#also tag your reasoning why please!

[whatsitzface]

Just out of curiosity✧˖°.☾

[inkskinned]

you wanted to be a good friend, because you loved your friends, but the truth was that everyone else somehow had a pamphlet on being normal that you never received. most of the time you learn by trial-and-error. you are terrified of the next big mistake you make, because it seems like the rules are completely arbitrary.

you've learned to keep the prickly parts of your personality in a stormcloud under your bed - as if they're a second version of you; one that will make your friends hate you. it feels feral, burning, ugly.

instead, you have assembled habits based on the statistical likelihood of pleasing others. you're a good listener, which is to say - if you do speak up, you might end up saying the wrong thing and scaring off someone, but people tend to like someone-who-listens. or you've got no true desires or goals, because people like it when you're passive, mutable. you're "not easy to fluster" which is to say - your emotions are fundamentally uninteresting to others around you; so you've learned to control them to a degree that you can no longer really feel them happening.

you have long suspected something is wrong with you, but most of the time, googling doesn't help. you are so-used to helping-yourself, alone and with no handbook. the reek of your real self feels more like a horrible joke - you wake up, and, despite all your preparations, suddenly the whole house is full of smoke. the real you is someone waiting to ruin your other-life, the one where you're normal and happy. the real-self is unpredictable, angry.

your real self snarls when people infantilize the whole situation. because if you were really suffering, everyone seems to think you'd be completely unable to cope. but you already learned the rules, so you do know how to cope, and you have fucking been coping. it's not black-and-white. it's not that you are healed during the other times - it's just that you're able to fucking try. and honestly, whenever you show symptoms, it's a really fucking bad sign.

because the symptoms you have are ugly and unmanageable for others. your symptoms aren't waifish white girl things. they're annoying and complicated. they will be the subject of so many pretentious instagram reels. if they cared about you, they'd just show up on time. you care, a lot, so deeply it burns you. you like to picture a world where the comments read if they loved you, they'd never need glasses to see. but since that's a rule you've seen repeated - "one must never be late or you are a bad friend" - you constantly worry about being late and leave agonizingly early. there are no words for how you feel when you're still late; no matter how hard you were trying.

so you have to make up for it. you have to make up for that little horrible real you that you keep locked in a cabinet. you are bad at answering emails so every project you make has to be perfect. you are weird and sensitive so you have to learn to be funny and interesting. you are an inconvenience to others, so you become as smooth as possible, buffing out all the rough parts.

all this. all this. so people can pass their hands over you and just tell you just the once -how good you are. you're a good friend. you're loveable.

[goldkirk]

hey this isn’t aimed at anyone in particular but I’m saying it for the record here: if I tell you no, please stop messaging me about fundraisers and mutual aid.

I get enough messages that it’s impossible for me to keep up without devoting at least half an hour each day, when I’m not even on tumblr that long most days. Me having a boundary about this isn’t a moral failing, it’s a lifeboat for me on my own blog.

In my personal life I’m already advocating and donating literally as much as I can spare. This is not me not caring, it’s just me not willing to interact with that on the one place I go online to not interact with irl news and world events for the most part.

I cannot be upset all the time. I cannot be upset everywhere. I cannot use all my emotional and mental energy fielding my own upset from ongoing events. My options are to hold boundaries about this or stop coming online at all.

I’m all for sharing information and signal boosting to reasonable extents, but the scale of it this year is so large and so enduring that it is literally not possible to for me to participate on every account I have. I’ve previously shared links to Gaza eSIM donations and a major hub of verified Go Fund Mes here and elsewhere online. We, the online humans, know how to look those things up ourselves by now. There are many, many people choosing to do advocacy work, and right now, I can’t be one of them.

If you’re extremely upset when I tell you I can’t share/donate right now about a Gaza family or personal fundraiser you ask me to share here, just unfollow and block me. That’s what those buttons are for. Protect your own emotions and energy and get me off your feed instead of staying upset and continuing to engage with online people or content that upsets you.

Please don’t send repeated angry messages based on manufactured purity politics and moral outrage into my messages and inbox when I exercise the right to run my own blog.

[stalkersamsrptumbler]

@anonymousmouse556 Sorry its not my best, my tablet didnt wanna agree with me ;w; LET ALONE I HOPE YOU LIKE IT!!!

[katsigian]

Hey what if we left people the fuck alone when it comes to their ships, yeah? Let people enjoy what they want to enjoy in this bleak fucking world instead of barging in with some lame and unneeded moral grandstanding. "UMM actually here's why your ship is problematic 🤓" how about we stop being judge-y and self righteous instead? What are you a cop? Because policing someone's ship in your 30's is embarrassing

If someone wants to ship their OCs with a certain dynamic or with a specific type of character, then that's FINE. Stop being a clown and vague posting about them. Unless there is something obviously wrong (i.e. underage and so on), your opinion need not be expressed in the most bitch-coded vaguepost

[mythalism]

my #1 fear with da:v is that they woobify and romanticize solas and rob him of the qualities that make him the dread wolf, fen'harel, great betrayer and bringer of nightmares etc. etc. etc, the kind of person who killed an old friend who got in his way, who orchestrated a successful but bloody coup, who mercilessly hunts down and kills mages who bind spirits, who we would have seen drag a low-approval inquisitor through an eluvian and shut it on them to chop off their arm if time had allowed, qualities like his cunning, ruthlessness and, most importantly, arrogance, in an attempt to make him more palatable to a new audience or to win over the players who have decided they hate him for those same reasons. but every time we get new footage of him being an conceited, condescending asshole (affectionate) like in vows & vengeance i am so so relieved <3

[satorisoup]

people will think im ordinary until they say one (1) thing about tmnt and all of a sudden im explaining the entire lore starting from the 1990’s movie & why donatello is the best turtle i fear… T^T

tag limit fights me… i must yap… please listen… SOB </3

[spider-man-2o99]

“why are you always only ever talking about, like, spider-man 2099’s childhood and mental health issues instead of posting panels of him Biting People” uh. because... spider-man 2099 the comic book... also does this.?

[moeblob]

Deacon loves two things: Ymber and digging himself a grave.

Fulj hates one thing: Deacon.

[theclosetedskeleton]

extremely low quality and kindof bad needful things art i made today/yesterday

[a-s-levynn]

"Even if the sky cracks in mourning / And the heavens just won't open up for me" A Series of Small Offerings - II/12 - day20

[autumnoakes]

hyperfixations really will have you imagining a 2 hour video essay on some white guy video game character huh 😪

[hunxi-after-hours]

hey, big fan of your blog! read some of your qianqiu metas, and was thinking lately about the presentation of the statist consolidation of power and framing of political unification as an unproblematic moral good in a lot of the wuxia/xianxia I've engaged with. having grown up with these genres, I know that censorship and sociopolitical circumstances are big influences on the message that gets put out. (1/3)

but also as an anti-authoritarian looking to art and literature for countercultural inspiration, I guess I've found a lot of wuxia lacking in a vision for a radical future. this certainly isn't to say that art needs to be radical to have value, or that wuxia spaces haven't created avenues of self-expression and joy for oppressed groups in an airtight society where there are dire risks attached to political activity. (2/3)

wuxia/xianxia are my favorite genres, but many aspects of its narratives seem to uphold structures of oppression (i.e. ableism, colorism, xenophobia, misogyny, etc). but hey, 嫌货人才是买货人, no such thing as perfect, best thing to do, I suppose, is to engage with art with a critical eye. thanks for your time! (3/3)

an anon after my own heart, hello! you're definitely getting at certain themes, assumptions, and values that in a way were built in to the wuxia genre as it has evolved today. whether you’re reading classic authors like 金庸 Jin Yong or remixers like 梦溪石 Meng Xishi, I’ve definitely noticed that wuxia as a genre has, well, complicated relationships with the structures of oppression that you brought up

(I'm leaving xianxia out of the discussion atm as I’m less familiar with it as a whole, but also I don't think it has the same concerns of nationalism and historicism that wuxia does)

in many ways, the modern wuxia genre is a heavily compensatory genre, which I mean specifically in a “hey, compensating much?” kind of way. it took me a very long time to realize and process this, diaspora kid that I am, but so much of contemporary Chinese culture is still profoundly affected by the events of the past 200-250 years. I mean, when you think about it, the imperial dynastic system wasn’t all that long ago; in many ways, Chinese society is still reeling from the century of humiliation, the breakneck industrialization, the mass deaths of the 20th century in war and famine and revolution and government abuse (there is also the matter of the government deliberately evoking public memory of past atrocities to fan nationalistic sentiment for its convenience, which not only keeps historical national humiliations top-of-mind but also disrupts processes of collective memory and collective grieving).

Stephen Teo, in Chinese Martial Arts Cinema: The Wuxia Tradition, tracks the origins of wuxia as a genre, and from the beginning wuxia has been bound up with anxieties over masculinity and national agency, which in literature can often be one and the same. Teo, in tracing early forerunners of wuxia and the historical context of its emergence, notes that "[i]ntellectuals initially regarded the warrior tradition in the genre as one of the elements that could provide a positive counterweight to China's image as the 'sick man of Asia'" (Teo 37).

Given the repeated incursions and invasions onto Chinese soil and China’s status as a semicolony for much of the 19th and 20th centuries, it’s almost too obvious how the wuxia genre provides a balm for those exact anxieties: the martial warrior tradition (the 武 wu in 武侠 wuxia, if you will) directly addresses fears regarding the emasculation of Chinese men; the historical settings of wuxia novels often set during or against a backdrop of past imperial Chinese glories; the featuring of military triumphs over “foreign barbarians” who sought to invade or occupy imperial land, or even better — the protagonist, raised among the “wolfish barbarians,” is uniquely positioned to combine the “raw, savage strength” of “barbarian” culture with the “cultured civility” of Han Chinese culture; the strong emphasis on tradition(al aesthetics) and traditional Confucian ethics of morality and righteousness as contrast and counterpoint to the rapid modernization and Westernization of 20th/21st century Chinese culture... you get the idea

Teo’s book surveys the wuxia genre over the past century, particularly through film, and he discusses how wuxia in the 21st century begins “to manifest as made-in-China historicist blockbusters mixing the epic form with wuxia" — which is to say, wuxia has increasingly become intertwined with the genres of period dramas and historical epics:

"Having been grafted onto the period epic, wuxia becomes a showcase of Chinese history, seeking to be universally accepted while at the same time locating itself within the historicist confines of the nation-state." (168)

wuxia’s increasing hybridization/conflation with historical epics (particularly in Zhang Yimou’s 2002 film 《英雄》 Hero, John Woo’s 2008 - 2009 《赤壁》 Red Cliff duology) increasingly politicizes the genre, and that politicization thereby links wuxia to national issues of structural oppression, like the ones you mentioned: the statist consolidation of power and framing of political unification as an unproblematic moral good, ableism, colorism, xenophobia, misogyny... any one of these could carry a research paper on their own, and I don’t presume to be able to solve or explain away any of them in a tumblr post, but I do think there are many ways in which the wuxia genre’s (often uncritical) support of structures of oppression are directly linked to the origins of wuxia as a genre that was in many ways wish-fulfillment for a 20th/21st century Chinese culture wracked with political turmoil, economic disaster, and cultural uncertainties

I particularly like Teo’s discussion here:

"...The grand historicist self-fashioning of the genre in a film like Hero and its offshoots Curse of the Golden Flower, The Banquet, The Warlords [...and] Red Cliff demonstrate the kind of nationalistic self-aggrandisement that critics find so disturbing, particularly so when the nature of the regime is authoritarian and autocratic, ever ready to invoke militaristic power as the means to their end of a unitary nation state.

“However, if we see the wuxia genre as a mirror of the nation, it shows China in perpetual crisis, torn apart by internal strife and the urge to cohere as a unitary state." (186)

the framing of political unification as an unproblematic moral good is something I find particularly interesting, because a lot of that has to do with Chinese history. the famous opening line of 《三国演义》 / Romance of the Three Kingdoms references this directly: 天下大势，分久必合，合久必分 / “All great movements under heaven [follow this rule]: that which has fallen apart for a long time must come together, and that which has been together for a long time must fall apart.” The entire cyclical narrative of imperial China has been this: a dynasty rises, a dynasty falls, the land fractures into squabbling kingdoms, out of which a single dynasty eventually rises, to eventually fall, to eventually fracture again. and so, a dynasty’s collapse and the subsequent societal fracturing into warring territories is naturally paired with the crisis and violence that ensues with the fall of a state. simply put, there just isn’t a period of Chinese history (or if there is, I don’t know of it) where political fragmentation has not been associated with civil unrest; therefore political unification must be an unproblematic good as it eliminates domestic warfare and returns order to the central plains. handily, this supports the current regime’s nationalistic and authoritarian agenda, and so we see this particular moral value reflected in much of wuxia fiction

not to simply brush aside ableism, colorism, xenophobia, and misogyny all with a wave of a hand, but I do think that much of this has to do with contemporary Chinese society’s current attitudes towards these issues. when a society privileges pale complexions in its beauty standards (see: the triptych of 白富美, the omnipresence of beauty products that advertise skin tone lightening, the entire entertainment/idol industry), colorism is a natural (and shitty) result. government-spurred nationalism, historical racism, and Han chauvinism all contribute to the rampant xenophobia of much of Chinese media, especially when it comes to depictions of non-Chinese Asia (Central Asia, Japan, SE Asia in particular). when wuxia needs a faceless enemy, it reaches for the barbarians on the border. ableism and misogyny are issues that contemporary Chinese society struggle with now; the issue of ableism in particular feels stifled in the cutthroat nature of the current job market (the flipside of China’s massive labor force is the knowledge that every person is fundamentally replaceable), and the depths to which cultural misogyny runs in China is growing steadily more and more evident as the gender gap widens

and when it comes to fiction, when it comes to literature, widespread change often doesn’t occur until there is a societal call for it. I’m thinking of the U.S. science fiction and fantasy scene, which went through its own reckoning with diversity and genre-reified prejudice over the past decade and a half. and now we have brilliantly diverse authors and searingly postcolonial works, queer characters on the regular, Tor Books itself advertising to us soft sad queer freaks on tumblr. the journey wasn’t easy though, nor is the journey remotely close to over, but the fact remains — there was, in a sense, a collective cultural awakening about the ways in which more classic SF/F often utilized and reified racism, prejudice, misogyny, ableism; and subsequently, there was a conscious effort towards holding the genre(s) and its creators accountable, towards writing and supporting and amplifying voices previously shunned and silenced

and, well, to be fully honest, I don’t think that cultural moment has arrived yet for wuxia. this is not to say that there are no wuxia creators out there trying to decolonize the genre, but that we haven’t reached the turning point where decolonizing the genre and examining its history of misogyny, xenophobia, ableism, and colorism is expected, accepted, even celebrated, and I don’t think we’ll get there until contemporary Chinese society goes through a cultural reckoning with these same issues

I also think it’s worth mentioning that whatever that collective cultural awakening/reckoning looks like, it must be and will be distinctively Chinese. Chinese culture maintains different moral values from Western (Euroamerican) culture; contemporary China faces different social issues and political problems than contemporary Euroamerica. whatever this journey looks like, I don’t think it will look like or should look the same as what the U.S. went through/is going through. decolonizing/deimperializing East Asia is inherently different from decolonizing/deimperializing the West, so I would like to stop short of making prescriptive statements on what that cultural turning point should look like

that being said: if anyone’s run into some good postcolonial wuxia lately, I’d be VERY interested to hear more about it

[doveotion]

Being self aware is literally hell I wouldn't wish this on my worst enemy

[acourtofquestions]

“She had no magic to wield, save for the keen eyes of the goddess at her shoulder and an uncanny ability to remain unnoticed, to play into expectations.”

[cinnamon-bunni]

NOT okay right now im thinking abt pokemon leaving scars on their trainers + everyday, domestic problems.....