#also this is rhetorical Just To Be Clear

[raayllum]

no no fandom. explain to me. explain how n’than guiding the kids through the zones of peril is different than ellis guiding the kids through the cursed caldera

[grewlikefancyflowers]

a key aspect of wwx as an inventor is his resourcefulness. he rarely invents wholly new things, he repurposes things that already exist.

the primary example is obviously ghostly cultivation, in which he repurposes the resentful energy of ghosts for his own means. wwx notes this himself, saying 'why waste it when it can be useful'.

and there is the yin hufu. the sword had been in the xuanwu for years, absorbing centuries of resentful energy from those who'd died, it even harmed wwx at the time. but he still thought 'this can be made into something useful' months later, he even remembered it and went back for it.

his evil-attraction talismans were made directly from evil-repelling talismans. he wasn't just inspired by them, he literally added a few strokes in his own blood to the evil-repelling talismans the wens had set up, reversing their function.

this is a constant of wwx's characterisation, he remembers the protective embroidery in the lan's robes and uses it to shield sizhui at mo manor, he needed a flute and so carved one directly from a nearby bamboo tree, in yi city he immediately knows to find a building with a living(ish) resident so he can have access to a stocked kitchen to make healing congee, and he repurposes the funeral paper effigies to fight for him. in any scenario, he instinctively notes and uses the resources around him, often repurposing them in a unique way.

this is fundamental to wwx—he innately thinks outside the box, is never confined by norms and expectations and is unafraid to directly challenge them. these traits are the source of his genius as well as his defiance of his society.

[bluehairedspidey]

this could just be me but i feel like there's a sort of unspoken general assumption that if you're bigender and identify as male and female and you're, for example, afab, you can only be male in a transgender way and female in cisgender way. but what if you're male in a trans man way And female in a trans woman way. what then.

[rhaenin-time]

Will never get over how weird it is that dragon show (but mostly society's reaction to it) of all things is what made it more clear than anything else that white womanhood was predated by, exists related to, and has so many origins in a patriarchal concept of good women vs. bad women dichotomy that goes deeper than the term Madonna Whore complex. I'm sure there must be a term and concept already established that I'm just missing.

What is it though???????????????

Sidenote: this is why I don't fuck with the "old boys club" circles of Indigenous activism that really think you can address race and colonialization without addressing patriarchy. They're just as bad in the long-run as the newer colonizer-approved "inclusive" movements that reek of white feminism-adjacent surface-level acknowledgement of the patriarchy and also really make me wish I knew if there's a term for "when it acts like white feminism even though it's in a different context."

What I'm saying is, someone please rec me some good intersectional books on patriarchy that actually go deep.

[junewild]

i don't really understand people who give feedback like this? a) i know that tireder isn't a grammatically correct word, but here's a shocking fact: people rarely speak in perfectly grammatically correct ways and b) if i DIDN'T know, do you think that this would be a particularly educational way of telling me?

[falmerbrook]

How does one deal with too many ideas and not enough time (or just ability) to do them. I have so many little projects (whether they be little drawing ideas or full blown long-term fics, animations, craft projects, etc.) pattering around in my head and it's stressing me out knowing I can only pick a fraction of them to focus on

[notasapleasure]

Second time in a day I'm getting fucked up views on Irishness on my dash???

If you're tempted to believe the assertion that the discrimination against the Irish can be equated with the discrimination faced by Black people in the wake of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, I recommend this article:

Here's the abstract if you don't like clicking:

Much Victorian Irish studies has followed the Americanist Noel Ignatiev's famous claim that the Irish “became white” upon migration to the United States, whereas they had not been in the context of the United Kingdom. This article argues, in contrast, that an emphasis on the undeniable racialization of Irish poverty and politics can distract us from an important truth: nineteenth-century Irish people, in Britain and Ireland as well as in the United States, were broadly understood as white, and “Celticness” was not in any serious or widespread way treated as equivalent to Blackness, although that did not stop some nineteenth-century Irish advocates from drawing that misleading analogy. Drawing upon cultural and anthropological work of the mid-nineteenth century, from Robert Knox, Thomas Carlyle, and John Mitchel to Charles Kingsley, Matthew Arnold, and the caricaturists of Punch to Frederick Douglass, this article proposes that the implication that nineteenth-century Irishness was cognate to Blackness—or the Irish experience a version of the Black experience—represents the epistemological and ethical error that Frank B. Wilderson III has called “the ruse of analogy” that we must interrogate more critically lest we, in Wilderson's formulation, enact a “mystification, and often erasure, of Blackness's grammar of suffering.”

A quote from within the article that gives a succinct idea of things too:

None of this should obscure the fundamental point, which is that nineteenth-century caricaturists, in both prose and image, turned to racist stereotypes of Black and other nonwhite people in order to mock whites who—for whatever reason—came under critique. After all, the deprecatory rhetorical alignment of the Irish with nonwhite people was frequently rather scattershot: the Irish-born (but London-based) royal physician James Johnson, giving an account of his early 1840s “tour in Ireland,” describes Killarney guides as “an amusing race” who “swarm about the hotels like the Hindoos and Mahomedans on the beach at Madras,” Cashel as “a city of wig-wams inhabited by Titanians,” and the “Hibernian” as “like a Mahomedan Cadi.” He declares that “the murders of this county [Tipperary] would disgrace the most gloomy wilds of the most savage tribes that ever roamed in Asia, Africa, or America.” For all of Johnson's racialized rhetoric, this is not a serious attempt at racial taxonomy but rather the deployment, in the interest of evocative insult, of whatever racist stereotype of nonwhite persons comes to hand. As David Theo Goldberg states more generally, “The charged atypicality of the Irish or Jews in the European context . . . is comprehended and sustained only by identifying each respectively with and in terms of the conjunction of blackness, (European) femininity, and the lumpenproletariat.” That says far more about the largely unquestioned ideologies of anti-Black racism than about prejudice toward, for example, deliberately disparaged subsets of whites.

[57sfinest]

Are there any flaws in the story of Disco Elysium that you would change if you could?

honestly in terms of narrative and structure? no, not really!

i think a popular answer to this question would be to say "make them not be cops!" but that feels to me like something you'd say to try to absolve yourself of the "guilt" (or whatever you want to call it) of liking characters that are cops, because the fact that they're cops is an intentional and meaningful part of the narrative, not just a lazy or convenient character decision.

however i will say that i would definitely change the inherent racism in just... everything about seol. yes the isolas are not a 1-to-1 copy of earth continents/countries but many of them are meant to be strong representations, and seol- which is both an isola and a nation, somehow- is just, like, all of asia. so not only does *every asian country* just get thrown into the same basket, it also happens to be a racist-isolationist culture that's Mysterious and Fascist and Closed-Off and Hostile and Exotic etc etc. it feels like they couldn't be bothered to be even the tiniest bit more culturally aware in that regard, didn't feel like talking to any asian people about how to go about things, and just took the western view of north korea and threw "asia" into it and called it a day. it's a really disappointing thing to see in a game that seems otherwise aware of those kinds of issues.

[pepprs]

my anxiety is unbelievably fucking bad rn. i am so scared

[yuridovewing]

Feel like one of the best ways you can convince someone that no, villains with compelling motives that have sad backstories are not terrible writing compared to straight up born evil villains who just want to kill everyone and be done with it, is to tell them that Warrior Cats writes born evil villains constantly while literally preaching “That’s how evil works, you can’t CHANGE, you’re either touched by demons at birth or you aren’t!” and it blows chunks

[moesartblog]

.

[belovedblabber]

Actually, thinking about that post about how it’s easier to hate nazis then to love Jews etc., and it did make me think about a similar (in terms of sentiment, I don’t want to imply that I’m saying these things are the exact same and can just be swapped in terms of how they function) situation I see a lot with how so many cis people who are trying to be good allies focus like 90 or so percent of their time on hating terfs and being like “punch a terf!” “fuck terfs lol!” etc. and so little time on trying to listen to trans people, uplift trans people etc. It’s very easy to jump on the wagon in terms of shouting those sentiments, often with good intentions (and very often, let’s be real, for clout as well), but then a lot of the time so little of that energy is turned to actually trying to do any work on your own internalized transphobia, and to trying to support, listen to, and uplift trans people. I see a lot of cis people shouting “fuck terfs” but then turning around and refusing to learn from and engage with actual trans issues past the surface level performance of anti-terf rhetoric. I’m not saying that saying like ‘fuck terfs!’ is a bad thing, obviously. But it does often seem that people will engage in that aspect of rhetoric without making any attempts to be actual by allies and uplifters of the people they claim to be supporting. 

And to be clear, I’m cis. And this isn’t me trying to be like “well unlike OTHER cis people I GET it” because no, I have many times had harmful shit I’ve had to unlearn, and I am sure I will continue to learn things and fuck up and need to self examine. This habit of talking the talk without walking the walk is just something I’ve noticed, and something I myself have done in the past. It’s a lot easier to say a trendy (within you know, many leftist circles etc.) slogan than to do actual work, and I think that this is something cis people, including myself, need to keep in mind

[unproduciblesmackdown]

forsooth reread the first part of lackadaisy and just a few excerpts, particularly w/a visual focus

like i said, that i started reading this in '07 (which, consulting the copyrights, means the end of this section was still Currently Updating at that time, very fun for me, i do also remember A Break b/w the end of that section & the first page of part two b/c i remember being so [oouhh hell yes] when that updated)

mentioning the off the shits quality right from the start and like, around this age maybe already starting to draw a bit more / beyond like doodles to pass the time at school or at home largely; not being at all very Online yet to know abt what the hell people post anywhere so like my god people not only just make their own comics, not only are they essentially ongoing graphic novels, someone can also just be making something this high quality....intriguing and just holistically inspirational on the artistic front, that people just Were out there able to just do this kind of stuff, nonprofessionally, b/c they wanted to. and just the intrigue of like, i loved keeping up with it as a whole then & since, the historical element is fun, the drama & mystery elements, the dynamic adventure aspect, the slightly lighthearted playful nature of the work overall (jellicle...), the constant relevance of Character and the constant progression of Story

but also it sure occurred to me that a big like Artistic Illumination & Motivation element of it is how immediately effectively quasi three-dimensional the art is, especially with the figures: the realistically consistent geometry in changing perspectives / characters being consistently constructed out of would-be three-dimensional shapes, the Lighting/Shading doing a ton to define the 3D shapes, the use of fabric wrinkling adding not just visual detail but following form & movement....middle school / would-be high school years as sure a particularly transformative time for my drawing like, hey, i can just do stuff, hey i can make & post niche fanart so that i'm motivated to draw just a lot more b/c i really am hardly moved to do it outside of that lmao....and i imagine that having This dropped in my lap and like, its feeling pretty immediate was this inspiration of like, organically selling this approach of Constructing Figures / to be thinking of things very three-dimensionally even when it Wasn't actually like, animation or an elaborate still life. like evidently my own art is very Line focused but i would say i'm also definitely thinking of figures as 3D like this / striving for the linework serving that too, or just generally striving for more [the Geometry works "realistically" despite obvious stylization, as it clearly does w/lackadaisy]

[e-the-village-cryptid]

Hey I’m also queer and I use it as an identity label. I don’t agree with people excessively trigger tagging it when it’s not necessary, but I’d really suggest you educate yourself on its history as a slur. I am a gay trans man, so this is absolutely not terf rhetoric from me. But I was called queer in a derogatory way my entire life because I lived in a rural area where it was absolutely used as a slur. Maybe consider that ppl asking for trigger tags are also LGBT and not your enemy lol

Like go ahead and isolate yourself from other queer ppl all you want but just bc some ppl are genuinely triggered by the term doesn’t mean they’re attacking you for using it, lmfao

I know you probably mean well by this ask, and I see where you're coming from. I disagree, but I will give a good faith answer in return.

To understand where I'm coming from, let's compare the words queer and gay. Both words originally referred to general sexual deviancy in a pejorative sense, only later being reclaimed as proudly worn identities. Both words have been used as slurs for a long time afterwards, queer being more popular in the mid 20th century and gay gaining popularity as a slur in the later 20th into the 21st century.

I know way more queer people in real life who have a complicated relationship with the word gay than the word queer because gay was the word that was slung at them as an insult and a weapon their entire childhood. Gay was The insult of the 80s, 90s, and 00s. Anything bad, or weak, or stupid was "gay". There were whole campaigns to try to stop the use of gay as an insult, that's how bad it got. It's given a lot of people a lot of pain connected with the word.

But I have never, ever, seen someone tag a post "g slur". Why? Two words, both initially pejorative, both reclaimed, both continuously used liberally by those who hate us as a slur and an insult. Isn't it interesting how the more inclusive of those two words was targeted in a concentrated effort that started just a few years ago in terf communities? Isn't it interesting how the more narrow, less inclusive word, despite being the one more recently used as a slur and insult, despite the people in the community who still flinch when they hear it, was simply left alone?

To be clear, I don't think that we should be trigger tagging gay, or starting some "gay is a slur!" movement. I'm just pointing out parallels and questioning why the attitude towards two words with similar histories are so vastly different.

Educate myself on its history? I know it was used as a slur. So was gay, so was lesbian, so was every goddam word we have ever used to describe ourselves because it is not the words they find disgusting, it is us. Queer has been reclaimed and used in a neutral or positive way for decades and decades.

Context matters. "you dirty queer" = slur "I went to the queer student group meeting last week" = not a slur "ew that's so gay" = slur "I came out as gay when I was 16" = not a slur

No one is denying that queer has been and can still be used as a slur. But this specific "queer is a slur in any context!" movement legitimately did come out of terf communities in the last few years. I'm not accusing you of being associated with terfs. But "queer is a slur and triggering no matter how it's used" is terf rhetoric, and they've managed to spread it beyond their community. To claim that a word that has been reclaimed for decades and used in a neutral-to-positive context is a slur is disingenuous, and they know it, but they've successfully gotten other people to parrot it by hiding it under a layer of false concern.

One final thought: I have literally never seen anyone ask for queer to be tagged because they personally are triggered by the word. It's always people speaking on behalf of some hypothetical person who can't stand to even see my identity written out in a neutral-to-positive context. And if anyone really is so genuinely triggered by the term that they can't even stand to read it, they can just filter the post content, tumblr lets you do that.

[aroaessidhe]

2023 reads

Adrift In Starlight

space opera adventure romance

a courtesan is hired to seduce the soon-to-be-wife of a famous actor

a historian who’s focused on her career & has no idea her marriage has been arranged by her rich parents

after a museum tour they and two co-workers accidentally resurrect an ancient alien artifact and end up on the run from the law, traveling from planet to planet

pan nonbinary transfemme MC, touch-averse ace MC

[femmefaggot]

saw someone say gus was the main character of psych. ik they meant one of the main characters. but not even true ? "hes one of the only black characters whose story isnt there to progress the white characters" baby...? was he not just glorified comic relief with 30% more plot/character development??? his character was "nerdy best friend/straight man" and he was nearly always pretty much just the straight man. just with somewhat more agency.