#I won't delete my other post because I do find it annoying when people add random tags (especially for tws) but I'll adjust my tags

[arttsuka]

I don't go here (found your post randomly on explore page) so feel free to ignore me, but re: this post i screenshot above it's because people are reblogging an addition to your post that explicitly mentions rape. They tag the trigger warning since it's mentioned by who they're reblogging from, but since you can't see previous additions in the reblog chain and only the tags they add when they reblog it just seems random.

the addition ↓

Thank you for bringing this to my attention

I'll try to check these things out next time before assuming

[lexpistachio]

Yo, your opinion doesn't bother me so much as I like debating? And like. I don't expect to change your opinion, just like you won't change mine, and you're totally within your right to not respond if you don't want to! I think with me, I don't see the issues presented as having disappeared? Like just because Jack has been doing well mentally doesn't mean his anxiety is totally gone. Bittys checking problem isn't gone, either, just because he's gotten better at handling them. 1/?

And maybe it’s because I went into CP knowing what to expect but like. I always thought the whole point of CP was “hey hockey’s cool but Fuck the NHLs homophobia and Fuck toxic masculinity. We don’t need it.” It should also be noted Ngozi did write something about homophobia/toxic masculinity in hockey. It was called Harvey, it was a screenplay she did for a class, and she wrote check please to be it’s counter. A Gay player with a toxic team vs an accepting one 2/2

Outsourced homophobia anyone?

Kidding aside, do you mean Hardy not Harvey, of which only the first 15 pages was shared? Firstly, I have read that and it features hypermasculinity and internalized homophobia but I didn’t see the toxic vs happy team comparison that you’re talking about. Maybe you have access to the complete script, maybe it’s really Harvey and you have, like, a different script altogether, I don’t know, and I honestly don’t care because that’s not what we’re discussing. We’re talking about CP as a body of work. You don’t tell each and every one of future buyers of the comics to, hey, read the script she wrote back in college, all the issues are there, this is the fluffy companion. We look into this particular piece as it is.

Going back, I don’t think you got the point of my answers to your previous asks: it’s not particularly the lack of homophobia that bothers us here. It’s not. It’s the erasure of this issues that were present at the beginning, which makes for an unsatisfying narrative. Homophobia and hypermasculinity in sports was real when Bitty was afraid to tell his dad, or his team, it might’ve been real when Jack OD’d, but now that they’ve come out (at Jack’s behest, may I add), it’s suddenly gone? Did the comics just present coming out as a cure to homophobia? That depiction makes my eye twitch, as a queer, but never mind that. Narratively speaking, it’s just unsatisfying, is all.

Allow me to be a little more pedantic here and talk a little about narratology. One of the most interesting explanations that I’ve read on why we read is by Peter Brooks, who said that we’re driven to read because of our drive to find meaningful, bounded, totalizing order to the chaos that is life, and if the natural state is quiescence, it is interrupted by dilations (through discursive manipulations), which are necessary also to give us a sense at the end that the narrative has reached a proper closure—that feeling of “ah yes, of course!” Basically, what he says is that in plotting, it’s necessary for loose ends to be tied for the purpose of reading to be fulfilled. How do we do that? He borrows from Freud and says that it’s through repetition of a past trauma. The goal is “to make an end to its reproductive insistence in the present, to lead the analysand to understanding that the past is indeed past, and then to incorporate this past, as past, within [the analysand’s] present, so that the life’s story can once again progress.”

It’s all fancy shmancy for: don’t leave your plot points behind because it’s fucking annoying.

That is to say, regarding your point that Jack’s anxiety or Bitty’s problem not disappearing, let me remind you that it’s fiction that we’re talking about here. They’re fictional characters. It’s like the metaphysical question about the tree in the forest: if homophobia and anxiety and checking problems (? what) exist out of frame and they aren’t manifesting in the comics itself, do they still exist? Maybe to your imagination, but more importantly, do they matter if these don’t affect the comics’ characterizations, the plot or the narrative at all? I don’t think so.

And the nature of oppression, or maybe any significant burdens for a long time at that–they tend to warp you, subconsciously, and it affects your attitude, your habits, your decision-making. A story: I grew up poor, and when I was growing up, my parents didn’t have money to spare me lunch money, so we have to eat every single food on our dining table because we can’t afford to get hungry outside. Years later, I had dinner with a colleague who was in charge of the tab that night. He noticed I was taking a long time in eating my food, and I was still trying to finish it even though some of our other friends had moved on to post-meal chatter. He said, “You don’t have to finish that, you know,” and it seems innocuous enough but I felt my cheeks flushing. I felt humiliated in that I recognized that I was still on that habit of voraciously eating everything in front of me if it was in abundance because I was afraid of being hungry. I realized I had certain behaviors affected by the oppression that I carried, even though some of them aren’t present anymore: I tend to hoard things, I stock food a lot. The oppressions I still carry, I can’t even begin to describe. My parents think mental health illnesses are weakness and laziness that I could snap out of any moment, so I try not to be a burden and would rather curl in by myself rather than seek help when I break down.  Having grown up in a traditionally Christian environment, I can’t talk about my queerness to my family. I don’t even write about it in my journal in fear they will come to look at it and reject me (which, I know they will). I certainly don’t hold a person of the same-sex’s hand outside when on a walk or talk to a significant other in a public kitchen in a shared house where my peers will be able to walk on me anytime. Such is the nature of oppression: it incites fear and manifests in the littlest of ways.

Check Please used to be so relatable in that sense, but stopped being so. Now everything’s just smooth and shiny with no past traces of anything at all. I remember Jack being so relatable in the ways he felt closed off to people and I was so interested on how he manages it once he goes pro, but the lack of repetition of these themes just makes for (1) inconsistent characterization (2) unresolved issues and (3) a seeming lack of insight on the nature of oppression, or at the very least, poor plotting decisions. Not to go post hoc ergo propter hoc on this, but love/coming out -> issues missing/not discussed, ergo? Fallacious, but that seems to be a problematic portrayal if I do say so myself.

(and not to go ballistic, but really? the way to fuck NHL’s homophobia and toxic masculinity is to pretend they don’t exist? really, you’re affirming that?)

Anyway, as I’ve said before that it’s okay if you want fluff; personally, if I’d wanted fluff, I’d read a fic. Though, even then, I like a satisfying story, but that’s just me. This has been a long enough post just to tell a person I have no chance of convincing anyway, apparently. I’m busy and tired, yo, and just so you know, people in this fandom with unpopular opinions have been harassed and driven into deleting their accounts, you know? So if you want a proper debate that doesn’t put me on the defensive I’d be glad to entertain you over the little smiley chatbubble in the right hand corner of your dashboard, thanks.