#I understand like. Misunderstanding racism. To an extent

[mandareeboo]

Baffles the hell out of me that people are racist. You don't like learning new things about people?? You aren't super excited to hear about how people live their lives in a culture completely different than yours??? You don't care about the vibrancy of the human existence????

[official-saul-goodman]

This is mainly my observation as a non black person watching the reactions of other non black people and especially white people to the show Interview With The Vampire, they are a result of a fundamental misunderstanding regarding the idea of horror.

in a world of white dominated hollywood horror movies that mostly contain gore and white familial tragedy and abuse, none of which ever ever include the concept of race, misogyny and homophobia, racialised misogyny, and racialised homophobia- people cannot digest a horror tv show wherein the main character is a black man who is always and forever a victim of systematic, social, and microaggressive racism. people, specifically white people, have always been uncomfortable with being shown the extent of anti black racism in a way that isnt heavily sanitised or sympathetic to the white cause. to white people, the genre of horror simply does not include race cause they have not experienced the horrors of colonialist genocidal white supremacist anti black racism. and i highlight anti black racism because it is the subject of the show, as well as being a topic that is discussed vaguely by non black people while still being the most perpetuated form of racism from a global standpoint.

to white people especially, as the people who are responsible for the worst crimes committed against black people, anti blackness is just one of life's constants that should not be addressed directly or in detail, so to depict anti black racism so openly as a part of the genre of horror is incomprehensible to them. they dont want to be shown even a smidgen of exactly the kind of shit their ancestors and peers are responsible for, cause horror to them must just be things that they relate to and nothing regarding race at all cause it causes them to confront their comfortable positions. this is the same reason why you see white people saying jordan peele's movies are 'too hard to understand' despite being very easy to understand.

horror to people of colour is a concept that intrinsically includes racialised violence, its a constant presence like a rusted nail hovering near an open wound. and white people reject this. which is why they decided to degrade and miscontrue the purpose of iwtv and call it 'just another self important show thats racist and not worth watching'. cause to them horror is meant to be enjoyable, they want limbs chopped off not the actions of their white ancestors coming back to remind and haunt them. even though horror is a genre that is meant to fill you with... horror. horror to white people does not include the politics of racism, cause they see horror as an apolitical genre (obviously incorrect when everything and the kitchen sink is political naturally).

to the people of color, it is a moment of feeling seen, to see a main character ( a flawed man a pained man) experience the horror of all round racial discrimination, to see the horror of him being dismissed and exploited by the white people around him, the moment of witnessing yourself in the other when you see Louis and Claudia being so utterly sabotaged by so many forces, the way they are pushed to making irreversible devastating decisions cause they think they have no other choice to achieve an escape from a multitude of things they suffer through, the manipulation and abuse they had to become accustomed to. this is the horror, the horror of being immortalised against your will and lack of choices you were given, the horror of being forced to be subjected to racialised misogynistic and homophobic violence for eternity. being forced to live with all these memories and no means of forgetting. all this while enduring the way a white man belittles them for even suggesting that he might be racist while he expresses racist micro agressions (both lestat and daniel). this is real horror that hits home, horror you want to devour as a person of colour cause you want to see more of this story continue, to see what becomes of this living limbo that Louis, Claudia, and eventually Armand have to go through.

and as most white people cannot fathom this, cannot relate, they dismiss this version of horror that focuses on racism as a core element from the perspective of a black man and forever young black girl. they dismiss the show as just being tone deaf colour blind casting cause they didnt even see the trailer or try to understand this show. the white guilt is a shield they use to defend themselves against the frank and honest depiction of anti black racism from the perspective of a black man. they do not want to understand. they want sanitised, digestible depictions of racism so the horror remains fun for them.

even though this show is literally categorised as horror, and has all the hallmarks of classic horror including the camp styling, the blood, the gore, the supernatural, and the violence - the single fact that the show's core theme is based around racism from the perspective of a gay black vampire man is enough for them to declassify as horror in their minds. cause people of colour and especially black gay men must always be shown as having a good time to dissuade the guilt of white people and their responsibility is establishing the systems that oppress gay black men. speak no evil, see no evil, hear no evil, and the evil is not there anymore.

i may have more thoughts on this that i'll express later but thats all i have for now.

[epickiya722]

Do you think the reason people misunderstand Midoriya, Bakugou, Uraraka, etc. is because they misunderstand Horikoshi himself?

Like, people say chapter 431 doesn't contribute to the story, but I think that's wrong to an extent, since it does give closure to Ochako's character arc, which is her dealing about her feelings for Izuku (Hori probably got bored of the money to her parents motivation, since it's never brought up again). I think Izuku/Ochako was always Horikoshi's intention since he does mention that he planned her and Izuku to have several scenes, but like many shonen authors, he simply sucks at writing a proper romance or developing a female lead beyond pining for the hero, leading to Ochako becoming less prominent as he couldn't find a better role for her outside of being the token heroine that deals with the token female villain.

(His treatment of other female characters in this manga is also not the best it could be, but that's a talk for another day)

Meanwhile, he became more invested in writing Bakugou, likely due to popularity reasons (Horikoshi is famously scared of cancellation due to prior traumas with Oumagadoki Zoo and Barrage. It's why we had annual popularity polls). As a consequence, the relationship between Izuku and Katsuki became a lot more focused, which contributed to the popularity of the ship. However, I don't think this was ever intentional from Horikoshi's part, since again, he doesn't know how to write a proper romance, let alone a queer one. It's his own take of a Naruto/Sasuke-esque rivalry with lots of emotional tension, which he DOES know how to write due to growing up with Naruto, and it's arguably better written because he actually tries to explore the psyches of everyone involved. But at no point I think he even considered making an actual gay couple, especially since his exploration of rather sensitive topics like LGBT rights and racism are not particularly well-thought, even if well-meaning. Magne and Toga end up evil and dead simply for trying to find liberty in an oppressive society, and Shoji's discrimination plotline is squished in the story at the last minute despite its inherent potential. This all tells me that he's not really this overly progressive, status quo-shattering mangaka that some people believe him to be, he's just a guy writing a superhero story that sometimes deals with social issues, akin to the X-Men.

In the end, I think Horikoshi just decided to end things the way he planned from the start, while not giving much thought to the middle. He did make Ochako's feelings a plot point, so he had to give some closure to that, but alas, he didn't give it the development it deserved beforehand. It was always in the back of his mind as he always sprinkled those "Ochako is crushing again" moments here and there, but never had it as a priority in the story due to the popularity of the main duo + Shouto and his dad, thus chapter 431.

That said, Horikoshi is still an amazing mangaka, but like many others, he is still learning, especially now that he is no longer some obscure creator and has to deal with the usual trappings of fame. He probably never expected MHA to be as huge as it is and it genuinely caught him offguard.

Could be that people do misunderstood Horikoshi's writing. There's many writing styles out there. And really depending on the individual who cross a specific writing style they can either understand it or don't.

I, myself, don't think I'm an expert on any writing style except for my own.

I do think Horikoshi didn't expect MHA to become as popular as it did, especially when his previous works didn't even run that long. (I did enjoy OZ though, that was fun.)

During the years, with that rising popularity it could be that he had to keep building up the plot and I felt like had he had more prepared and probably had more time some of the plot lines could have been handled better.

He just had to experiment along the way while also going by the words of his editors and assistants. (There was also Horikoshi's health issues which hindered some creative development. How relatable.) So there some things he could and couldn't do. I mean part of the ending we got wasn't even the original ending we had in mind, not completely. One element of that OG ending (Movie: Heroes Rising) he did keep that I can think of is Midoriya losing OFA. Which was something that definitely coming.

Also, another factor of that misunderstanding of Horikoshi's writing are cultural and experience differences.

Now with Ochako and her crush, I'll be honest, even though it was "obvious" she's the supposed "love interest", I still don't think Horikoshi intended for her to only be known as that, let alone probably not really one at all.

Horikoshi has written female leads before and they're not written to be a love interest. (Shoutout to Hana Aoi, I adore her. Always doing her best.) Ochako didn't begin the story liking Izuku like that and that crush came later in the story. Heck, going back, a lot of their earlier moments I wouldn't consider "romantic". Just more like "look at these silly kids".

You mentioned Horikoshi stated he wanted to add more scenes for Izuku and Ochako, but what kind of scenes?

I get it as in more scenes in general. When thinking about it because as the story gets to the ending, Izuku doesn't have a lot of scenes with Shoto or Tenya who like Ochako he did become good friends with in the earlier parts of the story.

You know what, to me it seems like the first half of MHA was Izuku building up those bonds with the people in his class and the latter half became him kind of coming to grips on his responsibility as the last/ninth OFA user. First half of those building bonds kind of works because come later those friends do come in clutch for him in the second half.

But anyways!

With the romance, Horikoshi may not actually want to write it, no matter the gender. But probably went to add it in much later because it what draws some parts of the fandom in.

Who really knows, but Horikoshi?

I don't know, he never seem like the kind of mangaka who has cares to throw in a love plot (at least for the leads) in his stories.

I'm not an expert on his writing, I'm still trying to understand it myself. However, I do think his style is misunderstood.

Whose isn't?

[nekropsii]

…I swear to God, why have like half the Beforan players tried to bone someone significantly younger than them??? Probably because the author’s a creep who got a kick out of it, but still, between what was just discussed with Rufioh, Aranea trying to hit on Jake, Cronus trying to bone his dancestor (jesus fuck) and Meenah dating a physically 13-year-old Vriska… that’s a THIRD of the dancestors? And those are just the four I’m aware of, I would be very disappointed but not at all surprised if there was a fifth.

Honestly, adults having inappropriate relationships with children is just a heavily recurring theme in Homestuck... It's not really all that surprising when you take a step back. Doc Scratch, Hussie's own self insert, Bro Strider... They're all much older than the Alpha Trolls are, and are creepy towards the Betas in some way.

Further discussion going under the cut.

Content Warning: Discussion of Sexual Assault, Harassment, and Pedophilia.

... Man, I'm having to write about this topic a lot lately, aren't I? This isn't even close to the only ask left in my inbox about something adjacent to this. It's kind of... Flattering, in the weirdest way possible? I don't know, I'm often approached for my opinions on some of the much more serious and dark aspects of Homestuck. Things that people don't really know, or talk about, or address- like the racism issues, Dave's CSA, et cetera. It's not really prestigious, I don't think, but it does require a level of trust in maturity and literacy. I appreciate it.

Anyways, this is mostly going to be me adding to and even debunking your ask here. I think this subject both deserves and requires specificity. It's an extremely emotionally charged topic, so peoples imaginations tend to get a little... Carried away, when they don't know the full extent to what's happening. Considering how it's not easy to term search things said by most of the Alpha Trolls, and some people really just do not want to/cannot interact with things relating to Child Harm and Abuse... There's bound to be both a lack of information and an excess of misinformation. It's understandable, but... Deeply annoying for me in particular. Lol.

Let's do this.

---

The inclusion of Rufioh in this is both correct and based on some of my own posting on the matter. Rufioh was hitting on Aradiabot, who is 13, because she reminded him of Damara... Specifically remarking upon how she's "just like the real thing". Charming...

Here's where I'm going to supply a debunk: Aranea did not try to hit on Jake, and he is not significantly younger than her. That's a pretty ugly misconception. She's 19, and he is 16. She had zero romantic or sexual feelings towards Jake. Yes, she tried to kiss him once... Because she knew that he was attracted to her and assumed he'd appreciate her making a move on him. This was part of her little scheme to make him Hope-splode. She never did actually kiss him, and there was genuinely no consent violations involved in the situation- he told her to stop before she could, and she did. It was just a misunderstanding. It happens. If you're still put off by that age gap, that's fair and entirely respectable, but that's not "significantly younger", and the situation wasn't really objectively creepy.

... Cronus is... Fucking gross. His whole gimmick is that he is "The Worst Character in Homestuck", and boy does he succeed at it. He won that title. Earned it. Absolutely flying colors. He tried to "get with" Karkat, Tavros, and Eridan. By which I mean he stalked Karkat all the way to his house and then tried to break into it, got really handsy with Tavros in the middle of a crowd, and... Sexually assaulted Eridan- his own flesh and blood!- also in the middle of a crowd. All of these kids are 13 years old, and his main character trait is "Sexual Assault + Harassment". No one's free. Not even literal children! Cronus counts as a full-blown Pedophile, by the way!! There's your fun fact for the day.

Then there's Meenah, who had her whole thing with (Vriska), who was 13. Not just physically, but mentally, too. She was just 13. That was a whole arc, so it doesn't really need much elaborating upon, I hope.

---

That's... Just about it, I think? That's all I remember, anyway, as far as the Alpha Troll Age Gap Weirdness goes. So... Only 3 of them are really problems in that respect, which is 1/4th of the cast. Still an upsetting amount, but not... As bad as 1/3rd, as far as optics goes.

In full honesty, it's kind of funny to me how the Alpha Trolls who have overtly sexual theming are... Pretty normal about kids. Damara's nice to them and nobody else, we've got zero reason to suspect Mituna of anything, and Porrim's just chilling. It's accurate, if anything.

Hopefully this has been fun and/or informative. Have a lovely day.

[schneiderenjoyer]

I've been reading through the TWTR series and the development you're making with Schneider seeing herself as both arcanist and human has me curious. Is TWTR!Schneider actually mixed like Satsuki or Pavia or is it something else?

Oh, that's...actually a really damn good question. Uhh

Well, generally I don't think it'll ever be properly brought up in any future chapters or stories for this AU series to its fullest extent, so if anyone wants to learn the depths of how I'm writing TWTR!Schneider's stance at being both human and arcanist, then feel free to read it here. It's a long read so take your time.

In order to understand my thought process, you'll have to understand that how I view arcanists isn't purely by race or the physicality. It's also in concept. R1999 has, thus far, shown to use arcanists as a "catch-all" embodiment of many topical interpretations. From conversations about discrimination, oppression, neurodivergence, etc.

Especially with the recent global release of the Uluru Games not only having arcanist represent the natural issue of cultural erasure or pressure, but also has this strange side plot of talking about drug abuse in athletic sports that sort of felt shoehorned in when compared to just as heavy a topic as racism. But that's just it. If you view arcanists more than just the embodiment of one thing and instead like a vessel to address many other conversations, then it'd make more sense how arcanists can both be a discussion about race, but also about drug abuse, mental health, and more.

That's how I'm writing TWTR!Schneider's situation being human and arcanist. I want to write and give her another kind of embodiment like many arcanists have. And the discussion I chose is about identity.

Gender or sexuality, it's more on wanting to talk about those feelings of struggling with your identity as a whole. The sick feelings of being misunderstood, that you are misunderstanding yourself, and the journey of self acceptance in a world that wouldn't allow it. It's about a quiet conversation with yourself that ask things like "am I wrong for being like this?", "do I have a right when I'm not born this?", or "am I broken for being this way?"

It's about that deep personal battle of knowing you'll find yourself, but also know the world won't welcome or even fully comprehend that depth that you desire. And the constant everyday talk of saying "you're enough." and "it's okay that I am who I am".

I also want to write things about TWTR!Schneider that involves other topics like chronic pain, stuff like long lasting injuries due to health or result in the desperate desire to reach that internal peace. But like how much r1999 writes it so casually, not romanticizing it, not glorifying it to the point it's terrifying how easy it is to just overlook the details because that's how I want this to feel. Natural. Unseeing. Terrifying everyday topics that sometimes, people just miss or keep to themselves.

These are things I want to express in my writing. This is TWTR!Schneider. I'll do my best to at least be decent at interpreting it.

[super-hero-confessions]

Hayley Atwell antis taught me what not to do when you're trying to get someone to believe you. There was a split second where I questioned whether the OP of the posts against her was telling the truth. But that chance faded away when I realized how they were trying to resort to all kinds of "-isms" and "-phobics" to defame her.

From claiming she was a racist because Peggy didn't get paired up with Gabe, to claiming she was powerful enough to decide Steve Roger's ending, to claiming a joke of her posing with a Staron pic was "harassing" the fans of the ship, to claiming she "sexually assaulted" Chris Evans for touching his chest. Don't get me wrong, racist actors absolutely exist and some actors absolutely can and do improv or contribute to the characters, and some celebrities absolutely allow for their fans to be shitty to others, and sexual harassment absolutely exists in the industry. I'm not trying to claim that these kind of things don't happen. But the second you start accusing the same person of all of it, with little to no proof other than your word, you absolutely lose all your credibility. Because you are trying to bring someone's downfall and are just using social justice as a way to turn prople against them, by throwing every accusation known to mankind.

Let's say that my co-worker started a rumor about me, maybe it was malicious, or maybe it was just a misunderstanding. If instead of saying "hey, they started a rumor about me" I say "they started a rumor about me and they also said disgusting shit about black people, and they said fat people are gross, and they support conversion therapy, and they think women belong in the kitchen, and they hit a child with their car when they were driving once, and I have no actual proof but I expect you all to believe me, cancel my co-worker and hold them accountable"... then people are gonna look at me as if I grew a second head, and rightfully so. Because it's obvious that I'm just desperate to make them look bad.

Go ahead and blame Atwell of bigger stuff. Like wars, poverty, etc, because apparently she is that evil and that powerful. But no one will believe you, and not because they like Atwell, but because you brought not being believed upon yourself. Because you are desperate to make her look bad and and you are willing to make any sort of excuse to do so, even trivializing things like racism, abuse or sexual assault. And this blog is anonymous, but if you are the same way in your personal life, I feel bad for you. Because we all go through bad things in life, and the day you do, the people who know you will not believe you or support you. You don't understand why? Check out the tale of the boy who cried wolf.

Or, one day you will make these accusations on your own blog to "prove" you know what you say is true, and Atwell will sue your ass. Either way, it's a lose-lose situation you got yourself into. Hell, if a couple of people got tired of GotG fans expressing how much they liked GotG 3, when it's something innocuous and positive, imagine how sick people are of your destructive, negative claims. You are trying to ruin a person's life and turning every real world issue into a tool in order to do so. And like I've said on this post, I considered believing you. But I did not, because your claims have reached a ridiculous extent. Get better at lying or stop lying. One day someone will lie about you.

And it won't be pretty.

[caffeineandsociety]

Take, for example, White AutDHD Girls, a big stereotype right now of a subgroup of disabled people who will gleefully throw other disabled people under the bus. Is it true that neurodiversity acceptance is largely limited to the most TikTok-friendly manifestations of two common disorders? Yes, to an extent - though we have to remember that said acceptance is still conditional. It is tokenistic. It offers superficial positivity, but no actual SUPPORT. This is still bad.

Is it a problem for people with different disabilities, including closely related ones such as schizophrenia, that this superficial support is used as an excuse to treat them as Doing Something Wrong/inherently anti-recovery/"that's not neurodivergence, you're just a basketcase freak"? Yes. The fact that the mainstream understanding of the word "neurodivergent" is exactly equivalent to """""""high-functioning""""""" ADHD/autism, and the fact that this misunderstanding is used to further harms against other disabled people, is true and bad.

Does that make it good to blame ableism as a construct first and foremost on the people - especially the women, because disability is seen as more natural and less ~scary~ in women due to a long history of pathologizing women's behavior as an aspect of misogyny - who are being tokenized? To call them all attention-seeking self-centered assholes who would sell out anyone More Disabled Than Them the moment you see their blue hair? Absolutely the fuck not. That's a misogynistic and ableist stereotype, NOT a class-wide truth.

Speaking of white girls, there ARE ways that racist behavior in white people is, as a broad pattern, divided by gender. In fact, this is part of WHY it's common for white feminism to turn into the kind of radfem nonsense that is anything but feminist - for the idea to warp from "as a broad pattern, men are privileged over women" (a true fact) -> "men being privileged over women is THE core oppression from which all others stem; men over women trumps ALL other axes of oppression" (yeah tell that to Emmett Till; having seen it from multiple sides INCLUDING being seen as different races depending on how much sun exposure I've had lately, I would argue in fact that the man/woman axis is typically among the FIRST to fall apart) -> "because this power differential is so great and so ingrained, it is INEVITABLE, we need female separatism to PROTECT WOMEN" -> "men are inherently dangerous and women are fragile delicate flowers who need to be protected from them at all costs" (...congrats, you've ended up right back at Boys Will Be Boys-brand patriarchy, good job). This pathway is, essentially, a mechanism to avoid confronting how gender intersects with racism, ableism, queerphobia, xenophobia, and more. This needs to be called out. Missing White Woman Syndrome - an extension of the "boys will be boys" mindset, the constant fear instilled in white men that their wives will be stolen away by some lesser evil violent man, and in white women that tells them they NEED to buy a million security devices lest a gang of 12 serial murder-rapists break into their homes on an evil whim - needs to be called for what it is.

Of course, Missing White Woman Syndrome is NOT the same thing as...acknowledging that, when all other things are equal, men will usually be granted a level of social power over women, and that includes telling people, especially but not exclusively men, some pretty fucked up shit that they're statistically likely to internalize at least some of, about what they can and should expect from women. You cannot let awareness of the dangers of Karenism turn you into some full-tilt "ugh feminism is cancer" chud. You cannot conflate actual feminist issues impacting women with that racist/xenophobic/ableist/queerphobic weaponized fragility. When you do, you HELP to make it sound like that very specific weaponized fragility doesn't exist, and complaining about it is just hating on women for no reason. White Girl Bullshit isn't pop music and makeup and fashion and fancy heavily sweetened seasonal coffees; to say it is is just fucking misogyny; White Girl Bullshit is calling the cops on a Black guy, while police brutality is THE issue dominating the news cycle, because he politely mentioned that her dog is supposed to be on a leash, or transvestigating WOC athletes.

For that matter, this kind of weaponized fragility is also something white men enact against Black men and some other MOC. It's the core of every cop's defense for shooting Black kids. Call THAT out too. The main reason it's a White Women Thing even more than it is a White Men Thing is that the pool of people white women can reliably claim victimhood against is larger and white men are more inclined to measure themselves and each other on Never Being Outmatched; white men are more likely to be ridiculed for being "victimized" by, for example, a migrant woman or a mentally ill teenager, whereas white women are more inclined to be pitied for the same claim because patriarchy casts them as poor delicate incompetent flowers in constant need of Protection, and white men as the people who need to do that Protecting.

You cannot solve this problem by mocking things women are stereotyped as liking. You cannot solve this problem by mocking women for surviving past age 25.

You similarly cannot solve assimilationism and misogyny by mocking gay men for liking makeup, or caring about getting married.

You cannot solve sexism by shitting your pants every time a Black man breathes in your general direction, nor by laughing about Male Tears every time a queer man talks about how queerphobia is an aspect of patriarchy and thus harms him.

Acknowledge the problem, attack it with surgical precision, and resist the urge to just circle it back to some old counterproductive bigoted stereotype.

Basically I'm just sick of how many people don't realize that they're doing the same thing as James Somerton.

Misogyny, ableism, lesbophobia? Don't become cute and good and progressive when you specify it's about white girls, and in fact it only makes it HARDER to discuss how white girls enact White Bullshit.

Racism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia? Not magically cute and good and progressive because you specified it's about men. Not magically cute and good to shut down discussions of how misogyny impacts marginalized men with "boo hoo male tears" either. It's a big case of "same team, asshole!"

It's not helpful to treat culturally normalized abuse as inevitable if you pin it on "straight people". It's not helpful to be homophobic as long as you specify "white cis men". It's not helpful to scream about the old ableist boogeyman of the Evil Manipulative Faker by pinning it on "white girls".

I am BEGGING more people to check themselves on these things instead of just repeating an ancient, dusty stereotype and pinning it on the most privileged subset of the group you're being biased against.

[bitchcraftmagic]

The whole Whoopi Goldberg thing is a really illuminating moment in popular culture. It reveals a lot about our ignorance when it comes to the Holocaust and our limited understanding of race.

The first thing I would like to point out is that the Holocaust was not an issue between two groups of white people. 22,000 Afro-Germans were victims of murder, sterilization, medical experimentation, and starvation. The Romani and Sinti people were also victims of the Holocaust and endured much of the same horrors that Jewish folks did. Not to mention folks with disabilities, LGBT individuals, and political enemies of the Nazi party. Russian POW were also victimized specifically for being Slavic. Poles and other ethnic minorities were targets as well. The Holocaust was first and foremost a racialized genocide of many ethnic groups, Jews making up the largest of those groups.

Whoopi Goldberg cannot be completely blamed for her ignorance on the matter (though doubling down and voicing that ignorance even after she was corrected is something she should be blamed for). The Holocaust is not taught with any type of nuance and not really at length. The majority of my knowledge came from an intensive college course I took as a religious studies minor. Within the American school system, very little actual context is provided. There are many reasons for this fact but I believe the foremost of those reasons is because to understand the complexity of the Holocaust would be to brush up against the American complicity. After all, Hitler and the Nazi party found inspiration in the American genocide of the Native Americans. These truths are uncomfortable to the American audience and any real understanding of the racial politics of the time would be to indict the American populace for their indifference toward the Holocaust. Whoopi is not alone in misunderstanding the Holocaust but she is a loud voice who should speak more responsibly.

To fully understand the nuances of this particular moment in pop cultural ignorance you have to look at the Nazi racial ideology through a critical lens. Goldberg’s comments were very much informed by her experience of modern American racial politics. Whiteness, as it is currently defined, includes Jewish people…to an extent. It is important to note that Whiteness, as it presents throughout American history, is defined not by what it is but by what it is not. Whiteness has no cultural specific markers, no identity besides its proximity to power. Whiteness at the founding of our country, for example, only really included English Protestants. 150 years ago I would not have been considered white despite the fact that now I am very much a white person who’s experience of the world is defined by the privilege that affords. Whiteness is defined by cultural context. It is defined by the need to shore up power, to reestablish the status quo. My family became white when it was convenient to adopt the hoards of Italian immigrants as members of whiteness in the lead up to the Second World War.

Something I see a lot is people assuming American racism and racial politics is universal. Racism, like all social construct, is culturally and historically specific. Anti-blackness certainly exists globally but the way that manifests is very culturally dependent. Like I stated previously, Whiteness in the American context exists only as an antitheses, there is nothing that defines it in specificity expect its proximity to power. In Europe during the first half of the 20th century many groups that would be absorbed into the modern “white identity” were racialized. Races were defined along national lines. Post the revolutionary period of the mid-1800s there was a global obsession with nationalism. Of course, this nationalistic fervor was not new but it was reaching a fever pitch. Concepts of national identity were redefined, reshaped, and refocused. A lot of this was, again, defined by what this identity was not. The colonial rush to partition Africa and Asia was as much a desperate grab for wealth as it was a desire to solidify national identity within Western Europe. The First World War was the violent crescendo of that nationalistic greed. But within these nations were “racial aberrations”, people who existed in its boarders but were never counted as its people. Jews, Romani, and Sinti were always considered a racialized other, people without nations. While they may have lived in France, England, Germany, etc. they were never French, English, or German. They did not belong to the national identity but were utilized to demonstrate exactly what the national identity was not. When convenient, they provided cover for cultural failings and strife. Convenient tools to utilize for prosperity and for national unity. By the time the Nazi’s rose to power the groundwork had been laid. Here were the scapegoats, the evil among us, the barrier to German prosperity and victory. And they were unique, for inherent to their being were traits reviled by the Aryan, the antitheses to the pure German spirit. It was their racial “inferiority” that marked them for slaughter and subjugation. It was their imagined essence that led to their demise. Please understand that this ideology was not unique to Germany but it reached its horrifying peak there due to a confluence of factors. It should never, ever be forgotten that many of the occupied nations were all too happy to hand over their Jews knowing full well their fate. And they did so with the same ideology in mind: these were racially deviant individuals effecting the purity of our nation.

Make no mistake, the Holocaust was about race. It was about the creation of the Aryan race, the ideology that drove a nation to genocide. To assume that racial politics can extend beyond cultural context and history is to admit to something that is rather dangerous. It is to admit that race is not an experience but a truth. It is to admit that there is validity in understanding race as a set of features, failures, modes of being that are inherent and not learned. To be critical of race is to understand that it exists only in the created and imagined. Again, it would be a grave mistake to assume that because race is constructed it has no bearing on reality, it does. Race, unequivocally, is a lived and real experience but it is unhelpful to assume that that experience is fixed. Race is slippery, Whiteness even more so. By its nature it evolves to survive. In its current evolution Jews have conditionally been allowed to exist under its protection but that could shift in an instant. We see it now. Antisemitism is on the rise and it’s violence is more pronounced. The veil of Whiteness has slipped. Whiteness only protects what is useful to it, it is always conditional. And conditions change. And it seems, for the time being, that Jews exist on a razors edge and are allowed into Whiteness on a case by case basis. Are they useful to the power structure? Do they uphold white supremacy? If yes, then they are useful tools. If no, then perhaps the Nazis weren’t so far of base, after all.

Whiteness is not something that has meaning. To be proud of it is to be proud of nothing, to be proud of vapor. There is nothing that it holds in value. It is not something rich with culture, held together in collective struggle, a beacon of joy, a thing of beauty. It is a Frankenstein’s monster of cobbled together vagaries that are, all together, meaningless. I suppose I can be proud of my Sicilian ancestors for their perseverance, their cultural complexity, their struggle under poverty but none of those things are a specific trait of whiteness. The songs they sung, the food they ate, the God they prayed to is not something that can be claimed by the ever evolving beast of Whiteness. It is not inherent to it. Nothing is inherent to Whiteness except it’s grasp on power, control, and domination. It paves over beauty like a road through a field of wildflowers. It neuters and flattens. Whoopi was right to be suspicious of Whiteness, it is insidious by nature, but she, like many before and after her, make the mistake of assuming that it is a fixed entity. And to assume this is to lose a battle against it. We must understand the shifting of Whiteness in order to loosen its grip on power.

[nothorses]

heyy! first of all i hope you're doing well. thank you for taking the time out to read and respond to this (if you choose to). this has been bothering me for a while and i'd like your opinion on it.

i read these two articles recently - the first one is about a lesbian professor of gender studies + sexuality arguing why women should be allowed to "hate men"; the second is an interview with her about the article in which she addresses some of the negative responses she got to that article.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/why-cant-we-hate-men/2018/06/08/f1a3a8e0-6451-11e8-a69c-b944de66d9e7_story.html

https://outline.com/ttKscw

i have a lot of questions about this.

firstly, i cannot tell whether this is the sort of reductionist, radfemmy, "fuck all men" feminist you've been talking about. i understand her sentiments but i disagree with her statement, and i want to get better at identifying shallow feminism. i don't think my personal opinion is credible enough (yet) to draw any conclusions right off the bat. are there any 'tells' or signs that indicate what sort of feminism someone is speaking about (in the same way that there are certain idenitifiers of TERF ideology even when it is not explicitly mentioned)? for example, in the interview, she explicitly says "Where is discrimination? Where are men being excluded? Where are men being abused? Oh, come on." as well as her implied praise of kamala harris as 'the feminist we need in office'. are those things indicators of whether her position on feminism is credible/an appropriate portrayal of how Feminism™ should function? in short, do i take this woman entirely seriously about all this?

secondly, how do you feel about gender being a social construct, as she states? does that not contradict the very real physical dysphoria that a lot of us experience? doesn't it invalidate almost all the experiences of struggle against transphobia and cissexism, as well as our identities, by painting gender identity as 'not a big deal' or 'fake' by virtue of being a social construct? also, is gender identity not influenced by biology to some extent?

thirdly, along a similar vein, how do you feel about gender abolitionism? i don't exactly have a v specific question about this one, i just want another trans person's opinion on how that sort of society would affect them. i do not wish to be stripped of my identity, and i am opposed to gender abolitionism because of that. is this sentiment a product of some misunderstanding i have?

if you have any other thoughts at all about the articles, i'd love to hear those. thank you!

Oooh, anon, these are such good questions.

Why Can’t We Hate Men? by Suzanna Walters

Follow-Up Interview with Walters

Walters does a weird sort of dance in both articles: her argument is that “hating men” is okay and even good, but she has to completely misrepresent what “hating men” is, does, and means in order to make her point align with what she actually believes is defensible.

“Hating men” is not actually about hating men, she says; she doesn’t hate men at all, in fact. She knows they’re not the problem, but rather the systems of patriarchy in place. She knows racism and other intersections make “hating men” complicated at best, and harmful at worst. She just wants men to “lean back” and understand the power they hold; to be feminists. She thinks it’s a good thing to welcome men into feminism.

So then what the hell does “hating men” actually mean, to her? Why make that the hill to die on, if nothing in her argument has anything to do with that hill?

I don’t think she really believes any of the arguments she’s making in the first place. Walters pays lipservice to racism and intersectionality in a brief comment, then never brings it up again. Her view of feminist issues is narrow and shallow, dealing mostly with “the safety of women” and the representation of women in positions of power; both of which fail to address the structural issues of the patriarchy and how it functions, and prioritize Making Women Powerful over dismantling the systems of oppression giving people power over each other in the first place. She believes that all men are universally and inherently benefiting from the patriarchy, and that men in fact are the system to be fought.

Some of this pings as TERFy, too. Walters never really argues against radical feminism. Her argument against gender-essentialism is, as you said, that gender shouldn’t exist at all- but she claims the patriarchy discriminates based on genitalia.

You caught that as well; “where are men being oppressed/abused?” she says, after her performative gesture toward intersectionality. Walters also compares the oppression of women to racism at the same time, which... holy shit.

I’d personally peg her as a mainstream liberal feminist. She’s a successful white professor who sincerely believes that her experiences as a woman are universal. Her takes are surface-level and shallow at best, and edging dangerously close to radical feminism and quiet TERFism at worst.

TL;DR: The Author

She’s a mainstream liberal feminist who makes a string of confused, contradicting arguments because she chose to die on a hill she doesn’t really understand. Her arguments stray TERFy and racist on multiple occasions.

RE: Gender questions

What gender is and where it comes from is a complicated question, and I don’t think there’s a simple answer to it. The major arguments are that it’s social, biological, or psychological; either it comes from how you’re socialized, what your genitals look like, or it’s something built into your brain chemistry (think “wrong body” trans theory).

I personally think it’s a bit of a mix, leaning toward the social and psychological, and that where gender “comes from” is a little different for each individual. Biology has a bit to do with it; we’ve had somewhat consistent ideas "man” and “woman” across various cultures.

But what gender means in each society is different, and how people conceptualize it has been different. What gender someone feels they are may be influences by their culture’s gender expectations. Some indigenous cultures even have anywhere from two to five distinct “genders”, and I can say personally that my conceptualization of my own gender relies pretty heavily on how other people perceive and treat me.

Not to mention that trans people have existed for as long as people in general have, even in societies that lack any formal gender concept for trans folks. So psychology must play a role, too.

So if we strip away all social expectations of gender, we’re still left with psychological and biological influences on gender. Which is part of why I don’t think we can abolish gender to begin with; people will always have internal understandings of gender to some extent, and they’ll always express them, and therefore there will always be a social element to gender. We can, however, work toward abolishing restrictive, binaristic, oppressive gender structures that limit and punish expressions of gender.

And as a sidenote, the whole “gender is just a social construct, but genitals are real” and “we should abolish all concept of gender” thing is extremely TERFy. There are thoughtful and trans-inclusive ways of approaching the question, but usually we’re talking about gender as part of a system of power and oppression. Walters is using the TERF framework that their “gender critical” comes from: gender isn’t real, therefore trans people aren’t real. Patriarchy is just based on biological realities and sex, and we should abolish the idea of gender (as code for abolishing trans rights and theory).

TL;DR: Gender

I personally believe that gender is a synthesis of biological, psychological, and social influences that is highly unique to every individual. There’s no real way to “abolish” it, only systems of power and oppression that rely on and enforce it. Walters’ way of discussing it is extremely TERFy, and her arguments should be heavily scrutinized.

[fadingfloweryouth]

Cultural Appropriation among East Asian Popular Culture

*I am aware that amidst the rise of AAPI hate crimes, this is a very sensitive time to be talking about this. However, I think it is very important for East Asians (in my case, a Chinese immigrant living in the States) to address our own ignorance and avoidance on this issue in order to have solidarity with other BIPOC communities. My emphasis is on the media portrayal of cultural appropriation and how that could be potentially damaging, I do not intend to imply that cultural appropriation is prominent among all East Asians.*

If you are a frequent consumer of East Asian pop culture, you would be lying to say you haven’t seen an idol or a celebrity wearing dreads on camera. Sometimes they do so to create a streetwear look, sometimes they do so to deliberately play a character. We also tend to turn a blind eye to the countless bad rapping performances and the occasional half-joking bits about tribal, native cultures. As of now, many fans tend to defend their favs by calling these instances as acts of negligence, that none of these celebrities had an intent to harm; but how much longer, and farther, should we tolerate cultural appropriation in East Asian pop culture?

East Asian popular culture has become part of the global mainstream in recent years. With the help of social media and the supplemental supports from local governments (think South Korea), today’s cultural flow go in both directions: while Asian pop culture is often inspired by Western elements, East Asian media production is now the new leading force of culture.

One “neutral” definition of cultural appropriation could be summarized as the representation of cultural practices or experiences and the distinctive artistic styles of the particular culture used by nonmembers. However, misrepresentation, misunderstanding and manipulation of culture is frequent and damaging to many marginalized, underrepresented groups.

Appropriating Hip-hop

Even though there is a “neutral” definition of cultural appropriation, there is no neutral way to appropriate a culture. The moment you partake in a cultural practice that is not your own, you are marking it with your own social marker. Just to give an example, the rise of Gangsta Rap was in response to the mass incarceration of Black people during the War on Drugs era. The history of rap and hip-hop, as a whole, is tightly connected to Black lives in America.

So why is Asian rap so filled with flexing culture? The answer is simple. The rise of hip hop and rap in the East Asian music scene is a simple copy-and-paste of the Western pop chart. Hip-hop has become the best selling genre, yet it’s important to note that today’s hip-hop has taken a detour away from its root. Hip-hop and rap has been rendered with pop sounds, often rendered with the voices of white performers as well.

The idol factories in both South Korea and China had picked up the trend. Hip-hop and rap is what gets the cash, so that’s where the executives want to take their trainees. Shows like The Rap of China(这就是说唱), Rap for Youth(说唱新时代), received enormous popularity in the last few years among young Chinese people. While the popularization of these shows can help nurture more diversifying music tastes beyond the typical Chinese pop music, they portray rap and hip hop in a highly inaccurate fashion. The flows and forms featured in performances felt unilateral, often with a strong emphasis on flexin’ solely for the sake of flexin’. In addition, in no way did any of these shows serve to educate music lovers on the history and background of hip hop and rap.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hIJnBh7Dv8

P.s. this video features Rich Brian, I think it goes without saying that he’s probably not the best person to be educating Chinese youth on rapping.

Appropriating Black Hairstyles

Some contestants of these hip-hop shows also wore appropriated versions of Black hairstyles, and it wouldn’t be far fetched for me to say that the increased popularity of dreads among Kpop idols had kicked off this trend. Some of these celebrities are people who I have immense respects for, such as Jackson Wang. As the Chinese member of the Kpop boy group GOT7, he was the only Chinese celebrity (that I’m aware of) who spoke up for the BLM protests openly on his social media (I should note that he received quite a lot of backlashes for “defending violence”). But he—as I found out—refused to apologize when being criticized for wearing dreads back in 2016. He was called out in 2016 for wearing dreadlocks in a Pepsi commercial. He claimed that he did not intend to be racist. However, his fans questioned his response, as his defense did not acknowledge the history of dreadlocks.

More recently, BTS’s J-Hope was also called out for his hairstyle in his first solo single, “Chicken Noodle Soup.” Not only was his hair called out to be tiptoeing the line of cultural appropriation, it also felt odd that he only switched to the dreadlock-looking hairstyle during the nighttime break-dancing scene in the music video. While this might not have any further implications intended by the artist himself, this is an example of how infiltrating the unprofessional, gang-affiliated stereotypes surrounding dreadlocks could be.

Part of me thinks they are doing this to please white people, I could easily be right. White people are interested in hip-hop but can’t go as far as getting interested in Black culture? Sure, we Asians will provide. I sound harsh but that’s truly how I see the logic behind Asian pop stars appropriating Black culture. It’s true that many from the K-pop industry do not have full authority to their own identity, but I simply do not get the extent of appropriation employed in the K-pop scene—and this sabotaging trend is spreading in a scary rate to both Japan and China.

Reality TV in China features mostly celebrities, but I assume the goal of the government (for producing all these shows) is to achieve some sort of relatability through portraying famous people doing normal things. Again, just like how Western culture and East Asian culture influence each other, creating a feedback loop, an echo chamber of what’s socially acceptable and what’s not, famous people and normal people alike are all capable of influencing the social norms of Asia. We in America indulge in drama, the unethical wrongdoings of distant rich people. It’s not like that in Asia. People look up to celebrities. So if someone in Blackpink decided to wear braids in their newest music video, you’re bound to see kids trying to do the same.

Internalized Colorism

Sure, one can argue that it’s all negligence and ignorance, but we can not pretend the acts of cultural appropriation are not a result of internalized colorism. Blatant racism is less likely to occur in East Asian societies since they tend to have a less diverse ethnic makeup, but internalized colorism has always been an underlying problem in East Asia. Take China as an example, being “light skin” (though the direct translation of the Chinese word “白” is equivalent to “white,” the phrase is usually perceived as “light skin”) is generally viewed as elegant, pretty, or decent. Phrases such as “yellow skin,” “black skin” have risen to popularity in recent years as internet slangs used by online participants to criticize celebrities or themselves. People strive to be as “white” as possible by setting a societal expectation for public figures to follow, creating this social discourse chamber that deems the white skintone to be superior.

Even more recently, the phrase “非酋” (direct translation: “African tribe leader”) is used as a metaphor for people who tend to have very bad luck and never get what they wish for. From the perspective of an outsider, not only is this phrase obviously racist, it is also more dangerous in the sense that the metaphor entails a long line of other language-specific words that imply racially-charged stereotypes that could not be easily understood by non-Chinese. The phrase itself, however, is often used lightly by gamers--since this is actually an official phrase that ties to certain characters in certain games--and other young internet users to ironically joke about themselves without really considering the racist undertones of the phrase. Therefore, while using the phrase itself does not necessarily make one racist, it certainly reveals ignorance of the Chinese society on the issue of race.

Online Community, Bullet Comments and Echo Chamber

A single character in Japanese/Chinese tends to carry a lot more information than a single letter. As a result, there could easily be more combinations of words with the same characters in comparison to the alphabet for Roman languages. With the rise of fan-fueled, fan-made, fan-moderated video/social platforms like Bilibili (Chinese) and Niconico (Japanese), internet slangs are becoming increasingly niche. However, “niche” is defined against the traditional sense here. Slangs are only “niche” in the sense that the context is only known to a very specific audience, perhaps a fandom of a game or a show, but this audience itself could be enormous--certainly in the case of China. In these separate but internally united communities, people communicate in slangs that are culturally specific among themselves. How, you may ask? Through the persistence and permanence of bullet comments.

Up till this point, bullet comments are popular only and specifically to Japanese and Chinese cultures, again, a likely result of the linguistic natures of the languages. The chaotic, seemingly-never ending feature of bullet comments is an easy tool to nurture a sense of tight-knitted community for young internet users. Teens no longer need to worry about parents’ attempts to understand youth culture--most adults literally can not bear with the overwhelming screen of repetitive slangs. Bullet comments granted a new sense of freedom that previous generations of Japanese and Chinese youth did not experience.

However, it also means that bullet comments could create the perfect scenario for a social echo chamber. It’s hard for outsiders to penetrate the existing banters among a community that talks in their own lingos, and it also encourages the repetitiveness of the same idea, same belief. But this is not a characteristic specific to bullet comments or online communities in East Asia, this is a characteristic common among many East Asian cultures. In comparison to Western cultures, East Asians are way more comfortable, even dependent on group mentality and general consensus. Relatability is often prioritized over individuality on the internet scape, which on its own isn’t necessarily an issue; but this nature of East Asian online community certainly makes it a particularly weak target to colorist beliefs and culturally-insensitive content.

The reliant tendency on echo chamber and group mentality of East Asian communities makes them vulnerable targets of certain Western influences, including cultural appropriation and internalized colorism. In the case of China, its government literally banks on unity among its citizens to establish more extensive social control in order to rule. In both Korea and Japan, unity and group mentality are strongly encouraged and embraced as well. Ultimately, while the problem of cultural appropriation is becoming increasingly worrying among pop culture in East Asia, this is a foreign concept and problem for East Asians who might be helping the spread of cultural appropriation. Regardless, education on the subject matter is necessary and we need to start addressing the problem now.

[renardtrickster]

“Everyone has implicit or unconscious bias” is a very good point that I don’t get why people love to not understand.

It is possible to hold bigoted beliefs while not holding up a flaming sign asking that we please kill this demographic ASAP. Everyone can agree on this. Your racist uncle who isn’t happy that his white daughter is dating a black guy and the dude with a tiki torch openly calling for race war are both racist. Not to the same extent, obviously, but they are both racist and the first shouldn’t be tolerated just because it’s not the second one. Everyone can agree on this. Certainly the typically right-wing people who would rail against the idea of implicit bias will happily agree that some “woke” people, despite claiming to be against racism or what have you, end up saying or doing some pretty racist things. On the note of woke people, I’ve seen people go against the “I’ve never said or done anything wrong ever” mindset popular in those spheres, on the basis that yes, everyone has said or believed something bigoted at one point, but you don’t now. Nobody starts perfect, nobody is perfect, you just get better, and the expectation that everyone be perfect ends up causing issues, within the cause and without.

The idea of implicit or unconscious bias is that everyone, or nearly everyone, has some sort of bias that, while they may not be aware of it, still exists within them. It’s unconscious. Examples of this may include white people who are not explicitly racist getting nervous when a black person sits next to them on the bus, or a dude who is not explicitly sexist being genuinely surprised at or doubtful of the idea of a woman CEO (girlboss moment) or something, or a straight person who is not explicitly homophobic being opposed to the idea of kids knowing about gay people or having that topic be discussed in their vicinity because they associate being gay with gay sex, which is inappropriate.

However, I see a lot of people misunderstand this. Firstly is the idea that people believe in the idea of unconscious bias so they can have an excuse to accuse others of bigotry. I don’t really see this. I don’t see people say “you/we have unconscious bias” to mean “you/we are awful people”, or ascribing morality to that. It’s certainly a bad thing to have, and a bad thing to crop up, but I only see people ascribe morality when it does crop up, i.e. when it stops being unconscious and just becomes conscious. Otherwise, no. “We have unconscious bias” is meant to be taken as, question your intent with certain actions and thoughts. Where is it coming from? And similarly, “we have unconscious bias” is not meant to say that you can never stop being unconsciously biased, you can never escape it, so roll over. The purpose is to encourage self-examination. Think for a second. Sniff out backwards internal reasoning, throw it out, and move past it. A cycle of self improvement.

The other thing is, the reactionary response to unconscious bias is to say “oh, so it’s only us”. I do not think that is the case, or that people who believe in unconscious bias (outside of the stupid yet loud minority that commenters are inevitably going to point to and then lump me in with them) think like this, that everyone with unconscious racial bias is white, or that everyone with unconscious gender/sexist bias is a man or cis, or that everyone with unconscious orientation bias is straight. In reality, I don’t think anybody thinks this. The idea of “internalized X” is testament to that, and the sheer existence of it as a leftist talking point basically debunks the people who say “oh you think it’s only Y who has unconscious bias”. No, there’s people out there who hate their own ethnic features, and women who look down on or even lowkey hate other women (Girlboss Moment™), and trans and gay people who feel guilty about feeling attracted to people because on some level they bought into the rhetoric of trans and gay people as predatory. Trans people with an unconscious bias against trans people! Weird, but true.

So basically the purpose behind the idea of “unconscious bias” is that society (we live in one!) and the various systems therein, possesses a trend of ingraining certain thoughts or beliefs in people. Often not very good thoughts and beliefs. And even if people openly denounce bigotry and work against it, they still might carry some baggage, because nobody is immune to propaganda. You’re not a bad person for having it, but it is nothing but a good thing to be rid of. Which is why people ask that you introspect on various issues, so you may see the internal logic, the little wizard behind the curtain. And if the little wizard behind the curtain is a shit, remove him. But when people react to this idea by denying that they could have unconscious biases ever, it reminds me of the “i have never said or done anything bad ever” thing they railed against and how it is now harder to take them seriously because it’s starting to look a lot like you’re just more of the same, buddy. But worse than that is the people who think that believing in unconscious bias is proof or indicative of you actually being the real, actual bigot in this situation. First, because it just feels like “anti-racist is a code for anti-white", 2!. Second, if your reaction to the mere idea that you could have internalized some very bad and backwards belief, even if you don’t actively believe in or perpetrate them, and this says nothing about your morals or if it’s even correct, but better to ask and explore just in case rather than assume that no, I’m perfect and infallible, is to get pissed, and scream about how it’s everyone else that’s the problem or it’s some ploy to persecute you? I don’t mean to blow all the goodwill I spent writing this post but it goes beyond defensive and seems like you’re aware that you have baggage that you don’t want to address because of some misguided sense of integrity.

[lowkeysebastianstan]

Yes i was mean PR. They should not insult with their names Ale but for me it's pathetic and funny to do Photoshop with own photos. And I understand many may feel bad (when I do not accept myself: looks, body and so on) but they should not offend her. understand some may feel bad. I really understand it, but they don't have to attack her. I don't care about Ale. Let her live and do what she wants, but she deserves respect because she is a HUMAN. +

+ Ok. Maybe she's racist, she has done some terrible things and etc.But there is someone who says is tolerant and attacks her for racism. It is also racism to some extent. That's why we keep coming full circle. I live according to the rules, tolerate and accept all of them because they are human, even if I do not agree with them. I have no right to offend them. It would be better if most people lived like that. +

+ I am not saying that the neglected should get someone's attention better - nice, calm and polite.

hi again! sorry abt the misunderstanding btw!

yes, you’re right. they really shouldn’t, although i don’t necessarily mean ppl shouldn’t get called out for terrible behaviour, but again, that’s not what they’re doing. they’re calling her all these slurs just bc she dares to be with him. so i completely agree. i still haven’t found all these terrible racist things, but as i said in the previous ask, i’ve not really looked either. and also right, many of these ppl will have bios that claim they’re feminist and loves women, and still, here they are. 

it would be better if we managed to be be nice, calm and polite, but then again, we’re the internet so i fear that’s a lost cause. :/

i hope you’re having a terrific day!

[shinra-makonoid]

Ngl it is kind of interesting to see someone trying to argument that people are following Depp because of misinformation while sharing misinformation yourself.

The fact that you base your arguments on Depp's private text messages, as well as his expressions/reactions to what is, to his eyes at the very least, his abuser (if you don't believe she abused him I would argue you can understand he thinks she abused him), as well as several other misinformation (Dior supposed racism I still haven't found a shred of evidence of, a complete misunderstanding of what the UK trial was about, a complete ignorance of the fact she did in fact cut his finger off, considering there are evidence of herself saying it in recordings) to claim that he is a very bad person ™️. The fact that you complain people who are defending Depp claim it's "white feminism" to not defend him while you claim it's "misogyny" to be against Heard.

You're doing the exact same thing, and just because you find it unjust that people are doing it against "your side" doesn't mean you're any better at all. I sure hope that to have the apparently very rational beliefs ™️ you claim to have regarding this trial you watched the whole trial, otherwise that adds to more hypocrisy.

Yes, I suppose it is sad that the relationship of two mentally ill people got broadcasted in all of its disgusting details, for the nasty pleasure of the internet, but it is also fundamentally a huge step for the visibility and understanding of male victims of domestic abuses, who, understandably want to get justice against the woman who destroyed a part of his life because she couldn't deal with being apart from him. It is also a huge step for the visibility and struggles of people suffering from addiction, and personality disorders, and overall those who suffered from trauma as children and how difficult it is to cope with it as adults. Because this is a testimony of that too, for both of them. And all of it wouldn't have happened had Heard not published publicly her Op-ed to begin with. She brought it on herself. It's because a lot of people had opinions about it that the trial had to be made public for Depp's side to be heard.

And it's a little bit rich of you to claim the medias are all about Depp when in most of the articles I could see were in defense of Heard (especially in my country). Twitter bots existing for the sake of Depp doesn't make the answer to the question of who abused who in the relationship different either. Which is an answer you can have based on you watching the trial and looking at the evidence, not browsing Twitter or listening to their testimonies. There is no evidence Depp abused Heard physically, especially not to the extent of what she describes in her testimony.

That said, you are right, people shouldn't attack Heard in any way for it, and I don't like the Turd jokes, and I don't appreciate she became the internet's punching ball, or people calling her a sociopath. But it happens because she won't ever be found guilty of domestic abuse by any justice ever. She will live free, maybe losing a bit of money and fame, but she will never get behind bars like she should have had, had she been a man doing what she did to a woman. Her freedom comes with a price, because people don't find it fair, rightly so. Contrary to with Depp, there was no way with her behavior that people could humanize her, because she doesn't know how to properly express herself to be honest and provoke empathy because she has/had no character growth whatsoever, due to many things but mainly due to her mental health issues she didn't choose to have. Trust me when I say that despite the fact that I think she is an abuser and she should be removed from society for the good of others, I do think she deserve to be free from her issues, to be happy and feel safe, away from any abuse, because she cannot help her behavior and she is highly suffering from her issues.

It's the same for Depp, any of the things you criticize him for are not things he consciously did because he is "evil". He didn't write those private messages because he was evil, but because he was suffering. He didn't do drugs/alcohol because he is evil, he did drugs because he is suffering from addiction. He didn't assault or get into fights with other people (not women per his words) because he is evil, but because he is a disturbed individual who lived in a very traumatic setting and has mental health issues fucking up with his life. And even had he been abusing Heard, he wouldn't have been evil for doing so, he would have been suffering from issues and it wouldn't have been fair as well to be hated for this reason, he would have also deserved to be safe and happy and healthy.

That is the only stance you can have in which you can claim that you "support victims" and "don't participate in a fandomization of two real people". Independently of what they may or may not have done, they both deserve support, safety, to be healthy and treated well, they always did and always will.

Don't worry though, he will probably lose the defamation trial still, as he lost the one against the Sun, because defamation is pretty hard to actually win, especially depending on how you would consider what "abuse" is/means. Articles, just like for the UK trial will claim it means "Depp was proven to have done abuse" and nothing will fundamentally change.

Except that the rich men who felt like they were wronged by one or several women will have the balls to speak about it now. And they should be heard, no matter what you personally think of them or who you choose to believe in the end.

(Btw I didn't know who Depp was before that trial, so I can say that I was pretty not "nostalgic" or whatever, never cared for Pirate of Caribbeans or him or her, until now).

I have been writing this post for a few days because I cannot stop thinking about the particular way that Depp v. Heard has been playing out in fandom not just over the course of this trial in Virginia but over the course of the past few years. One of my friends commented recently about the way in which fandom can train people to see things which are not there by taking fragments of media out of context and scrutinising them for small ‘tells’ which hint to the ‘real’ story often in support of a shipping narrative similar to the way that fragments of this trial are decontextualised and recontextualised, pored over in minute detail, and tea leaves read to support the idea that Amber Heard is lying, that Amber Heard is an abuser.

Much of what is circulating on social media about this case are outright lies at worst — the idea that Amber Heard quoted The Talented Mr. Ripley on the stand, which Snopes had to debunk — and pernicious victim-blaming nonsense and abuse myths at best. Milani Cosmetics’ decision to wade into the trial by suggesting Heard claimed she had used their specific concealer before it was released (she didn’t, the palette was used as an example of colour correcting concealer palettes) and insinuate that she must therefore be lying about having been abused falls into the latter category. The idea that if someone misremembers what brand of concealer they used over half a decade ago they are lying about being abused is appalling, it’s laughable. And it’s everywhere. This should be disturbing to anyone watching this case who truly cares about victim advocacy regardless of where you fall on the question of who abused who because the mainstreaming of abuse myths hurts all victims. There is no such thing as using an abuse myth to defend a victim or expose an abuser; if Heard is an abuser the logic underpinning that conclusion cannot be abuser logic without causing incredible social harm to victim advocacy.

And I have seen in fandom the way that people engage in wilful misreadings of all sorts of things to support an idea which is contrary to all reality. The prime example of this for me is Loki. Last summer I became unhealthily obsessed with the way that Loki fans who were opposed to his relationship with Sylvie concocted all sorts of wilful misreadings not just of the show itself but of interviews from the cast, writers, director, and even the composer — which would then go viral, racking up thousands and in some cases tens of thousands of likes.

There was a post on here and on twitter which took out-of-context quotes from several people involved with the show to frame them as contradictory and made some joke about people in a group project not agreeing on what it was about. This post got tens of thousands of likes and shares but if you read the quotes in their full context it was plain that all of the people speaking were in fact in total agreement on what the show was about. There was a cohesive behind-the-scenes agenda but it didn’t matter. Natalie Holt, the composer, mentioned in several subsequent interviews that her words had been taken out of context and twisted to imply something she emphatically was not saying. Other quotes were taken out of context and had bad faith readings applied to try to frame Kate Herron and Sophia Di Martino, both bisexual women who have expressed support and allyship with the trans community, as transphobic in order to justify online abuse and harassment of them. The same people doing this were simultaneously perpetuating harmful transmisogynistic rhetoric about ‘autogynephilia’ in order to frame the relationship as problematic and twisting Julia Serano’s academic work on the topic to support this even after she had expressly disagreed with this and called it out.

The primary driver of all of this is of course misogyny but if anyone pointed that out the deflection was to gesture towards Sophia Di Martino/Sylvie and Kate Herron being white women, particularly in contexts where the people doing this were challenged on why they didn’t hold Tom Hiddleston and Owen Wilson to the same standard. The exact same deflection is used to dispel any notion that misogyny might be a factor in the virulence of people’s anti-Heard sentiment: that defending her is “white feminism” and that she is exploiting “white woman’s tears”. This really illustrates the way that people in fandom have — in the words of one of my friends who I was speaking to about this the other day — learned a particular vocabulary but not an analytical toolkit.

“White feminism” and associated terms like “white woman’s tears” were coined to describe the unique tools which white women have at their disposal to (a) oppress racialised people and especially Black people, and (b) recruit others — particularly white men — to do the same. These terms do not apply to dynamics between white women and white men because white women cannot be racist towards white men. Depending on whether the white men in question belong to other marginalised classes white women can be ableist, transphobic, homophobic, or enact other forms of oppression against them but they cannot specifically be racist, so gesturing to their race in order to deflect from questions about double standards applied to a white woman versus a white man is a total non-starter and yet it happens all the time in these discussions. In fact the reason it happens is because (Depp’s struggles with addiction notwithstanding) the white men in question don’t have any other known marginalisations along which the white women might be oppressing them. So we have to make something up.

What’s really disturbing in the case of Depp v. Heard is that gesturing to “white woman’s tears” implies that white women are in fact the oppressors of white men and that they are more likeable and sympathetic figures to the general public. This posits either that misogyny is not real or that it does not apply to white women and is not a factor in the way that the general public assesses alleged abuse, which is not just untrue but actually dangerous. At a certain point the truth of what happened between Depp and Heard becomes immaterial when people are talking about the way the pro-Depp side is presenting and mainstreaming arguments which are extraordinarily harmful to victims of abuse. In fact, the victim-blaming rhetoric which is being pushed under the guise of “advocacy for male victims” is an uncanny echo of the transphobic rhetoric which was perpetuated in Loki fandom under the guise of “calling out transphobia”. What is happening here is that people are removing terms from their original political context where they were used to criticise oppressive power structures in order to support and uphold the paradigms they were coined to critique.

The disconnection of these terms and ideas from the power analysis they’re a product of also means that even when people are able to recognise that particular arguments are harmful they’re not able to see them in their full context as Depp and his team wielding systemic power and privilege to oppress and marginalise not just Heard but anyone identified as sharing a class with her. There are all sorts of posts and threads about the fact that it’s important not to allow Heard’s ‘diagnosis’ of borderline personality disorder to add to stigma that people diagnosed with BPD face with no recognition of the fact that this stigma is the exact reason Depp’s team wanted her characterised as having BPD at all. The argument from them is that she is a bad person and she is an abuser because she allegedly has BPD: they are stigmatising people diagnosed with this disorder in order to character assassinate her. Yet none of the people writing these threads about the importance of not letting this colour your perception of people with BPD have stopped to question why his team even considers whether she has it or not of any relevance and how this relates to the way he could be trying to exercise power and privilege in order to silence her. It’s insane to me that I even have to point this out.

What is absolutely fucked about all of this to me too is the proliferation of “amber heard supporters dni” in people’s bios. A lot of ink has been spilled in fandom on the overwhelmingly performative, virtue-signalling nature of a lot of dni criteria and this is what sticks in my throat when I think about this. People who put this in their bios are largely following the crowd and have done no actual research into the case beyond whatever distortions of the truth that have been leaked by his legal team cross their dashboards and timelines, if that. There is no curiosity about her allegations or her evidence or any desire to understand why people might support her when seemingly the entire internet has decided she is a monster, and what it comes down to is that people are virtue signalling by showing that as a matter of principle they do not stand by a woman who has made allegations of serious physical, psychological, and sexual abuse. What is considered virtuous in fandom is close-minded reactionary hatred of a woman who accused a powerful man of domestic violence. It is considered virtuous not to investigate her allegations. It is considered virtuous to declare that you hate her because everyone else does.

This hatred is so completely outsized in response to her perceived crime it absolutely dwarfs any outpouring of vitriol around someone like Harvey Weinstein because it’s not actually coming from any moral outrage about abuse itself. What is fuelling this outrage against Amber Heard is misogyny and victim-blaming, and that’s the fatal irony of all of this. Even though people are mired in cognitive dissonance about “who abused who” many of them show that underneath it all, even if they can’t admit it to themselves, they really do know she is a victim and that he is an abuser or else they would not apply victim-blaming tropes to her nor abuse apologist talking points to him. It’s the fact that we all know, really, instinctively, who is abuser and who is victim, that Depp supporters have to protect themselves so fiercely from this uncomfortable truth by making not just Heard herself but anyone who speaks in her defence or to the facts of the case personae non grata and acceptable targets for harassment and bullying themselves. It’s because we all know, really, in our hearts, that the power differential favours him that it’s necessary for him and his supporters to indulge in pernicious victim-blaming abuse myths to paint her as the villain. It’s because we know this that his supporters have to accuse everyone who questions his obvious DARVO tactics of “not thinking men can be abused”.

Actually, men can be and are abused, including in some cases by women, but abuse is about power and control. This is why the majority of male victims of abuse are marginalised in some way or otherwise vulnerable (young actors getting started in their careers, for example). It is also unbelievable historical revisionism to pretend that #MeToo has only ever been about female victims of abuse. It’s important for a number of reasons to recognise that abuse is a function of power and control and a tool for enforcing power and control but in particular it’s necessary to acknowledge this because otherwise the only explanation left for why there is such a gender disparity statistically between who perpetrates abuse and who is a victim of abuse is the TERF explanation that men are innately more violent, which is not true.

But to believe that Depp is Heard’s victim despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary is to completely eschew this power analysis of their relationship. It is to believe that there is power parity between a twenty-two year-old just getting started in her career and an A-list global celebrity with multi-million dollar mansions all over the world and his own private island. It is to ignore the reality that throughout their relationship she was surrounded by his staff and his security, that even the nurses who saw her after his beatings were on his payroll. To believe that he is her victim even after it was ruled in the UK to a civil standard that he abused her is to posit the MRA belief that women are always immediately believed when they allege abuse and that this imbues them with massive social power to ruin men’s lives “for no reason”. The fact that people seriously argue that the UK legal system favours women is absolutely astonishing. But not only is it not true that women are not believed in general, it is also not true that Amber Heard was believed! The rewriting of history around this is fucking breathtaking. She was getting called a lying gold-digger from the start. The only person who has ever been hurt by these allegations is her.

But at this point the need for it to be true that Depp is Heard’s victim is compounded not just by a desire to keep loving Johnny Depp but also by years of participation in a movement against Heard which, if she is a victim, is morally indefensible. These are people who cannot accept the guilt and shame of having participated in a harassment campaign which is fundamentally victim-blaming and misogynistic in nature and targeted not just against her but other victims speaking out in her defence. They cannot accept this truth so they choose to look away. The furthest you will get one of these people if they do listen to facts about the case is “well they’re both bad”, which itself is a victim-blaming cop out and dangerous rhetoric which prevents victims from recognising that they are being abused and seeking or receiving help.

The other day, I saw some old tweets between Depp supporters talking about how disturbed they were by the behaviour of other Depp supporters in the wake of his replacement by Mads Mikkelson in Fantastic Beasts 3. This was fascinating to me because in this conversation these two people confidently proclaimed that Depp himself, being a kind and gentle soul, would never condone the harassment of Mikkelson or Mikkelson’s fans. But this is ridiculous and totally disconnected from reality since it’s a documented fact that Johnny Depp’s legal team has been purchasing bots in order to provoke harassment of people speaking out in defence of Amber Heard — many of whom are abuse victims themselves — and it would not remotely surprise me if they had also directed this abuse at Mikkelson and his fans.

You can see this bot activity for yourself in any one of the hashtags his supporters are pushing. This “sweet and gentle man” is haunted by his misogynistic rants in texts to friends in which he describes lurid fantasies about burning Amber and desecrating her corpse, the texts in which he called the mother of his children a ‘cunt’, the property damage he committed in the past. The cognitive dissonance it requires to describe this man as ‘gentle’ irrespective of whether you believe he is a victim must be immense. But it’s also required in order to keep believing that Johnny Depp is who people want him to be, and part of shoring up his image as a gentle man means demonising a woman who was twenty-two and just starting out in her career as an actress when she met him and trying to convince yourself she somehow had the balance of power in their relationship.

If you look at any of the hashtags his supporters are pushing you will also see something even more disturbing, which is the way that supporters of Johnny Depp are also extending the abuse apologist logic and absurd conspiracy theories they spin in defence of him to other abusers. It’s worth pointing out that Marilyn Manson, a close friend of Johnny Depp’s, is now suing Evan Rachel Wood for defamation and many of Depp’s supporters are raking her over the coals in the exact same way as Amber Heard and I’m left wondering what is the limit of what people will believe? In five years will I see “evan rachel wood supporters dni” in people’s profiles?

What is amazing to me too is that there are people discussing the ‘fandomisation’ of this trial — the fancams, the memes, etc. — who are speaking about how disrespectful it all is to Johnny Depp as if it’s not precisely the response he and his legal team want. The more people make fancams of him being ‘savage’ on the stand (an odd choice of words given the furore over his racist Dior Sauvage ad campaign, not to mention the fact that he is the subject of horrific abuse allegations) and TikTok videos drawing attention to the disparity in crowd size between his and Heard’s fans the more people are encouraged to respond to this case emotionally rather than logically. People are manipulated into thinking supporting Depp is the popular stance and shown that they will be socially ostracised if they criticise him; people are encouraged to lean into nostalgia around his movies and remember how good he used to make them feel (and feel anger at Heard for “taking Jack Sparrow away”, never mind the fact that Depp had already left the franchise before Heard’s Washington Post op-ed was published); people are guided down a path well-worn with misogynistic tropes about lying, gold-digging, perfidious women out to ruin good men’s lives.

The repeated assertion that “she shit in his bed” (proven false, but nobody cares) and associated scatological puns on her name are intended to associate her with disgust. The posting over and over of his severed finger without censorship or content warnings is intended to shock and upset people in order to make the associated accusation that “she cut off his finger” (also proven false but again, nobody cares) stick in people’s minds. These things are fed by his team to the media in order to discredit and undermine her so that nobody is listening when she describes the horrific abuse she suffered at his hands during the fight in which he lost his finger or if they are they don’t believe her. The fancams of Johnny Depp “being savage” and the videos making fun of her sobbing so hard she can’t breathe and reenacting her allegations to mock her for them are two sides of the same coin both of which benefit him and his narrative. He is being lionised and she is being demonised, exactly as he wants. And it is exactly as he wants. This is a man who texted one of his friends that he would give her “total global humiliation”. The man stated in black and white exactly what he wanted so I’m not sure why anyone would think he would be appalled by any of this.

On a final note, I wonder how many people have actually read the op-ed that she is currently being sued over? I think people should and bear in mind that this is the speech Depp and his team is trying to silence. It barely even alludes to him and the bulk of it is about the need to expand protection for victims of abuse in general. Remember that.

[minblush]

Leave mimi alone. If you could get over your jealousy for one second you would see would a sweet person she is. I follow her because she doesn't look for fights unlike blogs like yours. Yet there are fights on her blog cause of people who don't have anything better to do like you.

so it’s been a while and i finally worked up any sort of courage to address all of this and i will do it under this one ask because out of all the ones mimi’s “fans” sent me, this one was the most civil

i’m still shocked that i got so many people attacking me over rightfully calling mimi out, and ofc there is no jealousy involved, i guess i just don’t understand why she is the blog that anyone would want defend, like let me summarize

she only gets notes because she is fast with her updates, why is she fast? she just takes updates from twitter and twitter translators a lot of the time without crediting and without any factchecking herself

she spreads unverified information and rumours because of it and got into trouble because of it more than once

she posts sasaeng information and photos taken outside of official schedules in the boys’ private time despite being criticized for it (like the jikook vacation)

she also still has the fact that she “stalks” the boys in her bio, even though i know for a fact people told her many times it’s inappropriate in the context of the fan culture in korea

she is very ignorant about mental illness (the post where she claims that jimin suffers from depression and was saved from it by jin as a fact is still up btw), the entertainment business in korea, colorism and racism (she thinks “reverse racism” is an actual thing lol) and she spreads her harmful opinions by writing essays about it to her large following

what bothers me personally a lot as a gay person, she is one of those obnoxious delusional shippers and normalizes that behaviour to her followers and also fetishizes gay men to a really ugly extent (i’m not talking here about normal shipping BTW I SHIP LOWKEY TOO, it’s about boundaries though, i’m talking about writing conspiracy theories and fetishizing, FETISHIZING, treating sexuality as a joke and treating it like a commodity, direct quote from one of her very “funny” posts: “BTS is gay ! Shippers : Of course. Why would I stan straight boys ? Who does that ?”)

(and yes as someone said in the tags, apparently she also did make racial jokes and jokes about north korea etc, but i haven’t seen those myself, only saw people mention it second hand so since i don’t have receipts i wasn’t going to include it initially)

and that is all before the jonghyun issue, which i feel like is kind of a culmination of a lot of what i dislike about her blog

she didn’t wait for an official confirmation from SM and immediately started posting about his death, all actual fanbases of jonghyun and shinee waited until after the confirmation to actually post about it, because can you imagine if it wasn’t true (no matter how real it may seem?), just like other actual bts fanbases most of these serious blogs wait for official confirmations for anything, unlike mimi who just jumps on any opportunity for notes and for her to be the news bearer. you could see people asking her to wait until the confirmation in the notes of her first posts, BUT SHE DIDN’T LISTEN, instead she let her posts spread and only added confirmation much later when it came out (which is what she does in general, spreads rumours / unconfirmed info, then when confirmation or denial comes out she edits the post and apologizes in some extremely lowkey way, despite her getting the heat for it she keeps repeating the same pattern)

her posts were made from the point of view of a bts fan instead of a human being, she was extremely tribal by saying things like that “as a bts fan, as an army” i offer my hand to shawol etc, “jonghyun took care of bts”

then she made her post about saying how we should be grateful the boys are under BigHit and not SM, because bighit supports the boys in expressing themselves about mental illness and provides help for them, blaming the company and the entertainment business for jonghyun’s death, showing her complete ignorance, not only do we not know what bighit is actually like behind the scenes (do people not remember the scandal where one of the managers hit jungkook on camera?), but the issue is that this didn’t apply to sm anyway… because…jonghyun was very outspoken about his issues with mental illness, so were other sm artists like taeyeon or leeteuk, there was/is even a support group for idols under sm that these guys as well as others like onew or yoona were a part of

and depression isn’t that simple, jonghyun had friends and outlets, but if anyone has ever been depressed or suicidal, then you as i would understand that sometimes that doesn’t matter, depression is a serious illness and the illness just won in this case, this is an opportunity to spread awareness about the illness, to urge people to seek treatment as well (jonghyun sought it himself) not try to analyze and pin it on any company or any circumstance

yet mimi linked jonghyun’s death to being oppressed by his company, by having to hold things on the inside, as if he didn’t talk about it candidly and didn’t express himself in his music

what i also found distasteful but i also can’t prove anything and people grieve differently, i still raised my eyebrows because when she lashed out at people who got rightfully angry for her for using this opportunity for notes and to make it about bts and bighit, she revealed that she was upset and cried because she thought about how it could’ve been “one of her idols” that this happened to and that she didn’t even know shinee that well… she was very coherent up until that point, but when people called her out she started to cry and be very emotional and started to talk about how she had liked shinee since debut and jonghyun was her favourite (so she has been following them for like 10 years? that is longer than i have been into kpop and i am OLD and have liked shinee since 2009.. so she’s been a fan that long and doesn’t even know the basics of what jjong was like and what he dealt with?) and then went onto analyze his lyrics and talk about how she should’ve known, and her blog transformed into other people consoling her despite her being the person that upset so many people with what she had done… that stuff doesn’t add up for me, but that is just speculation since grief is different for everyone etc, it’s just something i personally can’t buy considering how she behaves online a lot of the time

she said she was sorry without actually acknowledging what she did wrong and after people defended her vehemently she actually changed her tune and started to say things like how it was a misunderstanding and even asked her followers to approach any people who were still “misunderstanding” and let them know, which,,, what even? i suppose i’m party this to thank for all the people that told me i was an ugly/jealous loser that should delete and/or die

and despite her being like this, despite her never learning from her mistakes, people still keep defending her and attacking people that call her out, and why? 

i would agree if it were one mistake, everyone always says.. let’s educate her instead of attacking her, let her learn from her mistakes, that’s what life is all about, right? i agree, people grow from their mistakes

but.. SHE NEVER LEARNS! she keeps repeating the same things, no matter how many times she gets in trouble, and you guys keep enabling her, i think it’s this culture of fans stanning other fans that creates toxic behaviour like this, why would she change? why would she learn? why would she start and mature, why? when she has so many people telling her that it’s okay, that she is right and everybody else is wrong everytime she messes up? i think people that send me those messages are complicit really

i just wonder, what will she have to do for you guys to see that she isn’t someone worth sticking up to to this extent, because due to this environment, she won’t learn?

is she the hill you guys want to die on?

i often see people saying that she does a lot for the fandom, but? she doesn’t actually do anything special, she basically takes from others and profits from them, if you follow actual update blogs that do their homework, like allforbts, ktaebwi, sweaterpawsjimin, or vlissful on twitter, you will see the difference right away.. those are the people that do work for the fandom, she redistributes and doesn’t even thank those that did the work, there are people that spend dozens of hours translating and researching, books worth of content, people that paid for japanese tv subcriptions so they can record those shows for you, those are the people that do a lot, reposting tweets, anyone can do that (and a lot of people do, which is fine as long as due credit is given, what i’m saying is… it isn’t special and doesn’t require any effort at all, so why worship someone for like… doing the bare minimum? and sometimes not even that?)

why would you guys go to such an extent to then attack people that called her out, and rightfully, you guys would tell me a person with depression and an actual fan of jonghyun, that “if you care about jonghyun so much why don’t you join him”

over mimi? over someone who acts like all that i described? is that worth it… i don’t understand this cult-like mentality, even if she were an actual angel that did save the fandom, what in the world would make this okay?

i now have anxiety every time i try to get on tumblr and will have to work to overcome it because you people told me to die over calling HER out while going to her and telling her how everyone else sucks and she is a lovely angel…

and why she doesn’t pick fights? i talked to her in the past and let me tell you… she is stubborn and won’t change her mind and when she sees she can’t out-argue and manipulate the person SHE BLOCKS THEM and doesn’t let them express their views on her blog, no she only lets views that paint her as a victim there, she doesn’t let her followers see any validand CONSTRUCTIVE criticism

that’s why she seems like she is above it, like she is only nice and the angel and people like me are scum for ever saying anything, she is very smart about that aspect of things. but she isn’t above criticism (and neither am i), she is a human being like me or you :/.

i’m not telling you to hate her or attack her, don’t please.., i’m just asking you to see her for what she is, someone who is notes and attention hungry, someone who refuses to learn from her mistakes and someone who actually flaunts her ignorance, please give your time and attention and thankfulness to people in the fandom that aren’t like that :( and mostly, don’t go around telling people that call her (or anyone) out to die like.. please?

if she wanted to defend herself she could always talk to me, or anyone, or address it in a constructive manner, instead of relying on her followers to do that for her while publishing dozens asks on her blog that praise her and tell her how everybody else is wrong

she isn’t a celebrity, she can speak for herself

the fact that she chooses to deal with things the way she does says it all, right?

just…please reconsider stanning other fans, it creates all this toxicity, nothing good comes out of it, that is mostly what i wanted to say

and she specifically isn’t worth all the hurt

thanks

[agoutirex]

The Complete Isaac Baranoff Saga

Some of you may remember that, for the past five years, I’ve been the target of a low-level, on-and-off harassment campaign by a guy named Isaac Baraoff over multiple Internet sites. Isaac is completely delusional, and his attacks against me on DeviantArt, Furaffinity, Tumblr, TVTropes, and Wikifur all fell flat because those are sites are all, to some extent, moderated by actual human beings who could easily see that Isaac was a ranting lunatic. But since Twitter is an automated Kafkaesque mess that will ban you and expect an appeal before it will tell you the reason for your ban, he has succeeded on getting my account deleted from that site.

Why? Because, after Isaac has multiple times on multiple platforms accused me and anyone who criticizes him of being racist against him for being black, I pointed out that he’s actually white.

Ultimately this is just Internet drama, but I am kind of annoyed to lose my account because of a delusional troll with a pointless vendetta.  So just because I want to rant about it, here’s the full Isaac Baranoff story (and other Isaac related paraphenalia) in a master post. Unfortunately, since many of the incidents happened up to 5 years ago, I don’t have screenshots or links for some things (Isaac tends to either delete or get deleted a lot). But I think you’ll find from the links that I can provide, that nothing I’m claiming is too extraordinary for him.

He first started attacking me after I drew a comic poking fun at Ralph Bakshi. For some reason, this made Isaac extremely mad online and sent him into a rage during which he claimed that my webcomic Murry Purry Fresh and Furry was a ripoff of his webcomic Horndog, despite the fact that I had never heard of Horndog and the two look nothing alike.  He also made grandiose claims that he was the first webcomic to have its own website on the Internet, which is a weird thing to say as (1) it’s not and (2) who fucking cares.

When I made fun of his plagiarism claim by saying YEAH I TOTALLLLY RIPPED YOU OFF, he added that to my Wikifur page as an admission of guilt.

Gotta humble brag a little bit here, cuz I wanna: I should also mention that Isaac continuously attacked me for “never having been published by a real publisher” supposedly unlike him.  I don’t think that you need a traditional publisher’s backing to be a legitimate cartoonist, BUT I will point out that (1) Isaac’s claim to be a published cartoonist rests entirely on the fact that his comics are posted on his own website and (2) I have published comics on my own websites Murrypurry.com and Guttersnipecomic.com as well as having work published by SLG Publishing, Jarlidium Press, Radio Comics, Antarctic Press, and Vivid Publishing – as well as publishing another graphic novel, Misunderstanding Comics, through a successfully funded Kickstarter campaign.  During my initial argument with Isaac, numerous people pointed this out, but Isaac refuses to acknowledge anything other than his own website as a “legitimate” publisher.

Because we like baiting Isaac, Aurelina and I talked about his delusions on several episodes of our comedy podcast SHOW: here, here and here.

Isaac has insisted that every single person who has supported me against his preposterous claims is actually one of my sockpuppets, including 5thehardway, Sonderjen, Technicolorpie, Rabbitshakejake, Bat-faced Alan, Zoemoss, Skoon, and Moodyferret.

He’s obsessed with the Nostalgia Critic’s Channel Awesome and frequently tries to rope various Channel Awesome people into his arguments to support him. To my knowledge, none of them have ever actually responded to him. EDIT: I stand corrected! Apparently, Jerrid Foiles is pals with Isaac:

He created a troll Twitter account to spew homophobic invective against me, and continues to squat on the “Agouti Rex” name on that site.

When his plagiarism claims failed to get any traction, Isaac started claiming that all criticism against him was due to racism and anti-Semitism. Once again, keep in mind:

When King Cheetah made fun of Isaac for attacking me, Isaac replied with a comment mentioning a Channel Awesome reviewer called The Rap Critic. King Cheetah, not knowing who that was, asked “What, is that the Nostalgia Critic’s new thing?” Any normal person would, of course, understand that to mean “Is that the Nostalgia Critic’s new schtick/persona/bit/whatever?” Isaac, however, has hilariously and willfully misinterpreted “thing” to mean that King Cheetah was referring to the Rap Critic as the Nostalgia Critic’s property and thus slave. He uses this to consistently accuse King Cheetah of racism.

In the same conversation, King Cheetah sarcastically asked if The Rap Critic was some fedora-wearing neckbeard. Isaac apparently confused fedora with fez and, being of the entire geographical region of North Africa and the Middle East, assumed that only monkeys wear fezes so this must be some kind of racist slur. Isaac has consistently deleted comments from anyone trying to explain the difference between a fez and fedora.

He apparently tried to goad both Dana Simpson and Jay Naylor into political fights (Isaac is a big wanky libertarian), but neither of them took the bait. Even so, he was proud enough of his instigation attempts that he listed them as “notable incidents” on his Wikifur page before it was blanked. Isaac initially singled out Naylor for abuse after Naylor made a disparaging Twitter comments about Rage Against the Machine; Isaac to this day still will go on long rants about how because of this he preemptively refused to give Naylor “a contract” with his imaginary “publishing company.”

In an argument with The Onion’s Nathan Rabin, Isaac claimed to be more successful/richer than Rabin because he owned his own “publishing company” that “sold more comics than Marvel and DC on a good day.”

Most recently, Isaac attacked Frank Coniff of MST3K fame on Twitter – as near as I can tell because Frank made fun of John Bolton? I’m not too clear on this, because Isaac deleted his comment after completely melting down in Frank’s mentions.

Isaac also recently had a complete meltdown when Anniemae04 didn’t follow him back on Twitter; after that, he had a second related melt-down attacking Plebcomics. You can see in his Plebcomics melt-down that Isaac is once again claiming to have BIG WHEEL connections in indie comics & animation; this time he’s claiming to know Ralph Bakshi, while he kept insisting he knew Bobby London when he attacked me.

  That’s all I got from now. Anyone out there who has any more tales of Isaac Baronoff, please let me know! I’m curious to compile more notes on his psychosis.

Under the cut: EVERYONE WHO MAKES FUN OF ISAAC IS A BETTER CARTOONIST THAN HE IS

[aur4-le]

African-Americans & Latinxs

Hello Readers,

I’ve thought about this a lot and I wanted to share. You don't have to agree. I don't want to sway anyones’ opinion. This is merely my own. 

Im a black Puerto Rican. Born and raised. Have never lived in the United States, but have traveled there many times. And I’ve learned that some African-Americans are not all that fond of white passing, light skin latinxs. I’ve seen a lot of it on the internet. And it really baffles me as to why.

For those of you who are unaware of South American/Latin American history. When Cristopher Columbus was exploring into the new world, he found lands in The Bahamas, Brazil, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Dominican Republic (among others), all inhabited by indigenous people. He literally invades these lands, enslaves the people and then they bring in millions of African slaves.

Eventually, these three different populations started to mix. Spaniards with Natives, Natives with Africans, Africans with spaniards, etc. Giving rise to a mixed society. The mixing mostly originating from rape, but it later progressed into a mind set that mixing would lead to a “lightening” of the African race that would probably lead to better oportunities. But that was hundreds of years ago, far from what I've seen and experienced today.

Don't misunderstand, there is prejudice– mostly class related. Your social class will most likely influence how people will treat you. You don't have to be black to be poor. And there definitely is racism/colorism but not to the extent that you witness in Northern America.

What, in my opinion, Northern Americans fail to understand is that our upbringing is completely different from theirs, which in turn influence our view of race and ethnicity. Northern Americans look at me and their first question to ask is if I'm black. What does it mean to be black in american society? What it means to be black in Northern America is not the same as what it means to be black in the Latin America. I look in the mirror everyday, I know i’m black. But the difference is my blackness does not define me. And that’s what I pity the most for fellow African Americans. Their skin color is their identity, its who defines who they are. African Americans feel comfort being with their counterparts.

The same does not apply to hispanics. Despite our difference in colors, latinxs share more commonalities than differences. Ive never thought of white latinxs as better or more privileged than me. I could be with a group of people all looking different from me, but if we all were to be latinx race would not even matter. We all share a language, a culture, HISTORY, just to mane a few.

Which brings me to my next point. White hispanics are not the same as a white american that African-Americans know. But they insist that they are. A white latinx (not raised in the USA) are two worlds apart from white Americans despite also having white skin. A true white latinx will never refer to themselves as white when asked “what are you?”. And I say a true white latinx, because there are white hispanics out there that like the privileges that being white brings them living in the US whilst most likely dismissing that they are latinx, better known as being “white washed”.

So don't get angry when a white passing latinx denies being white, because that would infer that they aren't hispanic. And I think the term “white passing” self explanatory. They look white, but it doesn't mean they are raised with white ideals. In the USA being white is both a race and an ethnicity, being African-American is both a race and an ethnicity. Even though being Latinx/Hispanic is an ethnicity, being latinx and being white or being black are two different things no one can deny.

I suggest reading this article: https://www.wbur.org/npr/138601410/what-it-means-to-be-black-in-latin-america

XOXO