to do...and it would shatter everyone's interpretation of you. Possibly dissolving any of the relationships you've built. Relinquishing control of the scenario you created. Because when you tell the truth, it turns into the "well, why would you do this?" conversation. Who wants to hear "because I wanted you to like me", "I didn't want to disappoint you", "I didn't want to make you angry" or "I wanted to be useful" in response? To see that look of utter disenchantment in their eyes as all your lies are revealed.

But....what if you could e r a s e the truth from your own memory? And not only your memory, but the memory of whomever you lied to. They would never have to know what you did. You would never have to face it. And you would never again be overcome with the feelings of inadequacies that triggered you to lie in the first place.

You wouldn't have to disappoint anyone, or yourself, ever again.

The Memory Gun started as a clever band aid to the trauma of the Gremloblin incident, yes. But it turned into something much more dangerous in the hands of an established and practiced liar.

[ethanscrocs]

Sailor Moon Design Musings!

i've been thinking a lot about shape design in sailor moon, specifically because i noticed that when i draw usagi, i emphasize these little details quite a bit. now, i don't feel entirely certain that all of these were intentional, but it does get me thinking. sailor moon's design in the early seasons of the 90s anime is very clear-cut and sharp, and it's cultivated in something quite iconic. yeah, it's generally the same costume as the manga, but there are elements of the design that feel... intentional? what i wouldn't give to ask people who worked on the anime if they were aware of these details or if they were added to her design purposefully...

edit: and omg, her compact brooch follows the same logic as the rubies on her buns in that it's a circular shape with a smaller circle inside that abstracts the shape of a crescent moon, kind of? ALSO. the tiaras on the sailor senshi follow this logic and in some art it seems more intentional than others.

if you count all of these details, plus the already obvious shapes, there would be 14? different moon shapes in her design!

(16 in this image)

you just can't beat her! to me, this is clearly a character design that was already gorgeous but is more than perfected for animation. i love it! 🌙

bonus - usagi's anime concept art:

maybe i'm just imagining things but (and god do i wish i had a higher quality and translated version of this image) this is feeding my brainworms. maybe i'm right about a thing or two, a couple of the elements i mentioned above seem even further emphasized here... hm... 🔍

[andiv3r]

Having to block everyone who has "wincest dni" in their bio not because I ship wincest (because I have come to the conclusion that I actually don't) but because I do think it'd be fun to poke around at the very real weirdness of their relationship that I've noticed in the show so far. And I'm 99% sure that my poking around will get seen as shipping.

[aromantic-and-aromatic]

I'll shut up abt jenova one day, but the idea that hojo is so proud of himself for having created sephiroth bc his will is so strong he can become a god using jenova just for sephiroth to have actually been influenced by jenova bc his mind wasn't strong enough to withstand jenova's control from how hojo raised him will not leave my mind

[clownowo]

questions...

[ceramicbeetle]

know there’s a lot of fandom appeal in hawkeye returning home after the war and getting “proper” psychiatric treatment for [pre-existing] mental illness but frankly rewatching Dr Pierce and Mr Hyde and Give 'Em Hell Hawkeye back to back makes me feel like hawkeye returns and becomes embroiled in the antipsychiatry movement instead

because the disparity between Trapper’s fond “He’s just unstable” that ties Directly to the war’s impact on Hawkeye’s sense of empathy and morality and BJ’s derisive “I'd say there was no point in letting this drive you crazy, but I can see I'm too late” that more explicitly dismisses his behavior as being baselessly irrational and pathetic is enormous, and I think with hindsight it wouldn’t escape Hawkeye’s notice. He is a character who remained relatively unchanged over the seasons — it was the way that people began to respond to, dismiss, and pathologize* his behavior that shifted dramatically enough to make him go from being “the sanest person [Sidney] knows” to being considered “Crazy”.

*"Pathologize" doing a lot of heavy lifting here. this isn't to say that Hawkeye isn't experiencing a break in reality in GFA, he absolutely is, the Point is that there's a horror story in the insistence that his psychosis in GFA is part of a history of unstable behavior, something Internal, something Individual, something caused by His Brain, rather than being a 'reasonable' response to an utterly unreasonably horrific situation, leading to him being forced into a treatment like heavy medications or ECT because it's more Convenient to label him as an already unstable Outlier than acknowledging the political, military, and traumatic situations that he was forced into that Directly Caused his behavior, you know?

[unproduciblesmackdown]

trying to say things about the bsol finale & how it has these little twists about what you don't necessarily expect for these roles but would you believe it i'm like i can't use my [just saying some shit] ability i'm pressed about wanting it to be more coherent & verbalizing doesn't even really happen if i don't have the [just saying some shit] wind in my sails But trying to say One Thing, how about the little twist like the miracle banana gets being that he himself lives, vs his emotional resolution that he would have died to help the musician, even as the musician is like no bestie you're good, even as the audience may expect & approve of even dying from funny little second banana guy who may even be supposedly taken as Superfluous now that thee man & thee woman have reunited (but it was always queerer than that) like. more resolution to our themes that that very second banana is doing just fine vs that the hero is, more classic iconisiquisms

[underscore-jude]

i take back any and all narrative critiques i had of firebringer when i was a bougie 14 year old thinking i knew my shit. this is par for the course in terms of starkid's narrative cohesiveness and the chorn twist is the funniest fucking thing ive ever seen