#Socially Problematic Children

[beartoothbarry]

I hate when I fall in love with a local band because then nobody else knows about them. WHY DOESN'T EVERYONE IN THE WORLD KNOW ABOUT SOCIALLY PROBLEMATIC CHILDREN??? they have vampires and cool guitar riffs and a funny music video about a sandwich that kicks all their asses. Everybody should know about them

[meowtalhead]

More patches >:3c

[carmsgarms]

Lol ew I found my abuser's wife's Instagram (we all went to the same high school so we have mutual friends) why does he look exactly the same as he did 15 years ago ((it's bc he's a manchild who won't ever grow up tbh))

[lumaspin]

i don’t think tumblr is ready for this take but yall remember how the twilight renaissance shed a lot of light on how things commonly classed as “women’s interests” were regularly shit on and socially acceptable to put down bc misogyny and whatever else. that but with disney world & the disney adult phenomenon

[aalt-ctrl-del]

republicans today really be out here having "that talk" with parents, telling them to tell kids,

[homoquartz]

this post is not gonna be well put together but i am having feelings

mean girls is trending right now because the musical movie just came out and i feel insane. idk why i do, it was stupid of me to think that most people Got It, no one ever gets it, it was always about the memes and the aesthetic.

the first mean girls movie was based on a nonfiction book called queen bees and wannabes. it interviewed and discussed the social hierarchy system in teen girl friendships. how they hold each other to these insane standards of heternormative femininity out of sheer terror that they won't meet those standards themselves. the way they leverage their relationships for some small degree of power in a world designed to strip them of it, even if it drags other girls down.

the "you can only wear your hair in a ponytail once a week and on wednesdays we wear pink" speech was not an original creation for the script. it's a QUOTE from a real teenage girl. those were REAL RULES.

then the musical came, and it was one step removed from the intended messaging of the film. OG mean girls was not perfect (and was extremely racist), but it said what needed said. the musical leaned on the comedy more, but still left a heartfelt undertone, and still critiqued the systems in place. of course no piece of media is going to be perfect, but it was about the conversation.

then this new movie comes out and it is washed over in the veneer of white hollywood feminism so thick you can't see anymore. the problematic aspects of the original movie are taken out to avoid "offending" when the offense was the point. it becomes toothless, it becomes some other thing entirely. they changed karen's line "i expect to run the world in shoes i cannot walk in" to "watch me as i run the world in shoes i cannot walk in." because choice feminism is in vogue, suddenly this character whose entire point is that she doesn't think deeply about WHY she does anything is suddenly hip to the fact that the world is against her.

i think of sokka losing his misogyny arc in the new atla. i think of the Heathers remake casting the bitchy, identical heathers as queer and hollywood-fat outcasts. as if the story, the meaning, the allegory is hidden in the sets and the jokes and the music. it's a whole new thing now, and it's a thing that means nothing in particular.

the plastics should not wear jeans. they should not have curves. their queerness should be suppressed, painful. their sexuality is not a slay, it's the only thing they think they have of value. the santa dance isn't sexy, it's shocking, it's mortifying - they are children.

they're not mean because "we are all mean." they are mean because they are girls in a world that brutalizes them and crushes them into a standardized shape. they are mean because the world is mean to them. they are mean because it gives them some power back. they are mean because it's the only weapon they have.

the landscape of femininity today has shifted to camera-ready makeup at the age of 10, stringent performative hygiene standards, and avoiding being caught on film while having a genuine emotion. the consumerism, the fatphobia, the racism, the classism, the homophobia remain. We could have had a conversation about that.

[autistichalsin]

In retrospect, four years later, I feel like the Isabel Fall incident was just the biggest ignored cautionary tale modern fandom spaces have ever had. Yes, it wasn't limited to fandom, it was also a professional author/booktok type argument, but it had a lot of crossover.

Stop me if you've heard this one before: a writer, whether fan or pro, publishes a work. If one were to judge a book by its cover, something we are all taught in Kindergarten shouldn't happen but has a way of occurring regardless, one might find that there was something that seemed deeply problematic about this work. Maybe the title or summary alluded to something Wrong happening, or maybe the tags indicated there was problematic kinks or relationships. And that meant the story was Bad. So, a group of people takes to the Twittersphere to inform everyone who will listen why the work, and therefore the author, are Bad. The author, receiving an avalanche of abuse and harassment, deactivates their account, and checks into a mental health facility for monitoring for suicidal ideation. They never return to their writing space, and the harassers get a slap on the wrist (if that- usually they get praise and high-fives all around) and start waiting for their next victim to transgress.

Sounds awful familiar, doesn't it?

Isabel Fall's case, though, was even more extreme for many reasons. See, she made the terrible mistake of using a transphobic meme as the genesis to actually explore issues of gender identity.

More specifically, she used the phrase "I sexually identify as an attack helicopter" to examine how marginalized identities, when they become more accepted, become nothing more than a tool for the military-industrial complex to rebrand itself as a more personable and inclusive atrocity; a chance to pursue praise for bombing brown children while being progressive, because queer people, too, can help blow up brown children now! It also contained an examination of identity and how queerness is intrinsic to a person, etc.

But... well, if harassers ever bothered to read the things they critique, we wouldn't be here, would we? So instead, they called Isabel a transphobic monster for the title alone, even starting a misinformation campaign to claim she was, in fact, a cis male nazi using a fake identity to psyop the queer community.

A few days later, after days of horrific abuse and harassment, Isabel requested that Clarkesworld magazine pull the story. She checked in to a psych ward with suicidal thoughts. That wasn't all, though; the harassment was so bad that she was forced to out herself as trans to defend against the claims.

Only... we know this type of person, the fandom harassers, don't we? You know where this is going. Outing herself did nothing to stop the harassment. No one was willing to read the book, much less examine how her sexuality and gender might have influenced her when writing it.

So some time later, Isabel deleted her social media. She is still alive, but "Isabel Fall" is not- because the harassment was so bad that Isabel detransitioned/closeted herself, too traumatized to continue living her authentic life.

Supposed trans allies were so outraged at a fictional portrayal of transness, written by a trans woman, that they harassed a real life trans woman into detransitioning.

It's heartbreakingly familiar, isn't it? Many of us in fandom communities have been in Isabel's shoes, even if the outcome wasn't so extreme (or in some cases, when it truly was). Most especially, many of us, as marginalized writers speaking from our own experiences in some way, have found that others did not enjoy our framework for examining these things, and hurt us, members of those identities, in defense of "the community" as a nebulous undefined entity.

There's a quote that was posted in a news writeup about the whole saga that was published a year after the fact. The quote is:

The delineation between paranoid and reparative readings originated in 1995, with influential critic Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. A paranoid reading focuses on what’s wrong or problematic about a work of art. A reparative reading seeks out what might be nourishing or healing in a work of art, even if the work is flawed. Importantly, a reparative reading also tends to consider what might be nourishing or healing in a work of art for someone who isn’t the reader. This kind of nuance gets completely worn away on Twitter, home of paranoid readings. “[You might tweet], ‘Well, they didn’t discuss X, Y, or Z, so that’s bad!’ Or, ‘They didn’t’ — in this case — ‘discuss transness in a way that felt like what I feel about transness, therefore it is bad.’ That flattens everything into this very individual, very hostile way of reading,” Mandelo says. “Part of reparative reading is trying to think about how a story cannot do everything. Nothing can do everything. If you’re reading every text, fiction, or criticism looking for it to tick a bunch of boxes — like if it represents X, Y, and Z appropriately to my definitions of appropriate, and if it’s missing any of those things, it’s not good — you’re not really seeing the close focus that it has on something else.”

A paranoid reading describes perfectly what fandom culture has become in the modern times. It is why "proship", once simply a word for common sense "don't engage with what you don't like, and don't harass people who create it either" philosophies, has become the boogeyman of fandom, a bad and dangerous word. The days of reparative readings, where you would look for things you enjoyed, are all but dead. Fiction is rarely a chance to feel joy; it's an excuse to get angry, to vitriolically attack those different from oneself while surrounded with those who are the same as oneself. It's an excuse to form in-groups and out-groups that must necessarily be in a constant state of conflict, lest it come across like This side is accepting That side's faults. In other words, fandom has become the exact sort of space as the nonfandom spaces it used to seek to define itself against.

It's not about joy. It's not about resonance with plot or characters. It's about hate. It's about finding fault. If they can't find any in the story, they will, rest assured, create it by instigating fan wars- dividing fandom into factions and mercilessly attacking the other.

And that's if they even went so far as to read the work they're critiquing. The ones they don't bother to read, as you saw above, fare even worse. If an AO3 writer tagged an abuser/victim ship, it's bad, it's fetishism, even if the story is about how the victim escapes. If a trans writer uses the title "I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter" to find a framework to dissect rainbow-washing the military-industrial complex, it's unforgivable. It's a cesspool of kneejerk reactions, moralizing discomfort, treating good/evil as dichotomous categories that can never be escaped, and using that complex as an excuse to heap harassment on people who "deserve it." Because once you are Bad, there is no action against you that is too Bad for you to deserve.

Isabel Fall's story follows this so step-by-step that it's like a textbook case study on modern fandom behavior.

Isabel Fall wrote a short story with an inflammatory title, with a genesis in transphobic mockery, in the hopes of turning it into a genuine treatise on the intersection of gender and sexuality and the military-industrial complex. But because audiences are unprepared for the idea of inflammatory rhetoric as a tool to force discomfort to then force deeper introspection... they zeroed in on the discomfort. "I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter"- the title phrase, not the work- made them uncomfortable. We no longer teach people how to handle discomfort; we live in a world of euphemism and glossing over, a world where people can't even type out the words "kill" and rape", instead substituting "unalive" and "grape." We don't deal with uncomfortable feelings anymore; we censor them, we transform them, we sanitize them. When you are unable to process discomfort, when you are never given self-soothing tools, your only possible conclusion is that anything Uncomfortable must be Bad, and the creator must either be censored too, or attacked into conformity so that you never again experience the horrors of being Uncomfortable.

So the masses took to Twitter, outraged. They were Uncomfortable, and that de facto meant that they had been Wronged. Because the content was related to trans identity issues, that became the accusation; it was transphobic, inherently. It couldn't be a critique of bigger and more fluid systems than gender identity alone; it was a slight against trans people. And no amount of explanations would change their minds now, because they had already been aggrieved and made to feel Uncomfortable.

Isabel Fall was now a Bad Person, and we all know what fandom spaces do to Bad People. Bad People, because they are Bad, will always be deserving of suicide bait and namecalling and threatening. Once a person is Bad, there is no way to ever become Good again. Not by refuting the accusations (because the accusations are now self-evident facts; "there is a callout thread against them" is its own tautological proof that wrongdoing has happened regardless of the veracity of the claims in the callout) and not by apologizing and changing, because if you apologize and admit you did the Bad thing, you are still Bad, and no matter what you do in future, you were once Bad and that needs to be brought up every time you are mentioned. If you are bad, you can NEVER be more than what you were at your worst (in their definition) moment. Your are now ontologically evil, and there is no action taken against you that can be immoral.

So Isabel was doomed, naturally. It didn't matter that she outed herself to explain that she personally had lived the experience of a trans woman and could speak with authority on the atrocity of rainbow-washing the military industrial complex as a proaganda tool to capture progressives. None of it mattered. She had written a work with an Uncomfortable phrase for a title, the readers were Uncomfortable, and someone had to pay for it.

And that's the key; pay for it. Punishment. Revenge. It's never about correcting behavior. Restorative justice is not in this group's vocabulary. You will, incidentally, never find one of these folks have a stance against the death penalty; if you did Bad as a verb, you are Bad as an intrinsic, inescapable adjective, and what can you do to incorrigible people but kill them to save the Normal people? This is the same principle, on a smaller scale, that underscores their fandom activities; if a Bad fan writes Bad fiction, they are a Bad person, and their fandom persona needs to die to save Normal fans the pain of feeling Uncomfortable.

And that's what happened to Isabel Fall. The person who wrote the short story is very much alive, but the pseudonym of Isabel Fall, the identity, the lived experiences coming together in concert with imagination to form a speculative work to critique deeply problematic sociopolitical structures? That is dead. Isabel Fall will never write again, even if by some miracle the person who once used the name does. Even if she ever decides to restart her transition, she will be permanently scarred by this experience, and will never again be able to share her experience with us as a way to grow our own empathy and challenge our understanding of the world. In spirit, but not body, fandom spaces murdered Isabel Fall.

And that's... fandom, anymore. That's just what is done, routinely and without question, to Bad people. Good people are Good, so they don't make mistakes, and they never go too far when dealing with Bad people. And Bad people, well, they should have thought before they did something Bad which made them Bad people.

Isabel Fall's harassment happened in early 2020, before quarantine started, but it was in so many ways a final chance for fandom to hit the breaks. A chance for fandom to think collectively about what it wanted to be, who it wanted to be for and how it wanted to do it. And fandom looked at this and said, "more, please." It continues to harass marginalized people, especially fans of color and queen fans, into suffering mental breakdowns. With gusto.

Any ideas of reparative reading is dead. Fandom runs solely on paranoid readings. And so too is restorative justice gone for fandom transgressions, real or imagined. It is now solely about punitive, vigilante justice. It's a concerted campaign to make sure oddballs conform or die (in spirit, but sometimes even physically given how often mentally ill individuals are pushed into committing suicide).

It's a deeply toxic environment and I'm sad to say that Isabel Fall's story was, in retrospect, a sort of event horizon for the fandom. The gravitational pull of these harassment campaigns is entirely too strong now and there is no escaping it. I'm sorry, I hate to say something so bleak, but thinking the last few days about the state of fandom (not just my current one but also others I watch from the outside), I just don't think we can ever go back to peaceful "for joy" engagement, not when so many people are determined to use it as an outlet for lateral aggression against other people.

[transmutationisms]

so i saw that ask you responded to re: problematic kinks and i was wondering what your thoughts were regarding like. non offending pedophiles (dont think of that as a kink but its what the ask made me think of). i hear a lot about restorative justice and how that relates to sexual assault but i have no idea what the approach is to stop offenses from happening if someone is worried they will escalate. i don't think porn addiction or whatever is real or that certain porn always leads to certain behaviors/perceptions but i never really see escalation in general ever talked about. is it just a shame cycle that stops people from changing? or is it a hardwired thing?

the reason you're stuck is because you're treating child sexual abuse, asymmetrically, as though it is a function of individual attraction or desire. when we talk about other forms of child abuse, we don't invent a psychological state that inexorably compels the perpetrator to commit abuse, and we understand the abuse to arise in the context of children's social, legal, and economic disempowerment. furthermore, when we talk about sexual abuse of adults, we don't present it as the inevitable outcome of an irresistable desire, or really as having anything to do with desire in the first place; it is a form of violence that both arises from and perpetuates structures of misogyny, racism, ableism, &c. when you try to discuss csa by discoursing about The Pedophile, nefarious individual afflicted with an evil and uncontrollable desire, you treat csa as though it is ontologically distinct from both other forms of child abuse and other manifestations of sexual abuse. this is a myth that specifically justifies closer family control over children, despite the fact that most csa comes from people the child knows and is structurally disempowered in comparison to: parents, priests, doctors, &c. this framing is not just fruitless but harmful.

[pawberri]

The key problem with "proship vs anti" discourse is that the most extreme versions of each side, the ones who actually bother to identify with these labels, accepted each others worst takes as arguments they had to debate. "Fiction =/= reality" is, in practice, an absurdly reductionist, anti-intellectual, thought-terminating-cliche that dictates we can learn nothing about a person via art and that their fiction reflects no political or moral messaging worthy of critique. In response to this, the "puriteens" who are too young to possibly hope to articulate their discomfort, to untangle their position from what is often real trauma experienced online, simply argue "yes, fiction influences and reflects reality in a 1 to 1 capacity." They, and people who want to use the groundwork they laid to make bad-faith callouts, make bad arguments about how the action of engaging in problematic fiction is on equal ground to real life abuse, or is a clear indicator of interest in real life abuse. Both of these arguments are terrible, but each side seems to radicalize the other further and further into their own brands of anti-intellectual reactionary belief. "Proshippers" become libertarian absolutists about free speech and view all transgression as righteous and alternative and therefore leftist. They gain a reactionary nostalgia for the past, desiring a time when people didn't seem to care about the implications of art. "Antis" become authoritarian and hypervigilant for signs of moral decay, at their worst, willing to align themselves with government bodies that offer carceral solutions to the debate. They are willing to use harassment as a tool of punishment, which then leads to false accusations and a fear of openness that puts people at risk of being triggered via obfuscation. (That said, proshippers also take part in plenty of harassment.)

I will say that I believe both of these movements are equally sensitive to co-opting by right-wing forces. We see the authoritarian tendencies of anti culture in harassment campaigns and even the way Republican law makers co-opt "grooming." The proship/fic crowd has such extreme nostalgia for the past that I often see people align themselves with the cultures of 4chan or other happily right-wing websites. They so heavily reject the idea that a drawn sexual depiction of a child could reflect any desire that they are disinterested in analyzing what the motivation behind the depiction is. i.e If we track the history of lolicon in Japan we do find that is, yes, countercultural, but that counter culture is right wing, very misogynistic, and defensive of patriarchial Japanese culture as it is and was including its culture around rape and abuse. Plenty of fictional content works as radicalization material, and radicalization material needs to be ambiguous. There is a valid reason to be hesitant to trust people who consume this content, even if I do not believe most of them will ever be dangerous towards children. The mere presence of sexuality is not enough to make a movement left wing. This kind of thing can again be seen in right-wing libertarian movements in the US. (And even leftist movements can be bigoted and even "pro-pedophilia" or otherwise disinterested in social reform around abuse.)

Is all content with elements of age-play this way? No. But to me, that is why kink media deserves to be treated as art and analyzed, critiqued, treated seriously. It doesn't have to do anything to anyone to be worthy of a moral critique. Said moral critique just doesn't warrant harassment and cruelty and reactionary exaggerations of the person consuming said content.

Anyway, what's my point in saying all this? I don't know. I'm just begging you to tag your God damn content with specific tags instead of random and nebulous shit like "dead dove" or "dark content", and also begging you to stop harassing people who do tag their content so I don't have to guess what "dead dove" and "dark content" mean. No one will erase incest kink fics or people who feel sickened by the idea of them off this earth because we aren't god, but we could at least all be responsible about tagging, flagging, and age-gating our stuff.

[autolenaphilia]

The anti-kink moral crusade rests on a lot of transmisogynistic assumptions.

Of course it’s no surprise, since it rests on ideas from the moralizing arguments about bdsm made by radfems in the 70s. The only change is that they are being massively hypocritical and inconsistent about which kinks are bad now, as I pointed out before. Now it’s only certain kinks, like consensual non-consent and fauxcest, that are bad because they “fetishize abuse”, and not bdsm as whole, despite that being inarguably true about bdsm.

And that’s purely to broaden the appeal of such arguments, so that even self-described “leatherfags” can moralize about fauxcest. The morals and principles are frankly just “It’s okay if gay men call their boyfriends “daddy”, because I find that hot, but if a trans lesbian couples pretend to be sisters it’s evil.”

And you can’t really appropriate the radfem arguments about kink without taking their transmisogyny onboard, since they stem from the same transmisogynist bio-determinist root ideology. Janice Raymond in The Transsexual Empire explained trans women through a lens of pathological sadomasochism. Years before Blanchard’s autogynephilia concept, radfems have seen transfemininity and kink as the same thing.

The image of the trans woman painted by radfems then and now, is of privileged males appropriating the pain and suffering of real wombyn, and playacting this suffering for their own perverted sexual amusement. And that is the same image painted of trans women with incest and cnc kinks in modern callout posts. They just remove the explicitly terfy language to make it less obvious. Instead of making a mockery of misogyny in general, we are instead accused of mocking the experiences of the survivors of sexual abuse.

And that boils down to the same thing. Survivors of sexual assault are often as a group assumed to be afab. This ties into a specific transmisogynist discourse. It’s one that argues that afab children are more often sexually assaulted, and that trans women are not targeted by sexual violence pre-transition, and comes to the conclusion that this proves that trans women are male socialized and privileged. This is the fairly nasty transmisogynist undercurrent here.

And it’s proven when in discussions about the transmisogyny of callout culture, a common cliché line in response is that “clearly some people’s worst oppression is being told they are freaks for shipping incest.” This treats transfems as ultra-privileged and transmisogyny as not real at all.

Of course in reality, transfems are disproportionate targets of sexual violence even in childhood and pre-transition. And many survivors of childhood abuse have these problematic abuse-fetishizing kinks, and use it to deal with their trauma, including many of the kinky transfems being called out.

And even if no one involved in the sexual roleplay and fiction being criticized have trauma, the trauma of other non-involved people is not a good argument for its destruction. It’s a reasonable demand to ask for triggering material to be tagged properly so you can avoid it, it’s unreasonable to demand it shouldn’t exist.

Yet transfems are expected to accede to the latter demand. And I think this is because of what May Peterson calls transfeminized debt. It’s how we trans women in feminist circles are expected to be perfect women and perfect feminists to be acknowledged as women at all, instead of as monsters to be destroyed. Of course because nobody is perfect, this leads to every trans woman eventually being thought of as a monster.

We are treated as having to pay off the debt of male socialization/privilege to get basic human rights. And this in practice means conceding every disagreement with TME people, and agreeing to every demand they make of us. Or else we get the hot allostatic load treatment.

And that’s why kinky transfems are expected to fulfil the ridiculous demand from certain puritanical TME people that “I’m not involved in your kink, but I have trauma relating to it, so you can’t do it.” And are treated as evil monsters for not fulfilling it. It’s clearly transfeminized debt and transmisogyny, we are treated as privileged perverted monsters, inherently exempt from sexual violence. And that is used to justify sexual harassment, in the form of callout posts for our sex lives.

[aryana-thefairy]

Astrology observations part-3 🦋

🦋Libra Sun have the best complexion and usually clear skin. The sun radiates from within. They act silly to confuse people but they are wise. I have never seen an unattractive Libra sun. There is something about them that makes them so pretty. Everyone’s crush.

🦋Venus in 11H has to do with glamour. They have classy rich social circles. Tend to have more friends from the opposite sex. The friends have a big impact on them. A desire for rich successful high profile life. Also, tend to be a hoarder. They are loved by all.

🦋I love how opinionated Aries women are. They tend to be feminists or environmentalists. They scare the hell out of men. It's their way or high way. Why do so many aries women have water sign children, it's cute.

🦋People with Saturn with 0-degree placement were independent from a young age. Since the time they were born, they were already done with everyone’s shit. Might not have the easiest childhood. Also, tend to be emotionally closed off as adults. But my god their sense of humour is dark, with the right crowd, they truly shine.

🦋Lilith in 1H or Lilith conjunct ascendant, so what is it like being accused all the time? Women accuse you of stealing their boyfriends and men accuse of you flirting even when you are not.

🦋Lilith in 12H, I already mention this placement in previous observations. Let's look at the positive side. Your sensual energy might not be too upfront. But people can’t forget about you. You haunt their subconscious mind. So there is a tendency for others to get obsessed with you. Your ex-lovers or friends can never get over you. It's impossible.

🦋The wit of Gemini mercury is so hot. Their memory is too good. An intellectual.

🦋Virgo mars are so logical and strategic with their actions. I would go to them for any kind of advice. They are the master planners. Ready for anything.

🦋Scorpio midheaven, they are people’s guilty pleasure. People hate them because they can not be them. At the same time they are appealing to others, everyone has eyes on them.

🦋Neptune in 1H have trail of copycats. It is what it is.

🦋I feel Sagittarius's placement have too many love interest. Best bodies. Amazing butt. Especially Sagittarius rising are some of the prettiest people I have ever seen.

🦋Venus in 2H tends to marry rich. They can become famous too.

🦋Sun in 1H or Sun conjunct ascendant are warm, charismatic, and regal. They appear radiant and have glowing complexions. Prominent foreheads. I don’t think this placement has any cons. Definitely makes life easy. Can be self-centred. Divine wisdom. Powerful leaders. 

🦋Aquaruis rising look exotic or unique. They often appear eccentric and would constantly say they are weird. Gives off maniac pixie girl or guy vibes.

🦋Cancer Mercury / Taurus Mercury are great listeners. They are the true best friends. Empathetic. Provide words of comfort to others. I think it takes great emotional intelligence to be understanding and empathetic. Cancer mercury is unbeatable in that aspect.

🦋Capricorn suns are frank and straight to the point. They are the least problematic people of all. If you have beef with them, it's mostly one-sided because they are focused on building their empire. They take no shit from others and might appear cold. They are real sweethearts. Capricorn sun/moon / rising are often the eldest children in the family.

Disclaimer: Take what resonates with you. Personal observations are biased.

[beartoothbarry]

Obsessed with this one local band called Socially Problematic Children. Their riffs feel so good on my brain, I've gone to see them twice now. Highly recommend them to everyone in the entire world

[lua-magic]

Mercury and your buisness Mind .

This blog is for those specially who wants to get into business or are confused between job and buisness or what kind of business would suit them.

Mercury is our logical mind, we also call it our business mind.

Which ever house Mercury sits in your chart that house related work or buisness you can easily get into.

Mercury in ancendent.

Native is made for business, he/she can get into any business and be successful. Such native has got strong business mind

Mercury in second houses

Mercury is exalted here, it makes you great speaker here, however this house is of family, so native can get into family Buisness or run buisness with family.

This house is alsovforbfood, so if moon is exalted then native can go into food related or kitchen or cloud kitchen business as well.

Mercury in third House.

Native would be great in communication, media, tours and travel and commission related work or business. If Mars is exalted then native can work with his siblings as well.

Mercury here decreases your courage, so native would be unwilling to take initiative, but if Mercury is not afflicted then person could work with his friends and would get support from his friends as well.

Mercury in fourth house.

There are two placement of Mercury which is tricky, one is fourth and second is in ninth house.

Whenever Mercury sits with moon or in cancer, Mercury make native obsessive and disturbs the mental peace of native.

It gives native OCD, especially if moon is afflicted then it causes anxiety, fear and overthinking.

As Mercury is fast moving planet so it makes moon highly disturbed 😧.

Remedy.

Remedy is to actually, decrease the strength of Mercury, ie, Mercury is your friend and social circle, such native should sit in isolation and should have minimum friends, Quality over quantity.

For gains and Money this placement is excellent.

Well, such natives are good in real estate, and with land related work or business.

They can also go for home related buisness like home decoration, or selling home decoration, furniture, luxury furniture, especially if their Venus is also exalted.

Mercury fifth House.

Best placement for Mercury, native is fast learner and life long Lerner and teacher.

Native would be successful due to his own intelligence, and learning.

Native could be author and writer as well.

Native could also opt for teaching and counseling.

Native can also do books related buisness.

Native is great with children and could get into buisness that is for kids, like, children book, teaching, selling toys or even writing children novel.

Mercury in sixth house.

This is the only placement where Mercury is comfortable doing job as it loves to solve day today problems, it is great problem solver here

But, you can go into service related buisness like, food service, taxi services any buisness that provides service to its customers.

Mercury is seventh house.

Relationship wise this is problematic placement, as Mercury is asexual planet and also fast moving planet, so it creates problems in relationship but buisness wise it is an excellent placement.

Native can get into retail buisness, or go for branding, networking, even make themselves as big brand.

Mercury in eitgth House.

Native thinks alot about money and gains, and money wise it is good only when native is involved in eighth house related work like Bank, insurance, CA, occult, auditing, digital marketing , crypto currency such person could also become great detective, they can go into Research and development as well.

Native is great when it comes to dealing with other's money 🤑, they make good salesman as well.

Mercury ninth house

Here, placement is challenging as Mercury damages the Jupiter, Mercury is selfish, while Jupiter is divine and loves to give that is why Jupiter rules twelfth house which house is house of giving.

Jupiter also rules ninth house, which house of Dharma, religion and rules, and Mercury being prince doesn't like to follow rules

So, when you have this placement then it is better you get into business where religion is involved like selling religious books so, you can save your Jupiter and Mercury is also happy.

But, be careful never go against morality in business because you will block all your blessings.

Native can sell, religious ornaments, things or books.

Mercury in tenth house 🏠.

Such people are great sales person and excellent at marketing and PR, these are the person who would sell comb to a bald person.

So, they make great salesman and marketing.

Such native could also work with government,or collaborate with government like government tender and work with them.

Mercury in eleventh house.

Such natives are great with masses, friends and are good in dealing with large number of people.

They should get into work that involves large numbers of people like forming corporative society, NGO, even they make great speaker, counsellor and teachers. People love to follow them, hence, they make great influencers as well

Mercury in twelfth House.

This is not good placement for Mercury and Mercury is uncomfortable here, Piesces is deep ocean and Mercury being prince doesn't like to go in dark, Mercury is also selfish so it doesn't like the idea of unconditional giving and charity which is also twelfth house.

But, twelfth house is also of, foreign land, meditation, spirituality, yoga, charity, and investment.

So, person could either work outside their motherland or get into import and export business.

They can also do business related to meditation, yoga, and spirituality.

They can also go for investment.

Now, Mercury also your speaking skills, If Mercury is afflicted by malefics then person would be extremely rude with thier words and would hurt lot of people.

When Mercury is with Mars native can go for automobiles or even in technical line.

[someoneintheshadow456]

I always knew that Instagram/Tiktok was exaggerated and fake but I didn’t know just HOW fake until I started actually going out and observing people in America. I thought that the disconnect between media and real life was much more noticeable in India, but it turns out that ALSO applies to the U.S.

Nobody actually dresses like a Gen Z except TikTok kids. No, college kids still look like college kids and not burnt up 45 year olds. No, Gen Alpha isn’t constantly wearing skincare and animal print onesies. Toys actually still exist and children play with them. iPad children aren’t the norm and in fact people glare at you if you have an iPad child. Nobody knows what “very demure very mindful” is. Nobody gives a fuck if you wear ankle socks or skinny jeans. Nobody actually thinks dark romance is problematic. You are more likely to see a person with a Walmart water bottle than you ever are to witness a Stanley cup. A shop forgot to take down their Pride Month decorations and used the OG flag, NOT the one with black and brown stripes (which in fact I have NEVER actually seen IRL even when I did go to the US in June).

TLDR social media in every part of the world is such a small fraction of the population that most of what happens on it is practically irrelevant.

[helluvathings]

It's interesting that the episode description straight up warned for Stolas lacking self-awareness. It's more or less a confirmation that Stolas and his character arc aren't finished, and between that and the content of the last couple episodes, I ended up going back through the series and looking at the path he's taken so far. Warning now, there's a lot of 'deconstructing' Stolas at first, but I do think he's on a positive trajectory and the set up serves as foundation for future character development.

Anyway for anyone interested in a from-the-beginning rundown of Stolas's arc, full post is below.

From his first conversation with Blitzø, you have Stolas in his bath making the favors for favors offer, while Blitzø is working and in a life-or-death situation. The language Stolas is using is too formal; it causes communication issues, and Blitzø has to tell him to stop using "rich person talk." The scene that sets up their whole dynamic is 1. Stolas establishing the transaction (given he could've straight up punished Blitzø for stealing or just taken back the book, this isn't bad; it just is), 2. Stolas at leisure while Blitzø's job has him in danger, and 3. the class/education difference resulting in Blitzø having difficulty understanding what Stolas is saying.

Move forward to Loo Loo Land. The language Stolas uses with Blitzø gets a lot of attention already, as does Stolas's rather poor grasp of social cues/difficulty seeing outside his own perspective causing him to clash with Octavia. One point I don't see raised as often is that Stolas hiring Blitzø to spend time together, when he doesn't need a bodyguard, and then sexualizing Blitzø while he does his job, is both condescending, and doesn't show much respect for what Blitzø actually does. He pays him more or less to put on a show, so Stolas can indulge a fantasy of them having a relationship (not because he's evil, because he doesn't know better).

Then you've got Stolas in the newest episode, getting annoyed with Blitzø for saying he thought Stolas couldn't be hurt because he was immortal. That if I.M.P. could handle Striker, Stolas surely could. Stolas's sarcastic, "It's not an imp's place to protect a Goetia, is it?" comes across different when considering Stolas literally once hired them as mock bodyguards. It just... escapes him, why Blitzø would think the idea of Stolas needing their help is outrageous. Never mind how clear Stolas's rescue in Truthseekers made their power disparity. Stolas often has trouble putting himself in other people's shoes, and it shows here.

The Harvest Moon Festival brings in Striker, who's basically a "class problems" mouthpiece, exaggerated for emphasis. He even remarks directly on how Stolas's treatment of Blitzø can look from the outside. There's also the episode's opening bedroom scene, where Stolas's idea of flirty talk is copious use of microaggressions, plus the later scene with Blitzø snapping about Stolas not using his proper name. It's likely not an accident that these things happen the same episode Striker appears.

Truthseekers has "impish little plaything," with honorable mention to Stolas pinching Blitzø's cheek and scolding I.M.P. like children. But it also has Blitzø's vision all but screaming how Stolas makes him feel. On the one hand, it's Stolas who brings him back to himself. He washes away the muck. He's something beautiful amidst the ugliness. But he's on a pedestal, he has Blitzø in chains. He has shadow Blitzøs fanning him like servants, and Blitzø stumbles away from him blind and mute, smothered by feathers.

Ozzie's is actually good for Stolas's development, because he gets his first reality check when Blitzø makes it clear he thinks Stolas only wants sex. (It also shows how Stolas feels about Blitzø behind the bad erotic-novel scripts he's been using, which is the first time the audience sees this outright). After that, Stolas realizes his relationship with Blitzø was problematic. He sees the transaction and gets rid of it, and he senses something off with his behavior that has him start calling Blitzø by name and stopping with the 'plaything' type remarks.

But the past two episodes have made it evident he'd made those realizations in a vacuum. His broader class awareness is basically nonexistent, and when Blitzø tries raising the issue, he groups Blitzø with Striker by default, as if any criticism of his status/wealth/privilege is unreliable and antagonistic toward him specifically. He refuses to sincerely consider that Blitzø isn't merely judging him, and that he might be saying something with legitimate basis.

The Circus is especially interesting. Aside from the commentary underlying the 'buying Blitzø' plot, the episode shows Stolas getting scolded by Paimon like a dog for showing respect to an imp; that likely wouldn't have been an isolated incident. It's played somewhat for humor ("I'm so good at daddying"), but it also shows why he'd have so much trouble with things like microaggressions. He has literally been trained to hold himself above others. And just going off the way Stolas is framed at Stella's party, isolated and alone, being laughed at by Stella and her friends, I suspect Stolas may see himself as a "good rich person," because he doesn't seem to fit well with the Goetia either; he's laughed at and bullied, he lacks privilege in his own ways. He identifies more with other demons than his own class--and it blinds him, I think, to the fact that he is still part of his class, and isn't immune to the problems that come with that.

Even in Seeing Stars, there's the moment with Stolas all but strangling that poor butler and hardly seeming to notice. In an episode that's almost entirely focused on father-daughter relationships, that still gets tossed in. Regarding the Octavia plot, Stolas lacking self-awareness comes up again; it's understandable that he's distracted with the divorce, and we do see him try to resolve the issue, but it feels like a quiet alarm indicating hey, you might have a recurring problem where your daughter is concerned.

Western Energy is another 'Striker shouting that class issues matter in this show' moment. While I think Stolas going the 'well, you're part of the system, so you can't complain' route when Striker tries bringing it up is loosely relevant, I also don't blame him for that one. Poor guy is being tortured, he deserves some slack. Oops, in my opinion, shows Stolas at his best; he's just been turned down by Ozzie, but he still sticks around and helps. We even see how sincerely happy he is when Fizz returns. It's a good example of how decent Stolas can be beneath it all, as well as his sense of romance appearing in a healthier way.

Then come Full Moon and Apology Tour, where most of the Stolas subtext gets screamed and/or bitterly snapped in his face by Blitzø. It's stated directly by the main character that those things matter, in a way that imo portrays Blitzø as at least partially sympathetic. And of course the Apology Tour episode description, yelling it for the folks in back.

What all this is trying to say is: 90% of Stolas's time on screen has set him up to have a 'getting more self aware' arc. I see a lot of accusations of the show babying Stolas, but I think it's more that it hasn't gotten around to doing what it wants with Stolas. There are 4 seasons. We're in the second. We've had Stolas's post-Ozzie's revelation, and now he's getting a lot more "you're part of the problem" feedback thrown his way. It's implied Octavia is going to contribute to that as well.

Anyway!! My personal guess so far is that if the "loses his powers and/or titles" theory that's been going around has any merit, that's going to instigate the start of actual, substantial change. Will that actually happen? No idea. But Stolas's flaws have been as articulated and developed as Blitzø's, and at this point, if the consequences aren't explored in the same way, it'll be dropping a ball that's already well in the air. I also think this isn't going to be a "fixed by the end of season 2" thing. Stolas problably won't appear again until Mastermind, and then there's just Sinsmas. There isn't time for him to change in two episodes. There is, however, time for him to have some big realizations, and for the change to happen next season.

[starastrologyy]

Composite Chart Notes 🪐

Hi everyone, please do not copy or repost anything I write on other social media platforms :) I recently became aware of a Pinterest page reposting all my posts from TikTok/tumblr! I don’t have a Pinterest for my astrology blog :)

A composite Aries Rising, can often indicate a very active couple. They may enjoy partaking in various sports or various forms of physical activities together. However, they can appear to be a very argumentative couple, this is especially true of mars, mercury, or pluto squares the composite ascendant. Their conflicts can often be made public.

This is interesting because in terms of long-distance couples, I often see Uranus conjunct the descendent or Uranus in the 3rd house in their composite charts. A composite Sag or Aqua rising is also common in the charts of couples who are long distance.

The North Node in the composite 5th house can indicate a couple who have children together.

Another indication of a “hidden” or private relationship, is if the composite chart ruler is in the 12th house.

This is more of a personal anecdote, but I once had a man slide in my DMs on Instagram. We had mutual followers but I didn’t personally know him. Long story short, he just began offering to buy me things/send me money with nothing in return. Obviously I found that kind of suspicious as there’s usually a catch! He didn’t even push meeting me in person! We just kinda spoke online for a bit. I got his birth details and ran a synastry chart between us. We had no 2nd or 8th house overlays. However, his Jupiter did aspect my Sun (which explains why he was so generous towards me). I then took a look into our composite chart, and our composite Sun & Moon are both in the composite 2nd house! Additionally , the ruler of our composite ascendant is in the 8th. Which explains why our relationship is literally based on him sharing his resources with me, giving me money, and buying me things. Obviously not all relationships with this kind of configuration will play out like this, I just thought this was so interesting.

There can be elements of sexual idealizations in relationships where there are hard Mars-Neptune aspects in the composite chart. One or both people may feel as if they have met their “dream” sexual partner if the orb is particularly tight. However, once the illusion or initial “high” fades. This aspect can prove to be problematic in many ways. There can be deceptions and disappointments that start to manifest. Mars square Neptune is common to see in the charts of *affairs* or short lived sexual relationships. However, please remember the entire chart needs to be taken into consideration.

Couples who travel a lot together usually have significant 3rd and 9th house placements in the composite. Jupiter in the composite 9th, 3rd, or conjunct the composite Mercury can also indicate a couple that travels frequently.

A couple with Jupiter or Venus in the composite 7th house, can make very good business partners. Couples who have the ruler of their composite midheaven, in the 7th house, may also decide to go into business together.

My readings are still open for those interested ! The link is in my bio :)