#anyway thats a tangent on a tangent on a disclaimer on a tag on an anxiety filled addition to a post

[coridallasmultipass]

If it's okay for me to add something related because I first saw this on Tumblr: In the mid-2010s, I heard about there being a gay Filipino deity romance (from one culture in the Philippines - there are many different cultures and beliefs) here on Tumblr. It wasn't until years later when researching Philippine deities for fun while trying to broadly connect with my culture that I found a deep dive where someone found that the Bulan and Sidapa love story originated from the same fictional blog source, and had been circulating from new sources and fan art claiming it was historical for years before the author tried to find a non-modern historical source for the rumour, creating a kind of Berenstain/Berenstein effect on the people he asked, claiming they'd heard about the love story from a forgotten source much earlier than the 2010s, but unable to give a specific name, or the source cited claimed they didn't actually know about the romance.

While I think in this instance, a shift in narrative is obviously okay when you consider it is still a living Filipino culture, and people from that clearly find identity with this modern take (which should be asked of people from the cultures directly affected by misinfo), it should also be important not to rewrite it as 'historical fact' particularly when it has a fictional modern source that someone can directly point to as the origin when they question and search down the telephone line (like the game).

(I use the word 'fictional' only in reference to the originating blog, because the blog was unable or unwilling to provide any sources that mentioned that relationship to the deep dive author. I'm not implying said gods can't be/aren't gay. I'm not from that specific Philippine culture, and I don't have enough background knowledge to make any claims of my own. There's also no like, singular religious text/'bible' that pre-Hispanic Philippine beliefs followed as a rule/that can be consulted about this - it's not like a translation debate. There's just no textual source pre-dating the blog making the claim of the romance, and historians/oral historians aren't making the claim either.)

I get variations on this comment on my post about history misinformation all the time: "why does it matter?" Why does it matter that people believe falsehoods about history? Why does it matter if people spread history misinformation? Why does it matter if people on tumblr believe that those bronze dodecahedra were used for knitting, or that Persephone had a daughter named Mespyrian? It's not the kind of misinformation that actually hurts people, like anti-vaxx propaganda or climate change denial. It doesn't hurt anyone to believe something false about the past.

Which, one, thanks for letting me know on my post that you think my job doesn't matter and what I do is pointless, if it doesn't really matter if we know the truth or make up lies about history because lies don't hurt anyone. But two, there are lots of reasons that it matters.

It encourages us to distrust historians when they talk about other aspects of history. You might think it's harmless to believe that Pharaoh Hatshepsut was trans. It's less harmless when you're espousing that the Holocaust wasn't really about Jews because the Nazis "came for trans people first." You might think it's harmless to believe that the French royalty of Versailles pooped and urinated on the floor of the palace all the time, because they were asshole rich people anyway, who cares, we hate the rich here; it's rather less harmless when you decide that the USSR was the communist ideal and Good, Actually, and that reports of its genocidal oppression are actually lies.

It encourages anti-intellectualism in other areas of scholarship. Deciding based on your own gut that the experts don't know what they're talking about and are either too stupid to realize the truth, or maliciously hiding the truth, is how you get to anti-vaxxers and climate change denial. It is also how you come to discount housing-first solutions for homelessness or the idea that long-term sustained weight loss is both biologically unlikely and health-wise unnecessary for the majority of fat people - because they conflict with what you feel should be true. Believing what you want to be true about history, because you want to believe it, and discounting fact-based corrections because you don't want them to be true, can then bleed over into how you approach other sociological and scientific topics.

How we think about history informs how we think about the present. A lot of people want certain things to be true - this famous person from history was gay or trans, this sexist story was actually feminist in its origin - because we want proof that gay people, trans people, and women deserve to be respected, and this gives evidence to prove we once were and deserve to be. But let me tell you a different story: on Thanksgiving of 2016, I was at a family friend's house and listening to their drunk conservative relative rant, and he told me, confidently, that the Roman Empire fell because they instituted universal healthcare, which was proof that Obama was destroying America. Of course that's nonsense. But projecting what we think is true about the world back onto history, and then using that as recursive proof that that is how the world is... is shoddy scholarship, and gets used for topics you don't agree with just as much as the ones you do. We should not be encouraging this, because our politics should be informed by the truth and material reality, not how we wish the past proved us right.

It frequently reinforces "Good vs. Bad" dichotomies that are at best unhelpful and at worst victim-blaming. A very common thread of historical misinformation on tumblr is about the innocence or benevolence of oppressed groups, slandered by oppressors who were far worse. This very frequently has truth to it - but makes the lies hard to separate out. It often simplifies the narrative, and implies that the reason that colonialism and oppression were bad was because the victims were Good and didn't deserve it... not because colonialism and oppression are bad. You see this sometimes with radical feminist mother goddess Neolithic feminist utopia stuff, but you also see it a lot regarding Native American and African history. I have seen people earnestly argue that Aztecs did not practice human sacrifice, that that was a lie made up by the Spanish to slander them. That is not true. Human sacrifice was part of Aztec, Maya, and many Central American war/religious practices. They are significantly more complex than often presented, and came from a captive-based system of warfare that significantly reduced the number of people who got killed in war compared to European styles of war that primarily killed people on the battlefield rather than taking them captive for sacrifice... but the human sacrifice was real and did happen. This can often come off with the implications of a 'noble savage' or an 'innocent victim' that implies that the bad things the Spanish conquistadors did were bad because the victims were innocent or good. This is a very easy trap to fall into; if the victims were good, they didn't deserve it. Right? This logic is dangerous when you are presented with a person or group who did something bad... you're caught in a bind. Did they deserve their injustice or oppression because they did something bad? This kind of logic drives a lot of transphobia, homophobia, racism, and defenses of Kyle Rittenhouse today. The answer to a colonialist logic of "The Aztecs deserved to be conquered because they did human sacrifice and that's bad" is not "The Aztecs didn't do human sacrifice actually, that's just Spanish propaganda" (which is a lie) it should be "We Americans do human sacrifice all the god damn time with our forever wars in the Middle East, we just don't call it that. We use bullets and bombs rather than obsidian knives but we kill way, way more people in the name of our country. What does that make us? Maybe genocide is not okay regardless of if you think the people are weird and scary." It becomes hard to square your ethics of the Innocent Victim and Lying Perpetrator when you see real, complicated, individual-level and group-level interactions, where no group is made up of members who are all completely pure and good, and they don't deserve to be oppressed anyway.

It makes you an unwitting tool of the oppressor. The favorite, favorite allegation transphobes level at trans people, and conservatives at queer people, is that we're lying to push the Gay Agenda. We're liars or deluded fools. If you say something about queer or trans history that's easy to debunk as false, you have permanently hurt your credibility - and the cause of queer history. It makes you easy to write off as a liar or a deluded fool who needs misinformation to make your case. If you say Louisa May Alcott was trans, that's easy to counter with "there is literally no evidence of that, and lots of evidence that she was fine being a woman," and instantly tanks your credibility going forward, so when you then say James Barry was trans and push back against a novel or biopic that treats James Barry as a woman, you get "you don't know what you're talking about, didn't you say Louisa May Alcott was trans too?" TERFs love to call trans people liars - do not hand them ammunition, not even a single bullet. Make sure you can back up what you say with facts and evidence. This is true of homophobes, of racists, of sexists. Be confident of your facts, and have facts to give to the hopeful and questioning learners who you are relating this story to, or the bigots who you are telling off, because misinformation can only hurt you and your cause.

It makes the queer, female, POC, or other marginalized listeners hurt, sad, and betrayed when something they thought was a reflection of their own experiences turns out not to be real. This is a good response to a performance art piece purporting to tell a real story of gay WWI soldiers, until the author revealed it as fiction. Why would you want to set yourself up for disappointment like that? Why would you want to risk inflicting that disappointment and betrayal on anyone else?

It makes it harder to learn the actual truth.

Historical misinformation has consequences, and those consequences are best avoided - by checking your facts, citing your sources, and taking the time and effort to make sure you are actually telling the truth.

[ravenkinnie]

Youre right about jinx and silco being emotionally incestuous and u should say it louder. I hated jilco fics sm when i was fresh to arcane because it's not fun to run into a gross what-if for my own childhood. But it's real. even if jinx and silco would rather eat lead than fuck each other, they're still incesty; I wouldnt have wanted to have sex w my parent, but we were close in a way we should not have been. It's just a fact of parent+child codependency that your relationship gets weirdly, almost romantically enmeshed. being codependent & a teenager at the same time genuinely screws up ur head. Thats why therapy exists

Anyway, fandom hates to hear it, but yea, it's incesty. There is nothing less comfortable than watching jinx and silco touch each other. discomfort is its own sort of thrill, yk? that toxicity draws ppl in, but they dont want to label it bc incest is actually really bad & u cant shrug off 'my faves are incestuous' like u can 'my faves murder on the daily'

here is my only take on darkfic or proship or whatever discourse people wanna call it: yes, the majority of those tags are not lolita, they are just bad porn. truth is, the mythical ao3 fic that's so good it should be published is just very rare because if you could write lolita or beloved, you wouldn't be on ao3 you would be winning Nike awards. majority of ao3 tags are just bad porn in general because that's very easy to write and most of humanity are just not good writers, that's statistics. as someone who checks both noncon and rape recovery tags, I can tell you they are both very bad and can perpetuate horrible stereotypes and ideas in their own ways because they are written by people and people don't have themselves as examined as we like to imagine. I have an extreme issue with people acting like only these highest tier level books or fics or whatever are allowed to touch on those topics because it goes unacknowledged that this IS the highest tier level in both quality and literacy. majority of people are not reading beloved because an average reading level is very low and those people are more likely to interact with things we dont consider well written and produce things that are not very good. but things happen to people who aren't that educated too and those people interact with the world around them too and they are also adults. I never once want to come off like I expect people to present trauma credentials at the door to be allowed to be interested in or produce different content and that means I'm accepting that refusing this survivors vs freaks discourse dichotomy means here be freaks and I'm okay with that. rape existed before we had language and it will exist long after elon musk puts microchips in our heads that make us communicate in binary code only - and then of course those things we make influence us further too, reality is just a snake eating its tail like this

sorry this was a tangent because I always fear when I start these topics online people will pull me into their discourse so I want to say I rdject the discourse the way it exists from the start shsjjs and I say this all as someone who does have triggers and who does check sexual assault warnings for movies and such, ao3 is honestly where i will always pledge my allegiance as a fic site just because of the tag system making it so easy to control content you see

I think the fact that I always feel like I should make those disclaimers is why it's so hard to have these conversations in fandom or just social spaces, because people don't actually want to talk, they want you to establish that you are the right moral agent to align with. I was gonna say this feels like a very western culture thing but I think you see it across so many cultures actually, that discomfort becomes inherent harm and breaking social parameters is considered violence so if you bring up something that is uncomfortable, that is complicated, you're the problem because you said it. there are parts of this fandom that don't even want to acknowledge that silco is not a very good person and he's an emotionally abusive parent because if piltover are the bad guys then we obviously have good guys in zaun but people, and by extension fictional people, are more complex than that. on smaller scale you see it in families often, this type of playing pretend and not talking about things and then if you're the one who talks they will say it's you who is toxic because you ruined the vibes, you should just shut up and accept it like everybody else does

but the thing is that a culture of silence has never once benefitted victims, and refusing to accept that depictions of abuse and the conversations around them exist in different ways and shades is exactly that, it's a culture of silence that refuses to accept that the world is so complicated and so the violence in it is so complicated. and families can get SO complex, when you grow up into an independent - emotionally, sexually, physically, whatever - human being around people who are fucking insane and they are so wrapped up in your core development across everything, things get messy

also I wanna say. people who say it's not uncommon for grown women to sit in their dads lap live lives I can't imagine - IM NOT saying that physical affection in your family as an adult isn't normal, it's very healthy actually, I just forget there are people who have like. good fathers out there, I don't even like when my dad stands too close to me like what is he planning...... why am I in the attack range.......