#but don't develop a victim complex about it. yknow?

[batemanofficial]

this is part of a larger point that i don't feel i can make constructively on this website but i think a lot of people need to realize that internet skirmishes between relatively well-to-do white teenagers do not constitute an axis of oppression. i mean this as benignly as possible but some of you need to develop thicker skin

[canonmisogynyvictimstournament]

PROPAGANDA

HINATA HYUUGA (NARUTO)

1.) When Hinata was introduced she goals, weaknesses, interesting interactions and relationships with characters other than naruto and a personality of her own. Post timeskip in shippuden, however, she was reduced down to simply 'naruto's future love interest' and little else. The entire Hyuuga plotline was dropped and she no longer had any relevance or personality outside of naruto. Part 1 hinata was shy and insecure on the surface but underneath that she was determined & hardworking, even to her own detriment. Her struggles were compelling. Her interactions with neji and her family are something you look forward to seeing more of. In shippuden she's like a flat carboard cutout of hinata. Her shyness exaggerated, her relationship with her family suddenly perfectly fine and boring. In part 1 naruto inspires her to keep trying but he isn't the reason she's working so hard, in shippuden he's pretty much all she thinks about. Her change in character design really highlights these changes - the perfect little wife for cishet men to fantasise about.

2.) Her entire personality and arc is boiled down to “shy uwu waifu in love with Naruto” and basically any development she gets, which is barely at all because Kishimoto hates women, is as attributed to NARUTO and Naruto only. Even her reaction to her beloved COUSIN’S DEATH makes her be like “omg I love Naruto” and serves to further NaruHina, which is absolutely insane she would Not react like that. Naruto only starts being romantically interested in her at the beginning of like, The Last movie, which is after 500ish episodes of her being treated as the sidelined love interest who is devoted to a guy who only cares about her when she’s a damsel in distress on a fight.

There are so many parts of her character that are/could be interesting, like her part in the Hyuga Clan due to being born as a superior and her dynamic with her cousin Neji as a result, (which could have had SO many great moments of reconciliation and standing up for each other grrr grrr) an exploration of the impact of her bullying & being looked down upon (even when she’s supposed to be a superior member, which adds to the shame) LIKE MANY OF THE CAST, seriously the people Naruto trauma dumps to are mostly consisted of people unfairly treated like that and it could have been used to further NaruHina WHILE showing her struggles

She is an incredibly capable fighter but the moment Naruto is there, she instantly becomes defenseless and needs to be saved by her crush, mostly as a “wow look at him isn’t he so brave and kind to do this for her?!”

There’s an episode where she is literally used as a defenseless punching bag for Pein by trying to sacrifice herself for Naruto and telling him she loves him, JUST so he can be more angry and have more motivation to beat Pein’s ass (aside of the yknow. Killing his loved ones thing) AND her confession is ignored by Naruto for the rest of the series. Just like any moment she shows her crush for him is met with obliviousness, which would be fine if they weren’t the main couple and didn’t go on for THE ENTIRE SERIES!!!!

In Boruto, the shitty sequel, Naruto is basically her deadbeat husband in her bland lavander marriage and Boruto is rightfully mad about Naruto’s distance from the family and even says he left her basically a single mom and barely pays time to the family, and Hinata’s role in the show as the housewife is being like “no you see Boruto you have to understand your father’s pov as the Hokage” and the narrative treats NaruHina’s marriage as a Good, Healthy Thing as if the characters are not miserable in this marriage.

3.) Man I don't even like her that much but she deserved SO much better. She was introduced as the heiress of a really powerful and renowed clan with complex dynamics, yet the author somehow decided to do almost NOTHING with the potential she had, and gave her very little personality besides being shy and fawning over the protagonist. She gets slightly more active in Shippuden (part 2), but her character still pretty much revolves around her love for Naruto, which sucks because again, she has so much potential. It's no secret that women in Naruto are badly written, and Hinata certainly is no exception. The male characters get dozens of episodes/chapters about their motivations, their backstories, what pushes them to keep going, and Hinata gets almost nothing besides her lifelong crush on Naruto that we are reminded of literally every time she's on screen.

NIKI NIHACHU (DREAM SMP) (CW: Bullying)

1.) Ohhhh my FUCKING GOD okay. So first off, MCYT (Minecraft Youtube) is not synonymous with the Dream SMP. The Dream SMP is MCYT, but not all MCYT is Dream SMP. I just want to make that clear before I start. (Also, the DSMP characters are referred to with a c! in front of their name, and the person playing that character is referred to with a cc! in front of their name.)

Anyway. So Niki, right. The Dream SMP had a LOT of ccs, and I can’t remember all of them off the top of my head but I think there were like…four women? Out of…god, at least fifteen people, maybe twenty? Which would have been fine, I’ve seen worse ratios. But the thing is, a lot of the male ccs’ fans were uhhh…not great about treating cc!Niki like a person. We’re gonna move on to her character in a bit, but cc!Niki got bullied, harassed, and criticized no matter what she or her character did.

c!Niki is either a mean girlboss or gentle and nice. When I saw people talking about c!Niki while the DSMP was active, their views of her were very one dimensional. Maybe part of this was because cc!Niki didn’t get a chance to develop her character as much as someone like cc!Tubbo did. One of the DSMP’s fatal flaws was a lack of communication and organization, and…yeah. It was very difficult for white male ccs to organize people for lore, but for cc!Niki it was…also bad. The misogyny that cc!Niki experienced from fans is inseparable from the misogyny that c!Niki also received. It’s a really shitty package deal.

OH AND ALSO. You know how the DSMP ended by getting like, wiped from existence or some shit I don’t remember. And Dream did this without letting the majority of the ccs resolve their character’s stories/arcs? Will it surprise you to learn that afaik cc!Niki wasn’t informed about this at first? Yeah. Overall she was just treated horribly by everyone and so was her character.

2.) Literally only like three people ever did storylines with her, two of whom immediately dropped it as soon as something else came up. She didn't even get to officially participate in the revolution despite repeatedly offering aid, and eventually ended up just. Building her own underground city. To have something to do. The only people to actually include her in storylines consistently ever were the anarchists, toward the end of the server.

3.) ok, so, the thing is, this isn’t just about the DSMP. historically, in mcyt spaces, women content creators have been harassed and treated terribly by fans (and talked over/ignored by other ccs and the fandom) for, essentially, daring to be women, and niki has been subject to that. cc!niki (the real life person, for those who don’t know mcyt player/character differentiations) was/is really good friends with cc!wilbur soot (i haven’t been keeping up with this corner of streaming recently but assume this is the case). however, despite being close irl friends and working really well with one another, niki had to deal with endless bullshit from people who shipped her and wilbur (and people who didn’t!!), so much so that they stopped streaming together for a while. this is just some background so you understand the baseline we’re working with here. (this is going to be more of a meta analysis on how cc!niki was treated by other ccs, as that’s my specialty and also in a rp space it affects how her character was played) (fan treatment of her also factors in a lot here since fiction is highly affected by realities like this in mcrp) niki’s character in the dream smp, and the lore she had (she went from a kind baker to one of the last holdouts against a tyrannical government, to a broken girl resorting to revenge for stability, to someone who was finally able to find healing and support in a safe space and worked to do the same for others) was largely ignored or disregarded by both fans and the other content creators on the server. hell, when her best friend died nobody even bothered to tell c!niki! she had to find out from his own goddamn ghost! (can you tell i’m mad about this?) she put up with so much shit on that server, in-character and out, and never even got to have a fucking break about it. justice for c!niki!

[22degreehalo]

Honestly, this is really interesting because in a lot of ways I've gotten the same result but from almost inverted parameters, right down to being aroace rather than bi (but I still largely relate better to sexuality, and bisexuality, rather than gender or being gay).

For me, I like the 'overly polite, tasteful, un-horny, neat-and-tidy' characters. (Well, not the tasteful part.) That's just who I am as a an aroace, neurodivergent person (though, again, not at ALL the tasteful part. Also not so neat normally as well.) And honestly, I'm actually super fucking over the seeming universalness of these constantly mean and snarky characters and bickering dynamics where everyone is trying hard all the time to be the most wittily mean and never admit to actually caring about a thing. I hate it.

But. Here's the thing. Since I was little, I've always known that I am just not a Feminist woman. Female characters like me are Bad Female Representation. Honestly? The ones I relate to best, that feel the most like someone I am or could be, come from anime. Yknow, those cliched moe girls who are cutesily quirky and fail at ordinary things but are just so darned nice and earnest! As someone with ADHD, that is honestly kind of how I am. But that's deeply unfeminist, so it makes me feel very guilty.

The only Correct way to write women is to make them the opposite of that. Hyper competent, snarky, rude, and Not Interested In Being Nice. The only acceptable character development is to take an insecure sweet girl and make her Not Take Anyone's Shit and have her realise she's actually flawlessly amazing at things and it's only other people who are the problem. And I can't relate to a single word of that.

Men, though? You know all those stories about the expectations of masculinity, the pressure to be perfect, the shame of expressing emotions, and the difficulty connecting to other people? Those things I can relate to. And when you pick those things apart, and let those men be vulnerable and like silly girly things without shame and be kind and choose something other than violence, that's feminist.

When women are the focus, the Woke thing is to judge who is the victim and who has it too easy and deserves punishment and scorn. When men are the focus, the Woke thing is to try to carefully untangle responsibility from trauma and find a path to making the world better through understanding and kindness and the recognition that we're all flawed and just have to keep trying. At least, in my experience.

Not to mention that female-foused works tend to lean VERY heavily into """"the sisterhood"""" which uhhhhhhH as a ND aroace I sure have never gotten to experience myself. And the fetishising of f+f relationships as inherently flawless and full of perfect understanding just makes me feel super uncomfortable and bad. Which, yknow, is also why 'women who are tired of being mistreated and making it everyone else's problem' isn't empowering for me. My experience is of being on the other side of that. Of being the one that hurt lesbians and bi women "punched up" at. I don't want to remember that and I do not want to do it to anyone else.

To make it clear, I don't actually want 'Perfect Stories Where Everyone Is Unproblematic And Nothing Bad Ever Happens.' (I mean, not all the time? Sometimes stories like that do make me happy, though! And I think that's okay!) I like tragedy. I like deeply flawed humans. I like all kinds of dark and twisted topics that make me deeply scared of antis. But what I'm most interested in are stories about people who care about being good, even if they're very awful at doing that, and works which scrutinise morality as a complex and interesting topic. But female-focused works are very rarely interested in that. Usually, morality is treated as very simple: if a woman wants to be nice, she's a saint (in a way inextricably connected to womanhood, and yep I'm uncomfortable again), and otherwise, she's a 'loveable asshole' (a character type I, in all honesty, outright dislike at this point, and yes I know how strange and boring that makes me sound. Sorry).

Also f/f shippers are often Actual Lesbians soooo me as an aroace who doesn't feel much connection to womenhood is deeply intimidated by them because I honestly think they're better than me and I still get worried deep down that I'm ~invading lesbian communities~ by being there. Whereas in m/m there's a wider variety of people and I can actually make myself believe that if someone does something to hurt me it might actually possibly be that they did something bad and not that me feeling bad actually just proves I'm a bad person, which is how I feel in f/f.

If there were more f/f stories about struggling with shame and learning to embrace kindness and sincerity as something that isn't always easy but is always worth trying, about how people who don't seem to be struggling often very much are, about the intense difficulty of knowing or being known by other people, then I would read them a lot more. But there just isn't - or at least, none which don't also fetishise womanhood in a way that triggers my deep discomfort.

A lot of us feel like that. It always surprises people, but it’s so common.

[tamiddyinyourcity]

12:47pm.

"Bitch that's my trash, you the maid, so you bagged him! Aah!" - Megan Thee Stallion.

Saturday, May 16th of 2020.

Whatever happened to Edwin? I think he might've died or something.

Edwin was that dude I always forget I fucked in 2019. A one night stand. Nothing remarkable about him, his dick game was atrocious, but he had a beautiful O-face, and interesting taste in house music.

And I forget when, why, or what context he spontaneously told me about his childhood trauma in, but it was sad. Never told anyone else about it in his life, and it was upsetting to hear how his family swept the horrifying details under the rug.

Not the first man I've met that simply never felt comfortable to tell people about it.

Not the first man I've known to hide a lot about their life, ever.

.....

He had Marco energy. The type to want me for sex and as a therapist, but otherwise, never wanted me for much else.

And despite knowing this, I still occasionally wonder how he was doing. Or, is. He could still be alive, but I wouldn't know, so....

Last I recall, he got spontaneously fired from his schoolteacher job, got in a terrible car accident, and had to move back in with his family, the ones that enabled his perpetrator not being imprisoned and tried to gaslight him into believing that his traumatic things never happened, as he had to be stripped of all privacy and sanctuary, with lots of broken bones unable to move.

I can't imagine the type of toll that had on him.

Last I remember, he kept telling me tons of things about himself that he never had told anyone. Apologized for how he treated me when we first met. (He was super scummy to me on our first bang, but eh, i respect his apology at least.)

Told me how he never feels comfortable enough to trust anybody with opening up about his emotions.

About how his life was hell for those few months.

Being lonely.

Being broke.

Maybe a little suicidal. But, I don't know if that's a full memory or not.

And of course, instead of asking to hang out, or openly talk face to face, he asked to fuck.

I said no, and how he could at least offer something to me pleasant, like a small chat over a sandwich, instead of just his penis.

He still hit me up from time to time....

.....

I worry for the guy, yknow?

Anyway.

Lots of men hide their emotions.

Almost every man I know.

I still can't forget how Patrick, the blonde one, who I genuinely loved so dearly back then in my own sense, (never tell him that,) hid from people for years about the incident.... that I'm not sure I still wanna repeat online. But, years of mourning over the loss of someone close, and not telling.... ANYBODY about it?

He developed a real complex about it over time, due to people not caring, and he got that "i cant make myself seem like a victim again" mentality that kills people every fucking year. It was hard to get him to open up about anything, like how abusive his mom was like hidden behind the allure of weekly baked, sweet-tooth level goods, and the flourishing greens of her gardens, or how much he missed his sibling, without him going "Haha nooooo, she's a real good lady I swear!", or "But I mean, I made myself REAL real whiney about it back then, so like, I just gotta remember that it doesn't matter now".... It's upsetting to know how many men will simply take things to the grave due to seeming like a burden.

That guy Tom I slept with, the night we had an also atrocious night of sex in the back of his Hummer, (classy,) told me about what an older neighbor did to him as a child. Never told a soul. He eventually told his dad, either after me or the same morning, but yknow... still, years of not being able to tell a single soul and letting it eat away at you like that..... Tom was a nice enough guy. I occasionally feel bad at that temper tantrum I threw at him over a seperate scenario, since he was a genuinely cool dude. I wonder how he's doing now.

And of course, Marco. Marco is a piece of shit, cheating loser of a person. He knows that. I tell him, often. But considering Marco befriends the type of people to spike his drinks with meth as a "prank", no wonder he usually ends up coming to me to talk. (And I'm not even a huge fan of him, firstly, so how bad must your friendships with others be if the girl you used to cheat on your girlfriend with is your ONLY option???)

But, I still sympathized with him. I never know his full story. I know his family dynamic is strained, and he was always forced not to cry, occasionally beaten, shit like that... Growing up with shitty parents and equally shitty peers, it never makes it easy. I feel bad for men, usually. Because it seems like the one time they feel able to open up, it's after sex, or only with a romantic or sexual partner in a brief period of pillowtalk, or during aftercare, or just anything.

Some will spill their whole life story at the slightest hint of conversation, then go "Whew! Damn, I haven't ever talked to someone like this before!" And It's like.... not even your... lifelong childhood friends?.... Not even the buddies you've had for 5 years?.... Not... anyone?....

But, not everyone's a listener. People apparently enjoy that I listen AND focus on what they say... It just makes me feel sad, knowing some people live in only a world where everyone talks but no one says what they mean, listens, nor cares when you do.

Tragic ass shit, man.

The amount of dudes who have told me about death in their families, abuse, drug use, molestation, tragedies, or overall traumatic things, and then just said "Wow, you're the first person I've ever told about that", makes me sort of want to cry.... Since it means something really terrible could've happened if they had told absolutely nobody at all.

I hope more men open up.

The annoying irony of knowing men that find it easier to lie than to be open about their emotions is also a thing.

Like, even if given the platform for honesty, one chooses to lie, as if they were not given a space to be vulnerable or reality for others......

It's a damn shame.

1:21pm.

I like honesty.

I like talking about my life without hiding it.

No one really cares either way.

The surprise of when people actually DO read or listen to what I say or make. Like, oh, wow, I made a difference to someone????

It may positively affect someone else, or open their view of me, life, or other things.

A cautionary tale.

I get to reread days for me, so that when the memory loss and the brain fritz kick in, I can still be aware of what's going on and things that may have happened.

If anything happens to me, which I hope it doesn't, I'd much prefer for people to know the events which happened, you know? You never know, really.

So, opening up is good for me.

Otherwise, bottling up has more consequences on the average person.

I've bottled up my life for years. I think I just stopped, around........ Hmm, 16? Or later? I just simply stopped caring.

I think once shit hit the fan in terms of:

The ceiling of my bedroom collapsing and not being repaired for half a year, and the lazy construction workers for my shithole building taped a sheet of plastic to the ceiling, that flapped cold air loudly and WILDLY through the room, leaving many nights sleepless. (Imagine the sound of someone flapping a trashbag open loudly right next to your ear.... Every fucking day and night in your bedroom for hours on end during winter.)

My shitty abusive mom becoming even more irate, when willingly bringing in my even more shithole abusive grandmother. (So imagine the last bulletpoint, paired with the thick smell of feces and unwashed old woman stink, and also, the sounds of an old woman staying up till 2am blaring Two and a Half Men on your fucking TV, knowing you have to wake up at 6:30am.... Plus, stomping, shouting swears, and shitting herself.)

My idiot ass mother decided to entirely get rid of the washer and dryer in our house, since... get this... she thought the dryer "didn't dry good enough". And threw out the washer, for no reason. Guess who was unable to have clean clothes for MONTHS since their mother is an "entirely perfect, or not at all" type, that didn't even bother getting a new washer, and just tossed out whole clothes cleaning system with no fucking replacement provided whatsoever?

The shitty construction guys also had procrastinated on fixing both non working showers in our unit.... One blasted steaming hot water 24/7 and never turned off. The other, had a mild drip. The idiots decided to fix the latter before the former; by straight up ripping the tub out of the fucking floor. Mosquitos from the outside came through the gaping hole in our floorboards and constantly stung all over my ass. No fun.

No privacy, safety, nothing.

And not eating.

Harrassment from exes.

More and more and more.

All together, guess which girl wanted to die all the fucking time? Meeee.

Guess who's family never could be relied on for even the smallest of things? Miiiiine.

Guess who turned to toxic relationships just to be able to have somewhere outside of the house to go to???? Also meeee.

And guess who's gonna need lots of therapy? Sadly, me. :)

1:44pm.

Frankly, talking shit about my family may piss em off a bit, but why? None of the shits a secret. When confronted, they prove my point.

They never care to better a situation, they never care to provide respect, they simply never care. And people probably forgot my mom even has a second daughter. (People tell me that often, if family events occur.)

So frankly, knowing I don't matter to people makes it easier to vent. No one would care! Easy! Aye!

Anyway, I'm gonna take a bath soon.

Relax, yknow? :)

Be safe. Love yalls. Be chill with others. Peace out.