#anyways I have a moral high ground because I’m not on twitter | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

lemonhemlock · 2 years ago

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Heeeyy, it’s the anon who sent in an ask a while ago about shipping Alicent with others out of spite. Feel free to ignore this ask if you’re tired of ship asks (I see you’ve already received more than enough lol) or if it’ll start any unnecessary discourse you’d rather avoid.

Just wanted to pop in and say that most people on Twitter are not okay. I had no followers nor was I following anyone and I had people screenshot a very innocuous Alicole tweet (it was literally a picture of a lady and her knight, basic) and talk badly of me - apparently I am lesbophobic and Cole is misogynist with anger issues 🤷‍♀️. Newsflash: Rhaenicent is not a healthy ship either, none of ASOIAF ships are.

I then came out as a Larycent shipper. I got ratioed (as much as, again, someone with no followers can).

Anyways, I got bored and deactivated but before I did, things got messy. There was group chat drama, people were saying pro-shippers deserve to be bullied etc.

All this to say that I am frustrated with the performative activism this fandom participates in, though I’m sure the same can be said for other fandoms. What’s the point of defending a celebrity by insulting another celebrity, or worse, another user? (Sorry but I’ll sympathize with a “regular” person over a celebrity any day. Imo, they don’t really care about bullying, they just project onto their favorite character or celebrity.) What makes one inherently morally better by being an “anti” but turn around and shit-talk people’s appearances or character? Real people with real lives and issues. Characters are fictional they do not exist, it comes off as disingenuous and self-righteous. I need people to do better.

Thanks for entertaining this ask, hope you’re doing well!

welcome back, anon. i hope you're doing well, too; don't allow this pointless drama more headspace beyond it being a funny anecdote. also, by this point, you guys should check-in using stage names. :)) or serial killer names. or maybe racing horse names ?? (those are always funny)

I had no followers nor was I following anyone and I had people screenshot a very innocuous Alicole tweet (it was literally a picture of a lady and her knight, basic) and talk badly of me - apparently I am lesbophobic and Cole is misogynist with anger issues

wow, how did they even manage to find you out in a sea of accounts with no followers or following anybody? i can understand the logic of dogpilling on a popular account, because they're visible in the fandom, but this? don't these people have, idk, jobs? do they not have to go to the grocery store or smth? what kind of lame-ass surveillance state? 😂

Newsflash: Rhaenicent is not a healthy ship either, none of ASOIAF ships are.

this is why shipping wars are even stupider in asoiaf-verse. what exactly moral high ground do you think you're defending here? i keep hearing "at least it's not an inc3st ship" well ok congratulations they're fucked up & unhealthy in a different way then?

I then came out as a Larycent shipper. I got ratioed (as much as, again, someone with no followers can).

ohhhhh anon you're a brave one with larycent there! i gotta say i was into it at the beginning bc he was super fucking yandere about it to the point of it being hilarious and, also, who can resist murderous puppy dog eyes ??? but the latter part of the season, esp. ep 9, put me off and i fed myself on the green family dynamics crumbs

Anyways, I got bored and deactivated but before I did, things got messy. There was group chat drama, people were saying pro-shippers deserve to be bullied etc.

group chat drama? is that a discord thing? i feel like it's a discord thing. this is so funny to me bc the only way "group chat drama" leaks is if you have traitors in your midst who screencap and then spread it around. so who are these conspirators? these subversive agents? these freedom fighters? who watches the watchers? 😅

What makes one inherently morally better by being an “anti” but turn around and shit-talk people’s appearances or character? Real people with real lives and issues.

they end up appearance-shaming and have zero self-awareness about it? oh me oh my 💅

performative activism is a very good word for what the moral panic that has taken hold of this fandom, at least on tumblr/twitter. another thing that makes me laugh is when people write page-long essays saying "ofc you can ship whatever you want, BUT..." followed by an entire diatribe on why shipping said thing (even if it's within the confines of fiction and decidedly not irl) puts a stain on your moral character and you should basically be ashamed of yourself 😂 so which is it? can people ship in peace or do you just want a pat on the head for being a good trooper?

#ask #anon #shipping wars #fandom critical

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hunrising · 4 months ago

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Omggg I am glad to see some sense on here cause the twitter activism is truly giving me a headache the only solution that these people want from what I’ve gathered is some abstract revolution which good luck pulling that off in 4 months( and I honestly don’t think they know or realize what a revolution entails) and any sort of realistic logic suddenly makes everyone in support of the genocide in Palestine. And I hate to break it to them but even if they don’t vote they’re still contributing to it because unless they’re committing tax evasion, their tax dollars are going towards the atrocities in Palestine so idk what they’re on their moral high horse for.

And the moral high ground in question starts and ends on twitter likeeee. Remember a few years ago people were BULLYING each other for not having carrd (?) links to resources about palestine and i was like ? what exactly are u doing this for!! And also yea the very reason that our tax money becomes blood money is more of a reason to vote and protest!! Idt people realise that we nearly lost the right to protest with the tories, and nearly lost it with trump. We cannot have the perfect candidate that 100% aligns with our views, like they simply dont exist I’m afraid, but surely there are some other dealbreakers like do u wanna lose rights or not? Sigh anyway im scared

#Anonymous

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mc-slowwalker · 3 years ago

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Damn people really come to tumblr only to bitch about shit they started on twitter while not tagging their shit properly yes this is a vague post because I’ve literally never seen anyone so fucking stupid and apathetic towards other people in my goddamn life

#mcyttwt #tdca #yes this is about tdca and if you’re regularly are in the dream tags you know what asshole I’m talking about #like damn at least most twitter folks will attempt to trigger tag shit #they really said what do you mean I have to be a good person #tw negativity #tw discource #wow look at those trigger tags/content warnings!!#anyways I have a moral high ground because I’m not on twitter #/hj

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idreamtofmanderleyagain · 4 years ago

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Hot takes about Severus Snape are a wierdly decent glimpse into how a person with progressive values analyses things. Literally every time someone talks about Snape, it’s like this tiny window into how one-dimentionally people actually think.

Recently saw a twitter post that was a fantastic example. Here’s how it goes (paraphrasing):

Person A:“Snape is POC and Queer coded, that’s why you guy’s hate him uwu lol.”

Person B: “Actually I hate him because he was mean and abusive to children under his care uwu but go off I guess lol”

Both of these takes are designed to be dramatic and/or reactionary. They each use partial truths to paint very broad strokes. These are get-em-in-one-hit quips. This is virtue signalling, if you’ll excuse that loaded phrase. Nobody had a substantial conversation, but now everyone who sees their statement knows the high ground they took.

At least a hundred other people chimed in to add their own little quippy hot takes into play, none of which add anything significant, but clearly made everyone feel very highly of themselves.

So many layers of nuance and complex analysis is completely lost in this kind of discussion. On tumblr, you get more of this kind of bullshit, but you don’t have a word count limit, so you guys just spew endless mountains of weak overblown evidence backing up your bullshit arguments, none of which was really about engaging in a real conversation anyway.

Here’s the thing about Snape.

He is a childhood domestic abuse victim. His abuser is a muggle.

He becomes a student at a magical school that takes him away from his abuser and immediately instills in him the idea that being a part of this magical world is a badge of self-worth, empowerment, and provides safety and security - provided that he keeps in line.

There is a war is being waged in that world over his right to exist (he is a half blood).

He is a marginalized person within the context of the narrative, forced to constantly be in the same living space as the children of his own oppressors who are being groomed and recruited into a hate group militia (the pureblood slytherins). They are in turn trying to do the same to him.

He is marginalized person bullied by children who are also part of his oppressor group, but who have “more liberal” leanings and aren’t direct about why he’s being targeted (the mauraders are all purebloods, Sirius, who was the worst offender, was raised in a bigoted household, the same one that produced Bellatrix.).

He had a crush on a girl who is a muggleborn, and therefore she is considered even lesser than him and carries a stigma to those who associate with her. That girl was his only real friend. In his entire life.

For both Snape and Lily, allying themselves to a pureblood clique within their own houses would be a great way of shielding themselves from a measure of the bigotry they were probably facing. There would have been obvious pressure from those cliques to disconnect with one and other.

Every other person who associates with Snape in his adulthood carries some sort of sociopolitical or workplace (or hate cult) baggage with their association. Some of them will physically harm and/or kill him if he steps out of line. He hasn’t at any point had the right environment to heal and adjust from these childhood experiences. Even his relationship with Dumbledore is charged with constant baggage, including the purebloods who almost killed him during their bullying getting a slap on the wrist, the werewolf that almost killed him as a child being placed in an authority position over new children, etc. Dumbledore is canonically manipulative no matter his good qualities, and he has literally been manipulating Snape for years in order to cultivate a necessary asset in the war.

He is a person who is not in the stable mental state necessary to be teaching children, whom has been forced to teach children. While also playing the role of double agent against the hate group militia, the one that will literally torture you for mistakes or backtalk or just for fun. The one that will torture and kill him if he makes one wrong move.

Is the math clicking yet? From all of this, it’s not difficult to see how everything shitty about Snape was cultivated for him by his environment. Snape was not given great options. Snape made amazingly awful choices, and also some amazingly difficult, courageous ones. Snape was ultimately a human who had an extremely bad life, in which his options were incredibly grim and limited.

In fact, pretty much every point people make about how shitty Snape is as a person makes 100% logical sense as something that would emerge from how he was treated. Some if it he’s kind of right about, some of it is the inevitable reality of suffering, and some of it is part of the cycle of abuse and harm.

Even Snape’s emotional obsession with Lily makes logical sense when you have the perspective that he literally has no substantial positive experiences with other human beings that we know of, and he has an extreme, soul destroying guilt complex over her death. Calling him an Incel mysoginist nice guy projects a real-world political ideology and behavior that does not really apply to the context of what happened to him and her.

Even Snape’s specific little acts of cruelty to certain students is a reflection of his own life experiences. He identifies with Neville; more specifically, he identifies his own percieved emotional weaknesses in his childhood in Neville. There’s a very sad reason there why he feels the urge to be so harsh.

Snape very clearly hates himself, in a world where everyone else hates him, too. Imagine that, for a second. Imagine total internal and external hatred, an yearning for just a little bit of true connection. For years. Imagine then also trying to save that world, even if it’s motivated by guilt. Even if nobody ever knows you did it and you expect to die a miserable death alone.

There are more elements here to consider, including the way Rowling described his looks (there may be something in there re: ugliness and swarthy stereotyping). These are just the things that stand out the most prominently to me.

J.K. Rowling is clearly also not reliable as an imparter of moral or sociopolitical philosophies. I don’t feel that her grasp of minority experiences is a solid one, considering how she picks and chooses who is acceptable and who is a threat.

All of that said, this is a logically consistent character arc. Within the context of his narrative, Snape is a marginalized person with severe PTSD and emotional instability issues who has absolutely no room available to him for self-improvement or healing, and never really has. And yes, he’s also mean, and caustic, and verbally abusive to the students. He’s also a completey miserable, lonely person.

There are elements in his character arc that mirror real world experiences quite well. If nothing else, Rowling is enough of an emotional adult to recognise these kinds of things and portray something that feels authentic.

In my opinion, it’s not appropriate to whittle all this down by comparing him directly to the real world experiences of marginalized groups - at least if you are not a part of the group you are comparing him to. There have been many individuals who have compared his arc to their own personal experiences of marginalization, and that is valid. But generally speaking, comparing a white straight dude to people who are not that can often be pretty offensive. This is not a valuable way to discuss either subject.

Also, I believe that while it’s perfectly okay to not like Snape as a character, many of the people who act like Person B are carrying Harry’s childhood POV about Snape in their hearts well into their own adulthood. And if nothing else, Rowling was attempting to say something here about how our perspectives (should) grow and change as we emotionally mature. She doesn’t have to be a good person herself to have expressed something true about the world in this instance, and since this story is a part of our popular culture, people have a right to feel whatever way they do about this story and it’s characters.

The complexity of this particular snapshot of fictionalized marginalization, and what it reveals about the human experience, cannot be reduced down to “he’s an abuser so he’s not worth anyone’s time/you are bad for liking him.”

And to be honest, I think that it reveals a lot about many of us in progressive spaces, particularly those of us who less marginalized but very loud about our values, that we refuse to engage with these complexities in leu of totally condemning him. Particularly because a lot of the elements I listed above are indeed reflected in real world examples of people who have experienced marginalization and thus had to deal with the resulting emotional damage, an mental illness, and behavior troubles, and bad decisions. Our inability to address the full scope of this may be a good reflection of how we are handling the complexity of real world examples.

Real people are not perfect angels in their victimhood. They are just humans who are victims, and we all have the capacity to be cruel and abusive in a world where we have been given cruelty and abuse. This is just a part of existing. If you cannot sympathise with that, or at least grasp it and aknowledge it and respect the people who are emotionally drawn to a character who refects that, then you may be telling on yourself to be honest.

To be honest, this is especially true if you hate Snape but just really, really love the Mauraduers. You have a right to those feelings, but if you are moralizing this and judging others for liking Snape, you’ve confessed to something about how you’ve mentally constructed your personal values in a way I don’t think you’ve fully grasped yet.

I have a hard time imagining a mindset where a story like Snape’s does not move one to empathy and vicarious grief, if I’m honest. I feel like some people really just cannot be bothered to imagine themselves in other people’s shoes, feeling what they feel and living like they live. I struggle to trust the social politics of people who show these kinds of colors, tbh.

But maybe that’s just me.

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neoheros · 5 years ago

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sneaking out headcanons feat. gym 3 squad ♡ — also this is all gonna be set in an au before or without the quarantine, so don’t leave your house please!! social distancing is important and people are dying!!

kuroo tetsuro

listen LISTEN

sneaking out is terrible and you should never do it because it’s dangerous and risky

and you as the woke and understanding gen z that you are definitely respected that

but , BUT , BUUUUT !

the minute your boyfriend snapped you a photo of him in his car with him rubbing his tired eyes captioned “couldn’t sleep, dreamt of u”

your morals were OUT THE WINDOW and now it was your turn >:// !!!

kuroo: i know it’s 4 am but what’re the chances you’d hop out for a quick trip to chick-fil-a 👉👈

you, purposely taking two minutes to reply: why are you still awake

kuroo, who knows you like the back of his hand: babe don’t lie to me, it’s embarrassing for the both of us x

so you agree !! because it was kuroo, the love of your life, the man you’d simp for, and he’s paying for food so hell fricken yeah

you throw on a hoodie, lock your doors, fluff up the bed to make it look like someone was sleeping in it just in case and you gently make your way towards your window

due to personal reasons, you want to pass away

you suddenly remember why you hated sneaking out and boy — the food kuroo was buying you better be worth it

the only way you were actually gonna get down from your two story house that idiotically doesn’t have a roof ledge was if you grab onto the tv satellite that latched by the sill

from your window you see kuroo’s car parked by the trash cans near your house and he’s got his windshield down signaling at you

mfer pulled out his phone from his pocket and waved as he zooms closer to your figure and he SMILED ?

you were in a dilemma?? and he had the audacity???? the fricken audacity???

kuroo, snapping you the vid he took: babe please you’re so cute you look like a tiny gremlin

you: had me in the first half, not gonna lie

it was a MOMENT for you !! but you just say what the hell and go for it anyways because you only live once apparently and sneaking out with your boyfriend at 4 am was better than sleeping

you grab onto the satellite ridge and you pray for mercy that it doesn’t make a sound or loosen up because if anyone found out you were doing this it was definitely kuroo’s ass on the line

while you’re struggling to get down, kuroo’s just in the car ??? laughing his ass off at your current state and you swear that he’s still taking photos

you get down on the cement safely and instead of him pulling up closer to your drive way naaaah he makes you walk to where he was at 😤

you, getting in the car: if i dump you by the end of tonight, just know that the only reason why i didn’t do it sooner is because i wanted food

kuroo, putting on your seatbelt: we’ll get back together in the morning, i’m not worried

so the two of you make your way to chick-fil-a, get food via drivethru and eat in the parking lot with the doors open and the windows down

he still looks very tired and before you even realize it it’s already 6 in the morning

you catch him yawn every few minutes and he always reassures you that he didn’t mind staying up this late :(

he’s baby

kuroo: lets get you home, are you gonna dump me yet?

you, kissing his cheek: no, i kinda love you

kuroo, less sleepy with a lazy smile on his face: aha simp

tsukishima kei

bro if you think he’s a goody two shoes boy who won’t ask you to sneak out at like 2 in the morning , you are so wrong

canonically, he is the most devious and logical character in the entire anime and if he wants to go out with you before the crack of dawn — he fricken will !!

he’s gonna be so sly about it too, nah, he gon make you think it’s your idea to sneak out

tsukki, texting you a tiktok of homemade shrimp rotini at 2:35 am: look what yamaguchi sent me

yamaguchi, who fell asleep three hours ago and absolutely is not in any state to send tiktoks:

so you’re there like ??????

bruv you were just tryna scroll through your twitter feed in peace, why the hell would he send you that like that’s so uncool

because now you were sleep deprived and hungry

you, close to tears: does your house in hell have a pool or

tsukishima, unnerved: i don’t like the concept of swimming

he’s gonna go on about how he didn’t realize what he did and how he’s kinda sorry for waking your hunger but you weren’t born yesterday !! you smelled BS !!

so you facetime him, ready to go off on how unsorry he is and you can already imagine the shit eating grin he must’ve had on

he answers after three rings and he’s in a MFING yellow hoodie with the dinosaur print in the middle, his hair neatly tucked and you just know that he’s got his keys on his fingertips

you, defeated: i’ve been played

tsukishima, heading out the front door: i deny all accusations

you’re not even upset though because this was a perfect opportunity to try the stability of your roof ledge and tbh? who wasn’t unreasonably hungry at 3 am

turns out climbing out your window was harder than you thought and you may or may not have gotten two new bruises on your wrist just by trying

safe to assume that you fell on your ass and since the universe has a particular hatred towards you, your boyfriend arrived at the perfect time to witness all of it

tsukishima: how are you gonna kiss me when you’re too busy kissing the ground

you, tears on your cheeks: if i wanted a bully instead of a boyfriend i would’ve SAID SO

when you get in his car, the first thing he does is ask if you’re okay though and he’s checking your wrists and hands for any scratches or bleeding because 🥺

tsukki: you’re such a clumsy idiot what the hell

tsukki, kicking down the pavement when you’re not paying attention: 💢🪓

you guys end up going to numerous places because most of the drivethrus in town were already closed

you see him get tired behind the steering wheel and you almost have the urge to offer to drive but you didn’t really feel like crashing his car any day soon so

you: lets just head to starbucks hm? get some coffee?

tsukishima, feeling bad because he knows you wanted to get food: we don’t have to

you, in love with him: if you say no i will willingly walk all the way to starbucks by myself , what , you think i won’t do it

so you guys go there and order a couple double shot espressos with a side of scones and muffins and the entire time you’re just trying not to shiver because name one starbucks you’ve been to that hasn’t been unreasonably cold huh i dare you

he notices this and he gives you his hoodie and ITS JUST THE SOFTEST THING OKAY BECAUSE HE’S COLD TOO BUT HE JUST WANTS YOU WARM

you: i knew it, you love me too huh 😌

tsukishima: unfortunately so

akaashi keiji

AKAASHI IS LEGALLY THE BEST BOYFRIEND IN THE WORLD !!

like he cannot be a bad boyfriend ?? it’s impossible for him to be so ?????? he’s just built that way ????

he’s the ultimate mixture of respect and self love , god was just like “let’s make this one perfect !!”

he’s DRIPPING in love each other juice and he eats kindness for breakfast so ha !

he physically cannot say no to you because he flat out adores you

( except when he feels like you’re wrong or being irrational to which he’ll politely correct you and educate you because that’s on what? that’s on having a healthy relationship ♡ )

so when you hit him up at 5:23 in the morning after a series of tiktoks that he has yet to see and react to you about, he’s kinda alarmed

but then again he’s also not ?? because let’s face it, at this point, he’s used to you spamming his inbox

the last thing you sent him two minutes ago was a text saying “bro just imagine this: you and me at a maccas drivethru with two oreo flurry’s and a box of 20 piece chicken nuggets — immaculate”

and you didn’t really expect him to reply?

it was five am and you were absolutely shit talking but when you saw his face time status go online you were just like ?????

akaashi, snapping you a pic of him under his covers with very tired eyes: it’s 5:27 am

you, sending him back a photo of you and the 2000 piece puzzle you spent the last two hours doing: that’s not a no 💅

he doesn’t reply and you’re not really upset by it because he probably just fell asleep and that was really cute to you so !!

but then two minutes later he’s facetiming you and you JUMP at the sudden ringing

he’s all tired and his voice is groggy and tight but he’s still smiling as he says “i’ll see you in ten”

YOU ARE !!!! PUMPED !!!!!

you won the boyfriend lottery , holy hell

now the only thing keeping you from seeing your man and the mcdonald’s sign was the eleven foot gap between your window and the solid concrete

you’d usually take the stairs but you just know that your mom would absolutely murder you for trying to sneak out when you should be asleep 💆‍♀️

it was either climbing out by clawing through the pipes or not being able to give akaashi a hug and you were not gonna let that second one happen

akaashi, after reading your two paragraph rant on how unnatural it was for your window to be that high: please be careful

you, haven’t slept in 32 hours: screw careful ! i embody elegance !!

in which elegance was screaming every time your pipes squeaked because dear mercy you did not want to die yet

akaashi, who just pulled up your drive way and is now seeing you almost fall to the ground:

you, on the verge of tears: please catch me

AND he does 🥺

it was a close call and he barely even made it to you when you chose to let go but HE DID ANYWAYS

you kinda fell on him rather than landing smoothly in his arms but that’s okay you were just glad you didn’t die

when you both get in his car, he just takes a hot sec to dust you off and ask if you’re okay and he’s so concerned please tell him you’re fine

he’s such a baby please i can’t believe this shit

the two of you end up in a mcdonald’s parking lot with doja cat blaring on the radio and you guys do your best to hold back your laughter as you eat

it was pretty cold and the sun was rising but honestly you couldn’t find the urge to care since the moment just felt so surreal

you: i’m sorry for waking you btw 🥺

akaashi, showing you his new lock screen which is the picture he took of you when he first saw you climb out the window:

you: i’m less sorry

bokuto koutaro

BOYFRIEND OF THE MFING YEAR

i accept no arguments, go cry about it

i literally don’t care what anyone has to say, bokuto is the only man ever ? he’s so deserving of every right on earth i’ll cry

the way that this is the third night in a row he’s stayed up til 4 am and he’s not even alarmed about it

like at this point he’s just accepted that he is nocturnal and that’s that on that !

before he actually had the idea to ask you to sneak out for him, he debated whether or not it was worth it

you needed sleep and you barely got any so when he knew you were resting he absolutely refused to message you :(

but then he also thought about how you would love to have a large dunkin iced coffee right now

and he was already getting ready for his morning fix so why not just ask harmlessly?

if you weren’t going to respond then he’d be okay with that because he knew that you were resting well

but if you were going to answer his consecutive texts with a positive reply then HE IS 🥺 over the moon

you, barely awake: can we get a venti triple shot latté instead , my caffeine tolerance is SHOT

bokuto, snapping you back within a minute: babe you are delusional if you think i’m gonna let you drink that

so it’s 5 am and your parents are in the other room asleep but you know that their jobs start pretty early so you had to get a move on

your room wasn’t that high from the ground to be honest, so you weren’t really worried about falling off

what you were worried about was how dizzy and out of depth the melatonin gummies made you because in order to fall asleep you took 3 and now that you basically forced yourself out of a self induced coma, your body was on the verge of passing away

bokuto tells you that he doesn’t mind if you’re not up for the trip and he’d just bring you back your coffee BUT NAH

you’re not a quitter 🤬 you miss your boyfriend and you are gonna do whatever it takes to spend some quality morning time with him !!!!!

so you throw on a proper outfit, make your way through your window and gently do your best to refrain from yelping every time your hand would slip from the railing that’s keeping your balance

bokuto, pulling up seeing you on your roof: you’re so strong 🥺👉👈

you, barely alive: all for you baby ❤️

he helps you get down from where you stood and he had the prettiest smile on earth i SWEAR when you immediately sank in his cold chest

he apologizes for making you sneak out like that BUT NUH UH YOU DO NOT LET HIM

he is a gift !!! and you knew how tired he must’ve been too since he kept yawning but he still took the time and energy to pick you up 🥺

he fastens your seatbelt in the car and puts the windows up because he knew that the air would get in your face and you didn’t like that

he even brought you a spare hoodie of his because he remembered how much you swooned over this particular fabric

bokuto: we’ll get you some coffee but you can sleep while i drive, ok babe?

you, trying not to cry: are you single because i really want to kiss you

bokuto, kissing your cheek: i’m dating someone i’m sorry

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shijiujun · 4 years ago

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i feel kinda bad for shl cos all the fans of hyx and spl are blaming shl since their dramas are being delayed :(

LMAO I really don’t get that altho i can see that the timing might be a little back to back, and i’m not a SHL-only stan by any measure but:

For HYX especially,

Firstly it was already having problems since the end of last year with censorship and review. This is mostly due to the reason that 2ha is a pretty big fandom and is the cult fave in the danmei industry - what this means is that there are three types of fans basically right, (1) Normal fans who love the novel + show (2) Those who fanatically love the novel in some extreme ways haha (3) Those who hate it and/or are HYX-onlys - so you get it all in a bag.

The first type of fans is definitely the easier ones to deal with, but unfortunately in big fandoms you get a lot of (2) and (3). It’s not something that’s exclusive only to 2ha/HYX but because it’s a cult fave, and a controversial one at that, problems definitely arise.

(2) are the ones who head down to the filming scenes, take photos and footage despite crew telling ppl not to do it, not to sneak around filming sites and definitely not to leak photos or footage. They do it anyway. Yeah sure of course it’s a couple of photos every few weeks or a tiny video every few weeks but word gets out. They’re inevitably hurting the show and the fandom with their actions, because shit trends on Weibo really fast, and the censorship committee (not just for the film industry or shows) is always lurking on the site to catch any sign of you know, hate speech for the country etc. and more. Not related, but the point is that social media is watched very closely. It’s not a myth or an exaggeration, you really just got to be careful, and HYX is a show that, despite not having been broadcasted, has consistently trended on Weibo over the last few months. Not always because of leaks, but yeah, HYX is in everyone’s faces. Fans themselves put a fucking huge spotlight on the show BEFORE we even have any content at all, and of course this isn’t enough to like create huge trouble for the show but then we have-

(3), which I believe creates the most trouble - the thing is 2ha and meatbun who wrote the book, has a long line of haters and antis, way before HYX came into the picture. I shall not go into details of how I’ve seen some big accounts on Tumblr here spit vitriol at the book without even reading it just based on the content/trigger warnings and playing the morality card (and I think most ppl who’ve followed me for a while know just what I think about that). Like this was way before any footage or leaks or even HYX being a thing came about - as a cult fave it has its share of haters, and this share is a huge. There are those who get off on their moral high grounds XD and I think especially these ones are the most troublesome, all they have to do is report that HYX is immoral, bad for culture etc. etc. hahaha and yeah the censorship team is always ready to step in on reports, especially on BL stuff.

And of course the larger part is the change in censorship processes - honestly even way before SHL came out in end Feb, HYX was no closer to getting passed by the review committee than it is now. Maybe yes, SHL scenes may be now used as reference for comparison but seriously? People are deluding themselves if they thought pre-SHL HYX was going through the review process smoothly and only hit roadblocks after. I mean, we’ve all seen the leaks, some of them are truly like god-tier scenes that may be hard to explain away. It’s not like they can repackage the script especially because they have to submit everything to the review committee.

I mentioned this in a post yesterday but how SHL passed reviews is due to the fact that they didn’t have to submit a full script. They only had to submit a partial script, and that makes a world of difference. Basically a team, under these requirements, can repackage the script to include the more het looking parts even I feel, and of course some heavy misdirection by the team, it could work. Now that you have to put an entire script up for scrutiny.. I mean, it’s hard. This is just a game of probability.

And the last reason I think is still Tencent. Honestly, I’ve never seen a huge ass MNC like this handle a show this terribly.

1. No control over leaks - This is honestly the dumbest shit to do

2. Terrible crisis management response time - When fans leak footage, it’s standard and practical business sense to control it IMMEDIATELY. They shouldn’t just leave it up to the crew to put up notices and as the company that owns the rights to the show, it’s up to them to possibly threaten legal action as well. Basically a sterner stance would have helped a lot, but Tencent is a motherfucker of a company who only cares about free marketing and publicity without any considerations over impact to the show itself

3. Terrible at communicating with fans - Seriously, I’ve never seen a company or team that’s been this bad at confirming delays etc. and providing updates about a show. I understand that it’s mostly due to them not wanting to affect the review process or create more chaos within the fandom but lmao Tencent allowed the hype to build so much and then goes absolutely silent at crazy rumours. I mean we had to find out about a delay from Cai Bao, their cat mascot, like??? In a really veiled and poetic message that didn’t outright say the word ‘delay’ like damn these ppl have a lot of time

As for SPL,

Lol we don’t know anything about this show. We don’t know if they took out or left in the Yifu part that would supposedly make it less gay or whatever, we don’t know anything about how gay it should have been or could have, so this one might be a tad more ridiculous. I mean none of us have seen any good leaks, and we haven’t seen any of the script, we got ZERO idea about this. Maybe they really went hard on the bromance, how would any of us know hahaha so all the more it’s like people have zero basis to go on, to say that it’s because of SHL. Seriously, everyone’s shooting in the dark.

Technically if laws didn’t change last Feb, I think SPL/WIK should have been passed in the same way as SHL did, but it’s just inopportune time for them.

===

- So tl:dr HYX already had tons of problems, that I doubt were going to go away just because SHL didn’t air, honestly. For SPL, it’s really hard to tell what failed the review, because none of us know what’s going on in the script.

No one cared about SHL, even I only realized the show was airing on the day itself and then made a rec post after I watched the first 4 eps. And if it truly was anything to do with SHL, I’m telling you that the first thing the censorship committee will do is basically shut SHL down, get Youku to take it off sites etc. until it’s reviewed again etc. etc. That hasn’t happened yet, at least not before HYX and SPL were stalled.

===

ALSO!! Don’t have to feel sorry for SHl fans hahaha I’m telling ya a lot of us definitely weren’t OG SHL or TYK fans, seriously! All the bigger accounts I see on Twitter are a combination of CQL/SHL or MXTX/SHL, SPL/SHL and I am personally 2HA/HYX/SHL. The fight is all out on Twitter HAHAHAHA but it’s not that bad, we’ve all got practice. Seriously WHO ACTUALLY is an SHL only stan I’ve honestly not seen much?! HAHAHA the point is we’re all yelling on behalf of SHL as a cross fandom fan, easier for us to do so as well. We’re talking about 2ha/HYX/SPL/Priest dedicated accounts that delved deep into SHL championing for no-nonsense in the space hahaha

#asks #shl #hyx #spl #and while i've never worked for the chinese film industry #i was in film and production #so i half know what i'm talking about #and i did ask a friend who works in a chinese film company #and yep ;/#if you need to know how disastrous big companies are #tencent is a prime example

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tarantulas4davey · 3 years ago

Text

Ufc Fighter Albert Dasilva Headcanons

hello, people who still follow me despite the fact i never post cause i’m a mess. how y’all doin? my favorite ufc fighter won the other day so now ✨this is what we’re doing✨. also i originally sent this thought to @we-are-inevitable ‘s ask box so find that post here (hi jac ilysm mwah mwah mwah)

i also wrote a part 2 so find that here !!

also,,,,, this is fairly obvious. but trigger warning for violence/physical fighting, and well as blood and injury. (it’s a rough gig y’all fjdhdb)

i sincerely apologize in advance for what a mess this post is gonna be i just had a monster and i’m hyped up on the win and this is a hyperfixation i don’t get to talk about very often so feel free to ask questions and HERE WE FUCKIN GO

OK SO

albert is just,,,,,, a violent sports guy. always has been, probably always will be.

most forms of recreational fighting, football, hockey, rugby, fuck even soccer if he gets too into it. he’s just a Built Person, and he wicked competitive, and that makes for violent displays of athleticism

I think he was probably a hockey or football guy in high school, but he was also on the wrestling team cause i said so

then after graduation he got really into kickboxing, just to have something to do cause he didn’t have school sports to play and train for all the time

and then one day his coach is like ‘hey. you’re like,,, stupid good at this. you should sign up for competitions, you might make some money.’

he does, in fact, ‘make some money’, cause in straight kickboxing? he’s pretty much unmatched on the regional scene, which is ridiculous cause he didn’t start training his stand up game til he was 18 or 19

then American Top Team (ATT, it’s a really big MMA training camp that had trained a boat load of the top talent in the UFC) approaches him like ‘y’know if you worked on your grappling you could be a really solid mma fighter’

which is HUGE, but obviously albert can’t pick up his entire life and move to florida to train with them, so him and race (this is me, of course race is with al. supportive boyfriend and number one fan alert <3) find gyms willing to work with him based in new york. then he starts signing up for shit.

he sticks with stand up fighting when he can, he likes it more and cause,,,,, well. it’s more entertaining. the higher your entertainment value, the more people watch your fights. the more people watch your fights, the more likely you are to get noticed by big promotions (like the ufc)

he uses his wrestling to keep grapplers on their feet (he’s got like a 90% takedown defense, what an icon) and he picks people apart.

he has a lot of technical skill, but he also is fiery and passionate and scrappy. he gets hit too much for his own good a lot of the time.

he’s super durable. this man can get hit clean over and over and stay on his feet, but that’s not gonna hold up forever. it takes a loss or two in a row to motivate him to change it

and oh boy does he change it

he spends a month in auckland, new zealand at city kickboxing (one of the best kickboxing gyms in the world, and they lean heavily on tactics rather than just charging forward blindly)

he’s straight up a different fighter after that. he’s quick, light on his feet, and avoids punches way easier while also setting up the angles for his own. he gets signed to the ufc 2 fights later.

his first fight is short notice. no training camp, he’s got 5 days to make weight, AND it’s against a top 10 ranked opponent. no big deal, right?

and albert, being albert, is super chill about it. sure, this is the opportunity of a lifetime, could decide his entire future as a fighter, and he’s barely got time to prepare.

but he’s in the gym every single day of the week, he doesn’t super cut on weight like most ex-wrestlers, and most importantly, it’s just fighting. all he has to do is get in the octagon and punch some dude in the face. he can do that all day.

race on the other hand,,,,,,,,

he believes in albert with his whole soul, he really does, but Fuck watching your boyfriend get hit in the head is no fucking fun. especially when you know that the guy throwing the punches has been training for months, and your guy hasn’t even had a week

so he brings jack for moral support. also cause jack is DEFINITELY a ufc fan and was the only one that would understand what was happening.

at some point in the first round albert gets caught clean, opening a cut on his cheek, which makes race Panic Even More

but he gets cleaned up between rounds, and it’s not swelling so he can still see, and it’s over by the middle of the second.

and albert wins, cause (this is fiction and i’m telling a story) of fucking course he does, and he probably wins with some stupid dramatic spinning back kick and gets clipped on twitter cause he’s just Like That

the part that makes me, as the ralbert shipper, super fucking happy is coming up but i need to add a lil real talk first

considering albert is like,,,, openly in a relationship with a man when he gets into the ufc,,,,, that makes him the first publicly gay ufc fighter. like,,,, ever.

this is realized after his hand gets raised after the ref calls the stoppage.

bruce buffer makes the official announcement, al gets his hand raised, he gets interviewed by joe rogan, and then his coaches, jack and race get to come into the cage

at first everyone things it’s a best friend or something, especially after the dap up bro hug things he gives his coaches and jack

but then albert sees race, and you can watch this boy’s face light up on the camera. then race throws his arms around albert’s neck and albert half lifts him off the ground in a hug around his waist and ok, sure, that’s not the most platonic thing you’ve ever seen, but that doesn’t prove anything

and then albert kisses race. like full, actual, on the mouth in front of all the cameras kiss. cause he doesn’t give a shit.

and nobody’s talking about his spinning back kick anymore, cause Holy Shit That Wasn’t Very Straight Of You Dasilva

but he doesn’t address it, cause every other fighter gets to kiss their wife or girlfriend or whatever in the cage after they win and nobody bats an eye, so why should it be any different for him and his boyfriend?

also, because it needs to be said, statistically there are ALREADY lgbtq+ male fighters in the ufc. like currently, in real life. they’re just not out publicly. the ufc has openly supported queer people’s rights in the past, and is partnered with 4 prominent HIV/AIDS awareness organizations. there is multiple openly queer women currently fighting in the ufc, including amanda nunes, who has been repeatedly called the greatest women’s fighter of all time. but as of right now, there is no openly mlm ufc fighters, so that would technically make albert the first. we love a trend setter. now back to what i’m supposed to be talking about djdhdbd

and eventually interviewers and fans on twitter realize that they’re only going to get one answer to vague questions about sexuality, which is “i’m dating a man and i fight people for a living. if that makes me a revolutionary, so be it bro.”

he includes race in a lot of his answers, especially in interviews where they ask more personal questions or grill him on his mental game, cause he loves race and thinks he deserves credit for everything he does to make al a better person and a better fighter

also, purely for my own entertainment, i think after he becomes champion (cause of course he does) he goes on the joe rogan podcast, and joe is pretty much the only one who gets albert to talk about any of it in a genuine way

he doesn’t get sarcasm or a blunt “can we talk about fighting, now?” like everyone else, he gets a real answer, cause that’s what albert came on to do anyway

he talks about getting together in highschool, and how it was race’s idea for him to start kickboxing in the first place, and what a fucking genius race is and how he’s getting his PhD right now, and how he didn’t want to talk about it cause he didn’t want to be the “gay fighter”, and how that’s a trivialization of his relationship with race and he refuses to let it be seen as anything but what it is, which is the best fucking thing that’s ever happened to him

just. Ugh. them <3

THIS POST IS SO LONG HOLY SHIT DHDHDHDH

anyway-

y e a h. albert dasilva would rock anyone’s shit. if i keep having thoughts about this i’ll make one about him becoming champion. thank you for your time ✨

also gonna tag @soaps-posts cause the brainrot is powerful so here you are my dear <3

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lispectore · 4 years ago

Text

hello, so i was going to make this yesterday but because of everything that happened i thought it would be better to not bring more drama to your dashboard, however i still want to speak about this because it bothered me so much.

i don’t know if many of you know but i’m an active member of the 404cord, and especially of the channel “critical thoughts”. this channel, for those of you who are not part of the server, is a channel where we have discussions about topics that may have bothered us at some point, be it related to minecraft youtubers, content creators or life events. it’s a great place to hear about other people’s point of views, their experiences and discuss your different opinions without being rude. it’s an amazing place because everyone is extremely respectful even when we’re not agreeing with each other.

so here comes the trouble, yesterday a certain person on tumblr started to get anonymous asks about things that were bothering them on the 404cord which is fair, everyone has the right to feel uncomfortable and complain (although i do feel like the person should’ve talked to the mods, instead of a person who’s not even part of the server). anyways, this is not my point, my point is that this person, who i’m not going to mention because they're a minor, also tweeted about the 404cord, keep in mind that they’re not part of it and they don’t know anything that goes on there.

this person especially bought the topic of when we were talking about the jimmy jacobs stream and completely distorted what we were talking about, but that’s okay because they’re not part of the server and they couldn’t see the entire conversation, but what bothered me is that they were mocking the use of a word (a word that i said myself, the word for reference is microaggression btw) by a non-english speaker. i get that you have this moral high ground and this ego that you’re better than everyone, but be careful when you’re mocking a non-english speaker and saying that they will embarrass themselves for speaking a language that is not their mother tongue.

also be more careful of what you say when you don’t know the full context of things and spread it to other platforms. the 404cord is a tumblr based server, i don’t know why you’re bringing that to twitter, next time before you complain about something at least be part of the server to know what you’re talking about. :)

#long post #negativity cw #discourse cw #zee rants

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qqueenofhades · 4 years ago

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I was already distressed about the political and social situation in the US, and then this happens. Are there any examples of societies that fought back against fascism and won, without civil or international war breaking out? Surely there must be some success stories in history. How did other societies overcome fascism, are there lessons to be applied to our current situation? Please tell me we're not doomed, because I have no hope for the future.

Sigh.

Okay.

I’ve been through... a lot of the stages of grief by now. That is, rageposting on tumblr, venting to my friends via text, drinking, crying while drinking, lying on my bed and staring at the ceiling, feeling the crushing weight of certainty that we’re all screwed and nothing matters, crying while talking to my sister, crying generally, lying in bed some more, and am currently still in bed while writing this, but am struggling to put on my internet historian aunt hat and offer some comfort to the stricken masses.

First off: This is bad. I’m not even going to pretend this isn’t bad. We all knew RBG had cancer again, but it was pretty fixed in our minds that she would somehow manage to hang on until after the election. 45 days before the biggest presidential election of all time, in the middle of this year, when names including Ted “Zodiac Killer” Cruz and Tom “Time for Roe vs. Wade to go, block federal funding from being used to teach about slavery, send in the military to crush the BLM protesters” Cotton have already been floated as some of her possible replacements? With Trump and McConnell determined to work as fast as possible to steal this seat as brazenly as they can, because they are literal fascists who don’t care about their own example (Merrick Garland was nominated in FEBRUARY of an election year and McConnell held it up for being “too close to the election?”)

Ugh. Anyone who doesn’t get that this is bad or acting like people are overreacting doesn’t get what’s at stake. And when, as we’ve said before and are saying again now, the future of everyone who isn’t a white straight rich Republican man in this country depends on an 87-year-old woman with cancer for the fourth time? Something’s wrong here. RBG’s death did not have to leave us in this total existential panic, and oh yeah, maybe this could have ALL BEEN AVOIDED AND WE COULD HAVE ALSO HAD THREE (3) NEW LIBERAL JUSTICES SECURING PROGRESSIVE LEGISLATION FOR A GENERATION IF SOME OF YOU HAD JUST FUCKING VOTED FOR HILLARY CLINTON IN TWO THOUSAND AND FUCKING SIXTEEN.

(Why yes I am still mad about that, I will be bitter until the end of time that we were consigned to four years and counting of this completely avoidable nightmare because of apathy, misogyny, and Leftist Moral Purity TM, but we’re talking about the future and what can still be done here, not what’s in the past.)

Anyway. Here’s the bright side, which admittedly sucks right now, but it’s been the answer all long:

VOTE.

You have to fucking vote, and you have to fucking vote for Biden/Harris. Everything that we’ve been talking about is no longer a hypothetical; it’s happening right now. This is not just some Awful Worst Case scenario, and it’s not somehow being spouted by privileged white liberals ignoring the struggles of the masses. (Viz: that awful fucking text post with its simpering self-righteousness: “are you punching nazis or just telling oppressed people to vote blue?” I hate that text post with a fiery passion and it’s the exact kind of morally holier than thou leftist propaganda that wouldn’t surprise me if it was generated by a troll farm in Krasnoyarsk.) My dad is disabled and lives on Social Security. Trump’s second-term plan to end the payroll tax takes SSID out by mid-2021, so... I guess that’s my dad fucked then. I’m a gay woman with long-term mental illness, no healthcare, no savings, no current job, and a lot of student debt. My sister has complex health problems and relies intensely on publicly funded healthcare programs. All my family have underlying conditions that would put them at worse risk for COVID (age, asthma, immune issues.) These are just the people IN MY HOUSEHOLD who would be at risk from a second Trump presidency. It says NOTHING about my friends, about all the people far less fortunate than us, and everyone else who IS ALREADY DYING as this nation lurches into full-blown fascism. That is real. It is happening.

Here’s the good news and what you can do:

Democrats are fired up and mad as hell, and they’ve already donated $31 million between the announcement of RBG’s death last night and today, and that number is climbing every second.

You can help by donating to Get Mitch or Die Trying, which splits your donation 13 ways between the Democrats challenging the most vulnerable Republican seats in the Senate. That also has raised EIGHT MILLION BUCKS in the less-than-twenty-four hours.

You can donate RIGHT NOW to Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, vote if your state offers early voting, request your mail-in ballot, or hound everyone you know to ensure that they’re registered.

You can call your US Senators (look up who they are for your state, ESPECIALLY IF THEY ARE REPUBLICAN OR YOU LIVE IN A SWING STATE OR ARE UP FOR RE-ELECTION IN 2020) and phone the Capitol switchboard at 202-224-3121 to voice your insistence that they respect RBG’s last wishes and refuse to vote on any Trump nominee until after January 2021.

The other good-ish news is that I woke up to an email from the Biden campaign this morning about how they’re well aware of this and they’re already on it. BUT WE CANNOT COUNT ON EITHER THEM OR THE SENATE DEMOCRATS TO BE ABLE TO STOP IT. Because Joe Biden is not president and the Senate Democrats do not have a majority, if the Republicans manage to rush a nominee and a vote and all 52 GOP senators vote for that nominee, hey presto, tyranny by majority, a SECOND stolen Supreme Court seat, and a 6-3 hard conservative majority for the next generation. Even if Roberts or Gorsuch sometimes defect on procedural grounds, Kagan, Sotomayor, and Breyer (who is also 82 and thus ALSO might soon be replaceable, thus resulting in an EVEN WORSE ideological swing) would be outnumbered on everything. This is terrible. I’m not even gonna pretend it wouldn’t be.

BUT:

If Joe Biden is elected with a Democratic Senate and House, IT MATTERS. It gets us off the fascism track, it gives us the ability to make progressive law and have it enacted without going to die in Mitch McConnell’s Kill Stack, it gives Biden the executive authority to nominate liberal judges and change Trump’s worst outrages on day 1, it stands as a huge example of a nation managing to reject fascism by democratic process, and while yes, we’d still have a terribly rigged Supreme Court, Democrats would control all the other branches of government and be able to put safeguards in place. The other option is outright fascism and the end of American democracy for good. This may sound alarmist. It’s not. It’s literally what the situation has ended up as, as all of us who were begging people to vote for HRC in 2016 saw coming all along.

So yes. That’s what you need to do, and what WE need to do. We need to make as much goddamn noise as possible, protest, contact elected representatives, make sure everybody pulls their weight and ferociously fights the promised attempt to ram through a new justice before Election Day, all that. But even if that does happen, THEN WE NEED TO FUCKING DONATE, ORGANIZE, AND VOTE FOR JOE BIDEN AND DEMOCRATS UP AND DOWN THE BALLOT. ALL OF US. NO EXCUSES. NO MORE TWITTER LEFTIST ECHO CHAMBERS. NO MORE. THEN, EVEN WITH A RIGGED SUPREME COURT, WE WILL ALL BE SAFER ON NOVEMBER 4TH AND CAN TRY TO FIX WHAT’S BROKEN.

The stakes are just too high to do anything else.

May her memory be a blessing, and a revolution.

#politics for ts #bury me in a mountain of salt #then vote #the end #humoristhefirstcasualty #ask

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ryuichirou · 4 years ago

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I saw one very stupid post on my dash about how snk is OBVIOUSLY nazi propaganda and trying to convert all of us into imperialists and white supremacists. tbh it’s not the first time I’ve seen that kind of stuff and probably won't be the last, but for some reason this time it gave me a lot of anxiety (I got wordy, I'mma need to send another ask, sorry)

(part 2) It's been more than half and hour and I still feel this awful sensation in my chest. It's just overall pretty fucked how to have something you hold dear being misinterpreted in the worst way possible, and I was just wondering what are your thoughts on this situation or how you deal with people claiming all sorts of awful shit.

(part 3) I imagine that as an artist some people probably direct their issues with snk towards you, 'cause I don't even post that much fanart and I've gotten anons "trying to educate me" on why this series is so wrong, after posting drawings. Of course, you don't have to reply, maybe the topic makes you anxious too and I don't want to bother you, so sorry for the depressing topic (｡•́︿•̀｡)

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

Tiiish, I want to hug you, I’m really sorry that this happened to you. I hope you’re feeling a little bit better now.

Like we already mentioned a while ago, when we were talking about that darn article, after we read through it and did a little fact checking (and I mean it when I say a little, because there weren’t many facts to check), we stopped caring about it. It’s not research at all, just a manipulatively written speculation on Yam’s motives and worldview, but sadly, people easily believe these accusations because they hate SnK and want to find a valid reason to hate it and shit on its fanbase. Because “I hate it because it’s nazi propaganda” sounds much cooler than “I hate it because it’s popular”, doesn’t it?

It’s easier to ignore the article itself though, and it’s much harder not to think about tumblr posts or those Twitter threads that get very popular (although there are a lot of bots on twitter, trust me…), and it’s especially difficult to ignore it when it’s specifically directed at you. But the only thing that these people deserve is a good ol’ block and (if they’re getting too offensive and abusive) a report for harassment. The thing is, their opinion doesn’t matter: it won’t change SnK’s story, it won’t affect its success and popularity, it doesn’t affect anything other than our mood (temporarily lol). Because they aren’t critics who actually give a flying fuck about the subject matter, they’re just random assholes with a hateboner for SnK, who sit in their echochamber and discuss the same shit over and over again. And if they’re “fans” of the SnK, it’s just them “consuming it critically” 🙄 such a convenient phrase and so easy to abuse.

If we think about these accusations again… they’re so damn nonsensical, it’s almost amazing. I’m not going to reread it or to make a proper counterpoint article out of this ask, so this is just based on how we remember these accusations.

Like, what part of SnK approves and pushes the idea of imperialism in any way? When the entire idea of the story is that war is bad? When people like Onyankopon, whose homeland was invaded by Marley, exist? And it’s never portrayed as a good thing? Having only one country dominating the world’s situation is literally the main reason why everyone’s suffering??

And come to think of it, Isayama is one of the few manga artists to kind of sort of openly critique Japan: he literally drew Kiyomi losing her cool and drooling while thinking about all the profit and wealth she would get from the deal with Paradis. Why do people never talk about that? What is it, if not a critique of greedy and two-faced nature of people from Azumabito clan, who are heavily implied to represent Japan? I don’t read a lot of manga in general, but do you know how many mangakas I’ve seen who directly talked shit about Japan while being Japanese? Two. Excluding Isayama.

Isayama is clearly invested in the Western culture and he understands the World’s History. He understands that political relationships are complex and that there are no “bad” or “good” countries. I don’t want to make assumptions about how much perspective of the world’s relationships the average person from Japan has, but I still feel like Yams has a pretty good understanding of it. He did his research for the subject matter, and while it’s obviously not perfect, it’s clearly there.

These people also claim that SnK is anti-Korean and anti-Semitic, but if Hetalia had taught me anything, it is that if the story has or used to have any anti-Korean undertones, the Korean readers wouldn’t want to have anything to do with it. They would be the first people to ditch the manga, they would be the first people to critique SnK, and rightfully so. They burnt Uniqlo clothes, their overall domestic policy is pretty anti-Japanese, so there’re literally zero reasons for them not to destroy SnK if they see it as anti-Korean. But the size of the Korean SnK fandom suggests otherwise, doesn’t it.

And the “big noses = Jewish caricature” argument, seriously? How anti-Semitic can you get? Who the fuck looks at people and goes “oh, those have big noses, bet they’re caricature of Jews”?? Sorry I’m getting heated lol The argument about “Asian artists portray Westerners with prominent noses because that’s what we look like to them” has been done a lot of times, I’m not going to go over than again.

And god forbid Isayama to use Germany and Europe to draw a story where his characters are (approximately) Germans and Europeans! Let’s go fetch our pitchforks to punish Isayama for using their aesthetic to make his story look more believable and authentic, right? “Oh, those areas where they hold Eldians resemble places from real life”, like no shit???? Ofc they would??? That’s what references for making the story more grounded are used for??? If I were to write a story about a fictional place based on a real one that I don’t live in, I’d use some visual references to help me to make it more believable??? Why do I even need to explain that?

In my previous post I talked about the armbands and ghetto and stuff, but I’ll reiterate: even if there are thematic similarities, it doesn’t mean that the story mirrors our history. And it doesn’t mean that there is an analogy, since Eldian’s situation is quiiiite different than what Jewish people had to go through. It’s just thematic similarities. And it still doesn’t plant any specific idea in the reader’s head, other than “having people shoved into ghettos with 0 civil rights is a horrible thing”, and I can’t comprehend what’s anti-Semitic or imperialistic about it. Also I’m sorry, but nazis are not the only people who genocided a bunch of people, breaking news. Nor did they invent armbands. Same goes for Japan in WWII.

And now for my favourite argument: Erwin is nazi because his name is Erwin and he was born on the same day than some nazi guy died… I won’t even talk about why this idea is hilariously stupid, I just want to appreciate the level of nitpicking that’s going on here.

So… yeah. People who have nothing else to do but to complain about the show they hate don’t matter. And people who consider themselves a part of the SnK fandom and still say this bs (yep, there are people who do that) are huge hypocrites. The heck are they doing in this fandom then?? Of course, any story is up to interpretation, but this is so backwards?

Sorry for rambling so much… anyways. We’re happy enough not to encounter any hate related to this topic, but we think it’s because we ship Ereri and people already hate us for that, so the majority of shit we get is related to that, I guess we’re a lost cause for them. We’ll see if anything happens after this post though.

But once again, I’m very sorry that you had to go through this. Please remember that this isn’t personal at all, and people who harass strangers on the internet just want to flex their high moral ground while acting like complete assholes. You don’t have to explain anything to them, you don’t have to talk to them, you don’t have to listen to them or give them any attention. I hope you’ll never stumble upon anything like this; but if you ever do, please block them, don’t even bother reading their attempts at “educate” you. Isn’t worth it.

Please have a good day, Tish. And everyone who’s reading this reply.

#replies

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duhragonball · 3 years ago

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Disinterpretation

I finally finished the Sarah Z video about “pro vs. anti”. It’s pretty long, and I ended up watching it in chunks over several days, but I think it’s worth watching, especially if you’re sort of partially connected to online fandom, but not enough to be aware of all the lingo.

As I expected, the whole thing was vague and confusing because the people involved in the conflict made it vague and confusing. In theory, the full terms would be “pro-shipping” and “anti-shipping”, but it seems like it’s more about particular kinds of ships that could be considered controversial. But that’s a slippery slope, and apparently the whole conflict mutated into both sides deciding that every hypothetical relationship between fictional characters is either equally valid or equally dangerous.

Long story short, it’s just purity culture, which was what everyone on Tumblr was calling it around 2012. But now, if you’re a sane person who genuinely asks: “Who gives a fuck about Voltron?”, these people will jump your ass and accuse you of being on the side of their enemies. “Children have died over the importance of Lotor/Hagger! Your callous indifference proves that you yourself must have murdered children!”

I think what Sarah Z really hit upon in this video was that media consumption has become so ingrained in our culture that people feel like it has to go hand-in-hand with our morality. That is, it’s not enough for me to watch Star Trek, I have to justify Star Trek as evidence that I’m a good person. Maybe this is where the expression “guilty pleasure” comes from. Conversely, it’s not enough for me to not watch Dr. Who, I have to somehow convince everyone that Dr. Who was invented by the devil.

I’m pretty sure the Reylo ship has a lot to do with this, since it’s kind of understood to be a dark, problematic concept, and fans either embrace its flaws or recoil in horror because of them. Star Wars itself is a dumb story about space wizards, so people try to give the debate more weight by linking it to freedom of self expression and/or enabling real world harm. Suddenly it’s not enough to just think two actors would look cute making out instead of fighting. Now it’s this battlefield for the soul of civilization or something.

I grew up in the 80′s, when “concerned parents” and grifters would accuse the Smurfs and metal bands of promoting satanism and witchcraft. I used to hear stories of teens going out into the woods in the middle of the night to do occult stuff, and all I could ever think about was: “Why would anyone bother wandering out in the woods in the middle of the night?” Which is why “concerned parents” turned their attention to things that were closer to home, like Saturday morning cartoons. It had nothing to do with the content; it was just about finding a safe, accessible target for their hysteria. Some people want to go on a crusade without leaving the house, so they pick a fight with Papa Smurf instead of confronting the real evils in the world. Even as a kid, I knew this was a con, because I’d watched the show for myself and knew it was too saccharine to be threat to anyone.

The pro/anti folks have tried to disguise this with a lot of terminology. I wondered why they seemed to reluctant to use the full terms “pro-shipper” and “anti-shipper”, and it’s probably a couple of things. First, the word “shipper” is basically an admission that this is pointless bullshit that doesn’t matter, and they’d like to avoid that connotation. Second, they seem to have decided that this goes beyond shipping itself, into practically anything else they want it to involve. It’s all part of the con, which is to make you believe that it’s “us vs. them”, and you can be part of “us” by curating specific attitudes about Steven Universe.

Seriously, “about Steven Universe” is such an incredible punchline. You can make anything funnier by adding those three words to the end of a sentence. “Do not interact if you blog about Steven Universe.” “Hey, what’s up, YouTube, this is SSJ3RyokoLover69, and this is going to be kind of a serious video about Steven Universe.” “Mrs. Johnson, the results of your biopsy are in, and I have some bad news about Steven Universe.” It’s a fucking kids show. “Oh no, all the characters look like the characters in all the other kids shows!” Yeah, that’s because it’s a kids show. Marvin looks like Garfield, this isn’t new.

The common denominator here seems to be that both sides try to wrap themselves in the flag of vulnerable groups: impressionable minors, trauma survivors, harassment victims, etc. The “pros” want to protect those people so that they can feel free to explore weird subject matter on their own terms, and the “antis” want to protect the same people from being exposed to weird subject matter that they might not want to see. It’s all about establishing a moral high ground. Back in the day, it was called “sanctimony”.

But people get roped into this, because at their core, people want approval, and this stupid conflict offers them a sense of community. As long as you support the cause, whatever it may be, you’ll have this online friend network that appears to support anything you do. But if you deviate from their norm, you’ll be cast out. Does this sound familiar?

To use a more familiar example, I still sometimes find people clamoring about Gochi vs. Vegebul. I’ve never understood this, because both ships were canon, and I never saw much direct evidence of a war between them, but people would still talk about how crazy the Vegebul shippers were, and how crazy the Gochi shippers were, and it was like some huge thing going on just over the hills. It’s the same idea, since the idea that you could like both or neither never seems to occur to anyone involved. I never gave a shit, because I used to see the same dumb agendas in the Harry Potter fandom.

Okay, so let me take you back. It’s 2005 through 2011, and I’m hateblogging all seven Harry Potter novels, because fuck you, that’s why. The funny thing I encountered was that occasionally fans seemed to want to pretend like my bashing of certain characters was proving them right somehow. They were like “See? He hates Ron Weasley too! That proves that Seamus Finnegan is the coolest guy ever.” The Slytherin stans would do this all the time, because I would constantly take the piss out of the Gryffindor characters for being self-important dopes. I think they just liked hearing it from an outside perspective. But I had to keep reminding them all that I hated all of them. Every character from Harry Potter sucks ass. Voldemort was my favorite, but only because he was the one guy who wanted to kill all of the others. But he sucks too because he failed.

And the shippers were the same way. I’d say something shitty about Ron, because Ron sucks, and some smartass Joss Whedon fan would be like “Yes! Boost the signal! That is why Harry/Hermione is the best ship!” And I’d be like “No, Harry and Hermione suck at least as bad as Ron does. They’re all terrible and I hate them.” I really do think there was some sort of Stockholm Syndrome going on with Harry Potter books, where everyone secretly knows they suck, but the fans sort of latch on to one or two characters and go like “Well, he’s not as shitty as the rest.” Like finding spaghetti in the trash and picking out the meatball with the least amount of lint on it. Then you’d go and start a flamewar with some other starving person over whether your meatball is shittier than theirs. This is what people mean when they say to read another book.

Anyway, the big thing I picked up from Sarah Z’s video is “disinterpretation”, a term coined by MSNBC columnis Zeeshan Aleem. The Twitter thread is worth a read, but the short version is that he once remarked that a Julia Louis-Dreyfus routine wasn’t very good, and someone got mad at him for insinuating that women are incapable of being funny. They just took his dissatisfaction with one performance by one comedian as being a universal condemnation of women comedians in general. And this sort of thing is all over the internet. Everyone sees what they want to see and then they take it as permission to overreact.

I ran into this myself a while back, because someone saw who I interacted with on Twitter and decided that they’re all bad guys and if I have any interaction with them, then that makes me a bad guy too. At the time I tried to play it cool, but the more I think about it, the more it ticks me off. And over the course of that conversation, it was said that I don’t talk about myself much, and that’s kind of funny, because all I ever do on social media is write long-ass blog posts like this one. I don’t expect anyone to memorize them, or even read them all the way through, but when I write all this stuff and someone goes out of their way to say they don’t know anything about me, the message is that they just didn’t pay attention to what I was saying, and they didn’t bother to try.

So I’m a little jaded from that, because I got called out for a bunch of stuff I didn’t even do or say, and apparently that’s just a thing that happens. People will reject you for completely arbitrary reasons, not because of anything you actually said or did, and you’re left thinking you made some terrible mistake. Except, no, I’ve seen it happen to other people, people a lore more conscientious than I am, and if they can’t satisfy the bullshit purity standards, then I never stood a chance. If the game is rigged so I can’t win, then I’m not going to play.

And it’s that same condition that probably draws people into these online holy wars, because if you declare yourself for the pro or anti side, at least then you’ll have a posse backing you up. Only they don’t support you, they support your willingness to support them. Once your commitment to their agenda wavers, even in the slightest, they will turn against you.

Sarah Z suggests that both sides of the war drop the pro and anti terms, since they lost all meaning long ago. But that just invites a new set of useless terms to perpetuate the same cycle. Her more useful advice is for fandom people to broaden their horizons. She got a lot of flak for tweeting “Go outside” once, but the ironic thing is that it’s sound advice. I had lunch with my mom yesterday and it was just nice getting away from things for a while. People need to do that more often, and unfortunately it feels like it’s harder to do than ever before.

But “go outside” isn’t just a literal thing. It can mean going beyond your usual haunts, reading the same books, watching the same shows, rehashing the same conversations. I think the reason this stuff always revolves around “shipping” is because there seems to be this deep-seated compulsion to pair fictional characters off like this, and for a lot of folks it’s the only way they can consume a story, so they do. And they do it lot, and there’s a lot of them, and they do it the same way every time, and lo and behold the same old conflicts start up. So maybe “go outside” should mean “go outside of that cycle once in a while.” Just a thought.

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46ten · 4 years ago

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curious as to your take on the current debate going on in hamiltonia re: hamilton a slaver vs hamilton not a slaver?

Whew, this is going to be a long answer. Since Jessie Serfilippi’s “As Odious and Immoral A Thing” was first published (I posted a few brief quotes here), likely as part of an ongoing interest in the Schuyler Mansion State Historic Site with the subject of the Schuyler and Hamilton families and slavery (see here for blogposts labeled ‘slavery’ including a couple about AH specifically), there have been three versions of a rebuttal by Michael E. Newton and some people calling themselves Philo (”Love”) Hamilton, one of whom is Doug Hamilton*. The ongoing engagement on this topic also brings up issues of historiography and hagiography.

In this whole discussion there is only one new piece of evidence that Serfilippi has referenced on Twitter but is not part of her article - I’ll get into that below. Everything else is a re-analysis of known and fairly popular sources, so I don’t think going through it point by point would be helpful.

But let’s be clear about something. This discussion around AH is in large part because of this Chernow falsehood: “[f]ew, if any, other founding fathers opposed slavery more consistently or toiled harder to eradicate it than Hamilton.” Chernow also calls AH a “fierce abolitionist” and a “staunch abolitionist” because Chernow doesn’t know what abolitionism is. This lie got tons of mileage with Lin-Manuel Miranda, whose musical character AH may have personal moral defects, but not blind spots as huge and disastrous to a modern audience as a lackadaisical approach to the owning of other human beings. (That Miranda’s approach totally riled some Black artists and scholars is well-known, and I wrote briefly about it here.) Serfilippi’s article doesn’t get the media play it does without the popularity of the abolitionist Founding Father myth that Miranda put on stage. So this conflict and news-cycle interest arose from Chernow’s need to give AH the moral high ground by claiming that he was the best best best abolitionist because Chernow is interested in hagiography, not biography. Unfortunately, Newton-Hamilton seem interested in the same thing.

A brief note on word usage: an enslaver, in most current usage, is defined as someone who participated in any aspect of the slavery enterprise. Considering AH’s undisputed role as money-handler (or the more laughable ‘he was a banker’ assertion in the Newton-Hamilton essay) for members of the Schuyler family acquiring enslaved persons, AH was an enslaver.

In my opinion, on the issue of slavery, AH is damned by his extensive ties from 1780 onwards to the Schuyler family. There’s nothing that can explain away the fact that AH at times lived with, visited, and sent his wife and children for extended stays and to be educated by his slave-owning in-laws. AH did not somehow become innocently involved in slave trading and ownership. Rather, he knew what he was doing when he married into the heavy slave-trading and owning Schuyler family and when he engaged in business acts for that family, including helping them to acquire/sell enslaved persons. These were morally weighty - and abominable acts, argued even in his day - and he did them anyway. There is not any record that remains that he had a problem having his children reared within an abhorrent system/household where people were enslaved and served them; in fact, given the number of times he sent his children to his father- and mother-in-law’s home for extended periods, it could be suggested he found nothing morally objectionable going on there. Philip Hamilton even thanked his enslaver grandfather for his advice on how to “be a good man.” P. Schuyler’s wealth and trading was through the slavery economy. Moreover, AH’s economic concerns were also inextricably tied to slavery - keep in mind that every mention of tariffs on sugar is connected to the slave trade. Almost everything led back to that evil institution.

During AH’s lifetime, a number of white AND Black persons articulated that all enslaved Black and Indigenous persons should be freed, that the practice of enslavement was a grave moral failing. AH was well-informed enough to know that Black Americans were articulating how freedom should be applied to them - indeed, many of the manumission policies of the original states arose from these efforts. So AH was fully aware of the arguments. (His son was involved!) Maybe this helped inspire him and his slave-owning friends and political colleagues to form the NY Society for Promoting the Manumission of Slaves, although none of this group agreed to give up their own enslaved persons as part of the organization of this group.

Or, as Newton-Hamilton audaciously state, “[AH] was more involved in building a nation” sotto voce based on enslavement and racial distinction than he could be bothered to care about the lives of enslaved people. This shouldn’t be a surprise when it comes to AH’s major moral failings/blind spots - he didn’t care about the lives of the people affected by his whiskey tax either. If one wants to nevertheless call this a “good man,” we’re probably looking at each other from across a void.

But this is well-trod territory. Several articles post-Chernow have evaluated and summarized positions on AH and slavery that I share:

“Hamilton's position on slavery is more complex than his biographers' suggest. Hamilton was not an advocate of slavery, but when the issue of slavery came into conflict with his personal ambitions, his belief in property rights, or his belief of what would promote America's interests, Hamilton chose those goals over opposing slavery. In the instances where Hamilton supported granting freedom to blacks, his primary motive was based more on practical concerns rather than an ideological view of slavery as immoral. Hamilton's decisions show that his desire for the abolition of slavery was not his priority.” Michelle DuRoss, “Somewhere in Between: Alexander Hamilton and Slavery,” Early American Review, 2011 [part 1, part 2]

“But it does illustrate something that his primary modern biographers have been reluctant to concede: Hamilton routinely subordinated his antislavery inclinations to other family and political concerns, and he did not ever approach even a modest level of engagement on the issue in his otherwise voluminous published works.” Phil Magness, “Alexander Hamilton’s Exaggerated Abolitionism,” 2015

“He was not an abolitionist...[h]e bought and sold slaves for his in-laws, and opposing slavery was never at the forefront of his agenda.” Annette Gordon-Reed, “Correcting ‘Hamilton’,” Harvard Gazette, 2016.

Serfilippi extends this:

When those sources are fully considered, a rarely acknowledged truth becomes inescapably apparent: not only did Alexander Hamilton enslave people, but his involvement in the institution of slavery was essential to his identity, both personally and professionally.

I have no objection to her statement. We simply have no record of AH strongly challenging the institution of slavery, while several of his colleagues and friends most certainly did. Instead, we have the financial transactions, the possible use of enslaved labor, and the possible ownership of enslaved persons, alongside his strong personal, professional, and political ties to owners of enslaved persons. And the new evidence: the inclusion of the following in a list of persons dead of Yellow Fever in NYC 1798, “Hamilton Alexander, major-general, the black man of, 26 Broadway” An Account of the Malignant Fever, Lately Prevalent in the City of New-York, 1799. We cannot know if this was an enslaved man or a free Black man who lived and labored for the Hamiltons, but it should eliminate anyone confidently stating that the Hamiltons did not own enslaved persons.

Thus, Serfilippi has successfully accomplished at least one important goal: bringing to the forefront the names (as we have them) of persons, servant or enslaved, connected to the Hamiltons.

I wrote above that part of the problem here is hagiography. If his concern is with the truth, I certainly look forward to Newton’s chapter-by-chapter repudiations of books written by Chernow, Brookhiser, and Knott on AH and the AH/GW relationship.This leads to the second issue that has arisen: the unprofessional, and frankly gross, glee in trying to punch down on a young female scholar. In my own field (an ex-partner is a military historian so I’ll speak for their field too), the approach when one believes a colleague is publishing in error and one has additional information that could illuminate the issues is to contact them and seek to work together to analyze and draw conclusions. Newton and the anonymous Love Hamilton clan didn’t treat Serfilippi as if she were deserving of this respect. Moreover, Newton has never, to my knowledge - and I purchased his books! - gone this hard after Chernow, who certainly deserves it even more.

But Newton-Hamilton betray their own concerns here: “Considering the era in which Hamilton lived, the challenges he faced, and his accomplishments, it is not difficult to understand why Hamilton did not make opposition to slavery his primary focus. His attention was on building a nation.” And what kind of nation was that? At the Constitutional Convention, AH’s lengthy speeches on the formation of the government have been recorded. There is no record of him offering any statements about the slavery issue, unlike his friend Gouverneur Morris.

Newton-Hamilton continue: “Unfortunately, that meant neglecting other important matters, not just slavery but also his own financial well-being.” Wow, a comparison is made between AH’s personal finances and the ownership of human beings. Could these authors be any clearer that the slavery issue is an inconvenience that they are ultimately unconcerned about? I’m unsure if Newton-Hamilton realize just how gross their attempt at addressing this issue has been, and that it’s hard to take their interpretation and analysis of the evidence seriously when these are the kinds of statements making their way into the rebuttal essays.

Now there is an interesting discussion about how even later abolitionists did not see a conflict in the employment of enslaved labor, but that too isn’t something that Newton-Hamilton show interest in. Instead, their approach seems to be that AH needs to be celebrated at all costs, and thankfully, those days are passing into history.

*It’s ridiculous that a group of people have given themselves a stupid pseudonym to avoid attaching their actual names to a so-called scholarly article. And I’m aware that I’m writing this anonymously, but on tumblr where maybe 5 people have made it to the end of this (I’m not publishing it on my real blog).

**I will not link it, but it can be found on Newton’s blog discoveringhamilton.

#Alexander Hamilton #Chernow #slavery #Philip Schuyler #Michael E. Newton #Serfilippi #historiography

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iheartsunset · 4 years ago

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Papa Louie Scarlett HCs

-Rosabella Ocampo is a 23 year old singer/songwriter and graduate school student who lives with her fiancé, Rudy, in a Powder Point condo. She is widely known by her legal/stage name, Scarlett Heart and is the lead singer/songwriter of Scarlett and the Shakers. While punk ska and playing gigs with her friends are her true passion, Scarlett plans to become a game theory professor in the future. She can mostly be seen writing lyrics for a new song, riding roller coasters with Rudy, climbing trees with Clover, and just vibing with Marty.

-Scarlett is rather bold and seductive, often playfully flirting with others or making jokes about inappropriate topics. I stole this from Rouge, thanks SnapCube fandub for revitalizing my love for Sonic. Alongside her flirtatiousness is her intelligence and desire to succeed, using rules and lessons that she learned from various games to apply to her daily life. Thanks to her love of poker and mahjong, Scarlett has grown to be very analytical and sly in her motives. Out of the shakers, she is undoubtedly the big sister friend as she’s kind of a bad influence on the rest of them and is always subjected to scoldings by mom friend, Janana.

-Rudy calls her “Princesa” because of her Cinderella-like backstory. Her mother was a very kind woman and Scarlett lived happily with her and her father. Her mother died in a roadside construction accident when Scarlett was only 9, leaving Scarlett heartbroken. Her father then married a woman named Moira with two sons, Graham and David, who was emotionally abusive towards Scarlett until she moved out at age 16. Scarlett’s relationship with her dad deteriorated over time and she’s basically disowned them since. She finds solace in Marty and Clover’s parents, who think of Rudy and Scarlett as their own. She also got along with the other Frostfield residents and helped Willow get back into hockey after her infamous car accident (the first one).

-Stan Twitter often makes memes of her because she’s so iconic and quotable. One of her most iconic moments was when she screamed “I wrote this next one about my bitch ass stepmom. Moira, if you’re listening, your hair is limp and you fucking suck!” at the VMAs.

-Music was her escape as a child, hence why she learned to sing and play multiple instruments. However, her stepmother made her play the violin in the school orchestra as opposed to being allowed in a punk rock band. Even though she was concertmaster and first chair, she hated life so badly. Scarlett can play the guitar, bass guitar, violin, cello, drums, the trumpet, the saxophone, the bassoon, the piano, the xylophone, the harp, the flute, the recorder, the French horn, the clarinet, i didn’t even list all of them and I’m tired already. When one of the other shakers has lead vocals on a song, she’ll take over playing their instrument.

-Scarlett met Rudy during their shared freshman year of high school. Hazelnut High’s orchestra department had its annual field trip to Powder Point (based off my actual orchestra field trip!). Scarlett decided to sneak away from her snobby classmates and teachers and have the time to herself. On one particularly large roller coaster, she sat next to a boy with a Mohawk who told her that since he was a Powder Point native, he could more than handle it. He then proceeded to cry the entire time while holding her hand. They realized how much they had in common and kept in contact even after her trip was over. Their relationship is super lovey dovey, yet chill at the same time. Couple goals, but not on the level of Prudence x Cooper x Taylor.

-The shakers got together during the 23rd season of Flipline’s Got Talent. After the shocking elimination of Taylor Morales in the quarterfinals, the remaining acts were merged together. Scarlett and Rudy and Marty and Clover were two sets of pairs merged together. They all got along beforehand and loved Scarlett’s songwriting, so they all wrote an original song together for the finals. Even though they were fan favorites and had lots of support from the audience, Bill and Boopsy’s amazing ventriloquy act was what won the show, with the upset Shakers coming in second place. Afterwards, they were approached by Janana who offered to become their agent, and all they’ve known since was success. Fun fact: Rudy wouldnt accept Clover and Marty into their act unless they beat him and Scarlett at poker. They did.

-The shakers each can speak multiple languages, with Scarlett being able to speak fluent English and Tagalog, Tagalog being her native language (Filipino gang!). She can also speak some Spanish, Japanese, Arabic, Hindi, and Gaelic because she hangs around the other Shakers and Janana so much.

-All of the food, drinks, clothes, and personal belongings Scarlett loves are various shades of red. Cherries, longanisa, red wine, and candied strawberries are her favorite. Her entire wardrobe? Red. Her LED lights? Red. It honestly scares Rudy how red everything is.

-Her voice would either be Jessica Sanchez from American Idol or Gwen Stefani from the No Doubt era. She also covers a lot of No Doubt songs during their concerts. Speaking of covers, the shakers like to sing classic rock songs as well as modern day hits. Scarlett has the vocal range to do Ariana and Mariah Carey justice.

-Her and Marty are best friends. They’re both on the same wavelength and will most likely have the same reaction to memes, like word for word the same reaction. They usually have to get Rudy and Clover out of trouble most days. I love their chaotic, yet chill energy, like the types that just sit and observe and quietly make funny comments to each other.

-She determines whether she likes you or not based off of how good you are at mahjong or poker. If you suck enough to let her win, she’ll love you forever but if you match her in ability, she’ll respect you but kinda fear you as well. If you refuse to play altogether, she hates you. She’s a game theory student, so playing any board game with her is grounds for disaster because she’ll use her weird psychology and tricks to win all the time. Ironically, she sucks at video games. Even though she loves games of chance, she’s hugely against casinos and betting, instead trading small trinkets like food or makeup.

-At the Cheeseria, she set up a poker table, a mahjong table, and a pool table for the entertainment. They unfortunately had to get rid of the Uno table because somebody (ahem, Jojo) got a little too heated over a match with Papa and Wally. And by “got a little too heated”, I mean that Jojo literally got in a fist fight with Papa and lost.

-All she watches are telenovelas. Don’t ask about The Office or Game of Thrones, all she knows is stuff like Rubi and Maria la del Barrio.

-She doesn’t like musical theater except for Phantom of the Opera. She has taken a few roles as Kim in Miss Saigon, but secretly regrets it because musical theater is so much harder than just a regular concert. She still respects theater actors, but will never again sit through Anything Goes.

-She is the only one of the workers who has managed to successfully punch Guy Mortadello. Koilee and Rudy came close, but Scarlett landed an especially hard punch to his nose. Next to being engaged and forming Scarlett and the Shakers, she says it’s the third happiest day of her life. Now, Guy Mortadello is extremely scared of Scarlett and will cry if he sees her or hears her song on the radio (which is all the time).

-She has a tattoo of a heart of her hand along with a crown. On three of her fingers are a yellow Diamond, green clover, and blue spade.

-Scarlett is absolutely gorgeous and badass, I always kept rewinding Papas Cheeseria just to see her and Rudy in the opening because I had crushes on them both. Anyways, stan Scarlett for good grades (it’s not working though I’m still failing two classes)

#flipline studios #papa louie #flipline #my hcs #scarlett and the shakers #scarlett #scarlett uses Stan Twitter #scarlett has punched guy mortadello #she’s so gorgeous istg #scarlett is funny in an unproblematic way #yes I stole the game theory professor thing from crazy rich Asians #scarlett has all the draw 4s in uno

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shadowmaat · 3 years ago

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Y’know, I’m really tired of the bullshit elitism surrounding books and how folks access them. A book isn’t more or less “real” based on its format. A printed book has all the same words in the same order as an ebook. An (unabridged) audiobook likewise contains all the same sentences as a print book. Folks can certainly have their preferences, but no one is somehow better than someone else because they think X format is superior.

Each format has its advantages and disadvantages. Physical books have a nice texture to them and I love the smell, especially in older books. But they also take up a lot of space and can wear out.

Ebooks are great because you can pack a lot in one device, don’t have to wait for a physical copy to be delivered to you, and can fiddle with the fonts and text size to help with visual/processing difficulties. But you can lose them if your device crashes or if the company decides to revoke certain books. And it isn’t always practical for lower income peeps.

Audiobooks are a lot of fun, especially if you need to do something else with your hands (like drive or stock shelves or whatever). You get all the pronunciations you might otherwise miss and if it’s a full cast storytelling it adds an extra level of “life” to the story. It’s also hella useful for the visually impaired, those who have trouble concentrating, have dyslexia, etc. But conversely, it can also be hard for some to concentrate on a voice (or voices) and if you miss something or want to reference back, it can be really difficult to do. Plus, of course, they’re not ideal for HOH book fans.

They’re all real books. They’re all valid. And while prices can vary, they’re all pretty easy to find, especially if you have access to a library.

You know what other format is real, but is hellaciously expensive and nearly impossible to find? Braille. A braille edition of Percy Jackson & the Lightning Thief is around $80 and has to be specially ordered. I point this out because there’s currently some bitchfest happening on twitter wherein someone who should know better asked fans if they preferred “real” books or audiobooks and when someone pointed out that audiobooks were essential for the blind, some raging jackass swanned in to piss all over them by pointing out that braille books exist and the “accessibility issue was handled decades ago” so the person’s complaint was invalid and nothing but fake outrage.

The audio version of Lightning Thief is, I believe, around $30, which is still on the pricey side, but not as bad as $80 and you can find it pretty much everywhere (sometimes cheaper with that Audible stuff).

There’s a difference between “this is a thing that exists” and “this is a thing that is readily available to those who need it.”

Anyway, point is, pull your head out of your ass and maybe think about people other than yourself for a change. What YOU like isn’t going to be a universal experience and sometimes folks are going to be limited in their choices in ways that you aren’t. There’s no moral high ground here. And if you think that printed books are the only TRUE way to enjoy the reading experience, I invite you to look up all the outrage and discourse that stormed the world when the printing press gained popularity and handwritten illuminated manuscripts fell to the wayside. ;)

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