#bananaman rambles

[u-friend-or-ufo]

Graeme general blight voice is just perfection

[bananonbinary]

Been thinking about the good place a lot lately

they talk a lot about how much motivation matters, and moral dessert and all that, and the whole problem with that idea, and traditional christian-esque morality models in general (and that DOES include a lot of the purity bullshit on this site), is that it’s literally impossible to be completely unselfish. (and that’s *the whole point*)

Seriously, think about it for a second. Why do you do good things? To help people? okay, why does that matter to you? did you say, “because it feels good to make others happy?” or “my conscience makes me?” or even “because I want to/like doing it?” Congratulations, those are all “selfish” reasons.

In order to be completely unselfish, you’d have to be able to remove yourself from the interaction entirely, so that your own feelings about what was happening was irrelevant. but you can’t do that, because the entire nature of life is that you’re only able to process the world through your own brain. there’s no hypothetical ideal of “goodness” that exists in a vacuum, and every single action you take is inextricably linked to your own self.

The real answer is that we help people because it’s healthy. because as humans, we’re social creatures, BUILT to work with each other to benefit everyone. and everyone includes you. And that’s okay! great even! It’s fantastic that every time you make someone else happy, you’re designed to get some of that happiness back. It makes the entire system a wonderfully mutually-beneficial thing.

What all of this means tho, is that the idea of a “good person” who only does things to benefit others, is bullshit. There are no “good” and “bad” people. There are no “good” and “bad” motivations. There’s only healthy and unhealthy interactions, and the healthy ones bring something good to both people. If the interactions truly only makes one of the parties feel better, that’s an unhealthy interaction. We usually call that being taken advantage of, or in more extreme cases, actively self-destructive and/or abusive behavior.

So.

If you, like everyone else, are ever sitting there feeling like you’re a “bad” or “selfish” person because you only do things to make yourself feel better, remember this: that’s what everyone else is doing too. and that’s a good thing. Be nice to yourself, we’re all in the same boat here.

[fluidfox123]

Ooooo!

Talking with friends, especially when they ramble about the things they enjoy, whether I understand it or not! It's always a delight to wake up to or check my messages throughout the day just to see some of the Big Brained ideas that they share or when they're going fucking nuts over something they found that they adore.

2. Creating! Literally, just the idea of creating, even when it's something really difficult, is something that always brightens up my day. Not only because I get to do whatever I want, however I want, but because sometimes I get to create with those around me! Such as drawing with friends or creating a whole ass fic together.

3. Researching is another one that, just like creating, may be difficult, but it's really fun! Especially when analyzing media or learning about different communities and incorporating them into my creations/thought processes!

4. This one may be cheesy, but I love it when I can brighten up people's days. It's such a little thing, but it always never fails to make me happy when someone else is.

Tags based on notifications: @starriswordsofwisdom2 @idiot-with-a-box-of-bowties @characcoon @exploringweare @elysian-fields-await @wings-and-cherry-blosssoms @bananaman-mp3 @dakotafinely @ anyone who wants to!

When you get this, please respond with five things that make you happy! Then, send to your last ten people in your notifs! You never know who might benefit from spreading positivity! ✨

Uhhhh- well let’s see-

1. My fandoms. This probably ain’t a big shot but I’ve managed to find comfort in plenty of series. And being able to project and just have good hearted fun always allows me to smile ^^

2. My dogs and cats. Honestly knowing at the end of the day I get to go home and see my fluffy children is what gets me through most days 💕

3. Bubble wrap. That’s it. I like the pop-

4. Dr Pepper, granted it’s not the healthiest but yes I drink it frequently and it’s my favorite drink. It’s like coffee is to others for me (since I actually can’t stand coffee..)

5. My town. I’ve lived my whole life in a relatively small, safe, quiet country town. I’ve grown up peacefully and maybe I’m just a homebody but I love it just where I am an have no intention to leave.

@firecurls-27 @nightmaretherabbit @marshmallow-biscuit-blog @cephalopvnk @bunskero @weirdgirl92 @rubiloveschocolaste @fanoffandoms23 @astral-riddles @salilaoceania and anyone else if you’d like too ^^

[bananonbinary]

okay i was gonna say more in that last post but now i’m just making a new post so whatever

the thing that gets me about “you can’t change anyone’s mind” ideas, what really makes me want to rebel against them on instinct, is that when you get down to it, it’s essentially saying there are just “good” and “bad” people.

Doesn’t matter if the “bad” person was made that way by circumstances beyond their control. If you maintain that a person with Bad Ideas will continue to have bad ideas forever, and won’t change their mind no matter what, you’re saying they’re irredeemable. You’re saying our choices can’t change it, and even THEIR choices can’t change it, they’re just always going to be a bad person. and let me just say, as someone who grew up in a fundamentalist christian household, that just sounds a bit too much like pre-destination for me to accept it.

[bananonbinary]

theres something ive been thinking about for a while that i’m not quite sure how to articulate, but i’ll give it a shot.

So like. Obviously fandom is full of heated debate about what characters You Should And Shouldn’t Like. One of the arguments I see tossed around a lot is “well you hate x character who’s kind of a creep, but not y character who’s a murderer.” Most recently, I saw this with Zebede, the friendsim character who wrote rpf, being compared to say, Konyyl, who literally kills people for money.

Let me just get it out of the way that fiction and fandom are supposed to be fun, and I really truly don’t care who you do and do not like. All that aside tho, It’s not really a fair comparison to make? real-person fiction makes people in this specific space uncomfortable, because we’ve probably all come up against it at some point. Murder, not so much. We can only view fictional characters through the lens of our own experiences, so wildly evil acts like “tried to commit genocide” or “actively eats babies” generally (hopefully) isn’t going to ping us as being as terrible as things people have actually done to us personally. (ex. Someone who ISN’T active in fandom spaces and has never heard of rpf before probably wouldn’t have nearly as extreme a reaction to Zebede.)

I guess what I’m trying to say is, “evil” in a fictional character only matters so much as the audience member can personally relate to what happened. Their actual “goodness” is more irrelevant than if their specific actions happen to hit close enough to home with someone to upset them or not, and more importantly, whether their relatability is able to outweigh that. So if you’re ever sitting there wondering “how could ANYONE like such a despicable character??!?!” it’s probably less them overlooking their bad qualities, and more that they don’t face the same types of injustice in their day-to-day lives as you do, and thus that specific problem doesn’t feel as “real” to them as another might. Being able to pick and choose which problems matter is the luxury of fiction.

[bananonbinary]

unpopular opinion but like..punishment as a concept needs to die. negative reinforcement has been proven time and time again to be more or less useless in changing behavior for the better, so much so that people get very upset if you suggest it for animals.

The impulse of “I feel bad and I want you to feel bad to make up for it” is a very childish one, and only serves to escalate things.

Here’s the very unpopular part: this applies to literally everyone. Don’t punish your kids, talk to them. Don’t punish your peers, work with them or cut them off if you have to to keep them from hurting you. Hell, don’t even punish criminals. remove them from society so they cant keep Doing Bad, but the goal should be to rehabilitate them, not to torture and enslave them. Vengeance has no place in our families, our relationships, and certainly not in our justice system.

[bananonbinary]

i have a question to anyone who knows more about history/language than me: why do we refer to famous first nation people by names like Sitting Bull? like, why is it in english? even when we anglicize names from other language, they aren’t usually the literal translation (nobody addresses someone named ‘naomi’ as ‘pleasant’). is it because names have different relevance in different cultures, and the meaning would be lost if the literal translation wasn’t used? or is it just because white people where dumb and refused to learn the actual names?

[bananonbinary]

tagged by @rainbowcloversandwhalechickens, so here we go

Rules: Answer the questions and tag twenty of your followers you would like to get to know better!

Name: i don’t really like putting my name on a rebloggable post cause i’m actually an old lady

Nickname: bananaman, bananasman, the Englishman, theen, probably a few others people call me around here

Zodiac: zahhak Sagittarius

Height: like 5′2 or smth idk do i seem like the kind of person to actually track that

Age: 20

Orientation: aroace...probably. sexuality’s dumb and confusing and bluh

Ethnicity: the Whitest White to ever White tbh. catch me crying about how spicy something is at 2am after eating like. ketchup.

Favorite fruit: watermelon!

Favorite season: prooobably fall cause i hate hot and cold weather, and fall is super pretty and smells nice and holidays and big floppy sweaters and mmmmm

Favorite book series: idk. artemis fowl is great, pjo is great, a few others. when i was little i read the entire Wizard of Oz series, so that might win on sheer nostalgia points. also if you squint ozma is trans and i will never let that go.

Favorite flowers: Roses, just because flower scents tend to overwealm me but roses are sweet and subtle

Favorite scent: uhh weird question. chocolate, baking in general, clothes fresh out of the dryer, cinnamon candles

Coffee, Tea, or Cocoa: cocoa. coffee and tea are both too bitter for me.

Cat or Dog: cats. i have 2 adorable kitties and i love them and they yell at me when im too depressed and give me little forehead bumps and its adorable :33

Average hours of sleep: ha.

Favorite fictional characters: so many. JUICE, lil hal, lup taaco, lucretia, +literally any angsty robots/clones/aliens that have “What Measure is a Nonhuman” issues. especially robots.

OTP: davekat. altho vrisrezi has been rising through the ranks lately.

Dream Trip: meh. technically i already went on a trip to tour europe on time and remember literally none of it, so. nowhere i guess? i don’t actually super care about scenery. a cruise on one of those super fancy disney cruise lines would be cool i guess.

Blog created: sometime in 2015. idk, my memory’s pretty hazy around then

Followers: 810 here, around 3000 on my sideblog

Tagged people: i dont really like tagging people so like, you do you. consider all of my followers tagged

[bananonbinary]

ok we can all agree that dress codes unfairly targeting young girls for “dressing provocatively” is sexist and sexualizing and fucked up, but i think we also need to acknowledge that the clothing MARKETED to young girls is also super sexualized and fucked up and while that isn’t the girls’ fault and a dress code isnt the answer, we as a society also need to stop telling girls to wear super revealing clothing in the first place and making their only options for casual clothes waaay more sexualized than boys’.

[bananonbinary]

seriously maybe its just my own trauma but actually genuinely FUCK “discipline.” even if ur talking “discipline, not punishment.” FUCK “tough love” and “building character” and “hard on you because i’m worried” and any other excuse parents use to be dicks to vulnerable children. im not even just talking about spanking, but taking away dinner, or a comfort item, or cutting them off from friends, or any other way to resolve the problem that isnt centered around “let’s talk/think about why this was a problem and how to do better next time, and why we acted this way this time” is a fucking bad way to treat another human being.

i have never in my life encountered a situation that would be improved by making a child feel like shit because it would “make them a better person.” it won’t. it’ll make them not do the thing again maybe, but only out of fear, not because they have a better understanding. and once that fear is taken away, ie, once they move out into the world, they have no basis at all for how to be a functional human. you have failed them as a parent.

also children aren’t fucking dogs??? (not that this shit works on dogs anyway lmao) you can’t “train” them out of “problem behaviours,” you can only abuse them into being people pleasers.

[bananonbinary]

im trying to juggle changing my name while also not being out to most of my family and its super weird and i hate it.

right now the solution we’re trying is “my mom knows and recognizes that i’m nonbinary, but still uses my old name and pronouns because the danger of her accidentally using my real name in front of family outweighs the slight discomfort of calling me my old name”

its not a very good solution, but idk a better one. i mean the only way someone unlearns your deadname is by constantly using your new one, but she can’t do that for my own safety. and she can’t use it only when family isn’t around, because we both know she WILL accidentally use it at the wrong time if she gets used to it. it sucks.

[bananonbinary]

I have similar feelings, I’m genderfluid and girl/boy is Not Wrong, but always feels incomplete. Woman/Man feel Wrong, but I think that’s because despite being an adult people still refer to me as “girl”. Sister is an ok term for me, but I’m more comfortable with son than daughter. I just. None of them feel complete I think. Like some terms are ok, but none of them are Right because they don’t actually describe me in my entirety. If I understood you correctly, same for you, right?

yeah. some are better than others but it’s all just trial and error finding those, and none of them feel actually 100% accurate. the other part was like, the role each word evokes? like Sister or Daughter feels like im in some Jane Austen novel and i need to be darning socks or finding a husband or some shit. Aunt or Niece don’t evoke quite that level of Defined Role for me, so they feel a bit more comfortable. enby stuff is really hard.

i toyed around with genderfluid for myself to try to explain this stuff but idk. i’ve still yet to find the mythical Perfect Vocabulary :/

[bananonbinary]

listen i know we all love to make cynical jokes and use gallows humor at every opportunity, but please please please don’t let your compassion die. The world may really suck sometimes, and everyone seems to be working against you, but if you can look at your fellow human and offer them a smile, or a warm cup of tea, or a kind word, then you’ve made the entire world just a little bit brighter. You’ve proven that there’s at least one person who wants to make things better, not worse. And if there’s at least one good person in this world, then maybe it will all have been worth it.

[bananonbinary]

i love the idea of “ultimate self” from hs because honestly that’s exactly what fandom is about. like once you’ve been around any fandom enough, the characters “True” self starts to take shape to the point that you could look at a film noir gay mermaid au and still say with authority whether or not it’s IC.

i dunno i just love this thing where fandoms take canon characters and very organically refine them until we’ve collectively created this sort of platonic ideal of who X is, and i feel like the concept of characters existing across all timelines and aus, especially in such an interactive and fandom-driven piece of work, is an interesting reflection of that

[bananonbinary]

i wish i had known i was on the aro spectrum earlier.

i wish someone had told me it was okay.

i wish health class hadn’t told me i was okay no matter who i loved, as long as i loved someone.

i wish my entire family hadn’t told me how i would understand when i was older; how i needed to hurry up and find someone; how i was going to be a mother someday.

i wish tv and books hadn’t told me that my only options other than marriage were ‘crazy cat lady’ and ‘pathetic sad old creeper.’

i wish the church hadn’t told me God would complete me by sending the One and that singleness was a great way to show off the virtue of patience.

i wish i hadn’t been taught to point and laugh at people who were single past their twenties.

i wish i didn’t still automatically say things like “when i have kids” and “my future partner.”

i wish i wasn’t still so terrified that no one will ever love me the way i love them.

i wish i didn’t still think my only option is to be sad and lonely forever.

i wish i didn’t still feel like a freak.

[bananonbinary]

sigh...i love my mom, and she’s trying so hard to understand and be supportive, and i’m so happy and grateful but... idk its still super frustrating and isolating that she just can’t fathom what being asexual is like or how it’s different than being straight.

and whenever i’m feeling particularly lonely and down about everything, her attempts to make me feel better always come out as “asexuals don’t face any real problems; plenty of people don’t get married.”

like. cool, thanks mom i really needed a heaping of invalidation on top of my creeping feeling of dread that i’m going to die alone and that my very existence is inherently abusive to anyone i get close to. :/

i dunno. she’s trying so hard, she just doesn’t understand. maybe she CAN’T understand, and that just makes me feel even more isolated and inhuman.

sometimes i really wish i was straight.