#and the arguments for him being sexist are sexist themselves
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swiftiethatlovesf1 · 5 months ago
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What is this feeling?
Heyy guys, I hope you enjoy this Max one-shot let me know if you want p2. If you want to read more stories of mine here's my masterlist.
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In the world of Formula 1, Red Bull Racing had always been synonymous with innovation and dominance. The team’s latest bold move, however, had set the paddock abuzz—YN, the first woman in decades to race in F1, had been signed as Max Verstappen’s teammate. It was a decision that polarized fans and media alike. Max, a four-time World Champion, was less than thrilled.
“She’s untested at this level,” Max had muttered to Christian Horner during the preseason testing. “And she’s… peculiar.”
YN, on the other hand, had heard every sexist remark and skeptical murmur from the moment she stepped into the paddock. She’d grown a thick skin, but being partnered with Max Verstappen—arrogant, aloof, and undeniably brilliant—was a challenge she hadn’t entirely anticipated. From the moment they were introduced, sparks flew, and not the good kind.
“You missed the apex again,” Max’s voice crackled through the shared radio channel during practice.
YN gritted her teeth, gripping the steering wheel tightly as she took the next corner. “Thanks for the advice, Coach,” she snapped back, her tone dripping with sarcasm.
In the garage later, their tension spilled into the open.
“Maybe if you listened to me, you wouldn’t be three-tenths slower,” Max said, arms crossed and an infuriatingly smug look on his face.
“Maybe if you focused on your own setup instead of micromanaging mine, we’d both be faster,” YN shot back, glaring up at him. She wasn’t intimidated by his height, his trophies, or his reputation. Max was taken aback, momentarily at a loss for words, which only fueled her satisfaction.
Despite their mutual loathing, Christian and Helmut had made it abundantly clear—their success depended on cooperation. Red Bull’s dominance was fragile; they couldn’t afford this. And so, YN and Max found themselves paired for strategy meetings, team-building exercises, and post-race debriefs. The team’s insistence on unity only seemed to intensify their animosity.
Yet, there was something else—a charge in the air whenever they were near each other. It was an unspoken, almost forbidden undercurrent that neither wanted to acknowledge. Every argument crackled with more energy than it should have, and every accidental brush of hands or shoulders lingered just a moment too long.
During a heated argument after qualifying in Monaco, the tension boiled over.
“You can’t keep cutting me off during debriefs, Max,” YN said, her voice low but dangerous. They were standing in a narrow hallway outside the media center, their voices echoing faintly against the walls.
“Maybe if you made a valid point, I wouldn’t have to,” Max retorted, stepping closer.
“You’re such a… an asshole!” YN’s cheeks flushed with anger, her chest heaving as she met his gaze.
Max leaned in slightly, his blue eyes locked onto hers. “And you’re impossible to work with.” His voice was softer now, almost a whisper, but the intensity remained. The space between them felt electric, and for a fleeting second, YN’s breath caught in her throat. She hated how he could disarm her with just a look—hated how her heart betrayed her by skipping a beat.
“Good thing we’re not here to make friends,” she finally managed, stepping back and breaking the spell.
The tension wasn’t confined to the paddock. During a sponsor event in Austria, the two were forced to engage in a game of go-karting against a group of contest winners. Max, of course, took it as seriously as a Grand Prix, while YN approached it with her usual mix of competitiveness and charm.
“Ready to lose again?” Max teased as they lined up on the grid.
“To you? Never,” YN replied with a smirk.
The race was fierce, filled with playful jabs and a few borderline moves that had their team manager raising an eyebrow. By the end, YN managed to edge Max out by half a kart length. She jumped out of her kart, raising her fists triumphantly.
“Enjoy second place, champ!” she called, her laughter ringing out as Max approached her.
He stopped in front of her, shaking his head but unable to hide the small, begrudging smile tugging at his lips. “You’re insufferable.”
“And you’re overrated,” she shot back, but there was no venom in her voice this time. For a brief moment, their eyes met, and the world around them seemed to fade. Max’s smile faltered, replaced by something softer, more contemplative. YN quickly looked away, clearing her throat. “Anyway, I’ll be sure to remind everyone of this victory during the next press conference.”
“You wouldn’t dare,” Max said, his tone half-joking, half-serious.
She winked at him. “Watch me.”
As the season progressed, their animosity remained, but so did the unspoken tension. It was during a rain-soaked race in Spa that things shifted. YN had been leading when a sudden downpour caused her car to spin out. She managed to recover but dropped to fifth. After the race, drenched and frustrated, she found Max waiting for her in the garage.
“Tough luck out there,” he said, his usual smugness replaced by something almost empathetic.
“Thanks,” she muttered, surprised by his sincerity.
He hesitated before adding, “You drove well. Better than most would have in those conditions.”
She blinked up at him, caught off guard. “Is that… a compliment from Max Verstappen? Should I record this moment for posterity?”
He rolled his eyes but couldn’t hide the small smile that crept onto his face. “Don’t get used to it.”
By the time the season finale rolled around, their relationship had evolved. The arguments were still there, but so were the moments of camaraderie and even—dare they admit it—something resembling affection. After a grueling race in Abu Dhabi, where they secured a one-two finish for the team, they found themselves alone in the motorhome, celebrating with a quiet drink.
“Not bad for a peculiar rookie, huh?” YN said, raising her glass in a mock toast.
Max chuckled, clinking his glass against hers. “Not bad at all.”
The silence that followed was comfortable, a rarity between them. Max studied her for a moment before speaking. “You know, you’ve proven a lot of people wrong this year.”
“Including you?” she asked, her tone light but her eyes searching his face.
“Especially me,” he admitted, his voice barely above a whisper. The weight of his words hung between them, heavy with meaning.
YN’s heart raced, and for once, she didn’t try to hide it. “Maybe you’re not so bad either,” she said softly.
The corners of Max’s mouth twitched upward, and for the first time, there was no animosity in his eyes—only warmth.
Perhaps, YN thought, loathing could evolve into something far more complicated, and far more exhilarating.
Part 2
@justaf1girl
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cindersnows · 4 months ago
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the problem with mitsi (or as i like to call it. mitsogyny)
(context: this was written under a youtube video, which i'm sure most of us have at least seen pop up in our recommendeds, in response to many people taking criticism against the new episode. it has been edited a little to be more cohesive as a somewhat-essay)
ok, i wanted to write out a rant/essay/ramble/whatever sort of summarising the criticism against mitsi's plotline because a lot of the people here seem to be misunderstanding the fundamental issue that people have with it, including some of those people themselves.
first off, an analysis that i think tell both sides of the argument very well which i feel should be read before reading the essay: Mitsi: What Makes A Fridged Character (and why y'all are wrong about it) | an AvA essay by InksandPensblog. i will note: i don't care to discuss whether mitsi was fridged or not and that won't be of much importance in this post. the above link gives some insight into some of the fandom's criticism of mitsi and how she was "fridged", defining common tropes for examples. that's what's relevant to this post.
the main issue with mitsi, in my opinion, is less with the fact that mitsi's a girl and moreso the fact that she's one of the only female-coded character in the series, and that her character's main purpose was to further victim's own development. the other arguably female-coded character in the series is pink, who (like navy) only really exists to explain purple's motivations. i don't have much of an issue with that since they're not meant to be important or sympathised with at all. that's not their job in the story.
with mitsi, i've seen people point out that she has more character to her than just victim's love interest and supporter: she invents rocketcorp, she's smart, she's kind, innocent and helpful. narratively speaking, she shows other creations' relationships with their animators, parallels her innocence with victim's trauma, and introduces victim to the outernet (as most fans call the stick realm).
but most of this things imo are either stretches or invalid arguments. she's not really a 2/3-dimensional character in any way; her main character traits boil down to the fact that she likes to be in service of others with no nuance behind why she likes helping people. she hypes up victim for the villagers, she starts a company with him to share his talents with the world, and she helps him overcome his trauma from alan's torture. all of her main plot beats center around victim: and while technically the sticks are genderless and free to be interpreted however the viewer wants, alan and most of his team see all the main characters as male, and that subconciously affects how they're written. mitsi, the first major female-coded character, spends most of her storyline in service of victim, a character not written as female.
there's also the issue of her being victim's canonical love interest. i feel like this statement from alan is important to keep in mind (don't mind the sound effects and edits, this is the only isolated clip i can find at the moment). in particular:
"i just assume that [the ava/m characters] are just a bunch of bros]. i haven't thought of adding any female stick figures but i think it'd be good. i don't want to introduce any romance though, i don't want that to be a theme."
he seems to have changed his mind on that last part, which is fine, but the notable part for me is that he seems to associate female characters with romance from the getgo. before anyone misinterprets this, i'm not trying to call alan sexist or anything. but there's a common issue with women in stories being reduced to just a romantic partner for the male lead, and mitsi falls under this, with her entire character existing to serve victim. (not to mention people will make things about romance whether you like it or not. that's just basic fandom. search up grapeduo or chodark.) even her death is to put victim on the path of vengeance--- it doesn't need to happen to show the extent of tco and tdl's destruction, because that's already made pretty clear in ava s2 the flashback and the earlier scenes showing various characters escaping burning buildings. when you write a female-coded character whose only purpose is to serve a male character, you're contributing to sexist narratives.
a counter i see many people point out with the idea that she has no character is that she does have character traits, it's just that they're generic ones like "kind" and "innocent". the issue is that she has no flaws to counterpoint this; it's not that she didn't have enough screentime. in ava4 for example, we see tsc's flaws pretty clearly; they can be very mean when they want to, they're petty (albeit for a fair reason), they're a little impulsive. this is shown in 11 minutes (from the moment they come alive to the end of the video).
with mitsi meanwhile… she doesn't seem to have any flaws? she helps victim whenever she can. she's nice to all the villagers. her customers all like her and she's a great leader at rocket corp (to note, specifically as part of a pair with victim. they're a power couple, she's barely given credit for her work alone). she has 13 minutes of screentime, or 10 if you count from her waking up in the outernet. there's plenty of opportunities to show her having flaws; maybe she acts a little selfish during tdl and tco's attack, only wanting to help herself and agent smith, or maybe she overworks herself, or feels awkward at having too much attention (and that could also be why she redirects so much attention to victim, she's shy). you could argue that the episode needs to develop victim and agent smith too, but ava4 shows that's easy to do too: just a few seconds dedicated to showing rgyb fighting over who leaves first shows that they can be selfish and childish. it's very easy to insert a moment like that for mitsi.
it's a little disappointing when the first major female-coded character in ava is completely flawless, with no personality outside of being nice and helpful for others.
also, slightly unrelated, check out this quote from mitsi's plushie website: "her white featureless face seems to ooze mystery and feminine power all at the same time." her main character trait, as a woman, is being feminine. it's irritating as someone who's been raised a woman to see her reduced to just her gender. she feels more plastic than a person, like the concept of what a woman should be (perfect, kind, useful) and not an actual character/person.
i would expect more from the writing in the series seeing as it's not just an independent passion project anymore, and has multiple writers that all could've worked to flesh out mitsi, or at least get a sensitivity reader of sorts to point these issues out. it's extremely disappointing and i can understand why people were upset.
tldr: the problem isn't just that mitsi's a girl, or that she's nice or dating victim, it's that she's written in a misogynistic way.
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tacitusk1llwhore · 4 months ago
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Don’t cancel me for this, y’all, but I’ve seen a lot of politically charged posts about RDR (as I should; games about outlaws and the corruption of big and small government are and always will be inherently political), but one thing has really bothered and stuck out to me the most, especially in male-dominated spaces in the fandom. The idea that the Arthur Morgan in this day and age would be a raging MAGA conservative—I’ve gotten so, so many posts about it on my TikTok today, and this is finally me snapping. Here are a few arguments I’ve heard for this. “When he hears that the Democrats want to take his guns, he’d say hell no to that.” “He’s from 1899; you really think he would vote for a Black woman?” And my personal favorite: “Arthur says in-game he doesn’t engage in politics.” I’m not going to go through each of these and explain, in detail with evidence from the games themselves, why I think these are the dumbest takes I’ve ever heard in my life. In a space I hope is more open to this discussion, I hope you’ll join me.
1.) The gun control issue. I know, I know, this one seems pretty obvious; I mean, he’s a red-blooded American man and cowboy. How could anyone possibly think for a second he’d be for the party of gun control?? While this is true, you know what’s also true? The fact that he lost a child to gun violence. Now, of course we don't know exactly how Isaac and Eliza were killed, but judging from the time and efficiency, we can assume they were shot. Now let’s get away from assumptions. Arthur mourned the loss of his son, felt the agonizing, intense pain of losing a child, and said that it changed him forever, hardened his heart. Do we really for a second think that Arthur would listen to the story of Sandy Hook, Parkland, Uvalde, and countless others and say, “No, guns are more important.”? Absolutely fucking not. Not only has Arthur felt that loss, that pain, but he is deeply empathetic; hearing the testimonials of children in these buildings, families that lost their babies, would be more than enough for him to understand and push for common sense gun laws. The erasure of Arthur Morgan's trauma of losing his son and the erasure of his empathy for children and families is rampant in political spaces of the fandom; to simply assume that because Arthur is an outlaw, in modern times he would be this “don’t tread on me.” “Cares more about guns than kids” kind of guy is asinine to me. Even if he hadn’t felt that loss and that pain, there are multiple times in the game where he is given a deeper understanding of things he has never experienced; he becomes angry at that pain inflicted, takes the mission with Charles and the Bison, and hears about the vaccines being diverted from the reservations, and the Black doctor (I think he’s a doctor) you meet in Rhodes. Once he heard these stories, these testimonials, or saw the pain, the hardship, he was quick to step in and do something to make a change. He would not value weapons over the lives of people, as we can see from the game.
2.) This one is always fun to see because it assumes that Arthur is inherently racist. Now, I’m going to state one of my least favorite but still valid arguments: he has minority friends. This is very true; look at Charles, Lenny, Javier, and Tilly. Here is why it’s one of my least favorite arguments: you can have minority friends and still be racist, sexist, homophobic… Having friends doesn’t make you antiracist, so what makes Arthur antiracist? One camp interaction stands out to me the most in regards to this, the one with Tilly when they first move south. Tilly comes to Arthur in specific to talk about how nervous she is being so far south; she understands that the south is a dangerous place for dark-skinned people, especially the location they’re in. Arthur, while he tries to soothe her, pointlessly at first, claiming that it's a good place to run from the law, also understands this, almost immediately changing his tone and telling Tilly not once but twice that e personally will keep her safe, that she has his word that he personally will keep her safe; a man that has hate in his heart for POC would not do that, ever. Another interaction is one with Lenny, where Lenny points out that Arthur wouldn’t notice the difference in the more southern states because the worst they’ll do to him publicly is say that he is friends with POC (less soft than that, watch the clips of it on YouTube if you want the full dialogue), whereas for Lenny the worst that can happen to him publicly is a lynching (which he states all the way back in chapter one where he almost was lynched). Arthur is not ignorant of racism; he knows that it exists—I hate the whole “Arthur doesn’t know about racism.” Because he does, and saying he doesn’t is an insult to his intelligence and awareness of the world around him. He knows racism exists; he personally just cannot fathom it; he cannot picture himself perpetuating racism (again, see the scene in Rhodes with the Black man), which is where I think that confusion that people say he doesn’t understand it comes from—he isn’t confused by racism; he’s confused why that man assumes he’s racist, because in his head he simply can’t fathom being bigoted.
This one has two parts, so bear with me. This also assumes that Arthur is sexist; the argument I see for this is the one-off comment he makes to the working girl at the saloon, "I didn't know I was talkin' to a lady." Was this an ok statement? No. Does it make him a raging sexist? Also no. Let's look at his relationship with Sadie; he does not underestimate her because she's a woman; he trusts in her and her abilities with unwavering confidence, so much so that he entrusts the safety of John, Abigail, and Jack to her. Now let's look at the camp interactions, one of which Arthur states that he sees no difference between men and women (bi king) and that most are bad, but some are worth loving. A man who is a raging sexist would never say something like this; he would never equate men and women, but Arthur does see them as equals. I see a lot of people point out that Arthur is far more protective of the camp girls than most, but this isn't because he sees them as less than him; he just understands that a lot of them lack the ability to fully protect themselves (Love you, Tilly and Mary-Beth). He isn't quite as protective of the women that he knows with confdence can and will protect themselves with confidence, but even then he will stick up for them if needed. Arthur Morgan is a protector of women, which is so incredibly important today and back then.
3.) Here’s my favorite. Arthur doesn’t engage in politics. Looking at this in terms of the game, he absolutely does engage in politics; he has opinions on rights and the government; that is, in fact, political—he doesn’t vote, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t make political statements or isn’t even unintentionally political. Now let’s look at this in the frame of today. Being non-political in 1899 and being non-political in 2025 are two wildly different things; politics has changed drastically in the last almost decade where thngs have circled back around to be voting for or against human rights, and from my evidence above, Arthur would be voting for those rights. In modern times it is almost impossible to be nonpolitical; I dare say it's impossible. Everything now has politics attached to it; that argument is their gotcha moment because they don't understand that, which is why they make the argument in the first place.
So, why does this matter? Arthur is a pixel outlaw in a fictional setting of 1899 America. I guess in the grand scheme of life it really doesn’t, but in fandom culture it absolutely does. Many people, including myself, come to fandom spaces to escape, to cope with things from their past or events of the day, to chat about characters, and to share theories and art, and so on. Imagine someone who lost a child, sibling, or friend to gun violence logging on for their daily dose of distraction only to see someone making points as to why a character who is comforting to so many people wouldn’t care about the death of their lost loved one, just guns. A POC or member of the LGBTQ community doing the same and seeing arguments as to why Arthur is homophobic or racist. Seeing something like that is in fact harmful; taking things and stretching them to fit your narrative despite the actual source material pointing in the opposite direction requires erasure and explaining your own personal biases publicly. Someone stating that Arthur is a racist is just them stating that they themselves are a racist or that they themselves care more about guns than lives—as we’ve seen, the public stating of controversial things or overall morally reprehensible ideals when gone unchecked spirals and spreads, and soon we have a space of people who will openly state bigoted things and push the people in the fandom here for reasons of a shared enjoyment for whatever reason or the people who use things to cope or as a distraction out of the space, effectively ruining it and potentially the outlook on the content of the game. Fandom spaces shouldn’t tolerate bigotry, and lots of Red Dead fans have been expressing bigotry lately, and these people have started to go completely unchecked. It bothers me; it always will, even if it is just a silly cowboy game.
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lemotmo · 14 days ago
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This person did not help the counter argument 🤣
Q. I do think it's super insulting for the media and many fans to basically say well we can all pretty much see where this train is heading and if you have a problem with it then you're sexist and homophobic. No. They're written as best friends, strong bonded, life long best friends, but only friends nonetheless. Oliver and Ryan skewing the acting towards the narrative they think the show should take is not the same thing as writing them with romantic undertones. I need people to be so serious right now because you all look ridiculous. They could both have other relationships if the actors stopped sabotaging their other relationships. Lou tried, he tried hard, but he got zero help from Oliver. Fox clearly wanted Taylor to be Buck's endgame, but once again they got zero help from Oliver. Ryan didn't even bother trying with anyone not named Devin so what did they expect to happen?! They could have chemistry with other people if they would allow themselves to put even half the effort into their other onscreen relationships as they do with the Buck and Eddie thing.
A. Listen, and this is me being so serious right now, your argument is non-existent. People are saying it's sexist or homophobic or biphobic or bigoted because it is. There is not a single valid argument that exists within the narrative of the Buck and Eddie storyline that supports the weakness of 'they've only ever been written as friends'. That's a non-existent, non supported by the facts argument. Chimney and Hen have only ever been written as friends. Chimney and Eddie. Chimney and Buck. Only ever written as friends. And no one ever confuses those relationships as anything else. The problem with your argument, anon is that it's disingenuous. You're not mad that they're written and acted with romantic undertones. You're mad that Oliver and Ryan just allowed their natural chemistry to be what it is without forcing 'bro code behavior' on it to make it more heteronormative. That's what really bothers you all. Just own that. If you truly believe you're valid in that belief then own it. Say it out loud. Their relationship makes you uncomfortable because you don't understand how two men, who have not publicly identified themselves as not straight, could be so comfortable being open, vulnerable, playful, and flirty with another man because you yourself would not be comfortable doing those same things with a member of the same sex. That's why people call your argument bullshit because it is.
We don't know how long Buddie was in the works before FOX ultimately stepped in and stopped it. We have no idea how long they were building towards that initial get together. So a lot of the acting choices from seasons 3 and 4 could, and in fact probably are, most likely tied to that initial relationship build up. Everyone loved that Jennifer came in and immediately declared that Maddie should be with Chimney. Jennifer and Kenny get a voice. Everyone loved it. Everyone loves that Angela and Peter get a say with what happens between Bobby and Athena. Aisha and Tracie get the same treatment with Hen and Karen. Everyone loves how they all get a voice. Why should Ryan and Oliver not get an equal voice in their onscreen endgame? Why do you believe they should have to play by a different set of rules than the rest of their cast mates? None of you all can answer that question. That's why your argument gets dismissed. It's not coming from a valid place to begin with. Lou did not try to sell the ship because he had a deep love for the ship, don't even try to make that statement. He tried to sell it because he liked the attention it brought him. Period. Any chance he got he made sure to emphasize his straightness, and he was clearly uncomfortable filming anything remotely intimate in nature. So that argument is also disingenuous.
Chemistry is tricky. It either exists or it doesn't. It's hard to fake. Yes, both Oliver and Ryan have far better chemistry with each other than they ever had with any other onscreen love interests. But they did have chemistry with a few. Oliver and Meagan had great chemistry when Taylor first showed up, it absolutely fizzled out before the end but they initially had lovely chemistry. Oliver and the actress who played Ali had nice chemistry. He even had cute chemistry with Connie in season one. He had no chemistry with Lou, no matter how hard you all try to declare otherwise. They were clearly uncomfortable with one another. Ryan had great chemistry with Devin (Shannon). He played the Ana stuff perfectly because she was supposed to lead to his initial gay awakening. He had no chemistry with Edy, their first few scenes, much like Oliver and Lou, were nice but once they paired them together it didn't work. That's okay. It doesn't mean Oliver and Ryan sabotaged anything. Do I think there's a genuine conversation to be had about how long Oliver and Ryan have been playing it a certain way, sure. But there's nothing wrong with playing up the chemistry. Their chemistry naturally exists. They don't have to put effort into it. It's the same when they do interviews. It's just what exists between the two of them and that's the real problem you all have with it. Instead of bro'ing down and over correcting, they allow it to be what it naturally is. And that makes you uncomfortable. Well that's a you problem. I would argue that Peter and Kenny have a similar kind of chemistry for that matter.
Thank you Nonny!
Well, what an utterly nonsensical question was that? Garbage filled with terrible ideas and opinions from beginning to end.
You cannot just 'force' to have chemistry with someone. Natural chemisty is one of the greatest things two actors can have. It's either there or it isn't. All the great 'will they won't they' ships had great chemistry. Some of them weren't even supposed to end up together, but the chemistry was so good they decided to change the writing for the characters and put them together.
I honestly don't think Buck and Eddie were ever planned to end up together, but because Ryan and Oliver had such great on screen chemistry the writers recognised 'lightning in a bottle' and went with it until FOX told them to stop.
Anyway, I agree with Ali.
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chaoticbiguysblog · 9 months ago
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I feel like initially most people were on the same page about Tommy Kinnard, they were like ok let's see where it goes and we got Bi Buck!! Like, in April, I was on top of the world bc of Bi Buck, and I was so excited for him and eager to see where it goes, even the ones who didn't want him for Buck from the start were indifferent to him.
But I feel like the divide and the ship wars intensified was when people started using the "healthy male friendship" and "why can't two men just be friends" argument against Buddie, we have hundreds, if not thousands of those in pop culture and homophobes often use this argument against lgbt rep, so to see a group, some if not most of which are queer themselves use the same argument is off putting.
Then, whether you're his fan or a hater, you gotta agree that Tommy's character is a blank slate, he's not been given much to do, besides a few moments, and a significant part of that is him being racist and sexist to two fan favourite characters: Chim and Hen respectively (similarly people disliked Taylor for what she did to Bobby, the redemption and forgiveness before she started dating Buck was implied but it's not enough). Other than that he doesn't have a lot of qualities. And what happens is fans project a lot of things on him. What made me abandon the Tevan ship was people "stealing" Eddie's character traits and projecting it onto Tommy, while labelling him a terrible mentally insane father who uses Buck for his own gain, yada yada yada. And I love Buck and Eddie equally, so to me that was irritating.
Also, since he doesn't have many character traits, his lines, which are intended as sassy can come off as him being a dismissive and condescending dick.
Then for the off screen side of things, we were constantly told Buck is straight, by the actors and the showrunner but everyone was like eh whatever, and then our headcannons were proven right, but suddenly theorising about Eddie and that a lot of queer people including myself identify with him is looked down on if not straight up mocked, and that the canon storylines are the only ones that matter have made the fandom a bit toxic.
Buddies are often accused of blindly hating on Tommy, that he's hated only bc he's not the guy we wanted Buck to kiss, so I feel like I should lay it out as to why a lot of us went from being indifferent or open to the guy to straight up hating him.
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tumblingxelian · 4 months ago
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There's this ridiculous narrative that going on in both RWBY subreddit: fans and critics alike are saying that Yang's memory is flawed (or even that she was lying) when she said that she basically had to raise Ruby herself when Tai shut down after Summer died. Their main argument is "Yang was 5! She couldn't even take care of herself, much less a toddler!"
Several works of fiction have five-year-olds whose parents are neglectful, emotionally defeated, or even abusive taking care of themselves just fine, like Matilda (Matilda Wormwood), Persona 4 (Nanako Dojima), and Kotaro Lives Alone (Kotaro Satou). Why are they willing to give them a pass for doing that, while saying that it's impossible in RWBY?
Yang's conversation with Tai before her sparring match in V4 doesn't work if this was the case.
I'm actually insulted by this argument because the mother of my oldest cousin was a complete and utter bitch who divorced my uncle, and cheated him out of as many supervised visits as she could by working overtime whenever she could. Combined with the fact that she worked an 8 to 8 job, my cousin had to teach herself how to cook, do laundry, change her bedsheets, and get herself ready for school since neither my uncle nor her mother were heavily involved in her life, kind of like Matilda, Nanako, and Kotaro. Gee, it's almost like fiction is at least somewhat based on reality. What a concept!
Sorry if I got a little rambly, but my cousin's experience and my own experience as an older brother cause this argument to REALLY make me angry.
I've had endless debates across Reddit, YouTube, Tumblr and forums alike with people who hold that exact stance and it is never not utterly asinine.
Even if we ignore the factual reality that lots of children, even very young one's often end up parentified and left grappling with adult responsibilities as a small child.
Which I need to stress we should not ignore and the fact these people do shows just how willfully ignorant they are being.
The fact of the matter is it makes no narrative, character or thematic sense for her to be wrong about this!
Like, really, what is the narrative end goal in these people's brains, to have one of the main characters most overtly emphasized sources of trauma. Not only brought up by herself but by the sister she had to raise. Be wrong?
It makes every scene discussing it, every aspect of her character it informs, every bit if dialogue that touched on it utterly meaningless. CRWBY don't have that kind of time to waste on a red herring that serves literally Zero purpose!
But of course these people don't give two fried fucks about things like basic common sense or competent writing.
They want Yang to be delusional or lying because in their mind the fact she 'dared' be traumatized, 'dared' to be something other than a ditsy party girl and 'dared' be even indirectly critical of a man, of her father, is an insult to them.
Thus they want to ignore what's on screen, what the writers say, what the characters say, what reality says about situations exactly like this to erase her trauma and depth, All our a blend of sexist offence and misogynistic defensiveness of a minor male character.
It sucks but then, since wen hasn't RWDE been awful?
On your example:
Extremely well said, very good examples, I would also add Gohan from Dragon Ball surviving in the wilderness for a full year at the age of 3/4/5 depending on translations.
There's so many conversations tat make no coherent sense if Yang was wrong, but as said, these people don't care about good writing.
My sympathies and respect to your cousin and exactly, reality is often stranger than fiction and frankly this fictional scenario isn't even that strange sadly :/
I am right there with you for my own reasons, it sucks!
Literally the only area in which one can reasonably argue that Yang might be somewhat misinformed I thin is in relation to what exactly was going on in Ruby's head at the time.
IE, believing she didn't understand what was going on yet. That doesn't actually undercut any of her own experiences, but could be the case as it seems Ruby's memories of those early days are perhaps clearer tan Yang realizes.
Of course this changes nothing about Yang being parentified from an incredibly young age, because Ruby herself outright said Yang raised her.
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zvtara-was-never-canon · 3 months ago
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What do you think about the claim that Zuko respects Katara more than Aang does?
"The guy that thought she should die because of her race respected her more than the best friend that had been supporting her in every way from day one" I dunno, sounds like bullshit to me.
Again, I have a lot of Hero X Villains ships, and that's a CLASSIC argument that is rarely ever true. It's just fans being defensive of their ship because OBVIOUSLY the villain will, at some point, do something genuinely horrible to the main character, while the "good" love interest usually won't go that far, and just has bad moments like a normal human being.
They know it looks bad, but instead of embracing it as just part of the trope and the contrast that is supposed to happen as the characters grow closer and thus the villain becomes less evil, they try to act like the villain never did anything bad to the main character in the first place, while the "good" love interest was the devil.
You rarely find a case of a love triangle (be it a real one or fanon one) with a character picking between the good guy and bad guy in which the dynamics are genuinely like the fandom describes them. 90% of it is just fanfic being treated as fact - hence zutarians acting like Zuko is the first male to ever do a feminism because he "doesn't refuse to fight Katara despite her being a girl", even though he's fighting her for the explicit purpose of letting his nation continue to oppress/kill her people, while Aang is TOTALLY a sexist pig that made Katara his maid, even though he was the one literally cheering for Katara when she threw hands with a misogynist that tried to tell her what she could or could not do based on her gender.
Another classic cope from fans of that kind of ship: acting like "support and respect" means "encourage them to do ANYTHING they want, even things that will hurt themselves and others", hence zutarians acting like Zuko "gets the real Katara" for encouraging her to kill Yon Rha (because he wants a cheat-code to make her forgive him) and Aang is the bad guy that "can't handle her thinking for herself" when in reality Aang was objecting to it because he's the one that actually knows Katara and understood that she'd regret killing someone, even a horrible person, while Zuko didn't realize it both because Katara is still mostly a stranger to him at that point, and because he grew up in a place that normalized, glorified and rewarded violence.
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blossomthepinkbunny · 1 year ago
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Talking about Adam and the villians of HB
Adam is such a dissapointing villain for Hazbin Hotel that absolutely doesn't make use of the great opportunities they had for the bad guy of this project. Like, what is Adam? A sexual, irrational, rockstar asshole who kills demons for fun and is shown to be completely idiotic and unable to make any good point for his actions. And that sucks.
Atleast to me, them making Adam an irredeemable asshole type just seems like the show acknowledging that they can't take any actual feedback on Charlies idea. He is a strawman who never really gets to be anything else until his final moments, when they want you to care about his fight. The show doesn't want you to actually think critical about what Charlie has planned it just wants you to think she is right, by making you hate Adam, by making his side actively carry out genocide. The fact that a show all about revealing that people have layers and presenting seemingly morally grey areas in them has a villian who is completely one note and just evil and irrational because the show needs him to be is not great.
There are actual things that can be criticized about the Hotel and the idea of redeeming sinners, but Adam can't call any of these out because then Charlie would have to defend herself, which she can't do and then you would realize that the writers couldn't think of arguments for why she is right. And then Charlie would come off as not as great as they want you to think she is.
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What if he had called out the fact that genuinely no demon seems to give a shit about being a better person. We don't get a definitive time for how long Charlie has been working on the Hotel but we can assume that it has been atleast a little longer. We see her advertise her idea on the news in the pilot and the Hotel makes an advertisement in the first episode, so we know that it's pretty open information that a place where demons can redeem themselves exist. Yet in the entirety of the pilot, season one and however much time lays between the two, only two sinners came to the hotel to change (im not counting staff members because they are there to work, not to be redeemed).
Angel Dust and Sir Pentious are the only ones who came to stay, which either means that just no other sinner cares to be better or that Charlie is not taken seriously and that her hotel is viewed as stupid in concept alone. And you have to remember that even these two didn't initially join because they genuinely wanted to change.
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Angel just decided to stay because it was a cheap place to live where he wouldn't have to see Val. And while Pentious does decide he wants to be better, we don't know if he would have even done that, had it not been for the agreement he made with Vox (which made him come to the hotel with bad intentions in the first place).
Why doesn't Adam get to point out that sending Sinners to heaven might be a bad idea when there are probably people that they hurt or may have even killed up there. Like, Angel Dust was in the Mafia and you can assume that he has quite the killcount and it's very possible that some of his victims are in heaven. That goes for every other demon too, they're down there for a reason. And while sometimes that reason might be something stupid or irrelevant, just giving every demon the benefit of the doubt and a chance to get to heaven (in theory) seems pretty irresponsible.
That is also completely ignoring the fact that Charlie's method has no proof of even working. Seemingly in the entirety of hell existing no sinner has ever redeemed themselves and went to heaven until Sir Pentious, which was mostly an accident as well.
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I'm not saying Adam had to be likeable or relatable, but it's pretty obvious that they made him so hateable just because. He can't just be an obnoxious, sexist asshole because that's not blatantly evil enough apparently. He also has to commit genocide for no reason other than that he enjoys it. Again, im not saying his genocide should be excusable, but he should have a reason that isn't presented as him just doing it for fun because hes a jackass (he should have a reason that would make what he is doing okay in his own eyes where the viewer could understand how he views the world without having to agree necessarily).
Writing evil characters who are purely bad because they just are can work. But in my opinion that shouldn't be the main villian, especially not in a show where the central idea is supposed to be discussing morality and moral greyness.
Cioccolata from Jjba is a villian where this works in my opinion. He is just evil and Araki really plays that up. He isn't just a crazy doctor type who violently experiments on people for fun, his backstory also shows that he has been doing this since he was 14 and started with driving elders to suicide. And also he films everything he does because he just likes watching people suffer. Cioccolata really is just irredeemably crazy and sadistic but it works for him because he is just a side antagonist and therefore doesn't have the burden of playing as a direct counter to our main protagonist and because for all his immoral actions he still has philosophy behind that. A fucked up philosophy but an understandable (not excusable) one nonetheless. He explaines that in his eyes people can only experience true happiness from two situations. Either when your own despair is replaced with hope, or when one watches other people fall into despair themselves. In his eyes, the more people he watches die, the more he understands the human race and the stronger he gets, which leads into another aspect of his philosophy, which is that the strong have have the right and responsibility to rule over the weak. That is why I think he works.
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We actually get some insight into Adams deeper character motivation in his last moments. When he gets upset that the demons aren't just falling at his feet, worshipping him, even though he is the original man all life came from. And that would be a good idea to expand on, that Adam has this intense sense of entitlement that leads him to despise the demons because he doesn't have power over them, when he feels like he should. And because a crowd of people that don't worship him, feels threatening to him, he would want them gone as to not possibly risk his position of power with their ideas.
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That could be the reason for why he despises Charlie, because she is a demon who makes her own plans to save her people, which would mean they could start to follow her and work with her, rather than idolizing him. Something like that would work so well for his character and would fit this saviour attitude that some religious people have when "helping" atheists by recommending that they should be religious to make all their problems dissapear or something (no shade to people who genuinely find peace and safety in their religion I think that's actually great but it's not a solution for everybody). The last moments he has give great insight into what his character could've been, had they focused on this, rather than always just having him say how much he enjoys killing demons for no reason.
And in the song he has he also nearly approaches giving another possible reason for his actions (that being that he just doesn't care because demons already had their chance to be good, didn't choose that and now don't deserve a second chance), but that is also never expanded on and is pretty much ignored throughout the season.
Also I find it interesting that Adam has to be completely and irredeemably evil, hated by everyone, while Lucifer gets away with just letting the people he is supposed to rule die like it's nothing. Lucifer didn't to anything to stop the exterminations, he didn't contact his daughter in quite some time and actively mocks her idea when first meeting her after these months of not giving a shit for her or what she does (her idea that is supposed to save his people from literal death btw).
We see him easily finish Adam off in the finale which begs the question for why he just never cared to do anything before. But it's fine because he's just so silly and goofy and actually cares a lot for Charlie say's the show. That is why he gets to be redeemed in the same episode he appeared in for the first time and no one is allowed to question him because then you're just not nice and understanding.
Lucifer didn't have to like sinners. I think his approach of basically leaving the sinners to their own devices is pretty interesting. But HH wants you to hate Adam and like Lucifer without acknowledging that people who just watch bad stuff being done without doing anything about it are also shitty. And for Lucifer it seems extra shitty because we see he can literally just defeat Adam and he just didn't do anything for this whole time.
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Helluva Boss has this problem too where it picks characters it wants you to like and if you don't like them then you're just wrong. And therefore no villian gets to call these characters out without being shown to be either stupid, irrational or mean.
Striker was genuinely interesting and cool when he first appeared. He was an antagonist who had understandable goals that tied in well with the trajectory of the story. The classism in hell's society is a pretty relevant theme for HB. We see that Blitzø has to sleep with Stolas to be able to even do his job and earn a living, we see Imps just being tossed around and abused and hear Stolas say stuff like "impish little plaything" to Blitzø. Striker wanting to take the demons of high rank down to make hell better for the Imps by ending classism made sense and was an interesting take to see. Especially since at that point the show didn't insist on Stolas being this misunderstood good guy who just cares soo much for Blitzø, there was a sense of suspense maybe to watch wether or not Blitzø will go along with Striker or if this interaction might influence how he views his clearly predatory "relationship" with Stolas.
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But all of that got thrown out the window because in s2 we just can't have people criticise Stolas, since actually acknowledging the fact that he benefited and actively made use of hells classist system would mean that we wouldn't see him as a poor confused bean anymore and that one might actually think of some of the pretty bad implications the Stolitz relationship has. So now Striker is a completely obvious, self obsessed bad guy who loves himself so much that he monologues about how great he feels when torturing Stolas instead of just killing him while they also gave him a weird gimmick where he doesn't like it when someone makes a sexual remark and gets so upset that he drags out Stolas' killing and gets defeated by Millie and Moxxie because of it (the same guy was established as a great assassin in another episode).
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They also removed all the backbone to his ideology. He still talks about Stolas diminishing Imps in "Western Engery" but it lacks any point because they have gone so far with woobifying Stolas that he is presented as sympathetic and Striker as bigoted. Striker also acts like he can't kill Stolas because Stella called off the assassination on him. I get him being upset that he won't get his money for the kill but he still has very clear reasons for why he would want Stolas dead regardless (atleast he had when he was still a cool character). It's not like suddenly not being hired anymore would make a big change for him.
Killing Stolas could have consequences because Stolas is royalty, but these consequences always existed for him even while Stella was requesting the assassination. Stella would obviously not want others to know that she is reponsible for Stolas dying (then again we don't know if that would even matter since demons generally don't care about killing others until it's plot relevant) and the point of an assassin is that people are killed in a way that can't be tracked back to someone, so Striker should also not face issues, especially since he is apparently a really good and threatening assassin.
Striker was interesting until the show decided it liked Stolas too much for people to call him out and be presented as reasonable. Stella was turned into just an abusive, whiny and stupid bitch who just hates Stolas and wants his money instead of acknowledging that she pretty much has the same backstory as Stolas, who we are constantly told to feel bad for because of his childhood (arranged marriage, forced to have a child and a set-up relationship neither of them wanted).
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Verosika is really not relevant but usually also falls into the "bitchy and just rude" category because she doesn't like Blitzø (it's not as bad for her as it is with Stella but still). Asmodeus and Fizzarolli where really mean and exposed and embarrassed Stolas and Blitzø publicly. But the next time we see Asmodeus interact with Stolas he is just chill with him? Why? Blitzøs and Fizzarollis relationship was atleast handled in a way and we see him act rude towards Blitzø until they make up. But it still followes the theme of people who dislike Stolas and Blitzø either changing their mind or just being shown to be horrible to make their opinion seem invalid (also notice how these male characters in the story get to be forgiven for how they acted and show different sides to their character while the women are reduced to being bitchy).
Barbie Wire was also handled soo bad. She only appears in the last few minutes of her début episode and never gets to talk about specifically why she doesn't want to have contact with Blitzø in the first place. The focus is mostly on how hurt he is by the fact his Sister wants nothing to do with him, even after he worked soo hard to find her and just wanted to make things right with her soo bad. They also basically made her a groomer which just doesn't help her come off as reasonable at all.
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For a show that wants it's main characters to do bad stuff and have to deal with being called out for that it surely doesn't like people actually calling them out.
The double standards applied to the villians as opposed to the "good guys" are also just amazing. Like Millie and Moxxie can complain about Chaz being a bad partner in hindsight, but when Verosika talks about Blitzø being selfish in their relationship it's all about how he feels. Loona literally throwing stuff at Blitzø, hurting him just because he dared to carefully point out a true fact about her behaviour is played for laughs, but Stella abusing Stolas is super duper evil and we all hate her now (not saying it isn't bad but the show shouldn't pick and choose who is funny when abusive and who is evil when abusive). The I.M.P taking out random people because they were paid to is fine, but Striker attacking Stolas after being hired is bad just because he also happens to have a (understandable) motiv for why he would want to do it regardless of his job and because Stolas just so happens to be a main character. Blitzø and Loona commenting on Moxxies weight is funny, but when Mammon remarks that Fizzarolli gained a few pounds he is just bad.
That's just my opinion on some of the antagonists in HH and HB. Mammon is pretty much the only villian I really care for in both shows (also Stella and Striker before they got ruined). I mainly think antagonist are either really underused (Vox, Velvette, Verosika) or were just incredibly mishandled (Adam, Striker, Stella). Part of this post was just an excuse to talk about Jjba tho, which I always love.
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rookflower · 2 years ago
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seeing nightheart arguments again as with every asc release so once again, a reminder that when people say "nightheart's arc (or that of any other warrior cats character for that matter) is sexist", 99% of the time they are not calling the character, themselves, within the universe, a misogynist. nightheart in the books does not hate women. liking nightheart is not misogyny. what IS sexist there is the choices the authors make when they are writing a character. because at the end of the day, the characters themselves are not real.
in nightheart's case, at the start of his story almost every female character in his life (sparkpelt, finchlight, squirrelflight, lilyheart, myrtlebloom, etc) was written as being needlessly cruel to him, in spite of their own characters, and the male characters in his life (bramblestar, alderheart, bayshine) were written as far kinder or more reasonable towards him. the issue was not the FACT people were being mean to him, but the blatant trend and malicious gendered stereotypes going on with how it was handled.
"but they've been redeemed by Thunder! they're all being nicer to him now!" yeah, but isn't it super fucking weird that it was written like that in the first place? that finchlight changed personality like the weather when she should have been a prominent enough character to have an established one, that sparkpelt needs to redeem herself for absences in squirrelflight's hope and tbc that were unfairly out of her control and were not even considered an issue until now it's convienent to make her son sad, that squirrelflight was treated as antagonistic and cruel over asking her adult grandson to do some chores or whatever?
"but that's the author's fault, not the character's!" the character is not real though. he doesn't have feelings that can be hurt, what is there are the words on the page, and a lot of people will look at a character's arc rather than imagining them as a real person or making up headcanons to fill in gaps. there is also nothing wrong with people disliking a character you like. that is always going to happen forever.
"so are you saying i'm sexist because i like or relate to nightheart?" no, nobody is saying this. nightheart is an insecure angsty young adult protagonist in a tonally silly book series who has a complicated relationship with his family and gets into relationship drama, of course a bunch of people are going to latch on to him, and there's nothing wrong with that. i know a ton of nightheart fans. people criticising him is not a personal attack on you or anyone.
"you're looking into this too deeply" man this is warrior cats tumblr, what are any of us doing here. sometimes engaging critically with a text is fun. sometimes, texts have genuine flaws and harmful biases within their writing and it's useful to learn to identify and analyse them. warrior cats is not and never will be peak literature and i don't think anybody expects it to be but that doesn't mean people aren't allowed to take critical approaches to it on anything more than a surface level.
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thebreakfastgenie · 4 months ago
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Imagine, if you will, that the democratic nominee in the 2024 election had been pro Palestine, but had also been anti women and anti lgbt. Could you imagine the outcry from leftists if women and lgbt people decided not to vote for them? It would be absolutely vile. But they have the gall to say we’re wrong for expecting them to vote democrat. It disgusts me
Yeah the bad faith American leftists who use the suffering of Palestinians as a rhetorical cudgel would have been furious. There is also a contingent of nominal leftists who just hate the Democratic party, and they would probably have just reversed course and yelled at anyone who said "yeah this candidate sucks on these other issues, but since there is no good option, it's worth voting for them to at least try to improve this one issue."
And in case anyone objects to this hypothetical as unrealistic, it wouldn't happen because of how US politics work, but it's not outrageous. Being pro-Palestine is left-coded in the US and a lot of the west, but it's not an inherently left or right position. Pro-Palestine, anti-women, anti-LGBT describes a lot of right wing political parties in the Arab world, and it's worth noting that in many (not all but many) cases they're pro-Palestine more because opposing Israel serves their own interests than because they care about Palestinians. Palestinians have spoken about this before. I don't want to spend too much time speaking on an issue I don't feel especially qualified to discuss in detail, but I wanted to acknowledge that.
There was kind of a microdose of what you're describing in the 2016 and 2020 primaries. Bernie Sanders isn't anti-women or anti-LGBT, but he did choose not to focus on those issues. His whole thing was about class and corporations and money and while Bernie himself was at worst mildly dismissive, his following did have a tendency to deride those issues as identity politics that were a distraction from the true cause. Bernie supporters complained that Hillary didn't focus enough on Citizens United in one of the debates and completely ignored that she chose to focus on Roe v Wade instead and I remember this because I am still mad about it to this day. I don't think Bernie Sanders is a raging misogynist (though a lot of people around him are) but I think he's a fairly standard level of sexist for a man born in 1941, and as often happens he's given a pass on it and even portrayed as a male feminist hero because he's progressive. A lot of people don't seem to think progressives can be misogynists or homophobic or racist. In any case, early in the 2020 primary there was some tension between the Bernie and Elizabeth Warren camps and some women were complaining about Bernie's history of sexism and I distinctly remember some Bernie supporters getting really mad about it. And I was like, is saying "I agree with these policies but I don't want to vote for a candidate that doesn't value women" so unreasonable? They made that exact same argument for other issues themselves. But when it's about women... And obviously if Bernie had won that primary I would have been all aboard in the general, but it was still the primaries and I was making a point.
The wild thing about all this behavior is we live in a country with a two party system where one party is an unhinged fascist death cult. They're evil and inept at governing and certifiably insane. It's nearly impossible to produce a Democratic candidate that isn't obviously leagues better than the alternative. If a meteor had landed on all the other candidates in 2020 I would have voted for Bloomberg against Trump. The only time we really have to weigh the benefits and drawbacks of different candidates is the Democratic primary and it's rare to get strong primary candidates who are wildly different from each other (Hillary and Bernie's voting records in the senate were like 95% identical; obviously the campaigns were going to focus on the differences but they're far more alike than different). We also have to spend primaries taking into account which candidate we think will have the best chance of winning a general election so the fascist death cult people don't.
And honestly I think we should take a minute to appreciate that Democratic candidates are pro-LGBT, because a lot of other center-left parties around the world are abandoning at least trans people.
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random-thought-depository · 23 days ago
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This post (which I can't reblog, and which I'm pretty sure is about aromanticism, see their tags) is, like, I want to write some sort of response to it but I'm not even sure where to start.
Like, yes, it is true that at least in pretty big parts of the world it's normal and at this point pretty normative for men to have casual sex. And what I think that person is actually getting at is there are a lot of hostile sexist men who approach heterosexual courtship in an adversarial exploitative way, and if hostile sexist men of this type were actually trying to do entryism to the LGBT/queer community via defining their adversarial exploitative approach to heterosexual sex as "aromanticism" letting them do that would be a very "so open-minded you've let your brain fall out" move. I don't agree with their claim that "cishet man who is emotionally uninvested in his sexual partners" is "the majority guy ... this is the normal way for cishet men to be," but that's not a necessary claim for their argument.
But:
1) IME "emotionally uninvested in your sexual partners" is not actually what "aromanticism" means in the dialect of people who are actually likely to claim it as an identity or defend the idea that it's a valid LGBT/queer identity. IME they're much more likely to talk about having friends-with-benefits type relationships with friends than to talk about the sort of sexual behavior I'd expect from hostile sexist straight men who just want to "score" with people whose company they don't desire for its own sake. They might be uwuifying their own sexual behavior to present a more socially acceptable persona, but...
2) I think the kind of hostile sexist guy who takes an adversarial exploitative approach to courtship is pretty unlikely to unironically identify as aromantic. This is the point on which I'm honestly most tempted to reciprocate that person's "is this your first day on Earth?" attitude toward people who think like me. Seriously, imagine how a guy who fits the negative stereotypes of PUAs or frat bros would react if you suggested to him that his adversarial exploitative attitude toward the women he sexually desires makes him "aromantic" and therefore queer. I don't think men like that want into the LGBT/queer community, by-in-large! Quite the opposite! Men like that are more likely to associate with and value inclusion in social groups in which perceived proximity to queerness would decrease, not increase, their popularity and clout.
I think if a straight cis man self-identifies as queer on the basis of being aromantic, it's pretty likely the experience he's using that self-description to articulate is something pretty different from fitting the negative stereotypes of how frat bro types relate to women. A guy who fit the negative stereotypes of how frat bro types relate to women would probably hang out with others guys like himself, and self-identifying as queer would probably decrease, not increase, his popularity and clout with those guys. I don't think a lot of guys are going to claim to be aromantic as a cynical dating/sexual strategy either; maybe some guy somewhere might self-describe as aromantic as part of a cynical strategy get into the pants of some Smith College types, but I think the kind of guy who might do that is actually not that common and the kind of guy who might do that would be more likely to adopt a persona tailored to appeal to more socially conventional women.
Like, I'm not going to say "hostile sexist man claims the adversarial exploitative way he relates to women he wants to have sex with is aromanticism" is something that never happens, the world is vast and various, but I don't think it happens on any significant scale, I don't think it's a threat we should be strategizing around on a scale above, like, small-scale friend groups who find themselves directly dealing with such a guy.
I went back and forth on whether I should tag that person in this or not (they seem a combination of logical and maybe unfamiliar with how ace/aro people self-describe that makes me think I might actually be able to change their mind about this to some extent, I would like to!), in the end I decided them making the post unrebloggable was a pretty clear implicit statement that they preferred not to have more engagement on it and it's probably better to not bring this to their attention.
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stvrpst · 10 months ago
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The amusing part about the whole “shipwar” issue was how bummy shippers painted buddie shippers as these nasty individuals who had no business being upset or furious.
Like any other fandom, I acknowledge that there are people in this one who are utterly repulsive and say questionable things, but what bothers me about the bummies, is how they exaggerated the situation. Because, in my opinion, what I saw when the shit was going down was actually very mild.
Like I genuinely have seen worse.
Now, personally, I never liked Tommy and was never neutral about him. I've been here since the beginning of the show, and I've seen that little dick behave like a racist, misogynistic jerk. So, no, I've never cared for him and never will.
Obviously, my natural reaction to other people's displeasure with Tommy's set-up was not to be upset. Because, as I previously stated, he has treated members of the 118 with such contempt. I thought it was very understandable that people disliked him.
But the way the bummies made it seem like not liking Tommy was a forbidden sin, and then couldn’t comprehend why people viewed liking Tommy—again, a racist/misogynistic man—as a bad thing was wild.
Of course people are gonna think you’re a weirdo for liking him, SOLEY because he kissed Buck, and then dismissing his shitty behavior- behavior that is sadly a lot of women and people of colors reality that they have to deal with everyday.
I was not surprised to find out that the vast majority of people justifying Tommy’s behavior were white people, cuz they LOVEEE dismissing shit like this for no reason. As long as it’s not an issue that affects them.
It is weird and bad that you would want Buck to be with a racist and sexist man with no redeeming qualities, just to satisfy your mlm desire. But, nah, let's be furious at the ones who have legitimate reasons to despise that dick.
And then making it seem like we didn't care about bucks bisexuality because we didn't agree with the idea of that dick stick being bucks LI? We didn't want Buck with that dick because we care deeply about his bisexuality and believe he deserves to explore himself with someone other than a huge fat bitch.
Somehow they managed to twist it and accuse us of homophobia.
I have never understood, and I never will, the pressure on others to like Tommy. That, in particular, was the most perplexing thing to me, and it helped me to realize that not everyone can think rationally.
Because there are valid reasons for people to detest a character, how are you going to get upset and start saying stupid shit just because people don’t like Tommy, because he engaged in behaviors that women and people of color experience in real life?
But all they had to say was
(1). “Y’all don’t care about bucks bisexuality”
(2). “Buddies are homophobic”
(3). “Let people ship who they want!”
(4). “Let us enjoy this!”
Over some asshole too.
They actually acted as if others were jumping them for no reason. They genuinely couldn't get how jumping ship because your favorite dude kissed a racist, misogynistic man and not exhibiting ANY concern that he kissed a RACIST, MISOGYNIST MAN just because Buck got to kiss a man is fetishistic as fuck.
They acted like the victims the entire time because people refused to tolerate it. So they altered their argument to "we jumped ship because of buddies behavior," and to this day I'm still trying to figure out what behavior they claimed was so terrible other than the fact that people were calling all their asses for being so fucking odd.
They were apart of the buddie shipper fandom weeks ago. They were apart of the group that “ran Oliver off twitter.” They were apart of the group that “ran the women off the show.” Crazy how when they were apart of the fandom, they didn’t speak up about the shit they’re not pulling out of their asses.
But now that they’ve jumped ship, oh it’s a big issue now.
And it’s so funny because they constantly tell on themselves all the time😭 the jokes be writing themselves.
“I didn’t jump ship because Buck kissed a man, I jumped because he was finally happy.” But when I go on your tumblr, Bree, to go see some of the support you showed when Buck was with Taylor since he was happy then too, I don’t see it? Why is that? So you just pick and choose when bucks happy right? As long as it fits your narrative right?
“Buck and Eddie are not co parents” but when I scroll down 5 months ago, everybody and their moms was calling Chris Bucks son and Buck a dad/second father figure.
“Eddies not a good dad/person” but you have Buckleydiaz as your username?
“We didn’t like Bucks other LI because they had no chemistry or build” but when Tommy pulled up out of ass crack with zero chemistry or build up, y’all still folded.
“Eddies a bad friend!” Yet, when I scrolled down your profile, all your asses were buddie shippers regardless.
“We didn’t like Taylor because she was bad.” Yet, tommy has treated members of the 118 like shit just like Taylor, in fact, maybe even worse. They both have treated members on the 118 horribly, interesting how they’re only excusing one of them tho. I wonder why.
They’re a bunch of losers I swear, and the vast majority of them are a bunch of old hags beefing with minors/young adults online over a damn fictional ship. Shits embarrassing. (No offense to all the good older people in the fandom, ily<3)
That weirdo Bree literally has kids and she’s out here triflin over a ship and going at it with literal teenagers. Get your shit together and maybe start putting food on your kids table because I know they’re hungry. you’re a whole grown ass messing with teens/young adults whose frontal lobes aren’t even fully developed while your kids are starving at home.
They would be so much more bearable if they literally didn’t try to dismantle every single dynamic between Buck and Eddie every single day.
And for no reason at all too. They want bucktommy endgame because they’re a bunch of fetishistic weirdos, and we want buddie for Actual LOGICAL reasons that makes sense and has substance.
Not only that, let’s not forget how
(1.) when Ryan Guzman did that podcast, talking about is mental health and past suicidal thoughts, a bunch of them were in the comments saying they wished he would’ve went through with killing himself.
You don’t have to be a fan of Ryan, and it’s 100% understandable if you’re not, but to fucking wish death upon a real living fucking person is disgusting, and suicide at that.
(2.) they decided to justify Tommy’s behavior by calling us ableist and claiming he’s autistic. I cannot even put into words how weird and nasty that is. Like you actually have to be dumb as fuck to go that low and justify an assholes obvious disinterest and behavior and double it down to “autism.”
Even if he was autistic—which he’s not—that doesn’t justify anything? You can be autistic and still be racist and misogynistic. That’s the shit y’all love to pull. The first time, they said Tommy’s behavior was justified because he was a closeted gay. When they realized people weren’t falling for that shit, they tried to switch it over and call us ableist and claim he was autistic.
It’s actually funny cuz it’s the complete opposite, cuz to associate shitty behavior to be autistic is so unbelievably ignorant.
(3.) They decided to contact and invade Tim’s privacy multiple times to the point Tim had to make it known that he only responds to not be rude.
(4.) They started bullying Oliver stark for not posting about bucktommy to the point that Oliver ended up allegedly blocking someone who asked why he wasn’t talking about it. (Which proves they were the mfs who ran Oliver off twitter)
(5.) They started to actually ship Lou and Oliver, two real life people.
(6.) They told people not to participate or donate to a charity event that was helping the people in Gaza just because one the mods in the server didn’t like bucktommy.
(7.) They thought it was okay to speak on Ryan and his characters identity claiming he was white and doubling him down to just that, while trying to erase his Mexican identity saying he wasn’t Mexican(he is.)
(8.) They started harassing journalists because they only mainly talked about buddie when they have stated multiple times that they’re buddie shippers, always have been even before tommy showed up and Oliver and Ryan have no issues discussing buddie anyways.
(9.) Completely dismissed the idea of having an openly queer MEXICAN character for other Latino/hispanic people to relate to because it would get in the way of their ship.
(10.) Called fans/stans of Eddie Diaz—a main Mexican character— “beanstalks.”
I’m still so shocked about this one because it was so unbelievably racist, and the person who came up with it is disgusting.
I’m sorry to any Mexican fans who had to witness that.
(If you’re confused, just to clarify, there is a slur used against Mexicans that starts with bean and ends with an er. Since Eddie is Mexican, they thought it would be funny to give Eddie fans an extremely racist under-toned nickname, hence “beanstalks” :/ )
(11.) They love to weaponize Ryan’s past actions as a way to deflect from the fact that Lous ass is just as fucking bad, but in reality don’t actually give a shit about what Ryan did or said and are only bringing it up to use Ryan’s past shitty behavior to deflect Lous shitty ass. Which is literally insane and stupid.
The list goes on. Yet buddie shippers are the bad ones, okay.
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daeneryscel · 1 year ago
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I really wonder where you got the idea that the greens consider Aegon a worthy king. No one thinks of him as such, including his family lol. Even he himself says that he does not want the throne and is not born to rule. People support the greens because: 1. They just like these characters more. 2. They believe that the greens in general would be better rulers than the blacks in general. 3. They believe that the greens have usurped the throne to protect themselves. In neither case is it a question of Aegon being a good king. Stop attributing thoughts to people that they didn't express.
i’m going to need y’all to read my post front to back at least three times, and then back to front thrice more. no where in the fucking post did i put down that the greens consider aegon to be worthy to the iron throne. the whole worthy statement literally goes “…aegon did nothing to prove he was worthy of being named heir, let alone being king.” the key words are ‘did nothing to prove’, HE did nothing. no where in the post did i mention the team green fandom, minus putting the tag ‘anti team green’. you’re nitpicking because otherwise you wouldn’t have something to whine about. i get that media comprehension can be tough, but really? is this the best you all can come up with? i understand all of the ‘reasons’ why people support the greens over the blacks. that’s why i’m not team green. it’s a comparison. how many times have you and your buddies haha-ed over rhaenyra being a privileged brat who did nothing to secure her claim? i’m guessing quite frequently, considering i still see the same dumbass talking points despite blocking the tags. your precious uwu aegon and his stans can handle having one of your arguments pointed out as sexist, right? you can’t come after rhaenyra for one thing and then give aegon a pass for the exact same reason. it’s hypocritical and contradictory to do so. use your brain. i PROMISE *pinky promise at that* it’s not that difficult to do.
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ladysternchen · 5 months ago
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Open Letter to the Silmarillion- and Wider Tolkien-Fandom
Dear fellow Tolkienists, Middle-Earth-fans, Elves-, Dwarves and what-not-else in disguise, you who call Middle-Earth (and especially long-lost- Beleriand) their home,
On this blog, I have written about this matter many times already, but I can't miss this opportunity to reach out once more to the wider community and again plead for a little more compassion and awareness within the fandom.
Everyone who knows me -in person, through my fanfics, through this blog- knows that my one and only within the Tolkien-legendarium is Elu Thingol, so it will maybe not be surprising what I am going to say. ;-)
I think that the argument that has been ongoing between those who like Elu Thingol and those who don't (which were, funnily enough - and I'm being sarcastic here- often those who most ardently love the Fëanorians) has at least vaguely been noted by most within the fandom. It got rather dirty on both sides. And that REALLY shouldn't happen.
It is inevitable when different people from different backgrounds read a book that there will be different preferences between those readers, and characters will be perceived and interpreted differently. A character that will be the hero to one reader may be the villain to the other, that is how things go, and given that the Silmarillion is not exactly a book of nursery-rhymes, I think we can all be expected to be mature enough to know and honour that.
Only apparently, we can't.
All sorts of stuff get dragged into those arguments that really have no room there, such as political views and the mixing up of canon and fanon. No, I'm not saying keep politics out of the fandom at all cost. Not when in recent years human rights, the adherence to science and protecting the world on which we all live has gone from being a consensus to being the agenda of one side of the political spectrum. This is frightening. And yes, it needs to be addressed. Or at least, everyone should be free to address it.
But by the Valar, please do it right. Do your research. Know what you are talking about. Specify.
It is so very easy to call Tolkien out for the views he shared with many of his contemporaries, and yes, at least I for my part am glad to see that we have moved on from these times -at least in parts. But to understand Tolkien, we must look beyond that. We must look at what he wrote despite being a white male academic in 20th century Britain.
An example of that: over the years, countless people have called Tolkien a sexist, because within the Hobbit and the LotR, women are so shockingly underrepresented. That is a fact, and one doesn't really get around that. But we also have to look at the Silmarillion and what the women are like in there. How Tolkien in drafts that reach back to the 1920s crated a society that treats males and females equally, how all the women he did write into his works were strong, independent women who would not bow to men safe perhaps in love- do we really want to call Tolkien a sexist per default then?
And if you call out Elu Thingol and those who have him as their favourite character for being racist, please stop one moment and read and think it through. Elves, Men and Dwarves are different species. Whatever attitudes there are between them, this can never be racism. Yes, it is compelling to see different ethnical (human) groups in them, but they are not. There can be racism amongst Elves (and I might point out that it is not predominantly the Sindar who see themselves and their works above other Elven people; it is not the Sindar who demand that others yield to them the works of their hands and hearts only to steal and later destroy them, just because they can; or who seek 'free lands to rule' in an already inhabited country), there can be racism amongst Men (and there sure is, and that is an issue!), there can be racism amongst Dwarves (we also know about that). But there can be no racism between Dwarves and Elves and Men.
And even if you choose to read the situation that way, and put fanon over canon, please don't assume that those real-life-people who love the characters that offend you share those beliefs- in short, stop calling me a racist for liking Elu Thingol, and I promise I shall never accuse you of plotting murder just because you love the Fëanorians.
So please, when discussing characters, do keep it civil. Keep accusations out of it, keep fanon out of it. If you're criticising a character, please do that based on canon rather than fanon (I'm not talking about liking someone based on fanon, I'm talking about picking the character apart based on fanon). It can be so incredibly rewarding to listen to someone who really feels a character and may explain things that other readers miss easily. It is fascinating to explore the reasons why someone turns to evil, or makes mistakes, or acts in the way they act. You need not dishonour other characters to love your own, and you can love your own with all their faults and negative sides. Listen to other people, and try for some compassion. Please. It never hurt anyone.
PS: And of course share with us all the art you do on your favourite characters, all your fanfics, all your meta, all your headcanons. Tell us about your faves backstories that Tolkien never got around to writing, tell us about your textual ghosts and OCs. And readers, give feedback. And see what comes of those conversations.
@silmarillionwritersguild
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theshypinkflower · 3 months ago
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Hello! I am thinking about making some sort of fan fic of Derek and my OC when they first met. Got any tips of how I should write it? I know Derek is an absolute ASSHOLE but I just need some extra information. Also love your headcannons we love you!
- Derek is not above saying slurs and overall just being an asshole. Hes misogynistic, sexist, and basically everything else under the sun. Things like homophobia is internalized tho, and keep (I cant beleive I'm saying this) any racism to a minimum. He can say some racy stuff and have some prejudice but he doesnt outright discriminate I dont think. Remember, he's learned all this stuff from his dad!
- Peaked in highschool and part of college. He's basically got little to no maturity when hes not having to put on a front. He can be VERY reckless and rambunctious
- Every other conversation with Matt ends in an argument or tension, they tend to keep their distance but believe me you can HEAR when they're arguing
- Dont forget, theres 8 other kids in the house, and some of them are still underage. Sure everyone kinda keeps to themselves but theres still a chance that they'll see the beat up person in their house if you have the freedom to walk around. Derek may be reckless, but he's not a moron. He'll usually do his best to hide you, the only people you'd really be able to see are Matt and Sal. I dont think Derek would leave the maids to care for you cause even they can squeal like his younger siblings.
- I've looked at some archived Gato posts, and apparently Matt is "as morally bankrupt as Derek" (I was always worried about making matt more sadistic since I didnt really see it in his character, but now its confirmed that he is!) Matt is not above messing with Derek's toy to flex his superiority
- Salvatore is still head of the house, so whatever he says go. There is grumbling from Derek once he's no longer in Salvatotes presence and sometimes even a tantrum (I can see him getting really frustrated and knocking stuff over)
- Derek is definitely the kind of guy to make you feel insecure about literally anything, so you can throw in some fun little items that allude to it. Diet pills, rationed food, certain clothes, hair dye, that sort of thing. He points it out and makes fun of it and each little item serves as a reminder
(Idk it this is what you need but I tried)
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rei-ismyname · 4 months ago
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Bishop is a bootlicker and the O*N*E suck part 1
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A while after M-Day, the US president signed an Executive Order authorising the Office of National Emergency, or the O*N*E (fuck that's annoying to type.) The O*N*E's remit is kinda confusing - publicly they're meant to protect mutants but the rhetoric used shows they want to contain them with an excuse to kill them - they're not good friends to have. As you can see, Beast is staggeringly naive here, but Kitty knows what's up.
They put Val fucking Cooper in a position of authority and rabid bigot called General Lazer (seriously) in charge of everything. The big plan is to force all 198 remaining mutants to stay at The Xavier School and have human-manned Sentinels to enforce it (as well as to insult and provoke, I have to assume.)
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Val is being asked leading populist questions here, but she does a shitty job of controlling the narrative. She insists that most mutants are law abiding citizens, but that's a ridiculous metric when the law is a permanent concentration camp guarded by symbols of genocide. Many, such as X-Force, agree. There's no ulterior plan here, they simply believe that mutants should be allowed freedom of movement and not have guns pointed at their heads. They stage a riot and break out.
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Oh, and Bishop works for them too. Not as an inside man or double agent, but because he believes this is a good idea. Notice how he doesn't object to General Lazer (lol) switching to lethal ordnance.
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Bishop is shooting people and firing energy attacks towards a group who are mostly civilians. Caliban says fuck that and uses his PTSD episode powers. It's pretty effective.
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The X-Men do show up but they don't fight very hard and it's implied that they let them escape. Bishop is still on the ground reliving his worst traumas when Emma Frost steps in and sorts him out.
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Cyke is explicit about his reasons for standing down - he didn't want to risk mutant fatalities. Bishop embarrasses himself by getting very personal, making accusations based off a very generous reading of Chuck's relevance to mutants, and caps it off with a sexist jab at Emma. He then invokes the authority of the president with a not-so-veiled threat, so Cyclops hints that living as prisoners guarded by Sentinels should be triggering alarm bells.
What's super fucked up is that as registered superpowered individuals, the military can order the X-Men to deploy as they see fit. Prisoners, wardens, and whatever else they like. The X-Men can choose to do that job ineffectively, but it does carry risk.
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His bizarre thesis is that mutants must police themselves (which aside from his presence, isn't happening) otherwise 'chaos' which gives birth to children being branded as mutants. He stops Cyke from preaching (he wasn't) by literally covering his mouth with his hand. His position and argument are ridiculous.
Note that in the meeting of the fascist brains trust Lazer and Stark refer to the mutants as internees and inmates respectively. Stark's biggest concern seems to be the possibility of these civilians joining Cap, and Lazer that the O*N*E isn't authorised to use enough force. Bishop sits at this meeting, says nothing, and does not object.
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Some fine architectural additions to the Xavier mansion there - huge prison vibes. The living members of the O5 tool up and prepare to break some laws. Scott says that 'soon enough we'll have to go up against Bishop and the Sentinels' - no illusions here about Bishop's position.
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Emma wishes Scott would 'let her go with them' and while I don't love the characterisation, Scott does make a good point. I feel like they'd have already discussed this privately, frankly, but Emma is indeed the most qualified person to be the politician and deal with the soft power/protecting the students. She's walking back to the prison/school after da boys leave when a Sentinel busts her for a frivolous reason - flexing power, basically.
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Emma objects to that shit, but Val fucking Cooper doesn't care. She wants to know where Cyclops and co have gone. After some half-hearted evasion she basically tells her to go fuck herself. It's a really solid line too.
Obviously judging people on their (second) worst act can be unfair, but Bishop has consistently been a cop. Event comics, especially this one, have been known to present people wildly OOC. In Civil War, pretty much everyone with authoritarian leanings loses their fucking minds. It's laughable that the creators thought the Pro-Registration side would be the popular one, but they did - so this shit is intentional. Running this mutant concentration camp story as part of the event was a bold choice, but I think they overegged the pudding. Bishop, with his trauma, fear, and growing up in a hell future could have been written as a tragedy. In a critical time, a man keeps making compromises and mistakes until he slowly realises he's helping oppress his people. Unfortunately, we didn't get that story and Bishop still tastes boot leather every time he eats. Don't forget he and Lazer are both black either, as if that makes it better or says anything profound. The O*N*E are still around to this day, showing that what one dumbshit president does fucks people over for decades, especially minorities.
Next time, shit gets a lot worse and Lazer gets himself a quisling voodoo doll, sort of.
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