#I think that's overrepresentation to say the least

[cripplecharacters]

Does Your Scarred Character Have to Hate Themself?

[large text: Does Your Scarred Character Have to Hate Themself?]

(TLDR: No.)

A frequent topic that shows up around facial differences is the self-hatred, self-disgust, self-insert-negative-emotion that we must surely experience. I want to ask* writers without FDs - why? Why do you feel about us in such a way that that's the most common way of depicting us?

*- rhetorical question. I promise I know the answer, but I'm not sure if writers do.

It's frankly worrying to me. Is it really that common to assume that disabled people have this internal, never-ending hatred for themselves? The overwhelming majority of us don't. We hate inaccessibility, when people stare, or some symptoms when they get in the way, or how expensive being disabled is, but I find the concept of us being so completely disturbed by our own disabilities extremely strange. It’s “tragedy porn” intersecting “most basic ableism”.

“But trauma!”

[large text: “But trauma!”]

Trauma of what! People with facial differences don't have some sort of default trauma that we come with like it’s a factory setting. We are a group of people with tens of thousands of stories and experiences.

“Trauma of experiencing ableism/disfiguremisia” - that's better, at least this means something. If you're writing a story about this, please get a sensitivity reader with a facial difference. You can assume how we feel all you want, but in my experience these assumptions are often bizarre and unrealistic. Or just end up writing the same “disability so sad” sob story that everyone has seen a billion times. If you want to write about disfiguremisia, you need to understand the nuance and have more than just the basic level knowledge (which 99% of people don’t have either). If you can’t do that, don’t write about it. Simple as that.

“Trauma of the accident” - thankfully, the accident is an event and a facial difference is a disability. If you want to connect these two like they're one and the same, you're almost surely going to demonize disability. People with traumatic spinal cord injuries, acquired amputees, people with TBI, people with acquired facial differences - we participate in our communities, we have hobbies, we date, we play with our dogs. Disability isn't a death sentence. Media who make it feel like it is certainly don't help people who do suddenly become disabled, don't you think?

Here's a post by @blindbeta about blind characters becoming blind through trauma that’s better made than anything I could hope to write here. I heavily recommend giving it a read.

And, I can't stress this enough - most of us didn't have “the accident”, most of us are born like this. "Traumatic scars" isn't the only facial difference that exists, far from it, it's only one of thousands. It's 99% of our representation and "representation". If you want to make a character with FD - please consider that we aren't a monolith. Just like not all physical disabilities are "wheelchair user with paralysis and somehow no other symptoms", not all facial differences are "traumatic scar with somehow no nerve damage".

The overrepresentation of it is incredibly telling, and sometimes - or very frequently - feels like the writer doesn’t actually even want to deal with us. They want to use our disability as a way to cheap drama, moral metaphors, tragic backstories. Not to represent us as living people who are much more similar to you than you apparently think.

Now, I do have enough awareness to know that that's a big part of the appeal. “Horrific Thing #2456 happens” and boom, instant drama. Of course, it's a reasonable response that they would hide their disability for years, avoid talking about it in any way, and magically change their personality to be mean and reclusive, or at least be constantly soooo sad about how much it sucks to be disabled, right?

Do I really need to say that having your character becoming disabled be the worst thing ever is ableism 101? We have been talking about this for so long at this point. Writing about the process of adapting to a specific disability is better left to people who have actual experience in it.

To give an example that will hopefully resonate more with Tumblr users, I will use the fact that I'm also gay. It's not perfect by any means but probably much more familiar territory.

Imagine, let's say, a character. He's gay. The story he's in is supposedly progressive, certainly not trying to be homophobic. The character has experienced an incident, maybe an act of aggression or a hate crime, that happened because he’s gay, which was traumatic. Happens IRL, sure. So of course the character starts hating being gay. He talks about how gross and disgusting it is, he never lets anyone know that he could be “one of them”, certainly not take a stance against homophobia. You can't mention him without mentioning the accident, they're seemingly fused together. No gay love, joy, even basic happiness, he would actually choose to be straight in a heartbeat if given the option to and complains that he can't. This is shown as a neutral, obvious thing that a gay man would do, no one comments on it. He stays like this the whole time, unless there’s a plot twist in the last 10 pages where the world is now magically perfect ("we fixed discrimination, yay!"). This is the only LGBT character in the story.

Keep in mind that there are people similar to this in real life, living with extreme internalized homophobia.

Reading comprehension quiz time: Is this, in your opinion, realistic and thoughtful representation? How does it feel when written by a cishet writer, versus a gay writer who is recalling his experiences? Do you think that it's reasonable for the majority of media representation to be like this, or very close to it? How would it affect younger gay people who might already be uncomfortable with being queer? Are gay men the target audience, or are they not even considered as a group of people who read books? Is this helping or damaging the general public's idea of how it is to be gay? Why or why not?

The Masterpiece

[large text: The Masterpiece]

From 13 to 19 of May, we are celebrating Face Equality week (what a coincidence!). It’s important to me in general - and I wish it was more important to abled people, but I digress - especially its theme for this year.

“My Face is a Masterpiece”

Great statement, it represents the community well, I do enjoy how bold it is. Very cool stuff, I love the work our advocates are doing.

But why do I bring this up?

Well, to very non-subtly show that we aren’t a self-hating group of people. We are a community, a community saying “our faces are beautiful, look!”, we are saying “treat us equally, and do it now!”. Our activism isn’t about self-disgust. It’s about fighting your-disgust. 

Why can’t writers keep up? Why are you still stuck decades behind?

Is this the only reason I bring it up?

The Call to Celebration

[large text: The Call to Celebration]

FEI, the org behind organizing it, asks a very simple question (emphasis mine):

“Why do we so often see stories about facial difference as a ‘tragedy’, when they should be about triumph?” “Calling all artists, allies, creatives, galleries.  You can rewrite the story to bring about #FaceEquality and celebrate the unique artistry found in every face. Your participation this #FaceEqualityWeek will help to tell the real story, that there is a masterpiece in every face.”

Here. We are calling for you to stop. Directly from the biggest international advocacy alliance group that's out there. If you create, this is for you.

The last argument to not have your character with a facial difference hate themselves? Because we don’t want this. We are tired and frustrated. For me personally, I’m also offended by this kind of assumption. We aren’t tragedies or cheap entertainment for abled people to pity or be horrified by. We are people, and if you can’t internalize that, you have no reason to write about us.

For once, celebrate us. Happy Face Equality Week!

mod Sasza

[janmisali]

What makes you think that YouTube overestimates the number of male subscribers though? The poll in the community tab, while it provides a smaller percentage than the YT stats, still shows a clear male overrepresentation in your audience. Maybe there is something to it?

youtube doesn't know the gender of most of its users. youtube only knows your gender if your youtube account is connected to a google account that has gender specified (assuming that's accurate and up-to-date).

for literally everyone else, youtube guesses your gender based on what videos you watch. it's unclear exactly how much of the gender data youtube analytics gives is imaginary, but it's definitely more fake than real. (if "0.7% user-specified" means the thing it appears to mean, all the gender data is imaginary, but I'd rather assume that youtube is just explaining the concept of "people who specified a gender other than female or male on their google accounts" badly)

unfortunately, this is (somehow) even worse than it sounds. a somewhat reasonable thing to do would be to guess people's genders probabilistically, like a weighted average of the known-gender distributions of all the videos you watch. say, "this user is 60% likely to be male, 30% likely to be female, and 10% likely to be User Specified" or whatever. still a wild thing to do, but at least it would mean the Imagined Data would still be like kinda meaningful.

youtube does not do this. it just, assigns you a gender. (it does this, of course, so it can know which gender-targeted ads to show you.) in the above example, this hypothetical user would be Assigned Male at Google, just taking whichever of the strict boxes al-Gorithm deems the most likely.

what this means is that if you're, for example, a youtuber who makes videos that appeal to an audience that's around 60% male, everyone whose gender youtube doesn't know who watches your videos (and other videos that appeal to that 60% male demographic) is Assigned Male at Google.

so, I have Very Good Reasons to suspect that youtube's claim that my audience is 82% male is Somewhat Exaggerated.

[mitigatedchaos]

The Low-Friction Moment

Post for September 16, 2024 ~4,000 words, 20 minutes

Tumblr user max1461 wrote:

I'm contemplating the tradwife shit again, I'm coining the term "bioconservative turn" for the present cultural moment (evidently the term bioconservatism is already in use for something else... perhaps "biotraditionalist turn" will do instead?). The tradwife shit, the raw diet caveman testosterone shit, the wombyn born wombyn shit, all of it. It's characterized by a couple of things I think:

If this is a real trend, where is it coming from? One theory someone could float would be that this isn't a unified, general trend, but rather a bunch of smaller trends resulting from responses to more specific issues. If it actually comes together, it's going to do so as a political coalition and will remain ideologically incoherent in practice.

I would like to propose a more general cause, or rather, a shared source of influence (not responsible for 100% of causal share): people are sick of computers.

More below the read-more.

Max continues (numbering mine)...

(1) An ever-present awareness (or pseudo-awareness) of biology, an interest in biological specifics such as testosterone levels, and an appeal to "biological essence" or "biological purpose" as a source of authority.

(2) A conservative, although not necessarily politically right-wing, outlook: "modernity is essentially flawed and we need to return to our roots in order to reconnect with what really matters".

(3) A particular focus on health as an ideal; per the above a sense that modernity is above all else unhealthy.

(4) A conceptual shift away from the mind and towards the body as the most central part of the human being, commensurately a great political concern with the nature of bodies, and an attribution of society's faults to the wrong-treatment or wrong-usage of bodies.

(5) A generally somewhat quietistic bent, although by no means apolitical. A focus on individual right behavior. Perhaps contrary to expectations, not necessarily characterized by eugenicism to any great extent.

Obviously these different components will be expressed to different degrees in different cases, but I think this circumscribes it pretty well.

I think this emerging perspective has a couple of distinct influences that are being syncretized to varying degrees. [...]

...and adds:

Please note that I am not here to argue some stupid shit, or to do base guilt-by-association of this or that ideology. I don't like this biotraditionalist turn very much, but the reasons I don't like it are thoughtful instead of vapid. I would be interested, though, to hear others' opinions on this trend, if they think it's a real thing and what they have observed about it, because I've been contemplating it a lot lately. At least, I'd like to hear from people with novel sociological observations or commentary to provide, rather than boring polemics.

a - The Axis

To the degree that this is a real thing, I suspect that this is about computers. Computers and virtual reality are low dimensionality, high disembodiment. Whether with video games or with social media (posts on a flat surface), it's possible to get completely absorbed in the virtual environment and forget one's physical body for a time - thus the overrepresentation of transgender individuals and furries online. (The pro-trans perspective would be that this relieves gender dysphoria, while the anti-trans perspective would be that this disembodiment creates transgenderism. One person reported doing hard math to distract from thinking about their body, so I'd lean towards the former explanation. I've discussed this matter previously in terms of the relative influence of movements.)

Transgenderism represents a weighting of the mind over the body. If the mind says 'M' and the body says 'F,' then 'M' is correct and 'F' is wrong.

Rationalism is partly about weighting the conscious mind over the subconscious mind and the instincts of the body. Transhumanism is about the use of the capital-forming power of the mind to replace the body (either by uploading the brain into a computer, or by replacing flesh and blood arms with cool robot arms).

It isn't surprising that we would see, in terms of one causal factor, the rise of rationalism, transgenderism, and transhumanism, during the 1990-2020 era, a time of profound and transformative change driven by rapidly-expanding computing power and rapidly-expanding accessibility of computers.

However, rationalists, transhumanists, and pre-normalization transgender individuals all tend to be the sorts of people who get their opinions by thinking about them individually, rather than socially.

b - The Problem 1

Computers, the Internet, and social media, especially the consolidation of social media into a small handful of sites, created a very low friction environment.

For the rationalists, or someone like me, this wasn't that much of an issue directly. I intuitively evaluate ideological systems for loops, and have a good feel for logical fallacies, so when someone tries to pose as higher status but makes a terrible argument, I feel pressured to contradict them rather than to obey them.

For people who primarily get their opinions socially, I think this has been a disaster.

As you may remember, my model of the Republicans is that they pick a guy and then they rally around him as their leader. In the 2000-2008 era, that was George Bush, which lead to a steadfast refusal to question the Iraq War, and likely contributed to the mishandling of the War in Afghanistan.

Now, The Guy is Trump. This represents a decline in the reliability of information about the details, but a correction on some of the fundamentals.

QAnon is pretty bad, epistemically. A loss of trust in institutions contributed, as did the lack of administrative political skill by Trump himself. He's also hardly a model of general epistemic virtue; his advantage is mostly not being invested in some of the bad choices the US political establishment made previously.

Did the reduction in friction contribute? I think so. Without a reduction in friction, we would expect QAnon to manifest in a dozen different conspiracy theories, rather than come together into one more unified whole.

(One of the chief problems for the red tribe is that they aren't a "complete ethnicity." They're largely a slice of the white American personality distribution. This limits the number and scale of their institutions, which reduces their ability to build an independent knowledge base using personnel aligned with their interests.)

Meanwhile, my model of Democrats is that they're more based on a perception of consensus. They are hierarchical, and they do value authority. Many conservative complaints about "unprincipled" progressive behavior are actually about progressive deference to tribal authority; the progressives involved assume that the authority "knows better" than they do, and so assume the right-wing criticism cannot be true (or is true but irrelevant).

The reduction in friction caused a two prong problem.

First, in an environment where information moves more slowly, it may be easier to build a consensus around truth, since truth is observable everywhere and remains fixed over time. (Yes, yes, specific artifacts and events, I know. But you get what I mean.) You can't be sure if the guy over at the other newspaper or other university would go with the same partisan message that you would, but if you try to keep your message relatively close to the truth, then the two messages won't be discordant. [1]

The system of blue checkmarks for institutional actors under pre-Musk Twitter enabled a rapid formation of consensus, without a need to coordinate indirectly using the truth instead of communicating directly.

It was easy. It was cheap. It meant making fewer compromises with the interests or desires of the coalition. They could coordinate around whatever dumb message they wanted to, regardless of its relation to the truth.

Second, the people working inside the institutions were exposed to the low-friction environment. From the outside, they could be identified and targeted by activists, who would be able to call down large numbers of people on the institution. From the inside, their coalitional loyalty meant that many of them adopted the lower-epistemic-quality ideology. At the same time, there was a significant decline in employment in some knowledge-generating industries, like the newspaper industry. (It doesn't help that the positions are prestigious, even if they aren't the highest-paying.) This combination promoted ideological infighting, causing a misalignment of the broader institution with its mission.

Institutional missions can be used to build supermajority support, insulating institutions from politics. If an institution has 75% support, then an attack generally can't get a solid majority even from the party with the greatest opposition to it. If an institution falls to 50% support, then it can be dismantled or defunded for votes. Since in the two-party system, each party wins about half the time, that's a risky position to be in.

Other people don't think exactly the same way I do about this, but there are similarities in their perspective on this matter.

c - The Problem 2

Because developing true information is so difficult, it's also a fragile process, thus the replication crisis. Even a slight tampering with each node in the process will screw up the outcome.

Activists generally want to exclude results that are unfavorable to their causes, and include results that are favorable to their causes. (They would justify this from a moral perspective - "protecting the weak," for example.) Without error, this results in bias that leads to a distorted view once the information undergoes lossy compression. (Imagine a 500,000-word book reduced to a 500-word summary - all of the qualifiers and hedging will, by necessity, be trimmed out.) Error can introduce favorable-seeming information that is mostly or entirely false, causing a report to go from merely omitting unfavorable information, to being entirely fake.

The more complex and multi-stage the knowledge-generating process, the more information that will be lost across the whole process from activism. People have a limited amount of time and attention, so they'll typically only look at the output of the prior stage, and not account for drift from activism in stages before that. This can happen with multiple people, or just with one person working on a multi-stage process. With research, for example, deciding what question to research is an initial stage which can introduce bias even if every other step is followed meticulously. At the end stage, if the peer reviewers are all activists, they may decline to heavily investigate a paper if it seems favorable, even if the author made an error by accident. (The replication crisis suggests that peer review is having trouble even without activism.)

Above relatively small percentages of activism, activism + research will tend to reduce to activism, activism + journalism will tend to reduce to activism, and so on.

Suppose there is some industrial chemical, the usage of which will save 10,000 humans, but potentially kill 10 whales. If there is an activist who says whatever they think will help to save the whales, rather than what is true independent of saving the whales, then you can't ask them about the trade-offs. If they think telling you the chemical is super-lethal and will kill 10,000 whales will save the whales, then they'll tell you the chemical is super-lethal to whales. If they think telling you it won't save the humans will save the whales, then they'll tell you that it won't save the humans.

Estimates vary, but let's say that English has about 250,000 words. Each unique word can be encoded using 18 bits. This is all a very rough estimate.

At a low percent activism, we get...

[chemical][kill][ten][whale][save][ten][thousand][human]

This comes out to about 144 bits of information.

Words can be used to reduce the space of possibilities. For example, "ten" is used to exclude every number less than 10, and also every number greater than 10.

Because the activist is willing to say that the industrial chemical will kill 10 whales or 10,000 whales depending on what sounds more convincing, "ten" from the activist represents "ten or ten thousand." That is, it doesn't reduce the space of possibilities by as much.

One way we can think about this is that the vocabulary of political operatives in general is effectively reduced. In a standard binary encoding, with 18 bits you can write any number from 0 to 262,144. In the reduced vocabulary, any number 0 to 262,144 is only used to represent { "none," "one," "few," "many," "more than," "less than" }, a total of six options, which can be represented with 3 bits.

The correlation between the words and the state of the world is reduced. The words no longer divide the world into as many categories. Thus, the number of bits of actual information transmitted per symbol declines. [2]

At a high percentage of activism, any message that might possibly benefit whales rounds off to group affiliation.

[me][pro][whale]

This comes out to 54 bits.

In my opinion, the reduction in friction has shifted members of the left and liberal political coalition towards activism, and towards group affiliation messaging, and away from more costly truth-seeking and independent thought.

The overall complexity of the world-model has declined, and the amount of genuine information transmitted per word has declined as well. [3]

That is my personal assessment.

d - Things to Hide From - The Cyberspace Layer

One of the big differences between 2008 and 2024 is the proliferation of smartphones with cameras and internet access.

This has resulted in the presence of an ubiquitous "cyberspace layer" which spread across most of the planet. Anyone, anywhere, is now vulnerable to being recorded on video, and that video almost instantly getting delivered to people on the other side of the planet.

As I have noted before, with reports that satellite internet access will be extended to 5G smartphones, the cyberspace layer will soon extend to nearly the entire planet.

Did you know that major retailers are still selling disposable film cameras in physical stores, alongside record players? Some people are arguing that film grains are irregular enough, and screens are low-resolution enough, that photo-negatives can be used to prove a picture is relatively more 'real' rather than AI-generated, but I don't have enough knowledge to say whether that's true or reliable.

e - Places to Hide - Private Chatrooms

Although Discord is not truly private, because the platform operator has access to everything the users post, we still see a lot of discussion moving there. Why?

I think there are two big reasons. One, it allows tighter control of who enters a space. That cuts down on spam. Two, because it's not exposed to the public internet, it's less vulnerable to what political scientists call "norm entrepreneurs." (That would be the guy that's trying to raise his social status by coming up with new social rules which he enthusiastically attempts to punish you for not following.)

If someone tries to start a mob to punish you for not agreeing to "rewild" your cat, you can throw him out on his ass.

Overall, information moving from public forums to private chatrooms represents an increase in friction, including higher information acquisition costs. This will likely reduce the overall wealth of humanity and emphasize social connections over raw intellect.

f - Breaking it Down

Alright, so with that background, I'm going to break it down.

(1) An ever-present awareness (or pseudo-awareness) of biology, an interest in biological specifics such as testosterone levels, and an appeal to "biological essence" or "biological purpose" as a source of authority.

Loss of trust in left-leaning institutional authority, partly due to the institutions themselves, partly due to activists misrepresenting what institutions or research actually say, and partly due to the shift of the granola-eaters to the right due to progressive restrictions on granola-eater behavior.

Biology contains a huge amount of physically embodied information, gathered over many millions of years. In this vein, it isn't surprising to use it as a source of authority.

(2) A conservative, although not necessarily politically right-wing, outlook: "modernity is essentially flawed and we need to return to our roots in order to reconnect with what really matters".

Fertility is collapsing to below replacement in all industrialized countries. In some places, like South Korea, the situation has become quite dire. Something is wrong.

I think the cyberspace layer is also stressing people out. They can be socially ambushed by like 50,000 people at once, pretty much at random.

People move around a lot. They may not know as many people in person for the duration of their lives. Modernity itself depends on more distant, thinner, lower-dimensionality relations, including working with impersonal bureaucracies, which some people may find uncomfortable.

I think people would also be a lot more comfortable if the pace of change was about half of what it currently is. If feels like from the mid 20th century to today, each decade should "really" have taken about 20 years, to allow people to get comfortable with the technology before it changes again.

Overall, I think going faster has been worth it due to improved medical treatments, but I have to wonder what the alternative branch might look like given the rising youth suicide rate compared to the low of 2007.

(3) A particular focus on health as an ideal; per the above a sense that modernity is above all else unhealthy.

Health is a wellspring from which many other strengths, and even virtues, may flow. Health is quite core. In terms of the trade-off, it isn't just a matter of wealth or health - it's difficult to have wealth without health.

The genetics industry are beginning to cure the blind, but the price for their services range from the price of a house to a typical worker's total lifetime economic output. Wealth has only a limited ability to buy health.

Minus housing prices, people may be feeling wealthy enough that they'd like to trade some wealth for some health.

From the other direction, people have a great deal of difficulty assessing the health value of products. They depend on institutions to do that. If they lose faith in institutions, they'll want to fall back to something, and that leaves perceived biology, "traditionalism," and so on.

(4) A conceptual shift away from the mind and towards the body as the most central part of the human being, commensurately a great political concern with the nature of bodies, and an attribution of society's faults to the wrong-treatment or wrong-usage of bodies.

Yes, this could be a reaction to the relatively high emphasis on the mind associated with the computer era.

Additionally, because a body is a thick, heavy, and difficult-to-change matter of substance, there may be leverage in a politics rooted in bodies and in the interests of bodies.

However, concerns about contamination of bodies have been around for a long time. People have fretted about what they eat for as long as I have been alive. After all, food isn't just fuel, but also materials. How can you build well using poor-quality materials?

(5) A generally somewhat quietistic bent, although by no means apolitical. A focus on individual right behavior. Perhaps contrary to expectations, not necessarily characterized by eugenicism to any great extent.

In an environment in which collective action can produce larger societal gains, it makes more sense to engage in collective action.

In an environment in which larger political forces have become unresponsive to reality, it makes sense to reduce the scope of your behavior and investment to one in which you can still gain traction.

You can't control what the US government does, but a sound mind and a healthy body will help you in nearly all situations - and a healthy body contributes to a sound mind. Further, the relationships of a family, especially between parents and children, are also more likely to survive changes in the nature of the state or the economy, than forms of support that depend on the well-functioning of the state itself. (Of course, this may lead to opposition to families from political operatives.)

There is little point to pursuing eugenics in such a context. It's effectively a declaration of war on some fraction of the population, and if you don't devise sound general principles, it's also a declaration of war on yourself.

I would also little to propose a little inversion - the life one lives demonstrates the biology that one has. Therefore, to live well is proof that one is worthy, regardless of the specific fine-grained biological details.

g - Rejecting the Oppression Model of Disability

There's another aspect at work here, which is the progressive model of disability. Progressives argue that everyone is equally capable in order to argue that they are equally morally worthy. In the progressive model of disability, if someone is wheelchair-bound, the fact that they don't have the same mobility as someone who can use two legs is because something is wrong with society, not with the wheelchair-user's body.

Of course, the world doesn't work that way. The underlying physical reality of mountains is not socially constructed, and adding wheelchair access to a mountain takes additional labor, energy, and materials compared to leaving the mountain solely accessible by foot.

In the progressive model of disability, if the government refuse to build a wheelchair ramp to the top of a popular mountain, they are oppressing wheelchair users. Some of the ideology you have described may be based on rejecting this frame.

h - The New Classy

Personally, I think the vibes that you're picking up on are somewhat faint currently, but they are there.

I think we are going to see some rejection of electronics and computers by higher-class individuals, or individuals from the subset of society that will come to be perceived as higher class over time.

Probably around 2015, when the number of notifications on my smartphone began ticking up, to the point that I noticed I was ignoring text messages because I assumed they were social media or app messages, I began aggressively limiting notifications.

Later, I began experimenting with the idea of a "social media hiatus," usually for a week or two. I found that somewhat difficult to stick to, because I have a lot to say. On the other hand, those hiatuses were actually too short. I've now switched to a Monday queue, so that posts only go up one day of the week (unless the President gets shot or something).

That has been relatively successful. This corner of Tumblr is a medium-length discursive space, so it's usually fine if a post shows up five days later. I post probably half or even a third as much, but that's fine. I've found that I'm mostly able to stick to it, which is good.

On Twitter, I have long had notifications turned off for every account except those I follow. When I want to check for replies, I go read the with_replies tab of my own account, and scroll down as far as I want to check. I don't even know the replies exist until I check; as such, they weigh less heavily on my mind, being only "possible replies" rather than "known unanswered replies." Eventually threads fall below the distance I'm willing to scroll, and I never see another reply on them again.

More recently, I've been running an experiment of no computers and no TV for one day of the week. (Calling and texting are still allowed.) It's still too early to talk about the results, but one thing I noticed almost immediately is this kind of twitching reflex to check the Internet on my phone (or computer).

Taken together, this can be considered "taking control of one's attention environment."

This requires a certain amount of power, wealth, or time, and also a certain amount of willpower (although it's about managing limited willpower to greater effect). For example, one must be able to opt out of certain software if it's a low-return attention hog ("low [monetary|insight|relational|positive emotional] returns to attention"), which might not be feasible in certain industries or for certain workers.

Gambling is trashy. Alcohol is trashy. Drugs are trashy. Sex addiction is trashy. In the future, it is likely that electronic over-stimulation will be considered trashy. The meltdowns people have been having on Twitter over the past 10 years have been spectacular, to the point that they're eroding public trust in expertise itself. If you want to give off a serious (and not trashy) and timeless aura, you can't allow yourself to be deranged by Twitter, or by filter bubbles.

-

[1] This is a new bit of theory I've been waiting for the right opportunity to post.

[2] This is also one of the issues with using nothing but bombastic rhetoric.

[3] Same as [1].

[danpuff-ao3]

@broomsticks, leftsideisdown, Jackie, whatever you know this fabulous human as, we can all agree on "wow what a rockstar." In fact, I got so caught up in compiling some excellent fic of hers, that I nearly forgot "but wait! There's more!"

Listen, her pinned post on Tumblr alone is incredible. Look at that organization! So easy to find anything you could want to peruse on a given day! Then...the meta?? The STATS? Okay the stats meta blows my mind because I'm nerdy enough to like stat talk but allergic enough to math to have 0 comprehension of numbers. Which boils down to "please don't make me touch a number, but I'd sure love to watch you play with them!" Like...what a nerd! I say, with the utmost respect and admiration. I'm geeking out over her geeking out, I swear. But ALSO...recs!!!!! All of that on top of being a prolific and varied creator, which is rad as hell! Her brain? I love it.

But also...what a sweet and supportive human! Also, did I mention cool? Very cool. I always love seeing what new thing she's chatting about, creating, or reblogging. One of my favorite people to follow, I swear!

So now...let's get into the goods!

Fics

the dark side of the moon

Luna/Bellatrix. Rated: T. Words: 200. Implied past Pandora/Bellatrix. Implied/referenced character death. HP Shipuary 2023. Kinkuary 2023. Femslash Fuckery 2023.

Luna grew up knowing two Bellas.

flowers kiss and miss

Lily/Narcissa. Rated: T. Words: 1,400. 14 drabbles. Non-linear narrative. Fluff. Romance. Angst. Secret relationship. Implied character death. Implied necromancy. Ambiguous/open ending.

She thinks mermaids are red-haired. She thinks they sing. She thinks they’re beautiful.

For Everything a Season

Dolores/Marge. Rated: G. Words: 300. Crack treated seriously. Romance. Christmas.

There were many, many reasons why they would not work. 

She bred bulldogs, for Merlin’s sake. She broke at least one teacup a week, she snored like a herd of stampeding hippogriffs, and she never cleaned her hair out from the shower drain. 

Oh, and she was a Muggle.

Hers

Cho/Fleur. Rated: T. Words: 700. POV First Person.

At the Yule Ball, a test of loyalty.

Sealed with a kiss

Bellatrix/Pandora. Rated: T. Words: 200. Secret admirer. Getting together. Hogwarts era.

Pandora's secret admirer is not one to be messed with.

Whatever You Want

Hermione/Minerva. Rated: M. Words: 200. Student/teacher. Dom/sub.

Hermione just wishes to please!

which one of us will survive the other

Lily/Petunia. Implied Petunia/Vernon. Implied Lily/James. Rated: M. Words: 1,292. Sibling incest. Dub-con. Infidelity. Canon character death. Halloween '81.

Petunia’s wanted magic her whole life. Then again, she’s always wanted what she couldn’t have. What she shouldn’t want.

One night, all her dreams come true.

Meta (Stats)

What was the HP fandom on AO3 writing in 2022?

more miscellaneous stats for HP fics updated in 2022 

wolfstar fandom survey results (part 3 includes astrology, so how could I not include it??)

hp character overrepresentation in fanon vs canon: more random-ass stats!!

atyd fic popularity stats

Recs

femslash fic recs: ginny + infidelity

HP fic rec list: underrated gems of 2022

a wormtail week works rec list

strange little girls: a rarepair (mostly femslash) HP fic rec list

also Mutuals March???? Incredible!!!!

for an explanation about Mutuals March, or to figure out why i wrote you a thing, please check out this post.

[iteratedextras]

I'm not saying that you were trying to exile me.

This is a general point about the damage to the knowledge graph. The ideal people to achieve connection and make your point that "actually, it's not really a real problem, it's totally solved, it's nothing to worry about" would be Razib Khan (himself Pakistani by ancestry) and TracingWoodgrains (the gay furry ex-mormon and former moderator of TheMotte).

They're both disgusted with this scandal, and Trace doesn't seem to trust that the existing government data reveals the full extent of the scandal.

When I say that you've lost people who understand that part of liberal techniques is about using disaggregation to prevent cycles of ethnic conflict, I wasn't joking. The reputation of the UK is shredded right now. That is how you look from the outside.

Let me point something out:

There is no way, no way what-so-ever, that you actually want me to compile the evidence you're demanding.

People like you interpret my stance of not collecting and stockpiling the most demographically unflattering information imaginable as "darkly hinting." You think it's just being irrationally hateful and racist for no reason.

It's the other way around. There are three important reasons I don't collect data about all of the worst incidents like beheadings and beating young girls with baseball bats and all that.

First, it would in no way convince you. You would write off such a database as motivated primarily by irrational racial hatred, and conclude that either intentionally or unintentionally, there is balance and it is lying by omission.

Even if I assembled such a database, I couldn't connect you to it.

Second, I am still protecting demographic reputation due to the number of innocent people. I am providing you with an opportunity to solve the underlying problem and correct it without providing overwhelming evidence that is useful to those primarily engaged in ethnic conflict.

I have already provided a link showing that existing government data shows a significant overrepresentation, and I have already provided a reliable (even if you don't trust him) source that the overrepresentation may be even greater than stated in said government data.

This is sufficient to show that the problem exists. This is sufficient to show that with a very high probability, the problem is imbalanced. Combined with the background information of there being incidents in other cities, this suggests a relatively broad problem that needs to be thoroughly addressed.

This is the minimum of evidence you required to determine that there is a serious problem to be dealt with (including, if necessary, conducting your own verification), while providing the minimum organizing basis for hardcore ethnic nationalists constrained within that evidence window.

I am not "darkly hinting" because 'I am desperately trying to protect my reputation' while 'secretly"organizing against Pakistanis.'

I am "darkly hinting" because you are supposed to get the hint, resolve the problem while it is still small, and prevent leaking organizing basis to the right and kicking off a self-sustaining loop of ethnic conflict that requires significantly more violence to resolve.

You probably think that what I just laid out above is a selfish rationalization intended to preserve my own advantaged position, which I am not consciously aware of.

I disagree. I think that there is at least one person on this website, who has been reading my content for years, who can tell from the outside that this maneuver is quite conscious and deliberate.

Third, I'm not like those people who watch videos of Russian soldiers being grenade-droned and dying on camera.

This should address some of your confusion - it seems you did not realize that this class of maneuver even exists. To detect it, analyze the poster's larger general body of work and compare it with their general allegiances and recommendations on methods and tactics.

[ @feotakahari ]

Okay, I found the point where I was confused. I didn’t realize coming down hard on sexual predators was supposed to be a change. I mean, isn’t that what courts do already?

As Americans, we keep getting reports that the UK are giving short sentences to violent criminals, letting them out early, or prosecuting "hate speech."

The problem with reduced trust is that the distance information can travel on the graph collapses. Someone will say, for instance, that "the critics are racist" because "there isn't enough data." Well, of course, the government can decide whether to create that data, can't they? And if they're still concealing the scale of the problem, they might use the bureaucratic tactic of just deliberately not creating the data, and then claiming it doesn't exist.

A defender might point to one example of an offender getting a long sentence, and that would help (it's a far sight better than just shouting "racist!"), but if someone on the outside thinks the defender would omit information about other offenders not being prosecuted or getting shorter sentences, then the defender can only establish that >0 offenders were properly prosecuted, and not that the problem has been "solved" and is no longer relevant to other politics.

Someone can demand infinite evidence as a political tactic, but this goes in both directions - someone can also say "he's just demanding infinite evidence!" (when the demands are not actually infinite) as a means not to do the work of being trustworthy.

This is a good reason not to exile people from the coalition for not being highly conformist. People who are a bit more disagreeable and independent-minded, who have a history of sound or at least reasonable criticisms of coalition leaders, can establish a path of trust to reach people who could not otherwise be reached.

Politics is about coalitions, margins, and thresholds.

If there were only one right-winger in the UK and he had 50% of the vote, then he could just refuse to cooperate. However, opposing political coalitions are composed of a large number of varying people, and not only are their personalities and life experiences not identical, but their beliefs are not perfectly inflexible.

People are human beings, not merely political units. There should be a focus on cooperating to create good policy, not merely building temporary engines of power, and where it is too difficult to cooperate, it may be necessary to first step back and see how it might be made easier.

[morallygay]

🟩⬜️⬛️ Animes for aro/ace people - Part 1 ⬛️⬜️🟪

part 2 here

Including:

-shows in which (a) character(s) has/have shown lack of interest or disinterest in romance and/or sex🔻

-shows that as a whole have little to no romance and/or sex in them or are not romance focused🔹

I encourage anyone to reply/reblog with ideas/suggestions of animes that could qualify (especially aroallo people since you are the least represented and, basically being the opposite myself, I will not necessarily notice it). This is an ever expanding list (in theory. when i remember to come back to it) :)

This is a completely personal list based on what animes made me consciously think “aspec vibes”; it’s not guaranteed that you vibe with my taste, but surely a few people will, and this is for them. Since I’ve seen a lot of animes while aroace, I’m one of the few people who could make this post, so here, finally I made it.

To me canon and the intentions of the author are very important and obviously change completely the context of the ‘representation’. The worst feeling is expecting representation and being disappointed and invalidated, so I will make clear what kind and level of representation it is and if intended (to my understanding/intuition) or not. Let’s start by saying that, in case you were born yesterday, we don’t exist according to media and anime is no exception so expect most of those to not canonically be aromantic or asexual, and that even if the author intended in some cases to make them in practice aro/ace, it is most likely in a way that is oblivious to the actual existence of these orientations (the words are never used for sure), ex. it’s supposed to be a quirk / personality trait and not an actual sexuality. Also I have a taste for seinen so there will be an overrepresentation of that. With that said, let’s go.

"Saiki Kusuo No Psi Nan" / "The Disastrous Life Of Saiki K" (like 50 episodes but you will not see the time pass)🔻

Definitely the n.1 aroace anime. It’s a comedy. The protagonist is an absolute aroace icon. He explicitly expressed multiple times that he doesn't get and is disinterested in romance/sex and those facts are pillars of the show and the comedy. He loves sweets. You can also see him as demi. However the (aro/ace) label is obviously never used since the author is probably unaware of this sexuality's existence. It's the kind of representation that is not intended as representation. He is ‘nonhuman’ aroace rep; the fact that he is a psychic and basically a god is intended as the reason for his lack of interest/attraction.

warning: in season 3 he loses his powers and it is implied that because of that he is now a Normal boy and therefore allo. and he shows attraction for the first and only time in the commercial breaks animations lmao. traumatizing 😔. that didn’t happen in the manga anyway so just bear with it and ignore it.

Otherwise there is a lot of romance in this show and instances of sexual attraction, and it has a lot of other problems. It probably doesn’t pass the bechdel test for like the first and a half season. But it really is funny— hilarious even. It’s also very problematic. Still definitely recommend and it is very empowering to watch as an aroace, but keeping all that in mind.

“Barakamon” (12 episodes)🔻

The protagonist is canonically asexual in the manga apparently. I haven’t read it but in the anime at least he did in fact show disinterest and confusion over sexual attraction. No info romantic orientation-wise. It isn’t perfect (there was a whole thing about a character that is a homophobic fujoshi and other instances of unfunny humor like that) but it’s an cute slice of life I suppose.

“Dr Stone” (35 episodes + 3rd season coming soon)🔻

The protagonist never showed romantic or sexual attraction and explicitly showed disinterest to both at times. He literally got married for practical reasons and divorced hours later. Aroace king. Here too his lack of interest may be intended as a joke to show that he is Logical and too busy with Science to have time for bullshit like “love”, but it’s not like he can’t be both so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. The show itself is about science and is overflowing with love for the world in general! I have some (unrelated to aspecness) problems with it but overall it’s really good + there’s other types of queer rep in the manga apparently but I haven’t read it yet.

“Ore Monogatari” / “My Love Story” (24 episodes)🔻

A very sweet and good romance anime. In this one the side character (on the right) is heavily implied to be on both the aromantic and asexual spectrums, and there was a whole mini-arc about him and that near the end of the anime. Very wholesome.

“Gekkan Shoujo Nozaki-kun” / “Monthly Girls’ Nozaki-kun” (12 episodes + 1 OVA)🔻

A hilarious romantic comedy that I highly recommend in general. The protagonist’s crush is super aroace in the anime and it’s very funny and validating/empowering. It’s supposed to be read as him being oblivious for the sake of comedy, and he still is her love interest so in the manga — which goes much further — he slowly starts to develop feelings too. I see him as demiromantic. There are 2 other characters that have shown confusion / lack of interest about sexual attraction (one only appears in the manga) that I see as alloace. Also everyone (yes the aroace guy included) is bi. Not canonically of course but yeah. Watch it (unless you’re the type that doesn’t do ships, then you can pass on this one).

“Shingeki No Kyojin” / “Attack On Titan” (87 episodes + the last season coming soon)🔹

Romance exists in the show in the way that: it exists in real life so it would be unrealistic to not have it. The show itself is not focused on romance at all, and there is no unnecessary forced romance either. The female characters are not sexualized at all and there are virtually no comment/scene that show sexual attraction, to the point where I wonder if isayama (the author) is not asexual as well. This is a show where it’s hard to find any characters who you can prove are allo; this is how irrelevant both romance and sexual attraction are.

“Beelzebub” (60 episodes)🔻

This one is a mostly episodic comedy. The protagonist has big aroace vibes. He is supposed to be read as oblivious (which he also definitely is, but I see him as both) and too dumb to be horny or something. There is a lot of fanservice (respectful one though (well, as respectful as fanservice can be??)) and his best friend’s entire personality is being a pervert and that’s really annoying. Plus one of the main recurring characters is a ‘predatory gay’ walking joke. Despite my very low tolerance for stuff like that I still personally somehow love this anime and find it very funny in the end. I haven’t read the manga.

“Yagate Kimi Ni Naru” / “Bloom Into You” (13 episodes)🔻

A wlw romance in which the protagonist is aspec, and this is obviously relevant and touched upon. Definitely arospec and most likely acespec too (can’t remember exactly). There is also an aromantic side character that enjoys consuming romance but has zero interest in personally participating in it.

“Banana Fish” (24 episodes)🔹(🔻)

The 2 main characters are mlm love interests, and their relationship isn’t sexual at all. The show itself does deal with the theme of sexual abuse, and it’s a recurring relevant topic so trigger warning for that (but not in a romanticized/fetishized way at all). Their relationship being romantic is technically not canon either but it’s subtext (the kind that if it was straight no one would question it). They’re called “best friends 😊” to the end lol so. yeah. It can be frustrating from a gay rep standpoint but at the same time also right up your alley if you want queerplatonic greyromantic (asexual) stuff.

This one is a bit of a tangent but mlm rep in anime that isn’t sexual is so rare so I wanted to include it since I’m an mlm aspec and this is just like me fr. Also it’s a must watch in general.

“Paripi Koumei” / “Ya Boy Kongming” (12 episodes)🔹

This anime is wild (complimentary). The main theme is music, but this description can’t do it justice. Anyway the show is completely devoid of romance (at least as of now with 1 season. I haven’t read the manga) but full of sweet friendships and heartwarming interactions. The kind of thing to show to someone who says that romance is a necessary part of humanity and that life is less meaningful without it.

“Acca 13” (12 episodes)🔹

A seriously underrated show. This one is on this list because it was very satisfying to watch as an aroace person. There is no focus on romance. There are characters who are attracted to other characters but it’s not relevant or used for frustrating unnecessary drama or anything, it’s actually in a very refreshingly chill, matter-of-fact way, and it never goes farther than that. It’s so unique in this way I can’t really explain it well, but it’s pretty cool.

[dirk-has-rabies]

Gender variance and it's link with neurodivergency

Okay so this is it going to be another long one

All quotes will be sourced with a link to the scientific journal I took it from

Okay Tumblr, let's talk gender (I know, your favorite topic) my preface on why this topic matters to me is: I'm autistic ( diagnosed moderate to severe autism) I'm nonbinary trans ( in a way that most non-autistic people don't understand and actually look down on)  and I went to college for gender study ( Mostly for intersex studies but a lot of my research was around non-binary and trans identities) I will be using the term autism as pants when I have experience with however when ADHD is part of the study I will use ND which stands for neurodivergent and yes this is going to be about xenogenders and neopronouns.

autism can affect gender the same way autism can affect literally every part of an identity. a big thing about having autism is the fact that it completely can change how you view personhood and time and object permanence and gender and literally all types of socially constructed ideas. let me also say hear that just because Society creates and enforces an idea does it mean that it doesn't exist to all people it just me that there is no nature law saying that it's real and the “rules” for these ideas can change and delete and create as time and Society evolves and changes.  gender is one of those constructs.

Now I'll take it by you reading this you know what transgender people are  (if you don't understand what a trans person is send me an ask and I'll type you up a pretty little essay lmao,  or Google it but that's a scary thought sense literally any Source or website can come up on Google including biased websites so be careful I guess LOL) anyway to be super basic trans people are anyone who doesn't identify as the gender they were assigned at Birth (yes that includes non-binary people I could do a whole nother essay about that shit how y'all keep spreading trying to separate non-binary people from the trans umbrella)  some people don't like to use the label and that is totally fine by the way.

now autistic people to view the world in a way differently than allistic (neurotypical) ppl do.  we don't take everything people teach us at 100% fact and we tend to question everything and demand proof and evidence for things before we can set it as a fact in our brains. This leads to why a lot of autistic people are atheist (although a lot of religions and this is not bashing on religious people at all I am actually a Jewish convert)  this questioning leads to a lot of social constructs being ignored or not understood At All by a lot of autistic people and personally I think that's a good thing.  allistics take everything their parents and teachers and schools teach them as fact until someone else says something and then they pick which ones to believe. autistic people study and research and learn about a topic before forming an opinion and while this may lead to them studying and believing very biased material and spitting it out as fact it can also lead them to try and Discover it is real by themselves.

because of this autistic people are more question their gender or not fall in a binary way at all as the concept of gender makes no sense to a lot of us. “ if gender is a construct then autistic people who are less aware of social norms are less likely to develop a typical gender identity”

no really look: “ children and teens with autism spectrum disorder ASD or Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder ADHD  are much more likely to express a wish to be the opposite sex compared with their typical developing peers” That was posted in 2014. we have been saying this stuff forever but no one wants to listen. the thing is gender variance (being not cisgender or at least questioning it)  has always been closely hand-in-hand with autistic and ADHD people I'm even the doctor who did that study understood right away that it all made sense the whole time: “ Dr. Strang said they were initially surprised to find an overrepresentation of gender variance among children with ADHD. However, they later realized that prior studies have shown increased levels of disruptive behavior and other behavioral problems among young people with gender variance”  SEE YOURE NOT WEIRD YOURE JUST YOU AND YOURE NOT ALONE IN THIS!!

5% autistic people who did the study were trans or questioning. it was also equal between the Sexes fun fact. that may not seem like a lot till you realize that the national average is only .7% that's literally over 700% higher than the national average. That's so many! and that's just in America.

 in Holland there was a study in 2010 “ nearly 8% of the more than 200 Children and adolescents referred to a clinic for gender dysphoria also came up positive on a assessment for ASD” they weren't even testing for ADHD so the numbers could be even higher!

now I want to talk about a  certain section of the trans umbrella that a lot of autistic people fall under called the non-binary umbrella. non-binary means anything that isn't just male or just female. it is not one third gender and non-binary doesn't mean that you don't have a gender. just clearing that up since cis people keep spreading that. non-binary is an umbrella term for any of the infinite genders you could use or create. now this is where I'm going to lose a bunch of you and that's okay because you don't have to understand our brains or emotions To respect us as real people. not many allistics can understand how we see and think and relate to things and that's okay you don't have to understand everything but just reading about this could be so much closer to respecting us for Who We Are from you've ever been and that's better than being against us just for existing.

now you might have heard of my Mutual Lars who was harassed  by transmeds for using the term Autigender (I was going to link them but if it gets traction I don't want them to get any hate)  since a lot of people roll their eyes at that  and treated them disgustingly for using a term that 100% applied correctly.  Autigender  is described as " a neurogender which can only be understood in the context of being autistic or when one's autism greatly affects one's gender or how one experiences gender. Autigender is not autism as a gender, but rather is a gender that is so heavily influenced by autism that one's autism and one's experience of gender cannot be unlinked.” Now tell me that doesn't sound a lot like this entire essay I've been working on with full sources…..

xenogenders and neopronouns are a big argument point on whether or not people “believe” in non binary genders but a big part of those genders is that they originated from ND communities and are ways that we can try to describe what gender means us in a way that cis or even allistic trans people just can't comprehend or ever understand. Same with MOGAI genders or sexualities. A lot of these are created as a way to somehow describe an indescribable relationship with gender that is so personal you really cant explain it to anyone who isnt literally the same as you.

Even in studies done with trans autistic people a large amount of them dont even fall on a yes or no of having a gender at all and fall in some weird inbetween where you KINDA have a gender but its not a gender in the sense that others say it is but its also too much of a gender so say youre agender. And this is the kind of stuff that confuses allistic trans people and makes them think nonbinary genders are making stuff up for attention, which isnt true at all we just cant explain what it feels like to BE a trans autistic person to anyone who doesnt ALREADY know how it feels.

In this study out of the ppl questioned almost HALF of the autistic trans individuals had a “Sense of identity revolving around interests” meaning their gender and identity was more based off what they liked rather than boy or girl. That makes ppl with stuff like vampgender or pupgender make a lot more sense now doesnt it? We see that even in the study: “My sense of identity is fluid, just as my sense of gender is fluid […] The only constant identity that runs through my life as a thread is ‘dancer.’ This is more important to me than gender, name or any other identifying features… even more important than mother. I wouldn't admit that in the NT world as when I have, I have been corrected (after all Mother is supposed to be my primary identification, right?!) but I feel that I can admit that here. (Taylor)” and an agreement from another saying “Mine is Artist. Thank you, Taylor. (Jessie)” now dont you think if they grew up with terms like artistgender or dancergender they would just YOINK those up right away????

In fact “An absence of a sense of gender or being unsure of how their gender should “feel” was another common report” because as ive said before in this post AUTISTIC PEOPLE DONT SEE GENDER THE WAY ALLISTIC PEOPLE SEE IT. therefore we wont use the same terms or have the same identities nor could we explain it to anyone who doesnt already understand or question the same way! Participants even offered up quotes such as “As a child and even now, I don't ‘feel’ like a gender, I feel like myself and for the most part I am constantly trying to figure out what that means for me (Betty)” and also “I don't feel like a particular gender I'm not even sure what a gender should feel like (Helen)”

Now i know this isnt going to change everyones minds on this stuff but i can only hope that it at least helped people feel like theyre not broken and not alone in their feelings about this. You dont have to follow allistic rules. You dont have to stop searching inside for who you really wanna be. And you dont have to pick or choose terms forever because just as you grow and evolve so may your terms. Its okay to not know what or who you are and its okay to identify as nonhuman things or as your interests because what you love and what you do is a big part of who you are and shapes you everyday. Its not a bad thing! Just please everyone, treat ppl with respect and if you dont understand something that doesnt make it bad or wrong it just means its not for you. And thats okay.

[thorraborinn]

So... I have a weird question out of a peculiar interest. I follow your twitter and you made a thread about how in the Viking age, aristocratic heathens initiated a proto-humanism project where the Sámi were exoticized and push to the Other until they themselves being done the same by the Catholics. If we take Rígsþula as holding any signifance for the framework of Norse social structure, was there any connection between "thrall" and "the Other" according to said "proto-humanism"? (1/2)

What I am getting at is that as far as I know, later on, the differences between "slave" and "Other" (i.e indigenous ppl and Africans). Even though I am admittedly ignorant about the relationship between the Norse and the Sámi/Finn under this lens other than some people (i.e Alaric Hall) theorize that the Norse Álfr is actually mystified Sámi. So I guess what I am really fascinated about is the mythological presentations of oppressed people and how they connect with each other.

Okay, let me back it up and explain from the beginning for those just joining us, though I should mention that I’m really only just getting started at working out this line of reasoning. I don’t think I’m going to get to a satisfactory answer to your question but maybe we can get a little closer or at least get a better grasp of what we’re looking at. Twitter’s a really bad platform for this sort of discussion and I really didn’t explain any of the framework I was applying, so some stuff definitely got lost (for example, I’m not arguing that they initiated it, I’m just starting from the earliest point that I think we can say anything about it -- the very broadest parts of it *should* be a feature of any society that has a conception of itself).

This was a quick, rough attempt at an application of the work of the philosopher/essayist Sylvia Wynter to Nordic (pre+)history. Wynter’s work is very dense and complicated and I confess on my first pass I did not have enough of a grasp of it to try to apply it, and I made that thread after starting to read her for a second time. The work in question is “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument.”

Bear in mind that I’m not an expert and I haven’t read a lot of the works that she cites, and I encourage everyone to read it for themselves, but I’ll attempt to explain what is relevant for what I was saying myself, and if I misconstrue Wynter’s work then that also has bearing on my application of it.

Most of the essay is a description and application of an extremely powerful framework for mapping the ways that people conceive of themselves as human and the consequences for them, as a product of a complex web of codeterminations including the immediate material and social conditions and interests; beliefs about cosmology, the world, religion, science; beliefs about other peoples; etc. She calls this the “descriptive statement,” so for example in medieval Christianity the descriptive statement describes humanity in terms of its needing to be redeemed of sin, which necessarily therefore divides humans into two classes of human defined by relation to that redemption, Christian and non-Christian. But then there is also gradation, because the difference between the lay population and clergy is also a description of relation to redemption, and furthermore the clergy’s occupation with matters of spirit over material or base concerns also corresponds to the idealist medieval cosmology wherein the Earth was at a remove from truth and goodness, fallen (again, by its relation to sin) and alienated from the unchanging and perfect realm of spirit (the heavens, literally, the celestial spheres in the cosmology of the time). So in a society in which this is the descriptive statement, non-Christians aren’t just a lesser kind of human, they are also a necessary and spontaneously co-determining cause and effect of the “overrepresented” Man (the Christian, or rather even further, the clergy, the representatives or even the correlates of truth/spirit/redemption). Even if every human on earth were Christian, the spectre of the non-Christian would be continuously and spontaneously produced by this descriptive statement.

The essay continues to describe the historical development of this descriptive statement and conflicts between competing descriptive statements that eventually result in Modernity at the intersection of colonialism, imperialism, racism, slavery, Darwin’s theory of evolution, humanism, liberalism, i.e. a paradigm where at the same time as Europeans were redefining and fighting for “freedom” they were also enslaving African peoples because the descriptive statement also included a transformed version of the gradation of the previous descriptive statements, wherein this new liberal freedom actually necessitated and was co-determined by a redescription of humanity that placed Black people irrevocably at its margins.

Remember that this is my brutal hack-and-slash oversimplification of just one aspect of it, and that’s why it’s necessary to read it yourself (even just in terms of describing history using this framework, I didn’t start from the beginning, I skipped over a bunch of steps in between, and also have not summarized her description of how that develops into the currently-existing world).

Wynter spends relatively little time seeing how this works in societies outside of the lineage of western civilization but those brief moments are very interesting to me, for example (p. 292, 36 of the PDF):

The non-Europeans that the West encountered as it expanded would classify the West as “abnormal” relative to their own experienced Norm of being human, in the Otherness slot of the gods or the ancestors. This was the case with the Congolese who, seeing the white skin of the Europeans as a sign of monstrous deviance to their Bantu genre/norm of being human, classified them together with their deceased ancestors (Axelson 1970). For the Europeans, however, the only available slot of Otherness to their Norm, into which they could classify these non-European populations, was one that defined the latter in terms of their ostensible subhuman status (Sahlins 1995).

I believe that we can see something similar at work in Norse culture at different strata of development toward Christianization (and yeah, I do believe that we can see a long-term process of Christianization already in operation at the time of our earliest sources for Norse religions as distinct from “Germanic religions,” and where as a working conception “Christianization” here refers to a much broader set of ideas than just accepting Jesus and more importantly has to do with ideas related to kingship, empire, ideas about objective truth and universal linear history, etc which are already clearly present in material like skaldic poetry we use to reconstruct heathenry).

In particular I was looking at the “Otherness slot” in terms of words describing trolls. I think that at the earliest stage (earliest stage that gives us anything to work with, that is) a class of people were being slotted along with trolls and that this results in a series of words that mean both this category of person and “troll” -- these would be sorcerers. Many words for sorcerers in Old Norse also mean troll, and sometimes it can even be difficult to tell whether a figure is an evil supernatural creature or a human sorceror, especially (but not necessarily) a female sorcerer. Examples of words like this include flagð, skratti, skessa, and in later Scandinavian this probably prefigures terms like trolldom. It’s possible that in an earlier stage this applies not to all sorcerers, but only to “bad” ones, (whatever that means) so that we have words like vǫlva and seiðmaðr which don’t also mean ‘troll.’ Also, don’t read too literally or specifically into “troll,” I’m using that as more of a catch-all in a way that might also include elves or dwarves or giants than how we are used to using it.

So far, my theory then proceeds to say that the second stratum is where a single word isn’t used for both phenomena, but we can see comparisons (and occasionally full-blown equivalences) in the literature. This is where I argued that heathens (that is, non-sorcerer heathens) found themselves on the other side of the process that they had previously upheld as it redrew its boundaries to exclude them, along with certain types of foreigners (this is actually a function of relation to Christianity, rather than of ethnicity, e.g. “Greeks” would fall under Christian/human while “Kvens” would fall under unChristian/trollish). A very stark example of this is Eyvindr kinnrifa (who is heathen) in Ólafs saga Tryggvasonar, who they try to torture into converting to Christianity, but he literally can’t because he’s a magically-embodied spirit of the air rather than a naturally-born human -- to us (well, to me) it seems nonsensical that that would mean he can’t accept Jesus, but that’s not what they’re talking about, they’re talking about inclusion in the descriptive statement of humanity. Comparisons of non-Christian people to trolls and other monsters are very common and sometimes quite shocking in Norse literature about crusaders, missionaries, and sometimes Varangians.

The Sámi kind of double count here because of the way they’re portrayed and deployed in Norse literature (i.e. sorcery always appears in some way in connection to them, even if it’s just their appearance in Egill Skallagrímsson’s family tree) and more than anywhere else in this description we see the real-world consequences of this, how they continued to be marginalized even as the descriptive statement changed over generations leading all the way to the present day.

I’m also going to point something out real quick, because I think the way that we talk about myth and literature generally makes us inclined to do this, but I’m not arguing that sorcerers in the first phase, or heathens/foreigners in the second, are represented by trolls and other beings. I’m saying that the distinction between them is actually dissolved so that they become basically the same thing, or same type of thing, or at least they fall on a spectrum that includes both. It’s also important that this is not done deliberately. I’m not saying that aristocrats in Norse society planned this, I’m saying that we should expect that it seemed self-evident and as completely beyond their control as the motions of the stars and planets.

Heathen Norse people might theoretically also have had other ways to slot people, for example I do not assume that they conceived of gods as being in either the same category as regular people or as trolls. This framework doesn’t demand that the system be binary, it’s more that the medieval Christian one happened to be both binary and universalist (i.e. applying itself to all of existence, which is not necessarily true for other peoples). Indeed, perhaps some people could, through certain rituals and/or at certain times, come to occupy the same slot of otherness as gods, but this would set them apart from regular people, because we have no reason to believe that regular people thought of themselves as being like gods, at least not while they were alive. So this is actually quite different from a sort of comparison like [us ; Æsir] : [them ; Jötnar] that is more familiar to both heathens and to literary study of Norse religion. But also, I’m not claiming to be able to map this out for pre-Christian Norse people in general, only that we can start to see one aspect of it preserved in the evidence we have.

As regards (medieval) slavery, I’m not actually sure where to place it in relation to this description. It’s important to state definitively, but without reducing the fact that slavery in the medieval and earlier periods was a vile institution, it wasn’t the same as the chattel slavery that was inflicted on captured Black people in the early modern era. It wouldn’t be possible, for a couple of reasons, to take Wynter’s application of the theory to the world that consisted of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and attempt to fit Norse people in it.

My initial reaction to your question is that I do not think that thralls would be seen this way in the thought-world that Rígsþula came out of. I think that within the poem thralls are seen as just as human as everyone else, and if anything Konr ungr might be being portrayed as something more than human, therefore he, rather than the family of thralls, is the one to occupy a space outside of the normal conception of human. In my opinion, many people’s readings of Rígsþula have been poisoned by Theosophical interpretation of it whereby the poem describes an incrementally-advancing evolution of different races of men (i.e. what Theosophists actually believed). I don’t think that interpretation makes any sense. I believe that it’s a poem about the composition of a single kingdom, and is trying to push the idea that despite being of different classes all of the people described in it have a collective interest in fulfilling the duties of their station (a.k.a. lying to the peasants that they have material interests in common with the aristocracy). There is certainly a tendency in Norse literature to identify people as having certain natural tendencies on the basis of their heredity and this does manifest in how they talk about people of different social classes, such as taking it for granted that it’s naturally-determined or at least expected for a thrall to be cowardly in comparison to a land-owning free man (this is very strongly highlighted in the story of Germundr heljarskinn, where the moral of the story is basically that the “nature” of his class manifests more strongly than anything else, completely overriding his foreign appearance), but I’m not prepared to make an evaluation of how this relates to their self-conception as humans.

About álfar and Sámi, I’m not sure that I feel comfortable coming to any kind of conclusion here, at least not for before full conversion to Christianity and the medieval Christian descriptive statement. Again, this isn’t a matter of representation (actually, it can be through Wynter’s description of somatotype norms, which I haven’t discussed but which I don’t think we have enough evidence for Norse people to make conclusions about).

For what it’s worth, if I were going to dig deeper into this my first stop would be Norse literature that describes álfar, risar, etc. as literally existing races of people, usually living somewhere in Europe vaguely to the east of Scandinavia.

Anyway, there might be more here that could be fleshed out with more research  but I do urge caution in overextending any analytical framework too far into areas for which we have limited evidence. What I have been interested in looking at are clear-cut direct comparisons, either because the same word is used (flagð, skratti, etc) or because clear, identifiable textual comparisons are made (Eyvindr kinnrifa is literally a spirit, lines like ‘he was more like a troll than a man’).

But above all else the one statement that I will make with absolute confidence: read Sylvia Wynter herself, do not apply me talking about her to anything.

[delightfulsweetsbluebird]

Yellow Privilege

It was the year of 2020; a lot of things were getting more attention than usual as people were staying at home and having more time on their hands to be online.  Among those, racial justice was a very hot topic that got the biggest number of active discussions. It had become such a controversial topic that, in many ways, it had become a propaganda device used by the leftists and the rightists, two core opposing political views and ideals in the Western world, or at least in North America. As an international student from Vietnam who had lived in America and been living in Canada for roughly more than 2 years at the time, I often chose not to partake in this kind of discussion because of the shallow understanding of the social and political complex of many participants in this conversation. Nonetheless, the foreigner mentality also largely contributed to my unwilling participation.

“Lucky that you are Asian.” - said Adi, a friend of mine.

“What do you mean by that?”

“Don’t you Asians enjoy more privileges than we do? You guys have such higher SAT scores, higher representation in higher education, and lower representation in prison.”

“Yes, that is true I guess but...”

“And you know, it’s like you guys don’t experience social and systematic racism. Which I think you guys are part of the oppressors now.”

I was shocked at the conversation. To an extent, I thought this was a bit racist in itself. But before putting out any replies, I wanted to ask why he felt this way.

“But how does higher SAT scores, overrepresentation in higher education, and underrepresentation in prison correlate to Asians being more privileged?”

“Well...because you guys are systematically favored?”

At this point, I understood that he did not really understand his statement and could not formulate a sound argument to back it up. And to be honest, I was pretty offended by it. To say that Asian did not experience racism, especially during the pandemic, when crimes against Asians was approximately 8 times more than usual, was pretty ignorant in itself. And the fact that Asians had higher representation in education did not mean Asians were not systematically discriminated in education system. Asians were never part of the affirmative action that supposedly benefited minorities/POCs. Higher education institutions, especially the targeted ones, for instance, the Ivy League, were criticized for having different admission standard criteria, often higher, for Asian applicants. Asians having lower representation in prison did not mean that Asians were protected under the criminal law. It was just a fact backed by statistics that Asians had a low crime rate. And, even worse, many Asian Americans often got deported instead of putting into prison for their crimes.

It was true that Asians had better statistics than other minorities. However, to condemn this as Asian privilege for all the wrong reasons, in my opinion, was racist in itself.

Related media:

https://www.reddit.com/r/UBC/comments/k1vmqy/yellow_privilege/

[7deadlycinderellas]

no more math and history, summer time has set us free 3/?

AO3 link

First session revs up.

Arya’s schedule gives her Thursdays and Saturdays off. On Thursdays Ygritte handles the stables by herself, and there are no riding lessons given on Saturdays.

The first Thursday, Arya spends the morning dropping her clothes off at the camp laundry, and then putting them away when they’re done. Since half her clothes are missing their name labels, she finds it easier just to wait around until they’re done rather than risking someone else getting her knickers.

After lunch, Arya decides to take a step into the drama barn and see what Sansa’s up to this summer.

The drama barn is actually a barn, though there are no stalls and no animals. A raised stage takes up most of the space, the lights and prop and costume storage up in the haylofts. When they put on the end of session show, the doors are opened and the audience sits outside under the stars.

Sansa had told her the second night at camp that the first session they were putting on Alice in Wonderland, the second the Wizard of Oz and lastly Peter Pan. Arya always liked watching the shows, and not just because the mass overrepresentation of girls in the drama program always led to some interesting cross-casting.

Right now, Sansa and Margaery are passing around scripts to this group of campers. Most of the campers are young enough they're basically yelling their lines, making the wit sound utterly goofy. The CIT is a blonde girl, who at closer inspection, Arya realizes is Joffrey’s sister Myrcella.

Arya asks about her after the campers start to disperse.

“Bran ran into her a few days ago,” Sansa admits.

“Did she say anything about…” Arya raises an eyebrow, hoping that says enough.

Sansa’s expression turns sour.

“Her and Tommen live with their uncle now. Joffrey’s going to trial in a few months because right after he turned eighteen he got drunk and plowed his car into a sidewalk, killing two people. Their mother went on a series of very public interviews about how it wasn’t his fault, but only revealed to the rest of the world how bad her drinking problem is…”

Arya’s gaze remains steady.

“Don’t worry, I’m not going to say I told you so.”

Sansa sniffs and shakes her head.

“You don’t have to, I should have known. I should have seen, even his own brother and sister didn’t like him.”

Arya pulls herself onto a crate of masks and looks Sansa in the eye.

“And at least your taste has improved since then.”

Sansa hadn’t had time to date much in the last few years, but the ones Arya had met seemed decent enough. Right now, Sansa’s gaze is aimed across the barn to where Margaery is checking over the Alice in Wonderland costumes. They’re mostly over-large foam headed animal costumes, suitable for children of many sizes, but there are a few that look more like typical clothing. She holds up the Queen of Hearts costume, a long filmy red thing.

“Is that your costume?”

Sansa nods, smiling, eyes still trailed on Margaery.

“I have to, I’m the only one tall enough to wear it. Sometimes if we’re unlucky it ends up being a boy“

Her eyes stay, and Arya’s follow. Margaery is lovely, golden chestnut curls, a huge red smile, the kind of body that was the envy of other girls.

Including Sansa, it seemed.

Arya’s voice softens.

“Are you still not comfortable with it?”

Sansa ducks her head.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Coming out to people outside the family.”

Sansa’s eyes fall closed. Arya had been the first person she had told when she had come to the realization that she was bisexual. It was still one of Arya’s proudest moments, that her sister trusted her that much. The other siblings had been similarly easy, but Sansa had been so frightened to tell their Mum, certain that with her old-fashioned ways, she would disapprove.

She’d never had the chance to find out.

Figuring this was as good a time as any to ask her, Arya wonders aloud.

“How did you first know anyway?”

Sansa gives her a look that’s half withering. Arya laughs, maybe it was a stupid question.

“How did you know you were straight?”

Arya shrugs, kicking her feet, the crate she’s sitting on is large enough that they dangle.

“I don’t know. Contrary to popular opinion, I’ve always liked boys. I’ve never fawned or made a fool of myself around them because I never thought they deserved that much extra thought. I still remember Mum fretting, wondering when I would start doing my hair and going out all the time like I was supposed to.“

Arya’s stomach drops again. She’d never told Sansa why Mum’s opinions on that specific topic was such a sore spot for her.

Sansa smiles.

“I’m not sure even Mum would know what to make of you spending so much time with the lifeguard here.”

Arya feels her neck turn pink. Sansa nods knowingly.

“Even back then I knew. You were always surrounded by little boys, but you treated him different than you treated them.”

“That’s different,” she insists, “I do like Gendry, but he’s my friend first. We’ve been friends for a long time...and a lot has happened since we’ve seen each other last time.”

Sansa nods.

“A lot has happened. I guess that’s one of the good things about camp. Gives you time to relax and reflect, remember what’s actually important.”

Arya had never thought about it like that, but it was the truth. Most children at camp didn’t know anyone else, they came without siblings or family friends, unlike Arya who always had a few people she knew here. They could be whoever they wanted to be for the summer.

Morning activities are over after that, so Arya and Sansa walk to the mess hall for lunch.

Lunch also means mail call, and Sansa squeals when they’ve got a letter from Robb, tearing it open before Arya can read a single word,

“He says work is going fine, though they’re still undoing so much of the mess Robert left us in,” Sansa starts, “He says the dogs are doing well too.”

Arya grins. Several years before, one of their father’s friends had a litter of puppies, one for each of Arya and her siblings, and Jon as well to have one. The enormous fluffy malamute mixes had run free on the Stark’s, frolicking in the snow come each winter. Lady had died early, and Nymeria had run away, but Arya still loved watching them all the others run about.

“He says Ghost misses Jon dearly, and lets us know he hasn’t heard from him either.”

Sansa bites her lip at the next lines.

“He also says he feels a million years old going into work every day...and tells us he wants to hear every single detail so he can pretend he got to come here this summer too.”

Arya frowns at this. It’s not fair that Robb had to grow up so fast just because he was the oldest, and the only one who could be legally responsible for the rest of them. She didn��t think her and Sansa were too much stress on him, but between Bran’s medical appointments and therapy and keeping Rickon in school and from actually running wild, she understands how it could wear him down.

Speaking of Rickon, after lunch is finished, Brienne approaches Arya.

“Can you come with me for a few minutes? It’s nothing serious, I was just hoping for your assistance.”

She leads Arya away, and as soon as they turn up the hill, she realizes they're going towards the infirmary. Gods know she spent enough time there as a camper, covered in bumps and bruises.

“Rickon got into a fight with another boy on the sports field when his cabin and one of the girls cabin’s were playing kickball. Rather than immediately punish the both of them for fighting, I was hoping you could get the story out of your brother before I make my decision.”

Arya sighs deeply. This is a role she often plays at home.

When she enters, she expects far worse than what she sees. Rickon’s hair is a mess and he has a splint on one wrist and a couple of scrapes on one cheek.

“How’s the other one look?” Arya asks, sitting down beside him.

Rickon’s silent. It’s a strange look on him. From faraway an unfamiliar person might even expect an angelic child with his red curls. His siblings knew better, and had resisted for years letting him off easy just because, at thirteen, he was the youngest of them.

“We were just talking about the zombie game at the end of session. I was telling how you all always talked about how they picked one person to be the zombie and try and infect the others. One of them started laughing and saying there wouldn’t even be a contest being that we had a real zombie here already.”

Arya must look confused, so he continues.

“Couple of the guys have been making fun of the other cabin’s CIT since we got here. The girl with the scarred face?”

Arya’s heart sinks.

“So you punched him?”

Rickon nods, his head still downcast. Arya sighs.

“Rickon,” she starts, “I’m not angry at you for defending someone being teased...but you can’t just punch people. Tell a counselor, someone who has actual power to punish that person who’s being mean.”

She ruffles his curls.

“But I will tell Brienne what happened and that both of you need be put on KP for the rest of session, but that she should keep an open ear out for anyone else bullying Shireen.”

Rickon nods, knowing that’s fair. And Arya pats his hair again. A week’s worth of emptying trash and doing dishes is worth it for standing up to a bully.

Saturdays are a different sort of day off. There are fewer cabin activities on weekends. Instead there are campfire breakfasts, beach parties, nature hikes and camp-wide tournaments. Tomorrow, Arya and Ygritte are set to be leading a trail ride through part of Mistwood, so Arya plans to spend her day off relaxing as much as possible.

Which is why she has to be convinced when Gendry tries to convince her to go on a short hike.

“I already had Hot Pie do us up a couple of sack lunches. I found something last year that I wanted to show you!”

And in the end, a hike is hardly the worst way to spend a free day.

Arya loves the forest, the places where the trees and wild things rule. There are cedars and hemlocks and tall, tall redwoods.

They’ve only been on the trail maybe twenty minutes when Arya spots a weirwood.

“I didn’t know these grow this far south!” she exclaims, examining the blood red sap dripping from it’s ancient face. She’s never spoken too much of her affinity for her father’s faith, the faith of her home in the north.

“There’s not a lot of them, but there are some,” Gendry tells her, “One year after you left, the counselor sent us on a scavenger hunt to find as many of them as we could when he took us on a nature hike.”

Further into the woods, the morning fog still lingers, telling Arya they must be closer to the coast than she had thought.

Eventually, they reach the edge of a gorge, before a sheer drop into a stream below. The ground smooths out into rock.

“What am I looking for?”

Gendry shushes her, sitting cross-legged on the ground pointing to a spot across the gorge where the ground slopes down into rock along the edge of the creek. Arya sits beside him, somewhat reluctantly.

They’ve been sitting for maybe half an hour, They’ve both opened Hot Pie’s lunches, peanut butter and jelly with apples, and munch on them quietly.

It’s close to noon when there’s movement below in the rock. The whole of Mistwood is full of caves, though counselors have never let the campers explore as much as they would have liked, citing the potential for there to be wild animals living in the caves.

“Oh!” Arya exclaims when the movement is revealed to be a wolf, huge and dark gray, leaving the cave to drink from the stream, blinking up at the sky with his huge blue eyes.

“I didn’t know wolves lived in the Stormlands, or anywhere in the south, for that matter” she says.

“There have been rumours of wolves in the woods here for generations. There’s a story about a northern girl who came here in the old days to marry a lover, and not only survived, but, thrived despite that old bit of advice that northerners don’t do well south of the Neck,”

Arya smiles and snorts. Advice like that always sounded ridiculously old fashioned to her, not to mention that so much of the Neck had been drained years ago for development, aside from some bits protected by the parks and forest services. Without it, defining the line between north and south was much more difficult.

“They called her the Wolf Queen, and it seems like that’s where they assumed the stories came from, until about five years ago, some wildlife biology guys working out here found this pack.”

They sit and watch the wolf until he returns to his den. Wolves come out to hunt at dusk usually, this is like the middle of the night for her. Arya finishes up her sandwich, licks her fingers and rolls the trash up to tuck in her pocket. She’s spread her hoodie on the ground and is laying on her stomach, gazing across the gorge.

The day is pleasant, not too hot, and with no one else around, Arya finds herself feeling comfortable, maybe a bit too much. Gendry’s sitting with his back against a tree, and she crooks her head over her shoulder looking at him.

Softly, her lips open and her words tumble out.

“Last year, right before I turned sixteen, Mum and Bran were in an accident. A drunk driver went over the median and hit the car head on.”

Her words slow, and she ducks her head back against the rock, so she can’t see Gendry’s face.

“Bran was thrown from the wreckage, he collided against a metal railing on the shoulder. Fractured his spine. Pretty low down, the doctors kept saying he was really lucky, and how much worse it could have been. Great joy that was to a boy who had just found out he would probably never walk again…”

Arya cringes, remembering the conversations with the doctors and physical therapists, how they had described that with therapy, Bran would regain independent control of almost all of his bodily functions and other ADLs. There were all sorts of things in that conversation she hadn’t wanted to ever have to consider about her little brother, but now had to, they all had to now…

“Mum was dead on the scene.”

Arya feels tears prick at her eyes, and she wipes them away. She’s not looking at Gendry, doesn’t have to. She can imagine his face contorting.

“I’m so sorry,” he says.

Arya feels warmth beside her, and turns her head enough to see Gendry stretched on the rock beside her, face up.

“How are- are you- are you all still living at home?”

Arya’s stomach flips when she realizes what he’s talking about.

“Robb had already turned eighteen. He was already interning at Dad’s company, so he was able to petition to become our legal guardian.”

Arya cringes again, thinking of the mess Robb and Mum said that Robert Baratheon left the company in after Dad’s death.

“Jon joined the air force as soon as he turned of age so we would get familial benefits from it.”

Gendry lays on his back, his breathing even, as he thinks on her words.

“I can remember everything from when my mum died,” he admits, “I was eight. I remember walking home from playing football at the park after school and there were people outside the flat, and a policeman told me to gather my things in a bin bag and come with him.”

Arya winces. She remembers Gendry telling her about the bin bags when they were younger, how it was all he had to move his clothes and school things and toys from place to place.

“It wasn’t until even three months later that I even learned what happened. That her neighbor had seen her collapse while watering the yard and called the ambulance. She’d died of a brain aneurysm, no one could have done anything.”

Arya rolls on one side to watch his face. The sun shines off his still fairly pale face.

“Do you-” she starts off, stuttering, “Do you constantly remember the last thing you said to her?”

Gendry nods.

“That morning before school, I complained we were out of my favorite cereal. Then I left for the bus.”

It’s petty, she thinks, a petty and childish set of last words. She still thinks hers were far worse.

“You turned eighteen in May,” she changes the subject, “Is your current foster dad kicking you out?”

Gendry smiles, genuinely.

“No. Mr. Davos was the one who impressed on me how bad the outcomes often are for kids who just age out of foster care instead of being adopted. He hounds me all the time, makes sure I stay in school. No one ever really did that before.”

Arya thinks. She knows a lot of the charitable work Mum had organized with the church and for PR events at the company had involved foster children. She’d never gotten involved, maybe she should have.

“He’s been wonderful to me...these three years were more than I had ever thought I would get as a kid. And I can’t imagine how those three years have been for Shireen…”

His voice trails off, and Arya thinks it’s a good enough time to bring it up.

“Rickon got into a fight the other day, apparently some of the kids have started telling Shireen she has to play the camp zombie.”

Gendry’s jaw sets. It is remarkable, Arya thinks, that his anger is so much quieter than it used to be.

“She told me last night that some of the girls have taken to calling her the Bitch.”

Arya’s shocked.

“Because-”

“Because her burns make her look like the Hound.”

Arya’s stomach twists again.

“I still can’t believe he let that name catch on.”

Her voice is quieter when she continues.

“They are burns then? I wasn’t sure.”

Gendry inhales roughly.

“Yes, they are burns. What happened to her, her story...it’s very different than mine, but it’s worse. I won’t tell you the rest of the story, I-”

His gaze moves from her face to his feet.

“It’s not my story to tell. If she’s with us one of these days, and tells me it’s okay, I can tell you, but not otherwise.”

Arya nods in agreement. The noontime sun has begun to wane, and the afternoon breeze begins to drift in from the sea of Dorne and makes the air more comfortable.

She turns her head over her shoulder again, and smiles.

“Thank you for showing me the wolves...It’s getting a little late though,” she says, “We should be getting back to camp.”

Gendry nods, pulling himself into a sitting position before standing. He offers Arya his hand to pull her to her own feet.

They hold hands the entire hike back to camp. Gendry runs his thumb along the inside of Arya’s wrist, and she hopes he can’t feel how much her heart is thrumming.

[tubaterry]

“The military would just refuse to follow orders”

It’s a pretty common response to “fascism needs to be actively fought.” Comforting, naive and mostly wrong, but definitely common.  I’m in the US - I’ve heard it before but this is my first time hearing it in our current national context. Stewing on it led to a very uncomfortable moment.

See, I was in the Marine Corps (the most hypermasculine of the US armed forces) for four years.  I was single with no kids, so I lived on base through most of my enlistment - I spent more or less 24/7 with the people in question here.  Short of still being in and/or doing widespread surveys, I’m pretty confident in my judgement of the kinds of people in the military; the typical mindsets, habits, and social structures.

On twitter I tossed out sardonically that at least based on my marines’ facebook posts, “The military would just refuse to follow orders” isn’t a platitude I can put any stock in.  But maybe it’s worth digging in and thinking about it outside of my own experience.

What kind of people join the military?

Well, all stripes.  The US military is “all-volunteer”, meaning we have no conscription - you only sign up if you ‘want’ to. In that context, there are two main groups of people signing up: self-selection and circumstantial pressure.  In my intuition (ie no data, just going on personal experience) I’d guess that the “pressured by circumstances” group is significantly larger.  That group is primarily defined by a class thing - last I checked, military representation more or less matched the demographics in the vicinity of the poverty line.

The second group are self-selectors.  They, each for their own reasons, tend to have joined up with some kind of purpose in mind.  Sometimes it’s specific training (aviation people especially), sometimes it’s family tradition.  Sometimes it’s nationalism.  Sometimes it’s extremists using it as a legitimate (legally speaking) path to getting proven combat training.

What kind of people turn it into a career?

This, I think, may be the more important part - beyond just the on-the-ground practical decisions, leaders define culture and values. Just like anywhere else, and regardless of an inclusive or exclusive style, leaders attract and keep people who work well with them.  And there are good leaders and bad leaders who have all sorts of worldviews.

Generally speaking though, the people who succeeded in my neck of the Marine Corps and stuck around were the ones who kept their boat-rocking to a minimum.

So, who makes up the military? It’s mostly made of the same status quo custodians as in the rest of the country, with a notable overrepresentation of right-wing types and people from rough-to-desperate backgrounds.  Then when you consider especially how much of the country is at least defacto segregated - This is great white nationalist recruitment fodder

But white nationalists aren’t a majority.

You’re absolutely correct.  And honestly I’m veering off-topic with that - it’s important to remember that they’re still there and their ranks are growing, but we can safely assume those groups are gonna be gleefully ‘just following orders’.

That’s a lot of preamble, get to the point.

Fair. It’d be disingenuous for me to take literally “The military would just refuse to follow orders.”, the core idea if you take the time to work out the implications of the statement is “Enough of the military would refuse to commit atrocities that their orders couldn’t be carried out”.  This deserves counter-questioning:  

What constitutes enough? and How many would refuse?

Well, now that I’m here I don’t have a hard answer.  However, I think history points to the answer to the first question being significantly higher than the answer to the second.

Maybe most wouldn’t actively participate.  But that’s not the same as having anyone actively stop a war crime.

When we murdered hundreds of civilians in My Lai (serious trigger warning here for multiple types of atrocities), one person did anything to stop it.  (If you can stomach the linked article, note the instagator of the massacre used the “just following orders” excuse.) The one person who stepped in was a helicopter pilot who put himself and his crew between the murderers and the civilians being targeted, ordering his crewmembers to open fire on the US troops if they didn’t stand down.

Wounded Knee massacre: no intervention

Sand Creek massacre: no intervention

Ludlow Massacre: no intervention

Highway of Death (First Iraq war): No intervention

Abu Ghraib: No intervention

And just for a direct comparison with today: We killed 1,800 Japanese-Americans in our internment camps.  Do not expect anyone in the military to stop us this time either.

“The military would just refuse to follow orders”

No.  No we wouldn’t.  And as someone who knows people in positions where the they may be confronted with this same decision... I hate that in order to type this out honestly, I have to say that I expect all of them to make one of the wrong choices.

[estj-destroyer-of-misinformation]

Enneagram/Instinctual Variant Survey Results: Two

Rankings

so/sx- again, we have one clear front runner

sp/so- sp/so and so/sp were tied for second most common in twos as a whole, however, sp/so was fairly equally represented in the two types, whereas so/sp was second most common for 2w3 and second least common for 2w1. 

so/sp- well represented in 2w3 but rare in 2w1

sx/so- well represented in 2w1 but rare in 2w3

sp/sx- while technically speaking, sp/sx and sx/so tied in their representation in the total type, sx/so works so much better theoretically with 2 that I’m giving it the edge over sp/sx

sx/sp- our first example of a very clear loser

Interpretting the data

so/sx as the clear front runner again aligns well with the theory. so2 is known for networking and making itself loved to all and sx2 is known for its focus on serving the individual. In terms of fulfilling that core desire to be loved, so/sx is just the most effective instinct. 

sp/so is a little more tricky to interpret, just because there are some conflicting sources on what the sp instinct actually means for the 2. Most online sources (building off Naranjos subtypes) say that they have a childlike demeanor that asks others to help them and thus love them, but I have issues with that given the fact it seems antithetical to the sp instinct to depend on others as your core strategy. Russo and Hudson describe the sp as more of a cooking and cleaning frenzied mom who has meltdowns later, which makes more sense, and would match with real 2s I’ve seen, unlike the childlike narrative.

so/sp I think is higher on the list just because of the social instinct again. It’s the most effective way to get people to love you and/or need you, although obviously the sx blindness copromises it a bit cause they come off more impersonal. Hence them being lower on the list than so/sx. This type is more common in the 2w3, presumably because of 3s own connection with the social instinct, and less common in w1, presumably because of 1s lack thereof.

Why sx/so was so underepresented in 2w3s, I don’t know. Why one sp blind type is so much higher than the other is a mystery. However, I think this is where insufficient data gets us. As noted previously, I didn’t have enough responders for 2 to make hard and fast conclusions.

sp/sx’s comparitive overrepresentation could easily be written off as another consequence of smll sample size, but i will offer one theortical explanation as to why one so blind 2 is more represented than the other. I think it might be easier to accomplish the sp2 core strategy (homemaking and responsible service gaining love) with the sx2 seductive edge/focus on the individual than to attempt the sx2 as a core strategy (bonding intensely with individuals to make them love you) with no social instinct to ease the transition. 

sx/sp would of course, be our lowest for the reasons supplied above. If you are typing yourself as a 2, I would generally skew towards assuming you have the social instinct higher than your blindspot.

[schraubd]

The Senate as a Minority Set-Aside: A Modest Proposal

Every state receives 2% (2/100) of America's Senators. This is true for big states like California (12% of the US population) and small states like Wyoming (.18% of the population). The result is that smaller states have political influence grossly in excess of their number of citizens. Indeed, just nine states comprise half of the American population -- meaning that half of America is represented by 18 Senators, while the other half gets a whopping 82. And thirty-three states -- Missouri and smaller -- have a larger proportion of Senators than they do a proportion of the American population (which is to say, their state's population comprises less than 2% of the American total). Critics of this arrangement contend that it is anti-democratic. But defenders say that's exactly the point. The Senate is designed to avoid tyranny of the majority; it is part and parcel of a broader commitment to protecting minorities from the predations of the majority. On this view, we can think of the Senate as a minority set-aside program. A quota of seats is reserved for members of a given political community (those who live in small, less populous states); they are guaranteed representation far in excess of what they'd likely receive in a purely "meritocratic" (democratic) selection process. Surely, the concern about tyranny of the majority is a valid one. And that got me thinking: why stop there? After all, if we're worried about tyranny of the majority, that concern is at least as robust -- maybe more! -- when talking about racial minorities compared to the minority of people who happen to live in the middle of nowhere, Nebraska. If the point of the Senate is to protect these vulnerable minority groups from being run roughshod by the majority, don't racial minorities deserve at least as much protection as Nebraskans? So here's my proposal: The 25 least populous states have less than 20% of the American population, but nonetheless hold half of all Senate seats. Call them the "set-aside" states -- they get extra Senate representation to protect the minority from the majority. My proposal is that in the set-aside states, one of two Senate seats should be voted on only by people of color. So in Kentucky (26th most populous state), one of the Senators would be voted on by all residents in Kentucky, and the other only by non-White residents. Now you might be thinking: that's not fair! Why should only a small subset of the population (Kentucky is approximately 15% non-White) get an entire Senate seat allocated to itself, one which most Kentuckians aren't able to vote for? But that's the same "tyranny of the majority" logic rearing its head again: after all, one could say the same thing regarding why tiny Kentucky -- barely a tenth the size of California -- should get two whole Senate seats all to itself. If the way we protect minorities is by setting aside half of our Senate seats to numerical minorities, then there's no reason why geography should be our sole or even primary metric. Think of how minority-protective this would be! Currently, there are just nine non-White U.S. Senators even though people of color comprise 23% of America (again, contrast that to 50% of all U.S. Senators hailing from states comprising just 20% of the population). But if the set-aside states -- Oklahoma, Iowa, Utah, Mississippi ... all the way down to tiny Wyoming -- all took their principled devotion to avoiding tyranny of the majority and applied it to race, that number would shoot way up. Assuming each of these states elected a racial minority to one of the two seats, we'd have another 25 non-White U.S. Senators -- a total of 34%! Admittedly, this still wouldn't be as lopsidedly disproportionate as the overrepresentation of rural states -- indeed, it'd be closer to proportionate representation than the status quo -- but in service of avoiding tyranny I think we we can let that slide. The color of skin you're born with is morally arbitrary, but then, so is living in Montana versus New York. Since I keep hearing that malproportioned electoral representation is absolutely crucial to avoiding tyranny of the majority, and since tyranny of a racial majority has historically been a far greater threat to American liberty than tyranny of the California, Texas, Florida .... Georgia majority, I can't fathom any reason why this proposal wouldn't gain the support of all those principled defenders of the Senate as a bulwark of minority rights. via The Debate Link https://ift.tt/2K0jXTZ

[antoine-roquentin]

IT’S A FACT that African-Americans are disproportionately represented in America’s prisons. In state prisons, where the majority of prisoners are held, African-Americans are incarcerated at 5.1 times the rate of white Americans.

But what remains an open question is what explains this racial incarceration gap; what needs to change to eliminate that gap? Is it a racist economic system that produces a disproportionate population of impoverished African-Americans who then are ground up by a criminal justice system that targets the poor? Or is it better explained by racial bias in policing and sentencing?

A new report from the People’s Policy Project argues that while both exist, it’s economic oppression that matters most — or, at least, matters first.

Researcher Nathaniel Lewis sought to examine the role of both race and class in male incarceration as they impact four different outcomes:

Whether or not men aged 24-32 years have ever been to jail or prison

Whether or not men are jailed after being arrested

Whether or not men have spent more than a month in jail or prison

Whether or not men have spent more than a year in jail or prison

In order to do this, he utilized data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (known as Add Health), which followed a nationally representative sample of Americans who were in grades seven through 12 between the years 1994 and 1995. The fourth wave of this sample was collected in 2008, when these Americans were between the ages of 24 and 32.

The dataset collected information on respondents that includes race, whether they have been incarcerated, and for how long. To compose his class variable, he created a composite that includes educational attainment, homeownership status, household income, and other similar categories. He also ran results through seven different models with the variables slightly differently composed.

His research found that “while class has a large and statistically significant effect on the first three outcomes, race — once one controls for class — does not.” In the fourth category, whether a man has spent more than a year in jail or prison, he found that race does have a significant impact.

Even in the fourth category, Lewis found that “though for all but one of the seven models the effect of being in the middle rather than bottom class level was stronger than the effect of being white rather than black.” In other words, middle-class and rich people were equally as likely to have served more than a year in prison regardless of race, but a poor black person was more likely than a poor white person to do so.

Lewis illustrated this relationship in a series of charts. As you can see, class quintile and the probability of incarceration track very closely except for the probability of being jailed more than a year, where this is a clear divergence for the lowest class quintile:

The results cut against the conventional wisdom on much of the political left, which argues that America’s system of mass incarceration is primarily built on racial bias and discrimination. Michelle Alexander’s “The New Jim Crow,” when published in 2010, sat on the New York Times best-seller list for more than a year and was dubbed “the secular bible for a new social movement” by philosopher and activist Cornel West. Alexander’s thesis, in its popular, simplified form, is that the modern criminal justice system in America is analogous to a “racial caste system,” similar to the Jim Crow-era South and other historical systems of racialized oppression.

But central to Alexander’s argument is the history of that oppression, beginning with her exploration of an economic system that drove blacks into poverty, undergirded by a system of racism intended to split poor whites from poor blacks, to prevent the formation of a transracial populist party of the working class. Alexander highlights the destruction of the post-Reconstruction Populist Party, which was a serious attempt at a trans-racial coalition. Its upper-class opposition used explicitly racist tactics to divide the white and black poor, helping to set off the trend that carries through to today.

Some of the tactics of racist economic exploitation present in the 19th century — particularly trapping blacks in crushing debt — are around today, as are others, such as simply refusing to give work to African-Americans, though it is done more subtly in the 21st century. By “whitening” a resume, a black applicant is much more likely to get a call back for a job interview. White high school dropouts are just as likely to land a job than black college students.

Lewis’s conclusion is similar to that of scholar Cedric Johnson (who is cited as the competing view to Alexander in the report). Johnson, a professor of African-American studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago, argues that “contemporary patterns of incarceration and police violence are classed in a manner that is not restricted to blacks and whose central dynamics cannot be explained through institutional racism.” Instead, Johnson sees the modern prison state in the United States as a means by which Americans who cannot find decent employment and living standards are discarded.

In an interview with The Intercept, Lewis attempted to explain why we may see a divergence over the fourth question.

“One aspect might be that this is where we would see the culmination of the race effect. That is, the study doesn’t find a ‘statistically significant’ racial effect for any of the other outcomes, but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t one there, just that it’s probably a lot smaller than most people think,” he said in an email. “If there is a small racial bias each step of the way (i.e. arrest rates, to initial incarceration rates, to sentencing terms), a study like this wouldn’t find it to be statistically significant at any given step, but when added together, as it is in the last question, we could see a significant effect, both in the technical sense and the common sense.”

That racial bias each step of the way expresses itself even in schools, where black students are four times more likely to be suspended, and on the sidewalks, where blacks are more likely to be stopped and searched. It all adds up.

The explanation around sentencing bias is particularly compelling in light of research released by the United States Sentencing Commission late last year. Its November 2017 report looked at federal sentencing data and concluded that “black male offenders received sentences on average 19.1 percent longer than similarly situated White male offenders” between fiscal years 2012 and 2016.

Ultimately, Lewis concluded that his data showed that the primary reason we see overrepresentation of African-Americans in the criminal justice system are factors related to poverty.

“I think that people are used to hearing the statistics about glaring racial disparities in the justice system, and police brutalization and the police murder of black individuals, plus the long history of stark racism in America, and they add this all up and, quite reasonably, the New Jim Crow framework of explaining mass incarceration as a racist system designed to oppress black people seems inarguably correct,” he told us. “But most of these studies and statistics don’t control for socioeconomic status, and the ones that do, I would say, do so inadequately. It could be that mass incarceration is primarily a system of managing poor people, rather than black people, and the racial disparities show up mostly because black people are disproportionately represented in the lower classes. This is what my study finds.”

Lewis concluded that his research suggests that one of the best ways to reduce the total prison population would be to embrace social democratic policy that would address poverty, the education gap, and other class divides.

“One implication, at least to me, is that policies aimed at alleviating class disparities may be the most effective way of helping black people, and all people, subject to being ground up by the criminal justice system,” he said.

the reason why it’s important to note that the prison population swelled with black people because black people were poor is because it helps to explain the origins of neoliberal policy. when america first tried to extricate itself from its commitment to keynesian policies in the late 60s and early 70s, it saw mass protest and strike action. workers were able to demand higher wages even as employment increased, which should have made workers too afraid of being fired to strike. in other words, stagflation. in response to this, nixon, ford, carter, and reagan ended their commitment to preserving labour peace and allowed private business to crush unions, deregulated industries and removed the cushions that prevented a race to the bottom in wages, moved the american dollar off the gold standard and made it the world’s reserve currency, which helped upper middle class americans afford consumer goods, loosened financial rules in order to allow complex derivatives to manage risk, militarized police and built up prisons, and initiated the drug war, in order to imprison the massive amount of workers at the bottom of the ladder who would be laid off. in turn, because black people are traditionally last hired and first fired, their numbers were the first to swell in prisons. the boon to prison corporations from prison labour was an ancillary effect, not the main motivation in and of itself. 

[phoebified]

i'm going to assume, apologies, that at least part of this is about me, since i am, as far as i can see, the only japanese person actually discussing chiyo.

this is very long. read more ahead!

two things to start out with - firstly, i am nisei, meaning i am second generation. my family is from japan, but i am not. this is a very unique experience for me, as most of the japanese people i talk to are from japan, and have slightly differing opinions on these matters than i do. many of them would not find chiyo's design that offensive. frankly, i don't think it's the worst thing either. most of my outward frustration is that, while the issues i have with her are small, they are very common, to the point that in almost any game i play that has a japanese character in it, they almost always fall into many of the same moulds that chiyo has fallen into. i can say with confidence, though, that many of the japanese people i know from japan who have moved to western, largely white countries have started noticing many of the issues that i've brought up about chiyo with other characters. the reason for this is that in japan, these characters are, at the worst, off-beat. but in america, and countries similar to america, the context is different. much of what i speak of on chiyo is context.

i would also like to say that i am not just "japanese-american". nisei is very different from sansei, just like issei is different from nisei. i want it to be very clear that i am on the cusp of american and japanese. i have had people say before that my opinion would be different if i were japanese versus japanese american, but i am right on the cusp. i can see between both worlds, one where i am a minority, and one where my people are commonly oppressors. i understand both these realities, and i don't need the differences explained to me. i guarantee you that i am plenty aware of the differences between these two.

second thing i would like to point out -- asian people are not BIPOC. and BIPOC stands for "Black and Indigenous people of color". they will not have the same input i would have, and i would not have the same input on black or indigenous characters, as i am east asian. therefore, i do not think BIPOC would have better input on anti asian stereotypes than i would.

also, linda is not middle eastern, or black. neither is she confirmed to be hindu. linda is south asian.

the reason sabine's design was discussed as problematic is because they took her from a white enemy into a possibly latina buff enemy. luisa was created as she is, buff and latina, or at least her final design was that. she was never intro'd as white and skinny. i do not think sabine cannot be nonwhite and buff. i'm nonwhite and buff. i love the rep! i just wish that if they were going to make a nonwhite buff character, i don't think the move to do such a thing should be turning a white, evil character into a buff nonwhite character. and this isn't like with chiyo where we don't know how they'll write her, we've seen sabine, and she's tried to hurt the player character before. again... not saying you can't have buff nonwhite enemies. i'm just saying the context is bad. it could have been done better.

i do agree that we do not know how chiyo will be portrayed in the game. i have not seen the writing, and i do not know their plans. but i don't think that pointing out some immediate red flags is somehow me trying to represent a "monolith opinion" -- i never claim to speak for all japanese people. i will claim, however, to know more about being japanese than someone who is not, as i have been japanese my whole life, last i checked. (not sarcasm btw that's supposed to be a joke)

i keep seeing the question, "well would it be better if she was a side character?" and i know this will be a controversial opinion, but yes. absolutely. i don't think many people think about how overrepresentation, especially when it's... not very good (i'm sorry, but i personally cannot ever think that conniving, evilly-smirking, dyed-haired, evil japanese girl is somehow... representation i want...? it's been done a thousand times. people really like making japanese characters, because japan is a big center of pop culture!), is actually a problem rather than helpful. if they had made chiyo maybe... a regular villain, but she happens to be japanese, i might have been bummed they rewrote someone i assumed to be white (maybe she wasn't going to be! but she definitely was not chiyo.) to someone who is definitely japanese, but i wouldn't have been so bothered as i am now. and if they had made chiyo to be a random side character, and just... a regular girl like, say, farah, who again, happens to be japanese, i would be super thrilled!

also, WRT writing to SSE vs posting on tumblr... it sort of bugs me that sharing my viewpoint on a blog is somehow not enough. i don't think there's anything wrong with sharing my opinion on a blog, especially when i never made it a "you have to reblog this" thing, i was just sharing my opinion. if i'm frustrated on my blog, that is for me. i don't think it should be my job or duty to write to a company over what i thought were relatively clockable common stereotypes.

and also, WRT to "if she's not problematic, she's flat" stuff -- with how many stereotypes she relies on, she is currently flat. i have been writing my whole life just about, and i can say with a decent amount of certainty that there aren't too many ways i can foresee them writing her that will make her characterization not that flat. i could expand on this later, but i will leave this as is for right now, as i touched on this briefly in a different post

i don't think chiyo should be sanitized, or "unproblematic", or... not... racist? i guess?? i just think that pointing out what i have immediately noticed as a nisei person, which again, gives me a very unique insight, shouldn't be such a point of contention. i don't think people can't disagree with me. in fact, this post was pretty respectful in wording. however, i want to emphasize this is the first time someone has done this with my opinion. so far, every rebuttal i have gotten has been rude, discredited me, accused me of possibly race faking, or implied the person posting knew more about anti japanese stereotypes than i do. i hope this explains my immense frustration with this topic so far -- keep in mind i've seen many white people sharing my sentiments, and nobody has given them the same rebuttal they've given me. the whole "don't drown out nonwhite voices with white voices on this topic" stuff doesn't make sense in this context to me considering that so far, the people i have helped write their posts have not gotten the same backlash i have for voicing the same thing. the irony here is that while i have helped them write their posts and talked to them about my experiences and what i've noticed with chiyo, their post does not get backlash/does not get as much, yet mine do, and not even directly.

going back, i do not understand your point on "white voices pushing out BIPOC voices". white people pushing out black and indigenous people of color's voices? i am not black or indigenous. i don't know why black or indigenous people would know more about being japanese than i would. we obviously do need to not have people talk over black or indigenous people, but i fail to see how that is the conversation at hand.

also, with what you said about "only one person of a minority talking about it you should seek out a second opinion", i have talked about this extensively with another asian person, who agrees with me. not that that matters, because people will have differing opinions, and obviously somebody who i know personally is going to most likely agree with me, since we are amicable, but like... i am not the only person saying this. and while i do agree diverse viewpoints are needed, i do not feel like my argument has excluded anyone. i also feel like perhaps if a japanese person is pointing out something that they think could have been handled better, not even something that needs to be changed, just something that's worth pointing out, and many of the people arguing against it are... not japanese... y'know? i'm not saying i'm a monolith, but again, many of the arguments i've seen against what i've said have either been nitpicking and not actually disagreeing with what i've said, but rather picking up on something they thought i meant, or just showing that they're not quite sure what i mean. which is fine, some of the things i've discussed have not been in as great detail as they could be, and i don't mind explaining specifics further, but... again, many of the responses i've seen have not actually been discussing my points. they have just been making different points, or getting mad i made a point at all.

obviously no solution will please anyone. i am intimately aware of this fact. but i also am aware of how many characters have had this same treatment. i consume a lot of media, i see this archetype a lot. it is a tired one. i do not think this is an unreasonable statement. i am not saying you have to agree with me that it's racist -- in fact, i'm not even saying it's racist as in "we have to cancel this, this design SUCKS!!", i'm saying it's racist as in "this is a very common stereotype, it's something i run into a lot, and it has caused problems for me in my real life, which is what i am speaking from the perspective of.

also, considering how many people i have seen saying i am not a monolith and can't speak for all japanese people, i have seen many people also trying to speak broadly and refer to a group of people... as if they all would have the same opinion. i don't think it's wrong for any of us to speak broadly. i think that's how many people who speak english speak when trying to make a point.

if they were to make a colorful, peppy, nonwhite, possibly snappy character, why couldn't they do the same thing for anne von blyssen? if they had given anne the same treatment they had given elise, i would have been ecstatic. i feel like many people keep asking "well would you have been happy if she were a side character? they're doing the best they can, i'm sure they researched it." but then my rebuttal is one, i WOULD have preferred that, as LOTS of media makes japanese characters like this, and two, they easily could have also made anne... asian. japanese even. peppy and bright and pink and sparkly. and i would have loved it. but instead they rewrote a character from "Elise" to "Chiyo" and made her... her current design.

again, multiple opinions are a good thing. but keep in mind most of the opinions i have seen that contradict mine are not very respectful or actually even discuss the things i've brought up. again, i'm not saying we have to change chiyo. i am pointing out things that i am noticing immediately that i notice frequently as a japanese person. again, i am not a monolith, and neither are japanese people. from japan. i have no idea what my family would think of this, because they are all very different people and would have very different opinions. again, i am not stating my opinion is the correct one, and i don't think i should be beholden to write to a company about this. i'm not saying you're saying that, but... y'know. i don't think the response to me being bothered by a mishandling of my culture should be "well why don't you do something about it, then?" it's very frustrating.

take all of this how you will!

Look, I’m not in a position to comment if a thing is racist or not (which I'm not going to argue), but I do have three things to add that can apply to any situation like this that I feel should be said. I’m not meaning to vague anyone with this, I just don’t want to tag anyone to make it feel targeted because it's not intended that way. This is just generally cautions, with the current Chiyo discussion as the example.

One, it’s important to remember, in any discussion, that the opinion of one is not the opinion of all. That risks the issue of viewing any one culture or group as monolithic, particularly in the discussion of BIPOC issues. Not to invalidate any singular opinion, but if you’ve only seen one person of a minority comment on a topic, it is worth seeking out a second opinion. Particularly if you’re not part of that group, which runs the risk of white people leading a discussion on BIPOC issues, pushing out BIPOC voices, or the voices specifically relevant to the discussion. Not to cancel each other out, but to in fact validate both, even if they contradict. More opinions provide more nuance to a topic and are more representative of an issue as a whole. Seeking out diverse viewpoints on a topic about diversity is important instead of talking on a topic you’re not qualified to talk on. And if we’re going to talk about Chiyo as the current talking point here, talking to someone from Japan and a Japanese American may have two very different results, considering those are two very different lived experiences even if they share a root culture. It would be worthwhile to see which the design originated taking inspiration from and which it's offending, even if it ends up offending both. Just knowing some of the conversation around Japanese culture, Japanese folks tend to have a very different stance on things that Japanese American folks find offensive and vice versa, following the conversation on what is and isn't cultural appropriation (obviously interviews can be biased, but this isn't the first video I've seen on the topic, just the most noteable I could find). That doesn't invalidate either, but it's worth understanding both perspectives when discussing an issue as a whole.

Two, all dynamic characters are problematic. This isn’t to say that characters should be offensive in design like it's a goal, but if a character isn’t problematic, they are inherently flat. People aren’t perfect, neither are their representations or the people who made those characters. Quick examples in game: Linda. Originally, she was the only BIPOC character in the entire series, a literal token black character. And now, as the only Middle Eastern and Hindu character in the cast that we've seen, is it not problematic that she comes to Jorvik to be chosen and a part of an organization worshipping a Celtic/Western goddess? Probably worth a larger discussion there but the game also has done its best to address that and Linda’s opinion on the matter and how she blends her faith. Maybe not enough for all, but it at least showed SSE did some research before just adding those traits to her character. Not long ago we were discussing whether Sabine was problematic because she appears to be a buff Latina now, but as Disney’s Encanto just showed with Luisa, those “problematic” people are based on real character traits. Latina women are often over masculinized and Luisa has been praised by the Latine community as representing those women and that issue at large in a positive light. What’s to say Sabine, once given actual context in game, can’t do the same? Or Chiyo for the culture she's immulating? Maybe it’s not enough for some, that isn’t my space to say and I'm not going to argue either case, but that issue is inherently problematic. But would Encanto have been better having all of the characters be like Isabella and just be pretty representations of a culture? Would SSO? Having only pretty unproblematic BIPOC rep then runs the risk of tokenizing characters to meet quotas, which is antithetical to actual representation. Would it be better that SSO had a bunch of unproblematic NPCs in side quests that never got finished just so Chiyo wasn’t the first Japanese character? I dunno, ask Li Jian and Li Ming Jian, two Chinese characters whose sole purpose in the game has been opening the gates in Epona and the explanation behind the Red String Trail. Is that better representation? SSO was made with a very white cast over a decade ago now, which puts the team in between a rock and a hard place to try and fix that in the game, which they are choosing to try and do at the very least (more to be said that about many other games from the same era). Play it safe with flat characters who have no controversial character traits when they decide to not just use a white character and therefore cannot be used in plot in a meaningful way or try and represent characters more realistically with dynamic, interesting, if not perfect, character traits, even if that means giving some of them problematic traits in the process. While the team’s efforts to change that have and will likely continue to stumble, is it absolutely better that they just make a bunch of diverse characters in the background who won’t get used? Because the only way to get characters who will impact the plot is for them to be Soul Riders or Dark Riders in the current story. That’s arguably another reason the Garnok arc needs to end, but it’s also moot as that’s the arc we’re in. There isn’t a solution that will please everyone, that is inherently impossible to the human experience as a whole. That isn't to say "don't complain, at least it's something," but calls to just change the Dark Riders back to their white character designs also defeats the point of SSE trying to improve. Absolutely point out problems, but understand there will always be something problematic in a character as well. Fully sanitized characters aren't interesting to tell stories about, and hyper-characterization of a character's design is often used to summarize stories that don't have time to be told.

Three, if whatever you think is still more problematic than whatever context might be provided (which is valid, again, I'm not trying to diminish those opinions), tell the team. Don't just write about it on Tumblr where they won't see it. I know we have team members here, but both of them are game designers, and character design is not their responsibility, not to mention there's only so much they can do. And SSE has responded to similar issues before that were brought up in the community, I should know, I was the one who pushed it. That's how we got the Irish Cobs changed from their more common names to the Irish Cobs. So say something. The contact feature isn't just there for reporting players and bugs. Tell the team, point out the issues. Maybe they change it, maybe they want to provide the context they have been planning. Maybe they want to show the research their team did into tropes and stereotypes first. SSE prides itself in having employees from something like 50 different countries. Maybe they ok'ed this with a Japanese co-worker, maybe they should be reminded that sensitivity readers/players are a thing for a reason. We don't know the intent, and so it's worthwhile to point it out how something may be harmful. Don't just talk about it, do something.

Like I said, it's not my place to say whether or not Chiyo's design is racist, and I don't want to undermine that if it's someone's opinion, particularly BIPOC individuals. However, just talking about this Tumblr does nothing to accomplish change. I've also seen very little of the discussion seeking out other viewpoints, agreeing or disagreeing, on the issue from other Japanese or Japanese American people (not that they're required to provide it, but this is currently a monolithic stance based on currently voiced concerns from BIPOC individuals). I'd like to believe, considering Chiyo's name, SSE has done some research into this. Chiyo's name is a pun on her character, meaning something close to "thousand years," like the thousand year child, which she is. Puns and nameplay are incredibly common in fictional character design in Japanese fiction, which leads me to believe SSE has done at least a little research when designing a Japanese inspired character, and likely more that we haven't seen yet because Chiyo isn't in the game. Maybe not enough, but nothing gets solved without either waiting to see ingame context or asking SSE for explanations when presented with the issue. So do one of those, otherwise it feels more like giving SSE reasons not to try.

[peachymess]

I don't know about this, but I've noticed that Fanon Eremin is usually portrayed as Eren gushing about Armin's greatness. I love that so much and it's amazing. But, I just really want to see Armin gush about Eren in future fanworks in the Eremin Fandom. I mean, isn't Eremin about equality? (Also what are your opinions on this?)

Hello, anon! I really can’t answer for other people than myself, but I’ll tell you what I believe, since you are asking for my opinion. 

If I go by my own stance on this, and apply that logic to the (majority of) the rest of the eremin fandom, I think there’s a really easy explanation for this - however, like I said, this is not the “answer”, just my theory on the matter: the same way that people have favorite and secondary ships, they also have favorite and secondary headcanons for their ships. This is the case for eremin as well; the most popular eremin headcanon/dynamic, is that of dom!Eren/sub!Armin. And I call them that not in the seme/uke way, but rather in the personality dynamic sense. On the surface, you see, it’s not incorrect to say that Eren is the more self-assured of the two, while Armin appears to be insecure and in need of positive affirmations from outside sources. Of course, we can analyze the depth of their characters separately - as well was their bond - for ages (because we all know there’s more to them than this), but this is a generally accepted surface-value for these two and eremin. It’s not wrong, and it’s perfectly fine to enjoy this dynamic (although it’s enriching to explore them more, hence why you’d appreciate a shift in the default). However, it has raised concern that this is the sole perspective being represented; if you saw them portrayed at dom!Eren/Sub!Armin for the first time today, you wouldn’t react - but as soon as you notice a pattern, you might. - And you’re not alone in doing so! I’ve heard this complaint many, many times in the last year or so! And I definitely second the notion that different takes on eremin would be refreshing - however, I do not share the idea that an overrepresentation of D!E/S!A* is a sign of people not appreciating Eren or neglecting him in their minds. What I believe is instead the cause behind this symptom, is that people can only “art” so much; I’m using my self as example here: I produce perhaps seven pieces of art in a year. And ever piece costs me a lot of effort, time and stress. Not to mention I’m doing it for free. I think most fandoms’ artists consists mainly of young artists, insecure artists and other artists making fanart in their spare time for free. What I mean by bringing this up, is that for the majority of fandom artists, the situation is this: for every one piece they produce, there are at least five piece ideas they wish they could make but can’t (for one reason or another). In other words, only the tip of the ice berg ever gets made what art is concerned. And when people know that their quota is limited, they have to pick and choose which very, very few of the ideas they have, they’ll get to make. Bringing it back to me: when I know I can only make five pieces in a year, I want to spend those slots on my favorite dynamic (D!E/S!A). Not because I don’t like S!E/D!A, or that eremin is the only ship I want to draw for (oh, all the ships I want to draw for but never get the time to, sigh), but simply because it’s my favorite dynamic of my most OTP’d ship. There’s a reason there’s a lot more talk about wanting S!E/D!A art, than actual art of it; we all agree that it’s toptier (I’ve never ever seen anyone say they have anything against this dynamic, in fact), but many of us are not at a stage where art is easy to produce, and therefor we’re still working on our #1 dynamic for our #1 ship from our #1 series. While the fandom may be oversaturated with it, our individual art is not (I don’t feel like five pieces of D!E/S!A is an overbalance, for instance). Now, some admirable artists take it upon themselves to work on pieces that there is a demand for instead of what they’d perhaps personally prefer, but for most of us, I think there’s the idea that “I will definitely draw for that ship/dynamic/series/etc - I just have to get better/more practice/make this one idea first”. And that is perfectly ok! Nobody owes anyone any particular kind of art unless you’ve agreed to take payment for said art! And I actually think that while wanting more S!E/D!A is important, spreading the idea that the lack thereof is a symptom of lack of appreciation for Eren is toxic. It can make people feel awful for preferring it the other way around, or feel demotivating or anyone working on the “problematic dynamic”. 

My opinion of this is thus, simply put: I wholeheartedly agree that Eren is worth fawning over, and eremin is beautiful for its balanced dynamic, but I have a problem with the spreading consensus that the imbalance in representation means Eren is mistreated or not cared about. Because for most of us, I don’t believe that’s true at all. Because I doubt I’m the only one who’s sitting on a bunch of ideas they’ll never fulfill. And because I know it’s possible to care deeply about other things than just the #1 thing that you end up blogging about. 

That being said, I’d love to encourage people to explore the S!E/D!A dynamic more. Due to it being so unexplored (compared to the opposite), there’s a good chance any one of you could be the “first” what ideas is concerned. Make a list of popular AUs: more of them are untouched in connection to S!E/D!A than to D!E/S!A - in all departments (art/fic/other). So who knows, if you jump the chance, maybe you’ll even start a trend! And for anyone worried that the imbalance is a sign of uncaring fans: I’d like to encourage a more relaxed state of mind where you can entertain the possibility that what you see, is just face-value (like eremin), meaning there’s more to every blogger than what posts/art makes it onto their blog; there’s love for characters that aren’t mentioned as often, there are more hobbies than anime analysis, and there’s appreciation for more things than one.*In this case, D/S refers broadly to how much emotional support the character needs, with dominance meaning independency what others’ feedback is concerned, and submission meaning a dependancy on external support to remain assured.