#I understand like. Misunderstanding racism. To an extent

[eddiegettingshot]

i think they misunderstand what racism can look like. it’s not just saying “eddie is violent bc he’s brown” which, to be fair, they’ve said in so many words in the past lol, but it’s also “if this behavior was exhibited by a white person, would i be reacting the same way” and the answer is FUCKING NO!!!!!! if buck pointed his finger angrily they would be like yay💓 finally baby buck 👶🏼 is sticking up👊🏻 to abuser eddie 😡 it’s crazy

it’s also the fact that none of them seem willing to accept or even understand that this response isn’t even something they necessarily have control over or are conscious of, that eddie’s skin color isn’t the only factor in their subconscious bias, that the interpretation ITSELF is imbued with their racism so they can’t textually analyze their way out of it. and it’s crazy because these are literally like racism 101 concepts. this is stuff that i have taught literally in Week One in race & ethnicity courses. this is the first slide of the instagram infographic. it’s not even stuff i realized still needed to be explained to this extent to people who are Online in suitably “socially liberal” spaces. but they literally sound like facebook commenters who exclusively watch fox news

[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?

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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!

[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

[garden-of-succulents]

I've taken some time to think over and process recent criticisms that people have made of me. Thank you to everyone for being patient while I took this time to reflect--I think that a brief review of my behaviour in the past has shown that I often respond poorly and clumsily in the heat of the moment, and these conversations benefit when I give them the thought and effort they deserve.

I am responding to people whose direct responses to me, or public commentary, seemed to indicate they wanted some sort of response from me. I hope I've addressed everyone; please let me know if I've missed anyone. I have also, as was requested, cleared out my OMGCP-related blocklist.

Briefly, about that: I have, in the past, blocked people for two main reasons. The first is that they're producing fannish content (fic, art, or meta) that triggers my anxiety, which my body reacts very poorly to; the other is that I have disagreed with them about something, but know that they are significantly younger/less privileged than I am, and blocking is one of the tools I use to make sure I don't impulsively strike up an unfair argument about something unimportant.

I would like to apologize for the distress and insult my blocking users caused them; it was not intended. I have been investigating ways to curate my online experience to what I can manage with mental health that varies from day to day, with less of a negative effect on other people and maintains their ability to draw my attention to important conversations.

Although I believe listening to criticism is important, especially on topics where I am privileged or ignorant, this is something I have to balance with my mental and physical health; I have to carefully budget time and energy to engage with it when I am capable of thinking clearly and deeply. Sometimes I'm able to seek out and read criticism, but sometimes I'm not. I miss conversations or misunderstand peoples' points. I know this is frustrating to people who do not have the luxury of ignoring or escaping these issues in their daily lives, and I'm sorry.

On a practical note, I am taking pains to make sure that people can contact me through my des-zimbits account, but I should make clear that unfortunately, I cannot accept anon messages and I am very unpredictable about seeing things written on blogs I do not follow; my friends are not in the habit of telling me about criticism made by third parties. There have been times that I only found out long after the fact that someone has put enormous amounts of time and energy into critiquing my behaviour on their blog, and become upset that I have not responded or changed. In those circumstances, I never saw the original posts in the first place. I don't have a complete solution for this, but I encourage people to tag me or message me a post they think I should see; if you don't want to deal with me thereafter, just say, "Don't reply."

I am making this apology not in hope that anyone will change their opinion of me or forgive me. I know that people of colour in this fandom are frustrated by white fans' inability to listen and respond in a way that makes things better, and I know that my own behaviour has contributed to that. My sincere desire here is to make it plain that I am willing to listen and try, and perhaps even make other fans feel that they can directly approach me with their frustrations and concerns.

I am beyond grateful to the fans of colour who have expended energy and time educating me, criticizing me, talking to me, and helping me. Your willingness to be open about your feelings and experiences, and to speak truth to power, have been unspeakably helpful in helping me see my blind spots, and understand the effect my behaviour has on other people. I know that it takes a lot of energy and courage it takes to speak about such a painful and infuriating subject. I want to thank the people who, despite my resistance at times, continue to engage me in these issues. Your feedback is valuable and appreciated.

@dexydex and @georgiapeche, re: this post

You’re right, I haven’t been responding correctly to your criticism. I’ve taken it too personally instead of taking a step back to consider your perspectives in a more nuanced and empathetic way. Thank you for all of the emotional labor you’ve expended up until this point trying to get through to me. I’m sorry that I’ve made it your responsibility to teach me what I’m doing wrong rather than go out and learn for myself. I’ve been complacent in the ways I’ve interacted with my own privilege. I’m sorry that my apologies have fallen flat time and time again. I’m sorry I haven’t done enough yet to unlearn my implicit racism. This is something I will increase my efforts to address and correct in the future. It is not your job to forgive me. It is not your job to absolve me of any ill will.

phillipsheabutter, re: this post

You're right; Kent's behaviour in canon is cruel and abusive, which Nursey's isn't. My response to them is very backwards the usual responses. I am especially sorry that my answer about him didn't address the word "hate", so I flatly said that I "hated" him, which is a strong and unwarranted negative assessment to make of his behaviour. This was especially wrong of me because the behaviour I was criticizing is a response many Black readers identify with, to the experience of having their emotional responses intensely policed and invalidated. It is a testament of my ignorance and prejudice that I felt this perspective was something I could choose to discard when thinking about him.

As to how I struggle to have empathy for one behaviour but not the other, I can't offer any excuse for my racism, but I can briefly explain: I’ve tried to articulate in the past that Kent’s narrative strongly evokes people and relationships that have been incredibly formative for me, and that I have dedicated years of personal searching and academic study to understanding Kent's kind of extreme behaviour and maintaining relationships with people who display it. My relationship to invalidating behaviour is still too raw and painful to talk about in detail, but in short, it was something I had powerfully negative experiences with when I was young, and as an adult I have found it deeply distressing when it was directed at me; I have embraced a career based around validating emotions. I hadn't yet truly realized the extent to which it is used as a coping mechanism by African Americans--the majority of Black people I have known have been first- or second-generation Canadians hailing from Africa or the Carribean, who have had expressed different cultural and racial experiences to me, and I haven't consumed enough American media to truly understand where Nursey is coming from. I struggle to relate to him as much as I do to characters like Ransom whose cultural experiences and coping mechanisms are more familiar to me.

In equating Nursey to generic white hipsters I encountered this behaviour from, I was erasing his Blackness in favor of pointing to an implied socioeconomic privilege that in no way makes up for or safeguards him from the experiences of being a Black man living in the United States. That wasn’t just wrong of me, it was careless and racist.

There’s a lot to his character that I’ve yet to explore and it was wrong of me to say I hate him when I haven’t done enough work to understand who he is or where he comes from. I'm going to work more to expand my knowledge and find deeper empathy for him.

@oluranurse, re: this post

You’re right, I keep making the same mistakes over again. I can understand how frustrating it feels when a larger blog says repeatedly that they will be different, and better, but the results are disappointing at best. I can only hope that by taking the time to listen, really listen, to your feedback, that someday I won’t have to apologize for my mistakes (because they will few and far apart).

I realize that as someone who doesn't have Borderline Personality Disorder, it is potentially problematic that I am so invested in its fictional depiction, especially given the extreme stigma against the disorder by members of my own profession. As I've explained before, however, it's a condition I've had significant personal experience with, and writing about mental health issues helps me build the skills that may let me someday write coherently about my own C-PTSD. What's more, I am not pulling these conditions out of nowhere or treating them lightly; I'm a licensed mental health professional, and I take a great deal of care to root my mental health headcanons in close analysis of the source material. The diagnoses I suggest for characters are by no means the ultimate truth about them and alternate perceptions of them are wholly plausible

I would like to talk more about your classification of BPD as "a mental illness that fandom likes to give to characters that have 'bad attitudes'," but on a separate occasion where that discussion doesn’t detract from the real conversation we’re having here.

In reference to the disagreement I had with brenbits, I still believe that the way they engaged me could have been more direct, and less heated, from the start. But I respect that other users confront issues they find problematic differently.

In reference to my post about dealing with criticism, I understand that the tone implied something much different than what I intended. I was attempting to be a resource for content creators who feel discouraged by discourse and offer show them how to respond to said criticism in a thoughtful and nuanced way. I realize how ironic that may sound considering some of my past responses. I know that in that post it sounds like I will apologize and defend every microaggression and racist comment that comes my way. That was never the case, but I’m sorry I did such a poor job of articulating that. Times that I have provided this service include helping writers find essays written by members of minorities about common difficulties or pitfalls in depictions of their experiences, or in helping them personally connect with someone who has the cultural competency to assess a situation, and is willing to expend the emotional labour of providing an author with a critique.

With regard to the time that I answered the question, "Are genderbends transphobic?" I shouldn't have answered, given that I am cis. I will make an effort in the future not to summarize trans peoples' opinions, and step back to amplify the voices of trans people who have already made their thoughts accessible.

I feel that the fandom should do more to support content creators and to talk through (especially with younger creators) what they could be doing better in terms of representation. I do understand, however, that doesn’t mean members of the fandom should have to stand for racist and stereotypical content and/or be grateful that it even exists.

You’re right, I’ve been complacent and racist in how I treat POC characters. I need to take a step back, consume more media and academic material related to the experiences of these characters. I need to immerse myself in the positive representations and transformative works this fandom already has for these characters. I need to make these already available transformative works more visible by interacting with them on my blog in ways that are supportive and enriching. I need do more to change my racist thoughts and tendencies because this is a comic made by a WOC that seeks to better minority representation and inclusion in the sports world. I need to be more present in how my behavior affects the experiences of others in this fandom.

I also concede that I do not understand the inherent danger that POC and trans people endure daily. I cannot take your concerns for granted just because I don’t understand them at first. It’s my personal responsibility to seek out information and understanding. I’m also sorry that I have focused more on my personal reaction to criticism rather than on the concerns raised about my behavior. I have many privileges in this fandom, I need to do a better job of utilizing them properly.

@eriquebittle, re: this post

You’re right, my apology focused too much on my feelings and not how my actions have hurt others. I was attempting to start a conversation I wasn’t ready to engage in properly. My apology was lackluster and nothing new at best. As I’m addressing in other posts, I am working on active change. From now on, I'll give the performative white guilt a rest and focus on listening and changing my behaviour.

@senor-lapin, re: this post

I meant what I said about doing my best. However, my apology was neither warranted in the way I handled it nor effective at articulating how I’m taking steps to fix my racist thoughts and actions. As I’ve addressed previously, I have removed the blocks I placed on other members of OMGCP fandom and will work in the future not to exclude them from the discussion. I will listen, research, and reflect for as long as I need to in order to understand my critics. That is the least I owe them.

@duanlarissa, re: this post

I was ineffective in trying to articulate or consider an intersectionality between neurodivergence and racial identity. The way I addressed Nursey and Dex’s relationship was very simplistic and downright racist. There’s a lot of nuance to their relationship that I haven’t begun to explore and shouldn’t have commented on. Nursey has every right to negotiate Dex’s behavior in a way that keeps him both mentally and physically safe.

@onethousandroaches, re: this post

It isn’t worse. You’re right.

In trying to dissect different aspects of his personality, I was not only minimizing his experiences and struggles, but othering and essentializing him. It was racist. I was racist. I need to consider and accept every part of his identity. I need to take a hard look at what I haven’t liked about him in the past, accept that I’ve been narrow minded and prejudiced, and unlearn those tendencies. I need to set a better example of how white fans should support characters of colour (especially Black characters in a fandom created by a Black woman). I need to use the privilege I have (as a white person, as a popular blog) to support this character and the people who enjoy him. All of him.

[mielleim-blog]

Time is a-ticking

Amazingly, I’m nearing the end of my time here in South Africa. While I am a hopeless nostalgic (reflecting seems to be in my genes) and am constantly looking backwards, I’m starting to think back on my time here more and more as August 16th draws nearer. I’m wrapping up my residency application now, too, and as I sift through all my past work experiences and the like, I get lost in memories. 

I’ve been so lucky to travel often while I’ve been here--Kruger and Cape Town multiple times, Mooinooi in the North West province, Limpopo, Nkangala, Durban... This country is so vibrant and chock full of different cultures. It’s incredibly beautiful but also incredibly complicated (and a bit scary/dangerous) due to this colorful cultural tapestry. It seems like much of the racism (both overt and subconscious) traces back to cultural differences and cultural misunderstandings. If only these people of different backgrounds were lumped in the same schools together, stuck in the same social environment, I think they would come to realize that there are core human personalities that cut across cultural boundaries: the trickster, the dreamer, the one asking all the questions, and the list goes on. People would naturally form new multicolored, multi-cultural friend groups.

The natural world here is just as incredibly diverse. Kruger is a mind-blowingly complex ecosystem. From the little industrious dung beetle, to the purple and green lilac breasted rollers, to the bright green and yellow bee-eaters, to the baboons, vervet monkeys, rhinos, elephants, and lions... It’s amazing to drive around and note the different social behavior of the different animals: the very territorial rhinos, the monkeys grooming each other, the birds calling for a mate... 

My mom and I had an upsetting experience one night on a drive in the Kruger. We were on a guided night tour. We saw a mother and baby elephant up ahead of us on the road, and the driver/guide immediately drove up to them, pulling parallel to them as they disappeared into the bush. At that point, a mid-sized adolescent elephant lumbered up on the opposite side of us. The driver stayed put, and the adolescent stopped in his tracks when he saw us. He then became visibly confused, putting one of his front feet out this way and that, testing the routes available to him now that we had gotten in the way of his tracing of his mother’s path. He finally deciding on trotting up the road in front of us, zigzagging this way and that, clearly unsure of where to go. He stopped at one point and let out a low grumbling sound, calling other elephants, likely his mother. He paused briefly, then trudged on, turning from this side to that, testing the ground on either side of the road. Uncertain still, he resumed his forward march and, looking visibly flustered, raised his trunk to the air, trumpeting. After a few more paces forward, he stopped along the right-hand side of the road, testing the route cautiously with one of his front feet. 

He decided to brave the brush off to the right, but he was obviously still distressed and distraught, shaking his head as he plunged ahead. My mom and I were both quite upset with the driver. He was too brazen, almost cruel, when we blocked this young elephant’s march.

Social support is so important for so many of us, elephants and humans alike. As I wrap up my project on mental health care integration here, I think back on how often South Africans family as a central source of support for mentally ill patients. Yes, this important in the U.S., but the emphasis on family support just isn’t the same as it is here. It isn’t just extremely important here, it is essential.

Since my arrival in Pretoria, there has been a major mental health political scandal occur here in South Africa, the Life Esidimeni tragedy. In Oct 2015, the MEC for health in Gauteng announced the termination of a contract between the Dept of Health and a health care organization called Life Esidimeni that had been tasked with caring for mentally ill individuals on behalf of the government. Between March to June 2016, about 2000 patients receiving chronic psych care through the government were transferred out of the Life Esidimeni institutions caring for them to NGOs, hospitals providing acute psych care, and families. It surfaced in Sept 2016 that about 36 former Life Esidimeni residents had died since the move, but it wasn’t until the health ombudsman’s report was published in late January 2017 that people learned of the full extent of the impact of the transfer. The NGOs to which the patients were transferred were severely lacking in resources, and many had not even been licensed. By mid-February 2017, the news outlets were reporting a death toll of above 100 individuals.

This happened in the middle of my working on a project on mental health, and you can only imagine how that might impact people’s perceptions of mental health care. Often, when I talk to people about mental health care here. “Life Esidimeni” is the first set of words rolling off their lips.

As my time draws to a close, I’m trying to round out my understanding of this beautiful and beautifully mysterious place. I’m exploring jazz clubs in Jo’burg and listening to Nelson Mandela’s book on my way to work (so interesting but it seems neverending). I’m reading Zarina Maharaj’s book about her role in the anti-Apartheid movement, and taking André out cycling on the streets of Jo’burg and Soweto. When I get back to the States, I will be all over the country: traveling from D.C. to WV, from WV to Pittsburgh, from Pittsburgh to Salt Lake, from Salt Lake to San Fran, from San Fran to Yosemite, and so on and so on until I wind up in Zuni, NM. My body will be far from the boulders of Capricorn province in northern South Africa, but my mind will be replaying my time here over and over and over again.

[maxa-postrophe]

About Fire Emblem - Conquest

Wow it was longer than I thought! Don’t worry, this is a one time thing only!

This text will explain my perception of the story of Fire Emblem Fates : Conquest. Expect some ranting,  spoilers (if you didn't play the game yet) and a lot of english mistakes (sorry for that). Also, I still have the final maps (27-28) to complete so I can't talk about the end of the game.

 This game... ah, well, to begin with, I must say that I liked this game  despite its flaws, as it's a really solid tactical rpg game. It's seem very odd why I want to write such a wall of text on a game, because it's not the only one with a story far from perfect, but, let's say it's professional deformation. As a comic author, I'm often thinking about stories I watch. I 'm not saying I would have done better, but this story in particular made my brain race for some reason.

As you already know, fates is about the hero/heroine Corrin choosing between two nation : Hoshido and her/his real family, or Nohr and her/his adoptive family. of course whatever story you choose, expect internal conflict, tragedies and drama. Since Nohr is the "invading ntion ruled by evil king", you can expect Conquest to be a thorny path. And, boy, I didn't exect that many thorns.

1 - Of Black and White

To put it bluntly, the story doesn't make mystery about making it a war between the white country of good and love versus the black EVIL country ruled by an EVIL king with EVIL monsters and basically anything EVIL you can find. And that's okay. The point is to support your adoptive family you care about and the nation you grew in, despite their flaws, over your newfound family whatever well intentioned they are. So by trying to end the war from the inside, you're between the hammer of our real family you're fighting and the anvil of your king (and adoptive father) you will betray.

On paper, I find it more interesting than magically making Hoshido an awful and demonic country all of a sudden. However, like everything, if you're not balancing some things, it falls. And in this case, it's a big, loud, hard fall. Hoshido and Nohr couldn't be more caricatured. It's not only black and white, it's plain PURE white versus EVIL black. From the first chapter, you discover a country that seem to be in an eternal night, dark and hostile, and aside your adoptive siblings who are pretty cool, you have all the time to see EVIL king asking you to do EVIL executions, then proceeds to do a couple of EVIL tricks like an EVIL terrorist attack, then you discover Hoshido and everything is  in light and there is flowers and everything is so welcoming (except Takumi, thank you for being an asshole in this ocean of sugar)... and in this time you don't have many occasion to sympathise with your Nohrian family, so they don't mean that much for the player at this point, so, in the end, when the game asks me to choose... I really, really searched for a reason to do so, and I didn't find any, aside "the nohrian royal family is kinda okay". I understand that siding with the ones you grew up with should be the "natural choice" I'm not talking about the country because the main character is spending most of his time in a tower so he doesn't know much about Nohr in the end), but the game made a terrible job at this and it doesn't seem natural at all. Anyway, I chose Conquest so hello, Nohr.

problem : The game concept IS to fight Hoshido's army, but your goal is to dethrone Garon. In other words, the main plot is contradicting the gameplay. And since the developers didn't want to make Hoshido look remotely bad in any way, all those battles against the white country seems really forced. Honestly, you could have kept the whole black and white stuff, only by making minor tweaks. The game suggests that Garon was originally not a bad ruler. I also read (may be false though) that one of the original ideas was that Nohr was a poor country so they had to invade Hoshido who was wealthy and didn't want to share anything... so the ideas are there for making an interesting setting. Unfrotunately, the gme don't say anything about that. Can't you at least explain us how this war originated? Plus, a lot of Nohrian characters are nice, aside from a couple of psychos like Camilla or Peri, when you see someone like Arthur, who is basically Captain Nohr, or any other nice people fighting with you, you can expect they wage war for a reason, right? But no, get only muhahahaha we will conquer the world and exterminate everyone.

There is a mission about a vassal country of Hoshido, telling you that Hoshido too had some expansionist views, and since Hoshido is basically Japan, that didn't sound all that surprising, and I was really motivated about this imperialist side , thinking at least you could liberate a vassal counrty, but, hey, guess what, turned out is was a dirty plan, and the local chief is a total scumbag, because you know, you HAVE to be on the evil side, always, and Hoshido are GOOD, always, so when you're freeing any Hoshidian people by pure chivalry spirit (misplaced, you chose the evil path, why being so wary of ethics, now?) they express their gratitude by... actually they don't express their gratitude, because you're Nohrian scum, and they would totally do the same in such situation because they are the good people, so why just thanking you?

 And that's it, the only dot of black in all this white is the latent xenophobia of hoshidian, which will consider "Nohrian" as an insult by default. But honestly I'm not sure this racism thing is on purpose. I mean, after all, Nohr is the agressor, and they show an impressive display of dirty deeds, so in the end, such a behaviour isn't really  a surprise. And considering it's fantasy japan made by japan people, well... let's say there is room for doubts.

2 - You shall Suffer

I said it at the beginning, reading at the main plot, your hero can expect to suffer, and in Conquest, you will suffer even more. However, there is a thin line between telling a tragic story and create cheap drama. There is a simple rule , which is, not any chapter of a story can be a climax, because if there is too much dramatic spikes, it becomes flat. However, in Conquest, you know that something unpleasant will happen EVERY. FUCKING. CHAPTER. It works for some time, but, chapter after chapter, the process grows duller, to the point I was rolling eyes at each dickish move after a certain point. I am honestly really surprised Hinoka didn't die yet and Sakura didn't suicide herself at this point. It becomes really baffling in contrast with the support dialogues or paralogues who are often lightheaded and comical. Don't misunderstand me, I am welcoming the oxygen brought by those sequences, but those bubbles of humour and the dark, emo story are totally separated, so those two parts doesn't mix and it feels... really weird.

Come to think of it, it could have been a way to balance it : My Castle phases are those instants of peace of friendship that helps Corrin to remain strong and don't succumb to suffering and sadness... but you can't really say this is lampshaded.

One  thing to note is Garon HAS a real reason to act like a total dick with you, which is likely to make you suffer so much it breaks your spirit, so you can become a vessel for Anankos, so, as unpleasant as it is, this incessant display of cruelty has at least a plot motivated reason. However, this point is never really addressed, since your hero may be sad and discouraged, but we never see any sign of losing his sanity, so as soon as it becomes obvious hat the role will be fulfilled by Takumi (poor Takumi....joking, I hate Takumi), every additional dick move by Garon or Iago only seems to be gratuitous excuse to cause easy drama. So yeah, another missed occasion to make a more consistent storytelling, I'd say.

3 - Sockpuppet Rebel

Changing things from the inside is a tough task, and, as a hero, you're prepared to suffer and to dirty your hands...but, only to a certain extent. Honestly, I understand your avatar's problem. While you're trying to take the burden, you have your ethics and moral code, and don't want unnecessary bloodshed, so, at leas at the beginning, being hesitant and unresolved is fairly understandable. However, I got the impression that the creators were half-assed doing it. I'm not saying that Corrin should have turned into a cold blooded monster, mind you (could have been interesting, though), but from a practical point of view, the main character is making very weird decisions on a regular basis. So, punishing rebels, obeying your father's orders however vile, is okay, but, trying to get rid of Hans or Iago, for example, seems out of question. I can understand for Iago as it's kind of the first counsellor, but Hans, while still under Garon's protection to a certain extent, is a mere thug. You have the entire royal family on your side, you're a Nohrian prince yourself, and considering how he behaves, showing disrespect or even tried to kill you, you have plenty of excuse to execute him at least a dozen of times. You will tell me "But Garon could execute you". No, he can't. The game forgets it, but we're talking about a country. This country has several factions, every member of the royal family have vassals, which means lands and troops. No matter how ruthless Garon can be, he absolutely, definitely can't take direct action against you as long as you have the support of your brothers and sisters, and punishing you for killing a stupid thug can’t justify the risk of a massive rebellion. And even without that, he can't kill you, he needs you alive as a vessel for Anankos.

Also, having the entire Hoshidian family imprisoned which means virtually the end of the war, isn't even raised as an issue because "it's neutral ground it's not right to do so". yeah, if there was a lot of countries, and if Nohr was wary of being invaded by a coalition after seeing a neutral place violated, I could understand, but since there isn't any other country of importance, well... this is a massive strategy mistake, even if you don't kill them, you could have keep them captive (and they die later anyway, so...).

So, my main gripe is the hero appears too passive, he is not working towards his goal, he is pushed by the current and can't seem to take a decisive initiative. You basically do everything Garon tells you for THE ENTIRE GAME minus three chapters! And since you are the "player", it's pretty frustrating, right?

 Now, you will tell me, yeah, but your nohrian family are spineless retards, they wouldn't move an inch to save you. Well it's true to some extent. Again, it's not like Conquest is totally wrong every time. Xander chooses to be blind by living with his memories of the good Garon the King was at one point. And regarding he others, they lived under terror of their father since their birth so, yeah, I can understand that they won't oppose openly to their father, and acts out of fear. Camilla even states something along those lines. In order to convince them to kill Garon, you must conquer Hoshido's throne... that sounds pretty good. But actually, I was imagining more something like an official coronation ceremony, where all important people of Nohr could witness that Garon became a monster, something that would prevent a rebellion because the king was assassinated (again, I recall this being stated in the game). But in the end, the only witnesses are your own family, so in the end, it's not that different than attempting to assassinate him more or less anywhere, except the only sacrificed life here would be yours (instead of countless hoshidian people). In the end, it's "all this for only that" ? Plus okay, let's imagine Garon isn't a slime monster.... well, does that change anything ? He is still an evil ruler, he is still committing war crimes and devastating foreign countries, so, in the end, it doesn't change much to the problem : Garon must be suppressed, I think even your stuck up adoptive siblings could understand that after a while, right?

4/ Routes

When you think about it Conquest could have been, with some tweaks, a splendid standalone game. less gratuitous drama, less black and white morality, less passivity, more boldness, more work on characters and even politics, less "I want to do something adult but not too much don't forget ethics", and you could keep a lot of current elements.

But the thing is, Conquest, Birthright and Revelations are meant to be a package, so, we don't have three games in one here, we got one game split into three, which means there are some holes that are left on purpose. Conquest is the hard path, the path of thorns. It's also the hardest of the two starting routes; so you can expect be rewarded to your effort, like a more satisfying end, or interesting plot points. However this would have deprived people buying Birthright, and, more than that, Revelation would become useless. And they WANT you to buy Revelations, so, no, you won't have your satisfying end (from what I read, revelations isn't that satisfying, though). So the reality is that they chose to sell you an incomplete game to make you spend more money on the other routes, making the flaws even more apparent.

5-Lost in translation

A last word about the localization. I understand that a good adaptation isn't about literal translation, however, changing characters personality (Effie for example who is supposed to be timid) and thus their dialogs is unacceptable, even if it's for minor support conversations. It doesn't matter that "original lines aren't better". translation isn't about thinking I can do better than the original. It's about keeping the core of a work and bringing it to you. I heard it's not the first time and I will really be careful about that in the future, because I don't want to ask myself each time "okay, but did he really say that ?". Also, censoring part of the game is also something I really don't like. I understand it's for a minor stupid petting game, I understand people not wanting to play it or reading embarrassing lines, but in this case, please, make it an option to deactivate it from the game, because whatever you call it it's "removing content", and I don't like the idea of having "removing content", especially from a game which already is already incomplete story-wise. But you wouldn't want age restriction to lessen the amount of copies sold, right?

In conclusion

As solid as the game is from a gameplay standpoint, it's leaving to me an intense frustration, that you can feel through the need of writing this huuuuuuuuuuuuuuuge wall of text. A lot a ideas, likeable characters and a story with a lot of potential, all of that was wasted to me. I really hope the next game will not repeat the same mistake and sacrificing a great potential on the altar of a commercial strategy.

[bountyofbeads]

The Fight Over the 1619 Project Is Not About the Facts

A dispute between a small group of scholars and the authors of The New York Times Magazine’s issue on slavery represents a fundamental disagreement over the trajectory of American society.

By Adam Serwer | Published December 23, 2019 4:00 PM ET | The Atlantic | Posted December 23, 2019 |

When the New York Times magazine  published its 1619 Project in August, people lined up on the street in New York City to get copies. Since then, the project—a historical analysis of how slavery shaped American political, social, and economic institutions—has spawned a podcast, a high-school curriculum, and an upcoming book. For Nikole Hannah-Jones, the reporter who conceived of the project, the response has been deeply gratifying.

“They had not seen this type of demand for a print product of The New York Times, they said, since 2008, when people wanted copies of Obama's historic presidency edition,” Hannah-Jones told me. “I know when I talk to people, they have said that they feel like they are understanding the architecture of their country in a way that they had not.”

U.S. history is often taught and popularly understood through the eyes of its great men, who are seen as either heroic or tragic figures in a global struggle for human freedom. The 1619 Project, named for the date of the first arrival of Africans on American soil, sought to place “the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative.” Viewed from the perspective of those historically denied the rights enumerated in America’s founding documents, the story of the country’s great men necessarily looks very different.

The reaction to the project was not universally enthusiastic. Several weeks ago, the Princeton historian Sean Wilentz, who had criticized the 1619 Project’s “cynicism” in a lecture in November, began quietly circulating a letter objecting to the project, and some of Hannah-Jones’s work in particular. The letter acquired four signatories—James McPherson, Gordon Wood, Victoria Bynum, and James Oakes, all leading scholars in their field. They sent their letter to three top Times editors and the publisher, A. G. Sulzberger, on December 4. A version of that letter was published on Friday, along with a detailed rebuttal from Jake Silverstein, the editor of the Times Magazine.

The letter sent to the Times says, “We applaud all efforts to address the foundational centrality of slavery and racism to our history,” but then veers into harsh criticism of the 1619 Project. The letter refers to “matters of verifiable fact” that “cannot be described as interpretation or ‘framing’” and says the project reflected “a displacement of historical understanding by ideology.” Wilentz and his fellow signatories didn’t just dispute the Times Magazine’s interpretation of past events, but demanded corrections.

In the age of social-media invective, a strongly worded letter might not seem particularly significant. But given the stature of the historians involved, the letter is a serious challenge to the credibility of the 1619 Project, which has drawn its share not just of admirers but also critics.

Nevertheless, some historians who declined to sign the letter wondered whether the letter was intended less to resolve factual disputes than to discredit laymen who had challenged an interpretation of American national identity that is cherished by liberals and conservatives alike.

“I think had any of the scholars who signed the letter contacted me or contacted the Times with concerns [before sending the letter], we would've taken those concerns very seriously,” Hannah-Jones said. “And instead there was kind of a campaign to kind of get people to sign on to a letter that was attempting really to discredit the entire project without having had a conversation.”

Underlying each of the disagreements in the letter is not just a matter of historical fact but a conflict about whether Americans, from the Founders to the present day, are committed to the ideals they claim to revere. And while some of the critiques can be answered with historical fact, others are questions of interpretation grounded in perspective and experience.

In fact, the harshness of the Wilentz letter may obscure the extent to which its authors and the creators of the 1619 Project share a broad historical vision. Both sides agree, as many of the project’s right-wing critics do not, that slavery’s legacy still shapes American life—an argument that is less radical than it may appear at first glance. If you think anti-black racism still shapes American society, then you are in agreement with the thrust of the 1619 Project, though not necessarily with all of its individual arguments.

The clash between the Times authors and their historian critics represents a fundamental disagreement over the trajectory of American society. Was America founded as a slavocracy, and are current racial inequities the natural outgrowth of that? Or was America conceived in liberty, a nation haltingly redeeming itself through its founding principles? These are not simple questions to answer, because the nation’s pro-slavery and anti-slavery tendencies are so closely intertwined.

The letter is rooted in a vision of American history as a slow, uncertain march toward a more perfect union. The 1619 Project, and Hannah-Jones’s introductory essay in particular, offer a darker vision of the nation, in which Americans have made less progress than they think, and in which black people continue to struggle indefinitely for rights they may never fully realize. Inherent in that vision is a kind of pessimism, not about black struggle but about the sincerity and viability of white anti-racism. It is a harsh verdict, and one of the reasons the 1619 Project has provoked pointed criticism alongside praise.

Americans need to believe that, as Martin Luther King Jr. said, the arc of history bends toward justice. And they are rarely kind to those who question whether it does.

Most americans still learn very little about the lives of the enslaved, or how the struggle over slavery shaped a young nation. Last year, the Southern Poverty Law Center found that few American high-school students know that slavery was the cause of the Civil War, that the Constitution protected slavery without explicitly mentioning it, or that ending slavery required a constitutional amendment.

“The biggest obstacle to teaching slavery effectively in America is the deep, abiding American need to conceive of and understand our history as ‘progress,’ as the story of a people and a nation that always sought the improvement of mankind, the advancement of liberty and justice, the broadening of pursuits of happiness for all,” the Yale historian David Blight wrote in the introduction to the report. “While there are many real threads to this story—about immigration, about our creeds and ideologies, and about race and emancipation and civil rights, there is also the broad, untidy underside.”

In conjunction with the Pulitzer Center, the Times has produced educational materials based on the 1619 Project for students—one of the reasons Wilentz told me he and his colleagues wrote the letter. But the materials are intended to enhance traditional curricula, not replace them. “I think that there is a misunderstanding that this curriculum is meant to replace all of U.S. history,” Silverstein told me. “It's being used as supplementary material for teaching American history." Given the state of American education on slavery, some kind of adjustment is sorely needed.

Published 400 years after the first Africans were brought to in Virginia, the project asked readers to consider “what it would mean to regard 1619 as our nation’s birth year.” The special issue of the Times Magazine included essays from the Princeton historian Kevin Kruse, who argued that sprawl in Atlanta is a consequence of segregation and white flight; the Times columnist Jamelle Bouie, who posited that American countermajoritarianism  was shaped by pro-slavery politicians seeking to preserve the peculiar institution; and the journalist Linda Villarosa, who traced racist stereotypes about higher pain tolerance in black people from the 18th century to the present day. The articles that drew the most attention and criticism, though, were Hannah-Jones’s introductory essay chronlicling black Americans’ struggle to “make democracy real” and the sociologist Matthew Desmond’s essay linking the crueler aspects of American capitalism to the labor practices that arose under slavery.

The letter’s signatories recognize the problem the Times aimed to remedy, Wilentz told me. “Each of us, all of us, think that the idea of the 1619 Project is fantastic. I mean, it's just urgently needed. The idea of bringing to light not only scholarship but all sorts of things that have to do with the centrality of slavery and of racism to American history is a wonderful idea,” he said. In a subsequent interview, he said, “Far from an attempt to discredit the 1619 Project, our letter is intended to help it.”

The letter disputes a passage in Hannah-Jones’s introductory essay, which lauds the contributions of black people to making America a full democracy and says that “one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery” as abolitionist sentiment began rising in Britain.

This argument is explosive. From abolition to the civil-rights movement, activists have reached back to the rhetoric and documents of the founding era to present their claims to equal citizenship as consonant with the American tradition. The Wilentz letter contends that the 1619 Project’s argument concedes too much to slavery’s defenders, likening it to South Carolina Senator John C. Calhoun’s assertion that “there is not a word of truth” in the Declaration of Independence’s famous phrase that all men are created equal. Where Wilentz and his colleagues see the rising anti-slavery movement in the colonies and its influence on the Revolution as a radical break from millennia in which human slavery was accepted around the world, Hannah-Jones’ essay outlines how the ideology of white supremacy that sustained slavery still endures today.

“To teach children that the American Revolution was fought in part to secure slavery would be giving a fundamental misunderstanding not only of what the American Revolution was all about but what America stood for and has stood for since the Founding,” Wilentz told me. Anti-slavery ideology was a “very new thing in the world in the 18th century,” he said, and “there was more anti-slavery activity in the colonies than in Britain.”

Hannah-Jones hasn’t budged from her conviction that slavery helped fuel the Revolution. “I do still back up that claim,” she told me last week—before Silverstein’s rebuttal was published—although she says she phrased it too strongly in her essay, in a way that might mislead readers into thinking that support for slavery was universal. “I think someone reading that would assume that this was the case: all 13 colonies and most people involved. And I accept that criticism, for sure.” She said that as the 1619 Project is expanded into a history curriculum and published in book form, the text will be changed to make sure claims are properly contextualized.

On this question, the critics of the 1619 Project are on firm ground. Although some southern slave owners likely were fighting the British to preserve slavery, as Silverstein writes in his rebuttal, the Revolution was kindled in New England, where prewar anti-slavery sentiment was strongest. Early patriots like James Otis, John Adams, and Thomas Paine were opposed to slavery, and the Revolution helped fuel abolitionism in the North.

Historians who are in neither Wilentz’s camp nor the 1619 Project’s say both have a point. “I do not agree that the American Revolution was just a slaveholders' rebellion,” Manisha Sinha, a history professor at the University of Connecticut and the author of Abolition: The Slave’s Cause, told me. “But also understand that the original Constitution did give some ironclad protections to slavery without mentioning it.”

The most radical thread in the 1619 Project is not its contention that slavery’s legacy continues to shape American institutions; it’s the authors’ pessimism that a majority of white people will abandon racism and work with black Americans toward a more perfect union. Every essay tracing racial injustice from slavery to the present day speaks to the endurance of racial caste. And it is this profound pessimism about white America that many of the 1619 Project’s critics find most galling.

Newt Gingrich called the 1619 Project a “lie,” arguing that “there were several hundred thousand white Americans who died in the Civil War in order to free the slaves." In City Journal, the historian Allen Guelzo dismissed the Times Magazine project as a “conspiracy theory” developed from the “chair of ultimate cultural privilege in America, because in no human society has an enslaved people suddenly found itself vaulted into positions of such privilege, and with the consent—even the approbation—of those who were once the enslavers.” The conservative  pundit Erick Erickson went so far as to accuse the Times of adopting “the Neo-Confederate world view” that the “South actually won the Civil War by weaving itself into the fabric of post war society so it can then discredit the entire American enterprise.” Erickson’s bizarre sleight of hand turns the 1619 Project’s criticism of ongoing racial injustice into a brief for white supremacy.

The project’s pessimism has drawn criticism from the left as well as the right. Hannah-Jones’s contention that “anti-black racism runs in the very DNA of this country” drew a rebuke from James Oakes, one of the Wilentz letter’s signatories. In an interview with the World Socialist Web Site, Oakes said, “The function of those tropes is to deny change over time … The worst thing about it is that it leads to political paralysis. It’s always been here. There’s nothing we can do to get out of it. If it’s the DNA, there’s nothing you can do. What do you do? Alter your DNA?”

These are objections not to misstatements of historical fact, but to the argument that anti-black racism is a more intractable problem than most Americans are willing to admit. A major theme of the 1619 Project is that the progress that has been made has been fragile and reversible—and has been achieved in spite of the nation’s true founding principles, lofty ideals in which few Americans truly believe. Chances are, what you think of the 1619 Project depends on whether you believe someone might reasonably come to such a despairing conclusion—whether you agree with it or not.

Wilentz reached out to a larger group of historians, but ultimately sent a letter signed by five historians who had publicly criticized the 1619 Project in interviews with the World Socialist Web Site. He told me that the idea of trying to rally a larger group was “misconceived,” citing the holiday season and the end of the semester, among other factors. (A different letter written by Wilentz, calling for the impeachment of President Donald Trump, quickly amassed hundreds of signatures last week.) The refusal of other historians to sign on, despite their misgivings about some claims made by the 1619 Project, speaks to a divide over whether the letter was focused on correcting specific factual inaccuracies or aimed at discrediting the project more broadly.

Sinha saw an early version of the letter that was circulated among a larger group of historians. But, despite her disagreement with some of the assertions in the 1619 Project, she said she wouldn’t have signed it if she had been asked to. “There are legitimate critiques that one can engage in discussion with, but for them to just kind of dismiss the entire project in that manner, I thought, was really unwise,” she said. “It was a worthy thing to actually shine a light on a subject that the average person on the street doesn't know much about.”

Although the letter writers deny that their objections are merely matters of “interpretation or ‘framing,’” the question of whether black Americans have fought their freedom struggles “largely alone,” as Hannah-Jones put it in her essay, is subject to vigorous debate. Viewed through the lens of major historical events—from anti-slavery Quakers organizing boycotts of goods produced through slave labor, to abolitionists springing fugitive slaves from prison, to union workers massing at the March on Washington—the struggle for black freedom has been an interracial struggle. Frederick Douglass had William Garrison; W. E. B. Du Bois had Moorfield Storey; Martin Luther King Jr. had Stanley Levison.

“The fight for black freedom is a universal fight; it's a fight for everyone. In the end, it affected the fight for women's rights—everything. That's the glory of it,” Wilentz told me. “To minimize that in any way is, I think, bad for understanding the radical tradition in America.”

But looking back to the long stretches of night before the light of dawn broke—the centuries of slavery and the century of Jim Crow that followed—“largely alone” seems more than defensible. Douglass had Garrison, but the onetime Maryland slave had to go north to find him. The millions who continued to labor in bondage until 1865 struggled, survived, and resisted far from the welcoming arms of northern abolitionists.

“I think one would be very hard-pressed to look at the factual record from 1619 to the present of the black freedom movement and come away with any conclusion other than that most of the time, black people did not have a lot of allies in that movement,” Hannah-Jones told me. “It is not saying that black people only fought alone. It is saying that most of the time we did.”

Nell Irvin Painter, a professor emeritus of history at Princeton who was asked to sign the letter, had objected to the 1619 Project’s portrayal of the arrival of African laborers in 1619 as slaves. The 1619 Project was not history “as I would write it,” Painter told me. But she still declined to sign the Wilentz letter.

“I felt that if I signed on to that, I would be signing on to the white guy's attack of something that has given a lot of black journalists and writers a chance to speak up in a really big way. So I support the 1619 Project as kind of a cultural event,” Painter said. “For Sean and his colleagues, true history is how they would write it. And I feel like he was asking me to choose sides, and my side is 1619's side, not his side, in a world in which there are only those two sides.”

This was a recurrent theme among historians I spoke with who had seen the letter but declined to sign it. While they may have agreed with some of the factual objections in the letter or had other reservations of their own, several told me they thought the letter was an unnecessary escalation.

“The tone to me rather suggested a deep-seated concern about the project. And by that I mean the version of history the project offered. The deep-seated concern is that placing the enslavement of black people and white supremacy at the forefront of a project somehow diminishes American history,” Thavolia Glymph, a history professor at Duke who was asked to sign the letter, told me. “Maybe some of their factual criticisms are correct. But they've set a tone that makes it hard to deal with that.”

“I don't think they think they're trying to discredit the project,” Painter said. “They think they're trying to fix the project, the way that only they know how.”

Historical interpretations are often contested, and those debates often reflect the perspective of the participants. To this day, the pro-Confederate “Lost Cause” intepretation of history shapes the mistaken perception that slavery was not the catalyst for the Civil War. For decades, a group of white historians known as the Dunning School, after the Columbia University historian William Archibald Dunning, portrayed Reconstruction as a tragic period of, in his words, the “scandalous misrule of the carpet-baggers and negroes,” brought on by the misguided enfranchisement of black men. As the historian Eric Foner has written, the Dunning School and its interpretation of Reconstruction helped provide moral and historical cover for the Jim Crow system.

In Black Reconstruction in America, W. E. B. Du Bois challenged the consensus of “white historians” who “ascribed the faults and failures of Reconstruction to Negro ignorance and corruption,” and offered what is now considered a more reliable account of the era as an imperfect but noble effort to build a multiracial democracy in the South.

To Wilentz, the failures of earlier scholarship don’t illustrate the danger of a monochromatic group of historians writing about the American past, but rather the risk that ideologues can hijack the narrative. “[It was] when the southern racists took over the historical profession that things changed, and W. E. B. Du Bois fought a very, very courageous fight against all of that,” Wilentz told me. The Dunning School, he said, was “not a white point of view; it's a Southern, racist point of view.”

In the letter, Wilentz portrays the authors of the 1619 Project as ideologues as well. He implies—apparently based on a combative but ambiguous exchange between Hannah-Jones and the writer Wesley Yang on Twitter—that she had discounted objections raised by “white historians” since publication.

Hannah-Jones told me she was misinterpreted. “I rely heavily on the scholarship of historians no matter what race, and I would never discount the work of any historian because that person is white or any other race,” she told me. “I did respond to someone who was saying white scholars were afraid, and I think my point was that history is not objective. And that people who write history are not simply objective arbiters of facts, and that white scholars are no more objective than any other scholars, and that they can object to the framing and we can object to their framing as well.”

When I asked Wilentz about Hannah-Jones’s clarification, he was dismissive. “Fact and objectivity are the foundation of both honest journalism and honest history. And so to dismiss it, to say, ‘No, I'm not really talking about whites’—well, she did, and then she takes it back in those tweets and then says it's about the inability of anybody to write objective history. That's objectionable too,” Wilentz told me.

Both Du Bois and the Dunning School saw themselves as having reached the truth by objective means. But as a target of the Dunning School’s ideology, Du Bois understood the motives and blind spots of Dunning School scholars far better than they themselves did.  

“We shall never have a science of history until we have in our colleges men who regard the truth as more important than the defense of the white race,” Du Bois wrote, “and who will not deliberately encourage students to gather thesis material in order to support a prejudice or buttress a lie.”

The problem, as Du Bois argued, is that much of American history has been written by scholars offering ideological claims in place of rigorous historical analysis. But which claims are ideological, and which ones are objective, is not always easy to discern.