#also i know some of these terms have discourse around them but people use them genuinely so they're getting added here

[andivmg]

My experience with Luke (Punz)

CW: toxic relationship, racism, dubious consent

I know in the past i said that i would no longer speak about him publicly, and when talking about my experiences with abuse and emotional mistreatment i begged to keep it anonymous but after reflecting on this for a week and seeing so many incredibly smart and strong women tell their stories. they have given me the strength to say his name.

this is really scary to talk about because of the copious levels of harassment i have received from his fans in the past so if this spreads or gets out of hand i will simply log off.

If you read my last post, i nicknamed him 1.

So aside from everything i said there, there were a lot of things i didn’t include because they would’ve made it obvious that it was him and it could potentially backfire on me so, i’m very afraid to post this. but i’m going to do it scared anyway, because it’s not fair that he gets to just go and live his life worry-free as if he didn’t practically ruin mine.

Because I already made a very lengthy post about him, i won’t include everything i said last time to avoid being redundant but if i repeat myself, please bear with me.

In our year long relationship i had to endure emotional neglect, gaslighting, verbal abuse, one instance where there was dubious consent, and much more.

Starting off at the beginning of our relationship, that’s when i was getting copious amounts of hate and harassment from his fan base (warranted or not), he decided that our relationship must be kept private. he said it was to “protect” me from his fanbase when in reality it was to protect himself. it was so he wouldn’t get all the backlash i was getting. this is funny because one of the things i got called out for was saying the B slur (derogatory term used against mexicans/latinos). I won’t get into the nuances of if i could say it or not as a puertorican because that’s discourse that does not pertain to this specific situation. But you know who definitely can’t say it? A white boy from Massachusetts. When i was getting cancelled for this and getting thousands of tweets calling me names, he decided that was the perfect time to say “I mean you are a b***** aren’t you? my little b*****.” Now, he said this completely unprompted. I was in the process of writing my apology and he just said that. I tell you this because i immediately shut him down and told him that there was no universe in which it was okay for him to say that word and especially not one where he could just call me that. While i was reprimanding him, he was smiling and laughing. he apparently found it amusing to call me a slur. regardless, he gave me a half-assed apology and said he wouldn’t do it again. and he didn’t. but this wasn’t the only time he was weirdly racist to me. this was my first time being in an interracial relationship so i was led to believe that this was normal by all the white people around me at the time. But, sometimes my spanish accent would come out and he would make fun of me and the way i pronounced some words. He also refused to visit me in Puerto Rico when i lived there or come meet my family when i really wanted him to because he “didn’t like the heat” or “it’s dangerous there isn’t it?”. Once, while we were watching season 2 of Bridgerton, he implied that the Sharma sisters were “too dark” for him to be attracted to them. This hurt me because they are brown skinned girls. I am a brown skinned girl. Then this, combined with the fact that he told me once he wasn’t attracted to me made me feel like my skin color was unattractive. These are only a few examples i can think of at the moment, but i’m sure there were more. Our relationship ended in 2022 so some of my memory is a bit hazy. But, I do remember feeling inferior to him throughout the relationship because he was white and I was not. I chalk that up to all the micro aggressions i had to deal with because i had never felt that way around white people before.

Another thing i had to endure was him constantly making me feel like he was embarrassed to be with me. Because i was cancelled, he didn’t want to associate with me too much. He did defend me on multiple occasions, I’ll give him that. But, he only did it because his name was getting dragged in the mud along with mine. Excusing my actions made him look better for being around me. In reality he didn’t really care. Because he was such a big content creator and someone i looked up to professionally, I took his advice as law. He told me to tone down my personality, to keep a low profile, to change things about myself to be more palatable to his audience. The same audience that spoke about me like “The pussy can’t be that good punz please stop defending her”. So i changed a lot of things about myself and my content to better suit what his audience liked. He made me feel like if his audience liked me, he would be public about our relationship and stop hiding it. He told me the reason why he wanted to keep our relationship a secret was because he didn’t want to get hate for it. But this wasn’t true. On my 20th birthday he went to Las Vegas for a twitch rivals event. That night i asked to facetime him to say goodnight and he refused because he was at a hotel room with his friends and he didn’t want them to know that we were together. It was as if my mere presence or the utterance of my name was a source of embarrassment for him. And he didn’t let me forget it. It wasn’t just a public thing at that point. He didn’t want people to know we were together, period. This was devastating to me because I would talk to all my friends about him. I was so proud to be with him and I was just one more problem to him. He made me feel so small and insignificant just because his fans didn’t like me.

He would berate me a lot. Not just due to getting heat online, although he did do that a lot. But in general whenever we would get into an argument or a disagreement he would always call me names like annoying or weird or stupid. He would raise his voice at me if i did something he didn’t like and call me an idiot. And that really hurt, i felt like i couldn’t bring up anything or do anything without getting insulted. If I hadn’t seen him in a few days because he was too busy streaming and i asked to hang out he would call me needy, clingy, and annoying. Granted, he might not have been wrong, but that is not something you say to someone you claim to love. He also insulted me when i was in depressive episodes. I have BPD and at the time i was not being treated properly for it. So, I was all over the place emotionally and he was what i clung to for validation, reassurance, and love. I talked to him when we first started dating about my disorder and told him that if it seemed like something he couldn’t handle that he could opt out of the relationship. I guess he didn’t think it was that bad or something idk because whenever i had really bad depressive episodes, he would tell me I was too sad to hang out with. He said that my sadness was a burden to him. Which would be fair. But, once my mother had a conversation with him about me. She told him that i am someone who needs a lot of love and caring. She said that if he wasn’t willing to put in that kind of effort into a relationship to just leave me alone. He reassured her that he would be there for me no matter what. He told my mother that he would protect me and my heart. He did not. He took all the warnings I gave him and ignored them and then made me feel like I was the problem. And even worse, he would say that i was pretending to be sad to get his attention when he would neglect for days at a time.

There were also some smaller things like the fact that he made me feel really guilty whenever he would spend money on me. Also, he would be really mean about my eating habits. For context, i used to suffer from an eating disorder. I was anorexic and had a really unhealthy relationship with food during high school and my first year of uni. This relationship began when i was recovering from my ED. For me, eating was really hard. So i had certain comfort foods that, while sometimes unhealthy, at least it was something to eat when i didn’t feel like eating anything. He knew this. Yet, whenever i would crave some of these foods he would call me fat. Constantly told me I’d gain weight from eating all that junk food. Saying that to someone with an eating disorder is crazy. Other smaller things were that whenever I would post tiktoks where i was lip syncing or just looking good he would yell at me and say i was looking for attention. Same with Instagram or Twitter whenever i would post photos where I looked hot. He never planned out a single date for us. I would beg him to get me flowers and he did maybe once but i’ll get into that in a bit. He would make fun of me in front of his friends to make himself look better. He let his friends say really degrading things about me in his presence. For example, once when i was showering, i overheard him on a discord call with George and Sapnap and i heard George say “if you don’t go in the shower and have sex with Andi, i will”. Once, when i was really struggling with my legs (for those of you who don’t know, i have arthritis and it’s very painful. at the time i wasn’t diagnosed but i was in a lot of pain) I literally could not walk. I had to beg him to take me to the ER because i didn’t know what was wrong with me. He didn’t want to take me but eventually i convinced him, and while we were there all he did was complain about how long it was taking and that he would have rather been at home streaming. Whenever I would talk about my interests that i was excited about like shows or books he would be incredibly uninterested and say that those things were stupid and he didn’t want to hear about them. I know all of these seem very silly or superficial but cumulatively it was awful.

Now for arguably the most serious thing i’m going to talk about. I want to preface this by saying i am just telling my side of what happened. You can come to your own conclusions about this.

On April 25, 2022 it was our one year anniversary, and i had made a dinner reservation for us. I expected him to plan something throughout the day for us to do. He told me he was going to spend the whole day playing Valorant so I got upset and cancelled the reservation. After a very heated argument, we calmed down and i asked him to come over. He came over about an hour later with flowers and drinks (I was 20 at the time so I couldn’t buy the drinks myself). He brought Smirnoffs and Trulys. For context, I am a lightweight. I always have been. I literally get tipsy on half a cocktail. And that day, I hadn’t eaten anything because i was in distress over our argument. So we get to talking and drinking. I blacked out after my second Smirnoff. Apparently I drank 3 but I genuinely cannot remember anything after finishing the second one. The next morning i woke up naked in my bed. I woke him up and asked him “Luke, why am I naked?” and he said “Because you didn’t want to put your clothes back on.” When I clarified to him that that was not what I meant, he got defensive and said that he didn’t realize how drunk I was. He proceeded to tell me that I initiated sex with him and that i was very enthusiastic about it. He said he didn’t know i could black out on three smirnoffs. He made fun of me for being a lightweight and continued to make light of the situation. Then he mentioned that i fell off the bed at some point in the night and that it was funny how drunk I was. I then questioned him. Because if he thought that me tripping and falling off the bed because i was so drunk was funny, how did he not know that i was too drunk? He responded by saying that i fell off the bed only after we were done. That day I broke up with him. I’m still really confused about what happened that night. I don’t remember anything and all I have to go on is what he said to me. We were in a relationship at the time and he says he didn’t know how drunk I was so I’m not sure what to call what happened. A while after that day, his friend that hmu while we were broken up and I started talking again and i confided in him about that night. He told me to be careful saying things like that because they could get me into trouble. I spoke to some of our other friends about it and they told me it was no big deal and that it wasn’t his fault that he didn’t know how drunk I really was. Because I don’t remember, I have been led to believe that this is not a serious matter. You can think what you want, come to whatever conclusions you want. That is just my side of the story.

I want to add that I’m not proud of how I acted after the relationship ended. I felt really angry at all the shit he put me through and I guess a part of me wanted him to hurt even a quarter of how I did. So I started talking to his friend and got involved with him. This backfired on me because his friend ended up really hurting me too so ig i got my karma. But the thing that hurt the most is that because of what I did, some of our friends took his side in the break up. I was told that I did something terrible by getting involved with his friend that he was already insecure about and that he didn’t deserve that. These are the same friends who were witness to the dumpster fire of a relationship we had and all the things he did to me. They turned their backs on me because of this one thing I did. But stood by and watched as he treated me like garbage for over a year.

I will conclude this by saying that while this relationship has been “over and done with” for almost two years now, I carry a lot of trauma from it still. I still talk about him in therapy and have had to put in a lot of work to heal from what he did and i still cannot say that i am okay. I am very blessed to now have a patient and understanding partner who has helped me heal from that trauma and i just want to quickly thank him for that. Nobody deserves to go through what I did. While yes, it was a toxic relationship, and I had a part in that, it does not excuse all the awful things he said and did to me. This is my truth, thank you for taking the time to read it.

[interstellarsystem]

Also adding on! Systems of any kind, and various experiences within them, are also alterhuman. They have been since the coining post.

Huge pet peeve of ours when people equate alterhumanity to just meaning "nonhuman", but also considering how common systems are in the community, it's always been weird to us how even we are overlooked. We absolutely agree with all of the above though (and we'll need to check out a few of these links later ourselves).

Plural: Multiple people in a body, to keep it simple. Morethanone is a good place to get a neat little rundown.

Fictive: A person in a system who is from a fictional source. They may or may not identify as that character in question.

Factive: Like fictive, but with factbased sources instead. Historical figures, celebreties, other people, etc.

Extranth: A member of a system who is nonhuman--specifically in a way similar to fictives and factives, and separate from otherkin. (Coining post).

Soulbond: A connection formed with a (usually) fictional character in someones mind. Note that not every soulbond/soulbonder considers themselves plural. (This carrd has a lot of good stuff all in one place.)

Daemonism: The practice of communicating with a daemon--a personified split of your consciousness that usually takes an animal form. Like with soulbonders, a lot of people in this community consider themselves separate from plurals. (Link to daemonism terms.)

Tulpa: A deliberately created person you share your body with. There's a whole lot of techniques to it, and not everyone considers themselves plural here either. (Note: Some might use "parogenic" or "thoughtform" here instead of tulpa--though "thoughtform" is a more broad term that can cover different things.) r/Tulpas has plenty of informative links for further reading.

Also, some things that don't fall under plurality:

Constelic: A label for when one collects/takes on multiple identities. They might have one identity, or a lot, and these can range in intenstity as to how they're experienced. (Link to coining post on the web archive, carrd on the web archive.)

Vampire: Someone who feeds off of energy, blood, or both. I don't have links on hand for the vamp community so if someone else wants to put some in, it'd be great.

Factkin: Someone who identifies as a factual entity--usually a person who has lived before, like a historical figure.

Otherhuman: A person who feels like they belong to another branch of humans/human species, fictional or real (link).

"Alterhuman" is such an expansive term, there's so much more than nonhumanity to it. Not everyone who falls under any of these labels would necessarily call themselves alterhuman, but the term exists as an umbrella for everyone who wants it. It's so much more than one or two things--and even nonhumanity has intricate nuances to it that go overlooked.

you there. person posting a "list of alterhuman terms" post in the community tags. name and define five alterhuman identities that ARE NOT nonhumanity or fictionkinity. if you try to use voluntary nonhumanity as one of these the dragon gets to eat you. you have five minutes.

[sensorydephrivation]

Amatonormative assumptions and the language of a hard launch: a rambly DnP essay thing

I have a lot of Discourse Thoughts about hard launching and all that, but there’s not much I can say that hasn’t already been said. This fandom is one that generally has significant representation on both sides of any major issue; any take you look for you can find someone genuinely believing. What I am interested in analyzing is how some people are insistent, whether or not they want it to happen or believe it will happen, that they haven’t Hard Launched, and others are equally insistent that they have. Because on the surface those should be completely contradictory takes, but a large amount of people believe each to be true.

I’ve seen posts making comparisons to PJ and Sophie, and I definitely think that’s a useful tool because it brings up the real question here: how do we speak about romantic and platonic relationships, and what underlying assumptions are at play when we use or don't use certain words?

Firstly, this issue is obviously mostly to entirely due to homophobia. Why do people assume PJ and Sophie are a couple just because they live together, even though they've never used the words? Because they're a man and a woman. Why couldn't DnP be publicly open about their relationship back in the day? Because they're gay. I'm not going to spend too much time on this point because it's obvious, but I feel like it's important to remember that Dan and Phil's relationship wasn't some Great Secret for no reason. They weren't no-homo-ing because of privacy or whatever, but because they weren't yet ready to face the immense challenges being publicly out sticks you with, especially in the early 2010s. If homophobia wasn't a thing, everything else I'm going to say in this post would still be true, but it would all be significantly less charged. Just remember that gay marriage wasn't legal in the UK when DnP met each other, and that 2000s pop culture overall was routinely, openly, virulently homophobic. Just keep that in mind. (Also, everything I talk about in this post refers to 2019 onwards, after they came out. I wasn't around for the no-homo era and can't speak on it. I'm also not going to be talking about the speculation around their relationship, because that's been talked about so much. It definitely is a factor in all of this, but you know that already)

Onto the main point of this post. The reason DnP haven't "hard launched" (that term itself is incredibly vague, but its popular meaning in this fandom seems to be explicit confirmation of a romantic relationship, which is how I'm using it here) while also having clearly done so is because their use of language does not line up with conventional expectations of how language around romantic and platonic relationships should be used.

The concept of "dating" as we think of it today is relatively recent, and language around it is even newer. The terms "boyfriend" and "girlfriend" only became prominent in the mid- to late- 20th century, and it took a while for them to gain the connotation (of almost always meaning a romantic relationship) that they have today. And yet people have still had romantic relationships for forever! How these things were described would depend on the society's norms around marriage and sex and often on the exact social dynamic of the couple. Today, we think we're better than all that and can find words for anything.

I'm no expert on what makes a relationship romantic vs platonic or even how to define those terms. I find it hard to define the concept of romance in a way that doesn't bring with it centuries of heteronormative amatonormative assumptions. And boy are there assumptions. (No, people who live together for life do not have to be romantically involved, that's a silly thing to believe.) When people see a relationship that lines up or does not line up with those assumptions, they expect it to have a clean, simple label. But the words we used for romantic relationships outside of marriage, due to how new they are, are completely not simple!

While these days they seem to be the most "unambiguous" terms to describe a romantic relationship, "boyfriend" and "girlfriend" are essentially euphemisms that can seem infantilizing and demeaning of the seriousness of a relationship. It's easy to see how they aren't for everyone, even if many people are fine using them for serious committed relationships. "Partner" is kind of ambiguous on purpose, thought like bf and gf, I think it's on its way to becoming a word with mainly romantic connotations. The term "significant other" is out of fashion these days, but just like bf, gf, and "partner," it's basically a euphemism that doesn't mean much in and of itself. We have no words to describe an unmarried romantic couple that aren't on some level unclear or unindicative of the actual nature of the relationship.

Dan and Phil have acknowledged that they were once in a romantic relationship, have made many many jokes about having sex with each other, and are committed life partners. On some level, you can take the combination of these things as a very clear confirmation of a current romantic relationship, which many do. Yes, this requires making a few assumptions, but they aren't the craziest assumptions in the world. In fact, as one can see from the PJ and Sophie example, they are assumptions that are often normal and expected to be made in social situations. So why do so many others not see it this way?

Well for one, we are a mostly queer community that understands the complexity of queer relationships and how these assumptions do not get applied equally. We see how these assumptions are often used against queer people to devalue their identities, especially those on the ace-aro spectrum and/or in queerplatonic relationships. We also are an extremely online community, familiar with the complicated layers of discourse around RPF and shipping, and hesitant to make assumptions in a way that could potentially damage relationships or invade someone's privacy.

But honestly? It's because DnP don't call themselves boyfriends. They don't explicitly frame their activities in romantic ways (e.g. call things dates). The terms they use and jokes they make, even in 2024, are not the sort of things we expect from the set of assumptions that go with a committed romantic relationship. (This is also where the discourse about whether or not they're open/poly comes from, but that's a topic for another day.)

The Date Night video stretches this to its absolute max. The game is full of cards about kissing and other things that fit cleanly into the set of romantic relationship assumptions, but they didn't use any of those cards. They only used things that were ambiguous, and tried to downplay the romantic implications as much as possible aside from the lampshading of it at the start of the video ("this is a great game to play with your best buddy as well" "phil says no homo" as well as the entire "ugh i can't believe they send us this" tone of the intro). The use of "partner" in this video is the clearest example of this. The game uses this word exclusively- after all, it's a standard, accepted, gender-neutral word for people in a romantic relationship. Phil confidently reads it off the card, with the "I don't care which set of assumptions this assigns us" attitude that's been prevalent over the past year and past few months especially. Dan avoids it half the time, and at the end of the video, seems to clearly mock the term, saying it in a silly voice and then comparing it to how stereotypical cowboys use the word. This stuck out to me; it made it very noticeable that they don't use that word at least in videos, and made me think about the connation of the word they do use-- "friend." That term, unlike any of the words I've mentioned so far, implies literally nothing. "Friends" can be people with a barely positive relationship or people with an incredibly meaningful relationship they center their life around. With no other qualifiers, it also implies that the people in question don't have a romantic relationship (are "just friends"), or even (because of amatonormativity) that their relationship is not especially deep or meaningful.

Dan and Phil have defined their relationship in quite a few ways-- or rather, Dan has, in BIG and in his interviews for WAD. These quotes circulate on here constantly as people discuss the meaning of them. I'm not really interested in talking about those as they've already been talked to death. I do think it's worth noting that we only get these things from Dan-- the one time Phil has ever spoken on his "current dating life" it was just to say "I don't want to talk about that, the door is closed." Obviously some of this is because the interviewers were pushy, but also I'm sure Dan enjoys his elaborate poetic metaphors enough to not be able to shut up about them haha. (Very unrelated but I wonder if this will come up if they end up doing interviews for TIT?) The thing is, these definitions show a deep, meaningful, complex, committed relationship. They include directly romantic terms like "husbands," "soul mates," and "normal gay relationship." You would think being willing to call someone your husband, even with a million other words around it, would mean you wouldn't have a problem calling them your partner, right? Yet these words do not reflect the language they use when speaking about each other in videos!

There are times when they say "friend" "buddy" or "mate" in a clearly humorous, ironic way, and seem aware that it isn't a term that makes people think of a committed, long term relationship. Other times, they use the word as if it is a fully accurate descriptor of their relationship-- in the glue story, Dan jokes about being ashamed to be seen as "the friend of the glue guy," and in How Phil Nearly Died, he quotes himself telling the hospital staff he is looking for "my friend." I use the hospital stories as examples because they are high-stakes (or seemingly high-stakes in the case of the glue story) situations and examples of how other people in their real lives perceive them. The way they choose to tell these stories to the internet is one in which the fact that a random hospital worker would likely interact differently with Dan if he was Phil's friendly roommate as opposed to his life partner doesn't matter. In other words: if they actually do call each other "friends" irl around strangers, those strangers probably have a very different impression of their relationship than we do. Their consistency in describing themselves doing so just means that they want to consistently use the term "friends" in their videos, not that they actually do that in real life. But to a viewer who is unsure about their relationship status, the fact that they are clearly life partners, no matter platonic or romantic, but in all situations opt for a word that does not imply that seems to be confirmation that their relationship is not clearly romantic, or at least that they don't want to refer to it as such.

If I have to draw a conclusion from all this, it's that DnP consider their relationship very complex and unusual (ymmv on if it is, lol) and have had to deal with a ridiculous level of scrutiny about it nonetheless. Again, Phil has almost never spoken on this, but Dan clearly dislikes any descriptor that carries with it a sense of assumptions about the nature of the relationship, hence why he uses like fifty contradicting ones or strange metaphors instead. "Friend" carries with it no assumptions. You can be "friends" and be in a romantic relationship-- plenty of people say "I married my best friend." But our society considers romantic relationships to be more meaningful and important than platonic ones. People assume that if you are in a romantic relationship, you would want to describe your relationship exclusively using terms that carry that set of assumptions, because that is the most important part about it. I honestly think Dan is being quite subversive in refusing to do so.

I have no idea if or when this will ever change, but I hope I've given enough context for those who are convinced they've already hard launched to understand why others are still waiting, and for those who don't think they have to understand why the issue is more complicated than it seems. This topic has fascinated me ever since I first started watching them, and I hope this post can help people reach a bit more of a understanding, rather than inciting more discourse.

[fakescenariosbeforesleepblog]

By fire and heart.

Pt. 5

Daemma Targaryen. Second daughter of King Viserys and queen Aemma, you're the living portrait of your mother with the character of a true dragon, as a second daughter you don't have right to the throne but certainly, you will protect your sister's succession by heart. (You are one year younger than Rhaenyra.)

Warning: Credits of this images goes to whoever they belong to! Grammatical and spelling errors, maybe this won't be good enough but In my head the story was a good one.

Disclaimer: I do not own any of the characters nor do I claim to own them. I do not own any of the images used nor do I claim to own them.

Pt.4 and Pt.6 is here.

You heard about the news of lady Rhea's death, an unfortunate event for a lady of an important house and suspiciously there's no news of your uncle, he wasn't there apparently.

You've been flying with Whitefyre, you do not wish to talk with your sister and neither to be in a ship with her.

You felt pity for Alicent, she is now on her own in that big castle, no friends, just her and her children.

You arrived earlier with the Velaryon, Laena and Laenor Velaryon received your father and sister.

You were eating breakfast when you saw Laena and Rhaenyra coming in, you stood up and excused yourself mentioning that you were ready to practice with Laenor, but it was really a lie since later Laenor and Rhaenyra were walking on the beach the same morning.

The visit was quick at least for the king and Rhaenyra, but you stayed, you convinced your father you were going to start your own search for a husband and occasionally you would visit him, he was hesitant but in the end he felt like he owed you that, Rhaenyra had her opportunity, it is fair that you have it too.

It was just to be away from home, until your anger and disappointment passed, while that happened you would continue your studies learning and getting better in your battle skills.

You assisted in the royal wedding just because it was one of your father's conditions, there you are walking around the hall, a beautiful light blue dress, you're just expecting to lose yourself in the crowd so you can go back to your chambers as soon as possible.

The entrance of your uncle is always a scandal, but not unexpected, your father always has a seat for him, his discourse is interrupted by Alicent, wearing the colours of the Hightower house, everybody knows what it means, war, your sister looks at you, confused expecting for some kind of signal that can helps her to understand what happened. But there's no relief since you avoid her look.

You're too focused on Daemon, the way he looks at your sister, hunger and desire, but also Alicent, perhaps you're angry with your sister, but you will not break your promise, you will approach Alicent to know what is going on, you think will it be easy since your distant attitude with your sister is evident.

While everybody dances you go to Alicent to compliment her for her dress.

- Thank you princess, perhaps this is not the right moment but I would like to have a private audience with you later.

- Of course my queen, if I can be honest with you, I've been feeling lonely, as you can see, my sister and I are not in good terms.

Both smile at each other and you leave her to talk with some other ladies, it's an enjoyable night until you see your father's eyes focused in the middle of the dancefloor, your sister and uncle, talking really close to each other, you're approaching when you suddenly hear screams and a lot of people pushing each other, you're dragged by the sea of people.

Ser Harwin Strong takes your sister far from the battle and then Daemon saves you, putting you away too. Everybody is in silence leaving the room as everything ends. There are no more festivities, the wedding takes place that same night.

You went to sleep that same night thinking about everything, your father's health, your sister's marriage, your uncle saving you, Laenor's pain and Alicent's actions. The dreams you had that night were full of blood, young boys with brown and silver hair, dragons and storms.

The next morning you joined Alicent, breakfast with her and her children, you don't know yet who could be an ally or an enemy, but at the moment you have to be on both sides.

You continued with your own plans of traveling around the seven kingdoms, you're not visiting houses to find a husband, that is not your principal objective, you want to find allies in case of those dreams you have become true.

With time you became close to Alicent, it hasn't been easy but the treatment you have with her children has been useful.

You discovered Aegon is undisciplined and emotional, a constant headache for Alicent, the other two are different and you put effort to know them too, but since Aegon is the older, you try to keep an eye on him, keeping him in that way, impossible and hard to control.

You heard the news of your sister's pregnancy so you went back home to meet the new member of her family.

You could hear the pain through her door, then a baby crying loudly, you get inside, it was such a beautiful view, your sister was smiling holding the tiny form in her arms, you never thought you would actually see her so happy with pregnancy and newborns, but she has been a good mother.

- Congratulations sister, another beautiful and healthy baby.

- Thank you Daemma, would you like to hold him?

You were ready to hold him when a servant intervened «The queen demands to see her grandson immediately»

- Why?

You demand but there's no response, your sister holds the baby and stands up.

- I'll take him, help me to dress up.

She's in pain, she should be resting but refuses to. All the maidens are helping while you're asking where Laenor is.

He appears happy as any father has to be, his face changes when he sees her walking out of the room. He offers to help but she neglects the help. You know what Alicent wants to see, if this baby finally will have silver hair or will it be another brown haired boy.

You will not join there, you will have plenty of time to meet the new little prince instead you decide to pay a visit to the other young members of the family.

The dragon pit, is a dark and fresh place, but you could sense the presence of the dragons miles away, the power they emanate is magnificent. You were at the entrance of the place when you heard laughs.

- What is it so funny? (You said)

All the boys turned back except for Aemond. As you got close you saw a pig in front of the poor boy.

- Who did this?

You feel like it is not fair and it is not funny, you were reprimanding them for such a horrible joke when you lost Aemond.

- Where's Aemond?

- He went to take a ride with his new dragon...

Jace murmured and the Three of them laughed, a roar echoed around and Aemond appeared, he ran away.

- It is not funny, Aegon, he is your brother, it suppose your job is to take care of him, not make fun of him! And you, young boys, would you laugh if the joke was for you? I expected the three of you to offer an apology to Aemond.

The boys pretended to feel guilty, you left the dragon pit to look for Aemond. Unfortunately it was too late, he was already with Alicent, the attitude of boys does not help to stop creating tension between both families.

Aegon was reprimanded by his mother after his joke at the dragon pit , he is constantly under the watch of the queen, punished for all he does and does not.

You were on your way back to your chambers, you paid a visit to Aemond and Helaena and once you were in your door you heard the sobs and sniffing of Aegon, he was sitting in the chair looking at the floor as if something interesting was there.

You sighed and walked to him, you know you have to treat him well, he has to trust you.

- Aegon? What's wrong, sweetheart?

You were going to sit next to him but he quickly wrapped his arms around you and his face hid on your abdomen.

- Aemond told mother about what happened at the dragon pit, it wasn't me! It was Jace's idea! We were just having fun, but she told me something about defending my family and me manipulating them!... Who cares about Rhaenyra's place in the throne?

- Shh, calm down, What about Rhaenyra?

- She says... me and my siblings life will be in danger, I don't want her place, I don't want to replace her, I don't want to be a king! I swear I don't want to!.... I'm sorry I know I shouldn't cry.

- Shhhh, it's okay Aegon, you're fine here with me.

He continues sobbing and your dress is already wet with his tears, you simply caresses his hair looking at your window too focused on what he said and how to use it on your sister's favor that you couldn't hear what he asked you.

- Daemma?

He looks at you, his cheeks are red and his eyes are puffy and filled with tears.

- Sorry, what did you ask, my dear?

- Rhaenyra... would she do that?

- Oh my sweet brother, of course not, she won't ever dare to hurt you or your siblings, the queen is just paranoid, don't believe in those lies.

You gave him a kiss on his head, you feel disgusted by your actions but you discovered Aegon constantly craves for the love and caring that his mother never shows him, it's pretty much the same with Aemond, a lonely boy who just needs comfort when the world is cruel to him. As a woman you know the power you possess over men and you have learned how to use it to obtain whatever you want.

Aegon hides in your chambers at every opportunity he has, it's one of the few places where the queen doesn't look for him, he feels like you're his safe place. He fell asleep on the chair, you were leaving the room to go to your sister and talk, when Aegon's voice caught you by surprise.

- Are you leaving?

- Sorry, I didn't want to wake you up.

He stands from the chair, anxious and afraid.

- Are you leaving again? Where will you go this time, huh?

- Rhaenyra requested my presence, I was on my way to her chambers, I'm not leaving... I wouldn't leave without saying goodbye.

- Why do you always leave? I barely see you.

- Aegon, I leave because I have to find a husband, it's my duty to find a good Match that can benefit our family.

- A husband?

He stays with his head full of thoughts, you nod and excuse yourself, leaving him there. The rest of your evening you spend it with your sister, gossiping about some lords and ladies of the court and then you mentioned what Aegon told you.

- How dare she!? I wouldn't do such a thing!

- Listen, we have to find a way to keep everything in order or at least neutral. I know Jace and Luke are merely children but we have to find a way to calm Alicent's paranoia.

- What do you mean?

- A marriage, between one of your boys with her daughter, maybe that will keep everything in peace, maybe she will agree.

Your sister considers your proposition but she's not very convinced, you know her, every time she doesn't completely agree with something you say she prefers to change the conversation.

- Where will you go this time? I suppose you will leave soon enough.

- Indeed, I think my next trip will be to the north, I heard Cregan Stark is widowed, his poor lady wife got the fever and didn't survive, the princess will be there to show how much the future queen cares about her 'friends'.

You blink an eye and she smirks before taking a sip of her tea, it's a good excuse to visit the north and since you're very charming, probably the wolf in the north will find your presence enjoyable.

The next morning you hear the news about the triarchy returning to the narrow sea, the council meeting is tense as ever before, Alicent continues attacking your sister and the legitimacy of her children and your sister tired of all this tension finally decides it is time to fix it, proposing a marriage alliance between Jacaerys, her son and Alicent's daughter, Helaena. While your father celebrates your sister's proposal, his wife doesn't share the same excitement, your sister looks nervous and anxiety is eating her alive so she proposes to give Aemond a dragon egg, but the face of Alicent says for her it is not enough, and then the next words coming from your sister takes everyone including you by surprise.

- Additionally I propose a marriage between Daemma and Aegon, both will reside in dragon stone.

Everybody looks at you, and your sister's look is a clear ask for help, you suddenly smile at everybody in the room.

- As the Targaryen tradition marks, I would be pleased to take Aegon as husband, I'm pretty sure Aegon and I share... A good connection.

Alicent's face is so serious and full of anger that you're sure she will explode at any moment, instead she simply indicates Rhaenyra is having trouble with her dress and her breasts and finishes with the simple words of «Thank you, the king and I will consider your offer».

You found invaders in your chambers, the two boys were sitting, waiting for you.

- Good morning my dear brothers, what do I owe your visit?

You say walking to the table full of lemon cakes in the middle of your room.

- We heard about the council meeting. What happened there? Mother was furious.

- Oh, nothing just proposal marriages and battles and a dragon egg.

You mention it as if it was not important but you know for them it is.

- An egg?

- Marriage? Who?

Aegon talks anxiously.

- Between Jace and Helaena and between You and me, and the dragon egg for Aemond. Oh, Aemond don't forget we will take a ride on Whitefyre this afternoon.

Aemond smiles, you know the boy only cares about flying over a dragon's back, he runs away without paying more attention in your conversation leaving you with Aegon.

- Are we going to get married?

You're still eating, not looking at Aegon who is waiting for your answer with excitement.

- Unfortunately for us, my dear brother, your mother wasn't very happy with the proposal, so, probably not, that's why I will leave tomorrow.

His face passed from happy to disappointed and angry, just the reaction you were expecting, you approached him and offered him a hug that he immediately accepted. You can feel how he melts in your arms, you have him under your spell.

- Don't leave Daemma, I can convince mother. You're the only one who treats me well.

He hides his face in your abdomen, like a little boy, you smile at yourself and plays with his hair.

- I do not wish to leave you, our sister tried to keep the family together, but the queen rejected the proposal my dear, It is necessary for me to look for another suitor.

Lies, you know Aegon will believe you, if he was fine with the idea of not intervening In your sister's succession now he will continue in the same path, going against his mother because after all, she is the one who separates him from you.

There has been a lot of conflict in the last few days, you don't want to look like you're escaping from all the familiar drama but it is time to leave, you can't stay there for so long since you had the freedom to go wherever and whenever you want to, you would stay a few more days your sister had a bad presage, you're not a believer of superstitions but if that gives her some peace you will stay.

The conflict between the young boys in the training yard was a good excuse for more trouble, Harwin Strong was too dumb, forgetting his place and letting his feelings for your sister's sons intervene on the way. This action obligates the hand of the king to leave his place in the court.

At least this man was honorable, more than any other who sat at the king's side before, recognizing his son's fault, talking about integrity and how he and his family failed the crown, your father rejected the idea, unfortunately the greens had a different idea, Lord Larys Strong the man behind the crime against his father and brother murder, now walks through the halls of the castle observing everybody, every action and interaction between y'all with the favor of the queen he walks freely, learning about everybody's secrets so now you have to be more careful when you're in Kings landing, you will have to spend more time out of home avoiding to be under the eye of the greens but at the same time staying close.

And as your sister predicted, the conflict between both sides of the families, the murdered of the Strong family, the rejection of the marriage proposals and the returning of Otto Hightower as the hand of the king was enough, your sister invited you to go with her, the boys and Laenor to Dragon stone, you agreed, leaving some of your maidens to be your eyes and ears at kings landing, soon enough the news of Laena's death echoed in the whole family. Greens and blacks mixed in a funeral, what could go wrong?

[theamberplumbob]

My Thoughts on Inzoi

I figured since my post about the whole Inzoi terms of service debacle blew up in a way that I never would have predicted, I should probably give a more nuanced explanation of my stance on the game and the discourse around it in general.

First off, I will just say right off the bat that I am not a fan of Inzoi, and unless some very big changes are made to the game, I am not interested in playing it.

I also want to make clear that my dislike of Inzoi is NOT motivated by any sort of love or loyalty to EA or The Sims. If there's one good thing to come out of Inzoi its breaking the monopoly that EA has over the life sim genera and giving The Sims competition. I also want to say that I despise EA for what it has done to the Sims franchise, and while I have played an absurd amount of hours in The Sims 4, I think it is objectively a bad product.

My biggest problem with Inzoi, first and foremost, is it's the use of AI. Inzoi allows players to use generative AI to make custom textures, designs, and paintings within the game. You may not agree with me on this but I am fully of the opinion that real artists should have been hired and paid to create all of the textures/paintings/designs for this game. Allowing players to upload their own photos and videos is one thing, but Krafton, a multi billion dollar company, chose to not support real, professional artists so they could save what is essentially pennies to them. All this results in, frankly, ugly and uncanny looking generated designs plastered all over the furniture and decor. For this reason alone I do not support Inzoi, but there's so much more to it than that.

There's also the fact that we have no idea how their AI is trained. Krafton apparently has an "AI Ethics Committee," but we have no clue what their actual code of ethics are. While it's bad faith to assume, they could be using stolen artwork for their AI. It is also very likely that whatever images you upload into the game, as well as any use of their facial scanning feature, could also be used as material to train their AI. This could lead to all sorts of ethical and legal issues I don't even know where to begin.

Secondly, I have to say, looking at the early access footage from youtubers and everything else I've heard about the game, it feels like its only going to repeat most of TS4's mistakes. In youtuber NotMalcolm's most recent video he discusses Inzoi's overly sanitized approach to various aspects of life, most notably that you can't try for a baby unless you are already married (source). Just like TS4, Inzoi is appealing to a younger demographic and sanding down the rougher aspects of life in order to cater to them. I fear that Krafton is likely taking it a step further and not only watering down the game for the sake of potential child players, but also using them as an excuse to enforcing extremely traditional values on its players. I have no interest in playing a life sim that only allows me to play out a single, socially acceptable way of living.

It also, like TS4, feels like a Young Adult Wish Fulfillment Sim™. The gameplay looks shallow, and it feels like it exists more to make aesthetic screenshots than it does to be an actual game.

I think when people say that Inzoi is missing the "quirky weirdness" of the Sims, what they actually mean is that Inzoi is devoid of personality. One thing that stuck out to me immediately is that the animations are so stiff, robotic, and lifeless. Again, everything is made to be ~*Aesthetic*~ with no regard to an actual sense of identity or personality.

I know people will say that its only in early access, but given how close public early access is to release, I highly doubt any significant changes are going to be made to improve what will be given to us when the time comes.

On a similar note, there's the fact that Krafton has never made a game before now that hasn't been riddled with micro transactions. I personally predict that Inzoi's monetization strategy will be just as, if not more predatory than TS4's is. The fact that we are drawing so close to public early access and have not heard a single word on their method of monetization speaks volumes. I simply do not trust it.

Now, of course, I need to elaborate on the whole Terms of Service Situation. I understand fully that Krafton's terms of service is industry standard and not too dissimilar to EAs, however, this post highlights that whats really concerning about Krafton's ToS is how difficult and confusing it is for players to access and review it. I find it understandable that Krafton's proud use of AI makes people a lot more nervous as to what their data could potentially be used for, and are going to be a lot more weary of Inzoi's ToS. Though I understand that it is only speculation, many have made the assumption that Krafton may use user's personal data to train AI.

I did not expect my post on the subject to make so much traction, and I now regret how impulsively I made the post. I feel I've contributed to fear mongering, even though I feel my concerns at the time were valid and I felt like people had the right to know. I could have done more research and given more of an explanation for what my concerns were instead of basically saying "Yikes..." and leaving it at that.

I was also told through an anonymous ask that the auto accepting of the ToS on closing the game was a bug that had apparently been fixed the first day the character creation trial was available. I of course cannot verify this myself, but I will take them on good faith.

I would also like to touch on two other talking points that have been very prevalent in the Inzoi discourse:

Diversity - I think this links back to my previous point about the game's goal of being as ~*aesthetic*~ (and marketable) as possible at the detriment of everything else. The game is clearly catering to a very specific, very pale and thin standard of Korean beauty, and I think that everything that doesn't conform to that standard was sidelined as a result. I will be fair and say that the Inzoi team still has ample opportunity to fix this and add more options over time. TS4 was also severely lacking on release, but over the years has made great strides in regards to representation. However I would have hoped that Inzoi, a game planning to release in early access in 2024, would do a lot better than a game that was initially released in 2014.

Partnership with Curseforge - I've seen many people accuse critics of Inzoi's partnership with Curseforge of being hypocritical, since TS4 also has a partnership with them. Of course, one would have to ignore the massive, community wide boycott of Curseforge, and the pressure the community has put on CC creators to stop using the platform for that claim to hold any water. I also think there is a notable difference in EA choosing to partner with Curseforge before the Israel/Palestine conflict began, and Krafton actively choosing to partner with Curseforge now, during an active genocide taking place, in which Curseforge's parent company, Overwolf, actively advocates for and donates to those committing said genocide.

In conclusion, there are a lot of valid reasons to not like/be suspicious of Inzoi. Of course I can't tell you what to do or what games you play, nor can I force you to agree with me, but don't be so quick to write off or demonize those who are simply trying to raise awareness or drawing boundaries regarding Inzoi and those who choose to make content with it.

I also encourage you to consider the points I've made and maybe think twice before investing yourself in yet another game that will very likely exploit your attachment to it in the very same way that EA and the Sims has. You need to make them deserve your time and money, which is why I'm encouraging you to advocate for a better and more ethical game.

You deserve better. We all do.

[theabigailthorn]

Surely with how popular you are you would have had a few cancelling attempts, but you're drama free. How? I thought you'd be target number 1 with TERFs.

So the thing is, people on the internet have and do try to wreck my life! But it's true that I get less of it than a lot of other women, and I often ask myself (and them) this same question. I think it comes down to a few factors. In no particular order:

I'm white and thin

I don't post selfies very often

The Philosophy Tube Jutsu: I never use my platform to say anything bad about individuals, so I don't make enemies

I'm British

I don't put my pronouns or the word 'trans' in my bio. I mention it if it it's relevant but to a casual troll looking for someone to go after there are more obvious targets

My brand: in terms of online content, my brand is 'Educational and Compassionate.' I try to be even-handed and listen to all sides and never be angry, and people are maybe a bit reluctant to get mad at someone who does that? In terms of acting, my brand right now is 'I'm Trying Hard and I'm On My Way Up!' which I guess people like?

I have a posh accent

I don't make online content about video games

I'm pretty enough that men like looking at me but not so hot it makes them angry

I transitioned in private before I came out publicly. I knew that when I did I'd get a lot of backlash, so I pre-emptively muted LOADS of words in my comments section and wove a kind of digital safety net

I'm so busy that I often miss whatever the discourse du jour is and don't get involved. As a wise woman once said, 'Do Not Tweet.'

I deliberately dress and present myself as 'classy' in public-facing stuff

Most of my content is scripted, so by default it attracts people who like to sit down and listen

Philosophy Tube is literally all about critical thinking and not taking things at face value. So if a typical Philosophy Tube Subscriber sees a post that says 'I saw Abigail Thorn kicking a puppy down the street!' they're more likely to stop and think, 'What's the evidence for this?' This means that when there are hate campaigns and lies spread about me (and there are, from time to time) my core audience sees through it and sticks around

I have very good mods! Big shout out to all the lovely people on r/philosophytube and all the people who moderate my livestream chats!

I have a social media manager who can look out for hate and pre-emptively guard against it

I don't hitch my brand to other people. I sometimes do little collabs or appear at events with other creators but for the most part I fly solo. That means if another creator blows up or posts something awful I minimise my chances of cancellation-by-association. I'm friends with lots of creators but for the most part I keep it behind the scenes (Learned this one the hard way!)

I'm not a sex worker. Those people get hate like you wouldn't believe - the sex workers I know are the toughest folks I've ever met!

I'm not very fun to bully! I do get death threats and hate campaigns and people make fake porn of me and libel me and all that stuff - literally every day - I just never talk about it publicly so trolls don't get the satisfaction of seeing me get upset. I just mute and block and move on silently. When I have to talk to a lawyer or the police about someone causing a problem, I handle it behind the scenes

Platform size. When TERFs in British media go after someone they tend to pick on people smaller than them, cause they're bullies.

I built my platform slowly, so I've had time to adjust and get used to how it impacts my life

People have tried to cancel me in the past and it's blown up in their faces, e.g. the Trump Transition Tweet Incident and the B*ck A*gel Affair.

To be absolutely clear, a LOT of this is luck and privilege. I'm not trying to blame the victims of online harassment: yes, some of these factors are things I choose to do but not everyone is able to make those choices. It's also the unwinnable game of respectability politics: yes I might get less hate because of the way I dress or whatever, but fundamentally that won't protect me if I get arrested and sent to a men's prison. These things aren't a substitute for a more just distribution of power. There's also this final possible factor:

It just hasn't happened yet.

[drdemonprince]

Your post about "transitioning to escape gender but then there's more gender" has been rotating furiously in my mind since I saw it. When I first realized I was trans at age 15, I identified as agender, but I knew I wanted to go on T and get top surgery so I decided it would be simpler to tell everyone I was a trans man and that just kind of became the truth. Now 10 years later I'm sorta starting to feel like I wanna actually be agender again, but the idea of an identity shift like that at my current age is terrifying and idek who I'd tell, or how I'd do it, and I don't think I wanna stop using he/him exclusively, and I have no idea why I'm telling *you* this other than that I'm scared to talk to anyone I know about it because it feels like somehow admitting that I was wrong about the gender I fought like hell to become, even though i don't really think that's the case I think my sense of self might just be continuously evolving... but I just wanna say you talking about having a gender shift like once every several years is helping me process this rn and feel like I'm not faking anything now AND wasn't faking anything before.

Dog i am right there with you. As a kid I always thought gender was bullshit, the coercive nature of it disgusted and scared me and I rebelled against it the best that I could. I loathed being assigned to any gender category, I never identified as a "girl", but I didn't really identify with any other category either. Puberty terrified me (and of course, it does most young people, but it felt like it would only more deeply entrench the category that I was assigned to in other people's minds, it made it more difficult to escape). I had trans friends as a teen but it did not occur to me to transition because there was really no end goal that I wanted to head toward, I just knew what I wanted to avoid and not experience. I coped mostly by degendering my body with a fairly androgynous style and way of presenting myself to the word and mannerisms, but also by starving myself which was not so great, and not sustainable. I considered transness for myself, even trying on a friend's binder and presenting masculinely at certain queer events, but it seemed to me at the time like just another way in which to obsess over gender, a foolish coercive socially constructed thing that i was trying to avoid.

In my 20s, I learned more about nonbinary people and figured that explained things pretty well. I was enamored with the transition journeys of some other trans people, largely trans women more than trans masculine ones (with some trans-effeminate faggot boy exceptions), but I still didn't want to take on all the expense and uncertainty and hassle of navigating the medical system for myself. I didn't think that the pursuit of being happy merited taking on so many risks or fiddling with myself so much. I saw it as an extravagance I didn't deserve, I guess, and I also couldn't locate a target outcome that seemed desirable enough for me. I was still dealing with an eating disorder and recovering from some trauma and didn't really think about my life in the long term. I guess I still don't, haha, whoops.

Eventually I came out as nonbinary, and nobody really gave a shit. There is a lot of useless, solidarity-breaking discourse that happens online about essentially who is "more" oppressed, binary trans people or nonbinary people, and a lot of that fight amounts to the two groups shouting about the ways in which they annoy one another without there being any cogent analysis of power and where oppression comes from (let alone how much those two categories overlap).

But I will say that being a they/them was far more difficult than being a trans guy socially and institutionally, because your identity is completely illegible to every system around you. "binary" trans people struggle under this too, but i have found there are some immense benefits to having a socially and institutionally legible target gender. nobody would fucking actually they/them me. not anyone. not even other trans people and queer people. there were no public gendered spaces for me. there were no spaces for me. there was no way to move through the medical system, professional life, and other public institutions as a nonbinary person. i was still just a cis woman in everyone's eyes. including the people who claimed to support me. and it was massively frustrating.

and so i think ultimately, i took my frustrations with not being at all able to escape coerced gendering as a nonbinary person and combined that with the affinity i do feel for queer men and the general sense of misery i was still experiencing in my life and decided what the hell, i'll round myself up to being a trans guy. i upped my T dose, i dressed more masculinely, i eventually got a super masculine hair cut that really squared off my jawline and got me gendered correctly, and i started more consciously inhabiting queer men's spaces.

and it was pretty dope. for a while. i felt the rush of having gotten away with something. when people effortlessly gendered as male i felt freed at last from the pressure to be a woman. i was no longer being coerced into being something that i was not. i had escaped the enforced category so much that people couldn't even see the history of that category being pushed onto me. there was relief.

but then. as always happens. people made little comments about my handshake being too weak for a man. the hypermasc dudes at the leather bar rolled their eyes at me and all the other effeminate dudes swanning around the bar. the people who picked me up off the apps or at the sauna would always let it slip, eventually, that they had a lot of experience with trans guys, or had most recently been dating all trans guys, and it would make me feel like a stock character to them, yet another category into which all kinds of assumptions had been projected. a type not a person. a few people said my haircut made me look like i was in the military or described me as actually masculine, which was equally jarring because it was so incorrect. people tried to affirm me by saying i was such a dude, i was such a man, i was such a fag, i was such a gay bro, pawing all over me leaving the mark of all their assumptions and oversimplifications behind. i had tried to run away from gender and there i was just BASTING all the time in everybody's goddamn assumptions about gender. trans people didn't talk about it any less than cis people did, they were just as fucking confining to be around.

it honestly feels really dirty. when people try to affirm your gender constantly and can't stop talking about it, when people look past you and see only your body, your history, or the role they have typecast you in, when people use your body as an outlet for their own gender or sexuality explorations, when they keep trying to measure every single facet of existence up into being masculine or being feminine or being toppy or bottomy or any other gendered type, it's claustrophobic.

as a trans man i tried playing this whole gender game and the second i started winning i began to feel even more disgusted with myself. it wasn't a victory or an escape, it was a capitulation. exploring with my identity and presentation has brought positive things into my life and my health has gotten better as a result, and i've made wonderful friends who, like me, are disaffected by this coercive gendering system. so i don't regret any of that. but trying to make myself legible under the existing gendered system was a fool's fucking errand. i wish i hadnt done it to myself and i wish i hadnt had it pushed onto me. to be clear, it was cissexist, binarist society that forced it onto me; even when other queer people coated me in their gendered assumptions that is obviously a byproduct of societal conditioning, and it's conditioning that ive reinforced in my own behavior and outlook toward others plenty of times too. we all do it, and we are all wronged by the existing coercive gender system.

i dont even care how i fucking identify anymore and i have no intention of changing pronouns again or anything, i'm so bored of it, i just actually want off this fucking thing. im not interested in trying to make others understand what i am anymore or in who i am even being simply categorizable, i dont want to obsess anymore over how i am perceived or to attempt engineer my appearance and mannerisms to broadcast an identity to anyone. i dont even want to fuck anybody right now at all because im so sick of how much that's a gender pantomime for people. i want off this fuckin ride man im so done.

it's kind of freeing, to hit this point of complete gender apathy, and i think it is a pretty common stage of identity development for a lot of queer people who have explored multiple identities and roles over time. there is no category that i actually am, or that anyone is, there are just the frameworks that society has given us to work with to understand ourselves, and the ways in which we flatten who we are to be able to make sense of the world using those frameworks. but who i actually am is so much more contextual and mutable than all that. i am a different person in the classroom than i am on the train platform than i am in the bedroom than i am cuddling on the couch than i am when i'm working out than i am when curled up on the floor crying than i am at a big furry convention. who i am continues to change as new people come in and out of my life and age and change and my body alters and as the weather turns. who fuckin knows man it's nothing and everything. i want to let it just be

[mariacallous]

Americans need to log off. Unplug. Shoot the TV. It seems impossible. Less than five days from Election Day in the US, most people can’t help but check the news—or TikTok or X—at least once a day. Swipe, refresh, repeat. By Tuesday, the connectedness will be constant. Mentally, political stress takes a huge toll. Given that anxiety can be exacerbated by uncertainty, the 2024 election feels worse than it has ever before. There’s a reason for that.

I don’t just mean the general sky-is-falling stuff—the militias on Facebook organizing ballot-box stakeouts, the conspiracy theory spreaders, the cybercriminals potentially waiting in the wings. Some version of those nerve-janglers has been around for years. Now, though, there’s a new factor upping users’ blood pressure as they doomscroll: AI misinformation.

Clearly US voters worry about how misinformation might impact who wins the election, but Sander van der Linden, author of Foolproof: Why Misinformation Infects Our Minds and How to Build Immunity, notes that the anxiety around AI might be more existential. “If you look at the problem from a more indirect perspective, such as sowing doubt and chaos, confusion, undermining democratic discourse, lowering trust in the electoral process, and confusing swing voters,” he says. “I think we’re looking at a bigger risk”—one that fuels polarization and erodes the quality of debate.

According to an American Psychological Association survey released last week, 77 percent of US adults feel some level of stress over the future of the country. It gets worse. Sixty-nine percent of adults surveyed said the race between Vice President Kamala Harris and Donald Trump was a cause of “significant stress”—a figure that’s up from 52 percent in 2016, when Trump beat Hillary Clinton. Nearly three-quarters of respondents thought the election could spur violence; more than half worried it could be “the end of democracy in the US.”

Christ.

On top of all of this sits the threat of AI-generated falsehoods. For more than a year researchers have warned of election misinformation from artificial intelligence. Beyond the polls, such misinformation has played a role in the Israel-Hamas war and the war in Ukraine. 404 Media called the aftermath of Hurricane Helene “the ‘fuck it’ era of AI-generated slop.” (Actually) fake news lurks around every corner. Earlier this year, the World Economic Forum released a report claiming AI misinformation is one of the biggest short-term threats the world faces. Bad election information and fake images can also bring in serious money for X users, according to a BBC report this week.

This was the first year the APA asked about AI and election anxiety and one of the things the organization found was that seven in 10 people experienced stress over the fact that fake information can seem so believable. One-third of social media users said they don’t know what to believe on those platforms. “It extends beyond just information and social media,” says Vaile Wright, APA’s senior director of health care innovation. “A majority of Americans said they don't trust the US government. So there's sort of this whole lack of trust in what used to be very trusted institutions—the media, government—and that, I'm sure, is not helping with people's stress as it relates to this election this year.”

When the US election season ramped up there were AI-generated robocalls (the Federal Communications Commission outlawed them) and now election officials are preparing staff to deal with any number of deepfakes they may encounter. X’s AI model Grok is reportedly boosting conspiracy theories. (It’s also, according to Musk, working on its MRI-reading skills.)

After months of fretting about AI taking jobs, now everyone has to worry about it taking faith in the democratic process?

For nearly two decades, one social media platform or another has ended up dominating a US election. Back in 2008, it was a still-young Twitter. During most of the twenty-teens, it was Facebook (and a bit of Instagram) and Twitter. More recently, TikTok has become a news-spreading tool. In each election cycle, people have swiped to keep up—and also confronted new levels of toxicity. Former Trump advisor Steve Bannon, who got out of prison this week, once told reporter Michael Lewis Democrats didn’t matter, “the real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.” That shit went online.

Now, that shit doesn’t even have to come from political operatives. Machines can make it. When people scroll around on their smartphones for a flicker of hope about whether or not their candidate will win, whatever discouragement or reassurance they find may not even be real.

The APA’s survey found that 82 percent of US adults were worried people may base their values on inaccurate information, and more than one-fifth said they’d believed something they read online or on social media when it wasn’t true. Another poll conducted in early September found that only about a quarter of voters feel confident that they can tell the difference between real AI-generated visuals, like the fake images Trump shared claiming Taylor Swift fans are supporting him. “That’s not a good sign,” van der Linden says.

If your fears about the election seem even worse than they did in 2020, this may be why. Misinformation takes a mental toll. “Political anxiety” exists, and research indicates it can impact those who aren’t anxious otherwise. Couple that with a media landscape where newspapers are coming under fire for not endorsing a political candidate and the picture of a nervous electorate becomes very clear. Trust no one; just wait to see what happens—then decide if you believe it.

[zenkindoflove]

You guys do not want to go down the road of starting to make blanket declarations that specific ships are "problematic" and "triggering". And let me explain why.

ACOTAR fandom, in my experience, is notoriously very far removed from general fandom. It's big and dispersed across many platforms that weren't created around fandoms, and so a lot of people enter it having little to no experience in other fandoms.

This discourse about what is or isn't a problematic ship and what kind of person ships a couple like that is not new. Fandoms of yesterday yore have had long fights about this and a general consensus has emerged which is anytime you start playing the morality policing game around people having fun with fictional characters, everyone loses.

Let's take this situation with Elain Archeron Week which is explicitly banning submissions for Elain with characters who are canonically known to be abusive to a romantic partner. Generally, the spirit of character weeks are to be ship neutral and importantly a concept that has emerged from prior fandom morality policing debate is the term Ship and Let Ship. Which means just because something isn't YOUR ship doesn't mean you need to come up for reasons why it isn't CORRECT to ship.

So, you think it's morally incorrect and triggering for people to see Elain paired with an abuser or a "bad guy"? That is okay for your own personal beliefs but if you start making rules around it for something that is supposed to be inclusive where do you draw the line or what that means? How about pairing Elain with the guy who runs Night Court Abu Ghraib? A role that means he actually tortures people physically and mentally to the brink that they are forced to "confess" to crimes. Is that some how morally superior to another character who emotionally abused their partner and confined them to a house?

See. That didn't feel good. Now did it? Do you actually want to get into a discussion about which wrong is morally worse than the other? Especially when it concerns a character week that is supposed to be about positivity and people having fun because they love Elain and they love the different interactions she could potentially have with characters in fanon?

And that is the entire point. When it comes to fiction, we all will be seduced by characters who have done bad things. Things that will trigger people. But, and I mean this whole heartedly, no one else is responsible for your triggers but you. You are the only one who knows what you can and cannot handle. Your Mileage May Vary. Tumblr's tag filtering system is in part for this very reason because of how fandoms use tumblr.

When you have a fandom wide event space, generally it's a bad idea to start throwing up these judgmental rules around people's character interests and shipping habits. Of course, any event runner is entitled to do what they please. But you also have to expect those who are excluded or know people who will be excluded are going to have something to say about it.

I really think the entire ACOTAR fandom could benefit from getting curious for once and actually digging into the histories of fandom, fandom lore and vocabulary, and start learning from from fandom elders. If so, we'd all be able to navigate these situations with a shared language that recognizes that the primary goal of fandom is to have fun first. And everyone's fun is going to look different and each individual is responsible for deciding what their squicks and triggers are. And the whole point of a squick is to let someone know this thing bothers me personally but I understand if it doesn't bother you. That sort of back and forth empathy across each side is how fandoms don't burn down in flames and people don't feel shame about what they like in fiction.

Now any fandom event can make whatever rules they want. But what I already see is a bunch of people (e/riels) are now actually making posts about why others who ship Elain with Tamlin are morally inferior, disgusting, perverse, and bad people. But hear me out, someone can easily think and say the same thing about you and your ship and if that is the kind of environment you'd like to fuck around in, well, aren't we all the worse off for it.

[thegeorgiatennantblog]

*Clanking pots and pans together *

I have a message for all the tin hatters and misogynists in the Tumblr fandom.

28th August, The Year of Our Nerd 2024

To Whom It May Concern

It has been precisely one year and one month to the fact that I first came across this malady that has been plaguing our fandom. Other fandoms have been more or less unfortunate in this regard. What started as a lighthearted joke has now turned into a toxic, vile, festering wound. For a long time I either ignored these blogs and their opinions or very politely tried to dismiss them. For an even longer time I was made to feel that I was in the wrong. After all we live in a free society and all of us believe int he idea of freedom of speech, freedom to hold whatever views and beliefs, and freedom to express those views and beliefs. But the very same citizens of these free society's in today's world are also facing a dilemma: how far does this right go? Is it unconditional? Is it absolute? Or does it qualify to some form of check or some form of necessary derogation under exceptional circumstances? When do those circumstances arise?

Most of us have come to an understanding in regard to the question, though all of us may not agree to it: it is understood that where your right to exercise your freedom offends and restricts my right to do or causes in any way for me or anyone else to feel endangered, then that is where we draw the line.

Reading @do-angels-dream-of-starry-seas 's post today I have come to the conclusion that the time has come to draw that line. It is a question on where we stand as a fandom if we let such bigotry and such hate prevail any longer.

I want to let everyone know where I stand. I have nothing against fanfiction. I have nothing against RPF. People have been creating RPF since time immemorial. If not for RPF a large amount of literature, film, music and other forms of art would not exist. Shakespear's Histories are essentially RPF, Hamilton is RPF, Netflix's The Crown is RPF, Le Morte d'Arthur is RPF, Baz Luhrman's Elvis is RPF and so is Andrew Dominic's Blonde. You may like some of it, you might dislike some of it. You might even be vehemently against some of it. But that's all it is at the end of the day; fiction. It doesn't hurt anyone. The real problem arises when people start becoming unbale to differentiate between fiction and reality. And that's no better than thinking that just cz someone played a serial killer in a movie means they're evil irl too.

It becomes suffocating for others to exist in these spaces when the delusion that the RFP is real transcends to take an even worse shape namely hating the real people involved in said person's life. How could you justify hating on their real life partners just so you can satisfy your delusional belief that these men are actually in love with each other.

Maybe it springs from a need to justify our lives in terms of conspiracy theories in this growing pandemic of untruths and fake news. Maybe it springs from some deep rooted internalized misogyny. Who can say?

Before I move on I want to highlight some problems with the wntire tinhatter discourse.

The existence of a PR. I want to clarify this here and now. PR works for important, famous, insanely rich people whose global fame makes their identity a part of the public domain so much that their entire image needs to be curated to meet certain requirements. PR works for Taylor Swift and Leonardo DiCaprio and Barak Obama. Who is does NOT work for are people who are only locally well known, live reasonably ordinary lifestyles, and have a painfully insignificant following outside their own cultural context.

The idea that one picture or a five second video can tell the truth about someone's entire personal life. It cannot. It never will. Body language is not even a science. Body language is misleading. Facial expressions are misleading. I am writing this right now with the most bland expression on my face. People around me think I'm writing an email. My internal emotions right now are another story. Moreover no one owes anyone any sort of information on their personal life, their love life, their mood, their life choices or whatever. Their lives are not public property. Please respect that.

The women are the villains. This blatant misogyny has become intolerable as the days go by considering most of these posts are written by women themselves. The whole controlling wife, poor meek guy trope is so fckng infuriating. When did we wake up to a world where women hold the reigns and an adult white upper middle class male cannot tell her that he wants a divorce. I thought this only happened to unprivileged women in third world countries who cannot file a divorce bcs then she will be left penniless and socially disgraced. The women baby trapped them. Of course they feel responsibility for the kids now. Child birth is the second most painful experience after being burnt to death. No woman does it for the pleasure of it nor for some strategic benefit that it will serve her. And giving birth to not just one but many. And then raising them. That's not easy! Secondly, having children is a mutual decision and process. If only women could make babies, we'd get rid of men for good lol! (this is a joke plz don't @ me) If someone decides to have children with someone, and we're not talking just one accidental pregnancy or sth... we're talking several kids over the years.... then they probably have that level of attachment, love and commitment to their partner. It's just common sense.

Absolute cynicism. Anything Georgia and Anna do is met with cynicism and their words are deliberately twisted to mean the opposite. While D and M will be applauded for speaking up for a cause, when G and A do the same, they are shouted down as pretentious or that PR made them do it. When D and M show affection towards each other that's all real and true but when G and A show affection to their partners it fake and a PR stunt. Moreover, the way they interact with their partners is also completely misunderstood. Anna is more private and subtle about her gestures of praise and affection. But from what she does show publicly we know that she absolutely adores her partner and her kids. Georgia on the other hand has her own way. She teases, makes jokes, pokes fun at him, but she's also literally the woman that is being ultra-horny for him on Twitter and Instagram in front of everyone else. And I think that comes from the fact that they were friends first and lovers second and they have maintained that playful friendly relationship with each other. Still, she is accused of never being appreciative, being cringey, possessive, creepy and always bringing him down. Oh, and we never talk about how Michael next to never promotes Davis's achievements. In fact, no one else I know does it. Literally the only person is Georgia jumping up and down going "This is my partner! Have you seen them! Have you seen how awesome they are! I love them!" Not just that, these tinhatters have such double standards that while D's neurodivergent traits are being praised, G takes the rap for it. She's a careless mum, an unworthy partner; none of her professional achievements matter. She is fighting her dyslexia and neurodivergence to achieve something but the tinhatters will make ableist remarks to bring her down. But they don't just stop there. They accuse her of abuse, rape and cyber harassment. Pray that she doesn't find out because accusing someone of that can get you behind the bars hon!

I know that none of this is going to disappear over night. We fight the fight every day and we hope that tumblr goes back to being the safe space it once was. But till then, it is important that we stay strong and stay together. I have had people come into my ds with links and other stuff that made me want to jump off a cliff. I have been subjected to some horrendous lies, all in a bid to 'convert' me. Sadly that's not happening babes.

So I just want these tinhatters to know that if you're here, then we're here too. And no matter how much of this toxic bile you keep spewing we'll keep washing it away. And that @dtmsrpfcringe and @goodomenswarning don't have to do it alone. If you wanna go at them then come at me bitches!

And I'm not scared to call y'all out @ingravinoveritas @letscoffeebreak @nightgoodomens

@invisibleicewands @climb-dtennant-like-a-tree @thetardisisbluandroseistoo and others but mainly you guys cz you're the ring leaders. Go on block me if you want to I don't care! Or better, send me some of those creepy asks you guys send Tori. At least it would take the burden off her!

Oh and, before I go, @dtmsrpfcringe you're a champ and we love you and we stand with you!!!

Yours Sincerely,

Meena. x

curator of TheGeorgiaTennantBlog

[familyabolisher]

Would you elaborate on why you don't really believe in addictive personalities? I find that a useful descriptor for myself that reminds me how easy it is for me to get into unhealthy behavior patterns. I have to fully stay away from tiktok and gacha games(I will never go gambling) because I know I can't trust myself with them. I also have to be REALLY careful with alcohol, etc. I have adhd and bi-polar, and I like having a phrase that describes my experience without being too over-medicalized and relating everything to diagnoses. I'm curious why you don't like it as a construct/whatever your opinion is!

personal explanatory power is one thing and i wouldn’t begrudge you that but i don’t really see how it has any materialist usage; and ultimately, like, i’m a marxist, any way in which i evaluate a framework that’s supposed to explain something in the world has to come from the assumption that the world is best explained through historical materialism. ‘addictive personality’ with no further elaboration is an idealist claim which obfuscates crucial points of discourse around addiction and the conditions that give rise to it—and indeed the conditions which cause us to name one substance or action as ‘addictive’ over another in the first place. addiction is materially punished; through social stigma, but also through housing discrimination, workplace discrimination, policing & incarceration, psychiatry, the sorts of forces that add up to eventually facilitate the conditions of social murder. we only have to look as far as the war on drugs to understand how ‘addiction,’ the consumption and circulation of substances regarded as ‘addictive,’ is not a prediscursive state but one that can be leveraged to violently enforce conditions of hegemony and quell insurgence through carceralism and social murder. i also just heavily distrust psychology as a field and certainly don’t buy these appeals to an essential self as a self who ‘has’ xyz tendencies as though xyz tendencies (such as the traits given in the five-factor model which is applied to ‘explain’ a predisposition to addiction) are anything other than postdiscursive descriptors we’ve imbued with meaning relative to a postdiscursive normalcy. i think psychological theorising around personality tends to obfuscate materialist frameworks in favour of methodologies which presume and reify normativity (eg. the claim that those more vulnerable to ‘addictive personalities’ have a stronger tendency towards ‘social alienation’ and ‘nonconformity’ without defining what constitutes ‘alienation’ and ‘conformity’ in the first place—as though personality traits simply appear out of thin air).

as we’ve seen dozens of times, “addiction” is a slippery term easily wielded towards reactionary ends. “porn addiction” is a line taken by anti-sex work radfems; “food addiction” is infamously unscientific and preying on cultural predispositions towards fatphobia; “internet addiction” is similarly flimsy and frequently deployed in theories of cultural degeneration. this doesn’t mean that the clusters of behaviours we term “addiction” aren’t “real” in the sense that some people do develop dependencies on particular substances, but that the term can be used to draw connections between the reactionary attitude held towards addiction & its attendant connotations (of infantilisation, justified removal of autonomy, incarceration, psychiatric intervention, and so on) and whatever the wielder wants to malign (porn, food, using the internet). if we reify the idea of there being an ontological state within ourselves by which we are more or less prone to “addiction,” we by implication act against the necessity of interrogating what is meant by “addiction” and why it is being invoked in the first place; we also place all our explanatory eggs, so to speak, in the basket of the individual cast as “addicted,” rather than turning our attention towards the source of the “addictive” substance or object and its material origins + usage.

so it bears asking what we’re obscuring and what we’re facilitating when we give legitimacy to the idea of an ‘addictive personality’ in the public discourse, which is what i meant when i said that the term has no materialist explanatory power for me—casting someone in the role of an addict, even if only in the hypothetical, allows others to enforce the stigmas that such a role entails, through, for example, infantilisation, denial of autonomy, and reluctance to treat the individual’s behaviour as worthy of respect, compassion, and mature response. it creates a telos out of addiction under conditions wherein addiction means incarceration (literal or psychiatric), discrimination, ostracisation, everything i just laid out in the first paragraph. it makes addiction into a fundamentally individualist discourse which must therefore have individualist solutions, rather than a complex nexus of social conditions and discourses that we can describe and then fight against.

[ara-line]

Some myth busting about Israel's Eurovision participation

Do note that I use countries here when referring to participation. The term broadcasters would be more accurate since a national broadcaster chooses the entrant and the broadcaster is a member of the European Broadcasting Union, the organization behind Eurovision. But a lot of people use the term countries instead of broadcasters, hence why I'm using that word as well.

Myth 1. "Israel isn't even in Europe"

Well, any country that's part of the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), which Israel, Azerbaijan, Armenia, and Georgia are members of, can participate. Same goes for associate members like Australia, hence why Australia is allowed to participate. Lebanon and Morocco could also participate but choose not to because of Israel. In fact, Morocco's only participation was when Israel wasn't participating in the contest, and Lebanon planned to participate but didn't because of Israel's participation. There are rumours going around that this is also the case for Tunisia and Qatar.

Myth 2. "Eurovision banned Russia but not Israel."

Not completely true. Russia was initially going to participate in the 2022 contest, but several countries protested against Russia's participation and threatened to withdraw if Russia was allowed to participate, thus leading to them being kicked out. We will come back to this point about several countries threatening to leave.

Myth 3. "A lot of the artists speaking out about Israel could actually just withdraw from the contest to make a real statement."

You do realize the EBU actually will fine countries if they withdraw too late without good reason? I'm pretty sure a lot of these countries have contracts in place for their contestants, and since the contest is set to take place in mid May, withdrawing would mean possibly being blacklisted from the music industry and losing out on more opportunities. Not for being pro Palestine, but because they backed out on a contract they signed and left the many, many people who work behind the scenes high and dry on really short notice.

Technically not a myth but worth mentioning: 4. "Israel should be kicked out because her presence is a security risk."

Where do we even begin with this? If a country like Sweden, where the contest is being hosted, isn't able to protect its contestants from terrorist attacks, they shouldn't be hosting. It's that simple. I doubt anyone would've said this if Russia was allowed to participate in 2022.

Myth 5. "Eurovision lets Israel pinkwash its crimes."

@pauvrecamille really summed up how a lot of the discourse around pinkwashing can be boiled down to "country I hate gives their gays more rights than one I like." We could talk about how the only transgender winner is from Israel herself.

And if there is a case to be made for pinkwashing in Eurovision, I would argue that it applies more to Russia and Azerbaijan than it does to Israel. At least Israelis can criticize their government and not fear being arrested.

Speaking of Azerbaijan:

Myth 6. "If even one country withdraws from the contest, then that will send a statement to the contest."

Not true. Armenia withdrew from the 2021 contest because of the war with Azerbaijan, while Azerbaijan was allowed to participate in the contest. This is even after we already know they've cheated twice in the contest, on top of the human rights violations. And we could talk about how so many were forcibly displaced because of Azerbaijan hosting the competition in 2012.

We can also talk about how Ukraine withdrew from the contest in 2015 because of Russia's invasion. Russia was still allowed to participate and went on to place second that year.

In 2008, Russia invaded Georgia and in 2009, the Georgian entry was called "We Don't Wanna Put In" which contained veiled references to Putin's invasion. Because Russia was hosting the contest that year, the EBU tried to get Georgia to change their song. Georgia refused and ended up withdrawing.

Remember what I said about several countries threatening to withdraw if Russia was allowed to participate in 2022? It took a total of 10 countries expressing their concerns about Russia's participation and three or four threatening to withdraw if Russia was allowed to actually get the EBU to reverse course on their decision. So there's that.

EDIT: Myth 7: "People wouldn't be bullying the artists for participating in the contest if the EBU kicked Israel out."

Why am I even surprised this is a talking point?

Edit: Myth 8: "Eurovision is treating Israel differently because of the whole lyrics change situation."

I've seen this on both sides, and this is not true. I've mentioned Georgia earlier, but I also want to mention Armenia's 2015 entry, originally called Don't Deny. It was changed to Face the Shadow and allowed to compete. It's reportedly about the Armenian genocide. The point is, stuff like this happens all the time. In 2021, in the midst of protests and lack of freedom, Belarus sent a pro government band with a song containing veiled lyrics threatening to subjugate the protestors. The EBU allowed them to submit another song but ultimately, Belarus was kicked out after they still failed to follow the rules.

So no, this is not out of the norm. At least from what I know. I'm more than happy to edit this section out if I have been proven wrong. God knows I've edited this post many, many times.

Final thoughts:

A lot of the people who are all high and mighty about boycotting Eurovision would absolutely not be doing that if it was Russia participating. They certainly didn't when Azerbaijan did in 2021.

A lot of the misinformation around Eurovision this year can be chalked up to antisemitism and not understanding how contracts work. I think it's also really performative and virtue signaling at best. Yes, it's true that the postcards(clips for the broadcast while preparing for the next performer) for the 2019 contest, held in Israel, where filmed in disputed territories.

Actually, let's talk about the postcards.

You see, KAN, the Israeli broadcaster, chose not to film the postcards in territories like the West Bank. And they were criticized for it by the right wing Israeli government. So there is a true fact about something bad the Israeli government did that you can criticize them for.

Now back to the topic at hand.

Yes, it's true that Israel's lyrics were changed so they could go ahead and participate this year. It's just that now, it's really difficult to have a sane conversation about Israel in general. It's difficult to have a sane conversation about antisemitism with some people. Take this post here trying to combat antisemitism only to end up having to fight Islamophobia. Put a big F in the chat for the OP of that post, yikes.

If no one got called anti LGBT when the World Cup was held in Qatar and people still watched, I don't see why people who choose to watch Eurovision this year should be called pro genocide.

Last but not least, I want to end this on a more positive note, so this year's contest is looking really good. No one's completely sure who will take the win this year, but right now the song with the most bets to win the contest is Switzerland. It's not like 2023, where we all knew who was going to win weeks before the actual contest. So I'm interested in the outcome this year. You guys are more than welcome to throw in your own opinions on this year's caliber of songs if you want.

[magpod-confessions]

The amount of the fandom who listen to this podcast, which condemns the audience for being a voyeur very openly, and then completely miss that point is staggering. Art has an inherently voyeuristic element, to listen to suffering as one does when listening to TMA is to be a voyeur, to hear the petty office gossip and the drama between characters on tape is inherently invasive.

It's also reflective of reality.

It's such a key piece of analysis and it seems like the fandom is swamped in condemnation of characters for revealing information on tape when the question then is: How else would we know? We are voyeurs, listening to this fictional world where we are dependent on the creator to showcase what details are significant. I think that generally, that is quite well done and at the same time, people get quite angry over it.

I'm not certain I'm articulating this well, but I think the biggest example is Melanie's passing mention of Jon's sexuality. It's so interesting to me that people condemn Georgie and Melanie for talking about it (but not Martin, which...), but that lens is not self-reflective of the fact that we, as listeners, should also not know it. It is representative of a lot of real life interactions in a very specific way that lives outside of idealism where information about people is often revealed and obtained without consent from either party. Part of the purpose of that reveal I believe is genuinely to comment on what the audience has been wondering about Jon in terms of sexuality and to call them in for their own voyeuristic tendencies by making them listening to it.

And yet, the only analysis that comes out of that is fighting over what that statement means in terms of Jon's sexuality. The number of arguments over what flavor of asexual that man is like he's an ice cream freezer crops up every month or so. The information is minimal and three people removed from the source, and not intended to be overhead by us, and then it causes a debate. The purpose of that, and overhearing gossip and learning things about people they haven't revealed themselves is that we are not supposed to know at all!

Huge fandom miss in my opinion in terms of analysis.

That isn't the only instance--I think the final statements of Elias and Rosie are also very good examples where that is information that we are not supposed to know. Unlike statement givers who have come to the institute or those who are not named, they don't offer that information freely (as much as can be said with an Archivist in tow), and its deeply disturbing that we, as viewers, have access to it. That so many headcanons and thoughts and ideas are built around twenty minutes of what is essentially forcibly extracted information.

The listener as the voyeur is one of the strongest elements of TMA and missing that I think is the core of so much fandom discourse. We could all benefit from some self-awareness, I think.

.

[genericpuff]

I don't know the term for creators who became popular outside the traditional steps to "make it" in their profession; then when people started taking their work seriously and giving them criticism, these creators saw it as an attack because they are not used to mentors and studies.

Smythe's professional training is vague at best, being a folklorist. Then there's the creator of the popular hell cartoon that became her own executive producer and director in her 20s (I'm not going to say her name since it tends to attract her rabid fans) and becomes reactive to any kind of criticism on Twitter. Then there's that TikToker Devon Rodriguez, who became popular for sketching people on subways, and when an art critic gave a mild review to his art gallery, Devon unleashed his fans on him.

Like am I seeing a pattern here for artists? And I guess, what do you think we can learn from it.

Ah, so this is a very interesting (and broad) topic that we've touched on in discussions in ULO and other webtoon-related communities. So buckle up, it's time for an ✨essay✨

I think the best way I can sum up my thoughts on this issue is: the vast majority of people who become paid content creators don't seek out a job as content creators, a job in content creation is just something that happens to them.

I say "content creation" because this is something that applies to a lot of other platforms and online mediums as well, such as the examples you included (TikTok, Youtube, Twitch, etc.). And don't get me wrong, it's not like every successful content creator out there didn't work their asses off to get to where they are, but for many... it still involves an element of luck. People don't go to school for it, people don't "apply" to become influencers, and much of it relies entirely on just making stuff until it gets seen and propelled into success.

I think a lot of these issues arise with the creators themselves and how they view their own work. The reality is that many of us artists have been treated as the "rejects" of society, we constantly feel like we're misunderstood and have some deep inner pain that we express through our art, and instead of going to therapy, we come up with OC's. It's a lot more fun and it's a lot cheaper LOL Webcomics naturally wind up being the perfect lightning rod for people who feel that way, where we can pour ourselves into the characters, the world, the narrative, in a way that perfectly mixes our talents for art and our need to express our innermost thoughts and feelings about ourselves and the world around us. So when our art gets criticized or rejected ... it can be hard for a lot of artists to not feel like it's a criticism of the self, a rejection of our identities, an attack on our feelings and experiences, because we've tied so much of ourselves to our work. And this can make that transition very difficult for people who are trying to go pro, because being professional demands separating yourself from your work, at least enough that you can view it objectively, recognize its flaws, seek out pathways to improvement, and not take every bump in the road personally.

A lot of successful creators are people who just never made that transition. It's led to an abundance of professional creators who know how to film themselves or react to content or, in the case of webcomic artists, write stories about their OC's, but don't know how to actually navigate the industry at a professional level. They don't know how to read and negotiate contracts, they don't know what deals are actually good for them and which ones are better left on the table, they don't know how to manage teams of people, they don't know how to react to the attention, praise, and criticism of their audience - they're just doing what they've always done, but now they're making money doing it.

None of this is to speak ill in any way of the creators who've found success and are still just doing what they've always done for money. None of this is meant to be a slight on the creators who are using webcomics and art as an expression of their deeper selves (I do it myself, it's very cathartic!) because ultimately that's what makes your work your work, the fact that you made it, with all your good parts and bad. Many of these creators are capable of running their platform without any issues because they've learned how to play the game, or because their platform is made up of people just like them so their audience is more like just a social circle.

But many of them still also can't operate on a professional level and those are the ones we often see getting called out and held accountable when they do shit like, I dunno, scamming their audiences for money or making alt accounts to manipulate user reviews or plagiarizing from other people's work or just being really REALLY shitty to their own audience.

Often times these are people who are just doing what they'd normally do as a hobby, became well known for it, and managed to turn it into a living. But they never actually learned how to turn their hobby into a job, and themselves into professionals.

And artists especially are prone to this because, let's face it, a lot of us are just weebs having fun drawing our blorbos, so of course if we get a chance to monetize that, we're gonna! We should! We should want to be paid for our work and time and efforts!

But we also have to remember that it's a different ballgame, especially if you're turning your audience into customers. "I'm just a baby creator doing this for fun" doesn't and shouldn't apply anymore once you start signing contracts, selling your art as products, taking people's money to fund your projects, etc. because now it's not just your art, it's what you're expecting people to pay for so you can eat and pay your bills and live.

As much as our art is often personal and should be cherished as such, you can't expect people to want to pay for it if you're not setting a bar and meeting it, or if you're not treating your audience with any amount of dignity or respect.

I'm not saying you're not entitled to having feelings or still wanting to treat your art as art, but the line between art and products is there for a reason, it's to set people's expectations and ensure that both sides are having those expectations met. Webtoon creators suffer from the same thing that a lot of Youtube creators and other types of content creators suffer from in this transition, and I feel like HBomberGuy summed it up best:

"In current discourse, Youtubers simultaneously present as the forefront of a new medium, creative voices that need to be taken seriously as part of the 'next generation of media' - and also uwu smol beans little babies who shouldn't be taken seriously when they rip someone off and make tens of thousands of dollars doing it."

It's not gatekeeping a medium, it's not telling people they aren't allowed to have feelings or to want to still have that personal connection to their work in spite of the professional level it's achieved, it's simply just expecting people to actually live up to the label of 'professional' that they're using to make money.

And this especially goes for someone like Rachel, who claims to be a 'folklorist' despite all the contrary evidence that says otherwise. This is the same person who copy pasted the first result on Google as her source on a simple word definition:

There's a second part to that HBomberGuy quote that also actually applies to Rachel really well in this discussion, concerning how she labels herself a "folklorist" and how that's affected and influenced the greater discussion surrounding Greek myth:

"But on the opposite end, Youtubers who act like serious documentarians gain a shroud of professionalism which then masks the deeply unprofessional things they do. We just saw that with James. I think [James] partially got away with what he's doing for so long because he acts so professional about it, so people assume, 'there's no way he could just be stealing shit!' so they don't check. And on top of that, a lot of James' videos contain obvious mistakes and made-up facts... but because they're often presented next to well-researched stuff he stole, no one questions it. I've seen James repeat a lie in his videos, and then other people claim it's true, and link his video as the proof. He has helped to solidify misinformation by seeming like he's doing his diligence."

There's always going to be discourse over what's legitimate and what isn't when it comes to Greek myth, there are loads of things we still don't know simply due to the knowledge being lost to time. But there's something to be said about a white New Zealand woman using her self-insert romance comic and platform to build a veneer of professionalism and legitimacy around herself, as if she's the authority on the subject, while simultaneously relying on first result Google searches and citing works that have no real foothold in the way of scholarly or "folklorist" discussion.

All that's to say, you're right, her professional training is vague at best. She's never completed a longform comic prior to LO, she's not doing her due diligence in actually engaging with the media she's trying to "retell" and exposing herself to the voices of those from the culture that's tied to it, and she's not holding herself to any sort of standards when it comes not only to being a professional, but a professional who's been held on a pedestal for all these years. She's still operating the same way she was 5 years ago - drawing and writing whatever pops into her head and sending it to her editor for uploading, with next to no intervention or guidance. Except now it doesn't have the benefit of being new and having "potential", it's getting noticed and called out more now than ever because it's been 5 years of this shit and it's been getting worse on account of her clearly being burnt out (or just giving up/not caring) and the readers can't be sold on "potential" anymore.

And that's all I have to say on that.

[sysmedsaresexist]

As someone with OSDD (if I’m right) what’s the worst misinfo about DID that us endos discuss in our spaces? /genq

JCYDJFCYS I love this question, I want my mods to jump in, too, but I'm going to spice it up with the worst misinformation from both sides.

For me, Dude, the worst I've seen in endo circles... is that DID is the same thing as mediumship. This is going to seem like I'm vagueing one of two people, but it's not you two (you'll know who you are). There's actually someone from before them that gave me the worst taste for that discourse, and probably made me a lot more angry about it.

In anti circles, it's got to be that dissociation is solely trauma-based. It's the most fundamental misunderstanding that leaks into everything else

I think those are my two biggest peeves.

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Mod Quill here to say FFFFFF I HATE MISINFO. Gosh it really is in all the communities, too.

In endogenic spaces, it’s hard for me to decide, but I think it’s the idea that the ToSD is ableist because “it supports final fusion” (which is its own can of worms, which I think Mod Robo might touch on, if my guess is correct). The ToSD doesn’t even fucking mention final fusion get off it. I hear about the ToSD being ableist constantly, and genuinely, it seems like just being medical at all in any way is considered ableist…

Meanwhile, anti-endos? Good lord. The worst misinfo I see is the gatekeeping of trauma. “You can’t develop DID from XYZ” — congrats! You’re a fakeclaimer who doesn’t understand how trauma works. I pray no newly discovered systems find you.

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Mod Robo here! Oh gosh, what misinfo haven't I seen? I swear I've seen the wildest shit!

Some of the worst stuff from pro-endos was them claiming or implying that CDDs are just the "broken" versions of endogenic plurality. I've seen people claim that DID doesn't require trauma, that the DID diagnosis only exists to stigmatize endogenic plurals, and that CDD systems who use terms like "parts" or "alters" just want to dehumanize ourselves and others.

Around 2019, a pro-endo started spreading a rumor that MPD was renamed to DID in order to stigmatize plurals which is just so horribly incorrect. Multiple dissociative disorders were renamed at the same time to have the word 'dissociation' in them, and it was done by a team of researchers. The pro-endo used the previous DSM chairman's ableism to spread lies and drag innocent DID systems into discourse.

Like mod Quill said, there's been a ton of misinfo from pro-endos over ToSD (theory of structural dissociation). I've seen people claim that it's completely bunk because one of the researchers who worked on it (there were multiple) lost his medical license for abusing a patient. I've also seen pro-endos try to apply ToSD to endogenic plurality and conclude that ToSD must be bunk because it doesn't fit? It just makes no sense to me because the theory was created to explain trauma-related dissociation caused by disorders like PTSD and DID, etc... It has nothing to do with plurality.

I've also seen tooons of horrible shit from pro-endos AND anti-endos about final fusion and fused alters/systems. I've seen people say it's comparable to grooming or suicide, or that these systems are just secretly "pluralphobic" and trying to become singlets. Honestly, the hatred and misinfo I've seen people say about fused systems is some of the worst.

As for anti-endos, I've seen lots of bad misinfo too... One of the worst things is gatekeeping common CDD things based on trauma type. For example, saying that nonhuman alters are only possible in systems who experienced ritual abuse. Other common CDD things I've seen anti-endos say can only happen due to ritual abuse: gatekeeper alters, subsystems, polyfragmentation, alters with number names or color names, switching due to triggers, alters who feel loyal to their abusers, alters that other alters can front through, certain headspace stuff like checkered floor tiles, having a headspace in general, etc.

I could say more but my reply is already longer than both Dude's and Quill's combined. I'll just leave it off here!

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Mod Signal: I like this ask a lot lol. It shows genuine curiosity and a desire to improve spaces. Misinfo collects like dirt around syscourse. We all have to sweep regularly to make sure that shit gets thrown out.

On the pro-endo side, the worst I've seen is endo systems attempting to lean into the fantasy model of CDDs to support their own plurality. That model has been debunked for quite a while, and it has hurt so many goddamn people. CDDs are trauma-based, we don't have to reverse scientific progress or fakeclaim some of the first cases of recorded CDDs to support endo systems.

On the anti-endo side, my least favorite bit of misinformation is the idea that the TOSD shows how different people's trauma ranks in the trauma Olympics. The idea that someone with polyfragmented DID must have had things worse than an OSDD 1B system who must have had things worse than someone with BPD, etc. The level of dissociation required for each label in the DSM relies on so many more factors than just "who had it worse". There are biological dispositions to dissociation to take into account, there's the reminder that what's traumatic to a child isn't always considered traumatic to an adult, there's attachment styles to take into play. There is so much more to the science than "I had it worse than you and I have the diagnosis to prove it".

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Everyone is welcome to reblog and add their own. This could be a good learning opportunity for people to go, "wait, that's not true??"

[olderthannetfic]

https://www.tumblr.com/olderthannetfic/759877394317410304/the-recent-dunmeshi-discourse-with-the-author?source=share

I think some of this disconnect (and also the one mentioned in reblogs about Yuri on Ice) is also due to very different cultural attitudes toward neurological disabilities (like autism and ADHD) and mental illnesses (like anxiety and depression) in the the Anglosphere vs. Japan. I know it's a lot more stigmatized in Japanese culture in general and I'm guessing that also extends to fandom spaces - whereas, obviously U.S., UK etc. culture more broadly still has a long way to go but it seems like progressive nerdy spaces like female-driven corners of online fandom (or honestly, IME, most English-speaking anime fandom in general outside of like, 4chan) have embraced neurodiversity. (I think a lot of people who hang out in these spaces underestimate how not-mainstream neurodiversity is even in the West.)

Also, it seems from what I've gleaned from Japanese anime creators' interviews that there's a lot less focus on giving characters specific identity labels there than there is here, whether queer/trans ones or neurodiverse ones.

Obviously I don't think stigma toward neurodiversity is ever good, but in terms of fandoms having looser or more rigid standards for whether a character "counts" as X identity, or if creators are specifically labeling them vs. letting the work speak for itself.... I'm not sure either way is better or worse? Just different. Like the reblog mentioned Japanese fans not thinking Yuuri from YOI has anxiety because he doesn't fit every part of the DSM diagnosis. I can't tell if that person is agreeing with that perspective or not, but ftr, plenty of us with diagnosed anxiety don't fit EVERY single criterion either. I certainly don't and I have a diagnosis. (For instance, I have social anxiety but don't experience the statistically most common kind of it, anxiety around public speaking - I have no nervousness at all about giving speeches. But get me doing small talk to people I don't know well and I'm a ball of nerves.)

To me, Yuuri seemed like a really clear portrayal of it, but I could see how he could be written that way unintentionally. From what I remember in interviews, the director and writer said it wasn't intentional but they can see it now that people have told them about it, or something like that. It also seems like that aspect of his character was coming out of the director's personal experiences, and maybe she had experienced it but not been diagnosed with it.

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