#Us politics is like a fandom seeing it in trending on this site | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

hanzi83 · 2 years ago

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Just Another Random Mental Check In (That no one asked for)

I figured I would do another mental check in for the sake of it, I think I am actually kind of liking writing blogs again over doing some of the podcasts, I mean it might be easier for the remaining of my following to actual follow along with, like would you rather waste time over accumulated rants over several days to just be put out there where you have to suffer through my stuttering, where some days it really gets bad, or would you rather a more direct message in written where the most you will have to deal with are run on sentences, suspect spelling etc, sometimes when I do the blog and certain words just stutter out and I struggle to spew it out, sometimes it feels like that scene in Bruce Almighty, where Jim Carey is fucking with Steve Carrell during his news broadcast, I know, I know, a 20 year old movie reference, and on a dated blog site that is deemed uncool because the new hard hitting shit is on substack, this is just a blog going off of vibes, but since world war 3 is trending, again, it feels every other day for the last 6 years that has happened. I keep thinking every day we are getting there sooner rather than later, you can just see how people and institutions are positioning themselves and how every day there is more trauma porn and if it is not that, there is more promotional corruption where we spend the discourse pointing out the hypocrisy of that institution and public figure where they become more cartoonish, you know people used to reduce me to just being a Howard Stern Wack Packer, and it is hilarious to me how much everyone, who used to at least sell themselves as being a respectable human being partaking in society, have now become a complete parody. It is why the entertainment world, while it still makes money, most of that shit is in the political discourse now, and anything exciting about celebrities is the real life drama and comedy shit that is happening. I feel we have manifested all our favorite entertainment and now we are getting the real life version of this entertainment, I have to remind myself of that since I am not watching every single movie and television show released because sometimes I hate missing out and caring about wrestling more, when that fandom has gone to complete shit. But maybe getting exhausted of these things is a good thing, I don’t need more entertainment in my life, I have a lifetime worth to consume and perpetuate tropes in my personality from absorbing this shit since I was a kid, I just observe how the discourse goes and what repeated tropes get repeated and beaten into the ground. Speaking of beating shit into the ground, I wake up every day and it is another day of sports entertainment easing into a more fascist world. Like the world we were living in before all this didn’t have normalized fascism that existed but now it has reached another level with how sophisticated it is by manufacturing consent with the entertainment and sell out celebrities, we have wanted to reboot our society to reestablish attitudes and ignorance from the 90’s mixed in with some truth, but not realizing all that shit that used to mean shit on the surface has become inflated since there are advancements in the game now that we have to pretend doesn’t exist so we have the narrative of the establishment being more liberal and having a bias towards woke shit, so anyone who says anything anti woke, or pro Trump is seen as the “just an opinion” and “cutting edge” because ever establishment hack has kayfabed their hatred and dumbed shit down, so other alt media places can constantly use it to dunk on since that has been their personality traits for the last 10 years, where it meant a bit more, but now most of the shit online is MSM level funding going on, maybe they are using other currency since the dollar doesn’t mean shit anymore. Again let me clarify if the previous sentences were not obvious, I am not some expert on shit, I am a pretty dumbed down guy who would try to go to smarter people to see what their narratives are, and now I am at the point where I can’t trust anyone, like am I allowed to be alarmed about other corrupted governments and what they might do, and not do it under a US imperialism mindstate where discredited public figures who never address the long list of what the US has been built on, and continues to do, just continue to fear monger about other corrupted governments, I at least get out of the habit not to generalize all the citizens in any country because that doesn’t solve shit, and I think we make the mistake of looking at the conflict in a 80’s aesthetic of pro wrestling where it is country vs country when I feel the far right wing movements all over the world have some alignment, it is like the fundamentalism the US has helped perpetuate in other countries was just practice before they bring it to the US officially. It is basically like ECW and other promotions who oppose the WWE, but in my opinion WWE always needed other promotions to establish shit before WWE finally borrowed from it and brought it to their company and that is how I see the political world wit how this shit plays out, people who are snooty and think of pro wrestling as low brow, I mean they already dumb down entertainment’s influence in general, but wrestling has always been the ugly stepchild of showbiz, but there is a reason why these politicians and celebs have always been fans of it, maybe not because they actually enjoy the actual product, but rather taking notes on how to use the elements implemented for their own personal gain, trying to manipulate a reaction by saying what needs to be said, depending on the role you are playing. So I don’t know which stances to really have on the impending doom now because it is hard to know who is telling the truth, and who has an agenda, and I feel like lately I have more vitriol to the online contingent because MSM has already been established as being a joke and it has been clear but that is all the material for the online shit, other than some people who used to claim being a left person is now perpetuating on the “underground internet platforms such as youtube” that Tucker Carlson is the only one telling the truth. I can’t keep up with the complexities and specifics of who worked for what think tank, or what obscure faction they are a part of and I wish sometimes the smarter ones could actually dumb down the messaging to get the general public to know, because the dumbed down sports entertainment that has more of the new age fundamentalism/conservative shit under the guise of super political correctness is what is running amok, because you find the right guise for the presentation and apolitical people won’t realize they are taking a politically motivated message that has an agenda, it has always been a regressive agenda but once you start hinting at progressive shit, it feels like that is the overbearing agenda that is getting out of control, while I feel that has helped the default agendas that have always been in place now stand out, which is why anyone is praising Trump will be seen as someone who is brave since it seems everyone fucking hates him and they clearly have an agenda because they are focusing on his corruption.

It feels like since the internet has become a lot more right wing with propped up accounts you have to cater to them for the entertainment or public figures to get some support and I feel the funded types online have made it seem they were calling out shit because it is neoliberal etc, which is a valid thing but it was not designed to get to a more progressive side, it was to bring in their own gimmicked right wing shit that people will not consider right wing since we give everything a cartoonish definition and put shit in a box. So now anyone who is not sharing the “liberal establishment” message feels like their message could never be compromised. It doesn’t feel we are in the business of actually exposing and explaining it because we insist on pretending we live in this regular world where the weird things going are just random acts playing out and we are just gonna compare it to whatever entertainment we watch, that is how committed we are to the entertainment, we have to pretend that saying there is organization into the imploding end goal and just the overall impending doom is some out there statement, and then these people from these alt media establishment like shows then pretend like anyone who thinks beyond the narratives presented are the ones who are insane, not the people who insist on playing their favorite television characters so they can give us gimmicked narratives so people can act out their sitcom dialogue and banter and then pretending the answers they have to countering the policies that the most wicked and corrupt politicians carry out, like this is not all planned to fall on its face. This is why I am not motivated to understand the rules that are advertised, literally everyone breaks the rules, there are inconsistencies, so why would I even learn the fucking rules. It is like when the wrestling world advertised traditional rules in their world, and trained you to understand what the standard protocol but then when the attitude era came, all those rules went out the window, and you broke stipulations.”Hey someone lost a match and said they would retire or not challenge for the title” but then crash television took over so those rules and stipulations didn’t even matter, and now I see that in politics. Normally when you are associated with a rapist, or a pedophile, you were kind of outcast from society, now you can just keep your high profile job and just exist for people to boo and hiss at you for. So it is my fault for looking at what is happening, but when I can’t have honest conversations about my concerns where this shit is going with people in my life, or people from my past etc, I have to rant and rave on social media. And that shit is dangerous because there are people who monitor me with great hatred and keep an eye on anything I say. Like I have stated, even if I come up with something that has legs, who is gonna give a shit because my message doesn’t reach the masses, everyday my followers list is decreasing more and more, but make no mistake dangerous people monitor my shit but if I am buying into your world of kayfabe, then no one knows who I am and I am a nobody so what threat do I serve, I am just some fatso rambling and creating bad AI Art while tweeting about wrestling and going on irrational proclamations of never watching the show again, and then I give back in. Again what threat do my theories serve if I am a nobody? You wanted this way. You get off on the fact that I am suppressed but then also then get upset that I don’t care how suppressed I am and continue to write down my thoughts, because I am supposed to feel isolated and neglected even online, like the people who run shit let me be isolated for the last 10 years for the last 10 plus years, but there was interaction going on with the Stern and wrestling fandom, but now they have made it possible to be isolated online and if I actually gave a fuck about my future, maybe I would be more insecure about it, although I am writing a blog at late hours of the night to talk about it so maybe there are some issues there, who fucking knows?

It feels like the same tropes and discourse goes on and it will continuously be on loop until it all officially goes to shit, every day I think we have reached that boiling point but we just go back to business as usual, we manage to create more discourse that use the backdrop of valid systemic shit but gimmick it for other grifts and causes that gets focused on more so than the actual systemic issue. I know even this blog has probably repeated the same shit I have said before, but maybe the world has gone to such a shitty place where it is repeated shit nonstop that now I am going so insane that now I am repeating the same shit over and over and expect to maybe think that this one blog will magically just change shit by the luck of the draw and maybe we can expose and explain what is truly going on, and not this fake Project Veritas level of “exposing” shit, but actually exposing these narratives and getting people prepared for what is to come because as far as I can see, the far right has always had their messaging to seem anti establishment and they amplified it and then there was some progression over the years, they fear mongered about that kind of change while also connecting it to the shady shit the democrats would be doing since the right wing trajectory system will book the decisions and have their figure heads, so now the far right can take advantage of calling out an already flawed system, while advocating for their deeply disturbed propaganda, and they can use their public figures to manufacture a lot of consent which will persuade people to move more right because they can count on the MSM to cover sensationalist representation that the right then can weaponize. That is how I see it, I could just be like everyone else and be alarmed by Clarence Thomas getting donations which will serve as a gimmicked way of bringing more villains to the forefront, like it is hard to get shocked that a donor to him would be into Nazi shit and it is like we know what these people are, but we have to act shocked and then we have to talk in circles with people who always have to hammer home that just because someone has an autographed copy of Mein Kamf, it doesn’t mean they support it because they could be in love with history, but is there not any other shit in history that you could collect? When you get some politicians speaking out about it, no one will take it seriously, even if the message is good, like not going by what the rulings are when the right never goes along with a bunch of rulings, these people will normalize their bigotry and racism etc be allowed that freedom, but people who represent the left have to limit the answers on the surface, because much like pro wrestling it is only interesting when the villains keep winning. So after all of this shit they have done, when one limited politician wants something done about it, it will be shat on, especially someone like AOC who is sports entertainer but she can do and say good things even if it is limited on the surface, so if in my fucked up head I know the world is supposed to implode, then it is more complex than “They voted against the people’s interest” and then have people who have dangerous ties and permitted outrage to react and not disclose their ties to corruption and questionable unethical tendencies with who is bankrolling them it becomes harder to trust their call outs of the system. So any kind of change does have to come from within that helps the outside carry that shit on, because nothing on the surface now will ever get better and that is on purpose because the real work is being done behind the scenes. I don’t believe anyone is truly 100 percent anti establishment, as much as they want to repeat the same old tired catchphrases etc. It gets exhausting, I have made the mistake in being so disillusioned by the MSM over the last 15 years, that hearing actual criticism of US foreign policy and other fucked up laws they are passing to fuck over its citizens was refreshing to hear it because back when I was a kid, anyone who didn’t praise a country 100 percent were labeled horrible people, so yeah me and probably a lot others gravitated to something other than the status quo and now the same people who would bash the status quo, have now become status quo by today’s standards, because the same shit 10 years ago that may have sounded revolutionary doesn’t mean as much coming from people who are sophisticating their grift to become more right wing because instead of just saying “We are sell outs who want to be associated with the Hollywood types and hang out with very powerful people so we will act like the wokeness is getting out of control and use sensationalist shit to convince people who are supposed to be left to embrace a more far right leaning mind” look no further than Ana Kasparian and Cenk from TYT, I have been pointing out for a year or so that they are slowly finding their reason to now think wokeness is getting too out of control, they will complain about culture wars issues, but they will boast about how they are better than MSM they are, they have record for everytime they were right about things, but yet when you have video of Ana defending the term birthing person within a medical conversation, she then all of a sudden brings on this issue of people referring to her as a birthing person like people are really doing that in her personal life, and she is doing this while there are fucking laws being passed to fuck over those communities, she could’ve went private to anyone who she feels is reducing her to a body part like she claims, but she purposefully did that, and then she has a bunch of far right wing accounts defending her, Candace fucking Owens is defending her and she gets mad at other people in the leftist space for critiquing her, and these critiques were fair but one woman thought people were coddling her when Ana knows better, so Ana didn’t mind giving a shitty “hot take” unprovoked and now she can do the pro wrestling shit of “YOU PEOPLE MADE ME DO THIS” so she and Cenk can become shitty sports entertainers who are not even funny, I hope the talented people from TYT leave and call this shit out but Cenk/Ana are probably like mob bosses of their institution and they have been waiting to have a mutual meeting spot with Jimmy Dore, David Rubin and other far right wing grifters, they will never admit that, because one of the things about sociopathic cults and very fucked up people is they never admit what fucked up shit they have done or will do, and they have gotten used to people enabling their shitty behavior that if you point out what unethical shit they have done they will lose it and deny it because they are fucked in their head, I have that shit in my life, I have jotted shit down whenever I need to vent off what I need to say and whenever anyone in my life denies what they have done or what they have said, I look back at the comments time to time when I jotted shit down, on a spiritual level, they will never fuck with me despite having the hive mind behind them who have enabled their shitty behavior of putting me through mental fucking hell, and these people still think they can be part of my life, like I can be my best self with people who have worked hard to suppress me so they could make backdoor deals and put things in place in case I do get vindication, so they can be around me then they will cater to people who hate me so they can oppose me. These sociopathic cults have that level of thinking and I might not have the back up to be able to say shit in person because they have connections with law enforcement or whatever power Mr Stern gave them, and they can shut me down, but they still monitor what I fucking say, they compromise anyone I make friends with but I would rather be dead than have to be around people who will never admit their wrongdoings and still get to act like they are better because of their aesthetic, and I see how people want to justify that a lot more, and people who oppose me will oppose anything I stand up for. When I was falling for regressive right wing talking points sophisticated under the guise of “celebrity just giving their opinion” like they are not a paid propaganda tool, people who have hatred for me would want to be on the opposite side but now that I have caught myself mentally from going further into the cult of what would be another right wing shit, people would rather be on that side to be part of the regressive side, and the funny thing is these people in general want to be stars in their own right but any negative opinion or pushback towards them they lose their minds, if me pointing out calmly what people have done or said gets so much sociopathic and vitriolic pushback, how will you handle it when people call you out for your shitty beliefs depending which billionaire is paying you. I have to be subjected to people who have had a lavish and luxurious life and have secrets to keep from me, get triggered by me having the views I have even though they don’t have to be involved, you think when people read this, you think any of them will reflect? Or will they jump in a group chat and take turns mocking my stuttering and making shitty jokes for their echo chamber because they can’t face how much more horrible they have become and how much more elitist they have become. People from my past who were not there for me when I had no one, will make me come out and beg for them to be part of my life again so they can know how much money my family supposedly and allegedly have so they can try to take and take and take, but they excluded me from monumental moments so they could hang out with celebs and partake in orgies because that is how you get bought off, they sold their souls for the good time but yet still need me and get mad at me if I don’t want it in my life. I won’t be able to escape this and I won’t be able to escape more and more people turning to the right wing and align with this new fascism that has been forming and I would rather be dead than have to see people I respected become these shitty sports entertainment characters that don’t mean shit because the entertainment is watered down and yet everyone thinks they have to become one, that becomes the number one goal while the systemic shit becomes a backdrop.

Anyways I know it is another blog that is all over the place, but when you have so many thoughts in your head and then old thoughts circulating in your head while you are still trying to process the fresh ones, my brain starts to malfunction. This is just a fatso in his mother's basement venting about the world so pay me no mind, but sometimes I just need to get shit off my chest, I know my journal thoughts are monitored so I at least will try to put this shit out there for an official publishing . It makes my haters’ leg up of monitoring me feel less than if I am putting out these thoughts in the public sphere because the one thing they get off on is monitoring what I say and thinking I have no fucking clue, in fact as I write this, they are not doing anything overly transparent but I notice I am getting a lot more “junk mail” being spammed towards me, it is a little bit of a nuisance but just the mere fact they have to fucking keep this shit going, and look I got another notification for 2 more emails with the junk shit just popping up. It is small and little thing that are done to try to annoy me, they constantly show they can hack my social media, they have not done anything too bad with it, but just the fact that they can show they can do that shit, they even report accounts I never interacted with or even saw the tweets from. As I write this another mass shooting fucking happened and you know nothing will fucking get done about it, we will find ways to weaponize the political motives behind this, because it feels like factions behind the scenes have forgotten to tell the masses they have their shooters ready and people will not give a shit because the culture war issues will have carte blanche while more mass shootings fucking happen, the people who act like they are doing due diligence by pointing out about gun laws etc, good attitude to have, but those insiders know they are never passing any good good legislation, it has become clear so we will get mad at the villains of the week and nothing will get solved whatsoever. The world is constantly falling apart, and this is why 20 years ago, when I was even more dumbed down, I could envision what the world was gonna turn to, that was very early on when the war on terror started and it felt we were going to get a bunch of ignorant talking points on television, the only art form that I found didn’t make me feel like a piece of shit for being a Muslim was probably hip hop, but then in 2004 when people turned against Bush a lot more, it gave me some hope even though my understanding was extremely limited, but maybe I could see a grand view of this world just going to shit, like I had experienced this shit in a past life. And now I am stuck here, more people are dying and being oppressed, they limit how much you can help on the surface, I don’t feel I can trust people anymore who used to be close with me, I am rewatching old episodes of Sopranos, and wondering if this world is just a big fucking nothing. Nothing will ever fucking get better it seems, and in the midst of all of this horrible shit happening, you know what gets traction online? All the shitty sports entertainment personalities who try to get canceled and have these stupid fake debates so both their clicks can feel they are useful and fighting this great cause. Complete and utter horsehit, the most mediocre personalities can be propped up and it isn’t because they are some great talent, it is because they are willing to become a regressive shit head first while dominating left spaces and getting all the points before they turn into fucking heels.

#Hanzi Howard Stern Show 2023 Mental Illness Sports Entertainment fascism heel turns gimmicks pro wrestling opinion theories no facts

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cubikzoa · 8 months ago

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Felt like I should post a polite reminder about the nature of creative media based on recent trends in fandom, because it’s good to get a refresher from all the social media chaos sometimes…

When I was really little, I used to play with Barbie dolls, like a lot of kids do. I would pop off the limbs of the Barbie dolls like I was an evil overlord as a joke, because I had a medieval phase and was an eccentric little kid overall. Now here’s what’s relevant: When I went to elementary school, me having fun popping the plastic legs off my dolls most certainly did not translate into wanting to yank the actual legs off of my classmates. Such a thought is never something that would cross my mind at all.

Now, that is essentially what fandom is: once a creator puts their work out in the world, other people perceive it and create off of it as they will. There’s no code to make people interpret things all the same way, because everyone is fundamentally different somehow. Fandom, in essence, is playing around with dolls in a more complex, media-related way. Characters and creations are fictional, and they're very much like the childhood Barbie dolls I’m sure many of us had. Something that people love and enjoy, something that people interpret and pose as things differently.

However. It becomes an issue in fandom when people start seeing their ideas and those of a fictional figment of a creator’s mind as something more worthy of respect and careful consideration than real people and reality. It’s like hugging a stuffed toy dog and then stomping on the paws of a real one. Unreasonable, right? The idea of fandom as some black-and-white idea space or something that can have a singular, homogeneous school of thought is the antithesis of fandom itself. That, as a plain fact, is impossible, socially, personally, psychologically and otherwise, because people will always have their own unique ideas and views to some degree of another.

And yes, there will always be people and things that others disagree with. Everyone is different. But it’s very very easy to simply block or filter tags or block other users on many fandom sites or apps like Tumblr if something is truly bothersome to you, mentally triggering, or 18+, for a few examples. I do this, it’s really the reasonable option that ends unnecessary conflict before it starts. It’s always good to put TW’s and CW’s for serious things, out of, once again, consideration for real people. People who, believe it or not, exist on the other side of the screen, despite the illusion of unburdened distance presented so conveniently online. You are responsible for your own online experience. Nobody can use telepathy and some kind of irrefutable, rock-solid method to help regulate everything possible for you, parents, blazed posts, anon asks and comments or otherwise. And overall, fandom, by definition, is a sandbox, an arts and crafts table where we can all share what we make and do with each other or not.

It’s something that’s supposed to be enjoyable, interesting entertainment of a billon different kinds to peruse, not a source of conflict. Think of it like a farmer’s market: you might have a grocery list of things you like or want, you might like one stall because they have cookies, and want to try another for their produce, or always step around one because you don’t like their tomatoes or onions or whatever. Creativity and fantasy is wonderful until people start to view those things as synonymous with reality. That has been and should never be the case, because it’s a fundamentally delusional and harmful thing, both for the person and others around them, when someone starts viewing fiction and fantasy as a sort of secondary reality.

So take a break. Take a breath of fresh air. Grab a drink of water, think for a minute, and then get back to posting and creating stuff about your favorites if you’d like. It’ll help, I promise. Let’s all help ourselves, others, and help along the good idea of helping make fandom mean fun, fantastical fiction, and an online family again.

#Before anyone asks I do not support one side of the “shipping discourse” or another. Both r narrow and conflict-oriented in my opinion. Thx.#And frankly I have better things to care about and do than fight over things like that. Sorting things in opinion boxes always turns out ba #Fandom #fandom news #Fandom family #Fandom connumity #Tumblr community #tumblr discourse #fandom commentary #Cue speaks #On cue #fandom content #tumblr fandom #Simply some friendly advice for everyone in these trying times #Text post

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solavelyan · 1 year ago

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intro.

It's a Dragon Age sideblog! My main blog is @bogunicorn, and I go by Bog (or any type of nickname you can wring out of "bog unicorn"). If you're looking for more info about me as a person, that'll all be over on my main.

This blog and my main are both 18+. Please do not follow me if you're under 18. I don't keep close track of my followers, but I do check out blogs that follow me because of the spambots, and I block minors on sight.

eta oct 2023: given The Bullshit happening at bioware following their mass layoffs and their leveraging of the next game against former employees' requests for proper severance pay, please assume that none of my posts or words are an implicit or explicit endorsement of the company itself. i mean, they already weren't, i just want you to imagine that all of my reblogs have an invisible "EA/BW execs fall off a cliff challenge" tacked onto them.

what to expect here.

Gifsets, fanart, jokey jokes, and sometimes (reblogged) meta posts.

My own Dragon Age thoughts, feelings, theories, random whatevers. My original posts of all kinds are tagged #bog post.

A general positivity toward queer shit, weird shit, horny shit, and kinky shit.

My fanfic and my OCs. I don't post fic too often, at least not in the last few months, but I have a ton of OCs (roster TBA). I write notes and profiles and little ideas for them as a hobby even when I'm not actively writing fic. Anything relating to my own writing will be tagged #bogfic, anything involving my characters tagged #my ocs and then #character name (oc).

Generally, I'm a multishipper at heart and can find something to love about any given ship, PC choice, character, or type of storyline. Chances are if I'm spending my time talking about something or speculating on it, it's because I'm having fun or enjoying myself.

Commentary on fandom trends and behaviors (and, sometimes, common sense reminders not to be a dick to each other about fake stuff).

To get blocked if you put rude or annoying shit in my mentions, including using any of my posts to character bash or otherwise go off-topic in order to air your personal grievances underneath my stuff. I don't care if you don't like Solas, or if you have strong opinions about Anders vs. Fenris, or if you think "supporting" the mages/Templars/Chantry is good/bad, or if you feel like your personal favorite character/PC option/romance isn't represented by my posts and you feel your specific criticism is the exception. Do not cite the deep magic to me, witch, I was there when it was written (like 10+ years and three US presidents ago). Mind your manners and blacklist or scroll if you need to.

what not to expect.

Untagged Veilguard spoilers. All my Veilguard posts with potential spoilers will be tagged #datv spoilers or #veilguard spoilers, since the latter seems to be what people are using across multiple sites now.

Consistent character bashing or character hate. I simply do not spend a majority of my online time thinking about stuff I hate.

Anonymous asks. Anon is always turned off, both here, on my main, and on my AO3.

Real world politics and news, or general (as in, not-DA-specific) Disk Horse. Honestly, probably not even that much Dragon Age Discourse, either.

Equating in-game choices or fandom opinions with real life politics and morality. I don't "support" any group in Thedas because Thedas is fake. My politics are for real people, not Wizard Politics or whatever.

Egg or cheese jokes.

the tag system (tm).

#timeless posts - Anything reblogged from the depths of @bogunicorn in the last 10 years. Usually queued.

#bog post - Any and all of my original posts.

#bogfic - Anything involving my writing or my OCs.

#my ocs - My OCs. Often accompanied by #[character name] (oc).

#spicy bog - Ye olde horny tag.

#bogcrit, #[character name] critical, #dragon age critical, #[game] critical, #fandom bs - These are my Complaining Tags. If you never want to see anything truly critical or negative, just blacklist #bogcrit. If you want to avoid grousing or critique of a specific character, the games in general, individual games, or the fandom itself, blacklist whatever listed tag is relevant to you.

#fic, #art - Fanfic and fanart that I didn't make.

#misc - Anything not covered by other tags.

#da au - Any kind of alternate universe post.

#ask meme - Blanket tag for any put-it-in-the-tags posts, as well as actual ask memes.

UPDATE: Characters are tagged by their *FIRST names. Origins and Inquisition PCs are tagged #the warden or #the inquisitor. Hawke is always just #hawke, Rook is always just #rook. I don't specify gender *or faction/surname in my character tags, EXCEPT for the Inquisitor because it's too much of a habit not to. This system is already complicated enough and I have like... 12 followers anyway.

Ships are tagged #[character] x [character] in alphabetical order, with the PCs just using their title EXCEPT for the Inquisitor. I also use the more common portmanteaus (like Solavellan, Fenhawke, Adoribull, etc) if I'm making an original post that I want to show up in the tags, but I would still slap "lavellan x solas" on a Solavellan post (for example) just for consistency. If you really really don't want to see a specific ship on this blog, block the alphabetized "character x character" tag. I know that's inconvenient if you hate Solavellan or something but like... I guess also what are you doing on this specific blog if you don't like that ship anyway.

contact.

complain to my manager

send me an ask

read my fic

#pinned post

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foxnate28 · 2 years ago

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Intersectionality on the Internet is Coming to a Red Light

Social media has been an integral part of the human experience over the last two decades, and it's not going away any time soon - what can we say? We love our little boxes that let us talk to people all over the world.

But something I've noticed over the last few years is a decrease in intersectionality on social media like Twitter and others - whether it's the algorithm to blame or something else, something has changed.

We're becoming more and more divided.

TikTok is a prime example - many accounts specialize in a certain type of content (ASMR, cats, pranks, ant farms, science, etc) and when something other than the primary category a person follows gets recommended, they'll often comment something along the lines of "How did I end up on _____ TikTok?"

On TikTok, this is harmless for the most part. More traditional social media like Twitter and Tumblr is where the harm comes into play.

We're on Tumblr, so I'll talk about it first. In recent years, the concept of the DNI (Do Not Interact) List has become an integral part of many bios. The concept is that you don't interact with that user if you meet any of the criteria on their DNI List.

DNI Lists can range from the mundane "minors only" for kids on Tumblr to the hyper-specific, usually fandom-based. Something like "DNI if you think X character should be with X character," for example.

It's a similar experience on Twitter, although due to the different media format of Tweets versus blogs it's a bit different. It also has to do with the fact that sites like Twitter and Facebook are primarily algorithm-based. Tumblr's feed is chronological and based only on what a user follows.

Twitter and Facebook use their users' interactions and likes (among other data, but that's a story for another time) to curate a feed for them. Suggested posts are thrown into the feed, with suggested friends and suggested groups and pages. Twitter now even has a "For You" feed which primarily shows the algorithm's suggestions on what it thinks you would interact with.

The problem here should be pretty clear.

The algorithm is killing intersectionality on the Internet by forcing us all into boxes and creating infinite echo chambers.

Only showing things a user is most likely to enjoy is a great idea from a business standpoint. The happier your user is with the content you give them, the longer they stay on your site. Hence, The Algorithm - a complex set of instructions that uses a metric ton of personal data collected by social media companies designed specifically to feed you content you like.

Users will often see themselves being proverbially shoved into a box based on their interactions, making their feeds one-dimensional. I've seen it with my own feeds.

When I first started my professional Twitter in January, I followed a few things and it didn't know what to show me - it started showing me tech news, which I wanted, but it was also blasting politics and local news stories at me, and feeding cultural posts in every once in a while to see if it could box me in with a specific identity.

Three months later, my feed is nothing but tech news. The trending hashtags are nothing but tech. Why? Because tech news is the only thing I interacted with on that account. If I lived in a vacuum, I wouldn't know anything else existed. I wouldn't know that most people don't care about tech as much as I do, because, well, everyone on my feed is talking about it.

So I'm boxed into a profile based on a single aspect of my identity, because that's what The Algorithm thinks I want, thinks will placate me enough to keep using their app. And it's the same for most other users, I'd assume. We aren't shown things outside of our comfort zone, or things others are interacting with (unless it's someone we follow), and as a result intersectionality on the Internet is dwindling.

People on the Internet who often have more in common with each other than they think might never get the chance to interact with each other because of a set of instructions controlling what they see.

It sounds oddly dystopian, and maybe it is. I don't think it was done out of malice or desire for control of the population, but more likely the reckless abandon of morals and ethics by companies in search of fattening their wallets.

#algorithm #intersectionality #I kinda went on a tangent on this one #sorry professor #I'm just really passionate about the way that social media and The Algorithm has a stranglehold on our lives

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avarindigenous · 2 years ago

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I’m sort of peripheral to silm fandom- I’ve read it enjoyed and I like that people make things about it but I don’t remember enough about the characters to really engage, I just hang out. Also I’m white. When I first found the silm fandom on tumblr one of the things that seemed really exciting about it was the racial diversity in fan works (HEllo Black Galadriel) but I also agree that I’ve noticed a decrease in the diversity of characters in the fanart I’ve seen recently. I wonder if it has anything to do with the new show? I wasn’t in the good omens fandom before the show was made but the impression I’ve gotten is that the characters were much more regularly portrayed an non-white before white actors played them. I wonder if fan artists/writers who were not particularly dedicated to diversity in arda are seeing the predominantly white cast (except for random ocs? What’s up with that?) of a Silmarillion-adjacent show and going oop! guess they were white all along! I don’t know if that’s what’s happening, but I’ve wondered what the effect of the show is going to be on fandom and this might be one of the first things we see. I’m glad to have found your blog and I hope that the trend doesn’t continue.

I think there are a lot of factors at play when it comes to the question of why this has happened, and the frustrating part is that most of it has very little to do with conscious racism.

as I mentioned in other reblog chains of the post you’re referring to, there’s been a downgrade in general fandom activity the past two years or so. the Silmarillion fandom tends to have a “cycle” of three to six years when people are most active - a new blog comes in and starts posting about a particular topic, it attracts attention and other like-minded blogs join in the conversation, the same points get rediscovered and newly discussed and litigated by each group of people, and then eventually people cease actively posting as much, either by leaving the fandom, leaving the site for somewhere else like Twitter, or by simply being less present online. because the conversation can get very toxic and political (from an intracommunity perspective) those of us who do manage to pay attention for years, even by lurking, usually refrain after a while from taking part in discussions and focus on content creation or on appreciating others’ art and fanfiction.

on that note, I don’t think it’s much of a secret that the Tolkien fandom is not a particularly chill or calm fandom space, even excluding questions of bigotry and prejudice. people get very attached to their interpretations of canon (myself included) and many will react very harshly to perceived bad takes or bad-faith engagement, or will take someone disagreeing with them over a characterization detail or a plot point as a personal slight. friendships have been ended, harassment campaigns have been launched, and groups of people have been bullied into lifelong trauma, all over questions of textual analysis. even if there’s no harassment present, a larger blog posting a “controversial” opinion is almost guaranteed to lose followers and receive anon hate or passive-aggressive DMs. you’ll note I’m not giving specific examples of what kinds of opinions trigger this behavior, and that’s because no one is immune to it. the reason I separate this from bigotry is because it truly is about scholarship. it’s the equivalent of giving a controversial talk at an academic conference and having all your friends cease to talk to you because they’ve decided you’re abrasive and rude simply for voicing your own opinions. why this is relevant in a conversation about diversity is that I need to make it clear that in order to be comfortable in this fandom space in the first place, you need to be comfortable with everyone in the world finding fault with your ideas and interpreting them in the most bad-faith way possible even if you’re white and you never talk about racism or diversity or LGBTQ+ issues at all. the people who endure this (which is anyone and everyone who develops some sort of large following on Tumblr and probably Twitter as well) and who decide to stay in the fandom will usually become extremely uninterested in anything but reblogging other people’s work and shitposting, or will else block everyone they never want to see their posts and threat monitor to avoid discourse and backlash.

fanartists, more than fanfic writers and editors and meta writers and analysts and even shitposters, are the backbone of the Tumblr Tolkien fandom. all of the other kinds of fanworks - including songs and fanvids! - are significantly less likely to get serious engagement. what the Silmarillion fandom “looks” like is crafted by the artists, and fandom activity lives and dies by fanart. graphics, fanfic, and other works get more engagement if there is an active fanart scene. the trouble here is that fanartists never stay in the fandom long, usually averaging two or three years. right now, almost all the fanartists regularly posting are drawing white characters, and there aren’t a lot of fanartists period. as a result, nothing is really getting noticed - @arwenindomiel mentioned trouble getting graphics to crack a hundred notes, and other friends of mine who aren’t white and make diverse edits have had trouble for years getting more than twenty or thirty people to like and more than five or six to reblog. even when they include white people, the situation isn’t much better.

as mentioned once more in other posts on the subject, being a POC and not having anyone engage with you is depressing. no asks, no fanfic prompts, no edit prompts, no interest in the creative work we do - even if we never face racism through direct slurs or criticism, the silence is exhausting and isolating. additionally, since several of us had a limited platform only a few years ago that now seems to have dried up entirely, we face the question of why we bother, why we create. this becomes even more frustrating if we love the canon and aren’t constantly angry about Tolkien, and want to reblog and talk about the things we like rather than assuaging white guilt, validating posts made by white allies about how they noticed something problematic (which also comes under assuaging white guilt; no one is helped by self-righteous “look, this thing in the text is bad!” posts because nothing in the text is mysterious or hidden, and fans of color have been aware of the problems for many years), or talking about how the text has problems. I genuinely like the story and the worldbuilding and it is my right to choose not to engage with the racism in ways dictated by an online fandom because I am always engaging with the racism in everything I do, but the posts that get noticed and that start conversations are posts about the problems in the text. this creates a space where fans of color are only allowed to be fans of Tolkien if we always hate him and hate being in these spaces, which is a negativity that takes a serious psychological toll and makes fandom feel like a duty. on top of this, we’re uniquely vulnerable to being singled out for bad takes as mentioned above, which makes wanting to speak out in the first place a daunting proposition. there’s very little room for error, or for opinions that go against the grain, and what little room there is is usually reserved for white fans.

the end result is where we are now - very little fanart, relatively little queer content, and almost everything featuring white faces. I’m unsure if I want to blame all of this on the show, as it’s a consequence of people cycling out and people being less proactive as well as general unexamined bigotry (it’s as if we reserve our vitriol for our fellow fans’ perceived bad takes and not actual structural problems in the community). it’s a frustrating problem that could be solved both by an attempt to be kinder to people we disagree with (and I am including myself, I am making a conscious effort to be as calm and as compassionate and as understanding as possible, but I’m certainly not perfect) and by resolving to champion diversity and diverse voices.

but this is a mess, all told, and I’m not sure how we can solve it.

#fandomconvo #replies #fandom racism #sort of

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spn-season-16-chronicles · 4 years ago

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SPNews

13th January 2021

No official info from the writers/producers/company

People still on hype caused by Jensen's post. Supernatural staying on trending for a long time. Misha Collins roasts Bruce Willis via twitter for not wearing a mask.

People against spn stopping trending - re-examining old trends. Discovering again that somewhere in early days Sam had mail address visible on screen - [email protected] and Dean had dating site nick - Impala67. Fandom proceeds meming shit out of it, sends spn back to trending.

More memes emerge - Jussy Jower confuses general public. Gig created and escalated (mostly) by @heller-jensen, to know more/see funny stuff go there.

DJ Qualls records a vid after being asked via cameo about Bi interpretation of Garth's and Dean's relationship. Starts with "Hello Hellers", calls the relationship strictly platonic. Doesn't think that famous dance scene had deeper meaning. Ends video saying that there was romantic relationship in she subtext (most likely meaning season 15 and obviously Destiel). People proceed proclaiming canonic meaning of the lamp anyway, half joking, half serious. Proceed to meme the shit out of that too.

Said Video also on @heller-jensen blog.

Kings of Con podcast, recorded on 6th, with Rob, Rich and Tina uploaded today on Spotify (entertaining and political). Announcement of next episode with Misha's presence - probably will drop on 20th (on Biden's Inauguration day) or around that date.

All that crazy stuff takes place while Trump is impeached for the 2nd time, as a first president in history. Many folks gather those news (again) from supernatural posts. Supernatural's link to US politics becomes even tighter.

What will happen tomorrow?

And now weather

#SPNews #supernatural #misha collins #DJ Qualls #jensen ackels #Garth #Dean Winchester #Why lamp?#Jussy #Jussy jower #Spn season 16 #Spn metafandom #Why is supernatural trending?

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fandom-oracle · 3 years ago

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Wait wdym? Do you think fic is bad?

i'm getting canceled tonight i guess.

if you actually did a good a faith interpretation of my post you know it's not really ABOUT fanfiction at all, i actually write fanfiction myself. i'm not sharing here because it's overwhelmingly bad fic that i write exclusively as wish-fulfilment or for self-projection, but at least i'm self-aware about it. i am ALSO one of the people who reads ze Books™️, although most of the academic material i consume are nonfiction, so this whole thing is particularly annoying to me. the crux of the matter is that, if you're a little younger you might've missed it, but this website was a hotbed of scalding takes like 'dante's divine comedy is literally fanfiction', 'something something is literally fanfiction' when the thing in question barely counts as a transformative work and, in fact, it weakens the definition of transformative work in itself to try to apply it to literally anything that exhibits an ounce of intertextuality. plenty of takes that are... true, but require some nuance, focused on the idea of transformative fandom as a place defined by its presence of overwhelmingly female and disproportionately queer (occasionally, though disputedly, nonwhite) content creators and the ways in which transformative fan content could be interpreted as a space of defiance to cisheteropatriarchy in the way it permeates traditional media. a third, less common but still relevant take was the focus on how certain fandoms such as trek and doctor who have a long history of involvement in real-world civil rights issues and progressive politics. so this kind of take has been the dominant view on tumblr and transformative fandom for a good decade now, perhaps longer, and the people with this kind of takes can sometimes be a little... obnoxious. and the majority of people on transformative fandom (regardless of wether or not the fandom is disproportionately composed of nonwhite individuals or not, by sheer virtue of american demographics and this site`s heaily skewed userbase, the majority will still be white) are white, and like any other space dominated by white people, fandom has often been a vehicle for white supremacy. "Stitch Media Mix" talks about this in-depth. the discourse on fandom racism and ways in which transformative fandom as a whole contribute to racialized stereotypes, hierarchies, and deeper problems within online culture has led to a lot of people with grievances with fandom, many of whom are women of color, to develop an entire online identity built around the concept of being "critical of fandom", which is a very weird thing to do with fandom is literally billions of people, not a unified demographic, and that being critical of something can mean a WIDE amount of things; which in turn has led to a lot of people insulating themselves completely from any criticism of fandom as being inherently in bad faith, which a weird thing to do when literally ANY sphere of society should be open to criticism. people taking critiques of media they consume and taking critiques of their own critiques as personal attacks are abound here and make everything worse. so a fairly recent (mid2018ish, definitely post the insanity of reylo discourse but before sarah z blew up in popularity) trend has been that people in these communities isolate more and more and the general discourse has effetively resulted in people with differing takes in fanfiction specifically but fandom as a Whole (which is, again very weird to say because fandom is not 'a Whole' because there's no unifying element to different fandoms) only interacting with each other in hostile ways. and increasingly, in my personal sphere, a lot of people are positioning themselves in the "fandom critical" (AGAIN, WEIRD THING TO SAY, WHAT DOES IT EVEN MEAN, PLEASE USE WORDS WITH PRECISION) sphere, and I tend to take that "side" myself, but i specifically do not think framing this as a team A or team B thing is useful. this culture war was in the buildup.

last week a post by a user i follow recently became popular. the post itself was a critique that i.. do not necessarily agree with. it was ultimately about the idea of easily-consumable popular media being seen as an acceptable form of exclusive media engagement by people in the "pro-fandom" sphere, and how the insidiousness of this line of thinking has to do with how capitalist media production is designed to spread, and how fandom AS A TREND, not specifically any individuals or any fanworks, can empower capitalism. the post specifically did NOT use the kindest possible words, but that was what they were trying to say. howelljenkins also has really good takes on the subject, albeit from a different angle.

anyway because this is a circular culture war, the result was as follows: 1) a bunch of pro-fandom types refuse to actually make a charitable reading of the post and insist the user in question hates fandom and thinks people under capitalism shouldn't have things that are Fun, and should Only Read Theory and keep sending anon hate to several blogs in the opposing sphere, therefore proving the point that fandom sometimes prevent people from being able to engage critically with things; 2) a bunch of anti-fandom types who defined their entire identity on hating fandom being like "haha look at these cringe people" instead of trying to understand why a demographic overwhelmingly composed of marginalized people would feel strongly to posts that use inflammatory language against an interest of theirs, thereby proving the point that most criticism of fandom is divorced from actual fan content and is vaguely defined. the reason this is a culture war that actually deserves attention (unlike most fandom culture wars, which are just really granular ship wars made into social justice issues for clout) is that, for the most part, both of these groups are mostly people with college degrees, many of whom will contirbute to academia in the coming years. fan studies is a relevant field. these discussions have repercussions in wider media criticism trends, and this is why i can't really stand it or just passively ignoring it the way i do with most other inconsequential discourse. like it's genuinely upsetting seeing almost every single tumblr user, most of whom should know better, patting themselves in the back for their inability to read things in a way that doesn't feed into preexisting cultural hostilities in fan spaces.

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phantomato · 3 years ago

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As a writer, what do you think about the discussions on HPfanfiction and HPSlashFic where people openly talk about fics that they don't like and how so many of those fics are bad from a writing and moral standpoint? I'm not sure if that's just the nature of Reddit and the users, but I was surprised to see that people so openly bash ships and fics. In the other fandoms I'm in, it's usually courtesy to keep your dislike of a fic/author to yourself or in DMs with your friends 😬.

Interesting question. I have a bit of a meandering answer for this one, if you’ll bear with me.

So, in general, shitting on fannish content you don’t enjoy in public discussion spaces is a dick move. Shitting on it such that you call people who do like that content immoral, depraved, etc. is even worse. It isn’t any one person’s place to set a definitive line on okay/good/allowable content and not okay/bad/forbidden content. Save the petty rants for DMs.

There will be community norms, though. Any gathering of people will have tropes/genres/pairings that they coalesce around, and rules of decent behavior will fray a little at the edges of this. A discord server for Tomarry fans might be kind of snarky about Tomione, and yeah, ideally, everyone would be totally kind and open to ‘ship and let ship,’ but there isn’t a huge degree of overlap in Tomarry and Tomione audiences and the handful of people who also ship Tomione might learn to either shut up or leave. HPFF has set a community norm that slash ships, ships with Death Eater characters, and Hermione/men other than Harry ships aren’t the focus. I don’t like this norm, I think it’s needlessly limited and pretty darn regressive, but it is the standard that most community members use and I’m not shocked that content for those ships is so thoroughly bashed whenever it comes up. And community norms can be used for goals that I like, so it’s not the ‘communities come up with their own standards’ thing I have an issue with. I love when communities coalesce around things like “we reject bigotry within fanwork,” for example.

Reddit is a shithole. I say this fondly and also with great hatred. I’ve been using the site for a decade, I ran a contentious subreddit years ago and know how the site tends to work. It is a place that prioritizes confrontation and attempting to ‘one-up’ other users as a form of play. Threads geared towards making people say controversial things will always be popular because it provides fertile ground for the player-versus-player interactions that redditors love best. And if this is your thing, it’s a lot of fun! I’ve gotten good at this. I enjoy dropping into a ‘bad ship’ thread and saying something that I know will upset people, just so I get to have pointless internet fights. I would be sad to see HPFF become totally sanitized and back away from these sorts of threads because I honestly don’t expect that it would happen alongside the bulk of HPFF users suddenly becoming open to slashfic or DEs or Hermione. HPFF seems to be predominantly approaching fandom from a cishet male lens, and thus a polite/respectful HPFF is a boring one to me. Give me my PVP, if the main fandom sub is always going to favor Indy!Harry and harems.

And then, finally, I think there is value to being able to talk openly about why a ship (or a fic!) doesn’t work for an individual. ‘Bashing’ isn’t what I envision for this, but I also think that the line for ‘bashing’ will be different for everyone, and discussions that are undertaken with good faith from all involved might still be difficult for someone to read. I’ve used this blog to express the reasons I don’t enjoy every mainstream use of Tom’s character (Tomarry, Tomione, x Reader), and I would hardly expect a fan of those things to like what I say. But I share those posts because they help me understand my preferences and I think they are useful and interesting commentary on trends within parts of fandom. I would love to read more of that! Breaking down ships and tropes and poking at why they work or don’t, what people like about them and why that might make them unenjoyable for others, is valuable analysis. At some point, if an individual is unhappy to see this analytical lens turned towards their favs, they should back out. It’s perfectly reasonable thing to want fandom to be a relaxing space where you don’t have to think about the whys and wherefores of your escapist fantasies, but, eh, that analysis is half of fandom for some people. There’s a time and a place. A personal blog or a public fandom forum are good spaces for this; the discord server dedicated to a specific ship is probably a bad space for it.

#ask #fandom meta

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max1461 · 4 years ago

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I think one of the ways all this culture war business has shaken out (here in the US, at least) is that, rhetorically and emotionally speaking, the left has become puritan while the right has become carnal.

[I know, I know. Take of the century, right. You've heard this all before. But bear with me!]

Of course, these things aren't universal descriptions. But I think it stands that the major emotive trend on the left for the past decade or so has been the desire for purity. Ideological purity, linguistic purity, etc. This is emotional undercurrent that has driven "wokeness" to take its current form.

On the other hand, the emotional undercurrent of the right is one of carnality. The issues that really get rightists going, the way leftists get going over decade old problematic tweets (again, generalizing here on both counts), seem to me that they can more-or-less be summed up as race, meat, and baby-making. "You're not allowed to be white anymore", "they're gonna make us all eat veggieburgers/bugs", "the lizard people are trying to sterilize us / kills babies with abortion / etc". It's all very... raw and bodily, in a way. And perhaps not coincidentally, the right has also been much remarked upon as the coalition of wearing-your-sexual-insecurities-on-your-sleeve ("cuck").

It seems to me that these two rhetorical positions have basically reversed since the bush years, but again that's been said before.

What's fascinating, though, is that here on tumblr (whence left-puritanism arguably entered the popular discourse), I think I see the same rhetorical distinction starting to shift again. Not a full reversal, more like a 90 degree turn. It seems to me that the real two tumblr factions (ignoring all the fandom people and maybe most of the site... idk this thought is still in beta) are starting to shake out as "rat-adj" and "anti-liberal".

Just as in the case of the contemporary online left and right, both these groups are defined more by aesthetics and rhetorical style than by actual policy positions. Among the "anti-liberals" you'll find everyone from anarchists to Maoists to self-professed fascists and white-nationalists. Among the "rat-adj" you'll find mostly social democrats, and libertarians, and ancaps (with a couple notable exceptions).

The "anti-liberals", I think, broadly represent what happens when you introduce a transplant population of disaffected Marxists, who've felt ill-served by the mainstream woke coalition, onto a substrate of carnal rightist meme culture. And both parties were irreversibly changed by that fateful meeting, or something like that (again, this thought is in beta). It's highly syncretic.

The common features of this "anti-liberal" aesthetic are, I think: hatred of respectability politics, hostility to authority and "mainstream" society, glorification of violence (to varying degrees of irony), a writing style marked by obscurantism, and opposition to liberalism.

The anti-liberals may all hate each other, but they all seem to reblog the same posts and say a lot of the same sorts of things. If you took away all the obvious markers (pronouns, hammer-and-sickles, pepes) and handed one of these blogs off to the average normie American, I think it would be a serious challenge for them to figure out if this person votes Republican or Democrat.

The "rat-adjs" are, counterintuitively, not actually defined by being rationalist-adjacent. Plenty of people in the anti-liberal group are "rationalist-adjacent" in a literal sense of the phrase. Rather, it's an aesthetic and rhetorical definition again: they adopt the rationalist writing style that emphasizes clear exposition and precision, they're generally more likely to be unilaterally against violence, and (again, generalizing here) I think they're much more likely to be friendly to the status quo.

Another facet is that I think the rat-adj group tends to be much more amenable to the idea of applying a computer scientist's eye for optimization to the social realm, whereas the anti-liberals tend to view attempts to optimize society as authoritarian and deserving of skepticism.

The puritanical/carnal dichotomy doesn't quite apply to these two groups in the same way it does for the, uh, woke vs. pepe distinction, but I think there's some level of inheritance at play. The anti-liberals seem to have an aesthetic inheritance from the right, while the rat-adjs have some level of inheritance (or maybe just independent innovation?) from the woke sphere.

This is the part of the analysis I'm least confident on, though.

Anyway, I'm not really sure where this was intended to go. Just some thoughts on late imperial tumblr culture.

#if you're wondering #i'm an enlightened centrist #navel gazing

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idreamtofmanderleyagain · 4 years ago

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Morality-Focused Frameworks Of Discussion As Acts of Control

This is a post in response to a larger conversation I’ve been having with @eshusplayground. I have a perspective that I think would be really relevant to the conversation but I also don’t want to derail the specific focus of the following posts she’s been making recently.

(Trigger Warning For Abuse Discussion and Brief Mentions of Rape)

---

So I’m in the Hellraiser fandom. More specifically, I’m a Pinhead/Kirsty shipper.

For those of you that don’t know, Pinhead is a demonic torturer from hell who’s design is inspired by the BDSM community. Characters who open a magical puzzle box have unknowingly given themselves away to his violent underworld community of eternal torment and depravity. Hellraiser is a film about romantic and sexual horror, and there’s quite a lot in there about abuse and trauma. Kirsty is a traumatized person, and in my personal opinion, very likely a CSA victim.

And I ship these two characters together.

So the subject matter of my particular fandom is extremely intense and niche and complicated to navigate, although YMMV (I have no trouble with this franchise, but I cannot really handle GOT or American Horror Story, for example). After I grew interested in Hellraiser and integrated into it’s fandom, my perspectives about the way we have conversations about villainous characters started to have a major shift.

I often see people have these intense conversations (and arguments) about where a particular character exists on a moral scale, with the subtext (or outright text) that if they tip too far one way or another, they can be rendered unworthy of their own subgroup of fans within their own fandom. People who love those characters or find them shippable are then subject to moral judgements.

So how does one apply such logic to a psychosexual torture demon?

The answer is you can’t.

The frameworks people online use to have these discussions do not make any sense when talking about my fandom. Hellraiser is a dark horror fairytale presenting disturbing, surreal images and behaviors in order to discuss complex and difficult experiences and perspectives. The monsters within it, like Pinhead, are more metaphor than anything.

Now, my follower count is too low and my fandom is too niche for me to really be on the receiving end of a lot of the cruelty that manifests online about the moral validity of the fiction I enjoy. That said, between the anti-kink TERFS and the younger folks involved in purity culture on this site, I can imagine exactly what it would look like. You know what they would look like.

“You’re an Abuse Apologist!”

“You’re an Abuse Fetishist!”

“You’re reinforcing sexism!”

“he’s an irredeemable torturer, you’re probably okay with literal real world rape lmao uwu”

“This is bad kink representation and you’re complicit in the abuse real men do to women because you like this!”

Now, setting aside the fact that the canon lore context of Pinhead involves him having a human soul brainwashed by a monster god to become what he is, and is also in a roundabout sense “redeemed” in canon, I think most people utilizing this kind of framework would assume that I believe Pinhead can be redeemed in the way online Discourse (tm) means it, because that’s how we talk in fandom about the villains we really like.

I do not want to redeem Pinhead. I don’t think he even needs redeeming. I don’t even see value in that conversation at all. Redemption is not a concept that makes sense for what he is, or what he could become as a character. The framework of Pinhead as a Real-World-Equivalent Human Male Abuser who Cannot Be Redeemed From His Actions would inevitably dominate all conversation, regardless of the fact that it is inherently incorrect and detrimental to real, robust literary analysis of the narrative he exists within and how brilliantly it actually interacts with male on female abuse as a subject. By nature of it’s gross oversimplification and misrepresentation, It ruins the potential for greater, more nuanced and complex conversations.

And that’s the thing: my engagement with this particular story and it’s characters has a lot to do with the potential in the narrative to examine how trauma interacts with love, desire and gender politics. Hellraiser has a very unique way of exploring that kind of subject through a storytelling aesthetic that appeals to me (horror/fairytale, gothic romance, etc).

This is about to get personal, so strap the fuck in.

I am the victim of gendered abuse, in that I had an emotionally abusive step father and sexism was absolutely a factor in why that manifested the way it did. I am also a second hand victim of gendered abuse, in that my biological father was a serial stalker and rapist, and other male abusers (or just self-centered family members) caused severe emotional destabilization in my childhood. I grew up viewing adult men as unstable, selfish children. My family endured a lot, and I came to resent the men in my mother’ life for not taking on the role of protector and nurturer when she needed them most. I had discovered the great lie of traditional masculinity: in the face of real crisis, grown men were not protectors. They did not hold together the domestic space. They abused or faltered and abandoned us. This was a repeated pattern among several men in different roles. I was often left picking up all the pieces, taking on roles as a child that these men could not. I had to have strength they did not.

My experience of desire for romantic intimacy with men and men in roles of stable, nurturing authority now inherently involves a jumbled emotional soup of fear, pain, and a deep longing that comes from a place of feminine vulnerability, a desire to be taken care of instead of being the caretaker.

The narrative of Hellraiser pushes a lot of buttons for me. It speaks to my own trauma experiences in a very specific way. In an effort to further that conversation, I’m trying to create a piece of art (a fic) inspired by the deeply personal feelings this film gives me.

For me, Pinhead represents the Jungian shadow masculine, a simultaneous mix of fear and desire, the potential for suffering and pleasure, and everything in between. These experiences are inherently intertwined for me. And Kirsty’s experiences mirror many of my own.

In other words, in order for me to get out of Hellraiser what I get out of Hellraiser, Pinhead has to be exactly what he is, and everything that he is. Which includes monstrosity. Which includes the potential for change. His place in the narrative must fully, truly embody this conversation I need to have with masculinity, which inherently involves painful, scary things.

Anybody demanding that I either denounce my interest in him as morally offensive because he’s a monster in the full sense of the word (and not just the aesthetic one like what is currently trending in Monster Boyfriend fandom), or force a traditional redemption arc upon him as if he were a real life human person who must repent for his real life sins, are essentially saying that I am not allowed to engage with this work of fiction in a way that is transformative for me. And that’s very unfortunate, because honestly, I think my perspective is so much more dynamic and has so much more to offer.

This is not just about basic catharsis. This is not even a power fantasy about emotionally transforming a powerful (white) dude, or “bad boy” fantasies, both standard arguments for villain stanning that feels like it has never truly represented me or the complexity of my experiences and interests. This is a full-on conversation and act of self expression I want to have through art about the experience of fear and trauma when dealing with men as a woman who desires men.

And I don’t think a person has to be traumatized in order to want to engage with this type of fiction. I want to be clear that my experience is not a justification for my interest (I do not need to justify myself), it is an example of a perspective that gets erased by the framework of these conversations.

To me, the framework of moral validity for enjoying fictional villains and monsters and whatever you please feels incredibly stifling to the complex, dynamic ideas and analysis that I want to engage in, because I, and many people I know, are consistently pressured to structure their thoughts with this framework as the only acceptable baseline of discussion. This is so ubiquitous that when people I’ve known have tried to engage in ways that diverge from that framework, the responses they get are outright confused or direct the conversation right back to the original framework they tried to avoid. Complex conversation gets steamrolled.

Somewhere in the conversation we were all having about acknowledging and discussing abuse and oppression, and acknowledging troubling patterns in media which reinforce the normalization of abuse and opression, some people decided that there was a very serious moral discussion to be had regarding the mere act of liking things which involve dark subject matter and complex, or even monstrous characters. They now argue that there are very clear cut, simple moral frameworks for A) telling stories and B) enjoying stories, and most importantly, that this moral framework is a valid justification for the social treatment and silencing of certain people.

A framework, by the way, which I think is actually not functionally a framework, because like the toxic American fundamentalist christian groups it’s thinking is structured from, it does not account for the vastly diverse moral landscape within it’s own space. There is no objectively consistent body of knowledge anybody is working from, because morals are derived from the human experience, which is inherently subjective.

Interestingly, no where does this have more of an impact than with marginalized people, and people like me, who want to express something deeper and more meaningful in the conversation about abuse and oppression than what this framework really offers us. To be honest, The more I see this kind of conversation making the rounds, the clearer it becomes that it’s a means of control and power game playing. It’s not about morality, but about how morality can be leveraged in order to silence truly diverse and nuanced perspectives and uphold people’s sense of self-comfort. It is a means of supplanting more convenient and easily digestible understandings of these highly complex subjects that require more intensive, thoughtful engagement, especially when it gets challenging. This kind of rhetoric absolves people of making room for complex and diverse experiences, and reinforces an (at face-value) easy to follow set of moral rules of how we are all allowed to think and feel.

The implication of all of this is that if we all adhere to the One True (alleged) Moral Framework of Fandom Engagement, then we will somehow come out on the other side with all the Good People having a Great Time having Squeaky Clean Fun. And I don’t think I should have to tell you at this point how stifling and disturbing the implications of that kind of mentality really are.

Quite frankly, I think a lot of us are very tired of constantly speaking on other people’s terms.

#abuse tw #rape tw #Fandom #Hellraiser

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savedpeople · 3 years ago

Note

☢ What fads/trends are you so over? ✂ A fandom that you feel isn’t open and accepting? ❥ Has someone ever ruined an FC or character for you? ❣ How salty are you feeling right now?

The salty af munday meme | Accepting | @wexarethewalkingxdead

I’m over the trend of reblogging everything from the source or RPers requiring followers to reblog from the source. I don’t mean memes, where it’s polite to use the source if you’re not sending something, but RPers not wanting anything reblogged from them, even if you’re mutuals. I understand why some prefer this, but it feels crappy reblogging something only to see my mutuals reblog it from the source instead of from me. Reblogging is a basic function of this site and often how people find other blogs and get their name out there, especially people like me who don’t make promo posts.

I haven’t been very active in any fandoms but twd lately, so it’s hard to say who does and doesn’t feel open and accepting at the moment. I’ll admit the ftwd rpc never felt very friendly to me though. I used to be open to interacting with ftwd muses (still am, technically), but most ftwd blogs I came across in the past acted kind of cliquey and elitist.

I have had certain actors/actresses ruined for me due to them being used as FCs by someone I had a bad experience with, along with a couple characters, but it’s usually temporary. I’ve had it happen in this fandom a few times as well.

I’m not feeling that salty right now, mostly nervous about some upcoming irl stuff.

#wexarethewalkingxdead #✘ || I ʀᴇᴀʟʟʏ ᴅᴏ ᴀᴘᴘʀᴇᴄɪᴀᴛᴇ ᴏᴜʀ ʟɪᴛᴛʟᴇ ᴛᴀʟᴋs ( ᴏᴏᴄ ᴀsᴋs )

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desert-bandit · 4 years ago

Text

Im supposed to be on hiatus but I gotta say this

WHY have I barely seen anyone on this site talking about the violent racism towards asian people lately???? I have to actively search for posts about it. Why is that??? Why is it that 9 out of the 10 things that are trending on this site have nothing to with helping people that are being oppressed??

Where are the people with their gofundmes and their petitions for Asian people now?? The same people who avidly spoke about Black Lives Matter and protested for black people a few months ago have turned a blind eye to Asian people. This is the problem with treating political movements like they’re trends. Just because you don’t see your favorite creators posting about it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t say anything. Oppression is oppression, regardless of the race, so if you have a voice, you should use it, even if it isn’t trendy.

On a site where most of the posts are comprised of fandoms that are based on Asian media, you’d expect more support for Asian people.

I’m tagging fandoms that have to do with asian culture in hopes that this will make someone uncomfortable enough to do something about this.

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innuendostudios · 5 years ago

Video

youtube

Here’s How to Radicalize a Normie, a video essay on how the Alt-Right and their fellow travelers recruit. Clocking in at 41 minutes, 6756 words, 633 individual drawings, and 27 sources (including three full books), it is by far the longest and most heavily-researched video in The Alt-Right Playbook. I am very tired.

It took so long to put this behemoth together that my Patreon started to dip. So, maybe a little more than usual, if you want to keep seeing videos like these, please consider backing me on Patreon.

Transcript below the cut.

Say, for the sake of argument, your friend Gabe is starting to worry you.

Gabe’s always been just, you know, a regular guy. Not very political. He likes video games, sci-fi, comics, Star Wars, and anime. White guy shit. The only offbeat thing about him is you suspect there’s like a 20% chance he’s a furry. For all intents and purposes, Gabe is a normie.

But recently Gabe’s been spending a lot of time on some radically conservative forums, and listening to radically conservative podcasts, and picking some radically conservative arguments with you and your friends. You never would have expected this, not from Gabe, and, given the speed it’s happened, it’s worrying to think where it might be headed.

How have the Alt-Right gotten their hooks into your friend?

If you’ve ever known a Gabe, this video is for you. Here’s How to Radicalize a Normie.

Step 1: Identify the Audience

What you need to know before we begin is: around 2013, the Nazis went online.

Hate groups in the US, as tracked by the Southern Poverty Law Center, had been growing in number since the noughts, but, between 2012 and 2014, they dropped by almost a quarter. Patriot groups dropped by over a third. However, hate crimes stayed about the same. Radical conservatism was not shrinking, but decentralizing. Still radical, still often violent, but now full of white nationalist nomads unlikely to join a formal organization.

This didn’t make them harmless. What it did was protect their asses from the typical hate group cycle: getting the public’s attention, making allies in conservative media, swelling their numbers, and then eventually disgracing themselves with failures, infighting, and, often enough, members committing horrific acts of violence, which come with social and sometimes legal consequences for all the other members.

So the Alt-Right and their fellow travelers these days don’t so much have members. They have hashtags, followers, viewers, and subscribers. This insulates them from their own audience. If Gabe, as a member of that audience, were to go out and commit a crime on their behalf, there’d be little doubt they had a hand in radicalizing him, but it’d be very hard to claim they told him to do it. On some of these sites, where Gabe spends hours and hours of his day, he’s never created an account or left a comment; the people radicalizing him don’t even know he’s there.

This distributed nature is what makes the Alt-Right, and the movements connected to it, unique. (You may remember a notable proof-of-concept for this strategy.) Doing almost everything online has, as compared with traditional hate movements, dramatically increased their reach and inoculated them from consequence. The trade-off, as we will see, is a lack of control.

And so we come to Gabe.

Gabe exists at the intersection of the kinds of people the Alt-Right is looking for - straight white cis men who feel emasculated by modern society, primarily, though they do make exceptions - and the kinds of people who are vulnerable to recruitment. Gabe fits the first profile in that he got bullied in high school, and often feels he has to hide his nerdy side for fear of getting ridiculed. The Alt-Right also has success with men who can’t get laid or recently got divorced or feel anxious about an influx of non-white people in their community. These things can make one feel like less than the confident white man they’re “supposed” to be. And it’s the closest they will ever come to being minoritized.

Regarding the second profile, it’s important to know that Gabe is not categorically different from you or me. He’s a cishet white dude - his problems are not unique. There isn’t a ton of research into the demography of the Alt-Right, but there may be a higher-than-average chance Gabe has a history of being abused or comes from a broken home. You don’t know if it’s true of Gabe, he’s never said. But most abuse survivors don’t become Nazis. The things that make people like Gabe recruitable tend to be situational: it happens often during periods of transition, as dramatic as the death of a loved or as benign as moving to a new city. Things that make people ask big life questions. Gabe has concerns like economic precarity, not knowing his place in a changing world, stressful working conditions. In other words, Gabe is suffering under late capitalism, same as everyone, and it’s entirely plausible he could have gone down the path to becoming a Leftist.

This is not to make an “economic anxiety” argument: the animating force of the Far Right is and always has been bigotry. But the Alt-Right targets Gabe by treating his “economic anxiety” as one of many things bigotry can be sold as a solution to. It is their aim that, when dissatisfied white men go looking for answers, they find the Alt-Right before they find us.

Step Two: Establish a Community

Were Gabe pledging an old-school hate movement, there would probably be a recruiter to usher him into an existing community. But that’s the kind of formalized interaction modern extremists try to avoid. Online extremism has many points of entry, and everybody’s journey is unique, so rather than be comprehensive we will focus on what are, in my estimation, the two most common pathways: the Far Right creates a community Gabe is likely to stumble into, or infiltrates a community Gabe is already in.

The stumble-upon method has two main branches, one of which is just “Gabe ends up on a chan board,” which we’ve already done a video about. The other is kind of the polar opposite of 4chan’s cult of anonymity: Gabe ends up in the fandom of a Far Right thought leader.

These folks are charismatic media personalities (that’s charismatic according to Gabe’s tastes, not ours; I don’t understand it, either). These personalities may gain traction on any number of platforms, from podcasts to reportage to blogging, though the most effective platform for redpilling is, and yes I am biting the hand that feeds me, YouTube. They may get Gabe’s attention through fairly standard means, like talking about or even generating controversy to get themselves trending, while some of the more committed will employ dubious SEO tactics like clickbait, google bombing, and data voids (just pause for definitions, we don’t have time).

What they tend to have in common, especially the most accessible ones, is that they don’t present themselves as entry points to the radical Right. In fact, many did not set out to be Far Right thought leaders, and may not think of themselves as such (though they are often selling products, of which the Alt-Right are among their biggest purchasers, and it’s not like they’re turning the money away). How they present is the same way anyone presents who wants to be successful on social media: accessible, approachable, authentic. The face-to-face relationship a budding extremist forms with their recruiter or the leader of their hate group’s local chapter are here folded into one parasocial relationship with a complete stranger.

Why this person appeals to Gabe is they’re not selling politics as politics, but conservatism as a kind of lifestyle brand. They rely heavily on criticizing or ridiculing the Left: feminists are oversensitive, Black people unintelligent, queer folks doomed to loneliness, and trans people insane; I dunno if it’s a coincidence that these are all things Gabe thinks about himself in his low moments. By contrast, they don’t sell conservatism as having sounder policies or a more coherent moral framework, but that abandoning progressive principles and embracing conservative ones will make Gabe happier. Remember, Gabe isn’t looking for white nationalism or misogyny, what he wants is the cure to soul-sickness, and these friendly micro-celebs are here to offer a shot of life advice with politics as the chaser. It is extremely important that politics be presented as a set of affects, not a set of beliefs.

The second pathway is infiltration, which is its own beast. Media personalities sometimes become gateways to the Right almost by accident: they do something edgy, a part of their audience reacts positively, and, facing no real consequence, they do it more; this leads to further positive reinforcement from conservative fans, the rest of the audience acclimates, and the cycle repeats, the personality pushing the envelope further and further based on what flies with their increasingly conservative audience. In this way, they become a right-wing figure by both radicalizing and being radicalized by their audience.

Infiltration is deliberate.

The Far Right will reliably target any community that has 1) a large, white, male population, 2) whose niche interests allow them to feel vaguely marginalized, and 3) who are not used to progressive critique of said interests. This isn’t to say progressive critique doesn’t exist, or hasn’t been baked into the property from the beginning, but that it has been, so far, easy for white guys to ignore. As such, progressives within that community probably don’t talk politics much, and women and minorities are perfectly welcome to post, same as anyone, but just, you know, don’t, don’t make identity politics, you know, like, a thing.

Given Gabe’s proclivities, he’s probably already in a number of fan communities where he can geek out and not get teased. And this is where the Far Right will go looking for him

Communities are at their most vulnerable to infiltration at times of political discord. This can happen naturally - say, a new property in the fandom has a Black protagonist - or it can be provoked - say, a bunch of channers join the forum and say provocative things about race to get people arguing - or both. Left to its own devices, the community might sort out its differences and maybe even come out more progressive than they started. But, with the right pressure applied in the right moment, these communities can devolve into arguments about the need to remove a nebulously-defined “politics” from the conversation.

The adage about bros on the internet is “‘political’ means anything I disagree with,” but it’d be more accurate to say, here, “‘political’ means anything on which the community disagrees.” For instance, “Nazis are bad” is an apolitical statement because everyone in the community agrees. It’s common sense, and therefore neutral. But, paradoxically, “Nazis are good” is also apolitical; because “Nazis are bad” is the consensus, “Nazis are good” must be just an edgy joke, and, even if not, the community already believes the opposite, so the statement is harmless. Tolerable. However, “feminism is good” is a political statement, because the community hasn’t reached consensus. It is debatable, and therefore political, and you should stop talking about it. And making political arguments, no matter how rational, is having an agenda, and having an agenda is ruining the community.

(Now, it is curious how the things that provoke the most disagreement tend to be whichever ones make white dudes uncomfortable. One of life’s great, unanswerable mysteries.)

You can gather where this is going: a community that doesn’t tolerate progressivism but does tolerate Nazism is going to start collecting Nazis, Nazis whose goal is to drive a wedge between the community and the Left. Once the Left acknowledges, “Hey, your community’s developing a Nazi problem,” the Nazis - who are, remember, trusted, apolitical members of the community who might just be kidding about all the Nazi shit - say, “Did you hear that, guys?! Those cultural Marxists just called all of us Nazis!” Wedge. Similarly, any community members who say, “but Nazis though” are framed as infiltrators pushing an agenda, even if they’ve been there longer than the Nazis have. They get the wedge, too.

This is how fandoms radicalize. They are built as - yeah, I’ll say it - safe spaces for nerds, weebs, and furries, and are told that the Left is a threat to their safety. Given a choice between leaving a community that has mattered to him for years and simply adjusting to the community’s shifting politics, the assumption is that Gabe will stay. This assumption is right often enough that a lot of fandoms have been colonized.

What is true of both of these methods - Gabe finding the Right or the Right finding him - is that Gabe does not come nor stay for the ideology. He’s here for the community, the sense of belonging, of being with his people, of having his fears validated and his enjoyment shared. The ideology is simply the price of admission.

Step Three: Isolate

There is a vast, interconnected network of Far Right communities out there, and Gabe is, at this point, only on the periphery. In order to keep him in, they need to disrupt his relationships to other communities, and become, more and more, his primary online social space. Having made this space hostile to the Left, they now seek to break his connections to progressives elsewhere in his life.

This is hard to do online. The whole appeal of moving radicalism to the internet is that your away-from-keyboard life doesn’t have to change. You are crypto the moment you log off. Some thought leaders will encourage their audience to cut ties with Family of Origin, or “deFOO,” but, even then, they can’t monitor whether the audience has actually done it the way an in-person movement could. And so alienating Gabe from the Left is less controlled, and, consequently, may be less total. How much Gabe isolates is up to him.

But the vast majority of Far Right media presumes an alienation from the Left. Part of conservative bloggers and YouTubers making the Left look pathetic is doing a lot take-downs and responses. This is a constant repetition of the Left’s arguments for the purpose of mockery, and, for Gabe, it starts to replace any engagement with progressive media directly. He soon knows the Left only through caricature. It also trains him, if he does directly engage, to approach the Left with the same combative stance as his role models. (For reference, see my comment section.) And this is only if he doesn’t partake in one of the many active boycotts of “SJW media.”

In addition to mocking the Left’s arguments, they also, curiously, appropriate them. This is one part sanitization: liberal centrism is more socially acceptable; indeed, many figures on the outer layers think of themselves as moderates, even as they serve as gateways to radicalism. But, also, many of Gabe’s problems could be addressed by progressive leftism, so they sell him racist, sexist versions of it. Yes, there is a problem with workers being underpaid and overextended, but the solution isn’t unions, it’s deporting immigrants; yes, there is a chronic loneliness and anger to being a man in the modern age, but it’s not because of the toxic masculine expectations placed on you by the patriarchy, it’s women being slutty; yes, wealth disparity does mean a tiny percentage of elites have more influence over culture and politics than the rest of us combined, but the problem isn’t capitalism, it’s the Jews. And it’s hard for Gabe to reject these ideas without, in the process, rejecting the progressive ideas they’re copied from; the Right’s “take the red pill” is, to the untrained eye, similar to the Left’s “get woke.” (Or, at least, the bowdlerized version of “get woke” that is no longer specifically about race which came to fashion when white people started saying it, grumble grumble.)

Take the red pill or reject them both; either is a step to the right.

As this rhetoric slips into his day-to-day conversation, even as seemingly harmless “irreverence,” it may strain relationships with people who are not entertained by this shit. Off-color comments about race and gender can certainly be wearying for female and non-white friends, which can lead to a passive distance or an eventual confrontation [“why is everyone but me so sensitive?!”], which only seem to confirm what his reactionary community says about liberal snowflakes. If he says these things on social media, he may get his account suspended, and, if he comes back under an alt, you can bet his new reactionary friends will be the first to reconnect, applaud the behavior that got him banned, and repeat should he get banned again. A few cycles of this and he’s lost touch with everyone else.

Also, his adoption of the insular, meme-laden terminology of this community makes him less and less comprehensible to outsiders.

Over time, sources of information get replaced with community-approved ones: conservative news, conservative YouTube, conservative Wikipedia if he’s really committed. The Algorithm soon takes note and stops recommending media from the Left. He stops watching shows with a “liberal agenda,” which usually means shows starring women and people of color. Now, there is evidence that the human mind responds to fictional characters similarly to real people, and that consuming diverse media can decrease bigotry in ways roughly analogous to having a diverse group of friends, which is one of many reasons we say representation matters. By consuming a homogenous media diet, Gabe stymies his ability to have even parasocial relationships with anyone who isn’t a cishet conservative white dude or one of their approved exceptions.

To the extent that any of this happens, it happens at Gabe’s discretion and at his own chosen pace. It has not been forced on him, only encouraged and rewarded. But the fact that it hasn’t been forced can make him all the more willing to accept it, because it seems safe to consider; even though his life and social circle are changing to accommodate, he does not feel committed. But many Gabes have walked these halls, and, if they close the door behind them, there’s nowhere left to go but down.

Step Four: Raise their Power Level

(...and they say we ruined anime.)

Consider the ecosystem of the Alt-Right as layers of an onion, with Gabe sitting at the edge and ready to traverse towards the center. (No, I’m not just going to reiterate the PewDiePipeline, though, if you haven’t seen it, go do that.)

The outer layer of the onion is extremism at its most plausibly deniable. Without careful scrutiny, the public-facing figureheads could pass as dispassionate, and the websites as merely problematic rather than softly fascist. It is valuable if Gabe believes this as well; that, at this stage, he believe the bigotry is simply trolling, the extremists an insignificant minority, and any report of harassment faked. That he believe where he is is as deep as the rabbit hole goes. And that he continue to believe this at each successive layer.

People in the deepest crevices of the Alt-Right self-report getting redpilled on multiple issues at different times in their journey to the center of the onion. If Gabe’s first red pill is about the SJWs coming for his free speech, he’ll think that’s all anyone in his community believes; there’s no racism here, people are just making a point about their right to use slurs. Then, when he gets redpilled on the white genocide, he’ll laugh at those Alt-Lite cucks who tried to sweep the race realists under the rug, and at himself for having once been one, but acknowledge that those channels and websites are still useful for onboarding people, so he won’t denounce them. At the same time, nobody takes those manosphere betas seriously.

And this process is reiterated with every pill swallowed: gender essentialism, autogynephilia, birtherism, Sandy Hook truth, pizzagate, QAnon if he’s really out there. The heart of the onion is typically the Jewish Question, but these can happen in any order, and in any number. But each layer sells itself as being, finally, the ultimate truth. Each denies the validity of the others; the layers ahead don’t exist, they’re made up my liberals, while the people behind are asleep where you are now awake. That’s why they chose “the red pill” as their metaphor: take it, and everything will be revealed. That’s why it cozies up with conspiracism. But what’s supposed to follow is that this knowledge help Gabe in some way, and it doesn’t. Blaming immigrants doesn’t actually fix the economy, and hating women doesn’t make men less lonely. But, having been alienated from everything outside the onion, once that sinks in, the only recourse on offer is to seek out the next pill.

And pills are easy to find. Those within the network have laissez-faire relationships, even as they, on paper, disavow one another. When they need a source or a guest host, they aren’t going to go to the Left; they’re going to feature each other. The Left is the enemy; their ideas are beneath consideration, and the only reason to engage them is for public humiliation. [Shapiro’s book.] But you can interview “western chauvinists” and that doesn’t mean you’re endorsing them, just, you know, it’s fine to hear ‘em out, nothing should be off-limits in the marketplace of ideas. Besides, Nazis are apolitical.

And because these folks keep showing up in each others’ metadata, regardless of what they say, Google thinks there is definitely a relationship between the guy “just asking questions” and the guy denying the Holocaust. Gabe is softly exposed to many flavors of conservatism just slightly more radical than he is now, and is expected, at the very least, to not question their presence. This is an environment where deradicalizing - listening to the Left - would be sleeping with the enemy, but radicalizing further? You do you, buddy.

Gabe’s emotional journey, however, is somewhat more complex. If you’ve spent any time reading or watching reactionary media you’ve probably noticed it’s really. fucking. repetitive. It’s a few thousand phrasings of the same handful of arguments. Like, there’s only so many jokes about attack helicopters! But these people just crank out content, and most of it’s derivative; the reason to pick one personality over another isn’t because they say something different, but because they say it differently. Gabe just picks the affect it’s delivered in.

Repetition dulls the shock of the most egregious statements, making them appear normal and prepping him for more extreme ideas. Meanwhile, the arguments themselves? They’re not good. (BreadTube will never run out of shit to debunk.) They are repetitive because they’re not good. They’re mantric. A good argument you only need to hear one time; if you can follow it, internalize it, and explain it to someone else, you know you’ve understood it. But a bad argument can’t convince you on its own merits, so it will often rely on affect. This can be the snappy, thought-terminating cliche, or the long, winding diatribe that sounds really sensible while you’re hearing it but when someone asks you for the gist you can only say “go watch these 17 videos and it’ll all make sense.” Both these approaches are largely devoid of content, but, gosh, if they don’t sound sure of themselves.

And that mode can be very persuasive, but it doesn’t stick the way a coherent argument does. It needs to be repeated, the affect replenished, because the words matter less than the delivery. There needs to be a steady stream of confident voices saying “we’ve got this figured out and everyone else is stupid” or Gabe’s gonna notice the flaws. They are not well-hidden.

And the catch-22 of returning to that stream over and over is that these communities are stressful even as they are calming. People afraid they will die virgins go to forums with people who share and validate that fear, and also say, “Yes, you will die a virgin.” People afraid Syrians are coming to kill us all watch videos by people who share and validate that fear, and also say, “Yes, Syrians are coming to kill us all.” Others have already pointed out that rubbing your face in your worst anxieties is a form of digital self-harm, but I need to you understand the toxic recursion of it: Gabe is going to these communities to get upset. Every emotion is converted into anger, because sadness, fear, and despair are paralyzing but anger is motivating; Gabe feels less helpless when he’s pissed off. And so, while he’s topping up on reassuring nonsense, he’s also topping up on stress. And, being cut off from everything outside the network, the only place he knows to go to release that stress is back to the place that gives it to him. It’s a feedback loop, pulling him deeper and deeper on the promise that, at some point, relief will come.

It is a similar dynamic that keeps people in abusive relationships.

When someone in Gabe’s community makes a racist joke, they are presenting Gabe with a choice between the human interaction of laughing with his friends and his societal responsibility not to be a fuckin’ racist. And not laughing seems ridiculous; everybody’s friends here; no one’s getting hurt; this is harmless. And so the irreverent race joke draws a line between the personal and the political, and suggests that one can be safely prioritized over the other. One way to look at radicalization is being asked to stick with that seemingly innocuous decision as the stakes are raised incrementally: first with edgier humor, and then comments that are funny because they’re shocking but you couldn’t really call them jokes, and then “funny” comments that are also sincerely angry, but, in each instance, since he laughed with his bros last time, it stands to reason he should keep favoring the personal over some abstracted notion of “politics.”

This is why the progressive adage “the personal is political” is among the most threatening things you can say in these spaces.

I’m not trying to make a slippery slope argument. Most of us who laughed at edgy jokes when we were teenagers didn’t grow up to be Nazis. It is a slippery slope in the specific context of being in community with people trying to radicalize you. Gabe is a lonely white boy in need of friends, and laughing at a racist joke is personal, while not laughing is political. Staying in a community that has Nazis in it is personal, and leaving is political. The personal is what brings people together and the political drives them apart. (The “only if some of them are bigots” part of that sentence is usually lopped off). There’s this joke on the internet that nerds perceive only two races: white and political. Following that logic, what could be more apolitical than an ethnostate?

They are banking on his willingness to adapt his beliefs to suit an environment that meets a need. That same need can be satisfied by white nationalism. There are few things more seductive to people who doubt their own worth than being told you are valuable simply for being white. And you can sub in male, cis, straight, allosexual, or able-bodied. It just takes priming: by the time Gabe officially embraces bigotry, he’s already been acting like a bigot for months. The red pill is simply the moment he says it out loud.

Change Gabe’s surroundings, and you change Gabe.

Step Five: ???

The final step in a traditional extremist group would be getting a mission. But that is one thing the Alt-Right can’t do. Once you start giving clear directives, you can’t play yourselves off as a bunch of unaffiliated hashtags and think tanks; you are now a formalized movement accountable to its followers, and can be judged and policed as such.

To my mind, Charlottesville was an attempt to become such a movement, taking things offline and getting all the different groups working collectively. And, as so often happens when these people get in the same space - especially with no official leaders or means of control over their members - it backfired. Their true colors came out before they were ready and a counter-protester lost her life.

This would be the point where, historically, an extremist group starts to disintegrate. Their veneer of respectability gone, they’re now hated by the public, the media wants nothing more to do with them, and everyone not in jail turns on each other or goes underground. This is also the point where the liberal establishment says, “My job here is done,” and utterly fails to retake control of the narrative, allowing the next batch of radicals to pick up more or less where the last one left off.

But to an already-decentralized group like the Alt-Right, Charlottesville was bad but eminently survivable. People retreated back to the internet, with its code words and anonymous forums, but that’s where much of the work was already done anyway. The platforms where they organized kept tolerating them, the authorities still didn’t classify them as terrorists, and any disgraced figureheads were replaced with up-and-comers.

The major change in strategy is that it doesn’t seem anyone has tried to formalize the Alt-Right since.

So where does that leave Gabe? He’s gone through this whole process of largely hands-off indoctrination - and I should stress his journey may look like what we’ve outlined or it may look different in places, this video is not comprehensive - but now he’s swallowed every pill he cares to, he blames half a dozen minorities for everything he sees as wrong with the world, and no one will give him anything to do. You’ve got this ad hoc movement frothing young men into a militant fervor and then just leaving them to stew in their own hate. Should we really be surprised at how many commit mass shootings?

This is a machine for producing lone wolves.

Leaving men to take up arms of their own volition is a way of enacting terror while being just outside the popular conception of a terror cell. There are also, of course, more classic militias that will offer Gabe clear directives - they’re recruiting from the same pool. And Gabe may stop short of this step, settling in a middle layer that suits him or finding the inner layers too extreme. But violence is the logical conclusion of an ideology of hate, and, should Gabe take this step, he can approach violence in the same incremental fashion he approached conservatism.

He can start with yelling at people on Twitter, and then maybe collective brigading, DDoS attacks, sharing dox, leaking nudes, calling their phone numbers, texting them pictures of their houses from the sidewalk. These acts of cruelty become games of oneupmanship within his community. All this can start as far back as Step 2, and get more intense the deeper he goes. Some people join explicitly partake in harassment and violence the way Gabe joined to talk about anime.

But this behavior can serve as a kind of buy-in. The Left and the feminists and the LGBTQs and the Muslims and the immigrants are all, within his community, subhuman. You’ve maybe heard the conservative catchphrase “feminism is cancer”; well don’t treat cancer by having a respectful exchange of ideas with it, but by eradicating it down to the last cell. Cruelty against the Left is framed as righteous.

From any other perspective, posting someone’s bank information is something you might feel ashamed of. Which creates a psychological imperative not to consider other perspectives. A thing that keeps people in is staving off the guilt they will reckon with the moment they step out. Gabe is also aware that anything he’s done to the Left could be done to him if he leaves; some communities even keep dox on their members as insurance. And the things he’s been encouraged to do to the Left will likely make him feel that the Left would never take him now; the radical Right is the only home he’s got. Harassment becomes another tool of isolation.

Steadily, options for Gabe are whittled down to being a vigilante or a nihilist. There are periods of elation: moments the Alt-Right feels it’s winning - or, more accurately, the people they hate are losing - are like cocaine. They are authoritarians, after all. But the times in between are mean and angry. They are antisocial, starved of emotional connection, consuming incompatible conspiracies that may at any point run them afoul of one another, devoted to figureheads who cater to but cannot risk leading them, and living under constant threat of being outed to the Left or turned on by the Right for stepping out of line. Gabe took this journey for the sense of community and purpose, and, but for the rare moments everything goes their way, the Alt-Right can’t maintain either. They can only keep promising his day will come, a story he could get from a $5 palm reading.

The feeling there’s nothing left but to kill yourself or someone else is so common it’s a meme.

But there is always a third option: Gabe can leave.

Pre-Conclusion: For Fuck’s Sake Do Not Make Gabe Your Whole-Ass Praxis

Before we continue, I want to state plainly that Gabe went off the deep end because he found a community willing to tell him that, because he is a cishet white man, the world revolves around him. Do not treat him like this is true.

If a fraction of the energy spent having debates with America’s Gabes were spent instead on voter re-enfranchisement, prisoner’s rights, protections for immigrants, statehood for DC and Puerto Rico, and redistricting, Gabe’s opinions, in the societal sense, wouldn’t matter. Reactionary conservatism is a small and largely unpopular ideology that is only so represented in our culture and politics because they’ve learned how to game the system.

And I get it. Those are huge problems that are going to take years to address, where, if you know a Gabe, that’s a conversation you could have today. And, if you think you can get through to him, it is worthwhile to try. This is a fight on many fronts and deradicalization is one of them. But it is only one, so please keep it in perspective. It sends an awful message when we spend more time trying to get bigots back on our side than we do the people they are bigoted against.

Your value as a lefty does not hinge on whether you can change Gabe’s mind.

Conclusion: How Gabe Gets Out

He may just grow out of it. These communities skew young, and some folks hit a point where hanging with edgy teens doesn’t feel cool anymore.

He may become disillusioned after the movement fails to deliver on its promises.

He may become disillusioned if something goes wrong in his life and his community isn’t there for him, if he feels they like his race and his gender but don’t actually care about him.

He may be shocked if he sees the Alt-Right at its worst before being appropriately conditioned. Charlottesville was a step too far for a lot of people.

His community may turn on him for any perceived unorthodoxy, and he may leave out of necessity.

He may be separated by circumstance from the community - a trip with no internet, hospitalization, arrest - and not be able to top up on the rhetoric. This may lead him to question his beliefs.

His community may disappear, either tearing itself apart or getting shut down by authorities.

He may have incidental contact with populations he’s supposed to hate, and have trouble reconciling who they are in person with what he’s been told about them. In his community, people bond over shared intolerance, but, suddenly, being tolerant helps him make friends. (This is one reason the Alt-Right has made a battleground of the college campus.)

He may form or revisit relationships outside the network, people who can offer him the connection he’s been looking for. This may reintroduce outside perspectives. More importantly, it rekindles his ability to have healthy relationships at all, something the Alt-Right has estranged him from.

As with recruiters, it seems these “escape hatch” relationships can sometimes be parasocial; coming to respect a public figure who is on the Left, or is critical of the Alt-Right.

Someone he is close to may compel him to choose, “me or the movement.” A lot of young men leave to save a romantic relationship.

Hearing stories from people who’ve already jumped may help; there aren’t a lot of public formers, and some raise suspicions as to their sincerity, but it is getting more common, and may be the closest we get to exit counseling for the Alt-Right.

He may become aware of the ways he’s being manipulated, or have them revealed to him, maybe because he stumbled into BreadTube, I dunno. Knowledge that you are being indoctrinated is no guarantee it won’t work - you are not immune to propaganda - but it can help one resist.

And he may revisit a core belief system that used to guide him, be it religion or social justice or a really wholesome fandom, and be reminded of the identity he used to have.

Moments like these, in isolation or in aggregate, can inspire Gabe to jump. They are also good times for friends to intervene. The reach and the impunity that comes with the internet means it has never been easier to fall into reactionary extremism. It has also never been easier to get out. People who exit skinhead gangs often fear for their lives; for Gabe, there’s a chance getting out is as simple as going to a different website. Much of his community does not know his name or his face and he may not important enough to dox.

What doesn’t get Gabe out - not reliably, not that I have seen - is an argument with a stranger who proves all his facts wrong and his ideology bunk. Facts don’t always work because facts don’t care about his feelings. This was about staying in a community, and holding onto an identity, that mattered to him. It was about belonging, and that is something a rando from the other side of the culture war can’t give him and probably shouldn’t be responsible for.

The theme here is human connection. Before he can do the work of disentangling himself, and facing the guilt of what he’s believed and maybe done, he has to know there’s somewhere for him on the other end of it. That the Right hasn’t ruined him. They’ve told him all of history is groups fighting each other over status, and, without his clan, he’ll be an exile. He needs a better story.

I don’t know that lefty spaces are ideal for this, in no small part because bringing someone who’s a bit of a Nazi but working on it into diverse communities is… questionable. And it probably wouldn’t be good for him, either; having just gotten out of a toxic belief system, he’s going to be deeply skeptical of all ideologies. In a perfect world, people who care about Gabe could build for him - to use a therapy term - a holding space. Someplace private - physical or digital - where Gabe can work out his feelings, where he is both encouraged and expected to be better but is not, in the moment, judged. That comes later. It is delicate and time-consuming work that should not be done in public, but we find these beliefs, built up over the course of months or years, tend to fall away very quickly with a shift of environment. Change Gabe’s surroundings and you change Gabe.

But, instead, a lot of people who jump are functionally deprogramming themselves, which is working for a lot of them, but it’s haphazard, and there are recidivists.

If you don’t personally know a Gabe, or have training as a counselor, you may not be in a position to help him. Possibly there are things you can do to disrupt the recruitment process or prevent infiltration of spaces you’re in - I’m looking into it, but talk to your mods - but, elephant in the room: meaningful change will require reform on the part of platform holders. Tools to disrupt this process already exist and are being used on groups like ISIS, but they’re not being used on the Alt-Right because they try oh so very hard not to get classified as terrorists (and also any functioning anti-radicalization policy would require banning a lot of conservative politicians, so there’s that...).

But what makes our story better than theirs is that the fight for social and economic justice, though it is long, and difficult, and frustrating, when it works, it fulfills the promise the Right can’t keep: it materially make people’s lives better. I am not prone to sentimentality, or to giving these videos happy endings. But one thing we have that the Alt-Right doesn’t is hope.

#video essay

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