#I’m not saying every anti is bad. I’m not saying ever pro is good

[signanothername]

How do you feel about the fandom?

I’m assuming you mean Ut/utmv?

How can I say this in the most gentle way possible hmm..

I genuinely do love the creativity within the fandom, the beautiful art and stories and ideas people come up with, the different interpretations of these characters even when i don’t agree with them or have my own thoughts/opinions, cause that’s what fandoms are supposed to, it’s all of us showing our love for these lil blorbos of ours in each of our own unique different ways

Of course, each fandom has its good and bad side, but to say the ut/utmv fandom is so damn negative to the point it’s suffocating is an understatement

I’m especially weirded out by the pro harassment behavior within this fandom, like, a mf would say “i’m anti harassment!!!!” Then turn around and post/reblog a post with +20 people name dropped to “raise awareness” for whatever little that is worth, you can “raise awareness” by messaging people privately, not make a list where an asshole can easily use it to harass people, and no, saying shit like “don’t harass these people!!!” Does not alleviate any responsibility from you if they do get harassed because of your post

That’s why messages are a thing, and only messaging those who explicitly state they want to be messaged, not jump in into people’s inboxes or messages and telling them shit out of the blue

So many people within this fandom need to learn fandom etiquette, how to mind their own business, and to use the damn block button, you’re uncomfortable with a certain subject? Tumblr has the most handy filtering system, don’t like a person/find them uncomfortable? Block them, blocking them isn’t enough and want to complain? That is what you can use your blog for, feel free to complain on your own blog to your heart’s content (not on other people’s blogs or under their posts if it’s not the subject for it) that’s what friends are for too, go to their DMs and complain till the end of time

Being just a bit bigger of an artist follower wise in comparison to other artists means that I deal with very special cases sometimes, because I’m also puzzled by the way people can get super comfortable with commanding strangers to do things they want or to break basic respectful boundaries like not getting people involved in drama even when they specifically state not to include them (me, I’m starngers, every time I reblog my boundaries post, it’s me implying that I got something that broke my very basic bitch boundaries that day, which says a lot about the fandom, cause i literally only got 4 boundaries stated damn)

That’s why I opt to not get too close to people within the fandom, and am generally careful as to who I let close to me, I’m very certain people might think I somehow have my own social circle within the fandom or have some wide connections they can never get, when in reality I’m isolated af

That being said, idk if it’s young people not knowing any better, or adults who act like children, but the fact harassment is very prominent and also very normalized within the fandom is something that definitely made me seriously think of just getting back to the Transformers fandom (one of the most chill fandoms i’ve ever been part of)

Fandom is fandom, keep it for rambling about blorbos, and learn to mind your own business <3

[todarknessitfalls]

Wait, a pinned post?? In this economy??

"Go on, make my day, go get high, on my mistakes."

Hi! I’m Antagonist/Kris/Nikolai, a certified crazy person silly goober.

I also go by Jack or Mercutio, but ask before using those names for me + nicknames. Jack and Mercutio is only for friends, and Tio as a nickname is only for very close friends

Artist page (Basic info) ->-> Meet the Artist!

My lovely boyfriend is @thund3randrain <3

Head over heels for my QPP @the-fallen-collective <3

I am unwell over many many things such as Palaye Royale, FNAF, BSD, Laceygames and unfortunately many many more

"Daydreaming of my funeral, like who would go, bet no one would show"

Currently obssessing over: FNAF + Afton Family Lore (specifically william afton) Palaye Royale The Amazing Digital Circus BSD Bendy and The Dark Revival + Bendy and The Ink Machine (blue is the biggest hyperfixations currently)

He/It/Void/Gore/Confetti/Pop/Doll/Lace. No They/Them (unless we're close) or She/Her please!!

"This is goodbye, you've bled me dry."

18+ users can interact and DM as long as you aren’t icky and comfy with the fact that i am a minor :3

DNIs: - Bad people in general - General DNIs (homophobes, transphobes, misogyonists, etc etc) - Radqueers - Pro-contact - Zoophiles, Pedophiles, etc etc - [Pro] Endogenic systems - Anti-recovery blogs (for EDs, S/H, anything) - NSFW + smut blogs - MDNI blogs - Anti-alterhumanity

"Same me, same you! Until the drugs start doing you~"

for our system blog see @a-void-of-a-system , there’s a personal blog list there. mostly the host (kris) will be posting here!!

I try to use tonetags, also please use tonetags with me!! It helps a lot :3

Please ask before touch!!

I mod too many RP blogs to count- I'll make a masterlist one day.

"I'm sorry mom I've got to go, I've dug this grave I call my home."

Interests -

FNAF + Afton Family

Super Mario Bros. (Basically every mario thing ever)

Bungou Stray Dogs

Laceygames

Classical literature

Drawing (i do take requests!! might be a bit slow though-)

Writing (both fanficition and original stories!!)

Saiki K

Assassination Classroom

"Unfaithful night, housewife she can smell the perfume"

common tags used on this blog:

#antagonist reblogs - i reblog random shit!! won’t always remember to tag though T^T

#antagonist rambles - my incessant yapping!!

#antagonist shitposts - i shitpost lol

#antagonist stims - self explanatory

#antagonist doodles - my drawings!!

#antagonist wrote something - my fics!!

#antagonist yaps with friends - me chats with my friends!!

#antagonist used a braincell - my thoughts. could be anything from shitposts to philosophy to maths!!

#antagonist vents - my vents, always check and block the tags pls!!

#antagonist is tired. - i am so so tired.

#antagonist laceyposts - what it says on the tin. i laceypost!

#antagonist is william afton - william afton posting

#man i love michael afton - michael afton posting

#my love <3 - i ramble about my beautiful wonderful boyfriend

#meri jaan <3 - i ramble about my fantastic beautiful partner

#antagonist roleplays - me just being a silly little guy with RP blogs on my main ^^

#antagonist raises the sun - i say good morning !

#antagonist travels to eep land - i say good night !

"Poor me, poor you, maybe one more drink or two Big dreams, small shoes, got nothing else left to lose"

uhm i think that’s it!! just be patient with me if i’m taking time to answer asks or requests, i get overwhelmed easily, and don’t take it personally ^^

all my moots ily and everyone else have a great time in my little corner of insanity!!

[eddiediazismyhusband]

🩺 or 🙅🏻‍♀️

Otherwise, I’m gonna start sharing anti-Eddie, pro-Tevan screenshots on your posts 😤

(I would never actually do that but pretty pretty please, these both sound SO FCKN GOOD, I need them 🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺) (also I’m not at all creative & obviously very bad at threats but I wanted to follow the rules 😇)

That is legitimately the most threatening thing anyone could ever say to me to get me to write, please don't play with me like that, I promise I will have my wips written and on your desk by 5 PM Friday.

🩺 - The Nurse!Eddie fic:

----------

Eddie looked up at him with a raised eyebrow.

“You were crying over a movie with Dolly Parton in it?” he asked.

“Hey, don’t trash on Dolly,” Buck admonished. “Besides, she wasn’t the focus of the scene, it was- Sally Field’s character is giving this really emotional monologue and I just… it gets me every time.”

“You’re telling me you’ve cried at this scene before?” Eddie gave him an amused look.

“It gets to me, man,” Buck defended. “It- it’s kind of a sentimental movie to me. Maddie and I used to watch it all the time, and… I don’t know, I just love it.”

Eddie frowned at the mention of Maddie’s name.

“Ah, and how is she?” he asked, changing the subject. “Maddie, I mean.”

“Oh she’s…” Buck trailed off. “Don’t tell Hen, she wants it to be a surprise, but she is pregnant.”

“Congratulations,” Eddie said, trying not to let the agitated edge show.

“Thanks,” Buck smiled. “I think I’m honestly more excited than she is about it. To have a little Buckley walking around.”

Eddie’s brow furrowed. Based on what Buck had said in the store a week ago, the baby wasn’t his, so technically it wasn’t a Buckley.

“I’m sure that it’s going to be a big adjustment for you both,” Eddie said.

Buck shrugged his shoulders. “I mean, not really for me- I’m planning on spoiling the kid, but Maddie and Chimney are the ones who are gonna have the brunt of it all. I’m just gonna be Uncle Buck.”

Eddie swore he heard a record scratch in his brain.

“Wait, what?” he asked.

“What?” Buck furrowed his own brows in confusion.

“What do you mean, Uncle Buck?” he clarified.

“I mean, my sister’s baby is going to be my niece or nephew,” Buck chuckled awkwardly, still looking at Eddie with a confused look.

“Sister?” Eddie asked, his eyes growing wide. “Maddie’s- She’s your sister?”

----------

🙅🏻‍♀️ - The Homophobic Marisol fic:

“She what?” she practically hissed.

“I-” Buck stammered. “I- she figured out I had feelings for Eddie and she… she told me I should stay away from him and Christopher. That she’s Eddie’s girlfriend and she doesn’t want me around to mess things up for her.”

Buck could swear he saw the faintest twitch of Pepa’s eyes before she took a deep breath, closing her eyes and bowing her head as if in prayer.

“Dios, por favor dame la fuerza para no retorcerle el cuello a esa perra la próxima vez que la vea-” she muttered quickly under her breath.

“Pepa!” Buck’s eyes went wide- picking up on the gist of what she was saying even though he didn’t understand it exactly. 

“I’m sorry, Evanito, but I never liked that puta for my Eddito,” Pepa told him. “I knew there was something off about her when I met her, but I never expected her to be so vile.”

“I’m really wondering if I should tell you the next part,” Buck chuckled as Pepa turned to face him.

“There’s more?” she asked.

“She told me she didn’t want me to ‘turn Eddie’ so that he would be with me,” Buck told her- feeling like a weight was being lifted by sharing this with someone other than Maddie or Chim. “And that if she found out that I told anyone what she said then she would tell Eddie how I feel about him.”

“Ay dios mio,” Pepa shook her head.

----------

[scarlet97531]

⭕️❗️- just like I do not respect JK Rowling and other terf’s wishes for safe spaces away from trans people, I do not respect anti endo’s wishes for a safe space away from pro endos. Hatred for a minority is not a valid identity and does not deserve to exist unchallenged. I will not let you have tags all to yourself to turn into an echo chamber of hate, because honestly that is not healthy for anyone. It is not healthy for you to base an entire social space around hating a minority group. Find social spaces about things you like instead, and if you really have to just block people you disagree with.

And I feel like I need to point something out, the main motivation for anti endo views seems to be just that endos make you uncomfortable. That is never a valid reasoning for being anti any group of people. That is reactionary behaviour, and it is the exact same thing that leads to racism, transphobia, homophobia, transmedicalism and terf ideology. Your motivation for advocating for a group of people to not exist should never be because of how they make you feel, you need to *prove* they are doing real harm to real people to a degree that actually affects people’s lives and is provably and intentionally their fault. And y’all have NOT done that.

“They’re spreading misinformation about a real serious condition!” That’s what trans meds say about trans ppl without dysphoria. “Their identity is scientifically impossible!” Literally indistinguishable from every kind of transphobia ever. “One time an endogenic system was mean to me/ did something stupid or bad!” You cannot. Judge a whole group. Based on INDIVIDUAL behaviour. Especially when there are tons of anti endogenic systems who’s behaviour is just as bad or worse.

I’m very happy to explain to y’all why I believe what I believe, but I’m not gonna be friendly about it unless you are. I want you to understand why I believe what I believe even if it isn’t enough to change your views, maybe if you at least bothered to understand what we’re saying and why we’re saying it you could at least have a little more empathy.

Honestly I do see how someone can get wrapped up into anti endo thinking, it is extremely prevalent in most online spaces and often sites “scientific fact” as justification, despite most information about how systems form being very understudied and unproven. And I know traumatized people have to be careful about who they trust, and who they believe, because they’ve been hurt before. But that does not justify such horrible behaviour. The feeling is valid, your actions are not. Please try to figure out exactly where the feelings are coming from, and think about if your behaviour is a good reaction to that.

For any endogenic systems reading this, I’d also love to hear from you! We’re a DID system so our perspective on this is limited, I’d love to know more about your experiences and your beliefs.

[maeve-on-mustafar]

Wait, that's so interesting Brotherhood gets a bad rep? I thought the writer was one of the few writers who understood Anakin and was excited for his coming novel!

To be fair, I think the reputation of the Star Wars: Brotherhood novel specifically depends on what fan circles you travel in. The Star Wars lore dudes on YouTube love this book, and so do most of the Star Wars EU podcasts. Also, if you’re a fan of Anakin & Obi-Wan as a team, you’ll adore this book, as its very foundation is their relationship. The author of Brotherhood is Mike Chen, who is a proud fan of the Revenge of the Sith novelization by Matthew Stover, and it is very evident that Chen takes his character inspiration from Stover’s own uniquely intense “closer than friends, closer than brothers” take on the Anakin & Obi-Wan relationship.

From what I’ve seen, the criticism of this book comes mainly from pro-Jedi circles on Tumblr, particularly fans who dislike Anakin. I’m guessing it’s due to three main reasons: 1) this book is very pro-Anakin and runs on the belief that Anakin was always an unwanted misfit in the Jedi Order and always was very aware of that, 2) the book takes a more critical view on the Jedi’s involvement in the war and frames them in a more questionable light, and 3) this book is very, very anti-Mace Windu.

Personally, my biggest issue is with the anti-Mace stance of this book, as well as the argument Brotherhood makes that Mace Windu was one of the Jedi to always dislike Anakin. It makes zero sense to me, because I’ve listened to every interview with Mike Chen that I can get ahold of (I can rec some if anyone is interested, just ask me), and he doesn’t seem to dislike Mace Windu? He just noticed that Anakin is very formal and respectful in front of the Council in AOTC, and he takes this as evidence that Anakin never felt comfortable with the Council or Mace Windu.

It’s odd to me, because in AOTC, Mace is very supportive of Anakin? From giving him the solo assignment of protecting Padme to defending him to Obi-Wan to not even asking “WTF are you doing on Tatooine?” when Anakin FaceTimes him from there. Ignoring all of those moments in favor of concentrating on Anakin’s body language in the Council scene is missing the forest for its trees, IMHO.

But something the Jedi-Positive segment of fandom does that bothers me is insistently push this theory that Mace’s characterization is due to Anakin being an unreliable narrator, and this idea is proven false several times. First, early in the book, even Obi-Wan thinks to himself that Mace doesn’t like Anakin. Then we get a scene of Palps during a private meeting with Anakin basically saying, “Wow, Master Windu sure sucks, doesn’t he?”, and Anakin not disagreeing. There’s also a memory Anakin has of Mace getting pissed off at 12yo Anakin for another Padawan referring to Anakin as the Chosen One, and another scene of Mace Windu trying to spy on Anakin to see if he’s doing a good enough job of training the younglings, and another scene of Anakin making a fool out of Mace by pretending their communication line is breaking up, and it’s very clear the reader is supposed to be on Anakin’s side.

Crucially, what we’re missing is a scene proving Anakin is an unreliable narrator and showing us that Mace is a good Jedi that just doesn’t like Anakin, or that it’s not even that he dislikes Anakin, but is just fucking tired and stressed out because of the war. But we never get that. We just get perpetually angry and irritated Mace Windu who immediately supports Palpatine’s decision to send Padawans out to the front lines—which Obi-Wan objects to, and Mace overrules him. This is an extremely unflattering portrayal of Mace that is deliberately written to be so, and I don’t see the point of pretending otherwise. There’s no unreliable narrator here—Mike Chen believes the Jedi weren’t ever fully onboard with training Anakin and never truly wanted him around and uses Mace’s character to convey that point. I don’t like it, but it is what it is.

All that being said, if you like Anakin and you want to see more of his bond with Obi-Wan, or cute moments with him mentoring the Jedi younglings, or cute moments with him and Padme going on undercover dates, this is the book for you. Mike Chen very clearly loves Anakin, Padme, Obi-Wan, and the Anidala ship, and tries to write each of them at their best but still with room to grow. It’s evidently he loves these three but still has awareness of their flaws and wants to examine what makes them tick.

My review would be that Brotherhood is a 4/5 book, with the point being deducted because of Mace’s treatment, but other readers who don’t enjoy him that much probably won’t have that issue.

Also, paging @fleetstreetfatality, our resident expert on Brotherhood, see if they want to make any contributions or confirm or refute any of my points. Fire away!

[pettytiredandjewish]

It's bloodthirsty genocidal hypocrite "Jews" like you that give the rest of us a bad name. If literal Holocaust survivors are condemning Israel and you're not than you're no better than our ancestors' oppressors

Oh wow- my first openly antisemitic ask (that’s not anonymous) I’m so honored! I would usually be kind when putting ass hats like you in your place but I’m exhausted, now having my first mug of coffee, and I just got done with working a long ‘hell’ shift at work… you’re probably gonna regret poking the wolf and making this post 🙂

- I’m pretty sure other jews on this hell hole of a site have been telling fuckers like you to leave the holocaust survivors alone when it comes to the i/p conflict. Yes they have their own beliefs/opinions/thoughts on the I/p conflict-just like every Jew out there. So for the love of g-d stop bringing the holocaust survivors topic up. Cuz y’all know what? Everyone has their own different opinions/views/ thoughts about the I/p conflict. I’m not gonna talk more about this but if anyone wants to talk about it go for it.

-since you little ass hat decided to bring up the holocaust, let me just tell y’all something. If my great grandparents didn’t escape Germany, they would have been captured and k*lled. But they escaped, sadly my other relatives over there did not leave in time and was sent off to the camps and most of them were k*lled. To this day my mom’s side of the family is still dealing with the trauma that came afterwards.

-I’m assuming you’re an anti Zionist person or you’re masquerading as a Jew. Calling other jews bloodthirsty and genocidal is fucked up and super antisemitic. And the fact that you openly said that was not super smart of you. It makes you look like a fucking fool and an ass. Also saying that I’m no better than our ancestors oppressors? Not really original and that’s also fucked up. Honey let me tell you something- i come from a long line of survivors and fighters. My Israeli and Jewish ancestors/family survived so many horrible massacres/pogroms/displacements/and the Shoah. If they didn’t keep fighting and surviving, none of us would be here. I’m also Native American (not gonna tell you my tribes cuz it’s not your business) but my ancestors/family survived the trail of tears, being slaughtered by colonizers, and being kidnapped and sent to the boarding schools. We fought and survived. Are we still facing the trauma- yes. Trauma that hasn’t been properly handled can really fuck you up and it can be passed down to new generations. It causes so many issues and problems- especially if you ignore the trauma. I’ve seen things that no one should have to see or deal with…so don’t you ever say that I’m like my ancestors oppressors cuz I’ll tell y’all something- I’m making my ancestors oppressors roll in their graves for just being alive, while all my ancestors are cheering me on. Have fun when others call your ass out 🙂

- no you got it wrong. Every Jew has been affected by the i/p conflict in some way. It’s people like you (cuz i really don’t know if you’re Jewish- you claim to be but you’re words says otherwise) that is using this conflict to blame “Zionist” (which let’s be honest y’all- we all know that they use Zionist as a code word for Jews) for everything that’s been happening. Anti Zionist people will parade around and say that they’re the “good jews” and that they’re not the evil ones- it’s those “Zionists” other there that are the evil ones (This type of thinking is really fucked up). Y’all follow the pro Palestine crowd hoping that they won’t think that you’re the “bad guy” and will even participate in antisemitic shit: Harassing random jews in street or online, surrounding synagogues, college campus buildings or hospitals chanting genocidal slogans, etc…but honey let me tell ya something- most of the pro-pal people hates jews. It doesn’t matter if you’re anti Zionist or Zionist. They don’t see the difference. They will continue to blame us for everything. I hate to break it to ya but it’s the truth. We all have been warning y’all but you guys don’t listen.

I said what I said and if you don’t like it well I don’t give a flying fuck 🙂 (I have no more fucks to give)

Am yisrael chai! ✡️

[moontyger]

Anyone still holding out hope for a ‘compromise’ on abortion rights needs to give it up. Right now.

Over the past few days, a Louisiana mother was arrested for getting abortion pills for her teenager, abortion reports became public records in Indiana, and Arkansas advanced a bill mandating an anti-abortion propaganda video be shown in public school classrooms.

Also in the last week, the new Trump administration erased information on reproductive health and privacy rights from government websites, Missouri Republicans moved to overturn a pro-choice amendment that voters approved in November, Idaho legislators proposed a bill that could punish abortion patients with the death penalty, and South Carolina lawmakers pushed legislation that wouldn’t just ban pro-choice websites—it would make it a felony to even talk about abortion with a pregnant person.

In the short amount of time Donald Trump has been in office, anti-abortion extremists have been told they can attack clinics without fear of arrest, and the Republican party who once claimed they’d never punish women for abortion now say bills to prosecute patients as murderers “inspire healthy dialogue.”

Do these sound like people interested in ‘compromise’? We’re watching conservatives dismantle democracy and force women back into the home—killing quite a few of us along the way. In what universe is the appropriate response finding common ground?

You don’t ask the guy with the boot on your neck to wear a softer shoe. You rip his fucking foot off.

To be clear, I’ve never believed in compromise on abortion rights—because there’s no such thing as a ‘middle ground’ for my humanity. But this isn’t just a moral stance, it’s a strategic one.

Republicans have never been weaker on abortion rights: Anti-choice organizations and policies are incredibly unpopular, and Americans want abortion to be legal—even Trump voters oppose bans! Rather than meeting voters where they’re at, conservatives have doubled down on their extremism—proposing bills that attack speech, restrict travel, and force women to carry doomed pregnancies to term. Most incredibly, they’re framing these once-fringe nightmares as ‘moderate.’

Every minute we waste catering to an imaginary middle only strengthens that manipulation. Every time a pro-choice politician backs parental consent laws to sidestep controversy, they’re not just abandoning one of the country’s most marginalized groups—they’re reinforcing the lie that abortion is more dangerous or serious for young people than forced pregnancy and parenthood. And when they allow restrictions later in pregnancy to avoid accusations of supporting abortion ‘up until birth,’ they’re accepting the premise that pregnancy should be legislated at all.

Don’t get me wrong, I support harm reduction and understand the desire to restore any access we can. Things are very bad and we’re all eager to stop the suffering. But it’s never been clearer that the only road forward is the one without concessions.

Americans are more pro-choice than ever, the GOP is afraid of the issue, and people are being harmed by bans every single day. If we’re making trade-offs when we’re at our strongest and the stakes are at their highest—when will it ever be the right time to fight for the future we want?

Conservatives aren’t waiting for their perfect moment. They’re not letting bad polling, bad press, or even the will of voters stop them. (I mean that literally.) They want abortion banned so that’s what they’re fighting for—at any cost and with any tactic.

And while I’m not suggesting that Democrats follow in their deeply immoral footsteps, I am calling on us to stop pretending as if good faith politics is still possible. The people we’re fighting are selfish, dishonest, and cruel; and we’re allowing them to dictate rules they would never even consider following.

Calls for civility and compromise on abortion are traps, ways to keep pro-choice politicians believing that there’s some magic middle ground policy that will keep voters happy and Republicans off their backs. But the middle ground disappeared the first time a 10 year-old had to leave her state for an abortion. Compromise died right alongside women in Texas and Georgia.

[alaskan-wallflower]

I totally agree with your post on censorship of Israel and Palestine. Obviously what is happening between them right now and tragic and disgusting. Lately people have been grouping all Jewish people into being zionists which is so harmful, I’m Jewish and my father was beaten in the city to the point where he was hospitalised just because he was wearing the Star of David. I was with him when it happened, he didn’t do anything aside from being Jewish, my family isn’t even from Israel, we are in full support of Palestine but people want to label us Zionist for a culture we were born into. Jewish and Israeli people can’t control their heritage and calling all of them zionists for it is insane, real zionists are terrifying and to throw the term Zionist around waters down the impact of them. They want to erase history of Jewish people and make us collectively look bad, comparing current tragedies to the holocaust, no violence should ever be compared like it’s a competition. Of course there are Jewish people who are bad and hold radical beliefs but that also goes for every other culture, ethnicity, and religion. I do not condone Israel’s actions in any way but I strongly disagree with showing prejudice towards Jewish and Israeli people who have nothing to do with the war and do not support it.

Tw Antisemitism, politics mentions of the Israel/Palestine conflict, read at your own risk. Come after me all you want. I don’t care. But I need to talk about this because it’s important.

First off, I’m so sorry that that happened to your family. Nobody deserves that at all. I send my deepest condolences and I hope that your father (and the rest of your family) is okay. It is absolutely disgusting that that happened. I’m assuming by ‘the city’ you mean NYC, and I know that antisemitic hate crimes have risen 200%, and it’s just vile, especially because Jews in places nowhere even near Israel are hiding blamed. It’s not their fault.Its not even the Israelites’ faults. It’s the Israeli government’s fault.

Secondly, I agree whole heartedly. There are good Jewish people in Israel. Good, innocent Jewish people who haven’t done anything wrong and absolutely do not deserve to be censored. Although I do not condone what is going on there right now, I absolutely do not condone October 7th either. You could argue that none of this would have happened if October 7th never happened. If you’re gonna talk politics, you have to look at both sides, not just the one you support. That goes for any politics, be it this, your position on the left/right spectrum, whatever. You have to look at both sides.

Words can’t even describe just how awful it is that Jewish people in places that have nothing to do with Israel are being blamed and harassed mot just on the internet, but in r3al life too. Watching it just makes me feel sick. Again, while I do not and will not ignore the fact that what the Israeli government has decided to do is absolutely disgusting and tragic, I also cannot and will not ignore the fact that innocent people are being labeled such harmful terms and their voices aren’t being heard. That’s like saying every American ever is anti immigrant or that every American in the world supports what’s going on in the government there, albeit on a much less extreme scale.

But yes. I absolutely don’t think that Israel should be censored while Palestine isn’t. If you want to censor one you gotta censor the other. What happened with me was that the person said they n didn’t want pro Israel people finding my post’. The thing is I don’t care who sees my posts. People aren’t always going to agree with me and my opinions and that’s fine. People aren’t always going to enjoy what I say. But I can take it. I don’t need a group of people to be censored for the sole sake of ‘protecting me from “the bad guys”’ (putting that in HEAVY quotes).

Again. I’m so sorry that that’s happening to you and other people on the internet. I’ve seen it happen. One blog I like in particular had been labeled a Zionist when they aren’t. And I feel awful for them because it isn’t fair. They’ve never even indicated that they are. In fact they’ve heavily denied it and I feel awful that so many people get this sort of traction on the internet. Everyone deserves to feel safe online, including Jewish people.

I don’t expect anyone to really listen to me though. I myself am not Jewish so take what I say with that in mind. I’m also a technical minor and nobody listens to minors so you know. People are probably not gonna care about what I say. But I’ll still say it because I wanna raise awareness

(Sorry for the rant)

[gentil-minou]

hi! I hope you’re doing ok! I’ve never written an ask before so I have no idea how to do this, but you’re one of the only people I follow who is posting about Palestine, so I wanted to ask. And as a brown person I’m really worried rn.

Elections are next year and I’ve seen so many saying that people should vote for Biden because he’s at least better than Trump which is… I don’t know what to say, but it’s completely absurd. This is going to be my first time voting and all I get from people is the same “lesser of two evils” rhetoric. It’s genuinely disheartening to see that these are the only options that are shown to people. I was wondering about what you think of what’s happening, and whether voting third party seems possible

I’m sorry if this was rude to ask you, but thanks for taking the time to read this!

It's not rude, I'm glad I made you feel safe enough to ask this!

I only have one answer for you: Do not let anyone tell you who to vote for or make you feel like an evil person if you choose not to vote for the person they want you to.

Vote, definitely vote!!! Especially in local elections, those are the best ways to get people you want in power and they are in charge of a lot of important changes.

As for the presidential elections, I've had so many people I thought I admired or at least felt comfortable around attack me for my choice not to vote for Biden. I've had people claim I was spreading "pro-Trump propaganda" (which is just ridiculously bad faith in all ways), tell me that I—a queer POC—am anti-LGBTQ, and tell me I'll be deported.

They do this all while ignoring and invalidating the very real anger and hurt the Muslim and Brown populations of the US are dealing with, all because their comfort is being threatened. And instead of pressuring the party that's doing that harm and try to listen to why we feel so betrayed by Biden, they double down and attack us. In fact, they are showing their true colors. They, like Biden, only ever pretended to care about us. So I am going to vote for people who actually do care about me, even if they say I'm going to "waste my vote"

Here's the thing; as long as you vote for who you feel the most supported by, as long as you go into that voting booth and step out feeling good about your vote, then you are not wasting it.

Putting this under a read more cause it's getting long

Personally, I'm voting third party. I've had my eye on the Socialist Party but am also keeping an eye out for the others and whether or not they stand out to me

At this point, unless the DNC decides to put another candidate forward, which they most definitely won't, the Democratic party has lost me forever. I'm lucky that my Dem representative has at least shown they're on the right side of history, but I don't think I will ever vote for the Dem party again. I've forced myself to do it for the last decade and I've been disappointed or betrayed every time, so no more.

I agree this two party system is a joke and we are all being made to be a part of it when no other democratic nation has something like this. Even other countries say our "progressive" party is just centrist. And that just doesn't reflect my values.

Liberals and "vote blue no matter who" are going to tell you that you're wasting your vote by voting third party, but in actuality they are the ones supporting a flawed system that only benefits itself, not the people. The more people who vote third party, the more the dems will be pressured to put forth progressive candidates like AOC or Rashida who are actually on the left. By voting third party, you are saying you won't stand by a broken system any longer

does this mean Republicans might win and we get another trump administration? Yes, probably, but here's the thing: when you look at the last 3 years, and I mean really look at it, have things improved all that much under biden? I, as a queer poc can't say that it has. Both are evil, one just pretends not to be. At this point I see no difference between Trump and Biden. Both don't give a shit about me.

The lesser of 2 evils is still evil, why vote for them? Why would I vote for either of them?

Why would I reward anyone who support genocide and cheers for it? Both Trump and Biden openly do. Their only difference is Biden is a better actor.

If my people were the ones being slaughtered (and they were. For a long long time they were), would I be okay with sitting back and letting these parties walk all over me? No, I don't think I would be.

The fact of the matter is that change does not come fast or easy. These things take time and pressure and a refusal to give in. Voting for Biden after all the horrible things he's done the past couple years is just rewarding a system that is fundamentally broken. You can keep trying to chug along on a broken wheel hurtling you towards doom, or you can take the time to force it to change.

I do believe the younger vote has a big chance to change things, to pressure our government to actually support its people, not just the white ones with money.

Ultimately you get to decide who to vote for. Use your right to vote, don't ignore it and don't waste it by voting for someone you don't actually believe in.

[1bringthesun]

it was @rivensdefenseattorney who made the mistake of asking to see any of them, for now i will toss brevity for the side and state my loud opinions! naturally, all applicable questions will be answered about bsd.

1. Mori Ougai, hands down. first there are those who believe he’s a man who lusts for the feeling of having power over others, then those who turn him into a saint who only wishes what’s best for everyone else. people simply can’t admit that he’s morally grey; a good bad character. but in this fandom, honestly, everyone is sorely mischaracterized. Ranpo, Poe, Dazai, and Akutagawa are probably up there as well.

2. Odasaku just wouldn’t be a good top because he’s that sort of guy who always assumes he’s doing something wrong. he’d ask every five seconds if his partner felt ok to the point of which they’d just go “get your ass on the bottom Odasaku, it’ll be better for both of us” and he, being the type of person he is, would do it no questions asked. plus, i think he looks cuter when he’s following instructions, but that may just be me…

3. my phone unfortunately doesn’t have enough storage to take any photos. also there are so many bad ones i wouldn’t be able to choose.

4. (this has nothing to do with bsd, but) when she blamed me for not reaching out first after telling me she wished i’d never been born and said she was leaving me forever, i was like: “okay if that’s how you wanna play it” [blocked]

5. umm…. i’m not in many big servers. i’ve always hated those egirl/edating ones though, where nobody knows each other.

6. burn me at the stake for this if you so please, but i simply cannot tolerate most soukoku fans. some are good. some are great! most are short-sighted children who can’t form opinions apart from the mass’ and harass people for not thinking the same way as them.

7. Chuuya. still recovering from his fandom portrayals. i’ll get to liking him eventually, but they make it hard…

8. that Dazai would ever vent to someone else. i don’t care if you portray him as completely dysfunctional or not, but Dazai is the type of person who always hides his true intentions until someone directly asks him or the situation calls for him to reveal it (Higuchi targeting Atsushi, Azure Apostle event, etc.). he would be the last man to ever give anyone else he knew his own emotional baggage, especially when it reveals his intentions and vulnerabilities. the only time he ever visibly looked distressed in canon was when Odasaku died. you’re telling me this same man cries in Chuuya’s arms and tattles to his shachou that Mori sucks?

9. i don’t like some of the simpler tropes, like the idea of atsukyou or Higuchi’s idolization of her senpai, but i tend to like most of canon.

10. how bigoted so many of the fans are. so many of them won’t even hear out alternative opinions…

11. ah, i actually don’t know how to filter things! but if i did, i’d probably filter pro-shipper/anti arguments. not looking for internet discourse about that sort of stuff; i prefer to just mind my own business

12. Odasaku is my first thought because i like him the most, but he’s actually pretty well-received. so instead i propose that Kajii, Ace, and Kyougoku should be given more attention. Kajii because he’s incredibly nihilistic, almost like fanon Dazai, and says the oddest things. Ace because i love when characters are paranoid and selfish, and he’s incredibly paranoid and selfish (also he said Fyodor would look good in a collar which i vehemently second.). Kyougoku is so charming, he’s like if Dazai decided to be a little evil and liked attention more. beloved, all of them.

13. people who woobify Mori make my skin crawl. he deserves to feel as much pain as my other blorbos but for the love of god stop making him seem like an innocent person when his character is fun specifically because he isn’t.

14. Fukuzawa being a dad to Ranpo. it’s very commonly something minor that’s included in fics. i see it a lot.

15. that kanji-writing blank page background that the bsd anime used in the beginning to introduce characters and whatnot. i really like how some artists include it in their work

16. i really don’t understand what fascination people have with making PM members spit on the name of Mori and join the ADA. Chuuya is interesting to me because he’s carved out a home for himself in the PM, and he’d lose his appeal if he turned his back on all of his comrades to “join the side of the light.” same goes for Akutagawa. in canon as it stands, he doesn’t have what it takes to be a good detective. i don’t enjoy how many people associate ADA with good yay happy morally white when even the canon clearly states that they’re not. Fukuzawa told Kunikida to shoot Dazai if he seemed ill-meaning during his entrench exam. that same man wouldn’t accept mafia members instantly at the batt of an eyelash. also, without the execs, the tripartite framework falls apart and leaves Yokohama vulnerable to attack. the mafia needs power in order for the city to stay safe.

17. where they put characters in immensely uncomfortable and revealing situations and cause them extreme amounts of mental stress. i love it. it’s horrible.

18. Kouyou!!!! she’s always portrayed as just Chuuya’s anesan or that pretty mafia woman Yosano has a crush on. i wish people would develop her character for who she actually is more. she’s like if Kyouka’s story stopped being told, like if Yosano never met Ranpo, or like if Odasaku stayed an assassin. like if someone embraced their dismal fate. so interesting. Kouyou-anesan is so cool.

19. …………………the Kajii and Yosano ship.. i can’t believe i fell for the classic enemies to lovers trope………..i just do love a boyfailure and the woman who beats sense into him….

20. didn’t really enjoy the PM arc in the way beginning. didn’t like the beginning of cannibalism, either, when everyone was just hiding from each other. (when i say i didn’t like it, i mean comparatively. i loved it very much by normal standards)

21. soukoku lap scene in dead apple…

22. Fitzgerald’s return arc. it was written so beautifully, and the way Alcott managed to inspire him really captured my heart. he’s so charismatic that i can feel myself drawn to him even though he’s just in my screen. his confidence is infectious. i understand why his subordinates can act so proud.

23. fyolai. i used to hate it. now i don’t mind it, but i still can’t see it as endgame.

24. Mori: enough said.

25. that Asagiri shouldn’t have made the Tanizaki siblings act the way they did. it’s not like he came up with the idea all by himself; Naomi comes from “A Fool’s Love” wherein Naomi and Jojii really do act that way. it’s much ickier in the novel, to be honest, and Naomi in BSD is so much more likable. i’m glad she was added in. it adds depth to Tanizaki’s character. she’s also a delight.

hope you enjoyed~ do feel free to give your own opinions or argue with me. i’m always interested in broadening my horizons.

🔥 choose violence ask game 🔥

the character everyone gets wrong

a compelling argument for why your fave would never top or bottom

screenshot or description of the worst take you've seen on tumblr

what was the last straw that made you finally block that annoying person?

worst discord server and why

which ship fans are the most annoying?

what character did you begin to hate not because of canon but because how how the fandom acts about them?

common fandom opinion that everyone is wrong about

worst part of canon

worst part of fanon

number of fandom-related words you've filtered

the unpopular character that you actually like and why more people should like them

worst blorboficiation

that one thing you see in fics all the time

that one thing you see in fanart all the time

you can't understand why so many people like this thing (characterization, trope, headcanon, etc)

there should be more of this type of fic/art

it's absolutely criminal that the fandom has been sleeping on...

you're mad/ashamed/horrified you actually kind of like...

part of canon you found tedious or boring

part of canon you think is overhyped

your favorite part of canon that everyone else ignores

ship you've unwillingly come around to

topic that brings up the most rancid discourse

common fandom complaint that you're sick of hearing

[bisluthq]

Her eyes made me think she was stoned in the beginning (and I don’t think she was. Unless she went to the game high, which would be kind of concerning) and I still thought they were the same in the ending 😂 But in the videos of the ending (like in the video where she is eating popcorn; don’t know if you saw it) they were more normal. More “carefree” I.e drunky but not stoned or out of it. In the videos. The pics even from the beginning still look weird to me for some reason. I’m not an eyes or a body language expert, though.

She was drunk but I wouldn’t say in a concerning level. Same about Travis even though it’s the first time after the SB that I thought he looked drunk (...unlike Taylor that we just don't see her drunk when she’s performing 😭). There’s a video of Travis and her walking out of the place. Just saw it. She didn’t seem out of it like she usually does when she drinks a lottt (don’t know if you saw the pics of her going to a restaurant with Travis after the US Open but... my girl was not in this world).

All that aside, I agree with all your points about drinking in Western society. And I’ve been saying that Taylor seems to have a drinking problem (and I don't think she’s an alcoholic) since 2020. But as you acknowledged, this discussion has been taken over by snarkers and antis of the relationship who use this to imply that Travis is a bad influence on poor baby Taylor or that she can’t stand him or whatever, when Taylor has been drinking a lot like... since before Joe, I’d say. And she continued drinking a lot when she was with him (from what she said) and definitely with Matty too lol. It’s annoying cause if we want to have a discussion about it, people assume that we are one of them and don’t come from a good place, while I don’t think any of this have to do with the men in her life.

yea I agree and again I’m not even sure I’m comfortable saying “Taylor has a drinking problem” because that is too close to “Taylor is an alcoholic” and writing that actually makes me like physically flinch. What I think I am comfortable saying is Taylor has a very weird relationship with alcohol that predates any recent boyfriend or event - she was white lying imo about not having tried alcohol before she turned 21 (she said this repeatedly at the time but like certain details never quite added up lol and she has stopped saying that, maybe because it’s just not relevant anymore or maybe because it’s not worth keeping up a weird white lie 15 years later), she’s had very weird remarks on what she likes to drink over the years, her favorite drink at one stage was vodka and Diet Coke which is not a light drinker’s favorite drink ever tbh like that’s a heavy drinker with an ED’s favorite drink, she’s been very fucked at social events over the years that we’ve seen her at, rumors are she drinks a lot at her houses when entertaining, etc etc.

I hope she’s okay and I hope that one day she maybe re evaluates the relationship she has with alcohol for her own sake. I’m not saying like “oooh get Taylor to rehab!!!” at all but as I keep saying, I think most women of her demographic could benefit from asking ourselves why we drink as much as we do and in the patterns that we do and try exploring/dabbling in sobriety. Fuck the whole “wine drunk cat lady boss” thing lol that shops are selling me. I wanna be a sober cat lady (at least the very least the vast majority of the time). And like also, she might be! Taylor might not be drinking at home/much at home right now, especially because of Travis. This baseball game aside, and we are all allowed occasional big nights, I agree that I haven’t seen him drunk since SB (where I think he was entitled to be). I also really can’t imagine a pro athlete, especially an older one who really needs to think about his body, drinking with dinner every night. That’s just not good or sustainable. So maybe since her consumption at home has gone down, she feels more excited to enjoy nights out ykwim and that’s fair. We don’t know her and I hope she’s okay and antis and snarkers must stfu.

But like alcohol in western society is a fucking problem lol. That’s my overall point.

[higgs-the-god]

I'm not even an anti or a proshipper. I'm just telling you proshippers do all the same shit you listed, you'd see it if you paid attention.I've seen a 13 year old attempt suicide because thousands of 🍖🌈 attacked them for tweeting an opinion that wasnt even directed at anyone and originally had 3 likes. I've seen proshippers with a psychopathic hatred for kids because they think they could *become* antis. Proship accounts themselves admit their side has a problem with harassment

Could you give some sources? I wouldn’t mind sharing some of my own myself.

I’m friends with a lot of other pros (self labeled or not) and sometimes talk to more, and yet I’ve only heard of pros being miserable because anything they say or do they could be called out for and harassed, whether it’s pro content or not.

Yet I stay away from antis, I stay in my own bubble and (on twit at least) don’t follow a lot of people just because I think they could be antis, my friends also do the same, and yet I still get harassed and bugged and insulted. Antis go out of their way to consume content they don’t like then shit on the creators for it.

Also. Maybe you’re just exaggerating but. A thousand pro shippers going after a teen? One teen? I have heavy doubts. Not saying it’s impossible but I really do doubt it. Yet I’ve seen antis very often harass fellow pros when we’re literally just trying to live life, even after some people completely leave the internet and don’t talk about their interests like that. Of your one teen I’ve seen close friends’ mental status decline heavily from being harassed and blamed and I’ve heard of other pros literally actually kill themselves because of it.

The hatred for kids thing; a lot of pros, somewhat me included have a.. distaste for younger people on the internet because 1) our blogs are usually very nsfw 2) and especially have pro content, which is terrible for children. We tag things, we warn, yet kids will intentionally ignore it and get hurt by our media, and it’s our fault. We have to protect ourselves and sometimes that includes having our blogs more than explicitly tell children to stay the hell away. This does not include going after them and targeting them.

There isn’t really a neutral ground with this, I’m gonna be honest. Maybe there’s a bit of a spectrum but you either accept that sometimes people are just fucked in the things they like (and they’re able to healthily explore that in fiction, like is recommended by many therapists and such) or you hate people for.. minding their business and just trying to get away from the harsh reality that is irl

[thesecondbatgirl]

This is not as positive as you think it is

It’s still Rosh Hashanah, and I’m going to post part of those 17 essays I swore I would never write. Starting off the year as I mean to go on? Or something. I originally had this as the first thing on my list of essays that I would never write but would absolutely get me kicked out of Star Wars fandom but I am tired and cranky and I am going to explain why tagging fics where the Jedi Order reform and start allowing attachment as *Jedi Positive* piss me off so much. 

First, let me make this clear. If you hate the Jedi Order and want to write those, go ahead. If you have issues with the Jedi and want to write those fics, go ahead. Nobody is stopping you. What I’m asking instead is to stop tagging them Pro-Jedi or Jedi positive. Use Jedi critical! Or not Jedi friendly! Please use those tags instead! Yes even if you think its Pro-Jedi! If you are saying that the Order needs to reform to be *good* then it is not Jedi friendly!

I mean, look, if you are writing those things then I have issues with the way you’re interrogating the text and will think that you’re *wrong* and also that you’re using some super problematic (and from my point of view, anti-semitic) tropes but if my 21+ years in fandom have taught me anything its that you are never going to get anyone to agree on anything, but tagging will at least allow us to have our own spaces? Like, you wouldn’t have gone into a [pairing of your choice] positive archive and post a fic where [pairing] break up because the one who isn’t your blorbo is abusive so your blorbo runs to *YOUR* OTP, because that wouldn’t fit the theme of the archive! So if your fic is saying that the old rules for the prequel Jedi are bad and need to be changed to be good, don’t put it with Jedi positive content! 

So first. Attachment. Other people have talked about it better than I have, but have some links about what attachment means in the GFFA and no it really does not mean love.

(Listen I am not going to bother to rewrite the meta when Lumi has already done the work for me)

https://gffa.tumblr.com/post/695309005156925440/this-is-every-instance-where-the-jedi-talk-about/amp

https://gffa.tumblr.com/post/680367423839485952/this-is-every-time-i-have-ever-seen-george-lucas

https://gffa.tumblr.com/post/685958601260646400/hi-totally-okay-this-ask-was-very-obviously-sent

https://gffa.tumblr.com/post/685727448042733568

https://gffa.tumblr.com/post/682990707642892288/i-never-understand-what-people-mean-when-they-say

…. Honestly just have the entire attachment tag ok:

https://gffa.tumblr.com/tagged/attachment

So. Having done your reading, for the purposes of the GFFA, attachment is greed/possession and *very very bad* for psychic space monks. It is not a thing that the Jedi can just suddenly *allow*. Letting Jedi start allowing attachments, which is the big thing I start seeing whenever people start *reforming* the Jedi is, to me, a Jew who lives in the US South, the equivalent of Jews for Jesus.

Whoa, TSB, you say. You’re going too far.

Not really. Let’s go with a central belief of Judaism. The messiah has not come, Jesus is not the messiah. For the Jedi, attachment is not allowed is one of the central core beliefs. So saying that the way the Jedi need to reform by changing one of their core beliefs hits me like the person who told me “oh honey, we don’t care how you worship, as long as you accept Christ” did. (Right after I was introduced as being Jewish!) If you’re changing the *core* of who the Jedi are, you’re making them no longer Jedi. It’s not just changing one thing, it’s changing *everything.* 

And, while the Jedi are much more Buddhist then they are Jewish, they still hit me very much in my Jewish feels. Gee, I wonder *why* I could possibly resonate with a minority religious group who were hunted down and murdered and who get accused of a bunch of anti-semitic tropes including baby stealing and secretly running the government???? There are no parallels, clearly.

So look. Every single time I get hit with a fic that’s tagged Pro-Jedi and then its “we changed our rules about attachment and that stopped us from being murdered” what I hear is “the Jews accepted Jesus so we avoided pogroms/The Holocaust.” Or, as another friend pointed out "the Sikhs cut their hair, converted, and so the Mughal Empire let them live.”

Obviously I don’t speak for every Jew, and I certainly don’t speak for any Sikhs, so not everyone is going to agree with my take. But there are people that relate to Jedi and there is a reason why people are uncomfortable with Jedi reform and allowing attachment. 

But if you’re going to write fic about the Prequel Jedi and have them reform, before you tag it pro-Jedi or Jedi-Positive, please consider if “well they have to change who they are to be good” is as positive as you think it is. Tags help people curate their fannish experience. I very much follow the philosophies of YKINMKATO and don’t like, don’t read. The backbutton is my friend! But when I think I’m getting positive fic and then it isn’t? That sucks. Please tag accurately.

…. And well, since I’ve broken my rule about not writing these essays I guess look forward to my future essays of “No the Jedi are not Catholic” and “Actually they don’t have any political power” and “please stop judging the Jedi Order by some middle grade books” and finally “Galidraan was not the Jedi’s fault oh my god Jango shot first” Shana tova, everyone. Let’s try to do better this year.

[vergilsfavoritebee]

Everyone in the notes is completely misinterpreting this post. The point isn’t whether Zionists are welcome in anti-Zionist spaces and vice-versa. The point is that regardless of how much you disagree with someone, if you resort to attacks against their ethnicity or religion, you’re a bigot. If you respect the “good Jews” but don’t respect our culture, our religion, and our practices, then you’re antisemitic. If you are constantly and uniquely scrutinizing Jews in your community, waiting for them to “out” themselves as infiltrators or bad allies, if we are constantly under watch, if we are interrogated about our every move, all because we are Jewish, then you are antisemitic. If no Jew will ever be enough for you, unless we treat our Judaism as a flaw, then you don’t care about us. You care about what we can do for you. And that is not the same thing.

And before someone says anything, I’m not saying all pro-Palestine and anti-Zionist activists are like this. I’m just saying that those who *are* more suspicious of Jews, and can only accept us if we’re absolutely perfect, are antisemitic. And from what I’ve seen, it’s a big problem in online spaces, especially. So those of you who get suspicious whenever someone is proudly Jewish, reevaluate your biases. And everyone who disagrees with this post, I want to ask you a question: Why are you more bothered by people discussing antisemitism than antisemitism? Because you know what helps the Israeli government’s propaganda machine a whole lot more than Jews discussing antisemitism? People perpetuating antisemitism.

I would like more people to understand that the real test of anti-Semitism, will not be, and will never be, will the people who are otherwise agreeing with you be anti-Semitic to you. It is, will they be anti-Semitic towards the people with whom they disagree.

It doesn't mean anything when a proudly anti-Zionist Jew in a watermelon kippah and a keffiyeh is welcomed by a pro-Palestine encampment.

It doesn't mean anything when a proudly Zionist Jew draped in an Israeli flag is welcomed by a right-wing pro-Israel counter-rally.

The test of anti-Semitism is what happens when the Zionist Jew walks into the pro-Palestine encampment and what happens when the anti-Zionist Jew walks into the pro-Israel counter-rally. How fast do people resort to anti-Semitic canards? How quickly is that person treated as the worst sort of example of what the other camp hates?

And it's that last example that is scaring me. Because that's where I see the anti-Semitism spike.

People who are loudly and visibly Jewish are often the most cheered on by those who agree with them, especially in movements where they are a minority. The flipside is that people who are loudly and visibly Jewish are often the most virulently harassed by those who disagree with them.

[feanorianethicsdepartment]

Alright, I read your recent post and need to know - what is your interpretation of Maglor’s relationship with the twins?

askjdhslkjag my biggest self-inflicted problem in this fandom is that my take on maglor, elrond, and elros' relationship is so intensely detailed and specific i am forever tormented by none of the fic i read ever quite getting it right (from my perspective; i’ve read plenty of fic that presents a good interpretation on their own terms, it’s just never mine.) it’s simultaneously way darker than the fluffy kidnap dads stuff and nowhere near as black-and-white awful as the anti-fëanorian crowd likes to paint it, it’s messy and complicated and surrounded by darkness, and yet there’s also a sincere connection within it which mostly serves to make all those complications worse. angry teenage elrond is angry for a great many reasons, and the circumstances around him being raised by kinslayers account for at least half of them. there’s lots of complexity here, and i don’t see it in fic nearly as often as i’d like

(warning: the post... feathers? i already have an internet friend called faeiri this could be awkward - anyway, the post she’s talking about includes the line ‘everyone is wrong about kidnap dads except me.’ this post follows on from that in being as much a commentary about why various popular interpretations of both how the kidnapdoption went and the way people subsequently characterise the twins just don’t work for me as it is a setting out of my own ideas. i’m not really interested in getting into discourse here, i’m just trying to get my thoughts down. i’ve read fic with these interpretations before that i’ve liked, even, don’t take this as a Condemnation, aight? also this turned out long as hell, so i’m putting it under a cut)

i can never buy entirely fluffy depictions of kidnap dads

which isn’t to say i don’t read them! sometimes all i want is something sweet, for these kids to get to be happy for once. it’s not like i think their time with the fëanorians was completely devoid of laughter

it’s just. the pet names, the special days out, the home-cooked meals, it can get so treacly it stops feeling like the characters they are in the situation they’re in and turns into Generic Found Family #272

it soaks out all the complexity - which is the thing i am here for - and acts like oh, these kids were never in any danger, they were perfectly happy being abducted by the people who murdered everyone they knew, there’s nothing possibly questionable about this relationship at all

and... yeah. that’s not the characters i know. that’s not the context i know they belong to

i just can’t forget the circumstances that led them to meet

rivers of blood, the air filled with screams, a town ablaze, a woman choosing to die. every interaction the three of them have is going to proceed from that nightmare

(sidenote: i tend to hold it was maglor that raised the twins, with maedhros looming ominously in the background not really getting involved. it’s mostly personal preference, i’ve been in and out of the fandom since before this kidnap dads thing blew up and when i joined that was a perfectly standard reading)

(also the cave thing was a dumb idea, old man, if only because it implies beleriand had streams safe enough for children to play in at that point. the way it separates the twins from the third kinslaying is also something i don’t particularly vibe with)

probably my least favourite angle i’ve seen on the situation (edged out only by ‘maglor was actively abusive towards the twins’ which no no no no no no no no NO) is the idea that maglor (and/or maedhros, append as necessary) took the twins specifically to raise them

like, i get where it’s coming from, but it makes maglor come off as really creepy

(i have read fics where it is indeed played off as really creepy, but that’s not a maglor i have any interest in reading about)

(’mags 100% bad’ is just as facile a take to me as ‘mags 100% good’)

even if you’re saying maglor took them in because they had no one left to take care of them - i highly doubt they were the only children the fëanorians orphaned at sirion. idk, it always makes maglor seem much less sympathetic than i think it’s meant to

i prefer to think of it as more... organic? something that evolved, not something that was preordained. them growing closer gradually, the twins finding an adult who might maybe be on their side, maglor becoming invested in them almost by accident

and then the twins are so comfortable with the second scariest monster in amon ereb they frequently sass him off and maglor’s gotten so used to not hurting them he’s not even thinking about it any more. no one’s quite sure how it happened, but they’ve made a Connection

‘wait aren’t they a murderous warlord of questionable mental stability and a pair of terrified small children who’ve lost everyone they ever knew? isn’t that kinda fucked up?’ yup! that’s the point! complexity!

another idea i don’t like is the idea that maglor was an objectively better parent to the twins than eärendil or elwing

other people have talked about this already, i won’t rehash the whole thing. i will say that while i don’t think elwing was a perfect parent - someone so young, in such a horrible situation, i wouldn’t blame her for screwing up - i do think she (and eärendil) did the best by them they possibly could

this is one of the few things they have in common with maglor

something i come across now and again is the idea that sure, elwing and eärendil weren’t abusive or horrible or anything, but they were a couple of basically-teenagers with so many other responsibilities, there was only so much they could do. maglor, on the other hand, is an experienced adult who could take much better care of the twins

and...

first off, it’s not like mags doesn’t have a job. he’s a warlord, he has a fortress to help run, military shit to handle, lots of other stuff that needs to get done to stop everyone from starving or getting eaten by orcs. i feel like sirion had enough of a government there was plenty of opportunity for elwing to take days off and play with her kids, but in the fëanorian camp nobody really has the time to chase after a couple of toddlers, least of all one of the last points on the command network. they just don’t have the people any more

(seriously, the twins getting a formal education with tutors and classes and shit is a weirdly specific pet peeve of mine. this is a band of renegades, not a royal household; if there’s anyone left with those kinds of skills they almost certainly have more important things to do)

more than that, though - well, a quick glance through my late stage fëanorians tag should tell you a lot about what i think maglor’s mental state is like at this point. he is so accustomed to violence death means nothing to him, he’s lost most of his capacity for genuinely positive emotion to an endless century of defeat and despair, he hates everything in the universe, especially himself, he’s only able to keep functioning through a truly astounding amount of denial, and he covers it all up with a layer of snark and feigned apathy, which he defends aggressively because he’s subconsciously realised that if it breaks he’ll have absolutely nothing left

(maedhros, for the record, is... i’d say more stable, but at a lower point. maglor may interact with the world mostly through cold stares and mocking laughter, but at least his mind is firmly rooted in the present)

(on the other hand, at least maedhros lets himself be aware of what they are and where their road will lead)

which... this doesn’t mean maglor doesn’t try to be kind to the twins, or rein in his worst impulses around them

there’s just so little of him left but the weapon

he stalks through the halls like a portent of death and gets into hours-long screaming matches with maedhros and has definitely killed people in front of the twins

not even as, like, a deliberate attempt to scare them, but because when you solve most of your problems by stabbing them it’s pretty much a given that people who spend a lot of time around you are going to see you do it at least once

and sometimes, he curls up in an empty hallway, and weeps

... suffice it to say i don’t think elwing’s the more preoccupied, or the less mentally ill, parent here

just. in general, the fëanorians aren’t cackling boogeymen, but they’re not particularly nice either

no one has the energy left for that. not these isolated and weary soldiers at the end of a long losing war and the beginning of the end of the world. they don’t really bother to guard the kids against them escaping. where else are they going to go?

the sheer despair that must have been in the fëanorian camp after sirion, the knowledge that the cause cannot be fulfilled, that they are utterly forsaken, that they’re really just waiting to die -

it can’t have been a happy place to grow up in, under the shadow of loss and grief and deeds unrepentable, and the slow march of inevitable defeat

they would have had a better childhood if they stayed in sirion, raised by people who knew how to hope

but that isn’t the childhood they had. and despite everything i’ve said, i don’t think that childhood was an entirely awful one

yeah, see, this is where the other side of my self-inflicted fandom catch-22 comes in. just as much of the pro-kidnap dads stuff comes off as overly saccharine and simplified to me, i find much of the anti-kidnap dads stuff equally simplistic in the opposite direction

the idea that maglor and the fëanorians never meant anything to elros and elrond, that they had no effect on the people they became at all, that it was just a horrible thing that happened when they were children, easily thrown in the rear-view mirror...

that’s even more impossible to me than the idea that life with the fëanorians was 100% fluffy and nice

like, i’ve seen the take that elros and elrond hated the fëanorians from start to finish. they were perfect little sindarin princes, loyal to their people and the memory of doriath, spurning every scrap of kindness offered to them and knowing just what to say to twist the knife into the kinslayers’ wounds

... dude. they were six. hell, given their peredhelness, mentally they could easily have been younger

what six year old has a firm grasp of their ethnic identity? what six year old is fully aware of their place in history? what six year old would understand the politics that led to their situation?

don’t get me wrong, i can see hatred in there. but something else that doesn’t get acknowledged alongside it often enough is the fear

some of the stuff i’ve read feels like it gives the kids too much power in the situation. they’re perfectly happy to talk back to and belittle the people who burned down their hometown and killed everyone they ever knew, like miniature adults who don’t feel threatened at all

and, like, six. i can see them going for insults as a defensive measure, but it is defensive. it’s covering up fear, not coming from secure disdain

(and a lot of those insults sound, again, like things an adult who’s already familiar with the fëanorians would say, not a scared child who’s lost almost everything. why would a six year old raised by sindar and gondolindrim know what the noldolantë is, let alone what it means to maglor?)

(... i’m just ranting about this one fic that’s been ruffling my feathers for five years straight now, aren’t i)

i mean, i write elrond as the world’s angriest teenager, who snipes at maglor pretty much constantly, but the thing about angry teenage elrond is that he’s angry teenage elrond

he’s spent long enough with the fëanorians he has a pretty secure position within the camp, and he knows that maglor won’t hurt him from a decade and change of maglor not, in fact, hurting him

but as a small and terrified child abducted by the monsters his mother had nightmares about? he fluctuated wildly between ‘randomly guessing at things to say that wouldn’t get him killed’ ‘screaming at maglor to go away in words rarely more complicated than that’ 'desperately trying not to do or say anything in the hopes of not being noticed’ and ‘hiding’

(and i don’t think the twins were never in any danger from the fëanorians, either. quite besides the point that before they started orbiting maglor nobody was really sure what to do with them... well, they wouldn’t be the first children of thingol’s line the minions took revenge on)

(fortunately for them, maglor did, in fact, take them under his wing. by this point even their own followers are shit scared of the last two sons of fëanor, nobody’s going to mess with their stuff and risk getting mauled. tactically, it was a pretty good decision for a couple of toddlers)

more to the point, i feel like a child that young, in a situation that horrible, wouldn’t reject any kindness they were offered, any soothing touch in a universe of terror

in a world full of big scary monsters, the best way to survive is to get the biggest scariest monster possible to protect you. that’s how elros rationalises it when they’re, like, eight, mentally, but at the time they were just latching on to the only person around them who seemed to care about them

that’s how it started, on their end. two very young very scared children lost in a neverending nightmare clinging tightly to the lone outstretched pair of hands

as for maglor...

i’ve called mags evil before, but i see that as more of a... technical term? he is evil because he did the murder, he remains evil because he won’t stop doing the murder. hot take: murder bad

but that doesn’t make him, like, a moustache-twirling saturday morning cartoon villain. he is deeply unhappy with the position he’s in and the person he’s become, and he’s always trying not to take that final step over the edge

it’s not that i can’t see a maglor who is abusive or manipulative or who sees the twins more as objects than people. it’s just that that characterisation is one i am profoundly uninterested in. i do occasionally read fic with it, but it never enters my own headcanons

horrible people can do good things!! kinslayers can do good things!! the fallen are capable of humanity!! people can do both good and evil things at the same time, because people are complicated!! maglor is not psychologically incapable of actually taking pity on these kids!!!!

it’s... again, complexity. the fëanorians straddle the line between black and white, which is a lot less sharp in the legendarium than it’s sometimes characterised as. it’s what draws me to their characters so much, why i have so many stupid headcanons about them. pretending they fall firmly on either side of the line is my real fandom pet peeve

and, like, this moment? this sincere connection between a bloodstained warlord and two children who will grow up to be great and kind in equal measure? i may not entirely like the direction the fandom’s taken it recently, but that beat, that relationship, it still gets me

so no, i don’t think elrond and elros’ years with the fëanorians were an endless cavalcade of abuse and misery. i think there was love there, despite the darkness all around them

an old, tired monster, and the two tiny children it protects

maglor never hurts the twins, not ever, not once. his claws are sharp and his fangs are keen, if he so much as swatted them he’d rip them in half. instead he folds down the razor edges of his being, interacting with them ever so carefully. he has nightmares of suddenly tearing into their skin

seriously, the power differential between them is so great, maglor so much as raising his voice would break any trust they have in this horribly dangerous creature. fics where he does corporal punishment always get the side-eye from me

the mood of their relationship is... i find it hard to put into words. melancholy, maybe, like a sunny afternoon a few days before the end of the world. three people who’ve lost so much finding what respite they can in each other as the world slowly crumbles around them

there are times when it feels like the three of them exist in a world of their own, marked out by the edges of the firelight. maglor telling stories of the stars, elros giving relaxed irreverent commentary, elrond getting a few moments to just be, all their troubles kept at bay

they are the last two lights in a world sunk into darkness, the last two living beings he does not on some level hate. he will tear his own heart out before he sees them in pain

he teaches them to ride, he teaches them to read, he gives them everything he still has left. the twins should never have been in this situation, maglor probably isn’t entirely fit to take care of them, but it is what it is, and they take what love they can

(maglor depends on the twins emotionally a bit more than any adult should rely on any child. he’s still very much the caretaker in their relationship, but that relationship is the only one he has left that’s not stained by a century of rage and grief. he’s obsessed with them, maedhros tells him frequently. maglor’s standard response to this is to try to gouge maedhros’ eyes out)

(that particular darker side to their relationship, where maglor’s attachment to the twins turns into a desperate possessiveness - that’s not something i think i’ve ever seen in fic. which is a shame, it feels much closer to my own characterisation than the standard ways this relationship gets maleficised. darker, in a different way than usual. horribly compelling in its plausibility)

however you want to read it, i don’t think you can deny this is a relationship that defines elrond and elros’ childhood. they were raised in the woods by a pack of kinslayers, the text is quite clear on this

but i’ve seen a lot of talk about how elros and elrond are only sirion’s children. they are completely 100% sindarin, they love and forgive eärendil and elwing thoroughly and without question, they identify with doriath over - even gondolin, let alone tirion. the fëanorians - the people who raised them - had zero effect on the people they grew into and the selves they created

and that, more than anything else, i find utterly unbelievable

look, i get what this is a reaction to. a lot of the kidnap dads stuff paints the fëanorians as elrond and elros’ ‘real’ family, and i’ve already talked about what i think of the idea that maglor-and-possibly-also-maedhros were better parents than eärendil and elwing. i think it’s reductive and overly optimistic and just a little too neat

but to say instead that elrond and elros held no great love in their hearts for maglor, no lingering affinity with the fëanorians, no influence on their identity from the people they grew up around, none at all? that after it happened they just left it behind and resumed being the same people they were in sirion?

that strikes me as just as much an oversimplification. it sands down all the potential rough edges of their identity, all that inconvenient complexity that stops them from fitting into any well-defined box, and replaces it with a nice safe simple self-conception i find just as flat and boring as declaring them 100% fëanorian

we can quibble over who they call ‘father’ (i personally find that whole debate kinda petty) but denying that it was actually maglor who was the closest thing they knew to a parent for most of their childhoods, and that that would, in fact, affect the way they thought of themselves and their family, elides so many interesting possibilities out of existence

(i’m not even going to get into the most braindead take i have ever heard on the subject, namely that because their time with the fëanorians was such a small fraction of elrond’s total lifespan it was like being kidnapped for two weeks as a toddler and had no greater significance than that. do you not understand what childhood is????)

like, i tend to think of elrond as a child as being very loudly not-a-fëanorian. elros is more willing to go with the flow - hey, if the creepy kinslayer wants kids, elros is happy to play into that in order to not be murdered - but elrond is very firm that he’s not happy to be here and he doesn’t belong with them

(this is after they get over their initial terror, of course, when they’ve realised they won’t be fed to the orcs for the tiniest slight. even so, elrond only really gets shirty about it around people he’s comfortable with, whose reactions he can reasonably guess at. naturally, the first person he does it to is maglor)

elros calls maglor their father exactly once, when they’re... maybe early preteens? this is because elrond hears him do it and immediately loses his shit. they have a dad, elrond says, in tears, and a mum, and any day now their real parents are going to come to pick them up and take them home

... right?

it gets harder to believe as the years roll on, as their memories of sirion fade, as they find their own places within the host, as maglor watches over them as they grow. elrond still mentally sets himself apart from the fëanorians, but it’s more of an effort every year. life in the fëanorian camp is the only one he’s ever really known. he can barely remember his mother’s voice

then the war of wrath starts, and the fëanorian host drifts closer to the army of valinor, and the twins come into contact with non-fëanorians for the first time in forever, and it becomes clear just how obviously fëanorian elrond is. he always insisted he wasn’t like the kinslayers at all, but he dresses like them, talks like them, fights like them

the myth cycles the edain tell are almost completely unfamiliar to him, he barely remembers the shape of the songs of lost doriath. even these sarcastic commentary and subversive reinterpretations he made of maglor’s stories - those were still maglor’s stories! he’s been trying to guess at the person he was meant to be, but it’s growing nightmarishly blatant how little elrond ever knew about him

instead, the people he was born to are as alien to him as the orcs of morgoth. he is a fëanorian, through and through

... yeah, elrond (and/or elros) having an absolutely massive identity crisis upon being reintroduced to his quote-unquote ‘true kin’ is another angle i’d love to see in fic that i don’t think i’ve ever come across. all those potential grey areas around who they are and who they’re supposed to be sound utterly fascinating, and i think it’s the complexity i hate to see elided over the most

i really, really doubt they could effortlessly slot back into being eärendil and elwing’s children. not when they’ve been surrounded by, lived alongside, been raised by the people who were supposed to enemies for most of their lives

they just don’t fit into that box any more. they can’t

speaking of eärendil and elwing, while i do agree that they both (especially elwing) get a lot more flak than they deserve, i don’t agree that therefore elrond and elros were never the slightest bit mad at them and fully forgave them for everything with no reservations

because, well, they were left behind. elwing had no other choice, but they were still left behind; it led to the world being saved, but they were still left behind. all the best intentions in the universe don’t erase the weeks and months and years of waiting, of a hope that grew thinner and frailer until it finally quietly broke

that’s a real hurt, and a real grievance. even if the twins rationally understand that their parents were making the best out of their terrible situation, you can’t logic away emotions like that. it’s perfectly possible for them to know they have no reason to resent eärendil or elwing, and yet still harbour that bitterness and pain

(i did write a thing once where elrond loudly rejects eärendil as his father in favour of maglor, but something i didn’t add in that i probably should have is that elrond later regretted doing that)

(not like, several centuries later, when he’d grown old and wise. two hours later, when he’d calmed down. but he was still legitimately angry at eärendil, because the one thing angry teenage elrond was not lacking in was reasons to be mad at the adults around him, and before he could figure out if he had anything less furious to say the hosts of the valar left middle-earth behind)

(it’s another element to the tragedy of the whole thing. in that particular story, which is mostly aiming for maximum pain, the only thing elrond’s birth parents know about their son for thousands of years is that he hates them)

(and he doesn’t, not really. you can’t hate someone you’ve never known)

not that i think they couldn’t ever make up with their parents! fics where elrond and his birth parents work past all the things that lie between them and form a functional familial bond despite it all give me life. i just don’t like the idea that there’s nothing difficult for them to work past

i don’t like the idea that elrond and elros would naturally, effortlessly identify with the mother they last saw when they were six and the people they only vaguely remember. i can see them doing it as a political move, i can see them going for it as a deliberate personal choice, but i can’t seeing it being immediate and automatic and easy

no matter how great a pair of heroes eärendil and elwing are, that doesn’t change the fact that to elrond and elros, they’re at most a few scattered memories and a collection of far-off stories. and so long as the twins stay in middle-earth, they’re never going to draw any closer

compared to the dynamic, multifaceted, personal, and deep bonds they have with the fëanorians - who, and i know i keep saying this but i think it gets tossed aside way more casually than it should, are the people who actually raised them, their birth parents must feel like a distant idea

and that’s why i can never buy interpretations of elrond as 100% sindarin, a pure son of doriath, with no messy grey areas or awkward jagged edges to his identity. given everything we know about his life, it seems almost cartoonishly simplistic

honestly it seems like a narrative a bunch of old doriathrin nobles trying to manouevre elrond into being high king of the sindar or something would propagate. it's neat and nice and tidy, something that’d be much more convenient for everyone if elrond did feel that way

but i just don’t see how he can. this narrative is easy and simple in a way real people never are, it ignores all the forces pulling him apart. elrond being uncomplicatedly sindarin with the life he lives and the people he's close to - that doesn’t make any sense to me

which isn’t to say i think he’s 100% noldorin, from either a gondolindrim or a fëanorian perspective. (i find it a little more believable, given, again, who he grew up around and who he hangs out with, but it’s still a bit too reductive for my tastes.) it’s also not to say i couldn’t believe an elrond who made an active choice to emphasise his sindarin heritage

it’s not how i think of him, but it works. i don’t have a problem with other people interpreting the complexities of the twins’ identities differently

i just have a problem with people acting like it doesn’t exist

in general i think there’s a lot untapped potential that gets left behind when you declare the twins, separately or together, as All One Thing

they’re descended from half the noble houses of beleriand, and they have deep personal ties to most of the rest. they belong to all of the free peoples even the dwarves, somehow, probably and i feel like that was kind of the old man’s point? so many peoples meet in them, to say they wholly belong to any one species is probably an oversimplification

they sit at a crossroads of potential identities, and rather than narrowing down their worldviews to one single path, they take the hard road and choose all of them. that’s what you need to do, if you want to change the world

and, to bring this back to my ostensible topic, in my estimation at least this mélange of possible selves does include them as fëanorians! it’s not overpowering, but it’s certainly there, and the adults they grow into long after they’ve left the host still bear influence from their childhood

nothing super obvious, nothing that wouldn’t stand out if you didn’t know what to look for, but there’s something almost incandescent in how fiercely elros reaches out for his dreams

there’s something almost defiant in elrond’s drive to be as kind as summer

as for who they publically claim as their family... honestly, it depends. while it’s usually more tactically prudent for elros to connect himself to his various human ancestors, on occasion he does find a use for his free in with the elf mafia, and elrond, code switcher par excellence, is famously the son of whoever is most politically convenient at the moment, which is rarely, but not never, maglor

(in the privacy of their own minds, well, eärendil and elwing may have been the parents elros was supposed to have, but maglor was the parent he actually had, and elros doesn’t particularly care to mope over what might have been. elrond, for his part, figures that after all the shit maglor has put him through, the least that bastard owes him is a father)

but honestly? i think before any of their mountain of identities, before thinking of themselves as sindarin or gondolindel or hadorian or haladin or fëanorian or anything, elrond and elros identify as themselves

they are peredhil, they are númenóreans, they are whoever they make themselves to be. that’s how elrond finally resolved his identity, figured out who he was and found something past the pain and the rage

he wasn’t doriathrin, or gondolindrin, or falathrin, or fëanorian, or whatever else. he was elrond, no more and no less

and that person, elrond, could be whatever he chose to be

... elros came to a similar conclusion, with much less sturm und drang that he’s willing to admit. being able to go ‘hey, i can’t possibly be biased towards any one of your cultures, because i’m descended from all of you and i was raised by murderelves’ makes it a lot easier to unite people around your personal banner, turns out

the stories other people tried to force on them shattered into pieces, and the peredhel twins were free to shape themselves into anything they could dream of

and as the new world struggles alive, these lost children of an Age of death begin to bloom into their full glorious selves -

i just. i love the poetry of that. despite every single shadow that hangs over their past, despite all the clashing notes pulling them apart, they harmonise it all into a greater, kinder theme, determined to make their world a better place in whatever way they can

they fail, of course, but so do all things. the inevitable march of entropy doesn’t diminish the long millennia they (and their descendants) held onto the light

and their growing up in the fëanorian host definitely had a huge effect on the noble lords they became. you can see it in elros’ loud ambition to create a land of happiness and hope, elrond’s quiet resolve to heal all the hurts inflicted by this marred reality

it wasn’t a perfect time by any means, but neither was it a nightmare. it was what it was, a desperate existence at the edge of a knife where, nevertheless, they were loved

even after years upon decades upon centuries have passed, it’s hard for the wise king and the honourable sage to separate out and identify all the conflicting emotions swirling around their childhood. they never knew eärendil or elwing, true, but they also never really knew maglor

not as equals, not as adults, not as people who could truly understand him. he disappeared into the fog of history, leaving only childhood memories of razor-sharp, gentle hands

it’s messy and it’s complicated and getting any real closure would be like shoving their way through a thornbush with bare hands even if elrond could find the shithead, and yet at the core of it all, there is light. not the brightest of lights, maybe, but an enduring one

that contrast, above all, that note of warmth amidst the shadows, is what fascinates me so much about their relationship. three screwed up people in a screwed up world, finding a little peace with each other

and the fact that somehow, it does have a good ending - the children grow up magnificent and compassionate and just, they become exemplars of all their peoples, lodestars of the new world born out of the ashes of the old - that makes it seem to me like this relationship must have contained some fragment of happiness

but, fuck, all the darkness that surrounds that love, all the tangled-up emotions its existence necessitates, all the prefabricated self-identities it can never slot into - nothing about it is simple, nothing about it is easy, and i find that utterly enthralling. especially how, despite everything, that flickering light never goes out

well, i don’t think it does, anyway. my take on this relationship is both complicated enough no one else ever quite gets it right and well-defined enough every single ‘error’ in other people’s interpretations sticks out like a kinslayer in rivendell

it is an entirely self-inflicted problem, i will admit. other people are allowed to interpret those complexities differently from me, and it’s entirely my own fault i lack the :waves hands around nebulously: to write my own hypothetical fic on the subject at a pace faster than glacial

still, though. i do wish there was more fic out there that engaged with these complexities. a lot of the common fandom interpretations of this relationship just sweep it all away

[theoriginalcarnivorousmuffin]

"Tom Riddle effectively destroys the country from the inside out, which I believe was his true goal the entire time" (c) wait a second, so you think that he wasn't going to really take over or anything, just destroy the fuck out of w britain?

I have avoided this ask long enough.

I’ll start by saying that asking me about Tom Riddle is like staring down into a bottomless rabbit hole. We could travel down that path, but it is a dark and perilous journey, and by the end of it I will come out looking like the Mad Hatter.

It also requires a few prerequisites that you’re just going to accept as true (or else got off the crazy train here).

We know very little about Tom Riddle or Voldemort

What we do know of Tom Riddle comes to us from suspect sources

I’m just going to go out there and start with the basis that Tom is not crazy

Elaborating a little on number 1. We never actually see much of Tom Riddle or Voldemort directly. He’s a bit like Thanos in the MCU, or Palpatine in the first two movies of the Original Trilogy, he’s this looming threat that we pass by and glimpse every once in a while but never really get quality time with.

Generally, Voldemort makes an appearance in a moment of crisis.

He and Harry fight over the philosopher’s stone for Tom’s very survival. He and Harry fight over the diary for Tom’s very survival. He resurrects himself with Harry as a witness. We get those very strange dreams from Voldemort’s perspective (half of which we later learn are fabricated).

None of these really lend to our, or Harry’s for that matter, understanding of Tom Riddle. There’s too much going on, it usually happens far too fast, and there’s usually something Tom Riddle desperately wants or needs that eclipses all other concerns or else he has an audience.

This is part of the reason we get those Halfblood Prince pensieve lessons: Harry knows nothing of Tom Riddle and doesn’t understand him at all.

Which leads us, of course, to number 2, most of what we know about Tom Riddle comes from Dumbledore. I’ve talked about this before, so I won’t spend much time on it, but Dumbledore has a very clear agenda in relaying these memories to Harry. Dumbledore already has strong suspicions of what objects are horcruxes and where they’re located, he already has Snape as a very reliable agent to continue work when he’s gone, his job here is to convince Harry there is no path but suicide. And that involves portraying Tom Riddle as the most evil man who ever eviled, was born eviler than the antichrist, and will die eviler than the antichrist. 

Now, does this make Tom necessarily good or bad? No.

However, it does mean when Dumbledore tells us things like, “See, Harry, an impoverished child was upset when I lit all his belongings on fire! What a monster!” (especially given that, in a similar situation, Harry thought it was hilarious when Hagrid gave Dudley a permanent physical deformity and Harry was told he was an angel child) we should take it with a very large grain of salt.

Right, so, with all that backdrop what I’m getting at is that a) we can’t take Dumbledore at his word b) even if we could he could be wrong c) Harry doesn’t have the introspection to be able to figure himself when a or b is happening. I won’t elaborate on this last much, suffice to say that Harry’s world is very black and white, divided into the camps of those who personally like him and those who don’t.

So, why do I think Tom’s goal was not to rule the wizarding world but instead to destroy it?

A few things.

First, there are so many easier ways he could have ended up ruling the wizarding world. More, even when he effectively does rule the wizarding world in book seven, he takes very strange actions so that he’s never directly in power.

Second, I never really bought Tom’s racism. It’s too convenient and too contradictory with his backstory.

The second first, because we’re going out of order today. I’ve gone over this before, but I don’t believe Tom had minions early and I think he was effectively treated as a muggleborn (see here and here) until he took on the Voldemort persona many decades later. I’m hard pressed to believe someone as intelligent, angry, and proud as Tom Riddle would willingly believe and accept he was inferior to the likes of Abraxas Malfoy. More, even if he wished he was a halfblood, I think the evidence of him being muggleborn would be stacked too high against him to deny even to himself (and when he finds out it’s not true, he has maybe a month or so before he realized that he’s the bastard son of a squib). 

And it’s just so convenient. All the people with the power, with the money, who are itching for a cause against a threat that doesn’t really exist believe in blood purity. Ergo, Voldemort shows up suddenly espousing over the top blood purity rhetoric (rhetoric that directly clashes with his “there is only power” philosophy at that). 

In other words, I think Tom Riddle gave himself a line that he knew would get him places very quickly.

And now for the first. For a guy who has had the entire country in the palm of his hands twice, one time taking it over in a bloodless coup, he’s really big on causing collateral damage and really small on actually doing the ruling thing.

The first wizarding war, Tom Riddle as Voldemort has the backing of the heirs of the most prestigious and wealthy noble houses save a select few. These are people with seats in the Wizengamot, which has a frightening control over the government itself (including the minister of magic). I imagine, in 1980 had Tom Riddle wanted to be elected as Minister of Magic, he would have been elected as Minister of Magic. If he wanted a friendly face in office then he probably could have made that happen to.

More than even this though, by this point, Tom had already won. By having control over the majority of the Wizengamot he owns the government. He’s done, it’s over, it’s finished, and many of the characters admit as much which is why Harry Potter was such a miracle. So why all the seemingly random, exceptionally pointless, terrorism? 

One answer is that Voldemort is crazy bananas. And sure, I guess we can go with that, except for someone insane he’s oddly effective and very consistent. 

I believe Tom was systematically destroying the very foundations of the country through its core aristocratic families. Within a few short years Tom decimates the Black family, it goes from having five heirs to none, and while some of this isn’t Tom’s fault he does take care of quite a few of them. He brands Lucius for life, while Lucius rises high in politics he never escapes the stigma of being a known Death Eater and in the end cannot escape the consequences for his actions. The Malfoy family is very nearly destroyed by the end of the series, had Draco died in the Fiendfyre. The LeStrange family, presumably decimated as well.

More, this is mostly me headcanoning, but I imagine Tom fuels an extremism that the Wizarding World had never contemplated. I imagine, previously, anti-muggleborn sentiment was probably fairly rampant among purebloods. Oh, some were very pro-muggleborn I’m sure, but I think most were fairly “eh” on the people and felt they were a drain on society (such as requiring constant funding for the obliviation department).

However, when Diagon Alley starts getting blown up every other week, when muggleborns start being tortured and murdered, when purebloods who aren’t anti-muggleborn enough are being tortured and murdered, this starts wigging people out in a way they’ve never wigged out before.

By the time we get to Harry Potter’s canon, it is now only a minority that are anti-muggleborn, and they’re perceived as raving lunatics. Nobody wants to be grouped with these people. Which, just goes to show, how much Voldemort rattles the wizarding world in a very small amount of time.

Then there’s Deathly Hallows, rather than become minister himself Voldemort installs a puppet minister. He shows no signs of wishing to change this and instead does things like destroy the sorting hat (which again shakes the very foundations of the wizarding world as whta will we do if we don’t know who’s a Gryffindor anymore?!)

So, where is this ramble going?

Given the results we see, that more than any others it seems to be the purebloods and often Tom’s own followers that suffer colossal losses, I think Tom’s actions are, in part, a means of vengeance against the entire damn wizarding world (but especially the purebloods).

He makes fools of these people, brands them as his slaves, and has them participate in the most over the top ridiculous rituals (the cloaks, the masks, the entire theatrics of it feels like Tom got drunk one night and planned this whole thing out). He destroys them entirely, and better, enables them to completely destroy themselves and the country they believe they’re trying to save.

Basically, I think by the time the series begins Tom is fueled by a nihilist rage that knows no bounds. But dammit all, the wizarding world is going to burn.