#Objectionism

[cloudabserk]

look i understand if you like marius because this is the evil morally bankrupt vampire story. however when people argue that marius was actually really cool and chill and normal about armand i want to fight them

[theonceandfuturequeenoftarts]

Harry wants it known that he’s at the ministry’s Yule gala under duress. It was all he could do to force himself into his dress robes and make himself presentable; he can’t fathom where he’ll find the energy he needs to get through the rest of the evening.

People he barely knows keep coming up to him – as they always do – to shake his hand, chat with him about this and that, thank him for his role in defeating the dark lord. (Still. He really wishes they’d stop doing that. It’s been more than six years now.)

And then there are pockets of people, staring at him and whispering behind their hands. Another constant in his public appearances, though he imagines the content of their conversations is at least a little different from usual, if not the tone. 

He’s just escaped another fan and is looking to make a beeline for the bar when it happens. Harry sees his doom approaching from several metres away but, since they saw him first and he (stupidly) refuses to run away, he stands there like an idiot, wishing he were anywhere else.

“Hi Harry,” Ginny says. It looks like she wants to hug him or get close, and his shoulders stiffen involuntarily. Thankfully, she stays where she is.

“Hullo Ginny,” he replies and, without looking at the man, utters a terse, “Malfoy.”

The smug arse smirks at him. “Potter.”

“How’ve you been?” Ginny asks, which. Rude. If she actually cared about that, she wouldn’t have cheated on him with the git on her arm, but whatever. 

“Oh, fine. Y’know, keeping busy.” God, he hates small talk.

Before he can respond with the requisite, ‘And you?’, Malfoy jumps in. “Yes, I suppose you have been, from what I’ve heard.”

Ugh. Fucking Malfoy. Harry wishes he had a drink or seven. He can’t believe he’d rather be caught in another conversation with that weirdo from earlier about his wand-care habits, of all things.

Ginny gently elbows Malfoy in the side with a chiding, “Draco.”

He’s considering the merits of letting himself be ripped apart by the anti-apparition wards to get away from this conversation – splinching himself can’t be much more painful than this – when a hand bearing a very welcome drink appears in front of him. That’ll do for now, though splinching is still on the table. Especially when he follows the hand to the arm up to the face and of course it’s Ri– Tom.

Harry gives him the side-eye, but accepts the drink. “Thanks.”

Tom leans in slightly, just enough so the two in front of them can’t read his lips. “You looked like you might be in need of a rescue.”

And as he pulls back out of Harry’s personal space, he rests a hand low on Harry’s back. Harry tenses for a moment before just accepting that tonight is all about him being as uncomfortable as possible. He takes a gulp of his drink – something dark and spicy. It burns pleasantly.

When he starts paying attention again, he finds Ginny looking at Tom with surprise; Malfoy is looking at the other man with – is that a hint of fear? And Tom is staring them both down, but somehow managing to do it with a veneer of politeness. 

“Good evening, Draco,” he says pleasantly. “Ginevra.”

“Riddle.” Malfoy’s greeting is stiff, as is the awkward, aborted bow he gives. Hmm.

“And Harry,” Tom says, turning to look at him fondly. “So good to see you again.”

Hoo boy.

“You,” Harry murmurs from behind the rim of his drink. “Are not subtle.”

Tom takes the opportunity to slide his hand further around Harry’s back, lightly gripping his hip and pulling him closer up against Tom’s side. He returns Harry’s withering look with an undaunted smile. “I wasn’t trying to be.”

“Yeah, I’m getting that.”

“When did you two get so cosy?” Ginny cuts in. Her tone is playful, but there’s more than offhand curiosity lurking beneath.

“Uh.” Shite, he doesn’t ever want Ginny to find out how this started, but especially not in public. Who knows who’s listening in or watching. “We ran into each other by chance a month and a half ago” –actually, he’s how I found out you were fucking Malfoy behind my back– “and we’ve met up a few times since then. It’s nice to have someone… uninvolved to talk to.”

Tom looks amused at that. He’s definitely involved in the demise of Harry’s relationship, and if there’s one thing they haven’t been doing (but probably should), it’s talking.

“I’ve been helping him expand his horizons,” Tom says without apparent innuendo, yet somehow the layered meaning is still obvious. Prat. “Getting him to try new things, keeping him busy.”

“You and half the town,” Malfoy mutters under his breath.

“I see…” Ginny says over him. “Funny how that escaped the rumour mill.” 

Harry laughs awkwardly, wishing for a stray lightning bolt to strike and put him out of his misery. “Must not’ve been exciting enough.”

The conversation dies for long enough to become uncomfortable - well, even more so. Malfoy touches Ginny’s elbow and leans down to speak into her ear. Harry seizes their distraction to turn on Tom.

“Are you sure you don’t want to piss on me to mark your territory while you’re at it?” he asks dryly.

Tom wrinkles his nose delicately in disgust. “No need to be crude. Though…” He gives Harry a considering once-over. “I’m not at all opposed to the idea of you carrying my mark. How do you feel about tattoos?”

Harry snorts. “Not a chance.”

The other man tucks his face in close to Harry’s, breath hot against the skin beneath his ear. “What about bruises?”

As though he doesn’t regularly leave an abundance of those on Harry anyway, what with his penchant for treating Harry like a chew toy. Harry shivers all the same, just a little bit. He can feel the barest brush of Tom’s grin against his neck.

Ginny clears her throat pointedly.

“Good to know,” Tom breathes as he pulls back.

Ginny continues trying to talk to him while Malfoy makes the odd snide comment, Tom attempts to meld into Harry’s side while replying for him and being subtly insulting, and Harry tries to become one with the floor. He realises he’s missed a question when he breaks out of his daze to find both Tom and Ginny are watching him expectantly.

“Huh?”

Ginny starts to say something when Tom cuts her off. "Care to dance?"

If looks could kill, Tom would be in a bad way with how Ginny’s glaring at him. "Harry doesn't dance," she says tetchily. Tom doesn't bother with her, waiting for Harry's wary nod.

He looks back at Ginny smugly. "Perhaps yet another new thing to which I can introduce him.”

“Okay, that’s enough,” Harry says, grabbing Tom’s wrist and dragging him towards the dance floor. Best to get this over with, and all the better if it means he doesn’t have to speak with anyone else in the meantime.

"She's not wrong," he mutters once they don't have to fear being overheard. "I don't dance.”

"Just follow my lead," Tom replies easily. “Would it be correct to say you don’t particularly care about stepping on my toes?”

Harry stares at him blankly for a moment before he feels a reluctant smile appear on his face. “It might be the one redeeming part of this.”

“The only one?” Tom says archly, pulling him into the correct hold. And, without giving Harry a chance to breathe or think, they’re off in what Harry thinks might be a waltz. 

"That was quite the risk you took," Harry says, trying not to stare at his feet and hoping for the best as Tom spins him around the room. He is, oddly enough, a much better dancer when he’s not constantly concerned about crushing someone's foot.

"Was it?"

"Yes. What made you think I wouldn't refuse and let you look foolish?"

He catches sight of a pleased grin on Tom's face from the corner of his eye. "The same thing that made me ask you to dance when I've seen your previous forays. You rise to the occasion when I push you.” He looks at Harry, for a moment, proudly. “I also knew you’d be more than amenable to anything that got you away from those two.”

Harry can’t deny that.

“Now look sharp, and do try to keep up,” Tom says, the hand at Harry’s lower back gripping him a little tighter.

“Wha–?” 

And it’s all he can do not to trip over his feet and take them both down in a painful sprawl, but the rush, the heady triumph of making it through the successive, intricate turns, goes straight to his head. Before he can stop himself, Harry lets out a loud peal of laughter, further disrupting the couples around them and drawing sneers and disapproving glances. And he just doesn’t care. Not that he thinks he normally would’ve, but it feels like it’s been ages since he’s felt so light and happy. So, he doesn’t think about the people around him. He doesn’t think about how it’s Tom who’s making him feel this way. He just basks in the sun-warm feeling of contentment – of being okay for the first time in a while.

(One night)

[gideonisms]

eowyn should have been a lesbian. Eowyn/faramir is like, fine, but it misses the point of eowyn for all baby dyke eowyn stans which is not that she longs for glory in battle and doesn't realize war is ugly and brutal, but that she's caught between two awful options and she doesn't want to be given one based on her gender. She's not in love with aragorn, she envies him because she finds the tasks he has in life more preferable and she hero worships him. Is this the point Tolkien was trying to make? Well, no,

[oksurethisismyname]

The Zoro Sanji dynamic in the live action gives major Chad Ryan I can’t dance high school musical 2 homoerotic competitive vibes but maybe that’s just me

[searchforahero]

Hi guys i wrote fan-fiction about Tim doing surgery on Kon and Kon being really gay about it :]

My Heart in Your Hand by searchforahero (anonymous) Fandom: DCU (Comics) Relationship(s): Tim Drake/Kon El Character(s): Kon-El, Tim Drake

Chapters: 1/1 Word Count: 3925

Description:

He feels Tim's fingers press against his heart more deeply than he has felt any sensation before in his life. Tim looks down sharply when he hears the rush of air escape Kon, come to think of it he could probably feel it too, the way his palm is essentially cupping his right lung. "Are you okay?" Tim asks, he's frowning, eyebrows drawn tight, and analyzing Kon's face for any sign of pain or discomfort. Kon grins up at him, he feels insane. This is insane, right? Having his best friend touching his heart and fondling his lung isn't exactly something he expected to ever happen to him. "Okay, uh, I'm glad you don't seem to be in unmanageable pain. You uh, have a nice heart, did you know that? Good and healthy." Tim's frown gets even deeper, which Kon hadn't imagined possible. "Jesus, that was a weird thing to say, I promise not to show up in your room in the middle of the night to steal your heart. You have a nice heart, who the fuck says that?"

[de4thparty]

"Shipping Joesara is bad because platonic male/female friendships are rare in fiction!" okay. I don't think me tumblr posting about it has any affect on what is in the text though

[tanadrin]

You've criticised nationalism a lot recently — don't worry, I'm not going to start insulting you or anyone, but could you tell me what your definition thereof is? Because in conversations with other people I have realised not everyone actually thinks it's the same thing (e.g. my mother seems to consider it the same as patriotism, ergo "being proud/glad to be part of your people group" — I doubt this is your definition, but as an example of how far-flung these may be)

i mean. i'd say a few things to this. one, uh. i realize this is annoying but. discourse objects do not have definitions--or rather, they may have definitions which are useful guides to how people use the word, but what discourse objects actually are is constructed by usage, and so will vary depending on how different users of those concepts divide the semantic field, and even depending on the context in which they are used. so, like, be aware of that pitfall

and having laid down that marker, i would then go on to say i don't think nationalism is strongly differentiated from patriotism, either in terms of how it's usually defined or how it's used in practice. i think patriotism is often used as, like. a synonym for a lighter, fluffier form of nationalism. i don't find compelling the idea that patriotism is inherently a virtue. and i think a lot of manifestations of patriotism are also manifestations of nationalism. like the dictionary definition of nationalism is probably going to be something like "preference for one's own nation and its interests especially vs other nations and their interests" and i think that covers a lot of expressions of patriotism, too.

indulging our tribalistic affinity for Us vs Them thinking is cute when it's something that doesn't matter at all, like sports, or which way the toilet paper faces, but i think as a style of thinking it ought to be resisted strongly when it comes to politics. the relevant virtue ought to be solidarity and humanistic feelings that encompass as many people as possible--ideally the whole human race--and not a sufficiently nice form of political or ethnic chauvanism

[thegreatyin]

is it a hottake to say we need to stop cancelling things for the audacity of having someone working on them do something twitter users find morally objectionable. "the art director of this thing draws weird furry porn" yeah and good for them?? what does that have to do with my enjoyment of this entirely unrelated piece of fiction

[solitarelee]

I'm pretty dubious about this community thing, but in the name of giving it a shot I have joined frogblr, which is just pictures of frogs and has like 400 people in it

[age-of-moonknight]

Werewolf by Night: Red Band (Vol. 1/2024), #2.

Writer: Jason Loo; Penciler: Sergio Dàvila; Inkers: Jay Leisten and Aure Jimenez; Colorist: Alex Sinclair; Letterer: Cory Petit

[cantsayidont]

The original "Mirror, Mirror" episode of TOS is revealing for what it says about the priorities of the Federation and Starfleet, but the return to the Mirror Universe in STAR TREK: DEEP SPACE NINE, ENTERPRISE, and DISCOVERY is mostly indicative of the intense hypocrisy (and acute moral failings) of modern STAR TREK writers in addressing the conceptual structures in which the franchise operates.

DEEP SPACE NINE's Mirror Universe episodes are predicated on the idea that mirror-Spock did eventually succeed in reforming the Terran Empire, but it produced a worse result: The Alpha Quadrant was conquered and the former worlds of the Empire enslaved by the Klingon-Cardassian Alliance. The writers of DS9 have been explicit about how they intended this to be interpreted: According to Michael Piller, who is the credited co-writer of the script, in Ira Steven Behr's words, mirror-Spock "actually screwed things up" by bringing about "a much more gentle empire that was conquered and taken over by the Klingons, the Cardassians and others." (This is per Captains' Logs Supplemental: The Unauthorized Guide to the New Trek Voyages, as quoted in the Memory Alpha page for "Crossover.")

The idea of showing that the TOS characters were not infallible or always correct is by no means unreasonable; it's certainly true that throughout TOS, Kirk often attempts to enact dramatic, sweeping changes in other societies based on snap judgments, and it's fair to suppose that some of those decisions didn't turn out well (which is something the DC STAR TREK comic examined at several points). However, it's revealing, and dismaying, that the one DS9 chose to pursue is "Mirror, Mirror" rather than, for example, "A Taste of Armageddon," "The Apple," or "Return of the Archons." After all, what could be more emblematic of the liberal values of STAR TREK than the Kissingerian argument that fascism is justifiable where the alternative is disorder and instability? I don't hyperbolize when I say that this is the most morally indefensible position presented in DS9, although it's also sadly consistent with the franchise's political position overall.

To make matters worse, Robert Hewitt Wolfe, who contributed to the script, later asserted (in the Deep Space Nine Companion):

Empires aren't usually brutal unless there's a reason. There are usually external or internal pressures that cause them to be that way. So I just thought that if the parallel Earth was that brutal, there had to be a reason. And the reason was that the barbarians (the Klingons and the Cardassians) were at the gate.

This statement is so abhorrent I don't even know where to begin, and it makes an argument much darker than anything in "Mirror, Mirror," whose depiction of the Terran Empire is singularly horrifying, leavened only by the campy cartoonishness of its presentation.

The storyline of the ENTERPRISE Mirror Universe episodes, the two-part "In a Mirror, Darkly," is clearly shaped by Doylist (real-world) priorities — specifically, to nostalgically revisit the aesthetic of TOS — and the admittedly amusing spectacle of the regular cast playing comically evil variations of their Pollyanna-ish characters. It mercifully doesn't take Wolfe's bait about the rationale for the Empire, instead indicating that the divergence between the Prime and Mirror Universes dates back to before the events of FIRST CONTACT. However, "In a Mirror, Darkly, Part II" ends up strongly implying that the main reason the Terran Empire of Kirk's time is so similar to the Prime Universe Starfleet is that the Empire has captured (and presumably eventually reverse-engineered) a time- and dimension-displaced 23rd century Starfleet vessel, the doomed Defiant from the TOS episode "The Tholian Web." DISCOVERY muddies the waters on this point, but the ENTERPRISE episodes tend to undermine the idea that the Terran Empire is simply a different version of the Federation, instead implying that its technology and knowledge is stolen from its future "good" counterpart.

Then we have DISCOVERY's Mirror Universe episodes. Hoo boy. DISCOVERY acknowledges the ENTERPRISE storyline without really answering the questions it raises beyond indicating that knowledge of the captured Prime Universe ship is a closely guarded secret ("Vaulting Ambition"). However, DISCOVERY makes a series of extremely troubling attempts to argue that the moral failings of the Mirror Universe reflect differences in the structure of that universe (for instance, the utterly absurd assertion that the Mirror Universe is literally darker than the Prime Universe, rendering Terrans unusually photosensitive) and even the biology of its inhabitants. "Die Trying" indicates that by the 32nd century, Starfleet believes that "a chimeric strain on the subatomic level in the Terran stem cell" gives Terrans a biological inclination toward duplicity. Yikes! This is a ghastly eugenicist argument, if anything even more repellent than Wolfe's apologia for tyranny: Some people are just biologically predisposed to be evil! Thanks, I hate it!

Again, this is much worse, and much more facile, than "Mirror, Mirror." In "Mirror, Mirror," the Mirror Universe and its brutal Terran Empire serve as essentially a moral bellwether for the Federation and the familiar STAR TREK characters. Its condemnation of fascism is not deep ("the illogic of waste"), but perhaps the most valuable point it makes is that the (relative) goodness of the Federation and Starfleet is not a state of being, but rather the product of an ongoing series of moral choices. This is the other part of Kirk's argument to mirror-Spock: When mirror-Spock remarks, "One man cannot summon the future," Kirk immediately retorts, "But one man can change the present."

DISCOVERY takes the opposite position: The evils of the Mirror Universe are intrinsic and immutable, and its resemblance to the Prime Universe is largely a coincidence that is rapidly diminishing ("Terra Firma" indicates that the universes have diverged so greatly after the DS9 era that crossover will eventually become impossible). Its principal ethical or moral relevance to the Prime Universe is simply to be an obstacle and an affirmation of the Prime Universe's utopian goodness rather than an examination, even a flawed one, of it might actually mean.

[cauchesque]

genuinely remarkable how many people are willing to just completely give up on ground reality in favor of blind social association games. they don't even fool themselves, they just decided to completely relinquish the object level and enter a world which is to gossip and callout posts what the realm of forms is to physics

[fruityfinch]

This is what I think the first Doctor (of Doctor Who) would look like as an animal!

It’s funny to think how badly the show would probably have done if it launched in 2005 with the first Doctor at the helm. At least to begin with he was grumpy, surly, and more than a little stuck up - and even when he stopped trying to actively kill or abandon his human companions he could still be pretty short with them! Nowadays the various Doctors like humanity and mostly are capable of maintaining friendships… but these are traits he had to earn over time…

As a bonus here’s his granddaughter, Susan, who would therefore probably also be a goat?? I don’t know. She was much more agreeable but also very odd.

[freakinator]

i feel like perhaps my own sense of morality and personhood gets a lil lost in translation when i do analysis type shit so just some things to keep in mind when reading anything from me

i dont really have an internal sense of morality, simply consequences and principles

this means i dont really care for whats "good", simply for whats logical which can sometimes be confused for/muddled with whats good cause to me whats logical is whatever causes the least problems in the long run

this also means that things like hypocricy, selfishness, deceit, etc are value neutral to me and are only really problems when they actually Cause problems so when i say someone has a trait thats commonly seen as something negative i dont necessarily see it as such

related to the above, i believe most personality traits are value neutral including things commonly seen as "good" and that on their own they dont mean much of anything, their meanings come from how the actual person uses them

its also why i dont really take much note of "negative" values until they pass a certain threshold or if im specifically talking about those traits

i react a lot more than i actually feel cause if i align with what i actually feel then yall are literally getting nothing from me ever lol

im a Lot more paranoid and emotionally & interpersonally disconnected than i let on which definitely colors how i do analysis

this especially applies to psychology things cause things related to it can be a genuine danger for me (both socially and my own psyche) so im a lot more hyperreactive of warning signs regarding that (whether perceived or true)

uhh i dont think it actually Changes what i say but it might change how yall read my posts, unless ig youre someone who already assumed i dont actually care that much lol

[bumblingbabooshka]

[TUVOKTOBER: Day 30] POV: Starfleet ensign asks fellow crewman to sit together at lunch. Lives to regret it.