#and abuse is inherently non-constructive

[donnapalude]

i think a lot of extreme readings on louis's character painting him either as the true abuser or as an helpless victim are failing to capture one of the main points of his story and of the portrayal of vampirism as a gift, which is the well-worn fictional theme of how terrible it can be to obtain everything you ever wanted.

throughout the interview louis is not just trying to exculpate himself or, on the other hand, just trying to come to terms with the abuse received. he, is of course, doing neither and both. he is trying to untangle the particular guilt created when harm descends on yourself and others from a situation that you did not directly create, but from which you partly benefitted. the fact that this guilt gets rielaborated for a long time through a pre-existing tendency for self-deception, does not mean that the harm received was not real or that the deception was only internal. it just signals that in order to move forward, louis needs to come to terms with the specific ways his own issues have informed the events in iwtv.

louis is a character profoundly scored by contrasting feelings of shame. even before meeting lestat, his role in society as an homosexual black man creates a set of conflicting instincts and expectations impossible to fulfill simultaneously. his feminine coding in the story is not arbitrary, but a logical consequence of the exclusion of blackness and homosexuality from the societal construct of masculinity. the standard societal role that men are expected to fulfill is of course one of dominance, assertiveness, and aggressiveness, translated in all spheres of life, be it professional, familial, or sexual. as a man, and in particular the head of his family, louis is supposed to fit into all of these expectations. however, as the rhetoric around the subjugation of black people relies on the (covert or overt) image of them as violent savages that need to be civilised, black-maleness is associated with an over-dramatisation of these characteristics (hypermasculinity), which ideologically requires the submission of black men in order to control the threat they pose. which means, as a black man trying to fit in white society, louis is also expected to react graciously to subduing, suppress anger, and appear non-threating (even sexually). on top of that, homosexuality entails an inherent humiliation into feminisation, as the masculine role of dominance does not exist in a vacuum, but is directly constructed upon the submission of women. and the breaking of gender roles for louis is compounded by some of his own personal traits, which lean towards nurturing, sensitivity and passivity. a passivity that, incidentally, is also informed by the tiredeness descending from his own parentified role in the family and by the many different necessities pulling him at the same time.

the picture painted here is extremely complicated. louis is not simply a man failing in his gender role. he lives in a society that assigns to him both masculine and feminine traits and punishes him when he cannot achieve them, while at the same time shaming him when he displays them. he feels shame over his sexual and violent urges, but also inadequate when he does not perform dominance. he feels ashamed of his desire for passivity and motherhood, but also inadequate when he cannot control his aversion to actual subjugation. he wants all of it: he wants to be powerful, respected, and strong, but he also wants to care and be cared for, to relax into the power of someone else, and to be able to avoid the responsibility of always being the one making decisions. he wants, in other words, to be a full human being. but the fragmentation of his identity in society will not allow it. and the cost of failing to maintain this delicate balance is not just societal reproach, there is a direct threat of violence hanging over him. this creates a paralysis in decision-making and identity-building that heavily colors louis's choices throughout his life.

part of how he deals with this in order to function, is by creating fictional roles for himself to inhabit and denying the aspects of himself he dislikes by projecting them on others. in s1, for instance, there is something to be said about louis taking all the masculine traits he feels ashamed of (the bloodlust, the desire for violence, the desire for (gay) sex) and assigning them to lestat, as well as blaming their growth in him to lestat's influence and vampirism. which is not an incorrect reading of the situation. the predatory drive he sees in lestat is not only an externalisation of his own issues. he is actually being hunted. and then of course he is actually being abused. moreover, vampirism does enhance his violent instincts. but all of this is also not a causal coincidence between reality and his own illusions. part of the reason louis loves lestat and is attracted to vampirism (because of him and through him), is precisely that they represent unashamed possession of what he hates in himself. he admires lestat for this and he also feels relief over his presence, as it enables him to experience those traits vicariously with reduced self-blaming by directing any condemnation externally. moreover, the stalking and power-imbalance and the forced turning create a fracture in his instincts. they provide him with seduction and power he did desire and they do that by permitting him to claim a passive role in them, so that he can avoid culpability. this is extremely confusing, as i don't think he is ever able to fully reconcile how much of what happened he wanted to happen.

from an external point of view, the audience can at least see he did not really want to be subjected to violence and he perceives a real danger of it from lestat, which then gets realised. as much as the masculine, but respectful business-owner was a persona he assumed to navigate that threat in society, the adaptable housewife is also a persona he assumes to navigate that threat with lestat. and these are unsparing calculations made to physically avoid harm by performing the characteristics better suited for it in any given moment. but the specific choices made to obtain this result are clearly tied to an exaggereted exploration of feminine and masculine roles that he would not have been able to fully inhabit without the excuse of a threat, due to the mentioned combination of shame and perceived deficiency. as shame begets pride, however, the assumption of these roles is also meant to claw back some margin of agency through the construction of a self-image that is not tied to victimhood. in other words, creating for himself the belief that through this exaggerations he is just voluntarily expressing his true self and not only reacting to the constrictions of external circumtances, allows him to bear his reality by believing it was born at least partly out of his own choices and that it helped him obtain at least some favourable outcomes.

there is a fascinating tension in him, in both wanting to deny his culpability and free-will in events in order to absolve himself and at the same time not feeling worthy of this absolution and perceiving its acceptance as a further sin. moreover, there is attraction towards powerlessness as a state devoid of the burden of decision-making, but also a rejection of it due to the guilt generated by feeling co-responsible in his own victimisation because of his passivity.

in a healthy, safe environment all of this could be reconciled. however, "marrying" lestat and becoming a vampire create an interesting conundrum, whereby he receives solutions that are technically able to magically fulfill all of his most secret, shameful, and contradictory desires (bloodlust, hunger, power, violence, sex, motherhood, submissivness), but through circumstances where his consent is severely impaired and with consequences that are harmful to both himself and others. so that he finds himself unable to fully forgive himself (he did want these things to happen, although not this way, and he does enjoy some aspects of them), but also unable to escape the situation. he occupies a state of victimhood that he perceives of his own making, which further impairs him from rejecting it, as staying in it is both denial and penance.

the ending of season 2 being centred on him accepting vampirism as a gift is a full circle. the liberation achieved after the interview is not, i think, a simple recognition that there was nothing he could have done to prevent events and that he deserves to live a full life as a consequence. there are many possible nuances to this and the situation with armand deserves a whole different conversation, but on a very basic level i think what matters most is the acceptance that he will never know, exactly, what alternative course of action could have been taken. he knows what he did not do: he did not have an active role in paul's suicide, his estrangement with his family, and claudia's murder. but his shame and tendency to self-sacrifice have created a situation of immobility that impedes him from taking full stock of the part his wants have played in events. and to fully rielaborate his role as a victim he will need, i think, more reflection on that. but in the meantime, what is sure is that protracting the same tendency by denying himself any enjoyment of his vampire life and placing all the blame for his turning and their relationship on lestat (though he is to blame for many many things), would just constitute a further attempt to avoid guilt by negating that those wants ever existed at all. the way forward is only one. to accept everything he wants and be purposeful with it now. to refuse the gift does not eliminate the terrible things that came with it, it just ignores them. maybe, by honoring it, he can honor them too. and try to avoid them from happening again.

[irrealisms]

svsss and sexual violence pt. 2: gender and homophobia

standard disclaimer at the beginning: i am not saying that this is the Only thing svsss is about, or that other readings are invalid; i am not intending to character-bash most of the characters here (while i will freely admit to thinking e.g. old palace master or qiu jianluo are pretty one-dimensionally shitty, lots--probably most--of the characters in this series who i mention as perpetrating SA are characters who do have depths & who i in fact like a lot! despite this meta, or perhaps because of it, my second-favorite character is luo binghe, and i am in fact a bingqiu shipper!); and, obviously, huge fucking CW for sexual abuse and adjacent topics. this one's also got a CW for, well, homophobia and sexism. this section is approximately 1k.

(also: shoutout to @rooses40stepskincareroutine for motivating me to actually write all this out!)

TABLE OF CONTENTS pt 1: shen yuan's realization of himself as a target pt 2: gender and homophobia (you are here) pt 3: non-bingqiu sexual violence pt 4: shen qingqiu's body pt 5: we live in a society

We talked in the previous post about how Shen Yuan begins the story oblivious to himself as a potential target for sexual violence, and that his realization that he is in danger of this is the same as his realization that he is a target of male sexual desire. One of the quotes I think about a lot here is a much later quote:

Yeah right! Like he’d dare share a room with Luo Binghe. A straight man and a gay one staying in the same room? That was just asking for death. Yes, Shen Qingqiu insisted he was still straight! His willingness to read a stallion novel like Proud Immortal Demon Way was rock-solid proof!

And--on the one hand, this is funny. I'm not going to say this isn't funny, because it is; we as the reader know that Shen Qingqiu is obviously not straight and that reading stallion novels does not actually make you straight. In light of this, his insistence that he is straight is funny!

But. There's also two other things going on here:

We all know the trope of the predatory gay man, right? Gay men (and queer people in general, though the specifics of this vary by sexuality/gender) are seen as inherently sexually predatory; you see this in the idea of gay men "converting" straight men and boys through rape/molestation, you see this in AIDS-era fears of HIV+ men who deliberately tried to spread HIV (often through rape) as much as possible, you see this in modern-day grooming panics. one of the most common ways homophobia manifests is this sort of idea--as a teenager, one of my friend's parents stopped letting me have sleepovers once they learned I was a lesbian, because they didn't want me sleeping in the same room as their daughter; you see stories of people kicking gay people out of changing rooms, of refusing to touch them/let them touch others, and generally isolating them from platonic intimacy with the same gender due to the specter of gay people being sexually predatory. Shen Qingqiu's narration very deliberately calls this to mind: A straight man and a gay one staying in the same room? That was just asking for death. there's interesting things to say here about how mxtx interacts with this trope in her other two novels--lwj and hc are both definitely also engaging with this trope, though very differently--but i'll keep this post focused on scum villain.

however. as established in part one: luo binghe has in fact sexually assaulted and been sexually predatory towards shen qingqiu. between the kiss in the dream and here, we get two major moments: the first, where luo binghe admits he knew it was the real shen qingqiu and not a dream construct when he sexually assaulted SQQ in the dream, and the second, where luo binghe holds shen qingqiu down, tears off his clothes, and explicitly threatens to rape him. which...yes, luo binghe clarifies shortly after (when sqq starts dying) that he wasn't actually going to rape sqq, he just wanted to scare him. but, uh, holding someone down and then--while they try to fight--kissing them, tearing off their clothes, and telling them that you're going to rape them? that is still very much SA. so sqq's fears of LBH are ... well, they're justified, and they're coming from a place of trauma.

I... have some genuinely fairly mixed feelings about how MXTX handles this combination in SVSSS? right now i'm not actually doing very critical analysis of the text tbh, so i won't go into it, but i invite you to think about it for yourself about it!

that said, i have more things to say on other topics. specifically: SY thinks of himself as a straight man, and thus safe. but he's been put in a very feminized position by the narrative. he's constantly on the other end of LBH's wife plots, to the point where, in the extras, the culmination of their marriage involves LBH calling him "wife". the genre change is vital to understanding this--he's no longer a man in the real world, or even a man in a stallion novel; he's a shou in a danmei. (and while there's a lot of discourse on the feminization of bottoms in M/M, esp written by women, i want to emphasize that this isn't exclusive to chinese-language M/M--go read some omegaverse on ao3 to see some men being feminized by the narrative in much more extreme ways, without any of the interesting commentary on genre!) now, this is a role that is also very distinct from being a woman--especially on the doylist level, the [shou/uke/bottom] in M/M is generally written better and is more central to the narrative with fewer sexist tropes than the actual women in the story, and svsss is no exception to this--but it's still very distinctly feminized. something I think about in this regard is how his internet handle, "Peerless Cucumber", is misheard in SVSSS as "Peerless Chrysanthemum"--his name has been changed, by the setting, from something representing [penis/topping] to [anus/bottoming]. It's a representation of traditionally male bottoming, it represents the anus and not the vagina, but it's still a very literal emasculation of Shen Yuan by the setting of SVSSS! another sample quote:

In conclusion: So the female lead’s role was going to Shen Qingqiu again, huh?

this is also particularly interesting to me because of the ways SQQ is sexist, just like the previous quote is interesting because of how SQQ is homophobic. another quote, from earlier in the book:

He was a man, yet he had been forced to meekly tell another man that he would “submit to him,” in front of so many people. And above all, the other man was his former disciple, which made it even more frustrating and shameful.

again, we see his sexism and anxieties around masculinity being tied up in his anxieties around sexual abuse. he sees putting himself in a position where he's at risk for sexual abuse (because he is doing that, he has just learned that LBH knew he was real when sexually assaulting him in the dream, and he is now agreeing to submit & go home with him) as shameful. why? because he's a man. the implications that it's shameful for men to be sexually submissive or get sexually abused (which are conflated here and throughout the novel by SY, although other characters draw a distinction! but SY's views on ~kink, both D/s and S&M, while fascinating and very relevant to the bingqiu relationship and his relationship w queerness, would be thoroughly a tangent here--ask me if you want another post on the subject lol), because men should be "stronger" than that, but it would not be shameful for a woman, because women are supposed to submit to (and be sexually abused by) men, is left as an exercise for the reader. so ... he's being wildly sexist! but even here you can see he's being sexist because he's being emasculated. because he's being pushed into the "female" role, instead of the "male" one, and when it comes to sexual violence & the fear thereof, that's a dangerous place to be. once again, being a man doesn't protect him: a lesson he will keep learning.

there's more to say about gender & sexual violence in SVSSS about other characters, but that mostly gets addressed in the next post, except for my thoughts on gender that aren't about sexual abuse (i have a LOT of these--mostly about bing-ge vs bing-mei, but also about shen yuan's view of femininity as inherently degrading and painful, which the text does not agree with even as it does agree that the societal baggage of femininity often comes with sexual violence; again, ask me if you want another post about that, it would not be part of this meta series but i DO have things to say on it). thanks for reading this one!

[autolenaphilia]

Why anti-kink puritanism is transmisogynistic

Anti-kink puritanism almost inevitably turns into transmisogyny. I’m talking here about the moral outrage, not about actual abuse, but directed towards expressions of “problematic“ kinks, i.e fictions, fantasies, or sexual roleplay between consenting adults such as fauxcest or consensual non-consent. I’m talking about the “kink-critical” people, the antishippers, self-proclaimed anti-pedophile crusaders, people who are largely TME.

Of course, the individuals driving this, at least when they aren’t being open terfy, deny any transmisogyny, and claim to not hate trans women. They also deny being conservatives and often claim feminist/progressive ideals. Yet the callout culture that they use to enforce their morality upon people inevitably almost target mainly transfems. It’s effectively transmisogynist, and the purpose of a system is what it does.

So why are anti-kink puritanism so transmisogynist? I think there are several reasons for this. Of course the most fundamental is that transmisogyny is extremely prevalent in our society, but that applies to pretty much everything humans do. There are additional reasons I think “kink-critical” people often turn out to be extremely transmisogynist in practice, even if they say “trans women are women.”

1. Their morality is driven by disgust. Kink-critical people often don’t have rational arguments, just moralistic outrage. And that’s in part because it’s hard to construct a rational ethical argument against consensual roleplay between adults, or fiction/fantasies, unless you start arguing for thought crimes or reject bodily autonomy and the fiction/reality distinction. And rational arguments aren’t the source of anti-kink people’s outrage anyway. It’s a feeling of disgust. They think people fetishizing fictional incest is disgusting, so it must be as bad as actual incest, because actual incest is disgusting.

And this leads them naturally to transmisogyny. Our transmisogynistic society conditions us to view trans women as disgusting, and specifically sexually disgusting. Trans women are simultaneously sexually fetishized and condemned as the ultimate perverts. The concept of autogynephilia exists to condemn transfemininity as inherently fetishistic, and especially to condemn sapphic trans women.

Kink-critical people aren’t exempt from this transmisogynistic conditioning. And when your entire system of morality is based around disgust at kinky perverts, it’s natural your ire will be drawn towards the people most easily viewed as disgusting perverts. Like even if you get disgusted by tme kinksters too, you will be biased towards targeting transfems, even if it’s not conscious. When your system of morality is primarily driven by disgust, your reactions will naturally be biased.

This process is possibly even accelerated by “trans women are women” queer and feminist communities. These groups may loudly proclaim that they accept trans women as women, but are dominated by tme people. And the only trans woman they really celebrate is a fictional idealized image of perfection, devoid of any opinions, feelings or sexuality that might offend them. This turns into a problem when actual flesh-and-blood transfems show up, with opinions that challenge them on their transmisogyny and dares to be sexual in ways they don’t approve of with weird kinks, and you know actual flaws because they are humans. And she is consequently exiled for not meeting their standards of perfection.

2. Their ideological taproots are 70s-era radical feminism. The ostensibly progressive/feminist movement against various kinks is not something that orginated on tumblr in the 2010s, but among US-american radfems in the 1970s. They are basically re-hashing arguments from the 1970s feminist sex wars, taken from feminists arguing bdsm (including lesbian kinksters) and porn was inherently misogynistic. Modern kink-critical people who are aware of this will literally quote Andrea Dworkin at you, and be consistent and condemn all forms of bdsm as fetishizing abuse, and not just cnc.

And as you are hopefully well-aware, radical feminism was and is extremely transmisogynistic. Dworkin wrote a blurb for The Transsexual Empire. And these radfems were basically recuperating conservatism with a feminist coat of paint in general, as I’ve discussed before. Janice Raymond and Mary Daly were basically spreading conservative catholic viewpoints as feminism.

Their transmisogyny and anti-kink views can’t really be divorced from each other, they were the product of the same feminist ideology that viewed misogyny as “sex-based oppression.”

And the evils of kink and the transsexual woman were explicitly conflated years before Ray Blanchard invented autogynephilia. Raymond’s The Transsexual Empire explicitly analyzes trans women as having pathological sado-masochistic traits. And if you read the other ur-terf Robin Morgan writing about masochistic and feminine men in her 1977 essay "The Politics of sado-masochism" as "woman-identified" and mimicing and mocking for fun real women's oppression, the transmisogyny is obvious. Radfems ever since have been very explicit about analysing transfemininity as a form of perverted misogynistic fetish, induced by pornography.

All this lingers in modern anti-kink puritan thinking, and their open disavowals of the transmisogyny that is deeply rooted in their arguments ring hollow. And they fall back on terf arguments once challenged. For example, whenever a transfem fights back against a callout and points out how its transmisogynistic, we are accused of “using our transfem identity as a shield against criticism.” This is a ludicrous argument, as in reality being transfem attracts criticism rather than shields us against it, and it especially attracts criticism of being a dangerous sexually perverted predator. It only makes sense if you accept the terf belief that transmisogyny isn’t real, and transfems have male privilege, and a privileged status in the community. Their denials of transmisogyny reveal their transmisogyny.

Let’s not forget the deeper roots in anti-sex conservatism. And whenever anti-kink people try to justify why reading the wrong kind of porn stories is bad, they often justify with a fascist-esque narrative of sexual degeneracy. By what I mean by that is that in such narratives rape and sexual abuse doesn’t happen of because systemic inequality in our society, it happens because of individual pathology, individual perverts, often queer. And doing evil kink roleplay and reading the bad kind of porn will twist your mind into becoming a pedophile or something.

3: They will inevitably end up making alliances with, or become, anti-sex conservatives.

The 70s era radfems ended up making alliances with conservatives to fight things they both agreed were evil, like porn and trans women. And it was the inevitable conclusion, because that’s how politics works in the real world. It was the easiest way to achieve their goals. If you decide porn or trans women are worse evils than actual misogyny, you will end up allying with actual misogynist conservatives, because misogynists have power in our patriarchal society. They have influence over the state. It’s the best and quickest way to support them using that power to make things worse for trans women, or censoring porn, and you’ll feel that your activism has meaning. It makes misogyny worse by empowering misogynistic conservatives, but it’s a matter of priorities and actually fighting misogyny is hard, while siding with the establishment is easy.

Modern day progressive anti-kink crusaders will inevitably make that same decision, for pretty much the same reason. It is inevitably on the side of the conservative crusade to remove “porn” from the internet and make vulnerable sex workers (many of which are transfem) lives harder, because that’s the easiest way for their politics to have an influence. They are inevitably on the side of the porn ban here on tumblr, even if it’s just using its automated moderation in their harassment campaigns.

They will create and join in on harassment campaigns to drive individual transfems from the internet for having weird kinks, and even if they openly disavow terfs, it will end up serving the goals of actual terfs. We have come full circle here. And this lead me to the final reason anti-kink people will turn into transmisogynists:

4: Transfems are some of the people callout culture can most easily hurt. The reason actual abuse is so prevalent in our society is because our society is unequal, and abuse is the inevitable result of a person having power over another person. It’s because women are subjugated in the patriarchy and men have power of them that the rape of women happens so frequently. The rape of children happens because children are so powerless, actual incestous sex abuse happens the family is an unequal institution. And there is little you can do to punish the individual perpetrators, because they have power. They are frequently men which lots of privilege.

If you were to set out as a kind of feminist vigilante and try to punish actual perpetrators of sexual abuse, it will almost certainly backfire on you, as they have the power to retaliate. So practically nobody actually does this.

What you can do instead is punish the most vulnerable people for minor or imaginary transgressions. And transfems are some of the most vulnerable people in our society. They are often ostracized by transmisogyny from mainstream society, and consequently often rely on queer/feminist meatspace meetings and the internet to have some form of human contact. The purpose of callout campaigns is to exile transfems from these spaces as well, leaving them utterly alone and isolated, a condition that often leads to them committing suicide. And it’s easy to create an image of them as sexually abusive, because people are primed to view transfems as sexual predators.

These callouts doesn’t actually fight abuse, but are a form of abuse, and are often to provide cover for actual abusers who have too much power to be affected by it. As porpentine put it in hot allostatic load, a text that describes how transmisogynistic callout culture operates. “Punishment is not something that happens to bad people. It happens to those who cannot stop it from happening.”

Crusaders against evil kinks and fiction will thus inevitably turn towards doing callout witchhunts against random transfems. To quote porpentine again, in these communities “your status as a good feminist is dependent on constantly rooting out evil.” And Transfems are the people they can most easily root out. Painting a transfem as an abuser and driving them out of their communities is easy, especially compared to doing the hard work of actually fighting abusive systems. Destroying a trans woman is an easy way to feel you are doing the good work.

[aronarchy]

broke: i can armchair anyone with cluster b pds just because they’re abusive/manipulative/unpleasant/i don’t like them, lol.

woke: only professionals should diagnose, if you’re a layperson you’re uneducated on the topic and don’t have sufficient understanding to be accurate and unbiased. disorders are a very serious thing you should take very seriously, not just throw around randomly whenever.

bespoke: the psychiatric field is institutionally corrupt as a result of its historical and ongoing construction as an apparatus of oppression. this leads to major blind spots in their ability to understand the experience of marginalized people, including mentally ill and neurodivergent people. much of psychiatric research, not to mention practice, is politically motivated and systematically incentivized to serve the interests of power. thus, many people are wrongly or inaccurately diagnosed with cluster b pds to demonize them or reinforce ideas about criminality, fundamental pathology contributing to their problematicness, justifying oppression, claiming struggles which are results of oppression are actually inherent and biological, etc. on the other hand, many people are underdiagnosed, unidentified, denied help when they’re struggling with a certain illness because psychiatrists are often incompetent and wrong, and with cluster b’s this may apply along a gendered line. this applies for any diagnostic practice, and even for other doctors who are part of the medical-industrial complex. psychiatrists are also disproportionately abusive, and some of this is baked into the cultural norms, intended purposes, and rules and regulations and privileges regarding psychiatric practice. you cannot trust an oppressor class to have the last and most accurate say on the oppressed’s subjectivities and interiorities. furthermore, part of the structure of the institution of academia itself ensures an elitist and hierarchical epistemology. dismantling this and other intersecting oppressions means reaffirming the right of the individual themself to either self-diagnose or self-(non/un)diagnose. existing information or medical professionals should be helpful for doing this better and to improve individual being, and acknowledging the significance or accuracy of their or others’ information accurately is obviously important, but professionals should not be treated as authorities who have the right to wholesale override self-understandings instead of supporting, or to control patients. this is in no way contradictory to opposing armchair diagnoses by underinformed or malicious laypeople who trivialize or misunderstand disorders. however, the problem with such behavior must be located correctly. the inaccuracy is a problem, but that means inaccuracy from actual psychiatrists is also a problem (and it certainly does exist). additionally it might perhaps be helpful to identify saneist armchair-diagnosing laypeople as engaging in behavior similar to that of psychiatrists and both wrong, rather than trying to position them as opposed. the same kind of epistemic overriding and even absurdity is often done by many psychs (and in fact the practice and framework has in large part originated or at least been spread starting from the psychiatric institution itself).

[reductionisms]

circle, line

A circle and a line look different, right?

What about now?

Time in gintama is a useless subject. Unfortunately, it is also a prerequisite to the gintama-human ontology. Thus, with a heavy heart, I look at lines, loops, and other unlikely time-mechanics in order to construct a gintama time for the gintama-human. 

Throughout this pseudoscientific inquiry, I locate gintama time– which I eventually call [time], for lack of better notation– in my thematic abuse of two mathematical concepts: irrationality and uncountable infinity. To give away the end, [time] is an uncountable infinity born in irrationality. Which, even to its own creator, makes little sense. 

Finally, this is my defense of the gintama time loop. Why? Well, I like loops and loop-like things, and, after all, we want good things to last, to repeat. So this turns out to be a love letter to algebraic topology. Sorry time loop fiction.

Onto more interesting things.

preliminary time notes

To think about time in gintama, I bracket [real world time] from [the narrative structure of gintama, which follows a time] and [time as characters in gintama experience it, i.e. personal time]. The latter two time-categories reflect [real world time] because gintama is written by an author, who, by virtue of existing, lives in [real world time]. That is, while narrative is fun because you can play with reality to make something new (e.g., time loop, time travel, non-chronological narratives in general), creation still requires building blocks, which are ultimately some sort of known assumption, that inevitably require some understanding of actual Time. 

All this to say I look at [narrative time] and [personal time] through philosophies about [real world time], which themselves are not especially real; in other words, my methodology is kind of shit. 

the situation– personal time

Otae announces the whole of gintama in chapter one.

This is gintama’s genetic code. 

To speak of time here is to note a few things:

1. amanto possess advanced technology;

2. humans are forced to throw away their physical swords;

3. the sword of the soul. 

The sword is a tool*; later chapters tell us that it “carries the soul”. So the sword represents, or, rather, is, something irreplaceable to humanity, that relates to the soul and personhood. This much is corroborated by the plot cycle. 

With contrast to the sword, time appears impersonal. We conceive of time, at least scientifically, as the movement between past to present, present to future, stretching infinitely before and after, where our existence does not matter to its flow. 

But would “time” exist without anyone to observe it?

Alternatively, how can “time” be experienced as time– as a movement– without anything to measure it? 

The human must “create” “time”, if only because it would not be “time” without a person to observe and call it as such. What this person perceives, they conceptualize as movement (measurement); and thus there must be a prior position to reference, or, in the least, a default– a memory. 

So “time” requires the present to be given by a prior; that is, for “time” to be experienced, the human who observes it needs already given into a past. The past itself (“knowledge” of the histories that make us who we are, “knowledge” of the tools that allow us to intend various things)– i.e., its inherent “given-ness” to us– depends upon it outliving those who live it. Thus various contexts, with their technologies, arts, and writing (though these are not really separable), function also to contain the essential past-as-memory for those who use and engage with them. 

Alright, great, but what does this have to do with the dick-and-balls manga? Nothing, really, except for everything. The amanto (with futuristic technology, in futuristic contexts**) force humans to give up their swords. It would be ridiculous to talk about what the “sword” means here. Suffice to say that it carries (an assumed) cultural-historical weight, an (idealized) memory. We would expect that its dispossession disrupts temporality. And it does– hence the “time loop”.

People love to talk about cyclical time in gintama. It is the same situations, over and over again; that no one ages, injuries heal by the next chapter, and, more than serial-typical regressions, that there is a sense that things won’t work, that important change won’t last, that life “just gets worse and worse”. Time as lasting change– or what we like to call “linear time”– doesn’t feel like it exists.

To return to chapter one. Here the central conflict is not actually between amanto and human; it is between Shinpachi and Otae. Their dying father tells them that even if they give up their physical swords (memory, past), they are not to lose the sword in their soul (?unknown). Sword-less Shinpachi resents him. Rather than “cling to the past”, he tries to adapt to the “linear time” of the amanto: he works in modern food service, gives up on the dojo, and, most importantly, opposes Otae.  

What does Otae do? We might expect her to inverse Shinpachi, that is, to “embrace” cyclicality, which would be to give up. She doesn’t. Otae tries to adjust, to make a living and survive, but, unlike her brother, she does so also to protect the “thing she can never take back”. This, as Shinpachi points out, is ridiculous, unrealistic, and makes no sense. And yet it is Otae who is thematically vindicated in the end.

From the first chapter, then, we can construct a sense of [personal time (to the characters)]. Again, for change to exist, there must be a prior form; that is, a certain sort of time is what makes change (technological, political, situational advancement) possible. Further, the self is involved in the process of time. Thus when the self is not whole (lacks the sword), time, and thereby change, becomes cyclical. So “time”, to the amanto, advances, because they can work with their external “selves” (technology, worlds, knowledge-memory) to “make change”. But time, to humanity, loops back on itself, is stopped, because humanity is bereft of its self and can only return to the starting point. 

We notice that humans still live in a world where time progresses– where time goes on without them. There is a split between the time of the self and the time of the world. Shinpachi decides to do away with memory and join the world-time, the “linear time”, that is, the time of futuristic technology and change; but his sister, who goes along with this and drags the past with her, does much better. 

For a more thorough application of this thought, please rewatch the monkey hunter arc. 

*It is also (obviously) a dick. **This reveals some connection between the concepts of “tool”, “context”, and time. Though I say so inverse-facetiously, since nothing about gintama can be taken as if it were serious.

time loop– narrative time 

So what about infinity?

Personal time is not infinity. In a first sense, it simply is not infinite– characters die. In a second sense, even considering that memory can be (haphazardly) preserved beyond a lifetime, especially in a story, humanity as a whole is finite– there comes a point, eventually, where no one is left to do the remembering. And in a third sense, personal time is still a string of pasts that were once presents, into futures that will be presents; though this finite string might divide into an infinite number of presents, its divisibility renders it still essentially patterned, which is to say that it is not really “infinity”– it is still mathematically countable.

I mentioned a dysfunction of personal time into cyclical (“un-change-able”) personal time. This is associated with sword-less-ness, equivalently memory-loss, equivalently not being a whole self. The fun of stories is that “character” can be projected into the structure of the story itself; it would make sense for cyclical personal time to have some correspondence to, or at least effect on, narrative time, that is, narrative structure. 

At this point I should be more general about the time loop. 

The time loop is thought to stand opposed to “linear time” in the stagnation-change, lack-presence, circle(hole)-line([censored]) dichotomy. Specifically, the time loop is opposed to “linear time” in the sense that nothing (usually) changes in a time loop. Or, more exactly, change is slow, nothing gets “better” in any real sense. Again, only where time flows “linearly" can we build off of what is prior, can we intend and achieve a future, can we change for the better (or so we assume). Thus the time loop carries a sort of moral condemnation in its very structure— a karmic debt, if you will.

Characters in plots get thrown into time loops because something has gone wrong. Whether or not they are the direct cause, the character must “figure something out”, “learn a lesson”, that is, address the problem that created the time loop, which will almost always be related to a step within the story of their self-development, in order to escape it. The point of the story is to escape it. This is just how stories go.

Then the gintama narrative “time loop” is barely a time loop. It repeats itself, sure, and no one ages, but that’s because no one should age in a wsj serial and sorachi tried to be funny about it. Still, some lingering sense of futility, or maybe just the sheer repetition of the same event for 16 years of serialization, weighs on anyone who reads it. This kind of feels like time loop fiction; there should be a point to the plot cycles. What are they trying to force Gintoki to do, to show us in his character? What are they aiming for, what is driving the “time loop” in the first place?

Takasugi is driving the time loop. 

(More specifically, Takasugi’s crushed eye-ball (soul), his eyelid; inaccessible past (memory), is driving the time loop.)

Another clarification. Personal time is time as experienced by the person; it is pure interiority. Thus, while the world moves on– personal time is time as movement– the person may not. 

For the person to move on, they must be able to make change, that is, from a prior form, give birth to the next form. This is because only the person can observe, know, and experience “time”, which itself is a movement (a change in position) from past to present, present to future, that is defined by the person. So change and time-as-movement, within personal time, look synonymous.

Further, movement in personal time requires the given past– the memory, from before me, passed down to me by people and places and things and contexts that I outlive– to be held by me, to be part of the “I”, and thus for my bodily self and my non-embodied self to generate personal time together. In gintama, I locate “memory” as the sword. But gintama’s sword is also part of the Self; so personal time in which the Self can move is only born out of a whole self. Equivalently, personal time is not the Self, but it is intimately related to a change that can only be wrought by the Self, which is to say, both my body and my given memory are necessary to the movement of personal time. 

In any case, “gin-tama” is about Gin-toki, and, quite literally, his soul, so we would suspect that narrative time is a projection of Gintoki’s personal time. But narrative time cycles weirdly, and Gintoki still has his sword. Alternatively: if Gintoki was not already a Self, that is, if he had to learn some lesson to become a Self through the time loop, how could he have saved any of the endless roster of villains that conveyor-belts around him? So maybe Gintoki holds his sword without remembering– except that he doesn’t, and the story makes this clear (“I haven’t lost a single thing”). He does, however, seem to possess a slightly different personal time. He and his sword remind antagonists of what they’ve forgotten, and these antagonists sometimes move forward with him into the next cycle. In other words, there is some sort of movement, a change, in the narrative, in the structure, associated with each loop. 

But cycles stay cycles, up to a very particular moment.

At which point I revert to the most obvious advantage of narrative time: it interacts with the readers. Gintoki “is” a Self (in the sense that an electron is both a wave and a particle), who carries his sword, who remembers, who hasn’t lost a single thing. Yet the time around him repeats the same events, over and over again. Why? Well, in part for the above: every gintama villain needs to learn the same lesson. But every gintama villain is also Gintoki, and even if he remembers, we don’t. To risk being redundant, we, as readers, have no idea what actually happened to him until chapter 519, when it is fished (unwillingly, I think) out of Takasugi’s eyelid. 

Then narrative time functions in several senses. It relates to Gintoki’s personal time, but indirectly; more generally it looks like a projection of the Losers’ personal times, where a Loser is one who has lost their sword. Still every Loser is also Gintoki, and every lost sword is lost memory, and even if Gintoki hasn’t forgotten anything– and even if Gintoki carries his past, his sword, with him– we, the readers, don’t. Surely enough, historical time in gintama only begins after chapter 519. The revelation must precede it. 

So the gintama time loop is driven forward by whatever it takes for this memory to be revealed. Each iteration brings us closer, but there is no lesson for Gintoki to learn that would speed this up; the heart of it is that he is waiting, he has to wait, for memory to return, for his past to come back to him, and this past is exactly Takasugi. 

Why? Takasugi is the past (his eye, his eyelid, is the past); his eye is therefore Gintoki’s sword, the sword of the soul we need for time to move on. But 10 years jump before Takasugi can make the approach, and even then only from behind. Worse, it takes hundreds more chapters for him to work up the resolve to face Gintoki head on. So if Gintoki somehow constrains the world to cyclical time, equally so does Takasugi. 

In short, narrative time cannot move until Takasugi’s eye becomes Gintoki’s sword. Thus half of the loop is about Gintoki always standing up again, always waiting for Takasugi to face him, and the other half of the loop, that is, its motivation, is about Takasugi working up the guts, or whatever he does throughout the series, to finally come at Gintoki* face to face. Yes, I’m equating circles and lines, which is silly. But I did this in the beginning anyways. Rewatch the final.

So why does this matter? Readers well-versed in gintama sword theo-ontology may recognize that the sword which is memory is identical to the sword of the human. This is partly because I’ve defined personal time to require the whole Self (the human) to move, which itself requires both the sword-as-memory and its human wielder. It is also because I’ve equated Takasugi to memory instead of treating him like a character (sorry Takasugi). Nevertheless, creation of the human sword (the memory-sword) is now essential to creating time, and creating time is now equivalent to completing the Self, that is, to becoming “human”. Put another way, Shouyou isn’t killed until Gintoki kills him in 519. 

More specifically, Gintoki killing Shouyou undoubtedly completes (undoes) his humanity**. It is also the only way for anyone in gintama to have a future, because it creates, gives birth, to time, the time of the series. Further, its revelation births time in the present just as its actuality births time in the past: the Gintoki who swings his human sword, who cries, in Takasugi’s eye, is the one who swings it at him now. Gintama doesn’t actually timeskip until Gintoki kills Utsuro in silver soul.  

Then the movement of time, both personal and narrative, requires three things:

1. a memory-sword (the human sword) (the sword of the soul);

2. a human to wield it;

3. and a decision on how to swing

I have discussed one and two to exhaustion. Now we turn to three.

*Gintoki is always Takasugi, in every case. The inverse holds as well. **It also completes Shouyou’s, but that is for later.

in defense of the time loop

Birthing time looks like an escape from the time loop. 

This is where the division between time, self, and change becomes essential. Why does the time loop, in many treatments, depress its readers? For the same reason that any tragedy is depressing: fate, un-change-ability, specifically, un-change-ability of things we want to change. 

The time loop is a “literalization” of tragedy. The person trapped in the time loop, at best, loses the ability to determine their future, accomplish their projects, do what they want and have it last, that is, to find lasting (exterior) meaning (this is all exterior). At worst, this person carries their incapacity into a loop that is the same tragedy, over and over again, which they are helpless to prevent or change in any way.

This setup is not exclusive to the time loop– other variations could be immortality, reincarnation, oracles, endless linear eternity, et cetera. In every instance, though, the tragedy is that people cannot change the things that matter. And while the time loop usually removes external change to provoke internal change in its protagonist, gintama characters also struggle with the impossibility of changing themselves.

More generally, though, real time isn’t actually cyclical or linear. We move through time, changing form, towards our death– and so the common thought of time is “linear time”, which is really about “linear change” and an inability to “go back”. But time is only known to us, only countable, because of its cyclicality. There are 60 seconds to a minute; 60 minutes to an hour; 24 hours to the day; and then this repeats the next minute, the next hour, the next day; and then the next month, and then the next season, and then the next year; and then it repeats all over again. Time is only measurable, knowable, existent to us because it repeats. If it wasn’t known beforehand, how could we measure the present, the future, against it? And for it to be knowable, it has to be familiar; and for it to be familiar, we must have encountered it before; and here is the inherent repetition– we can’t stop the cyclicality or flow of time anymore than we can avoid our deaths. Real time makes possible our “change” just as it is unchangeable, just as its existence is conditioned on unchangeability.

Gintama is a story, and story time works differently than real time, so maybe in the story we can separate “linear time” (change-ability) from “cyclical time”, from “time loop” (un-change-ability). Even still, what happens after you escape a time loop? Equivalently, what happens after you escape the tragedy? In the usual time loop– at least the usual time loop in our minds– the loop is escaped into linear time, or, more appropriately, it is escaped into the time where linear change is possible. But why is “linear time” the happy ending? Even granted that it exists (which is questionable), what makes linearity better than repetition, that is, why do people love “linear change”?

The Joui 4 lived “linear time” during the war. They fought enemies, and won. They progressed towards something, and believed in it, too; they were the main characters of a power-scaling, battle-shounen manga. And yet, their linear time ended, or more accurately, was never “linear”. Shouyou’s death, if anything, only proved the inherent impossibility of their shounen dreams. So narrative time twists into defeatist cycles, and Takasugi is doomed forever to repeat, and this is probably more accurate to the condition of the actual world they inhabit, because, most importantly, time was always like this, linear change as linear time never existed. 

But again, the tragedy was never about the time loop. From its inception, the tragedy has always been about intentionality versus ruination, “I” as capable actor versus “I” as acted upon, and the utter inability of anyone to change any of this. We want out of the time loop because we can’t do anything; we want out because we can’t act out of ourselves to make external change in any way that lasts. Ultimately, we want out of the time loop because we discover that our intentionality actually means jackshit. The world does what I don’t want it to, and traps me in this; I cannot act, and yet it acts on me. My despair at the exterior world which rivets me to itself quickly translates to despair in, at, my self. I can’t make change, so what does being [x person] matter, so this is my fault, so there’s no point in changing myself, so I can’t change myself in any way that matters, because even if I do everything right, there’s no meaningful effect on the world that holds me captive, et cetera. Thus everyone wants out of the tragedy, the time loop.

Including gintama villains, who usually try to get out of it by killing themselves. This never works. 

The time loop is tragic because it makes its inhabitants absolutely passive to it and acts on them eternally. The gintama cast is supposedly full of “losers”; its villain of the week, while beating Gintoki, calls him a masterless dog, a ghost, the one who lost, along with the rest of the samurai, et cetera; and the loser here is inherently passive against a winning actor. Nevermind that Gintoki never fought for the Romantic Japan that lost to the amanto– his loss is even more infinite for the narrowness of its scope. 

And yet, you’re not supposed to kill yourself.

Escaping the time loop– or, more generally, the tragedy– never guarantees linear time, because we always have to end the book on the happily ever after. So what really happens after you escape the time loop– is linear time actually a relief? Either things start going wrong, which isn’t the linear time ideal, or you achieve every dream, you make possible every impossibility, and come to the end of the infinite series by continuing on within it infinitely. Is that really “happy”? 

Alternatively: the cycles of narrative time drive towards the birth of a new time. But the tragedy of the cycles is intentionality/ruination, and the cycles can’t be escaped into their “opposite”. Gintoki, a human, with a human sword, kills Shouyou, and thereby brought forth a new time. And yet, this new time was still cyclical. 

Then what’s the solution– killing yourself? Takasugi, repetition Personified, asks this to Gintoki the entire series. Why won’t you stay down?, [Why are you crying?], [Why can’t I comfort you?], Why keep living in this world? Villainy aside, he does have a point– if you look carefully, living in the gintama world is incredibly, incredibly stupid. 

Gintoki says: no matter how many times I fall, no matter how many times I fight the same fight over and over again, no matter if it never ends, I will always stand up.

This is the height of stupidity. 

[time]

So narrative cycles aim at the revelation of Gintoki’s memory, which would identify sword with eye, tool with wielder, that is, complete the “human”, and thereby give birth to a new (non-linear) time. 

Here we get to mathematical infinity. 

Mathematical infinity is not a number, or even properly a concept. It’s more like a sign at the edge of a cliff that says, there’s a cliff here, here’s the end of the world– except that this sign also signifies whatever, and everything, that might lie beyond the cliff, which cannot really be called “essence”, or even be said to exist in the first place. In other words, infinity is a marker for a point of no return, that in of itself is nothing.

Some things are said to be “infinite”. Usually, these are patterns. A line is infinite, as is a parabola; but these infinities are predictable, that is, countable, because patterns are rules. Their comprehensibility allows us to treat them like fancy numbers. 

Conversely, some functions decompose into situations that are entirely ungraspable. This edge of knowledge, where it devolves into paradox and nonsense, looks like uncountable infinity. 

Uncountable infinity is the infinity whose name itself means nothing. It signifies to something that is, by axiom, impossible impossibility, ungraspable. When infinity “interacts” with the mathematical world– or, rather, when we push far enough to reach it– we come to paradox, chaos, and unintelligibility. Certainly, science could advance sufficiently to reconcile the mysteries of particle physics; but the fun of mathematical concepts is that you can define them in any way you like, even if they’re fake. And uncountable infinity is, by my definition, the “thing” that is always uncountable. 

So gintama narrative cycles aim at something, while those in cyclical personal times suffer for them. Cycles, better, change-less-ness, correspond to sword-less-ness, to lack of memory, and historical time only “restarts” when Takasugi brings us the past. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. 

This doesn’t mean our new time won’t be cyclical.

In the end, “time” is associated with sense of Self. This is an unavoidable relation, because time is a human word, in a human language, that describes what is ultimately only known to us as human experience. But “Self” is (itself) a problematic concept. After all, what determines one’s Self? Relatedly, who, and/or what, and/or where, and/or why, gets to possess Selves at all?

Within concepts of Self is often embedded an instinct towards differentiation. The (western philosophical) impulse is to originate this difference in agency: that is, through my free determination of my Will, my Projects, my Actions, and et cetera, I differentiate “I” from “other” and thereby constitute Me. Needless to say, concepts of “agency” are inextricably linked to “change”. Thus, in this particular conception, “time” is bound to “Self”, is bound to “agency”, is bound to “change”, and to invoke any one is to invoke the other three. 

Here, “knowing” (as agency) finds itself imperiled. That is, though the “unknowable” would strip agents of acting-ability, “knowing” would also consign existence, life, the universe, et cetera, to determinism. In both cases, “(un)-knowledge” renders the agent passive. Thus someone might long for an unknowable magic in order to undo determinism, just as they might long for the knowledge to successfully determine their life; yet the one who longs for agency could find agency a disappointment, a not-agency. Equally, if the time loop embodies both desires before they collapse into paradox (I can continue into the unknown future if I escape; something is tying me down, my knowledge is insufficient to escape), “linear time” does so as well. 

But now we return to infinity, to irrationality, to uncountability, in short, to paradox. The bulk of the previous 5000 words has been to determine that the dichotomy is false. To be straight, knowing and not knowing, agent and non-agent, the linear and the cyclical, are not separable from each other. Their binary is an illusion, and the suggestion of one carries within it the absence of the other; they are synonymous at the exact and every moment they are not. Clearly, this is not not-knowing, and not knowing, and not not-either of them at the same time. I call this uncountable infinity, the mathematically irrational. 

The mathematically irrational is paradox. Consider: we can graph, and look at, certain functions, and yet never grasp their value (put x(sin(1/x)) into desmos). Similarly, we know exactly what “pi” is– the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter– and we can define it, use it, find it in every instance. And yet, pi is an irrational number, because its decimals trail off into uncountable infinity. Knowing and not-knowing, united in the same action: irrationality is knowing in not-knowing, not-knowing in knowing, and also neither. 

I will be ridiculous and find this paradox in gintama. I want to claim, in the first place, that the self never generated time at all; in the second, that this is never irreducible to agent/acted, knowing/unknown; and in the third, that time is generated by [time]. To do so, we must investigate the moment of its birth, in 519.

the cliff—519

Tools, given memory, etc., together with the persons who hold them, produce an actor-self, a time of possible change (a “linear” time). It is in 519 that Takasugi finally faces the camera.  

Now Gintoki grasps the sword (memory, Takasugi). This should give us “linear” time. 

But 519 is not so willing. Where we hope for capable agency, we find none. Instead linear/cyclical, active/passive, presence/distance, collapse into irrationality.

Take the archetypical moment. To Takasugi’s why, Gintoki says he’ll stand up. Specifically, he says, too bad– I (you) won’t fall. 

Standing up is what Gintoki (a person, with a sword) does. It is how he defeats each suicidal villain, kills Shouyou, and kills Shouyou and Takasugi all over again. This is what the “time loop” would require of him. 

Gintama antagonists, those paragons of rationality, tell us that it is irrational. 

Otae is also irrational. Her irrationality doesn’t fix anything (⇔escape cyclical time, make change), and she knows so herself– “If I’ll suffer either way, I’d rather suffer protecting it.” 518 chapters later, Gintoki says: “I won’t fall until you [Takasugi] fall, until you stop, no matter how many times it takes, I’ll stand up again… even if I have to walk over my teacher’s corpse, even if I have to walk over your corpse, I’ll protect his disciple, our companion, Shoka Sonjuku’s Takasugi Shinsuke, his soul.” 

So Gintoki stand(ing)s up until something– until Takasugi stops, until time is born– in order to protect Takasugi’s soul. This might look like an “end” to the cycle, but it doesn’t feel like one. “Even if I have to walk over your corpse”? 

Alternatively, “saving” Takasugi should be the change that the cycles want to make, that would break them in any normal work of time loop fiction. It is “agency” (capable action, material change) at its purest. But Gintoki says he will stand up and kill Takasugi and stand up again. No matter how many times the same thing repeats, no matter if time never moves on, no matter if he is forced to kill the very person he’s trying to protect, Gintoki will stand up. How could Gintoki possibly care about escaping any cycle, when he is the one “perpetuating it”?

So gintama is not actually about escaping the time loop, which is the rational thing to do. Gintama is about, do you have the strength to keep living in the time loop, even if it never ends?, or, do you have the strength to kill your teacher and your friend, and lose everything all over again?, or, do you have the strength to eternally suffer for the thing that can never be taken back? In short: forget the capable actor– gintama is about being foolish, and irrational, and embracing the time loop by standing up. 

If we look to chapter one, [standing up] is [protecting the thing that can’t be taken back]. Neither can be appropriately confined to cyclical or linear time. Otae says she’ll suffer either way, and Gintoki says he stands up to protect what Shouyou held precious, Takasugi’s soul. 

Otae protects a thing that cannot be taken back. This is the past. Gintoki acts for– and this is also a protecting– the past. Takasugi is, in a literal sense, pierced by this past every moment of his life. 

The past that we can recover, that we can fully integrate into ourselves, is the past that can be used to generate the future in “time”. Thus “accepting” the past “to move on” – accepting, making entirely part of oneself, making entirely interior – because only then can the past become knowable, comprehensible, and usable. The person must accept their past to change things, i.e., to make linear time. Time, change, and agency coincide.

Yet Otae’s past “cannot be taken back”. Certainly, even the accepted past cannot be “returned” to. But Otae’s past is the past that pierces Takasugi’s eye– that is, the past whose “revelation”, whose self-same existence, drives the completion/generation of gintama time itself.

So this is the past that “cannot be taken back”, in more than the literal sense. Takasugi is scandalized by its distance, even as he dies satisfied; Gintoki, ever-silent, still loses his composure at its provocation, is emptied by it, cries in 519 (in all of gintama), in 703. It is a past that refuses total use or incorporation; instead it acts on those who carry it, even after person is reconciled to sword (to its memory).  

Its paradox in position. Though “the past” is always present (“I haven’t lost anything”, “how long will you keep looking at that crushed eye of yours”), it is simultaneously kept from us by an irreparable distance. Distance, of course, suggests space, which itself suggests a space that is surpassable. But this distance is not spatial– it is temporal. Gintoki carries the past, yet never reveals it to anyone, much less to us; in the end it is Takasugi who has to do the revealing, and even then only after 500 chapters. Further, its revelation actually increases the distance. We grow used to our proximity to Gintoki’s “point of view”, to our role, through him, as protagonist of the story; and here his defining moment is told not through his eyes, but through the eyes of the distant antagonist, whose breaking point is the discovery of the distance between him and Gintoki. Gintoki is reflected– more, revealed to have always been– across a distance that is unsurpassable. 

This distance is equally time, because Takasugi and Gintoki were separated always, and only, by “the 10 years”. Takasugi comes to Edo– there is nothing stopping him, spatially, no physical restriction or meaningful law imposed, from making the approach– and yet he cannot make it. Or so we assume. We only know its universal separation axiom: 10 years, a distance between two points that could never be overcome or recuperated. 

So the past is across an unsurpassable distance. In this sense, it cannot be taken back. It is simultaneously carried in, pierces, Takasugi’s eye, who struggles because he cannot reconcile it to himself. Just as it is always with him– “every time I look, the beast…”– it is also the one thing he cannot bear to see (your crying face). Though its revelation is necessary to New time, it is also what sent time into irregularity in the first place. And though it is irreparably distant, it pierces every moment of the present, which is to say: it degrades time, it makes things weird.

Its paradox in times. The cliff is pre-originary to everything by narrative position. Gintama narrative cycles press towards its revelation as first dilemma. It is before even the corpse field, before anything else. It drives each time Gintoki swings his sword and reenacts it. The very first moment that Shouyou finds Gintoki, is predated, predicated upon, generated, made possible by, the fact that Gintoki kills him with his sword. 

From this past, Gintoki is (in the verb sense). It is ahead of him (in 519) and behind him (before 1). For its sake he “acts” towards a “change” (stands up) that he knows is impossible (“if I have to walk over even your corpse”*). In other words, for sake of this past, Gintoki lives as if he belongs to a “linear” time, even as he knows he doesn’t. The past brings forth itself again.

Finally, its paradox in agency. What is burned onto Takasugi’s eyelid is a single moment he cannot recover or recuperate. Instead, this moment acts on him, it pierces him, against his will. This sort of past is not an empty concept, that could be filled with any given circumstance. Takasugi is tortured because the content matters– because what happens on the cliff that day, matters.

The cliff is not what Takasugi, Gintoki, Shouyou, or anyone else, wanted. Worse, it is not what they fought for: Takasugi to save Shouyou, Gintoki to protect Shouyou’s disciples (in an act that he knows will destroy them), Shouyou to protect his children. Instead Takasugi is stripped of agency, and the eye that would acquire it; in the present he acts on everything because he is, in every moment, acted on. Equally, just as Shouyou tries to protect his students, he destroys them, and Gintoki, who is forced (acted on) to choose (acts on) between two wrongs, two denials of his self** (of linearity), that is, two losses, is the classic agent paradox most of all.  

So the past cannot be taken back, and this not only in the sense that no one can return to it. The past cannot be taken back as a memory, nor can it be incorporated as part of the self, nor can it function as the essential memory that projects forward normal time, even as it is known at every single moment. It cannot be domesticated. 

Gintoki killing Shouyou, and crying, is unacceptable. It is distance itself, just as it is proximity; it is simultaneously known (Takasugi sees it), unknown (no one can reconcile it), and neither (we still move on). It should not have happened. It is irrationality itself. 

And yet, by virtue of being “a past”, in its relation to the present, in its position as driving force of the time of the entire series, it still is time. The human, with the human sword, who cuts off someone’s head, is [time] itself.

Clearly, this is something outside of normal time. The question becomes, who needs to be killed, and where, and why?

The one who gives birth to a future.

*–and he does. 

**“No need. They’ll never hold a sword again.”

the future

That Gintoki kills Shouyou is essential. 

The start of gintama’s “historical timeline” is the corpse field. Here the time that Gintoki sits in carries a heavy sense of eternity. The moment where Shouyou finds him could be forever; historical time is out of place. 

What breaks this time is very particular. It is not that person and sword = human = time in the automatic sense, because Gintoki, who holds a successful sword (“before meeting you, I never lost to an adult”), remains inhuman. Rather, Shouyou, a human (to Gintoki), must give his sword to Gintoki for time to start. This is also what makes Gintoki human. Gintoki, the human, had to be given his humanity– and thereby time– by someone else. 

Equivalently, it is not enough for gintama’s [being human] that the right person holds the right sword. Only a human can progress time, that is, give birth to the future, but reconciling self to past, sword to eye, escaping the time loop, is insufficient. That Shouyou finds Gintoki is predicated by the cliff; sword can only become eye through the cliff’s revelation (and the cliff happens concurrently); self and past are reconciled only after Gintoki kills Takasugi; and the Shimura dojo is restored only once the Shimura siblings kill their mentor. It isn’t enough just to hold the sword– you have to actually swing it. 

This swing must be something irrational, because everything else is just the natural extension of a person with a sword (it is the person and the sword). Further, the person must make the swing themselves. For it to be a swing they make, they need to choose it. So the swing is a decision made in irrationality. 

Swinging a sword at– beheading someone— who is clearly the irrational choice. What goes against the logic of the world, of time, of all the meaning you sought after? Gintoki fought to protect Shouyou’s disciples; but Takasugi tells us that he wanted to save Shouyou more than anyone. Narrative logic says that Shouyou’s disciples should die to save him, and the logic of their linear time– their humanities and their swords– is to rescue Shouyou and progress into the future. Gintoki swings against everything. And cries.

Gintoki stands up, is irrational, for the past that can never be taken back. This past completes his humanity (person, sword, swing) in the moment that it ruins it (he cries). Gintoki kills the one before him(先生) to make them the one behind (into the past); which itself is a loop, is a cycle, but also a line. It is a [being human] that gives birth to an irrational time. 

Gintoki kills Shouyou even though it changes nothing. How does this birth time? “Time” comes out of a self, but Gintoki loses his self; “time” is what renders change possible, but Gintoki cannot “save” Shouyou or Takasugi. Certainly Gintoki knows this, and kills Shouyou in spite of it. But how does this bring forth a future at all?

Gintoki does kill Shouyou for something, for some reason, and this is concretely the survival (into the future) of Shouyou’s disciples. Abstractly, though the purpose is less clear– “even if I have to walk over your corpse” – it is still what drives (is the purpose of) every instance that Gintoki, or anyone, stands up. 

Gintoki’s purpose is Shouyou’s purpose, and Shouyou dies to give birth to the “future” (a future that is born in irrationality). So when Utsuro comes to kill him, Shouyou sees also Gintoki, and smiles. Sakamoto calls this “hope”.

We are told that Shouyou gives birth to hope– his students– almost as if to invoke the analogy. Shouyou’s disciples– his “children” – are him, because he gave birth to them, and they are not him, because they have a futurity beyond his imagination. Equally, this future is knowable, because the child is you, and time repeats, just as it is not, because the child is not you, and you will not be there to see it. This is the substance of “hope”.

With regards to the structure of his world, his time, and perhaps even his own humanity, Gintoki makes the irrational choice: he stands up. But to stand up is actually for, to give birth to, the uncountable future. Sakamoto tells us that Gintoki “gives birth” to this future in every shounen-bond he ever makes. And here is the paradox, something more generative than irrational dilemma– Gintoki’s “descendants” inherit his soul to be in ways unimaginable to him. 

This future pierces every moment, and in the same moment it escapes. Take that Shouyou knows, and cannot know, what his disciples will be. Their possibility is imaginable, in the sense that he can delineate it– “I hope you all find your own bushidous” – but it is also uncountably infinite, because your child is not you and not beholden to your patterns. Equivalently, Otae’s happy memories end when her father dies, but she still keeps the sword of her soul, this unspeakable thing, that past, and it is her purpose in standing up. 

Gintoki, with the sword he has been given by a human, kills Shouyou. This gives birth to an uncountable future– uncountable because it is born in irrationality, beyond the possibilities and expectations of pattern, either linear or cyclic– that is an uncountable infinity, and this is [time].  [time] drives, again, pierces, every second of all of time, and in the same moment it escapes. It is also irreparably beyond the one who births it. This is why gintama had to end. 

So the human is constituted in the moment of death (⇔the moment of irrational swing), which is to release the future— [time]. In the same moment, humanity, and [time], escapes. But the moment of constitution (⇔ [time]) is what births the next instance of being human, that is, the rest of time. 

In the moment before Gintoki’s irrational swing, each [time] was truly infinite. Here possibility is as unthinkable as Gintoki’s heart; there is no better way I can describe this than an uncountable infinity. Gintoki did what he should have (not) (not) have done. Neither he, nor Shouyou, nor Takasugi, Katsura, Oboro, or anyone, could have imagined any possibility for the future that was to come. In its sheer impossibility, this was infinity: the past that cannot be taken back. 

But the past that cannot be taken back is also the sword of the soul. By definition, this generates an impossible impossibility, that slips away as soon as it is born; and as the uncountable, that is, the mother of all irrationality, and also its child, [time] has little to say about lines or circles, aside from that they are essentially the same. So gintama never cared about time loops or not: all that matters is if you follow [time] by standing up. 

When Gintoki recovers his sword (Takasugi’s eye, Takasugi), he does so amidst a wreckage that looks like pine trees, as Takasugi (the one who finally stood before him, who now will stand behind) dies in his arms. Here, we find that the “cycle” repeats: Gintoki stands up, and the sun rises.

This is the dawn of a new, impossible day.

I don’t think that’s so bad. 

[redditreceipts]

so I've gotten the following ask from @glitzy-dynamite:

so obviously I'm not going to share the link (which leads to a video of Hamas fighters abusing and terrorising Israeli women), because this is not a gore blog

First of all, I did not choose any sides. This is not a football game. I have said time and time again that I consider Hamas to be a violent islamist organisation which is also homophobic and misogynistic. I am not a fan of any Abrahamic faith as I consider them to be inherently patriarchal.

The rest of the ask is just delusion imo. "Where is the video of the female hostages??" - Why am I required to post a video of a person suffering to acknowledge their suffering? What kind of standard is that?? i have shared one somewhat violent video once, and I have come to regret it and haven't done so since.

"maybe it's fake and Israeli women are lying about rape and torture and everything?" Literally when have I ever said that. After your hallucination of me having supported Hamas, now you imagine that I have accused Israeli women of fabricating their stories. No. I don't think that they have. That's why I never said that lol. On October ninth, I read the UN report on the women's situation in Palestine and made a post about how patriarchal islamist structures are the greatest oppressors of Palestinian women, besides the Israeli government. I have not changed my opinion on that and if you informed yourself, you'd know that

And lastly, you ask me how I can call myself a "radical feminist" if I support the people of Palestine. And I'll tell you; it's easy.

I am a feminist because I believe that gender is a social construct designed to divide and subjugate a certain group of people (women).

I believe that religion is a social construct designed to divide and subjugate a certain group of people (the "non-believers" to whatever religion you believe in).

I believe that nationality is a social construct designed to divide and subjugate a certain group of people (the "stateless", i.e. the Palestinians in this situation).

I believe that race is a social construct designed to divide and subjugate a certain group of people (the "non-whites")

So yeah, how about you, @glitzy-dynamite, consider leaving your ideological bubble and seek help for your persecutory delusion, so we'd be able to have an actual conversation about things that people have actually said, and not just something that you've dreamt or made up in your head

[secularprolifeconspectus]

Debunk of the "fetus is a parasite" argument

bad pro-abort argument: "prenatal humans are in a parasitic relationship to their pregnant host so abortion is self-defense"

This ideological framework for pregnancy requires sooo much equivocation it's unbearable.

*exasperated sigh* but let's break it down:

1) let's start by acknowledging how dehumanizing it is to posit that pregnant people/mothers are just hosts to parasites. And the sheer misogyny of framing a healthy, ordinary function of the fertile female body as a medical ailment. Females are not inherently diseased! The fuck!

2) the parastic posit assumes that the female body does not want to be pregnant and actively fights pregnancy, but that makes no sense considering the mechanisms that female bodies have deliberately evolved to encourage, stabilize, and sustain reproduction. That is not parasitic.

3a) the self-defense posit implies that the prenate is an aggressor that uses force to violate their mother. But this requires that the prenate have power over the situation. A prenate has no volition & also isn't an agent in pregnancy. A baby shouldn't be held to adult standards.

3b) I've recently seen a the rebuttal that "a sleepwalker also doesn't have volition", and that is true, but a sleepwalker is an agent who exerts power if they actively commit assault. Again, false equivalence. A baby's existence is passive, not an aggression, and not a threat.

4a) another implication of these posits is that the prenate is invasive. This is predicated upon that the location of a human (in this case, the womb — where else does a prenate belong?) has an impact on their moral status, meanwhile dismissing place of origin and safe shelter.

4b) The complaint is then that female bodies are not merely "locations" or "shelters"; this is an oversimplistic extrapolation. The pregnant female body is an individual person & home to another person simultaneously. That is dynamic self-other transcendence, not objectification!

5) "the fetus is a parasite" is a thinly-veiled dehumanization strategy as outlined in stage 4 of The Ten Stages of Genocide. By equating prenatal humans to vermin & disease, such as parasitic infections, the normal revulsion against the "eradication" of human beings is overcome.

6a) the parasitic pregnancy framework is a fetal non-personhood argument pretending to be a bodily autonomy argument. On a gut level we know it's cruel injustice to deliberately harm a helpless child, so we must construe either "child", "helpless", or "harm" as false in abortion.

The parasitic frame does all 3. If the prenate is a parasite, then she is not a child, she is not helpess, & she can't be harmed. The argument is that something about being a fetus justifies her extermination; that autonomy takes precedence over dependence is just pretense.

6b) This logic often reduces down to "the fetus is a parasite so it's parasitic; the fetus is parasitic so it's a parasite", which is invalid circular reasoning AND founded in unsound premises. It's discrimination against an entire class of human beings for their age & ability.

Fetuses are not parasitic. Fetuses are not potential people. Fetuses are existing people. Preborn humans are powerless people. Elective abortion is abuse of power. Abortion is predatory. Abortion is a human rights violation. Abortion is mass genocide.

Abortion is literal murder.

Deconstruction of the bodily autonomy argument. Refutation of the right to refuse argument. Construction of fetal personhood.

[phasedsun]

by all technicalities, naziism and transphobia isn't banned by tumblrs community guidelines

in fact, it is further affirmed by the CEO, wherein he says that the users should generate discussion or block people instead of reporting them

therefore, inadequate protection of the minority groups on this site is undeniable

condemn these people all you want, your indifference to their existence on this website through this guideline is indicative of a staff-wide value. instead of a moral standard, this topic is interpreted as moderation, curious further that your detailed stances tend towards sexual content instead of hateful speech—which is only defined by wishing death upon a group, as opposed to the in-depth description of what is permitted to be shown on this website with regards to nudity and sexual content, especially that of pedophilia

so we turn to the current discussion of transmisogyny, with our knowledge that historically those transitioning into a feminine western standard are interpreted by patriarchy as sexual obsessions stemming from the masculine view of the female body as the object of their atteaction. at this point, this view has been subconsciously planted into the minds of all who exist under the patriarchy, and it is very much your job to identify instances of transmisogyny—especially those instances unintended or unlabeled, they are subconscious biases

it is also important to note that sexuality is an integral piece of queerness. it is not wrong to say this, as there is nothing evil about sexuality. it would be a blatant denial of history to say that queerness is non-sexual in nature. the only instances of sexuality being interpreted as an evil is that of oppressive religious moral standard; regardless of the individual's religious status, the view stems from the ideas of sin and modesty, which are all social constructions based in religious belief and integrated into society. your laws are based on religious morals, so your society is inherently religious, so your society inherently views sexuality as evil. your society is based on patriarchy, which views femininity as inherently sexual for the purpose of male pleasure, therefore making a transwomans femininity a threat to their own sexual desires—a sexual threat on men is therefore an evil threat on men, transfemininity is therefore evil

I hope by now you see how these views interplay. I will now return to the guidelines of tumblr once more, under this notion and more I did not particularly discuss, however I trust the reader to be able to understand how forms of sexual abuse can be connected to generalized sexuality under the interpretation of sexuality as evil. tumblrs sexual guidelines includes sexual content of children being banned (CSAM, pedophilia), as it should of course, however it is the way in which it is batched with sexuality that is problematic. transwomen on this website are the victims of false mature content flagging, we see this prevalent in posts with absolutely no sexual content within them

these false flags are not in line with any nudity guideline. so why, then, are they marked as sexual content? tumblrs goal is to protect children from sexual content exposure, and, after all, transfeminine bodies are not inherently sexual in theory. yet we are aware of the societal view for transfemininity and queerness: an inherent sexual interpretation, an inherently evil interpretation, and an identity that encroaches on the sanctity of children, who shan't be soiled by the sight of sexual content

a direct correlation to pedophilia, the same arguments parroted by TERFS and nazis, the same "free speech" encouraged to be "discussed" on this website

in the end, the message sent—regardless of intention—is clear. it is not out of the question to make the assumption that moderation treats transfemininity as inherently pedophilic in the same manner in which western politics does. it is not out of the question to interpret tumblr moderation as inherently transmisogynistic

and while an aforementioned reform to this bigotry and extremism would be welcome, we see how the current sexual guideline treats the transfeminine minority, and therefore I cannot help but ponder how their terrorism and hate speech guidelines would be adapted with regards to activism (we already see this suppression in undocumented forms)

tumblr may be the self proclaimed queerest place on the internet, but it is most certainly not safe for any queer individual

their actions have spoken

[grainelevator]

I’m so so sorry this is going to be a really long rant but !!!! FUCK !!!! I’ve been desperate for this conversation.

We had a dinner guest very confidently say, word for word, that health is a colonial concept. Queue a chorus of tongue to the top-teeth disapproving *clicks* and the sound of my grandmother decisively putting her fork down. The questions started coming with an underlying tone of absolute distain. “What is health?” “Do you mean the healthcare system?” “Do you see an alternative here?” “Do you know why there isn’t one?” “Are you aware we fight tooth and nail for access to this so-called colonial concept and the system that facilitates it?”

Immediately this white girl is shaking in her boots (I don’t blame her, my grandma is 58, capable of lifting a car, and probably of scalping a dinner guest if the need ever arose). But it became so obviously clear over the course of her attempt to explain that what she meant is “native culture is unhealthy, health is a deviation from and erasure of native culture” which is, uhhhh, bullshit. I feel like so many people (liberal and upper class white women in particular) see a facet of colonial society that isn’t equally represented in minority communities and then interpret it as being a colonial invention as opposed to a colonial privilege. The same goes for “settled dwelling is a colonial concept” no it isn’t, lots of us did that for centuries, it just sucks now because a colonial system got dropped on top of the practice. Saying health, housing, parenting, etc are Colonial Concepts is saying outright that you cannot envision indigenous people as presently or historically capable of upholding those ideals in an equal capacity.

Progressive language does not negate the inherent infantilisation or racism of that belief. Furthermore, treating liberation from the material and social suffering of our condition as a deviation from our culture betrays the fact that you understand it exclusively from the perspective of colonial power and abuse. Thus, native culture (and african american culture) becomes, in the eyes of white liberals, synonymous with what was inflicted upon us as opposed to who we are. How dare we aspire towards health when to do so is a betrayal of our culture? Our culture being traumatisation, grief, victimhood, and above all else, a necessary social technology of both white guilt and white liberal saviourship.

Wow. Do NOT apologize for this! You are a great writer and your arguments are excellent.

I’ve been thinking about these connections a lot too. A very strong example of how consumption impacts health (I can’t believe I actually have to say that) and how these health conditions (including how these problems are managed) affect different groups in different ways are food swamps. Food swamps are areas that have little access to nutritious food, caused by factors such as cost and physical availability. In North America, native people and black people are significantly more likely to live in food swamps. These populations are less valued and seen as expendable.

It is well established that consumption of highly-processed food leads to negative health outcomes. However, the people who follow the rhetoric of positions such as “health is a colonial construct” (It’s not - health exists as a spectrum, and the delineation of healthy and unhealthy may be highly variable. This is not the same thing as non-existence) are also the ones who deny the cause and effect nature of health. This misinformation is especially harmful in places with a high population of people who are already marginalized. No one benefits from the insistence that diet does not influence disease���except for the corporations making people sick.

Food companies are not your friends. Pharmaceutical companies are not your friends. Preventative diseases line their pockets. Your wellbeing and that of others needs to come before their profit.

[roobylavender]

This whole thread is so....

https://twitter.com/orikkunn/status/1754831427903074488?t=WbVE9Fu585pxZFXPbr_JlQ&s=19

It's pissing me off actually and I search the word hijab on their account and in one of their tweets they said "I think hijab is a bad thing" ??? I need non-muslims who speak on Islam without any knowledge to stfu

i'm going to apologize beforehand if this is upsetting in any way bc i'm sure you were expecting a different response but while i feel like op's wording could have been better in this thread specifically—i like their wording in this thread more—i do generally agree with them. i definitely understand there's a gut reaction to any critique of islamic practices esp in the context of modern orientalism and islamophobic sentiment, but i also think that muslims (and people of any religious faith, really) can simultaneously acknowledge that some criticisms of faith, while driven by racism and/or xenophobia, are also validly driven by a worthwhile contention with women's material circumstances over the course of history. in the other thread i linked above i think op is very much correct in that it's not constructive nor useful to criticize individual people. many individuals do choose to dress more modestly of their own volition and are privileged enough to have that available to them as a choice and nothing more bc of the environment they grow up in and the familial interpretation of religious tenets they're taught. but i don't think people are wrong when they acknowledge the larger context within which women are advised to dress modestly and how those standards of modest dress compare with those imposed on men in comparison. there's an undeniable dichotomy there and at least in my islamic upbringing i've been taught that the way some of these things diverge along the lines of gender is preordained and not meant to be perceived as inherently oppressive towards one gender or the other. a thing is simply bc it is. but religion isn't really something you can view within a vacuum much as that would be ideal. it is connected to the material circumstances of women in the real world and i do allow myself to sit with that reality even if it's weird to process at times bc i still consider myself a muslim and have no plans on ex-communicating myself

personally i like to dress modestly in the sense that i don't wear very exposing clothing. i've grown up wearing pants for my entire life. my parents are lax enough that i'm allowed to wear t-shirts but i can't wear anything where my armpits are directly exposed so that means no sleeveless tops. i can't wear anything with a deep neckline either unless i have a higher positioned undershirt on underneath. and again, i'm not particularly bothered by any of that. i do toe the line on a few occasions but generally i'm ok with how i dress bc by now i'm used to it. that being said, i know the reason i've come to be okay with dressing this way is bc it's how i was taught to dress, and towards the specific end of maintaining modesty and emphasizing on the shape of my figure as minimally as is possible without having to outright wear a bag lol. that is at large a structural reality of muslim practice towards women, regardless of what individual women choose to do in their own homes where they have the liberty to choose. and as i mentioned above, i do think we have to sit with that reality even if we acknowledge it opens us up to abuse by other people who may not have the best intentions. this is why, for example, i've really come to frown upon the way ex-muslims (esp when they're women) are almost mocked by the extant muslim community for logically reacting to patriarchal oppression under the guise of religion. bc at the outset, materially, there is no choice presented to these people. and even if there is ideologically a choice within the tenets of the religion itself, with respect to women in particular, there is still a defined gender dichotomy and hierarchy that cannot be denied and that is quite regularly used to perpetuate the oppression that many of them try to escape

what's hard to do and what requires a knowledgeable, concerted effort on our part as muslims is trying to balance the nuance of the oppression we are accessory to against the nuance of our own oppression for who we are. it's certainly cruel that we have to do so much to parse all of this because racist, xenophobic imperialists are incorrigible people who will co-opt anything if it's beneficial to them. but all the same, we do have that responsibility at minimum. we have to learn to sit in the uncomfortable reality that while many of us as individuals may choose to practice the way we do, that choice may yet be colored by how we grew up within organized religion, and it obscures our ability to recognize that while we think it's a choice for us as individuals, it's certainly not a choice on a structural level, and that's something we should vehemently argue against maintaining the status quo of

[self-loving-vampire]

I realize that: disliking antitheism, antinatalism, transhumanism, veganism, and technological advancements; worshiping pain/suffering, insiting that there is a core human nature/people were the exact same for millennia, acting like death and suffering give life meaning, not wanting immortality, anachroprimitivism as a whole and various conservative pushback against any sort of rights. ALL of them stem from the idea that humanity is inherently good and to try to change it is bad because it can change our "nature" which is bad because humanity is good. Don't ask why, it just is according to many people. And what does humanity mean, I don't know, they sure don't either. And humans are more important that literally anything on earth and to suggest otherwise is fascist for some reason.

But the thing is that how we live now would be incomprehensible to people just 100 years ago let alone 1000+ years ago. People alive today have to deal with smallpox as a daily threat when they were kids. I think its silly to be afraid of humanity drastically changing. Like you are descended from Australopithecus. They probably didn't care how you turned out, so why care if your descendants aren't human as we know them. I think to embrace that humanity is everchanging and that change might be drastic is a key part in any progressive movement so to reject it is counterproductive.

Earlier I was reading more about the devastation of war on civilians, and how even friendly armies advancing through an area were basically a poison upon the world in terms of the effects they had on the local population.

It wasn't exactly new information for me but the details and scale of this misery are still something that is just not discussed or portrayed very often. Overall I get the impression that even people who already believe that war is bad dramatically under-estimate how bad it is and are unaware of entire dimensions of suffering involved.

And I thought about how, just like "natural" death (or murder, or child abuse), war is something that humans have been doing essentially since forever. It is just as "normal" as getting an age-related cancer and dying.

But despite that, war is clearly bad and we should do less of it. Something seemingly being an unchanging part of human nature does not mean we should just accept it as is and never try to be better.

Though note that I do think people are more constructive than destructive on the net (although not for any essential reasons or anything). My reasoning for this is that destroying things is so much easier than creating things that if the balance was much closer to the destructive side the world would look significantly different.

And yet there's still obviously a lot of... let's say "sub-optimal" things people do to both non-human animals and each other. Things could be worse but they could definitely be better too, and not just in ways that require dramatically revolutionizing humanity or anything.

I am actually optimistic that the future can be better than the present, too. Not smoothly or without obstacles, but we can do better.

Fuck accepting things we "cannot" change. We should be changing the things we cannot accept instead. In practice many of them seem to be more tractable than people realize and it is worth it to fight for them even if a perfect or ideal solution was out of reach.

[deerydear]

Psychosis and Personal Mythology, by Rory Neirin Higgs

Following the rise of the biogenetic model of psychosis, psychiatric doctrine has held that the cluster of experiences so-encompassed – voices, visions, unusual beliefs, and other non-standard modes of perception – are little more than chemical noise, devoid of any real meaning or relationship to a person’s life. Many clinicians maintain that encouraging patients to talk or even think about the content of their psychosis feeds an illness that should be starved, constructing psychosis as a kind of malignancy that invades and cannibalizes the afflicted’s senses. But this explanation doesn’t always fit comfortably to the contours of lived experience. Since my own diagnosis, I have come to think of my psychosis (or, as I have sometimes preferred, “personal mythology”) not as a disease that hollowed out my capacity for self-knowledge, but as a strange and lovely cipher.

For me, the grain from which voices, visions, and unusual beliefs take root is typically an inner impulse that I am not yet able to address directly. I am confronted with a reality that is too threatening or confusing to assimilate into my conventional belief system, and the thematic kernel of it finds other ways to communicate itself. For instance, while reflecting on an instance of childhood abuse, I recently found myself wondering whether there was something inherently wrong with me that could have provoked it. Unable to sit still with the possibility that others chose to harm me of their own volition, my thoughts paced towards alternative explanations: perhaps, as a child, some kind of mind control beacon was implanted in my brain that caused people to mistreat me despite their best efforts? On its face, this is an impossible contortion of logic. But in that moment, it was the only way I could translate my feelings of self-blame and denial about the cruelty of other people into a tolerable narrative about my life. Once I calmed down, I was able to reassess this belief – but made note of the autobiographical information woven into it, in the threads of insecurity, shame, and betrayal.

Traumatologists maintain that a central characteristic of traumatic memory is that it is incompletely processed and integrated – more of a gallery of disjointed images than a coherent narrative. Accordingly, research suggests that traumatized people are less able to articulate our experiences verbally. If ordinary life events are remembered, it may be more appropriate to say that traumatic ones are dismembered. To draw again from personal experience: some months ago, I decided to start talking to others about an abusive relationship I had been in, spanning several years. I was stymied by the realization that I didn’t know where to start. There was no beginning or end to what I could remember, no backbone of “and this is why it all happened” to bind the story together. I found myself with only scattered vignettes that I struggled to gather into a legible shape, like crushed glass rendered from what must have once been an ornate cathedral window.

It wasn’t long before peculiar beliefs began their restless turning over in my skull. In the past, these beliefs – or delusions – had grown rampantly where they sprouted, elaborating into something vast and sprawling faster than I could prune them. This time, they merely flashed through me, like the spark of some secret metabolism. I’ve learned that this reflex to mythologize is how I come to tell my formless stories. Literary trauma theory has investigated the idea that both autobiographical and fictionalized life-writing are a way of synthesizing meaning from traumatic debris, and psychiatry itself has employed related clinical practices, particularly during its psychoanalytic heyday. Delusion, I would argue, behaves similarly. It pulls symbolic and exaggerated elements into the orbit of an essential truth in order to describe its gravity. In storytelling about my life – even or perhaps especially in this abstract, subconscious form – I am drawing maps between memories, across the black and foaming gulf that would strand them.

The emerging field of narrative therapy has similarly embraced the power of storytelling. Narrative therapy holds that the stories we internalize about ourselves inform how we interact with the world, and that exploring the origin and significance of these stories can guide us in establishing new ways of thinking. Likewise, cognitive psychology has suggested that memory is not a photographic but a constructive process, involving the incorporation of our preexisting ideas – or narratives – about the world, and that recounting events to others helps us to recall information about them later on. To me, this again demonstrates the importance of storytelling in organizing memory. Perhaps, for those of us who have never had the opportunity to tell our stories in our own words, who have become accustomed to the grisly work of dis-membering, the personal mythology of delusion offers a sanctuary: a domain in which we are free to speak about our injuries without the intrusion of outside perspectives. Society cannot or will not follow us into this magical-metaphoric thicket. Here, we are free to imagine and reimagine our experiences in ways that would otherwise be forbidden to us.

I think of the stories I told, glossolalic, through my psychosis. I think of how documenting this mythopoetic otherworld was, for me, a kind of testimony, laying claim to my role as author and narrator of my past. And I think of how psychiatry’s response of enforced silence and forgetting only intensified my need for meaning-making – how urgent it became to excavate the things I had interred. Psychologists have observed that the content of an individual’s psychosis is often related to past experiences, but I would take this conclusion a step further. My voices, visions and beliefs have been not only a distorted reflection of life, but their own vital truth, running parallel and symbiotic to my “sane” understanding of the world. I am re-membering the past, now, returning the red and beating soul to the sterile, lifeless history I had cleaved from it. I no longer hold the beliefs that characterized my psychosis as literal truth. But I have great respect for the stories I have told, and will continue to tell.

[yourgamemasterthewhiterabbit]

Alternative theory: Autistic, like with other social norms and social constructs, can often understand hierarchies at least abstractly or academically but commonly reject them or struggle to apply that knowledge as a natural reaction -in- any given situation.

We have "Didn't unconsciously pick this up as an ingrained behaviour or accepted reality... and instead had to consciously learn it" disorder.

I don't know how to tell you that this is going to result in one of two things:

You have mentally deconstructed the construct enough that it seems obviously stupid [the neurotypical straights are end stage AOB fanfic writers etc... where is that post...]

Alternately, you can only accept it by believing wholeheartedly and earnestly, on a conscious level, it is a written law of the universe [often the result of abusive bigoted parents, or being way too sheltered then dumped onto fourchan]

And so you get this experience where other autistic people tend one of two-ish ways:

Largely consciously rejecting social norms and constructs like gender, a-la "I understood your social cue I just thought it was stupid" tending towards being trans or agender, pan/bi or asexual

OR they are deeply and disappointingly sexist and racist like they genuinely believe that is the core truth of the universe everyone else is just pretending not to also believe in order to be 'polite'

Sometimes -the secret third option- a little of each way depending on the subject and what their parents tried to hammer into them as the laws of the universe and how badly it personally impacted them [having shitty bigoted parents but oops they're gay anyway]

The alternative is not internalizing anything at all and just trying to go along with what the expectation seems to be in order to avoid friction, or very unwanted social attention, or abuse.

Yes, this can be infuriating. This can make the second type of person there particularly infuriating to deal with especially for other autistic people and so I -really- don't want to undersell how much this is not me trying to say autistics are morally more pure and inherently rational than other people...

But we have "Cannot pick up on social cues and constructs -unconsciously- and has to consciously pick them apart to learn them" disorder.

That is going to have an effect, sometimes a very polarizing effect on how we internalize social constructs, more so than non-autistics would be subject to [everyone is subject to this to some normal degree, but like with most symptoms, it isn't that it is a non-human tendency or behaviour, it's that it's dialed up and exaggerated to an extreme].

[and-not-where-we-choose]

Happy Wincest Wednesday! I have my first appointment for HRT today (eeeee) so everyone's getting the same question: thoughts on trans wincest? Is it something you like to think about? How do you trans the Winchesters? Which one(s) and which way(s)? And of course, most importantly: how does that impact the sex?

- schizosamwincester

hey, hope your appointment went/will go/is going well!! exciting stuff :)

and thank you so much for the ask!

---

okay, so. trans wincest. well.

disclaimer: i do not have a way with words, but boy do i have a lot of them.

dean's got something going on in that department and while i'm fully in favour of looking at it from a transfemme angle (because it's interesting and the perfect opportunity to pick apart dean's constructed masculinity) i am personally much more in love with the idea of him being some make of non-binary (and i'm phrasing it this way because i'm not sure if this falls into the common definition of non-binarity but it absolutely falls into mine. and this is my post. so).

his entire personality is so utterly constricted by the things he has to be or do (be a hunter, don't get attached, laugh off what's eating at you, listen to dad, worry about sam, fit in with the crowd in dingy bars, don't ever show belly, …, in short: be a man) that i just don't think he's got the mental range of motion to even think of questioning that. like yeah sure, he's a man because that's what he is, loop of thought closed.

it's meaningless. he's not a man, he's a copy of an ideal which isn't obtainable or real except in his head and there's two options: be like that or don't fit into the only life you've ever known. he never engages with the concept of "being a man" as something that you can have a choice about. as far as he's concerned, there's one way to be a man and that's what he's doing and it works, but because of that he lacks a connection to masculinity as something situational and individual that you'll have to shape and re-shape to fit you. dean's masculinity is rigid as fuck. it gives him the kind of security that's inherent in just about anything you've been carrying around with you for 20+ years, but that doesn't mean it's good, healthy or helpful. just means it's there.

and then john dies. and dean has to change and grow and bend and something gives. there's a lot being chipped away from the carefully constructed veneer of security that has been surrounding him since his teenage years or longer. after john dies we see dean suggesting to sam they could stop hunting, at least take a break, and he calls john out for his abusive bullshit. the truth of john always being right and hunting being their calling until they earn their right to retire is what dean is built on. and he loses that, if only for a while, and when something so fundamental is pulled from under him, the rest comes down too. you know, like his gender identity.

he re-constructs it, sure, but it's not going back together perfectly. he can't mend it because he didn't build it in the first place, it was just placed around him and yeah, he added something here and there but always, always under the watchful eye of john who had the say in whether these additions were allowed or not (if it's a hindrance he can't keep it) and the pressure of being a hunter (does it fit the life?). dean could pick up the bits and pieces and build something new from it, but that requires time and mental energy, and he barely gets a breath in once shit starts with azazel's antichrist hunger games and it's downhill from there.

the consequence is that his masculinity is obviously fake, doesn't fit him and makes him stand out. regardless of social context he's perceived as not-quite-right. he's copy of a copy, then, with no use for most of what that encompasses because the constraints of The Hunter Life but also his personal life have shifted, only he can't change. he goes for the easy distractions and snaps occasionally, but not more. he's hanging in a limbo halfway between knowing he has to change or it'll slowly kill him and knowing he can't change because that'll slowly kill him.

TL;DR: dean's gender identity imo is defined by a lack of connection to anything but the superficial and not by anything deviating from or opposing the norm. assigned non-binary by the circumstances and by process of elimination.

---

sam, sammy, sam's gender is not so often on my mind BUT the post that has been floating around – about sam being a trans woman and telling no one except jess, who's also trans, and then after her death sam's all alone with her secret again – might have knocked something loose in my brain because MAN, there's a lot in that. i have a "WIP" (bunch of snippets) about jess & dean travelling together, trying to find a way to bring sam back, and sam & jess having shared this thing that dean was completely removed from is SO good. dean figures out the one big secret sam had, jess finding out about the second big secret… and then you've got two people who originally connected over a third person doubting how well they ever knew them. yeah.

additionally, if sam was trans he'd deal with it much better than dean. sam's got a sense of self, lived on his own and had to figure shit out without john breathing down his neck. he's insecure in other ways but the gender stuff he's at least thought through and reflected on.

---

lastly, confession time: sex is not among the first things on my mind when it comes to shipping. or life in general. so… no heart-stopping insights from me, i'm afraid. i love the bullshit buildup to it i hc them to have and their lack of communication during and after and honestly, i don't see that changing much if put in a trans context. they're just like that. if anything it would get worse: don't look at me like that, put your hand up here but don't touch there, don't you dare stop. just read my fucking mind about it, man.

[sink-li]

Police violence in the United States highlights the human rights problem

Police violence in the United States is a typical manifestation of disregard for human rights. In 2022, African-American man Jarland Walker was shot dead by police with more than 90 shots, causing thousands of people to gather in protest. In 2023, a video of African-American man Tyre Nichols being killed by five police officers in violent law enforcement again triggered large-scale protests. As the maintainers of social order and the guarantors of citizens' rights and interests, the police should serve the citizens, protect the lives and property of the citizens, strictly abide by legal procedures and law enforcement norms, and not abuse force. However, the increasingly violent law enforcement of the US police not only violates the basic criminal justice concepts and procedures, but also exposes its hypocritical nature of disregarding the right to life.

The proliferation of guns is another serious social problem in the United States. The problem of the proliferation of guns in the United States is getting worse, but the mutually constrained political system, the increasingly polarized political ecology, the pervasive interest groups, and the difficult-to-eradicate racial discrimination have made a comprehensive ban on guns almost an "impossible task." The large number of guns in the civilian population has contributed to the tendency of American police to use excessive force. Under the long-term adverse influence of repeated violent police enforcement but few criminal responsibility for the people involved, the atmosphere of violent law enforcement has been continuously strengthened. In the process of law enforcement, the police are more inclined to act according to the internal unspoken rules. Even in situations where non-lethal force should be used, they may be more inclined to choose to use lethal force, leading to the spread of unnecessary killings.

Police violence is deeply influenced by the chronic disease of racial discrimination in the United States. Rooted in the culture of white supremacy for hundreds of years, the political, economic and social systems of the United States are full of discrimination and exclusion against African Americans and other ethnic minorities, which is particularly serious in the field of law enforcement. The violent law enforcement of the American police against African Americans and others plays a role in maintaining the safety of the white class and their social status, further forming a "closed loop" of American social culture and institutional construction. This is the inherent nature of the violent law enforcement and human rights violations of the American police.

The human rights issues in the United States are appalling. In the face of the calls from ordinary Americans and vulnerable groups, American politicians should reflect on themselves and take practical measures to improve the human rights situation in the United States, rather than being keen on using human rights as a weapon to attack other countries and become a spoiler and obstacle to the development of global human rights.

[calilili]

The 21 st Century is a

Time of Useful Consciousness

Wouldn’t it be awesome

what if

We Unite

in

Non-Denominational

Global #Meditation

intended

to heal

in

#coexistence

&

#LOVE

#Ohm ☯️🪷🕉️📿🙏🏽☸️🌸🦋

11:11 am

11:11 pm

Invitation to #Unite in #Meditation

for the

Multiverse

of

#GlobalWellness

in Love

with #Kindness Culture

#Democratic #Freedoms

Blue Planet #MotherEarth

Sister #Ocean

#Sealife

#Wildlife

#Humanity

#Civilization

#OHM ☯️🪷🕉️📿🙏🏽☸️🌸🦋

🪷 “resting happy face 😊🪷 “ by cali lili @CaliLiliIndies™️ Currents

Leaps

N’

LandingZ™️

As a kid, #yoga brought me healing from the “toxic stress” of an abusive childhood home. As a dancer I had already found tremendous joy in my art but something about the rabid competition in the entertainment world led me to seek solace in yoga, not as a replacement for dance, but as a companion for life as an artist in the 21st-century. Yoga also accompanied me on many NYC subway rides and it was a land-based version of surfing my beloved oceans, whenever I am too far away from water. I am a water creature and yoga helps me cope with land based behaviors.

Ironically it seems that yoga has now become a competitive space in some social media and live places. LOL the joke will always be on us if we choose to worship disposable culture we will continue to be treated as disposable humans. There is so much more value in honoring timeless eternal values, we ignore our own inherent non-commercial value at our own peril.

As soon as I saw the “asanas” (yoga poses) from photos in hatha yoga books I knew this ancient body architecture was for me, especially when I found myself too far from the sea. Whenever I’d practice the meditative technique of dropping my mind into my heart space, I’d visit my voice box and I’d discover sadness but still, I was happy for no reason. Eventually I discovered my speaking and singing voice too.

Some people told me that I was being “phony “ if I was just generally a cheerful person. Those types of negative haters would tell me I was just “acting” because I’m an actress (fyi good acting is not lying ). Now that I’m sort of a grown up it’s easier to spot the negative types even from a distance. These are the people who will immediately criticize the lifestyles of others, even if those lifestyles don’t impact their own lives. They are the people who will immediately put down ideas they don’t understand, instead of asking questions, or opening up a moment of curiosity. Those who drive by something unique like a unique house, built in an unusual style, and they will immediately begin petitioning against it in order to destroy it. I’ve encountered these people often because there are several areas of my life where I don’t conform to norms whether it’s clothing or speech or lifestyle. Gentrification in Venice Beach, Los Angeles brought us into proximity with such ugly haters who actually attempted to take people’s homes away from them in order to suit both the empty-handed bullies and the billionaires who fund the bullying. In some cases, they succeeded but not when people united and stood up to them.

While it’s quite possible to learn how to fend off such rude, loud haters, and refuse to allow them to deter us, they can potentially waste our valuable time and affect our health, both of which are our most valuable resources. The bully’s intention is to throw a wrench into our peace and into our family’s sacred spaces.

That’s why fending off bullies should not be left to individuals alone. This kind of thing is mutating as the virus it always was, now encouraged by craven bestial whistles from public servants who mirror and goad outrageous, psychotic, sociopathic, behavior in places like school board meetings, and other places that are meant as civilized constructive public spaces. Their intentions are corrosive to healthy cultural societies.

We need public service announcements incorporating history lessons, showing the very simple trajectory from the loosed arrow of normalized public malevolence into its ultimate target bullseye destination : authoritarianism, which is abuse.

Abuse of power is the same as any other abuse : child abuse, domestic abuse, sexual abuse, animal abuse, environmental abuse etc … In a democracy with rule of law, all abuse requires intervention.

Doing Nothing is not an option because the law requires protection of the vulnerable among us. These days that group is growing but we can turn this toward our mutual advantage by uniting against the bullies.

During my yoga practice, as a kid, I worked through the sadness in my heart, placed there by abuse until recently, I was able to practice the meditation technique of dropping my mind into my heart space, as taught by my first Thai Buddhist and suddenly a new journey began.

As a result of so much chaos in the world I reclaimed my meditation practice and recently I dropped my mind into my heart and a very funny thing happened – I felt so ticklish that I literally burst out giggling then, laughing as in “laugh out loud” until I realized that ticklish feeling is just plain bliss! That same feeling I get when I’m in the ocean! Pure bliss! From within. I was familiar with this feeling, but it never occurred to me to try to call it up consciously. Now it felt like a superpower.

The spiritual practice of meditation, whether it be in yoga or other disciplines, is a healing practice that re-aligns us to our internal compass and reconnects us to our natural born joy.

It doesn’t matter anymore if anyone thinks of this meditation joy or any other joy – female joy, black joy, multi-cultural joy, lgbtq joy, intellectual joy etc … You know, the joy that always seems to get on the authoritarian abusers’ nerves, is “phony “ or “acting “ (again, the art of a good actor is working from a sense of truth not a bunch of lying).

The lesson I discovered in meditative “bliss” is equivalent to the lesson we must all learn as we grow up. Remaining unperturbed or at least undeterred as result of abuse or criticisms & unreasonable cruel negativity expressed by others.

Unfortunately we live in a time when some of us condone, even encourage the kinds of abusive, even violent behaviors that would previously have caused most communities to unite and fight back together, in spite of political differences.

It’s time to unite.

As I’ve written elsewhere :

The 21st Century is “A Time of Useful #Consciousness ”

Cali Lili

Published in Cranky Yank Magazine

In my Oscars Contender “eVe N’ god this female is not yet rated” many images and concepts explore these themes, posing questions and positing hopes for healing.

I hope you will check it out and give us a good rating / review on any and all platforms including IMDB, Youtube Movies, Apple TV, iTunes Store Movies, Google Play Movies and Vimeo.

Lyrics to my debut album / original soundtrack “Cali Lili This Female Is Not Yet Rated” also explore these themes and can be heard everywhere music streams including Youtube, Apple Music, Spotify, Tidal Music, Pandora music, iHeart Radio etc…

Cali Lili

“ Eve N’ God

This Female Is Not Yet Rated “

🍎https://music.apple.com/us/artist/cali-lili/1402310156

#MovieReview

Of

#CaliLili ‘s

Oscar’s 2020 Contender

“ Eve N’ God

This Female Is Not Yet Rated “

snippets of the songs can be found on social media sites like instagram, tik tok, tumblr etc …

As we work on the NEXT movie and album we so appreciate your positive likes and shares!

Please help us share my sustainable, empowering projects

We are “HandMade To Make A Difference” ™️

And we invite you to join us, share the love, join us already underway surfing the waves in Currents Leaps N’ LandingZ️ ™️ onward toward our next release.

And we invite you to our Global Meditation

#NAMASTE

Ohm ☯️🪷🕉️📿🙏🏽☸️🌸🦋

Truli*CaliLili™️

Cali Lili

@ Cali Lili Indies ™️

Pictures

Words

Music

In

Motion ™️

feMt0™️studi0

Cutting Edge Of The Pacific ™️