#a whole lot of other phobias and -isms

[lady-phenix]

Blog intro, Rules, Tags, and character profile

Welcome one and all to the Court of Ravens! My name is Ash and this my new rp blog. I'm trying to be a little better about being "professional" on here, though I wouldn't honestly call myself a pro. I've been role-playing here on Tumblr on and off since 2012 and I just like to have fun with it! That all being said I do welcome almost any and all folks from any Fandom to interact, with only few exceptions. Please continue reading below the cut to fully enjoy your stay ^.^

Rules

1. Absolutely no minors. Sorry guys, but im 30+ years old and not that I don't love yall and wish you the best, but it'd feel kinda awkward interacting with you guys. If you need help or advice though feel free to ask. I'm a person first and an adult second. Still if you're under the age of 18 please wait until you reach that age before interacting/following.

2. I don't generally do NSFW unless I know you very well (I'm demi-sexual and this kinda also applies to my characters). Also I'm not a porn source. I only NSFW if it serves the plot (I may be RPing as a demon but I generally don't participate in stuff like Sinday. More power to you if you yourself do, it's just not my thing). Also if you're below the age of 20 please don't try to do NSFW plots with me. If you have teen at the end of your age, you're kinda still a teen in my eyes. It's like that awkward gray area for me...sorry.

3. We are tolerant on this blog. I don't accept any kind of -phobia or -ism on here of any kind. Please be nice to each other and be nice to me. Don't be a dick.

4. I don't do Fandom drama on this blog. Whatever is going on with Viviziepop or who/whatever has nothing to do with me nor do I share any parties views. The opinions/thoughts expressed on here are purely mine. Don't pull me into drama or there will be problems.

5. Please be patient as I do have a life outside of this blog, and I'm about to work two jobs as well as work on a novel! I have a lot going on in my life so replies aren't always gonna be on my top priority. I also run several other blogs and have other OCs that I sometimes get more of an urge to write for. Thank you for your patience.

6. As the mun of this blog I have every right to choose who I do or don't interact with. Please don't take it personal if I don't get back to you right away. I'm probably super busy or I'm occupied with another rp for the time being. I admit I'm bad at multi-replies but I'm trying to get better.

7. Don't bring politics or social drama on here. I'm here for a good time and not to be reminded that reality sucks. Thanks!

8. I don't tolerate abuse of any kind. Mistreat me or my muse (as in like your characters whole thing is being an asshole for no reason) I will not hesitate to end the interaction and block. Me and my characters do not exist to be your punching bags. Fight scenes are fine, and insults depending on context are okay too. But being needless or senselessly cruel without reason isn't okay. Kinda goes back to just don't be a dick!

9. I LOVE shipping! I LOVE crossovers! And I LOVE OCs! All of that stuff! As it says in my description I'm Canon divergent and crossover/oc friendly. If this is a problem for folks I'm definitely not the blog for you. Please be respectful of my rp partners!

10. Seriously just have fun with it! I don't mind a little chaos, just so long as it's the fun kind. I try to be the cool mun who isn't so stingy about everything.

*as a quick side note, music is a big deal on this blog, so by all means feel free to share music yall love with me, and I may just do the same for you ;) *

Tags/taglist

This is kinda more for me than it is anyone else cause I'm terrible with tags and I'm trying to get better. These are subject to change/be updated. I'll also try to tag NSFW and triggering subjects as necessary.

tag: The Phoenix Sings- usually song/music related.

tag: thoughts of the Phoenix- usually just stuff I think Phenix would think of. These can be kinda random.

tag: matters of the court- anytime the Court of Ravens is mentioned, usually for lore purposes.

tag: matters of the goetia- any time the ars goetia or the goetia family are brought up/interacted with. Again this is usually for lore purposes.

tag: OOC- out of character, pretty self explanatory, whenever I interact out of character.

tag: open starter- any time I post an open rp starter that can be answered by anyone.

tag: rp title- I like to title rps sometimes so I'll use the title I come up with as a tag to keep better track of it. More for fun/organization purposes.

tag: Phenix interacts-tag used when interacting with specific characters. Again more for organization purposes.

tag: NSFW- pretty self explanatory

tag: TW- trigger warning: then followed by triggering thing- Done more as a courtesy than anything else.

tag: Phenix Aesthetic- Anything that goes along with Phenix's aesthetic

tag: Phenix Fashion- Things I imagine Phenix would wear. can be clothes, make up, etc.

tag: Phenix Poetry- usually poetry and/or quote related. Sometimes it's about her, other times will be specified.

tag: Phenix family- anything pertaining to her family, biological or in law.

tag: fanart- whenever I reblog fanart. Pretty self explanatory. Will also tag characters.

tag: The Phoenix Calls- used when reblogging rp memes and starters.

tag: Phenix canons- used for dropping bits of lore about phenix and her family.

About Phenix

And those are all I can think of. If I come up with anymore ill update them! ^.^

Verses and AUs

1. Canon universe- formerly trapped in an abusive marriage, Phenix spends most of her time taking care of imps and other hellborn and sinners who escaped bad situations in her family home, Raven Hall. She wishes to continue her mother's legacy with the Raven Court, and wants to eventually make it an official branch of hells government to give the so called lessers in hell a voice.

*Canon for the blog, but not the show. Though I do try to work within the shows boundaries with this.

2. Ward of the Morningstars/ ward!phenix AU- in this alternative universe, Phenix was taken in by Lucifer after her mother was killed because he felt partly responsible for what happened to Ravenna and for Phenix's fall from favor with Paimon. She sees Luci as a second, but primary, father, Charlie as her sister, and Damian Morningstar as her brother. Vaggie is her future sister in law, and the deadly sins are her aunts and uncles (though some she favors more than others).

3. Royal Guard AU- this is an AU where Striker is a captain of the guard in the House of Andras. Realizing just how bad Andras actually is, Striker and Phenix concoct a plan to free her and put an end to Andras' wicked hold on her. This features the pair Striker/Phenix in a romantic way.

4. Human AU- Phenix is a human royal from the small kingdom of Goetia who's of marriageable age.

5. Genderbent AU- Male Phenix whos escaped from a bad marriage and just wants to raise his two kids, Javier and Viviane, in peace.

6. Queen of Wrath AU- This is based on a fanfic that I'm writing in which Paimon and Satan, the king of wrath, struck up a deal many years ago and has led to Phenix becoming the deadly sin's wife. Unsure if I'll post the story itself but this will be updated if and when I do.

*please note that all of these are subject to be changed/updated*

Full name: Phenix Quezala Goetia

Gender: female

Age: 30+

Demon bird form: a giant five eyed quetzal (two on each side of her head plus one in the middle of her head) that appears to be made of various colored flames.

Ordinary demon form: (terrible at drawing so I'll give a physical description) 9 feet at the tallest. She's mostly red feathered, though she has gold feathers on her face, particularly around her eyes and prominently in her long tail feathers. Her chest is black feathered, with what looks like a light red/orange heart on her bust. Her eyes are mostly black with red-gold irises and odd lavender pupils. She has a third eye in the middle of her two regular eyes, but its usually shut so not visible to most unless they have supernaturally goof eyesight. The feathers on her head start short at the neck and shoulders and but spread elegantly down her back, as though theyre layered atop of each other. They're mostly red but are tipped in black with gold accents. Her style of dress varies on the day and who she interacts with. Despite her fiery colors she actually has a deep fondness for cooler ones like emerald green, blues of any kind, and anything purple. Will on special occasions wear her husband's colors of cream, black, and purple...rarely.

Powers: pyrokinesis, sound manipulation, imitation of any voice, knowledge of most if not all instruments.

Nicknames: Nix, Nixi, Rose Red (I highly warn against calling her this, unless you want your vocal cords pecked out)

Titles: Princess of the Goetia family, Grand Marquess in the House of Andras, and Queen of the Court of Ravens.

Blood Family: Shax (maternal grandfather), Viviane (maternal grandmother), Ravenna (mother), Marchosias (older maternal uncle), Malphus (younger maternal uncle), Paimon (father), Stolas (older half brother), Octavia (niece)

Married family/in laws: Andras (husband, a just no, JN for short), Caim (Andras' brother, a just maybe, JM), Larissa (Andras' mother, JN MiL), Aamon (Andras' father, a total Just Yes, JY FiL)

Important information: There's a lot of backstory to her, but I might reveal that in increments rather than just dumping it all here. So here are the top ten things you should know about Phenix:

She's King Paimon's oldest daughter, but not his oldest child. She's younger than Stolas by about eight years. He went through wives like Henry the 8th. Phenix is the result of his second marriage and her mother's name was Ravenna, who started the Court of Ravens under everyone's noses.

Phenix and Stolas are close, despite their mothers having been serious enemies. He's one of the few people in her life who call her Nixi. She's also 100 percent supportive of his divorce and is close to Octavia.

She got her grimoire at 11, much like her brother, and was given the purpose to act as a muse for musicians and poets throughout the world and across time. She was also betrothed to her husband Andras at this time.

She married Andras at age 20. They've been married for ten years but have no children...yet. Andras has tried to keep her content through the use of illusions. On the blog, she's mostly out of his fog, and he's the reason she hates the nickname Rose Red.

The Court of Ravens was created by her mother Ravenna when Paimon attempted to divorce her but failed. She meant for it to be a safe haven for anyone seeking refuge from a bad situation. Anyone can join the Court, no matter their station, any and all hellborn and sinners are permitted to join the Court.

Phenix has a key to the Court, which is disguised as a portrait ring of her mother. There's more of these rings that are commissioned in Lust and Gluttony. They all look slightly different but always have Ravenna's flying raven signature on them somewhere. Gates to the Court can be found in Gluttony or Lust, and they can only be gained access by the rings which are guarded by Beelzebub and Asmodeus respectively.

Phenix is technically Queen of the Raven Court, and has been since her mother passed. However, she didn't know about the Court until she herself had need of it.

Phenix is accepting to any and everyone. She despises the Goetia's way of thinking, and when she takes her place as Raven Queen, she denounces the Goetia in favor of "her" people, the outcasts and needy of Hell who come to her for protection and sanctuary.

She has seriously thought of killing her husband and taking his prized angelic sword, Exnoctum, as her own.

She does eventually want to have children, not only to succeed her as Raven Queen/King, but to pass on her so called radical beliefs about equality in hopes of eventually ending the stigma that comes with the caste system of hell.

And that's pretty much all you need to know about Phenix. If I come up with anything else or change her canon, I'll be sure to update the list. Now as I said there's a lot of lore surrounding this character and a lot of it involves her family, and especially her mother and connections to the other sins. However, I feel like those should be revealed in time. Until then, by all means feel free to interact! Phenix is super friendly towards most folks. Thank you so much for reading! I know it was a lot! <3

-Mun Ash

[cuddlesomeone]

i’ve seen a few people express surprise, so i wanted to reblog this and emphasize: dragon ball is a whole different ball game from dbz or dbs when it comes to offensive content—both stuff that aged badly and stuff that was never really great to begin with. there’s a lot of isms, phobias, and other yikes moments.

that said, i think media should be examined in context. dragon ball was published in 1984 by a 29-year-old japanese man, and a 27-year-old american woman in 2025 (like me) is obviously going to have different sensibilities and a different sense of humor. for my purposes—mostly analyzing panel flow, line of action, and laughing at the jokes that do land for me—i’m willing to grin and bear it when something like this pops up. but i totally get that a lot of people reading it now won’t feel the same way.

so, in general, i wouldn’t really recommend reading dragon ball unless you’re mentally prepared to run into some seriously offensive content or have that knowledge change how you see the later parts of the series. at its core, dragon ball started as a comedy martial arts manga with an often vulgar, sometimes straight-up offensive sense of humor, and that’s something to be aware of going in.

it is genuinely so jarring to read og Dragon Ball

me one minute: wow what well-executed and smooth panel composition and distinctive character designs. ahaha oh Goku with your whimsical japes

me the next: Bulma had a giant diamond in her bikini bottoms and we also made a joke about how it looked like a bulge and about how it smelled

[richardsondavis]

This post will NOT cover everything that took place in GamerGate. That simply isn't possible here. GamerGate wasn't one drama, it was many small and large events that unfolded and built upon each other over a period of years, and took place in every part of the internet at once. My aim here is to lay out the key figures, and give a general understanding of what happened and why. There are resources linked throughout the post which can expand on events I mentioned, but there are many more that I left out.

Come with me as we explore the dark corridors of the internet that gave birth to the modern alt-right. I'm going to try and keep this gaming related, because this isn't a political discussion board, but references to greater political movements are unavoidable.

Be warned, this post contains basically every ism and phobia that you could possible imagine. Tread with care.

Also, when I refer to 'gamers' with a lowercase G, I just mean normal gamers as a whole. When I say 'Gamers', I mean Gamergate supporters.

Anita Sarkeesian - Sexism in Gaming

This shitstorm began in 2013, though its roots trace back far earlier, and while it would come to suck in thousands of pundits, politicians and thinkers from around the world, it began with one woman: Anita Sarkeesian.

Anita is a Canadian-American media critic. She started her Youtube Channel Feminist Frequency in 2009, analysing portrayals of women in pop culture. In 2011 she worked with feminist magazine Bitch to create a series of videos titled 'Tropes vs Women', which examined the damaging cliches and stereotypes against women in film and tv. It did pretty well, but she was still a small voice in a small circle. The natural next step was to talk about games, and that's what she did in 2012. 'Tropes vs Women in Video Games' criticised the sexualisation of women in games, the way they are treated as helpless damsels in distress, or given to the player as a reward. As Sarkeesian herself points out in her first episode:

"It's both possible and necessary to simultaneously enjoy media, while also being critical of its problematic or pernicious aspects'.

The videos were pretty even handed, and never really took the 'rabid angry feminist' tone that people have come to portray. I recommend taking a look. Anita was clearly not much of a 'gamer' herself, but she saw the positives that could be drawn from them.

In order to fund the project, Anita created a Kickstarter - which was all the rage back then. The kickstarter drew attention from every corner. Some of it was positive - she asked for $6000, but ended up with almost 7000 backers and $160,000 pledged. However a lot of it was bad.

Keep in mind that this all took place at a very critical moment in the feminist movement. Tumblr and Twitter were at their height, and a lot of positive momentum was being made. The video game industry was gradually becoming more inclusive too. Games at the time were - to much controversy - including more POC, women, and LGBT characters. But at the same time, a push began against this. A lot of men were feeling alienated by the rapid change, and this negative stance on feminism tended to look past the majority (who were pretty reasonable) and focus only on the minority of feminists who were explicitly anti-male. And in time, the progressive community would make the same mistake with gamers. But for now, it was these anti-feminists who saw the premise of Sarkeesian's videos as a threat toward 'their territory' - the male oriented video game industry. Anita became the poster child for everything these men hated. There was a coordinated effort on 4chan to destroy her Kickstarter, to DDOS the site, to report her twitter accounts, and otherwise eliminate her. It got pretty nasty. At the time it was a bit of a shocker just how nasty it got, but little did we know it was just the start.

A number of articles started to surface on various sites documenting the bizarre outrage, and that only lent it more momentum. Kotaku, Polygon, and other more left-leaning gaming news sites headed the exposure.

Anita received enormous harassment on social media, including vast numbers of rape and death threats, and she was doxxed multiple times (a practice in which a person's home address is posted online). Her wikipedia articles were vandalised with racial and sexual slurs, and she was sent drawings of herself being raped. A video game was created, 'Beat Up Anita Sarkeesian', in which players cover a photo of her in blood by clicking on it. Critics who disparaged the 'game' received death threats themselves. The creator of the game, Gregory Alan Elliot, was taken to court. The case had significant implications for online freedom of speech in Canada. She was accused of being Jewish, and received enormous amounts of antisemitism dubbing her Jewkeesian, until it came to light that her heritage was actually Armenian - and the harassment switched to an Armenian theme without skipping a beat.

Anita capitalised on her infamy, and used it to speak out on sexual harassment at TEDxWomen, as well as several universities. She was scheduled to speak at the 2014 Game Developer's Choice Awards, and would receive an accolade herself, but an anonymous bomb threat was called in to try and get the event cancelled. It really is hard to overstate the sheer level of vitriol this woman had thrown at her. But she would not be the only one.

"I don't get to publicly express sadness or rage or exhaustion or anxiety or depression, I can't say that sometimes the harassment really gets to me, or conversely that the harassment has become so normal that sometimes I don't feel anything at all. I don't get to express feelings of fear or how tiring it is to be constantly vigilant of my physical or digital surroundings. How I don't go to certain events because I don't feel safe. Or how I sit in the more secluded areas of coffee shops and restaurants so the least amount of people can recognise me."

Zoe Quinn - Ethics in Journalism

Zoe Quinn is an American video game developer and writer. In 2013, she released the game 'Depression Quest', a text-based game in which the player roleplays as themselves and is taken through a number of scenarios relating to depression. The game was based on her own experiences, and was received positively by critics. It's a raw and heartfelt project, and I really recommend it. However, there was a contingent who insisted that Depression Quest couldn't really be called a game, and it's true that it blurred the lines between a book, a visual novel, and a game.

This began a broad - and still ongoing - conversation within the gaming community. What is a game? People tried to come up with a clear cut definition, but there was always something that fell outside it. Does it need a failure state? That rules out Animal Crossing, which is definitely a game. Does it need an end point? That rules out Tetris. Does it need violence? Does it need characters? Does it need interactivity? Does it need choice? Does it need goals? Does it need visuals or sound? It's easy to look at most games and say 'yes, that's a game'. It's easy to look at a book or film and say it isn't. But when projects approach the line, things get a bit confusing. There are those who looked at Depression Quest and saw a book with extra steps, and there are those who insisted it was a game, but with all the extraneous stuff taken away. This is a massive philosophical debate, but we're here for drama, so let's move on. All you need to know is - it got great reviews, and some players were unhappy.

Zoe was added to the list of persona non grata. She received her own wave of death and rape threats, but rather than backing away, she documented them and spoke out about them to the media. This earned her even more hatred, which steadily grew more and more intense, to the point where she fled her home out of fear for her own safety.

But it wasn't until August 2014 that 'GamerGate' as we know it would officially begin. And it started at the hands of a relative unknown name, even now. Zoe's former boyfriend Eron Gjoni published a long and sprawling blog post about their relationship in which he levelled a number of accusations against her, the most inflammatory of which was that she had been given positive coverage (of Depression Quest, among other things) by a Kotaku journalist with whom she was sexually involved. This was a false accusation. It later came out that this journalist, Nathan Grayson, had barely ever mentioned Quinn or her work, and when he did, they hadn't been together. But never let the truth get in the way of a good story. The letter included copies of chat logs, text messages, and emails, and for all the world appeared to be legit.

The Gamers in question accused Zoe of exchanging sexual favours for positive press and professional advancement in what they called the 'Quinnspiracy'. Of course, Zoe Quinn stood to gain nothing from the praise Depression Quest received. Contrary to the claims that she was using her status as a woman to gain money... the game was free. And always had been. But this spawned one 'debate' which would go on to define GamerGate - that of ethics in game journalism. Video game press came under enormous scrutiny, especially the left-leaning Kotaku. The idea was that if a pundit/reviewer/critic was left leaning, their views could not be relied upon, because according to GamerGate, they were biased. Large lists were created to map out the various 'SJW Journalists', which boiled down to a blacklist of public figures who spoke out against GamerGate.

But for Zoe, it just meant abuse.

A lot of this began on 4chan - because of course it did - and users leapt at the chance to renew their attacks on Zoe Quinn and Depression Quest. Adam Baldwin (yes that one) coined the term GamerGate on Twitter, and his followers sent it trending. GamerGate gradually developed into a movement which would viciously attack anyone it saw as a target, and had its base in 4chan and Reddit.

Within four months of the blog post, Quinn's record of threats had exceeded a thousand. Around that time she is quoted as saying:

"I used to go to game events and feel like I was going home [...] Now it's just like... are any of the people I'm currently in the room with ones that said they wanted to beat me to death?".

I would go into detail on the exact content of these threats but frankly, I don't want to. All you need to know is that they contain the worst possible things that some very creative people could come up with. Quinn's Tumblr, Dropbox and Skype accounts were hacked, and she once again fled to live with friends. Everyone even tangentially connected to her got showered with hatred. It was a full on witch hunt.

In a BBC interview, Zoe summed up her experience.

"To me, GamerGate will always be glorified revenge porn by my angry ex. Before it had a name, it was nothing but trying to get me to kill myself, trying to hurt me, going after my family. GamerGate will always be that to me. There was no mention of ethics in journalism at all, besides making the same accusation everybody makes toward any successful women, that clearly she got to where she is because she had sex with someone".

EDIT: There was a section here in which I covered the Alec Holowka scandal in 2019, but commenters pointed out that it isn't really relevant to GamerGate, and I agree with them, so I removed it.

Brianna Wu - Taking Action

Wu is an American video game developer and the founder of Giant Spacekat, a small game studio. In October 2014, she began monitoring 8chan (think 4chan's even worse cousin), and began tweeting about GamerGate, ridiculing them for:

"...fighting an apocalyptic future where women are 8 percent of programmers and not 3 percent".

In the process, she placed herself in the sights of the mob. Anonymous details about her, including her address, were leaked on 8chan, and of course she got the standard death and rape threats, and had to flee her home. If this seems like it's becoming a pattern, that's because it is. The pattern would repeat itself over and over going forward. A minor figure speaks out about something, right wingers try to shut them up with abuse, they use that abuse to increase their platform (thereby becoming a minor left wing celebrity), they become an even bigger target, and they soon end up plastered across the internet.

But to the fury of many Gamers everywhere, none of these women were backing down. In February 2015, Wu declared:

"By attacking me so viciously, they're helping give me the visibility to usher in the very game industry they're terrified about".

Wu created a legal defence fund for women targeted by GamerGate, offered cash for information leading to the prosecution of its worst members, and became heavily involved with the FBI. She exclusively attended events with a security detail. As of today, she and her husband continue to live under aliases.

In 2017, the FBI closed their investigation and declined to prosecute any of the men who sent threats (even though two had confessed). Wu went to the media, campaigning for dedicated FBI agents who understand and monitor the dark corners of the internet like 8chan.

While Wu, Sarkeesian and Quinn would become the three horsewomen of the GamerGate apocalypse, they were not alone. Other women who became major targets include Jenni Goodchild, Liana Kerzner, Devi Ever, Leigh Alexander, Felicia Day, and more. It simply isn't possible to cover every single victim of this movement.

At the time, most people who played video games had no idea this was even going on. And often it was getting swept up in generalisations that turned regular gamers into Gamers. There were those who felt like they were being unfairly portrayed as sexist/racist/whatever else, and responded indignantly. This became heavily involved with the #notallmen and #yesallmen movements (and then #notallgamers). But sometimes those generalisations were right. There was a lot of anger going around in general.

Vivian James - Politics in Gaming

Of course, to the 4channer, the ideal woman doesn't exist. She has to be created. And so Vivian was born. Vivian James (chosen because it sounds like Video Games) was created as a mascot for GamerGaters on 4chan, and her portrayal tells us a lot about what Gamers wanted women to be. She was an anthropomorphized avatar of the /v/ (Vidya) community on 4chan, created in response to a totally separate Zoe Quinn controversy surrounding game jams (events in which developers race to make weird and wacky games). She was used in propaganda as a champion of ‘free speech’.

You see, one of the many debates (and we must use this term loosely) that GamerGate created was that of 'politics' in gaming. Representation was increasing of LGBT people, POC and women in games, and some players insisted that these inclusions were politically motivated. They claimed that games as a medium were not meant to be 'political', and forcing 'politics' into the games was a negative thing. They wanted a return to the 'non-political' status quo - and it just so happened that the status quo was white straight American men (usually with guns). Because they themselves were mostly white straight American men, it never struck them as political for a game to feature a white straight American man, it was simply normal. The default. And any deviation from this was labelled as 'political'.

Of course, any intelligent person can see through this to its deeper meaning - these players didn't want gays, women, and non white characters in their games because they were prejudiced. All media is political in some way. Even games which try not to be political.

This is what GamerGate boils down to - a war over the status quo. One side pushing for change, the other pushing to stop that change.

Vivian never mentioned her gender, her ideas or her politics when she played a game - you could play against her and mistake her for a guy. Rather than disrupt the status quo by existing, she allowed it to absorb her. And that's what Gamers wanted from all minorities - they were welcome as long as they didn't disrupt games as a haven where everything is catered to the default player, a white straight American man. Vivian was a 'real gamer' because she embraced the default. Anyone who rejected that default was a fake gamer, whose love of games was a lie, and whose real purpose was sabotage.

This links in pretty heavily to the #NotYourShield movement, basically a platform for women, POC and LGBT Gamers who supported GamerGate and saw its opponents as exploiting them as a shield to deflect criticism. Ironically, GamerGate used these people as evidence that they were not prejudiced at all, in a very 'I'm not racist, my best friend is black' kind of way.

Penning the Playbook

GamerGate had found an effective way of tearing down its targets, and its playbook would come to include strategies like gaslighting, dogpiling, sea lioning, gish galloping, and dogwhistling - and would inform the strategies of the alt right. By creating a state of fear, where people are too scared to even speak against GamerGate, they were able to silence opposition. And unlike its opposition, who were very real and public figures, GamerGate was decentralised and anonymous, akin to a swarm with no individual leader or face, and which therefore was incredibly hard to defeat. This was never a two way street. Of course, GamerGate had its open and public supporters. Let's go through a few of these colourful characters now!

Carl Benjamin (Sargon of Akkad)

Sargon is your standard basement dweller youtuber, the kind of guy who DESTROYS libs with FACTS and REASON. He gained a lot of traction from GamerGate, and he explains why here. You can kind of imagine him as a more extreme Ben Shapiro.

Richard Spencer

Another Nazi. Richard Spencer was a big supporter of GamerGate. You can look into himself if you like but frankly I don't want to do the research into him because that means I have to watch and read shit he has said. His main claim to fame is being the man who coined the term 'Alt Right'

John Bain (Totalbiscuit)

Totalbiscuit was a popular game critic who died of bowel cancer in 2018. He is widely credited with being the man who legitimised GamerGate. It should be pointed out that Bain was never a white supremacist or abuser or anything like that - and he is often wrongly characterised as being more extreme than he really is. He was conservative, aggressive and thin skinned, but he wasn't evil. To him, GamerGate was always about ethics in journalism, what defines a game, and politics in gaming. He had been an ethical crusader long before GamerGate, and so none of this is truly surprising. He was either incredibly naive or just wilfully ignored the fact that these online movements were just fronts. It is somewhat ironic how much he had in common with James Stephanie Sterling (once known as Jim Sterling before transitioning), another British pro-consumer activist and long-time collaborator, who was always on the total opposite end of the GamerGate spectrum. Indeed, most of John's closest associates were anti-GamerGate.

I met TB once at a convention and he seemed nice enough.

Milo Yiannopoulos

During his time working at Breitbart, Milo was an outspoken supporter of GamerGate. His big thing was that he was a gay right-winger, and he used his homosexuality to deflect criticism for his views. He has since been banned from basically every site possible. Like many others, he seemed somewhat right leaning at first, but gradually unveiled himself as a full on nazi.

Steven Jay Williams (Boogue2988)

Boogie is a youtuber who came to fame through the persona of 'Francis', in which he would put on a funny voice and rage about minor things. But gradually he became more popular just for being himself, and his own views. When GamerGate first emerged, Boogie tried to stay moderate, but his views got more and more extreme as time went on. In 2017, Boogie had a gastric bypass surgery, which made him lose weight. But after that, he revealed himself to be quite a nasty person.

Christina Hoff Sommers

Sommers is an author and philosopher of ethics, and a resident scholar of the American Enterprise Institute. She is probably the most 'legit' of GamerGate's supporters, and has carved out a niche in making right wing talking points palatable to the average person, before they move on to the more extreme online figures.

EDIT: Steve Bannon

As a commenter pointed out to me, I've left out someone important. While Steve Bannon himself was not very strongly linked to GamerGate, he was the founder of the heavily right wing site Breitbart, which gave a platform to Milo Yiannopoulos and many others. Bannon would go on to play a pivotal role in the Trump presidency.

Sexism in Gaming Studios

While this is far removed from GamerGate, it's a case of 'the birds coming home to roost'. The movements that GamerGate helped to start have returned and taken many large game developers by storm in recent years. I thought I would go over some of them.

Part 1: The Fellowship of the Rats

The first big publisher to go under the magnifying glass was Ubisoft. In mid 2020 they came under fire for sexual harassment allegations.

Last month the company, one of the world’s largest video game publishers with a portfolio including Assassin’s Creed and Far Cry, launched a probe after allegations of sexual misconduct were shared online. Serge Hascoet, chief creative officer and the company’s second-in-command, has resigned, as has the human resources director, Cecile Cornet, and the managing director of the Canadian branch, Yannis Mallat, Ubisoft said on Sunday.

MANY of Ubisoft's executives were forced to stand down.

This video goes into a lot of detail on exactly how much of this abuse was covered up at Ubisoft.

Unfortunately a year later, Ubisoft had made minimal changes. Luckily for them, the spotlight would soon be stolen away.

Part 2: The Two Lawsuits

This particular controversy concerns Activision Blizzard. After a two year investigation, the company was found to have extreme harassment against women and minorities, and has discrimination baked into its terms and conditions of employment. Everything from compensation, assignment, promotion and termination is affected by gender. The entire company is governed by a 'Frat Boy Culture'. California's Department of Fair Employment and Housing filed a lawsuit against them..

At first, Blizzard's president Allen Brack claimed no knowledge of this. But then numerous former and current Blizzard employees spoke up to support the accusations. They insisted that almost nothing was being done within the company to fix it. On 26 June, more than 800 employees (eventually as many as 2000) signed an open letter too their leadership demanding that Blizzard recognise the seriousness and show compassion for victims. When that didn't work, employees held a meeting and on 28 July, organised the Activision Blizzard Walk Out For Equality. Turnout exceeded two hundred.

Renowned scumbag Bobby Kotick released a statement describing Blizzard's earlier statement as 'tone deaf' and promised 'swift action'.

An article by Kotaku went into more detail on the infamous 'Cosby Suite', and revealed that Ghostcrawler (one a high-up on World of Warcraft) was on the list of guests.

Numerous developers left the company, either in protest or due to allegations against them. More and more horrible stories began to emerge, far worse than the original lawsuit had uncovered. Sponsors pulled out, investors filed a class action lawsuit toward the company, and Brack stepped down.

You can read more about it here

Hilariously, Blizzard also completely neutered any remotely sexual or flirtatious lines, emotes and jokes out of WoW.

Part 3: The Return of the Gamers

Since then, numerous other companies have been accused of similar problems. Paradox Interactive, SCUF, Insomniac Games, Bethesda. In fact, it might be easier to list the gaming companies that haven't had any allegations.

It turns out that the people who worked in these companies were often just as nasty as the fans.

Luckily, the reaction has been a far cry from GamerGate. On that, at least, we seem to have made some progress. And I suppose that's something to be optimistic about.

A Troubled Legacy

So what is the legacy of GamerGate? It never really 'concluded' or 'finished'. But if we zoom out on our scope a little, we see that it was just a tributary which flowed into the greater river of the alt-right. And from that river would spill forth Donald Trump, Pizzagate, Qanon, the Manosphere, and Incels. GamerGate was arguably just a microcosm of a much greater societal movement, not its cause, but it was the moment that young online conservatives began to push back against progressivism, and collectively organise. It was the moment where their techniques for censorship, propaganda and recruitment would be rewritten for the internet era. And it was the moment when thousands of online fascists looked around and realised their views weren't that rare after all.

The positive effects have been there too, however. The push back against Gamergate has definitely helped us recognise the dark corners of the internet, and also led to widespread changes in the industry. But the consequences of GamerGate have not yet fully shown themselves.

It's hard to say where it will all lead.

[digitalcockroach]

the entire "you only see what you want on tumblr tho!" line is so disingenuous bc like even tho you do have better control of that kind of thing here than you do other social media sites, there is no way to perfectly foolproof curate your feed - most people arent scrolling through weeks of posts for shitty opinions when they follow someone, people change what they're blogging about or suddenly start talking about some weird shit all the time, i know im personally not online enough to know every thing eveyone i follow thinks and says and posts 24/7 (which is also my gripe with people being like "oh my god how could u be mutuals with soandso when they always reblog from [insert problematic user you've never heard of before] r u secretly a terf/pedo/etc???"), and also generally stupid and obnoxious people sometimes have otherwise very good blogs *shrug*

and honestly more than all that these wider tumblr culture issues - this was all brought up in the context of recent posts about tumblr as a whole being really racist about rap and other black dominated music genres, but I think applies across a lot of the broader isms and phobias and how they show up in memes and popculture and tumblr culture - are usually showing up in REPLIES, REBLOGS, and TAGS. or in ASKS. someone will post innocuously about whatever and when that post breaches containment - a phrase we literally use bc we are aware that the immediate circle of followers is pretty consistently into the same shit shares the same opinions or beliefs - they will be nonstop flooded with stupid ass comments, sensitive 20 year olds picking fights, tags proudly proclaiming distaste and ignorance over the literal subject of the post, get tagged by randos who wanna debate or "call you out", it's not smth people are just seeing on their dash bc they follow shitty people

dont leave stupid fucking replies on peoples posts from MY reblog fuck offfff

[thinkatoryprocess]

do you have any thoughts on how mencken matsson and roman are doing in the YKWniverse after mencken's four (or eight) years are up?

I've thought about this a little bit, but let me spin out some post-fic thoughts.

Mencken runs for president again, but not how you might think. His ultimate goal in the primary race is to aggressively out every shitty piece of rhetoric and policy that the other candidates are doing - not in order to win, because he knows he won't, but to basically do his best to shame them into better behavior or to frontload a ton of ammo for the only decent people in the race. He cuts a few throats on his way out of the party and as soon as he loses the primary he actively leaves the Republican Party to become an independent.

Despite the impression someone might have with the timeline of Roman and Mencken that it's a quick flash in the pan affair that might flame out, they actually become very comfortable and happy together and are actively inseparable within 4-5 years' time. They live in Manhattan together after the presidency is over with Aurora, while occasionally dropping in to stay at Mencken's home in Albany, a sort of pilgrimage that Mencken seems to need and matters more to him than he's willing to admit. Mencken invests his time in political activism on several surprising fronts and maintains a strong social media and online presence, no shock there.

Roman and Matsson develop a very strong bond, though a year or two in Roman has a commitment meltdown because he becomes very aware that this is serious and he doesn't want to curse Matsson with his presence forever. It's a whole thing that the three of them have to untangle and eventually Roman has to reckon with how fucked up he is about feeling so weak to Matsson. It's one thing to love Mencken, because Mencken insists upon himself. Matsson is a purposeful surrender on Roman's part, and surrender is bad, obviously.

Mencken and Matsson become very close friends - no sexual vibes, beyond verbal domming in scenes with the three of them. It's a big deal for Mencken, who doesn't have a lot of people in his life. Eventually it's not just about Roman connecting them, but an actual connection of their own that Mencken is very eager to maintain. Matsson appreciates the attention, because Mencken is a more supportive person than most.

Re: Mencken, deradicalization, and the Roys. Over the course of four years, Mencken has more than a couple of freakouts with regards to his deradicalization and whether or not anything he does means anything or is really genuine. And he is doing things - his presidency is full of weird hybrid shit (as usual) informed by Eavis and activists against most isms and phobias that still has to have the conservative tilt he needs, leading to hard centrist moves, effectively. He gets shockingly upset about the idea that he's lying to himself and he can't get any credit for getting better because this is all fake. Roman pulls him back, because the key Mencken was missing before was that he didn't view people as human; he very much does now. A whole new well of empathy opens up in him eventually and he can't bring himself to believe that it's genuine because he hates himself for being what he once was.

The Roy fam situation is complicated, because it's clear Mencken's changed, but it doesn't erase the scars he caused. No one has forgotten that dinner. Even while Ken and Stewy hang out with Roman and Mencken, even when Shiv goes to hang out with Roman and Auri and Mencken is around, it hovers in the air between them all. It hurts Mencken more than you can imagine to realize he can never fix it, but it is what it is. He can't undo what he did.

Mencken winds up being a pretty great uncle - especially to Lilah, Stewy's baby - with all things considered, though Sophie has good reason to be distant. Eventually, she's old enough (16, let's say?) that she actively addresses Mencken about the situation, and he actually almost breaks down in front of her, giving a painful and sincere apology with full awareness that she doesn't have to take it. It doesn't change what happened, but it causes a shift, and she adjusts her idea of Mencken, starts to talk to him independently. It's a weird relationship, but it gets stronger over time, even though the weirdness hovers.

I think that's it? That's a lot, but that's what kicks around in my head when I think about it.

[ablednt]

This isn't to say that queerphobia isn't obviously its own issue that needs to be combated directly but I feel like a lot of queerphobia is caused by other phobias too

Was thinking about it because of the whole "they/them is plural [and no one is plural, are you one of those insane people who hear voices?]" argument and how while it is just an excuse to get mad at nby people it's also caused by a fear of delusional thinking (which is both ableism towards psychotic people and pluralphobia as this overlaps greatly)

How often have you heard trans and nby people called delusional, the r slur, insane, etc? It's the most prevalent form of transphobia.

From the start the labeling of queerness as a mental illness because psychiatry couldn't get its shit together (queer ppl really should all be antipsych but convo for a different day) punished queer people for their proximity to mentally ill and disabled people.

There's also the ways that queerness threatens the patriarchy and thus queerphobia is directly impacted by racism and misogyny etc.

I'm sure, we can probably connect basically any ism this way so I don't think it says a lot perse but what I desperately need is for queer people to trace this logic to the conclusion of "If I want to face less queerphobia I also need to help fight against forms of oppression seemingly unrelated to me."

Back to the first example, if you don't start boosting systems in the wider queer community and destigmatizing psychosis you're bound to be desperately disproving pronoun semantics for the rest of eternity, lest you're mistaken for one of the Crazies.

[911firefox]

Some thoughts on the Buckley parents, I've shared them with @lots-of-planets who agreed and say she had similar thoughts so I'm interested in what others think.

The Buckley parents aren't mentioned again after Buck says he plans to have therapy sessions with them at the start of Jinx. This is interesting and notable because Maddie gives birth to their first grandchild but the only grandparents we see and hear about are the Lees, particularly Anne.

Why is this when they seemed pleased about the baby in previous episodes?

I suspect they said or did something to cross a line and Maddie has had to distance them in order to protect her daughter.

Why do I think this? The parents seem very closed minded. They set off my internal alarms as people to avoid (expecting all the phobias and isms from them basically) and while that's subjective, I know that I'm not the only one. When the first photos were released of the Buckleys they quickly got lots of comments like 'they look homophobic' etc.

Anyway, Maddie is standing up to them for the first time in her life in season four for Buck. If they made a comment about Jee Yun I have no doubt she'd cut them off immediately.

I suspect they made comments about Jee Yun's name. That since Howard has a 'normal American name' they're taken aback that Jee Yun has an Korean name. They perhaps have been going around and calling her the americanised version 'June' and pretending that's her name.

And when Maddie realised, perhaps some family friend in Hershey sends a congratulations card with the name June and the whole thing comes out, she put her foot down. Respect Jee Yun's name, Chimney and their heritage/culture or no contact.

And when Buck finds out, he obviously supports them 100%, maybe even calls off the therapy sessions.

This is total speculation but we thought it made a lot of sense as a reason why they haven't even been mentioned. They just seem like the sort of people who'd have an issue with Jee Yun's name.

[autisticchicc]

Unstructured Autism Rant

A/N: For COVID reasons, mask is purely metaphorical in this piece, not an actual face mask, the work scenario was something that happened pre-COVID.

Trigger Warnings: In-depth descriptions of autism-related struggles and meltdowns.

Disclaimer: This is my personal experience with autism, that is not to say that this is the experience of every person with ASD.

“Have I solved your issue today?” I ask the customer on the other end of the phone. I have; I don’t know why I’m asking this. The customer confirms I have, and I wish them goodbye, a good day, and thank you for calling the business. I don’t care if they have a good day, and I why on earth would I thank them for calling us? The entire interaction went on for far too long for my liking thanks to small talk and the customer pushing pointless information about themselves onto me. He told me he was sketching by the riverside, but why do I need to know about that? How do I respond to a piece of information that does nothing to or for me? Upon hanging up, I breathe a sigh of relief. The mask slips off my face slightly as I rub my temples.  

The relief is short-lived, as one of my co-workers comes over to my desk to talk about something. I take a deep breath and pull the mask back on properly before forcing myself to engage enthusiastically in this conversation. I don’t know this co-worker that well, I know nothing about how she talks, her personality, or her humour, only that I have a huge margin for error in this conversation. I concentrate intensely, trying desperately to make sense of her rapidly changing facial expressions and knowing when it’s my turn to talk. After interjecting at the wrong time on several occasions, I give up and just respond meekly when there’s an obvious gap. I feel embarrassed and awkward, and when she walks away, I kick myself. Why is it so hard to have a simple conversation? I’ve yet to make any friends at this job, and I don’t think I ever will at this rate.

I swivel back to face my two screens and lament the lack of a blue light filter on this software. My eyes ache, and the dog (yeah, don’t ask) on the upper level of the open plan office keeps barking. The occasional trilling of a phone irritates me more than usual as the late afternoon sun glares through the floor to ceiling windows at my photosensitive eyes. I can’t close the blinds because my co-workers love the sun, but I’m rapidly approaching a meltdown thanks to overstimulation, exhaustion, and following vague instructions all day. It feels as though every piece of sensory stimuli is stabbing at my eyes and ears. At the end of my shift I clock out and leave without saying goodbye to anyone. I don’t know them well enough to feel comfortable going out of my way to say anything in the first place.

Upon exiting the building, I cover my ears with my big headphones, the relief that washes over me is immense. All those invasive sounds are gone now, and I can listen to whatever I want. I still feel on edge, still teetering close to a meltdown, so I choose not to worsen it by listening to something that would fuel my anger. Sometimes it’s necessary, sometimes I desperately need to hear the pained screams of Pete Steele, the aggressive guitars and lyrics of Body Count. But today, I need something that isn’t going to give me the encouragement to punch the first person that triggers my rage.

For me, music is transformative and transportive. When I listen to particular songs with noise-cancelling headphones, it’s allows me to go somewhere in my imagination while my body moves to my real destination on autopilot. I decide on an uplifting song by The Knocks and Big Boi, Big Bills. It’s a song that makes me feel like a character in a movie that has just moved to a new city and is pursuing an exciting new life. To an extent that’s sort of true for me, minus the excitement and plot armour. Either way, it’s an uplifting song for me. So much so in fact, that I listen to it on repeat all the way home. If something interrupts the song, like an announcement on the tube or having to pause it, I have to restart it or it’s not the same.

When I eventually arrive home, the transformation happens. The moment my bedroom door closes, and I turn my headphones off, it begins. The outcome of this transformation can be vastly different depending on how my day went. It might be that it was a successful day socially, so I leave my phone out of sight and silently bury myself in a hobby for hours in order to recharge. It might be that the mask comes off and I begin to scream and sob, breaking anything I can to stop myself from self-injuring, burying the heels of my hands into my eyes to block any light. The transformation varies, but it is always the result of the same thing: suppressing who I am.

Much of being autistic and being forced to operate in a society catered to neurotypical people, for me, is suppressing my natural instincts and behaviour. Even when I have a positive day socially, it’s often contingent on how well I assimilated with other neurotypical people in that particular interaction. This is frustrating because not only am I exhausted because hardly anyone accommodates for me, I am also measuring the success of my day on other peoples’ standards. Many of my interpersonal relationships also operated that way until fairly recently, I was forced to behave and communicate the way that other people expected me to rather than what felt natural to me. There is only so many places and so much time I can maintain this act for, and so I was forced to simply cut those friendships off. I am no longer willing to negotiate my needs with people that clearly don’t like me enough to respect my disorder.

The friends I keep are mindful, lovers of the eccentric, embracing that which is different and persecuted for it. Often times I find that the people closest to me also have parts of their identity that mean they must also wear a mask of sorts when moving through society, be it racist society, patriarchal society, or queerphobic society. Our arms interlink on the fringes of an abstract hierarchy, turning away from the status quo and pursuing a life in truth and diversity. One day I’d love for everyone to be able to live authentically, for discrimination, isms and phobias to fade away into the past. I don’t see it happening in my lifetime, or perhaps ever, but I hope it does eventually.

In an ideal world, I would only interact with those aforementioned friends and no one else, but as we’ve established, that is not the world we live in. The reality is, I almost never get to interact with people who accommodate for me. I deal with people touching me without permission which makes my skin crawl, forcing me to take my headphones off when I’m fending off a meltdown, managers who don’t give me the specific step-by-step instructions I need, classmates who don’t understand that I don’t talk because I’m too shy, not because I’m unfriendly, lecturers that forget I can’t operate well in group work and can’t be in classrooms with harsh, fluorescent lights… The list is endless. Even going to the shop is a struggle, because the employees have no way to know. Although Tesco’s have been considerate and ‘progressive’* enough to introduce sunflower lanyards (https://www.tesco.com/help/invisibledisability/), most stores have absolutely no assistance in place for customers with hidden disabilities. I just have to hope that they don’t speak to me and that I don’t end up getting overwhelmed and having to ask anyone for help.

In a lot of ways, this pandemic has meant that I can avoid quite a lot of the scenarios that would usually cause me stress. I no longer work (admittedly, this causes more stress than it relieves), I don’t have to attend class in person, there is little to no in-person socialising, family events are cancelled, seasonal holidays are cancelled, queuing and crowding is no longer allowed (without distancing), etc. That has all been excellent and a relief. But on the flip side, it has given rise to a whole host of new problems. I hate being on camera or speaking in online lessons, there is no way for me to remind the teacher subtly I can’t do group work, masks trigger heat-related meltdowns for me, the financial instability of being unemployed has been a huge stressor, and the lack of government support is utterly enraging. 

Overall, it’s been a huge adjustment. The job that I talked about my experience with at the beginning of this rant is long gone now, so many things have changed. I have never dealt well with change, but this year has forced me to. In some ways I suppose you could say this is a positive development, exposure therapy is best at times. I just wish it had been more on my terms and not at the hands of a viral pandemic. 

[sagemoderocklee]

Reiteration ❤️ A (but not GaaLee :p) P T

A - Your current OTP(s)/OT3(s)/OTX(s)

oof. okay so aside from GaaLee:

1) ShikaTema 2) NejiTen 3) Kakagai

i think these are the only like three ships i could say i feel strongly enough about that i’d classify them as OTPs. GaaLee honestly gets its own category anyways. im not really active in any other fandoms, and the only other ship I’ve ever felt as strongly about as i have gaalee was really Harry/Draco and well... ya know. Although if i were still super active in CLAMP fandom KuroFai and DouWata would 100000% be up there. And of course the forever and unbeatable Sakura/Shaoran but specifically CCS SakuShao because I think TRC isn’t quite as good with their romance

P - Invent a random AU for any fandom (we always need more ideas)

oh. that’s. okay we’re answering hard questions tonight i see.

something niche for you and me: new member of your MLM/communist/leftist reading group is Very Cute but very new to MLM/etc and needs extra help to understand the complicated history, theories, etc.

T - Do you have any hard and fast headcanons that you will die defending, about anything at all (gender identity, sexual or romantic orientation, extended family, sexual preferences like top/bottom/switch, relationship with poetry, seriously anything).

oh god. this is really opening a can of worms lmao and also.... i may have to put this under a cut because god i have so fucking many and some of them may need elaboration.

1. Gaara doesn’t ever take up sleeping/napping post Shukaku

this is something that I know a lot of ppl don’t like/want because everyone wants Gaara to be happy and like big same! but i do think that Gaara’s physiology is entirely altered from Shukaku and the lack of sleep. I feel like having it ingrained in him that he couldn’t sleep, knowing the devastation it would cause, plus all the trauma he has--he’d be plagued by nightmares first of all, and no shinobi is gonna wanna take a sleep aid or something to help them sleep more easily because that would just be a huge opening for someone to attack you. but the other thing is i think it would genuinely make him feel sick. like i know that when i get too little sleep i feel sick because my body needs a certain amount. BUT i also know that those days where im too depressed and don’t get out of bed and sleep too much i ALSO feel like shit. Gaara has lived his entire life without sleep--barring specific instances of forced sleep to release Shukaku--and his body has to have adapted to that. fifteen years of not sleeping there’s no way his body would know what to do with that. his body is so used to subsisting (and this is my own like explanation for how Gaara survived pre and post Shukaku) off of massive quantities of food and by funneling his own chakra into his brain to act as rest, healing, etc.  like i think at this point it’s so unconscious that he isn’t even aware he’s doing it anymore--like breathing. His chakra--which is already another physiological system in their bodies--is just taking up the job of the rest portion of his brain.

that all being said, i do still think this will have an overall affect on his lifespan, but not necessarily his physical or mental health in the immediate sense.

2. Kankuro is straight.

this goes for like all the characters i see as straight, and like i hate like putting this in the like “die defending” category, but there’s this sort of.... sense that when you’re LGBT in fandom you’re gonna see every character as gay and you’re sus/someone’s gonna side eye you if you don’t. like i get the whole ‘well obviously everything is straight and cis IRL, and im sick of it’ reasoning behind “everyone is gay/trans” but the thing is.... I wanna see cis and straight people who support their gay/trans friends and family. I don’t need to live in a world where no one is straight and cis. I need to live in a world where people who are straight and cis actually support and love LGBT people. i personally don’t get anything out of the fantasy of no straight cis people because what does that solve? and what does that say about the homophobia and transphobia within the series? It doesn’t solve or say anything. And quite frankly a series like Naruto is inherently homophobic and transphobic (especially trans misogynistic), and i think brushing that aside with an “everyone’s gay/trans” is more insulting than helpful because it’s not addressing the issue. I’m more invested in seeing the characters who aren’t LGBT supporting and loving and working to make the world better for their LGBT friends, family, and community.

like i know not everyone is writing/reading fanfiction or art or what have you in fandom for like realism or whatever, i get the whole escapism of it all, but i approach it this way because for me I just don’t get anything out of pretending that the -isms and -phobias within the series don’t exist.

also straight trans people exist?????

i could go on about this--like some characters are just... not good and i don’t wanna claim that as LGBT because of that--but like i think this is the biggest thing for me at the end of the day: seeing ppl who aren’t LGBT supporting LGBT ppl.

3. Gaara is a polyglot. Also, he’s self-taught in just about everything. He spent most of his youth in the Suna library for obvious reasons, so reading, writing, language, poetry, history, politics, arts, etc he learned there on his own.

4. Shikamaru and Temari live in Suna 6 months out of the year, and Konoha the other 6. Temari does NOT give up her job to be a nagging wife, and Shikamaru is 100% a wife man.

5. Lee is not originally from Konoha or Fire. He doesn’t remember his parents or how he wound up at a Konoha orphanage because trauma. Also his first language isn’t Japanese.

I have more specific HCs about who Lee’s parents are, where he came from, and what happened to his parents, but that’s like spoilers for a fic.

6. Tenten is not an outright orphan. She actually comes from a clan of weapons masters and smiths.

I think it’s fairly common for ppl to assume Tenten is an orphan because we obviously never see her family--granted we just don’t see much of her to begin with--but I personally fell in love with the idea of her having a clan with the focus being weapons. Her parents are still dead, but she lives with her grandmother, who’s renowned for her weapons.

7. Lee has a HUGE amount of chakra. Like obnoxiously huge stores of it that he just doesn’t know how to manipulate--not quite Kisame levels, but definitely a LOT. He gets as far as walking on water and walls, but he absolutely has to be focused to accomplish those feats and prefers just going really fast so he doesn’t fall in/off.

8. Sage mode!Rock Lee.

I have talked about this before(x, x), but you can absolutely pry this from my cold dead hands--actually, you couldn’t. I’d still hold on to this even in death.

9. Lee has like a photographic memory which is why he always writes things down that people tell him.

10. Gaara will be the last Kazekage--whoever comes after him (and i do have a HC for that) will be Kazekage only in the sense that they’re like the figurehead maybe, but ultimately Gaara is working to completely change the shinobi way of life and the Kage system will be dismantled starting with Suna/Gaara.

11. In a modern AU context, Lee is a HUGE fan of Queen and Bruce Lee.

12. Lee definitely grows his hair out later on in life and changes up his attire and becomes his own person.

13. The Kazekage Estate is a generation home--most households in Suna are, and in fact, it’s really fucking weird for someone not to live in a generational home--so Gaara lives there with his siblings. When Temari gets married, she and Shikamaru live there, and continue to do so when they have kids. If Kankuro has a kid (and a spouse), they’ll live there too. Lee eventually moves in. The house is always filled with love. When Gai visits with Kakashi, or when Tenten and Neji visit, they stay there too.

[phoenixfangs]

okay this post got a little out of hand so its going under a readmore, im rambling abt irredeemable media and purity culture and the critical culture on tumblr and how it jazzes me up and infuriates me at the same time. i mention killing stalking specifically so if u dont wanna see that go ahead and skip this one

ive been a little fascinated by the concept of "irredeemable media" lately and like. i think we as a community on tumblr r trying so hard to compartmentalize media into only two boxes: problematic and unproblematic. and i think thats A Little idiotic LMAO

oftentimes were not even digging into the material we just See smthn like a distasteful trope or a -phobia or -ism Somewhere in the material and brand it problematic, and leave it at that. most "critics" (i hesitate to call them that but i dont have a better word) on this site dont even watch or read the thing theyre talking abt -- its valid to not Want to read smthn like killing stalking but at the same time how many ppl decrying it as The Worst Possible Thing have read even a chapter of it? my guess is very few

(this is NOT an endorsement of killing stalking btw, this is what started my fascination with "irredeemable media" so i am currently reading it to see if it rlly is that bad, and like. yeah its p god awful LMAO i cant in good conscience even recommend it for others to review/critique it its so vile. i want to make it abundantly clear that i am NOT reading it to enjoy it, i am NOT enjoying it in really any way while i am reading it, i think its disgusting in the way it depicts homosexuality, abuse/sexual assault and the way it treats women as a whole. i just wanted to read it bc now i have proof to back up any points i happen to make abt it being a disgusting story, bc im the type of person that wants to experience the Thing b4 i give genuine criticism of it)

ANYWAY killing stalking is maybe not the best example of my point bc even if u havent read it its not hard to accurately criticize it bc it rlly is Just That Awful but its what i brought up bc its what im investigating rn (i dont even wanna call it 'reading' bc thats embarrassing that im reading it LOL im investigating im doing research on killing stalking this is a scientific venture of mine), but like ill see smthn labelled as "irredeemable media" and i think "hm. has this person ever engaged with the material? how do they know its irredeemable? did they actually read/watch/whatever or did they see a lot of ppl talking abt it on tumblr?"

and like i said, i have no problems w anyone who looks at smthn labelled "irredeemable" and decides they dont want to engage w it, i couldnt give less of a shit what other ppl do with their time at this point in my life, i just think the critical culture on tumblr makes it maybe not the best place to get accurate, authentic criticism of things that have problematic elements (or anything rlly, the critical thinking skills on tumblr r subpar at best even when it comes to "good" or "acceptable" media)

and anyway im more fascinated w the culture of engaging w "irredeemable media": if u consume X media that is bad then, by the transitive property, u r bad. THAT is what fascinates and infuriates me abt the critical culture on tumblr. am i a bad person now bc im reading an Objectively Problematic comic as research, even tho literally nothing else abt my behavior/thoughts/morals has changed besides the mere existance of this comic in my life? will i be viewed as a dangerous person bc im reading an Objectively Problematic comic even though im actively decrying it and authentically telling u how bad it is and how much i dislike it and dont want others to read it because its so bad?

bc its not just media we try to box up into "problematic" and "unproblematic", its consumers too. for some reason when it comes to things deemed "irredeemable", if ANYONE engages with the source material, they r suddenly branded as "irredeemable" too, and any nuance of the situation is sucked out into the vacuous wasteland of media criticism on this website. obviously i think it goes without saying that bad media attracts bad ppl but at the same time, we make that assumption abt EVERY consumer of bad media, and i think thats unfair and narrow minded, esp through the lens of criticism

ppl want a moral high ground so badly, they want to feel superior to others so badly, that they jump at the opportunity to call someone an X apologist bc they consumed a media one time. purity culture on this website makes media criticism so difficult and toxic and its. ITS INTERESTING. ITS FRUSTRATING. I LOVE AND I HATE IT. i want to study some of u ppl like animals, the way u react when u hear someone watched hetalia one time or read homestuck one time or laughed at family guy one time. if i had the time i would Genuinely write a think piece on this phenomenon bc its so fascinating to see ppl playing into this purity culture and trying to one up each other by saying "well i NEVER watched this or read that so im morally superior to this other person who did"

i guess my point is, purity culture goes beyond just wanting pure, wholesome media with no flaws and no problematic elements (which is impossible btw bc everybodys standards r different) for the sake of. idk -- ppl like that would claim its to create a positive non-toxic space for folks in margianalized identity groups or smthn probably but idk if i buy that from ppl who behave in such a self righteous, self fellating sort of way -- but that demand for purity extends to consumers of problematic media as well and, who is it passing judgement on those ppl from on high, like a god? the same idiots sitting at their computers reblogging "x my beloved" gifs, same as anyone else

i guess what im actually saying is that NOBODY on this website has any right to pass such harsh judgement on anyone else, nobody anywhere has the right to feel superior to anyone else just bc they only watch pure childrens cartoons and not terrible problematic things like game of thrones or whatever

[bubonickitten]

so ive been thinking of listening to tma for a while now but im a very anxious person. did it trigger your anxiety a lot? ive checked out the content warning list and i already know ill need to skip a few at least

TMA has definitely triggered anxiety for me at times, mostly on my first listen-through and with regard to topics that already make me anxious, but it didn’t trigger any panic attacks or anything, personally. But that’s just me. It totally depends on your own needs and triggers (as well as your general familiarity with horror as a genre). I think it helped that I binged it, so I wasn’t left hanging for a week on an emotionally-charged cliffhanger -- but now that I’m caught up, I do have to wait a week between episodes like everyone else, so it can be a bit more anxiety-inducing, lol.

Most of my anxiety was that sort of low-level, generalized, creeping dread that comes with the horror genre -- but I also tend to get really nervous even when I’m reading/watching/listening to/playing/whatever various other genres. (Especially when a character I love or identify with is in trouble and it isn’t immediately clear whether they’ll make it out alive, lmao.) Horror just tends to bring out a different kind of anxiety, and I like that sense of dread (well, depending on the subgenre of horror we’re talking about; there are some I don’t vibe with as much). But I definitely have to be careful with how it plays with my anxiety symptoms. 

(Putting the rest below a cut bc this got long.)

Almost all the episodes have a unique framing in that they’re comprised of a statement (basically a short story embedded within the overall metaplot, usually events that happened in the past), narrated by a single character (usually Jon, but not always), followed up by metaplot stuff. The season finales are an exception, usually they’re all metaplot happenings with a lot of action and multiple voice actors throughout. So, if you wanted to, you could follow the metaplot and not listen to the statements, or vice versa. (If you do that, I’d still recommend reading summaries of the statements, because even though they work really well as standalone short stories, they’re all connected to the metaplot in one way or another, even if it doesn’t seem like it at first, and there are recurring characters that show up in them frequently.)

The statements themselves usually don’t make me super anxious, probably because they’ve all happened in the past and I don’t have to worry about the main characters being in active danger. Most of my anxiety comes in when it’s current plot stuff happening with the main cast of characters. But, the statements are where you’re most likely to find specific triggers bc a lot of them deal with common phobias (spiders, trypophobia, claustrophobia, agoraphobia, decay, being watched, etc.) and other potentially triggering content (compulsions, paranoia, unreality, gore, body horror, police violence, etc.), as well as commentary on xenophobia, racism, and other -isms and real-world social issues (portrayed critically and not condoned in the slightest, but still present). The writing is so evocative and descriptive that even if I don’t have a specific phobia, it still brings out that sense of dread for me. (I also tend to have trouble with conflict between characters and there’s a lot of that, so be careful if characters being mean to each other puts you in a bad headspace.) 

In case you haven’t already seen it, there’s a Google doc with spoiler-free content warnings for each episode here; the unofficial transcript site has content warnings at the top of each episode page; and for episodes you know you’ll have to skip, if you still want to keep up with the metaplot, the Wiki is good for summaries, and each episode page is split into segments (statement/supplemental/etc.)

I’d keep in mind, too, that Jonny Sims has been clear that it’s a horror-tragedy. It won’t have a happy ending. That’s something I have to prepare myself for, as someone who gets very emotionally attached to characters. So far there have been a few deaths of beloved characters, and I’m 100% sure that this season is going to have some hard-hitting major character deaths. But one of the nice things about it is that Jonny Sims is good at treating his characters with compassion, even when he puts them through some serious grief and suffering. It doesn’t strike me as just another “kill your darlings” mentality, or throwing characters away without wrapping up their personal arcs just to make a cheap point. 

I personally like dark fiction that has a hopeful ending, if not a happy one, and Jonny Sims is definitely including humanity and hope and love even in recent episodes, but the ending is... probably going to be more tragic than hopeful. That’s a creative direction he’s intended from before the first episode of the podcast was even recorded, and he’s been up front about it and I trust him to execute it well because so far his storytelling and character development have been stunning, so I just have to do my best to prepare myself for any anxiety and grief I might experience as the series’ ending draws near, haha. (Nice thing is, this fandom has a lot of nice fanfic, so even if canon is rough, I have some outlets.) 

I’m rambling, so: TL;DR, yes, depending on what specifically triggers your anxiety, this podcast might be a rough listen at times. I find it worth it, because the story is really good (and again, I tend to get anxious even outside of the horror genre), and Jonny Sims is an amazing writer, and the podcast is brilliantly voice acted and soundscaped -- but definitely be careful and mind the content warnings. The current season (which will be the final season) is particularly rough because even though it’s still supernatural horror, it also deals with a lot of very real-world horrors. I mean, the whole podcast does in some ways -- there’s a lot of pointed and brilliantly written social commentary -- but the current season is especially raw, especially considering current events. 

If you have any specific triggers or content you’re worried about -- because the content warning guide is great but vague since it’s spoiler-free -- feel free to message me again (anon or otherwise) and I can go into detail about the specifics (depending on what level of spoilers you’re comfortable with). 

[purplesurveys]

740

‘Does your best friend bother you more than anyone else? This is so weird. Someone wouldn’t be my best friend if all they did was annoy me. If one of my best friends did start to bother me with anything they’re doing, we’re close enough for me to comfortably call them out on it. Who is your best friend? Angela and Gab. Do you like someone right now? A lot more than that at this point. Do you even think you stand a chance with this person? I’ve been with them a handful of years now, so yes. Do you consider yourself truly happy? Not truly. I can generally keep myself happy but I’ll sometimes have days where I’m anxious, angry, hurt, confused, lost, or all of the above. It’s a work in progress.

How often do you cry? I want to say at least once a week; that's pretty accurate. Are you emotional? Yes. What is the worst thing you would do for 10 million dollars? I find these questions so stressful to think about lol. Just give me scenarios to do for $10 million and I’ll tell you if I’m willing to do it. Have you ever had/do you have an eating disorder? [trigger warning] No. But when my depression was at its roughest a part of me wanted to try adding self-starvation to the other methods I was already using to harm myself at the time. Didn’t really work out. Have you ever cut/burned yourself intentionally? Cut, yes. Burned, technically yes, but I didn’t know it would hurt me. When I was 7 I thought I had some sort of invincibility so I placed a finger on a clothes iron that was plugged in at the time. So I kinda did it on purpose, but not because I wanted to burn myself lol? If that makes sense? What do you think of people that do? Hope that they have people around them who care for them and can help them pull themselves out of that hole. What's your opinion on drugs? Have you ever done any? Scary, especially the hard drugs. I’ve seen Breaking Bad, Trainspotting, and Requiem for a Dream to know not to try them lol. I’ve only had milder ones like caffeine, nicotine, and painkillers. Have you ever noticed the hidden adut jokes inside of kid shows/movies? When I encounter the episodes these days, yeah I would notice them. When I was a kid they used to be just sentences that didn’t make sense to me. Do you want to be famous? Why? I’m not opposed to it. I wanna be able to travel places, get freebies, and afford a lot of nice clothes, but I’m also not willing to do absolutely anything or lose who I am just to get famous.

Do you sin often? I don’t really think of that anymore. What are your views on God? Nope. What do you think happens after you die? I go to sleep permanently, which for me is the most peaceful way to think of death. Sometimes if I’m feeling a little alone or helpless, it’s just as comforting to also think of the possibility of reuniting with my lost loved ones when I die, like my lolo or the great-grandparents I never met. Are you afraid to die? I’m afraid of dying painfully, if anything. Like I don’t want to be stuck in a burning room or have a ceiling collapse on me, you know? If you had the chance, would you want to know the date of your death? Yes. Have you ever felt that you weren't good enough? Of course. Do you have any siblings? If so, are you jealous of them? Yes. I’m not jealous/envious of Nina, but I do sometimes wish I had a talent that was as tangible and recognizable as hers – she’s an artist and an editor, and very good ones. Do you have a good relationship with your parents? Why or why not? I mean we don’t hate each other, but I wouldn’t go running to their arms if I had a problem. We have a more buddy-type relationship.

Are you always wanting more? Yep, I’m quite materialistic. Do you make good first impressions? You’d have to ask the people I’ve ever met. I hope I do, though. Do you feel bad for obese people, or do you just laugh? I am so unimpressed with this question.  What would you do if you were obese? Idk, it would depend on the mindset I have once I’m at that point. Are you ashamed of your past? Not ashamed. I just wish it had a lot more happier days. Do you miss your past? No. Do you have a song lyric that describes where you are in life right now? Ain’t it fuuuuun living in the real wooooorld ain’t it goooood being all alooooone Who are you closest to in your family? In my immediate family, it’s probably my sister. But generally speaking, it’s my eldest first cousin on my mom’s side. Do you ever open up to people? Yes, but I’m also private. Like I wouldn’t just share my life story with anyone - you have to ask about it and know which questions to ask. Do you consider yourself guarded? Why or why not? Sure. I’ve had shitty people come in and go out of my life throughout the years. Are you an honest person? I guess. Do you like animals? Love them, except cockroaches and flying cockroaches.

Do you think doctors prescribe medicine too often? I...don’t really have an opinion lol and I don’t know if I should. I don’t know the first thing about medical ethics. Are you a control freak? In a group setting, mostly yep. Do you enjoy getting drunk, or do you feel like you're losing all control? I like getting drunk but only until a certain point, i.e. when I feel giddy enough to socialize with strangers or start dancing. I’ve had a couple of bad experiences from drinking too much and it’s always so embarrassing the day after. What do you think happens when you go into a coma? I’ve read accounts on Reddit from people who used to be in one and the stories vary. Some stayed passed out through the whole thing, others dreamt in a lot of vibrant colors, others had dreams that they considered metaphors for dying, others were a little aware of what was happening or being said around them. Do you think the internet is dangerous? I know it is, lmao.

Name all the social networking sites you use: Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, YouTube, Linkedin. I re-installed Snapchat recently but I don’t use it for social media. Do you think anyone truly knows who you really are? My best friends do, in different ways. Have you ever given anyone the chance to really get to know you? Yes. Do you block people out of your life when they start to get too close? No. It’s very rare that that gets to happen so when it does, I keep them around. Who do you think has the most pressure to be good-looking; guys or girls? I think both experience a lot of pressure in very different ways. It’s not a contest. Do you care what impression you make on people? Kinda, especially if they make the wrong one lmao. Do you think TV is too much of an influence on today’s youth? If anything today’s TV has a lot of responsible representation from sexual consent and coming out and mental health to POCs, which gives off a suuuuper positive influence to kids and young teens these days who now feel like they can see themselves in the characters they meet and scenarios they see. Racism, sexism, homophobia, and all the other -isms and -phobias never get to fly by in this age anymore and that’s a great thing too. Just look at Brooklyn Nine-Nine, Sex Education, Itaewon Class, and I wanna say The Good Place? but I’ve never seen it. What do you think people would do if all the computers crashed? I honestly think that would be the last straw that would break the camel’s back for people to start chaotically freaking out lol. There’s too much happening as it is. Honestly, do you say racist things? Filipinos in general are resentful towards mainland Chinese but that’s because they have bullied us for so long, they’ve literally shit on our historical parks, they keep buying our lands, they claim our seas, and they belittle and mistreat Filipinos, especially the ones who work as OFWs in China. We wouldn’t be as racist if most of them didn’t act like such assholes to begin with. Personally, I don’t verbally say racist stuff but I will judge mainland Chinese in my head if I come across them or hear another incident of them misbehaving. Do your parents put way too much pressure on you? No, which I’m quite grateful for. They just let me do my thing, they ask me what jobs I want without hinting what they want for me, they let me fantasize about my dream purchases once I have a salary without guilt-tripping me over letting them have a share of my money, that kind of stuff. Has anyone you loved ever died? Two big people in my life. Do you think people overreact when their pets die? Not at all. Pets are family, and everyone’s reactions are valid. I remember when Lorde’s dog died and people were either 1) making fun of her and called her overreacting when she said she was gonna be unable to release new music for the meantime, or 2) stoked that her new music is probably gonna be sad and emotional because of her dog’s death, and I thought both were terrible. Do you know who you are, or what you want to become? I’m getting there, don’t pressure me lmfao. Do you have your future mapped out? Or are you just taking it day by day? Day by day. I have a good big picture planned out, but I also like living in the now. What are you going to do now? I dunno if I want to take another survey or watch YouTube videos now. But directly after hitting post on this I’ll definitely take another sip of my coffee and give my dog cuddles for a few minutes since he just woke up from his nap.

[legionofpotatoes]

Okay then, since both of y’all are just delving in I’ll try to keep things (relatively) spoiler-free and stick to story sense and semiotics! Few caveats:

Have not had prior experience with Kojima’s body of work and if that’s a prerequisite in how I “should feel” about it then yike on a bike (just getting this out of the way based on what I’ve had talked at me)

My read excludes the entire context of moment-to-moment gameplay; I basically watched chronological story cutscenes stitched together with NPC interaction vignettes sprinkled in-between. 9 or so hours in total. 

I did this because the gameplay does not interest me at all - and not in protest of chill social games (I adore both No Man’s Sky and thatgamecompany stuff, for example, and try to champion anything without Gun in it), but because the setting and length did not align with my expectations for something to invest so much time into. Still, I was super intrigued by the story, and, to a lesser extent, the plot.

also I have a hard time writing in condensed English, so this may run quite long. I’ll put the rest under a break. Second language, sorry!

I’m trying to think of a good way to start this. Like I said, the story, or what the thing was ABOUT, was infinitely more interesting to me than whatever wacko packaging Kojima thought up for the narrative. Which was a complicated, thought-out piece of fiction shattered into many disparate pieces and fed to us in a mystery-box-filmmaker kind of way, making us reverse-engineer what essentially was a rather simple interpersonal uhh. family tragedy, I guess. 

But to its credit the lore is visibly built solely to support whatever thematic messaging Kojima would want to weave in there - something I can respect. Meaning it gets as wacky and as nonsensical as it needs to be in order to reflect the high-concept allegories at play, aaand then it does so to a fault. I adore works of fiction that don’t give a shit about “tone” - I hate that word more than anything in modern media - but effective symbolism in storytelling, IN MY OPINION, requires a deft hand, nuance, strong authorial position, and a good grasp of social context. 

I want to like, go through these four points individually and nitpick my problems with the game in their lens, because I think they cover pretty much everything I feel like saying:

1. A deft hand - to me means to selectively dramatize correct themes and plot points as you go so that shit makes sense in the end. I felt this was incredibly lacking here. It was like a symphony going for hours without a crescendo. The absolute wrong bits of soulless exposition would be reiterated THRICE within a single cutscene while necessary context of, hell, character motives or even plot geography would be left vague. Intentionally vague, some would argue, but their later function would never arrive. Other times, what would visibly be conceived as wink-and-you’ll-miss-it foreshadowing could overstay its welcome to the point of inadvertently spoiling a later plot point. My girlfriend sniped the (arguably) most important reveal of the game, which is left for the tail end of the final epilogue (!), in the first hours of watching. The symbolics and allusions were just too plentiful where they should have been more subdued. I am DYING to provide examples here but I’m keeping it spoiler-free. Again, if this is a Kojima-ism, too bad; but it’s not a catastrophic failure of storytelling by any means. There are very few masters of this thing working today. But what can be easier to navigate, I think, is...

2. Nuance - this kinda goes hand-in-hand with the upper point but is a bit more important to me and applies to what SPECIFICALLY you decide to heighten in order to slap us across the face with your deeper meanings. Certain characters - not all of them - feel like caricatures. The silly names and overt metaphors (wearing a mask means hiding something! connected cities all have ‘knot’ in their name!) are honestly, genuinely FINE as long as their function isn’t betrayed, but the lean into metaphor worship can sometimes wade into SERIOUSLY shitty territory as contemporary implications are ignored altogether, and that ties into my fourth point, which I’ll address before looping back to the third; needless to say, approaching sensitive subjects with broad strokes is not exactly the way to go. But broad strokes is almost exclusively what this game does, forgetting to incorporate...

3. Social context - and I feel like avoiding examples here will be difficult lest I end up sounding like a dogmatic asshole; but there is a right thing and a wrong thing to do when co-opting IRL concepts to fit fictional messaging/storytelling. I feel that a character “curing” themselves of a phobia by experiencing emotional growth that vaguely corresponds to what the disorder could have symbolized is a wrong thing. And I don’t even want to get into all the wacky revisionism the lore ended up twisting into, which was mostly honestly entertaining (the ammonite will be a good hint to those who’ve played it), until it decided to, again, lean a bit too hard into painting today’s reality as a crisis of human connection and imply some questionable things about why, uh, asexual people exist, for example. Yes it makes some sense within the context of the lore and what’s happening in the plot, but it’s completely lacking in social know-how of the here and now. In other words: a Bad Look. To me, this type of wayward ignorance is a much more serious issue that can historically snowball any piece of writing into a witless disaster. I don’t know if it quite does it here, but it’s not really my place to say. Still, you can have wacky worldbuilding that has no sense of dramatic tension, nuance, or awareness towards the audience, and yet containing one last vital glue holding it all together, and that would be...

4. Strong authorial position - or intent I guess, to speak in literary terms - and I still have trouble pinpointing how and where this exists in this game. A bullshit stance you say, and I hear ya; cause this here is a video game very pronounced in its pro-human-connection messaging, painting the opposite outcome as an apocalyptic end to our species. And as I understand the gameplay is all about connections too - leaning into that theme so hard it even renders itself unapproachable to most capital-g Gamers. I honestly respect the balls of that. But really, as an author who headlined the creation of this thing, what was it really about? What were you trying to say?

And beyond “human connection is real important to beat apathy” I got nothing, and I think that’s because of points 1 and 2 failing in succession, and then point 3 souring the taste. It just had to be apparent the moment the curtain fell, is what I find. You just have to “get” it immediately, get what it was trying to say, but that will happen only if it’s been articulated incredibly well up to that point. Maybe the entire punch of that message REALLY depends on you spending dozens of hours ruminating on the crushing cost of loneliness as you haul cargo across countries on foot and connect people to your weird not-internet? If so, I’ve missed a vital piece of context, and with this being a videogame and all, it’s honestly a fair assumption. But otherwise.. it felt like a hell of a lot of twisting and turning and plot affectations that only led to more plot affectations and sometimes character growth (which had its own bag of issues from point 3) and not a hell of a lot to say about human connection beyond the fact that it is. good and useful. It felt like a repeated statement instead of being an argument. Does that make sense? I understand the story optics here are zoomed waay out and set on targeting the human condition as a whole, but like.. if you’re committing to a message, you have to stand by it.

Why is connection good? it’s a dumb question without a DOUBT but since the game has set out to answer it then it.. should? Did I miss the answer? I may have, I honestly can’t exclude the possibility. My lens was warped and my framework of consuming storytelling is a bit rigid in its requirements (the four points I mentioned), so maybe I’m just too grouchy and old to understand. 

I just think Pacific Rim did it better and took about 7 hours less to do it! And yet, it, too, involved Guillermo Del Toro. Curious.

If you made it this far and are interested in my thoughts on the technical execution of it all as well, uhm, it’s pretty much spotless? Decima is utilized beautifully, the Hideo vanity squad of celebrities all do their very best with the often clunky dialogue, the music is great, the aesthetic and visual design is immediately arresting, and it certainly does an all-around great job at standing out from the rest of the flock. I fell in love with the BB a little bit. It is also a game that is incredibly horny for Mads Mikkelsen, which almost fully supplants the expected real estate for run-of-the-mill male gaze bullshit. It is. A change.

That’s all I got folks

[khixsoncounselorpdx]

The Not-So-Blank Slate: Social Justice Practice

As a social justice-oriented counselor, supervisor, and educator, I’ve known for a long time that my work is biased. Biased towards social justice and against oppression. It is biased towards awareness of racism and anti-blackness. It is biased towards acknowledging all the -isms and phobias and naming, witnessing, and validating these experiences when my clients share them. Biased towards radical-leftist-anarchist-anti-fascist-socialist-intersectional feminist-Marxist social justice perspectives. Unapologetically. There is no way around it for me. There is no neutrality. There is no blank slate. There is no separating my personhood from my counselorhood.

What If We’re Not on the Same Page?

I’m sharply aware that fellow practitioners and their clients don’t always share the same values and beliefs. The question comes up a lot in my work when I’m teaching or training, and it sounds like this: This social justice stuff is all well and good and I buy it, but what if my clients or colleagues don’t share these values or politics? Embedded in this question is an underlying awareness and discomfort that we do have strong, biased values and that we are interfacing with people and systems that do not share these values. In this politically divided, partisan time, some may be worried about being labeled a social justice warrior. It’s a strange, strange world that people would pejoratively label someone who believes in social justice! But here we are. We are fighting against systems and structures of power that are maintained by people who actively believe in their supremacy, their right to discriminate, and a whole bunch of other egregiously harmful bullshit.

It’s Not You, It’s the System

There are also deep, deep incongruences and outright hypocrisy within the systems, educational institutions, and even non-profits that purport to support social justice. Embedded in these systems and the people leading them are often deep conflicts about the mission, the ways they relate to workers, clients, and students, and the large disconnect between what is said and what is practiced. All of these conflicts are challenging to contend with. And I can understand why some of us in the field are confused about how to represent our values. If we take a look at our own ethics code, we can analyze some of these confusions and tensions. The second and third point in the preamble to the American Counseling Association Code of Ethics (2014)  states that the following are core professional values of the counseling profession:

2. honoring diversity and embracing a multicultural approach in support of the worth, dignity, potential, and uniqueness of people within their social and cultural contexts; and 

3. promoting social justice.

Later in the Counseling Relationship section of the ethics code, the Personal Values guideline states:

Counselors are aware of—and avoid imposing—their own values, attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors. Counselors respect the diversity of clients, trainees, and research participants and seek training in areas in which they are at risk of imposing their values onto clients, especially when the counselor’s values are inconsistent with the client’s goals or are discriminatory in nature.

There is some contradiction and discrepancy in this personal values guideline when compared with the preamble. We all get caught up on the “avoid imposing” language when in fact the whole profession has a strong set of core professional values that it is imposing on its fellow professionals and clients. The other part, when the counselor’s values are inconsistent with the client’s goals, is deeply conflicted. A useful guideline when a counselor feels challenged by a clients’ sexuality or gender, but what if our client is a white supremacist? Surely, we’re not going to be value-neutral. We may struggle. We will have to seek guidance and consultation on how best to proceed within the therapeutic relationship (and perhaps the refer-out option will be taken). But we’re certainly going to do our best to find creative ways to challenge values that are discriminatory and dangerous to groups of people in our communities. If we can’t challenge oppressive, white supremacist, and patriarchal values within the privacy of a counseling session, how do we exactly plan to disrupt the atrocities that keep happening in the name of these values?

`graphic from justseeds.org

Apples & Oranges

False equivalence seems part of the problem. The values of social justice are not harmful to our clients. Doing justice is different than doing harm. Of course, there are plenty of things we can do to be harmful in our role as counselors. But challenging a client on transphobia is not the same as client abandonment. Being curious about your client’s Zionism isn’t the same as breaking confidentiality. Questioning why your male client talks down to the women in his life isn’t the same as providing ineffective treatment. Processing with a client who didn’t intervene during a moment of racism in the grocery store isn’t the same as having inappropriate boundaries. When we suggest (as one of many treatment options) that a client who is frustrated with the current order of things could do some canvassing or show up at the next protest, it isn’t imposing our values, it’s just good treatment.

Grist for the Mill

The thing we risk when challenging our clients with different perspectives is a therapeutic alliance rupture. If you and your client don’t agree on how to work towards your client’s goal (or you have different goals altogether), y’all might have to stop to work this out. It might be challenging. More situationally, if our clients are coming to therapy to get help with a relationship but you see things escalating toward abuse, you’re gonna broach this. If a client comes to us to work on depression but we notice they are discriminatory to their co-workers of color, we’re gonna find a way to bring it up. It may be difficult and tense, but we are trained (or should be) to handle ruptures in our work with clients! We are trained to name it, figure out how to communicate with compassion, and work through difficult moments with our clients. We can weather these tensions in these professional settings. We can get awkward with our clients. Our shared humanity is at stake when we don’t take the risk to challenge ourselves, our colleagues, and our clients.

No doubt it is quite confusing and maddening that the general public can’t agree that it is problematic that people and institutions want to destroy the life and humanity of some of our fellow humans. But the time for neutrality in the counseling profession is over. It was never possible in the first place. As we circle the drain towards fascism, let us be unapologetic in our quest for social justice. As Howard Zinn said, you can’t be neutral on a moving train.

[allronix]

Exactly.  Like a lot of bad ideas, it had a logical reason behind it. Cartels and other dirtbags were using kids as drug mules or putting them into sex trafficking, and they’d bullshit the authorities that “oh, I’m their uncle/dad/mom/cousin” to get them looking the other way and releasing the kid right back to the crooks. Or that throwing a unaccompanied kid in a cell with adults no one vetted while you track down their parents/guardians is a recipe for trouble. 

But then, things start going to hell; too many kids, not enough manpower, facilities not maintained, lack of oversight, good old anti-immigrant sentiment and those facilities to keep the kids develop worse conditions than most state DoC facilities keep convicted crooks. 

That was the whole issue. It started under Bush II, ramped up with Obama. When that idiot Cheeto got elected was the first point when anyone cared (because they wanted to tar and feather the guy with every ism and phobia on the books, which...well, he kinda was). And the Biden/Harris ticket (along with Democrats like The Squad) really play hard to the “kids in cages” story. The whole point was to clean up those facilities and speed up the time to get any unaccompanied kids back to their families and keep ‘em out of the hands of the dirtbags. But Biden gets in office and everyone’s sleeping on it because he’s got the right letter by his name, even if it’s the same old shit the deep fried Cheeto was pulling. 

so glad people voted for the lesser evil and we have children in facilities again instead of kids in cages

[thosemintcookies]

Looking up reviews for ammonite because maybe I'm gay and I want to watch women be gay shut upppp

And I go to the Wikipedia and apparently people are doubting the historical accuracy as if that's a valid take for things other than documentary???

I mean in documentaries they expressly put forth the idea that what they're presenting is true but with stuff like historical pieces, even about real people, there's always going to be framing and interpretation? Like honestly, for me, it's less important that a figure is portrayed accurately than if the piece is 1. Emotionally competent and well executed and 2. Respectful to the legacy within reason (like, if someone was homophobic, maybe making the character secretly gay isn't the best look and it plays into a lot of harmful stereotypes... or like if someone killed a whole bunch of people for no reason you can make fun of them and I won't care tbh)

Like it's not the same as a eulogy and its definitely not the same as mishandling human remains. Its a story. Its like when people criticized Coppola's marie antoinette for inaccuracy as if she didn't know. She threw in anachronisms on purpose. the aim of the piece was to say something about privilege, feminine image, frivolity, tragedy etc etc

Like yes, the reading comprehension on this site is pretty bad, but literary criticism is kind of bad everywhere?? People take in media in bad faith all the time and look to find fault with it. Especially if its made by marginalized groups (still am not forgiving how dudebros assassinated birds of prey even tho it was a straight up masterpiece and did pretty well, actually. Someone literally said "get woke go broke" to me irl. Maybe the audience is me, then. I wanna see women being friends and going ape. Do I not deserve media that caters to me?)

It's like. People forget to consume media in good faith nowadays. They hear something is bad for x-ism or y-phobia without even trying to discern intent behind why it's depicted. Is x-ism or y-phobia depicted because the creator thinks it's right? Or is it to expressly condemn that behaviour? Conversely, people think stuff like gender and sexuality and race are too political as if people haven't been fighting for liberation since the beginning of time. In literary circles, it's such a tired conversation about reading with intent and reading with a receptive and thirsty mind.

Like, read and watch in good faith. Look for the authors intent within a story. If a work serves it well, if something resonates with you, keep that feeling safe. Think of the types of critiques you're making. Develop some fucking literacy.

Also, listen. You don't really get to choose what affects you. I watched the good dinosaur once and the dad died in it and I was really emotional about that even tho the rest of the movie was middling at best. There is no objective way to take in media, but to disregard the piece entirely in favour of picking it apart at the nitty gritty? Its the kind of abhorrent cherry picking i see from bigoted Bible readers who puck verses to justify their behaviour