#but often people have an issue because of racism or because they somehow ignore how m/f ships get ignored when they’re interracial

[laniidae-passerine]

I’m one of those people who will double down on an m/f pairing when I realise that the female character is being ignored or degraded by the fandom because she’s ‘in the way’ for a gay ship involving a white boy (especially when she’s black or brown) and I think I’d just like that on the record

[theotterpenguin]

I really like the nuanced take about Zutara and why it makes some people uncomfortable and I can see both sides of it. I ship Zutara now but at first I didn’t and it made me really uncomfortable but I think it was just because of certain fan content I was coming across. Some people do portray Zutara in an extremely fetishized & creepy Stockholm syndrome way that makes Katara come off like some helpless damsel stereotype. It made me feel really gross thinking about as a young WOC but rewatching the show and seeing the true dynamic of these characters made me fall in love with them again. So I guess my feeling is that in canon i really love the dynamic but I hate the way *certain fans* twist it and refuse to acknowledge the racism & misogyny in what they’re doing

this is a complicated topic with many layers to it but first - i am sorry if you have ever felt unwelcome in the zutara fandom due to experiences with racism/misogyny.

it would be ignorant to claim that the zutara fandom is somehow uniquely unaffected by systemic racism or sexism, but it would also be disingenuous to claim that these issues only exist in certain parts of the atla fandom. racism, sexism, and general bigotry exist in every fandom due to institutionalized inequality in social structures. and to make it clear, i'm not directing this criticism towards you, anon, you are entitled to your own personal experiences, but i have seen a broader trend of people attempting to use fandom racism to moralize their position in ship wars, which is diminishing from the actual problem - the focus should be on acknowledging the existence of fandom racism/sexism, combatting implicit biases, and creating spaces that can uplift marginalized voices, rather than focusing only on optics in an attempt to gain moral high ground in a silly *fictional* ship war.

however, given all this, the reason that i am still in the zutara fandom is because i appreciate how many people in the fandom are dedicated to unpacking issues of racism and sexism and cultural insensitivity in atla's source material, which i personally haven't seen in many other sides of the fandom (that often sanitize what actually happened in the text to avoid acknowledging these issues in their favorite show). of course this is a broad generalization, but that's generally why i stick with the non-canon shipping side of the fandom because fans that are willing to stray away from canon are often less afraid to engage in critical analysis.

i also do think the zutara fandom has come a long way from the early 2000s when the show first aired. for example, when i first joined the fandom i had mixed feelings on fire lady katara, but i have since read some fanfics that have done an excellent job deconstructing some of the problematic ways that this trope could be interpreted and balancing respect for katara's cultural heritage and autonomy with the political and personal difficulties of being involved with an imperialist/colonialist nation. the fire lady katara trope, capture!fic, and other complicated topics/tropes are almost never inherently racist/sexist, but rather, their execution is what matters. and all this is not to say that issues of systemic racism/sexism do not still exist in this fandom, but it personally has not significantly negatively impacted my experience in the zutara fandom due to the wonderful content that so many other fantastic people produce, though everyone's mileage may differ with what they are comfortable with. anon, i hope that you are able to find a place in the zutara fandom for you! but i also know many people that have stepped back from other fandoms due to experiences with racism/misogyny, so i understand that decision as well.

on a final note, i think it's important to acknowledge that fandom doesn't exist in a vacuum and broader issues of racism and sexism are rooted in the media, the entertainment industry, and mainstream societal norms. while i do sometimes focus on fandom dynamics/discourse in my criticisms, i think it is equally as important to acknowledge how issues of prejudice and inequality are perpetuated through larger social structures, which is why it frustrates me when the atla fandom refuses to acknowledge the flaws of the original show, which has far more influence and social power over the general public than discourse over fandom tropes ever will. personally, i don't understand the phenomenon of holding fan-made material to a higher standard than mainstream media.

[olderthannetfic]

https://olderthannetfic.tumblr.com/post/756204827274625025/ive-had-to-deal-with-people-in-a-couple-of-my?source=share

the person who compared this situation to an abuser threatening suicide might be being ridiculous, but there is a similarity in terms of that you can't use your psychological issues to just treat people like crap. and i've seen so many communities go through this, and i think people tempted to make excuses for this sort of thing need to look up that essay about the "missing stair."

your mental health issues are not your fault but they are your responsibility, and they are not the responsibility of a bunch of people in a discord chat. and if you have particular situations that tend to trip your triggers, it is on you to try to avoid those, rather than demand that people can't, say, disagree or debate with you in the POLITICS chat even when you say factually inaccurate shit because disagreement "triggers" you. if I were that way, I would not go into a politics chat. (this is a real example and this person ignored repeated suggestions that she stop going into debatey channels if it triggered her. the mods eventually had to ban her from the politics channel.)

as others have said in the replies too, I also think people ignore how this stuff is often deliberately manipulative, even with people who are legitimately troubled, where they still learn that claiming "triggered" is a great way to shut down conversations and make yourself into the victim. i've seen people repeatedly deliberately stir the pot and then cry "triggers" when it had the expected result. i've seen people use it as a get-out-of-jail-free card for racist or misogynistic behavior or microaggressions - now i can declare that this poc getting mad at me for racism or woman getting mad at me for misogyny is actually a mean ableist for yelling at me when I'm triggered! reverse card! now i get to be the victim now!

but overall, there's a difference between "expecting everyone in your chat get therapy before they can join" like someone tried to suggest in reblogs, vs. "telling people to stop using random internet strangers to replace therapy / making their mental health issues other people's problem / taking zero responsibility for their own internet experience in a way that makes everyone else miserable." most of the spaces i've been in like this are full of people with mental illnesses and neurodivergences, like you said in your initial response. (there's also a convo here about the weird way the internet seems to think only "bawww cry" responses are neurodivergent but "angry and defensive" are not, never mind that being a lot more stereotypical for say autistic people. i think especially in heavily afab spaces, it often dovetails with misogyny, an inherent distrust of women who react in more stereotypically "masculine" ways.) none require that nobody have issues or ask for support. but there's a difference between that and expecting the server to be your therapist. as well as just like, expecting people to somehow read your mind and recognize which otherwise innocuous behaviors will trigger you!

--

[nightcolorz]

it's so crazy that people are out here making literal terf arguments over a fictional gay couple

also it was taking me out how that reply was literally citing examples of Louis' textual racial oppression as evidence of him being a subtextual woman like is that really what we're doing now?? Lestat owns the Azalea on paper because Louis can't own it as a black man during Jim Crow not because Lestat is equally invested in running the business as The Man like it's 1000% Louis' thing, and ignoring the strategic ways he operates his business black man just bc you're uncomfortable with the moral nature of that business is so blatantly insulting to Louis character and agency it's ridiculous. Like if Louis is a woman the majority of these people are being unironically sexist towards her because they like the boring self-insert wattpad version of her they created in their heads rather than the actual character.

sorry for the rant you can feel free to ignore it but that was driving me crazy

don’t apologize for the rant I’m so happy u sent me the rant bcus now I feel like I’m not crazy 😭😭. I didn’t actually read that one reply bcus the weird font changes gave me a migraine, but I skimmed enough to know what their thesis was 💀.

the terf shit is genuinely insane. I think a lot of this interpretation comes down to cis women with internalized sexism and transphobia (and racism cough cough) choosing to interpret Louis and lestats relationship in a way that aligns with their heteronormative narrow minded view of relationships (especially abusive ones) bcus they r unable to interpret a story about a gay black man being domestically abused by a flamboyant white man in a way that doesn’t revolve around the oppression of cis women bcus they believe that cis women are the central and only victims of oppression and domestic violence.

even tho it is explicitly shown to us that Lestat is able to abuse louis bcus louis is socially oppressed as a black man and lestat has societal power over him, ppl feel the need to put this “he’s also a metaphor for women” angle on it bcus they don’t want to confront the reality that men, especially men who are oppressed bcus of race or queerness or disability or any number of things, can be abused by their partners, and often are. I’ve noticed a lot of cis women have a problem with acknowledging that men can and do experience oppression that is “for women”. Domestic violence is often leveraged against women, but men are also victimized by it too, and stories about men who r abused deserve to be told without being “secretly about women”. This is especially weird since Louis is a black man, and I think a lot of this interpretation is happening bcus a lot of ppl subconsciously believe that black men can’t be victims of abuse or violence without being somehow women. Which is fucked up, obviously. It also undermines the actual story being told about a black man trying to navigate abuse and power structures by suggesting it’s actually about misogyny, bcus the implication is that misogyny is more important or legitimate then a black man’s experience and therefore he is just a mouth piece for a “real issue”

this is also why I think ppl argue lestat can’t be feminine bcus he abused Louis. They think that a feminine person can’t be an abuser, so they think that when I say lestat is feminine, im actually invaliding that he’s an abuser and suggesting he’s actually not abusive (bcus he’s fem). Believe it or not, u can be feminine and flamboyant or be a woman and at the same time be domestically violent against ur partner. Lestat’s feminine self expression and behavior is completely irrelevant to him being abusive, and he can be abusive and leverage his privilege over Louis while still being a feminine person. I think cis women have a problem with this bcus they are frightened to admit that they are capable of being instigators of violence despite being women/feminine . So friendly reminder, femininity is not the same as being morally good or pure, and femininity and victimhood are not the same. Trying to paint lestat as this embodiment of masculine and patriarchal ideals when he is very much a feminine queer man just bcus u insist that abuse has to fit into ur narrow minded view of what an abuser and a victim looks like is well, ignorant.

so Ppl who r socially oppressed are often victimized, and women are often victimized bcus they are socially oppressed, but Louis is socially oppressed and and that does not make him a women. Got it? 💀

It’s also important to acknowledge that Louis is a pimp who uses the victimization of women to gain social status and money for himself. Equating his suffering with the suffering of women is just not accurate when the show explicitly demonstrates to us that Louis is able to use the victimization of women to his advantage. Louis still operates within the patriarchy as a man, and him being abused by another man doesn’t make him less of a man, doesn’t make him akin to a woman thematically, and doesn’t mean he experiences misogyny the way women do in the narrative

(also, just a disclaimer, I’m not talking about ppl who headcanon Louis as trans or gnc or feminine, that is all awesome and a great way to express urself and how u relate to him. What I’m talking about is ppl who say that iwtv is thematically about domestic abuse against women bcus Louis is presented as the woman in the relationship since he’s abused by lestat )

[kittycat-in-the-dark]

Why i think it is kinda frustrating to love the character of Jason Todd (or just any dc comics character at this point) - coming from a fan

VERY IMPORTANT WARNING: because i like Jason Todd this is gonna be mainly about him. I am gonna discuss certain things in canon and fanon about him that at this point are so tiring, and i just want to rant about them. Also, opinions that you might or might not agree with (lol). So, here comes my rant:

The Mess that is Canon and why it gives me headaches

So, we all know our dearest DC comics, and what a pain they can be. They love being inconsistent, because writers love to write wtv they want while ignoring stuff that came before, change or outright erase characters over night just because "they have their own vision in mind", ruining characters by practicing sexism, racism, classism, all -ism there are, on those characters and through other characters - because why not? And so, most of the times when a character goes to one writer to another it feels like some really do decide to keep their worse traits and add to them and ignore the actual interesting things about that/those character(s) that could make for some more interesting stories and character development. (And i know that most of the inconsistency is not just the fault, or even at all, of the writers, because that is more an issue caused by higher-ups and the decisions and limitations they put on their writers. But, that doesn't mean that writers cannot do better in the writing department, like plenty of writers and creatives have consistently done amazing things even under limitations, actually limitations sometimes showed to be helpful in challenging the creativity of artists,,... thou, i still think that DC needs to give their writers a basic sheet with info on the characters and make their current writers read/get familiar with previous characterization of the characters, at least a bit because this inconsistency is so annoying... also, you guys are supposed to be professionals in writing, like??)

Now let's see what certain writers decided to do with Jason, as an example, i guess, also because i know the most about him. Sorry for still being behind on other characters, aaaaa. So bare with me, please...

Decided to guide him to his death instead of continuing to expand on how Jay could heal from his childhood trauma, deal with his emotions and grow into being a better person and hero:

Jim Starlin (one of the writers of Batman comics in Post-crisis) decided to take the sweet boy that loves his family, that has anger issues from his past trauma, but that still did his best to help people and has very resourceful, and decided to completely focus on just how angry he was and the "tragic destiny that always awaited for him", especially because he also somehow deserves it -> which is, unfortunately, something that is made even worse in the New-52 and Rebirth. There is just this over insistence that because Jason was angry in certain situations, that he is and always was "broken" or "improper", and stuck on a never-ending cycle of violence. And in recent comics, every time young Jason Todd is brought up (in discussions, flashbacks and stories happening in his time as Robin) more often than not, the writers decide to put too much focus on Jason's more negative traits related to his anger and arrogance (about this last one, i, personally, don't think he was originally. Like yes, he could be too reckless sometimes and disobey orders from Batman and stuff, but which Robin didn't... also Jason was actually pretty well behaved for the most part of his Post-crisis Robin time).

But ya, this is also generally a problem, that DC still practices to this day, with Jason, Damian, and other sidekick or kid characters. I even remember seeing a post/article about the departments in DC, especially the Batman comics one, having writers or superiors, that didn't like and outright hated the concept of Robin, they wanted to get rid of Dick Grayson at first, but fortunatly Dick was moved to another department when he became a full time Titan and going on his own adventures completely separate from Batman. This is also why Dick is not that present during Jason's years as Robin... which kinda sucks. Like yes, Dick having his development and building his own team and new hero identity outside Robin, Batman and Gotham was great and all, but it's so stupid and frustrating that the actual reason Dick wasn’t a present brother was because of executive stuff going on at DC rather than that much of an in-universe and character reasons - like, i get that it can be justified by "Dick and Bruce were still going through their issues from spliting up and Dick had his own responsibilities as a solo hero and team leader" - but it wouldn't have been impossible to at least have Dick visit Alfred and Jason more than he did in canon, or show him and Jay having or keeping contact more after their first meeting, or even better, let Jason hang out and get closer to the Titans more, so he can spend more time with his new brother and make hero friends of or closer to his age... i mean, there were some panels that showed, for example, Jason and Dick skiing and Jay going on like 2 missions with the Titans, but it would have been awesome if Jay actually got to build closer relationships with them.

Also, from what i understood, many weren't happy with the introduction of a new Robin... plus Jay was Robin in the comics for just 1 year in real world time (from 1987 to 1988 -> yes, i am not joking... the most known and nowadays canon version of Jason, aka from Post-crisis, was Robin for just a year, the other 4 years of being Robin, aka from 1983 to 1986, was with Pre-crisis Jason that was basically Dick 2.0., and that doesn't even make part of the main continuity, as we know it*) and in Universe he was Robin for about 3 years (he was 12 when he met Bruce and died at 15), and considering that most stories during this time were more focused on Bruce/Batman and on the villain of the week type stories, Jay really didn't get that much character exploration before dying. Which kinda sucks...

*a little note about this: so, in 2022-2023 the Dark Crisis event happened, which apparently restored Pre-crisis as being part of canon, which makes no sense considering that Pre-crisis Jason Todd and Post-crisis Jason Todd are completely different, but ya DC doing DC stuff like usual, uffff - but, i still think that the "main/real" Robin Jason is the one from Post-crisis

Thou, even if A Death in the Family kinda started the way of depicting Robin Jason as too angry and violent, i don't think that the way the conflict was depicted between Bruce and Jason is as bad as it is depicted in recent comics - because it was more about Jason and Bruce respectively missunderstanding each other's side. That being that Jason probably saw being benched as a "step" to be fired like Dick was, or that Bruce thought that he wasn’t good enough to be Robin and that his place as Bruce's son, probably, wasn’t "so secure",, while on the other side, Bruce just wanted to bench Jason from Robin because he was indeed becoming too reckless and violent in the field, so he was worried that his son would hurt himself. So, i think it's important to understand that this story, despite it's many problems, at least tried to be more balanced and "realistic"/genuine with the conflict between the characters. But the thing with the "destined to die and to live in violence" still is kinda shitty, because again, it is leaning into the idea that Jason deserved this, even if everything that happened in this story happened mainly because of miscomunication between Jason and Bruce, and DC not giving the chance for Jay to take another path.

The "voting for Jason to die" thing:

Okay, i am gonna be honest with that idk much about this subject. But i remember reading an article and posts were it is claimed that the vote might have been rigged because a lot of people at the time in DC wanted to get rid of Jason and because, well, the call type vote must have been kind of a mess when it happened through the phone back in the 80s. Plus it is also believed that the people that were able to vote, voted for Jason to die probably mostly to see if DC would really do it, ya know just for the fun of it and to see if DC really had the balls to do it, which many seemed to actually be doubting. So ya... but either way, the fact that people at DC thought about this, is kinda weird and unfair imo, because Jay, like i said before, wasn’t even given the chance to developed or to build a different path other than one filled with tragedy and violence...

The erasure and non-erasure of Sheila Haywood:

As we all already know, the actual reason why Jason died was that he tried to save his mother from the Joker, when he discovered that she was working for him. The problem with this arrives when DC always choose to frame it as "Jason died because of his recklessness and disregard for Bruce's authority when he told Jason to stay put". And the problem with this is that it makes it seem like DC doesn't even consider how a kid in Jason's situation might feel and act and that the fault wasn’t his or his temper's or wtv that he died, as much as it was the betrayal of his mother and Batman literally leaving Jason behind, when he could've and should've taken his son with him to do the rescue and to make sure Jay and Sheila would be save. And especially considering that Bruce was aware that Jason can be quite stubborn and reckless, and that he must really wish to save his mom more than anything, that, logically, Jay would've gone for his mother no matter what Bruce said or how he promissed that he would save Sheila. Also, Batman and Robin are supposed to be partners,, how did Bruce think that with such an important and personal mission for Jason that the kid would just stay on the side lines and wait for Bruce to do something. Also the fact that, somehow... huh, Jason made it to the warehouse way before Bruce did, even if he went for it way before Jason, like?? - but either way, 80s writing used to be weird and stuff, but when it comes to A Death in the Family, many people pointed out that the writing makes almost no sense and it is quite goofy with a lot of things, despite supposedly being a monumental story considering that this is the first time a sidekick dies and stays dead, and in such a tragic way... also that shit is so goofy that it ended with Joker as an Middle East Ambassador or wtv... so ya. Too stupid even by "silly simple fun superhero stories of the 80s" standards.

But the problem, like the title of this point sugests, is that some writers in more modern comics, aka Post-crisis from the 2000s, New-52 and Rebirth, decided to outright erase Sheila from the equation. Which takes away from a relatable and sympathetic factor that lead Jason to his tragic end, and instead focus on just how reckless, stubborn and angry Jason is, and that was what killed him. Also, that now, the reason he got involved with Joker was not because it happened that his mom that he wanted to meet and save was working for Joker but that Jay had a very deep insecurity about himself as Robin and Bruce's son and so he just decided to go after Joker impulsively in order to impress Bruce by stopping and capturing him on his own, which ya... way to ruin it guys... like yes, it can be said that Jay went to Ethiopia looking for his mom originally because he and Bruce were having problems, after all Jay did find out about his mom and decided to leave when he heard Bruce and Alfred discuss to bench him from Robin because he was too violent and reckless in some recent cases, more notably the Garzonas one, and so it makes sense that Jay would kinda associate not being a good enough Robin as not being a good enough of a son for Bruce, and thus motivating him to look for his mom when he, basically accidently/by chance, learned that he has a biological mother that is alive and well, and that might want to have him back as a son.

And then, you have writers that, after others chose to erase Sheila completely (like they did in the New-52), decided to write that the reason Jay died was because of trying to save Sheila, like that line Jay says in Task Force Z, "I died trying to save someone I love.", and it creates this annoying back and forth with this fact... like, erasing and/or bringing a character or their importance to the story or the main characters' development is a big deal, and DC writers just played with Sheila around like randomly throwing the ball to see if it lands on the "Sheila exist this week" or on the "Sheila doesn't actually exist the next week or ever did" side of the field.

Being weird about Jay's relationship with Talia because the writer (aka Judd Winick) wanted to be experimental and that Talia and Jay having "just sex" is not a big deal because it's normal for people to just have sex, the context be damned (also the consequences this could bring in how people view Talia's character):

i don't think i need to elaborate on this more than i already did...

The writer of UTRH (Judd Winick again) went too far while depicting Jason's violence:

Okay, before you go at me for shitting on the writing of a writer that is considered to be the best Jason Todd writer, i have to say that he did some interesting and fun things with Jay, but also paired up with a lot of stuff that contributed to a worse perception of Jason's character and falling further into the "Jason was always destined to be violent and murder-y" hole. Like, he even added more to Jason's time as Robin, but only decided to focus on the more negative parts of it, and while i can understand that he probably wanted to put Jason's flaws and conflict with Bruce at center stage for his return as the villain Red Hood, i think he kinda started the trend of refering to Jay as always being the "Angry Robin" and that everytime there is a flashback with Robin Jason since then it is always about his anger and nothing else. Also, i feel like he kinda forgot to show Jason caring about innocents, aka women and children, while writing this, which is kinda weird considering that he did show that side of Jay in Lost Days...

From the Titans Tower fight till the end of Post-crisis Jason's writing was a complete mess:

i feel like DC reached a point by this time where they had no clue what to do with Jason (and nowadays they are still at this point and have been in it since then, if we are being honest). They decided to either make Jason a total nut case full on villain that hurts a lot of people for no good reason and at the same time have stories were he is an ally to the Heroes and where he does the right thing, even if he is still a bad guy. And the thing is: if DC really wanted to make Jay an anti-hero that walked a grey line where he sometimes did his own selfish desires and still antagonized certain heroes he thinks he has a bone to pick with (like Batman and Nightwing), but that still gave a shit about innocents and would help people even when aligned with villains, they could have but they kinda didn't. Like, i know it's a very cut and dry definition of an anti-hero, but like, comics are stacked full with over used tropes and have created some themselves, and with this Jason could be a more interesting story element everytime he popped up because the readers and the heroes would never know if to expect Jason to be against them or helping them. Plus, they could advance from this by developing him from a more "villainous anti-hero" to a more "heroic anti-hero", and doing so by touching/going on Jason's roots as Robin and what made Jason the happy hopeful kid that loved to help people. But no,,,, they decided to do a complete mess!! DC, why... thou, i kinda feel like this transition of Jason from a more "villainous anti-hero" to a more "heroic anti-hero" didn't happen properly for the same reason Jason became more violent and angry as Robin didn't work that well/felt rushed, and that was because this was made in a short time limit. Because, like Starlin wanted to get to the "fated death of Robin because of his issues" as quick as possible, Post-crisis Red Hood Jason seemed (imo) to suffer from this as well, because Post-crisis (as a continuity/timeline) was ending, the next big retconning event was approaching in DC comics,,, like heck, even the story of UTRH was interrupted sometimes because of a timeline/universe altering event... and then the One Year Later event happened, and Jay seemed to have become "more crazy that ever", and the heroic parts that Jason still had were discarded completely. Which tbh i wasn’t a big fan of, at all. So, Jay ended his Post-crisis story as a full on "deranged villain".

RHATO is a BIG mess; YES, unfortunatly, i mean both of them, maybe exept for the first 25 issues of RHATO (2016) - why did DC have to give Jason's main books to Scott Lobdell?! Also, those first 25 issues of RHATO (2016) are kind of a miracle, all things considered:

So... RHATO (2011) was basically Jason's first big "going on his own with a team in stories non-related to Batman"... and it was awful. Because well, DC decided to make Jason, Roy Harper and Koriand'r aka Red Hood, Arsenal and Starfire the Outlaws, and write them completely out of character. Which ya, pissed off/annoyed a lot of fans... and these are the main reasons why (i think, might have missed some thou, but this serve enough to make a point against this book):

First off, it makes no sense for Roy and Kori to agree to Jason's methods and philosophy, so question: why would they join/form the Outlaws and with Jay as the leader?

Why is Jay the leader when he was no previous leading experience at this point, while both Kori and Roy do?

Why tf was Roy made dumb and Kori into an eye candy character, while being stripped off of their inteligence and kindness respectively?

Why are 2 of Dick Grayson's closests friends, one of which is also an ex-lover, hanging out with his little brother, considering that when those best friends first met that brother they were already adults, and Roy even had his daughter Lian, when Jay was just 12?

General answer: the writer decide to say fuck you to anything and build what could be considered a "male power fantasy" through Jason, also sexism, so he ended up ruining everything and everyone.

Long, more specific to each question answers:

Kori and Roy were "given to Jason" as his teammates and friends and made "more violent and outcasted" from their previous teams and friends/family because DC rebranded with the New-52 and wanted to be more edgy and had no idea what to do with these 2 characters so they decided to shove them together just because... and also because they had no idea what to do with Jason either, like i said previously.

Jay is the leader because "power male fantasy" for and with guys without powers, having no idea what to do with him that could be interesting, human characters in DC are often made the leaders to make up for and balance with their more powerful teammates, Jay is made the leader instead of Roy because the Bats are always up in DC's hierarchy of gets to lead the team and be the main face of the team and comic because money. Also,, look, i know it can be said that Jay, just like any other Batkid, deserved the chance to have his role and his experience as a leader, but because of his short time as Robin he didn't even get that much experience working with others or with a bigger team, besides being partners with Batman, and he never got to have a proper leader role before the Outlaws (and no, being a crime-lord doesn't count because he mostly did things solo, his partners and workers worked with him under fear or because the other option was worse than him, and also he killed the guys he worked with or that worked for him a lot... so ya, i wouldn't call that leadership experience). It really was a decision made just based on "the Bats need to be the leaders at some point of any teams we create" DC rule.

Roy was dumbed down so he wouldn't be the logical leader and because Jason needed a "dumb best friend" or something and Kori, well... the boys needed an eye candy sexy alien woman for the comic to actually be interesting... also, they threw away her kindness because she needs to be as rude and angry as her male teammates.

Also, weird as shit that they decided to give Jay Dick's best friends (or i guess ex-best friends during this time) because they were too lazy to make new friends for Jason.... also they had to ruin their established relationships because why tf not? - also why is Roy only refered to as Jay's best friend when he was/is Dick's best friend (or one of his best friends)... like?? i mean, people can have more than one best friend, but DC doesn't seem to understand that, so...

in conclusion, this book ruined everyone!! Hurray DC, that was such a great achievement *fucking insert infinite tons of sarcasm here*.

Also, to make a little note/comment about something that comes from fandom about this Outlaws Team specifically: i really really really hate that, because of this book, Jason is shipped with either Kori or Roy or with both at the same time in a poly relationship. And while, yes i get the "let them be shipped" because this is just people having fun with the characters and all that,,, no matter how they put these ships, i will always find them gross because of the reasons i mentioned above,, aka Kori and Roy were adults when they met 12-year-old Jason -> like just this alone should ring alarm bells,, Kori is Dick (Jay's brother)'s ex, which akward,, i mean, overall these relationships just give me the icky... okay?? Sorry about this little detour. Moving on from this now. i just really needed to let it out.

RHATO (2016) actually started better... a lot better. The first 25 issues are interesting and have sweet moments that i really like. i said it before, but these 3 are my favourites together, until DC decided to ruin them as well... because why not. imo, RHATO (2016) did better because, well, despite being written by the same writer of RHATO (2011), this one actually fixed some of the problems of the previous one and the character dynamics between the main 3 were pretty solid (for the first 25 issues that is..). And that is because:

Jason and Artemis have great chemistry with each other either you look at it platonicaly or romantically.

Their banter is amazing and so funny.

Love that these Outlaws, especially Artemis, are more the type of "Jason gives an order like he is the leader, but they ignore it because they have a better plan" - that doesn't mean that Jay doesn't have his own good plans/ideas but him being the "main leader" is not as cut and dry as it was in RHATO (2011).

i like that Jay is the more emotional link of the Outlaws, aka he was the one that kept at first the Outlaws together.

The relationships between Artemis, Jason and Bizarro are just so sweet - like sorry, but they make my heart go mush, okay?

i like that even if the writer tried to write a romantic relationship between Jason and Artemis, that they, and especially Artemis, didn't put that much focus on it, it was something that existed in the background while they were more worried about other things, such as their missions and taking care of Bizarro.

But, after that things became kinda bad:

By the end of issue 25, Jason was beaten by Batman because "he killed Penguin" on live television (which btw Jason didn't actually kill him) and so Bruce beat him up pretty badly, some say even worse than he beats his villains.

Thou, i will give it to the story just the fact that i think it's interesting that things for Jason went to shit the moment he decided to go on his own after Penguin without his teammates, which kinda strenghtens the fact that Jason needs someone besides him when something bad happens to him or finds out something bad (like here when he finds out Penguin was responsable for his dad's imprisonment and death).

But a big problem: making Jason's established abusive father seem as some kind of "martyr for his family", even if he actually hurt his wife and son, at the time, more than anyone else. Also, that Jason actually went for it with believing his dad was a good guy and proudly went after Penguin while claiming to be Willis's son. Like, i don't think it's that unbelievable that Jay still cared for his dad, even if he hurt him and his mom a lot, but... the writing paints Willis too much like "a good guy trying to help his family that got involved with the wrong people" while letting Jason's mom and her importance to Jason on the sidelines or outright ignored - like, i know that in Post-crisis, more specifically in A Death in the Family that Willis was refered to as "a dad that made mistakes trying to help his family", but by this point in Rebirth (and with the New-52) Willis was established clearly as having been an abusive husband and father, and more clearly than ever... so, it's kinda fucked up that at this point the writer tried to kinda "hero-fy" him because he abandoned and abused his family for "the good of his family",, like that doesn't erase all the pain he caused his wife and son, either he meant to cause it or not. Also, they brushed over the importance Catherine had in Jay's life, when she was one of the most important people to him in Post-crisis.

Then Artemis and Bizarro are "taken away" from Jason because their multidimensional spaceship hideout went out of control and transported them to another place, leaving Jason alone with a pissed off Batman that wasn't finished with beating his son up, until Roy Harper appeared to save his friend.

After this, things get worse because Jay and Bruce reunite and easily make-up, without actually solving anything, which keeps them for the rest of Rebirth continuing a never ending cicle of: "we are at odds because of our desagreements -> one of us (mostly Bruce) does or says something very fucked up which causes a big fight -> they separate again -> some shenanigans happen and they are obrigated to work together again -> forgiveness or semi-forgiveness ensues -> part ways again -> cross paths again either intentionally or by accident -> repeat cicle again.

Eventually, Artemis and Bizarro return, but their character design is worse, like way worse, especially Artemis's that is just atrocious, being that she went from a well built muscly woman with a one piece suit to the super skiny woman that looks like she doesn't have organs in her abdomen wearing a top, because why not....

The relationships and dynamics between the main trio became weird and boring. Especially between Artemis and Jason, and Bizarro kinda gets ignored until he leaves to become king of the underworld, lol. Oh, and then Jason and Artemis kiss, reach the conclusion they think of each other as brothers rather than lovers (even if they fucking kissed a lot of times at that point), and when they part ways they are both sappy because "they know that what they said to each other then is not true but cannot be together" type bullshit... and like, what?? - i am gonna be honest, at first, ya know in the first 25 miracle issues, a romantic relationship between the 2 seemed sweet and okay, i actually liked it, even if they were kinda doing the "will they, won't they" thing, and honestly, i wouldn't even have been mad if they reached the conclusion that they work better in a platonic relationship than a romantic one, even if they still have romantic feelings for each other. But not the weird ass bullshit the writer pulled with this...

And the time Jason was solo was just mediocre story after mediocre story, uffff.

So, Jay finally kinda gets his own book (even if they technically aren't, as they are team-up books, but they are the closest thing to a Jason Todd solo book as we can get...), only for both to end up being awful for the most part... if only DC gave Jason a better writer. Like, thank everything that most probably Lobdell is never gonna be his writer again, but that doesn't necessarely mean that other writers that followed did him any better.

**Also,, what is somehow even worse is that these books are the ones that popularized in fandom this idea that "everytime a character is paired up with Jason in a Hero Team, they get ruined by him", which makes the dislike for Scott Lobdell and his writing even worse because this man just managed to ruin everything!!

DC is trying to reintegrate Jason into the Batfam - which is something good and could be interesting, but there are some things that are kinda bad/tiring about how they are going about it:

In the New-52 and Rebirth, DC redeemed Jason, thou with the New-52 it was kinda weird because they didn't exactly redeem the Jason that we knew at the end of Post-crisis, but a more "tone down" version of him, since they decided to change most of the characters' backstories in this new universe. And i can understand why DC did this especially for Jason, considering that by that point Post-crisis Jason has gone a little bit too far, to suddently begin a redemption arc with all the baggage "villain" Jason had. So, they basically started over, erasing all the Post-crisis Jason stories except for UTRH, and changed his backstory. One example of one of these changes, was that they retconned Lost Days and changed that part of Jason's story to him training not just with Talia in the League of Assassins but also with the All-Caste, being that Talia guided Jason to the All-Caste to protect him from her father. And then his redemption comes when, after UTRH, instead of Jason doing all the horrible things he did by the end of Post-crisis, he started working with the Batfam sometimes, even if he still did his vigilante anti-hero business mostly alone, and even if Batman didn't aprove of it and Jay's methods, and so, this is where the "Jason is an on and off member of the Batfam" thing started. And then the redemption continued with Jay founding the Outlaws with Arsenal and Starfire, starting working more with the batkids (even if they still were at odds with each other), appeared everytime there was an emergency,etc.

But, as most know, the New-52 has a lot of writing problems, especially considering that Jay and the Outlaws have Scott Lobdell as their main writer. The thing here, that is pretty frustating, is that these ideas with Jason had the potencial to be great,, i mean i do like that Jay got to redeem himself and get closer to his family, but it feels cheap, especially because, for example, DC really thought that in order for Jason to have, at least, a good relationship with Tim, they first had to completely erase the close relationship that Tim and Dick had as brothers (and don't get me started on Cass and what they did do her during this time)... because why not? i guess the Batkids are only allowed to get along with one sibling at a time now,, especially considering that the New-52 was the one that started the idea in fandom that Jason is Tim's favourite and Damian is Dick's favourite, and so Dick and Tim's brothers relationship is left in the wind to be obliterated.

And then, DC rebooted again, and continued with the redemption path for Jason in Rebirth, which was, like i said before, interesting, but then they kinda ruined it. Also, both in the New-52 and part of Rebirth Jason suffered from this limbo of "being or not being part of the family". And is especially frustating with the ever repetitive conflict that Jason and Bruce have. Like,, it does have some good moments and ideas, but the problem is that after a while they kinda become pretty repetitive with each story of Rebirth.... so, like, it would be nice if DC did something more to advance their characters' development and relationships, just saying... also, so much wasted potential with most of the ideas they bring up,, DC why don't you go with your ideas to the fullest instead of constantly keeping your characters in some kind of limbo, uffff.

Robin Jason flashbacks from the New-52 and Rebirth always being under the shadow of his death:

So, i did mention this in passing before, aka that i am tired of seeing DC canon in more recent comics only show Robin Jason as angry and violent. But the thing is,, i don't think they shouldn't show angry Robin Jason at all, they can obviously show that. But the problem is that they never focus on any other characteristics of Robin Jason. Like, even if the kid was angry and violent, that wasn't all that he was, he was also happy, he was also sad, he was also insecure, he also loved his family a lot,,, plus he wasn't angry just because of "teen angst" or "teen disagreements with Bruce", he was angry because of the injustices he and his parents went through and that other people keep going through in Gotham City. And i think it's also obvious at this point that Jason's anger and violent actions were just a protection mechanism he developed to protect himself on the streets and from his trauma. So like, DC should really tone down on bringing up Jason's anger so much, because he is not the "angry Robin", that is not all he is or ever was. Or, ya know, at least they could stop acting as if Jason being angry is just "senseless"/exaggerated.

And we all know at this point that DC does these "angry and violent Robin Jason" flashbacks because they always write with Jay's tragic ending in mind. Everything about Jason since he died, is about his death and only that, even if he has a lot of other more interesting things to explore and deal with than the trauma from his death and his shitty relationship with Bruce.

Jason just cannot have or keep close positive relationships:

It's just the fact that DC really has a problem in establishing Jay into some closer and definitive relationships, other than always having a "up and down" relationship with Bruce. Like, the Outlaws (aside from being ruined by writing), after they decide to eventually separate their ways, aren't put together anymore, for better or for worse, with the Batkids it's just the "we check on you only when something happens and we need your help or there is the possibility that you are going to go too far on a solo mission, aka if you go back into your killing and violence". And for the rest, even including his Robin years, he is mostly isolated from other people, especially people that belong to "his group" aka people of his age, background, generation, with same philosophy, etc. Just like,, why is this boy so alone,, wasn’t he suffered enough on his own?

Fandom also gives me a headache sometimes

Jason being either a feminist or a misogynist:

I am gonna be direct and say that the "Jason is misogynistic because he hurt Mia Dearden/other girls or women" and "Jason always drinks his respect women juice" crowds are weird and make no sense. And also kinda wrong (imo)... and why do i say this...

Well, the "Jason is a feminist/drinks his respect women juice" belief comes from the fact that Jay, at least as Robin, tended to get defensive of women when they were insulted and/or abused, especially when they were so by men, and because of the love he was for both his moms and the relationship and respect he has for Talia. Now, the thing is, this and other examples such as "how he showed respect for Onyx in UTRH because he worked with her and didn't underestimate her as an opponent, and helped her after he incapacitated her", isn't necessarely feminist, i would mostly call it respectively basic respect for other people, caring about vulnerable women because he is a good kid and a hero and because situations where women are suffering at the hands of men bring up his trauma from growing up with an abusive dad that especially hurt his mom, and not underestimating any opponent you come accross because in vigilantism and the world they live in anyone and anything can be quite dangerous if you are unprepared. So, in other words, Jay is a decent human being (even at his worst) that cares about the well being of others, especially people in vulnerable groups such as abused women, but he doesn't have any beliefs or actions that, imo, "make him feminist". Or an outstanding feminist, especially when other characters, that are both heroes and villains, have shown this type of behaviour towards women. Thou,, and i am about to kinda contradict myself,, just reading Jason's Post-crisis stories until UTRH, saying that Jason is a feminist/cares about women being hurt by men is valid, and especially as he is shown to have empathy towards the victims he encounters,, and even more than Bruce was ever shown to have to this type of victims... so that is an interesting and valid point, imo. So, it seems like a weird limbo that is somehow made worse by RHATO's writing bacause ya know, Lobdell,... but ya, i don't think calling Jason a feminist is that wrong either, maybe it depends on the writing you pick, because, ya know, he really has inconsistent writing (the pain of loving Jason Todd T-T).

The "Jason is a misogynist" side believe this because Jay was had many times, especially by the end of Post-crisis when he kinda went too much off the rails in his "crazy villain persona", hurt and insulted women. Which valid, i guess, some can interpret some of his actions and statements during this time as sexist towards women... but the thing is, or actually 2:

Writers projecting their own prejudices towards women through Jason, like for example in how he behaved towards Donna in Countdown. But in that event everyone was pretty ooc, the story was very long and a mess, and Jay during this time was written as being an ass to anything and anyone, so...

Most of the times Jason fought a woman/girl it had nothing to do with them being women - actually if Jason fighting, hurting, insulting and causing trauma and/or awekening past trauma into other characters is misogynistic, then when he does it to boys/men (like he did to Bruce, Dick, Tim, Oliver, etc.), does that mean he is being a misandrist?? Like, what kind of logic is that? - what Jason is actually doing through his horrible actions is getting revenge and spreading on to others his trauma, his pain and suffering. Is he right in doing it, especially to characters he barelly knows and have nothing to do with his pain, such as Mia, Onyx and even Tim and the Titans? Fuck no! But he is not a misogynist through these actions, sorry to say this, but i really don't think he is.

Saying that Jason doesn't care about either women and/or children:

This is a tricky one... and that is because i, and many other fans for that matter, said/say that Jason doesn't necessarely have a "special care for women and children" in a sense. But like i said before he does care, a lot. And it's always nice when we have stories where he is shown doing that (Like in Urban Legends: Cheer and Task Force Z, even if these stories have other problems..), because certain writers (like Winick and Lobdell) kinda forgot about this side of Jason. Jason cares!!!! He cares!! And that is important to point out about Jason because, while, like i said before, this is not a "special/unique" characteristic of Jay like some fans make it out to be, it is important and special for just Jason as a character because he was been protrayed as uncaring, an ass and outright villain before, and, unfortunatly, that protrayal is the one that is the most present in most people's minds (mostly because of the popularity of the story UTRH). So ya, even if Jason did hurt people that didn't deserve it at all and that make part of the group of women and children, that doesn't completely erase or contradict the fact that Jason cares and wants to help (plus reasons i said before like shitty writing that makes no sense and that the people he attacked could still defend themselves or had the capacity to, so like he didn't hurt or go after civilians, ya know. Again, it doesn't justify or make it less of an evil what he did to those people, even if they are trained heroes, but it's also not something that invalidates the statement "Jason cares about people" - it's about nuance). Also,, even if i said that perhaps, by how Jay was written sometimes, that "he doesn't have a special mission in protecting women and children", he actually does, but he isn't shown doing that directly, as he is mostly shown just killing and/or beating the guys that hurt women and children,, which i think is what, paired up with him hurting characters like Mia Dearden, Tim Drake and Damian Wayne, and this hurting actually being depicted directly on panel,, leads other fans to find it "unbelievable that Jay actually gives a damn about women and children when he did this to this specific women/girls and children".

Making people that like Jason or want to defend Jason or discuss his wrong doings feel as being held at gunpoint because people aren't allowed share their opinion either against him, favouring him or even a balance of both (this applies to all fans, including Jason Todd fans, obviously):

Okay so... one thing that i noticed is that people cannot seem to be able to have civil discussions about Jason, in a way. Like, no matter what stance people take on the character, there is always someone ready to "shut you up" because they don't agree with your analysis and/or opinion on the character. Also, yes, this happens with fans of other characters too, but, for some reason, Jason is one of those characters that seems to bring up the most heated discussions in DC fandom.

Also, while yes and obviously, people are allowed to and should interact with posts they disagree with and explain why they disagree, there are some people that take it too far. And i also think this problem comes from the fact that people tend to "cherry-pick" the version of the character that they consider canon. For example, there are people that, because they prefer the stories from Post-crisis, the only valid version of the characters for them is that one, other people prefer the New-52 and/or Rebirth, or they actually prefer the headcanons version of the character because canon is too much of a mess to understand. And honestly, i think they are all valid. The problem comes when people seem to not distinguish "serious discussions, analysis and criticisms" of the actual canon and "fun post that can be either based in canon or just headcanon". Plus, not every jab a person does to a character is a serious criticism or an actual critical post about that character, sometimes they are just dumb jokes that actual fans/people that love that character do for fun. Being a fan of a character doesn't mean defending the character 24/7 or that if they make a joke on the expense of that character that they now hate them... like, we are here mostly to have fun with our favourite characters, and that includes making fun of them and their flaws as much as analyzing and defending them. And also, loving a character doesn't mean that you don't see or talk about that character's flaws and mistakes, as they are. Not everything your favourite character does was to have a moral/positive explanation, sometimes characters can just be shitty people and that is fine.

Also, i don't understand why, but some Jason Todd fans literally act as if he is the only character with bad writing, when like all characters have suffered from it. Heck, some characters even outright disapeared for decades at this point, even if they still have fans that talk and make content about them to this day.

And well, if Jay has bad writing that makes no sense for his character, so do other characters as well -> i am specifically pointing this out because sometimes people do bring up certain characters' bad actions from a certain comic where they were written by someone that seems to not know shit about the characters and made horrible decisions such as making them say something misogynist, for e.g. And some of you people really hold on, like, 3 shitty panels from a comic from 2 decades ago to prove "how bad/sexist/racist/etc" a character is, when they are completely ignoring who the writer is, if what that writer wrote makes sense with what is mostly know/established about that character, if it still applies in more recent comics with the most recent version/characterization of the character. Like, i am not saying people cannot talk about these scenes/panels and criticise/complain about them, like they can, everyone can, but first there is the need to make clear the context of the panels, who wrote it/what era is that comic from (sometimes just this explains a lot) and maybe say at the end "thank fuck they don't write that character like that anymore" or something else along those lines - because ya know context matters in this stuff and while, yes, everything that was written and published by DC comics is canon, i think it's also important to understand where the character is at now compared to that "bad writing version of them" and how this "bad version" compares to other writing from the past or same time of that specific comic. Sometimes that "bad version" is just a speck in an ocean of some pretty good or just decent writing of that character.

Jason fans seem to always be arguing and dividing themselves with black and white ideas of how Jason is, and especially on how he was as Robin:

So... just like anything and any other character fandom out there, the fans tend to also separate themselves in groups defined by what they choose to believe about a certain character. Especially with such complicated characters as the ones from comics that have like a billion versions of themselves.

When it comes to Jason, people devide themselves into very specific ways they see him, for e.g. the most known fractions are:

Robin Jason was an innocent happy boy until modern comics came and ruined it by making him angry out of nowhere (which makes no sense when Post-crisis Jason was shown "doing violence" since his introduction. i mean ya, it was in self-defence when he was scared by Batman finding him stealing his car's tires. But like,, sometimes these people act like the mere thought of Jason doing anything violent or being angry is impossible or complete character assassination when it makes sense that Jay would be phycally and emotionally protective of himself with violence and anger due to his trauma, hard time having to survive alone on the streets and dealing emotionally with all he was been through).

Robin Jason was angry and violent 24/7 (okay this is a general exaggeration, but there are people that think that Jay was mostly angry as Robin, when like during his original Post-crisis comic run he had like 4 big "anger and violence" moments and they all had understanding reasons on Jason's part to be angry and become violent with who he did).

The "the fault is on the Lazarus Pit" crowd (or just on anything and anyone else except Jason himself,, which is kinda ironic because Jason in canon, even at his worse, always took responsability for his violent actions, so...).

Jason is the big protector of women and children (i already wrote what i had to write about this).

And like, these examples and many other fractions, aren't wrong about these characterizations, because, yes, these come from canon, but, again, the problem is with people focusing solelly on one of these sets of characterization, to the point where they ignore the other parts of the character - aka they flanderize the character - which is pretty annoying tbh.

DC fans that claim that the only reason Jason is angry when he returns as the Red Hood is because of his death:

First of all, i know that some people just joke about this in the sense that "it is ridiculous that Jason is angry at the world because he died, when so many other characters have been tortured, have died and returned from the dead in the comics, and especially in DC. So, him and his trauma are not that special". And while i get where the joke comes from, and that DC's most recent writing of Jay's trauma just focusing on on his death at the hands of the Joker doesn't help it. But,, Jason's main issues and trauma don't relate that much to his death,, actually it can be argued that since he returned from the dead that he doesn't really care if he dies again. i don't think that "his greateast fear is to die again", as some seem to believe. i said it before and i will say it again,, Jason's trauma relates more to being let down by his loved ones, especially by his parental figures, feeling like he doesn't matter enough to his dad (aka Bruce) and that the systems that hurt him and continue to hurt others are still rolling and going without any significant change. (For not saying that he never, even to this day, got Justice for what Joker did to him,, which is also ironic because, ya know, Batman and DC's stories are all about Justice... i know this is more complex than this, but this is often a point that gets dismissed to a degree in discussions about Jason and why he wants revenge on the Joker and Bruce. It's not about him dying, it's about not having Justice for himself when he has a father figure that could give him that, but as we all know he didn't, at least not how Jason needed/expected it,, and the fact that Joker still keeps hurting people to this day - thou this problem also comes from the fact that for meta reasons, DC cannot kill the Joker to "give Jason some peace", because he is one of the most popular characters, villains and antagonists to Batman, so there is that).

And while, like i wrote before, people are allowed to joke about Jay "being too emotional over dying, when others have died too and haven't done what he did because of it", i think it's also important to understand that, well, that is actually an exaggeration, ya know, reducing/flanderizing Jason to just "a violent crybaby that is angry at the world just because he died", which again, gives a very reduced and wrong idea about the character to people that don't know much about him. Which is kinda ironic, imo, because sometimes the same people that either joke or seriously describe Jason like this will lose their shit on other people's joke posts about the characters they like more, so like??

Just... ya know the saying -> if you are going to joke/shit/criticise/be mad at a character at least do it about stuff they actually did and/or characteristics that are more consistently shown through out their canon writing.

There seems to be a lack of empathy (especially this one)/sympathy towards Jason coming from a meta level (writers and fans) and the in-universe people (aka characters in Jason's story)

i know that this part just by the title alone can come off as a little bit "dumb", because i am basically saying that no one understands Jason Todd,, which is ridiculous because i didn't create him and, tecnically speaking, the ones that know him the most are the people that created him, wrote him and own him, aka DC comics and their writers. Which is funny considering that for the most part of this post and most Jason Todd fans are always criticising and complaining about Jay's writing. But i think that when we say that "no one understands Jason Todd", we tend to refer more to the modern interpretations and writers of the character. Thou, when i say that other characters don't understand Jason in-universe that is totally right.

(Little note here: i am gonna come off as pretty critical of Bruce and his treatment of Jason. Though that doesn't mean that i think Bruce doesn't love his son. Also, Bruce loving Jay doesn't mean he understands his son, and him not understanding his son doesn't mean he doesn't love him. Bruce loves his son, and Jason loves his dad, they love each other a lot... the problem is them misunderstanding each other.)

So,, let's start this section by taking a step back to Post-crisis Robin Jason and keep going from there.

Jason is introduced to us and Batman as a street kid that had "...stones to rip off the Batman´s buggy--". And Jason's first response to seeing Batman is to hit him with the tire iron and run to his hideout. We see he is alone, defensive and that he misses his mother, and he is making everything he can to survive. This is also where we see Jay have a "sense of justice" or at least an understanding that, even if he also steals, there is a difference between him and other people stealing to survive and stealing for more selfish means, like Ma Gunn was doing in Jason's intro story. So, it is made very clear that Jay is not just some punk that enjoys stealing or hurting or seeing people being wronged and used, like the boys that were sent to Ma Gunn's school were (which fair, included Jason at the time, but he didn't have that much of a hard time running from her. For not saying that when he did he still thought by himself to go after her, when he could have just taken his new stolen tire and simply go home, without returning to help Batman). Then he is taken in by Bruce and he is happy being Robin and staying with Bruce for quite a while.

But... the lack of empathy already begins to show through Bruce, that doesn't seem to wrap his head around what Jason needs to heal from his trauma, and comes off more as patronizing when he "teaches Jason about how to do Justice in their Unjust world", which comes off as even worse when you think about the fact that he is telling that to a kid that was seen and lived those injustices practically since day one. And that is because Bruce cannot get out of his own vision of justice and of healing after a traumatic experience. And especially because Bruce doesn't seem to grasp that Jason's trauma is based on a lot of more difficult and traumatic moments than just having a single defining traumatic moment that changed his path in life forever in a big way, like it happened to Bruce and Dick when their parents died (i know that Bruce and Dick suffered through other traumatic events after their parents' deaths and especially as vigilantes, but the point i am trying to make is that, after becoming heroes and having dealt with their biggest trauma through finding ways to do Justice, they eventually "got used" in how to deal with current and future traumatic events, while Jason as just a 12-year-old kid went through too many traumatic things at such a very young age which compiled into his overall trauma, so it's not just dealing with one single defining moment of trauma, it's a colection of more of those from even before Jay became Robin - and that's what Bruce seemed to miss - also, that not everyone is gonna deal with their trauma, even if it is similar, the same way he did, like sometimes he really forgets that, especially when it comes to his children). But,, even with this in mind, i and others actually think that the writing here, including a little after Jay's death, was more sympathetic (at least) towards Jay's situation than next comics and writers were - and that is because at least, originally, despite Bruce lacking some understanding in how to help Jason, he actually did try with Jay and there wasn't that much villainization of Jay's behaviour, either coming from the writing or from Bruce himself,, considering that, at least, Bruce blames himself for Jason's death instead of the blame being put on Jay completely, and Bruce did try to understand and help Jay before, even if he took a while to "try to do something" and he still failed his son. Thou, there is also a disregard towards Jay's situation coming from other characters as well, such as when the Titans, that together with Bruce, would say things that compared Jason to Dick, and obviously more in the sense of "Dick was amazing, hopeful, less angry, etc., than you are as Robin", which obviously contributed to Jason's insecurities.

And while previous writing of the characters makes them "miss the mark" in understanding Jason,, which can just be seen as a character flaw and a indicator of the fact that the Heroes that existed and that Jay encountered at that time just didn't have similar experiences to Jay to make it easier to understand him and that they all were being kinda "narrow minded" because they missed when their friend, Dick, was Robin,, at least the writing of the story and certain parallels between Jason and some victims he and Bruce encountered did give some validity to how Jason feels.

Then Jay dies, the story when Bruce "beats himself" over Jason's death passes, which fine, quite valid, the characters need to move on. But... the next Post-crisis writers decided to turn Jay from a tragic and misfortunate story to a cautionary tale - and this is where the victim blaming of Jason Todd starts to happen.

So, from this point on the writing starts to look at Jason more as a failure that all young heroes need to avoid becoming. Then this is made even worse when Tim Drake comes around, as the new and cooler Robin that is also more relatable, with some comparisons and jokes made at the expense of Jason and his tragedy, which makes the perception of Jason as a failure even worse. Like, DC was really so stupid that they thought that putting emphansis on Tim's perspective on a kid that he knows next to nothing about was the best and correct way to look at Jason in their overall writing... they didn't even try in making other characters that actually knew Jason, like Dick and Bruce, correct Tim on his assumptions - and why is that?? Well, obviously, because DC really wanted to drive home to the readers that Jason was the "bad angry Robin that got himself killed because of his recklessness"... like it can even be said that Tim showed more respect to Jason's Robin memorial than he did Jason as a person. And while Tim making wrong and bad assumptions about Jay is okay, and again, something that can be seen as a character flaw to explore,, the fact that the writers just chose to reinforce Tim's vision of Jason through other characters is just so stupid and makes it look like no one really knew or even cared about Jason Todd, because they needed to focus on "Jason being the bad Robin" narrative. And again,, the fact that characters that knew and were close to Jason, aka Bruce, Alfred and Dick, didn't correct Tim and contributed, and might even given this idea since the begining to Tim viewing Jason as being too "angry and reckless" and that this is what got him killed, could have been used to explore this flawed vision of Jason that these characters had of him as something that was the result of grief, and perhaps of denial that they failed him (especially in Bruce's case that was there when Jay died)... but naw DC just decided to make everyone seem like assholes towards Jay's memory, a 15-year-old kid that died trying to save his mother (which wow, how tf did no one realize how this came accross when DC wrote and published this...).

Thou, as ironic as it might sound, after Jay digs himself out of his grave (because this poor boy can never have any rest) and spends one year in a coma and then waking up and walking catatonic through the streets of Gotham all alone for almost another year, the person that ends up showing him the most understanding is Talia al Ghul, even if at first she might have just cared about her own plans. So, she is the one that shows and gives affection to Jason, trains him and actually gives him the tools to start his path of healing, even if it is filled with more violence than ever before and revenge. And this is where Jason is finally able to "let loose" to show the world his anger towards it's injustice, where he goes after horrible people that hurt innocents and ends their torture of others once and for all, and he actually gets to show and tell Bruce and the Heroes that they failed him and that their methods might not be as good/effective as they think.

But, this is where people also start (both writers and especially readers) not liking Jason even more or to outright hating him, which fair, he did do some actions towards certain people that, no matter how you look at it, always will be wrong and outright horrible. Which might turn Jason into a little bit of an hypocrite himself, just like Bruce and other Heroes. And while it's not a problem, at all, to critique Jason’s actions when he returned as the Red Hood, this is often used to downplay or outright dismiss Jason’s pain and at least the sympathy that he should still have (or even actually have to begin with) from the writers, audience and in-universe characters. Even as he redeems himself and shows regrets about his actions that he did during his worse time, in more recent stories, people will never forget or forgive and stop holding over his character what a "horrible person he is for his mistakes", even if in the real world it was been 12 years since he started his redemption and in-universe, for a couple of years (at least around 2 years, not sure because comics timelines and ages are a mess, but for quite sometime now either way) he has been putting in the effort to respect his father's wishes and become a "better vigilante" that doesn't kill.

But either way it is put,, Jay doesn't seem to have the right to be right in any capacity anymore, to have valid reasons to still be mad but move on from it just being about his death, and going back to being about the other trauma he went through, which almost everyone seems to have forgotten about, especially because the newest writers or DC superiors forgot about it or outright erased it. So, the parts that gave a "clear reason" to feel for and understand Jason were thrown out of the window so they could just make a back and forth between Jay and Batman, where Bruce is mostly the one in the right, despite being the one that failed so many times at helping his son, and a lot of times being the one that caused Jay more pain than anything or anyone else.

And, honestly, the people that use the "Pit Madness" excuse/explanation aren't giving Jason understanding either, they are just giving him an out so the character can be "redeemed" without actually having anything to redeem himself for,, after all it isn't his fault, so why would he need to take responsability or have a valid reason to do what he did, he simply doesn't have a reason, it's just the Pit controling him and his anger or something. Like a puppet... which comes off more as "fake sympathy" because these people seem to only be capable to empathize/sympathise with Jay if he wasn't in control of his violent actions.

Also, maybe he doesn't need/deserve to be forgiven for the way he hurt people that didn't deserve it (such as Mia, Onyx and Tim), but he does deserve at least some understanding, and understanding doesn't mean you agree to his methods, to how he went about "warning Batman and the Hero community of their errors". And it's a damn shame that this seems to be a hard concept for some writers and fans to grasp.

Plus, it's also such a shame that nowadays writing decided to "corrupt" the little that Jay had as Robin by painting him as an angry and violent punk with no good reasons for why he is like he is. Where is that understanding for that kid that went through such a hard life, that just continued and continues to give him nothing but hardships and pain.

So,, i just wanted to conclude that i think Jason had enough of people (both in meta and in-universe) only painting him as if he is "one of the worst people there was/is", that he deserved the pain he went through, claiming that he had no way to have it better, when that couldn't be further from the truth, if he was properly given the chance to grow out of the cycle of violence and pain, that he still wasn’t fully able to move away from even to this day.

Ending my headaches with this post

Generally, i think it's so funny to think about how much our generation gets attached to fictional characters in such a personal way. And while it is valid to feel and express either positive or negative feelings towards a character and their actions, i think that these need to be more balanced and about things that are true about the character, aka coming from canon, as much as canon gives us so many shitty ideas and some really questionable writing choices. Like, at this point i am so tired that DC keeps doing this to Jay... DC, just please make up your mind once and for all in either or not you want Jay to be part of the Batfam and give him something else to do besides always being at odds with his family and going back and forth in working with and not working with them... just find some basic consistency with him, we ain't asking for much.

And again, just because i love Jason and i did defend him more than criticised him during this post, that doesn't mean that i agree or defend everything he did and/or believed/believes in,, i just enjoy his character and some stories (or really the potential that he had/has) and to discuss about it. But sometimes the writing and some fan opinions really annoy me so much, so i feel the need to camplain about them... so, this is why i made this rant on Jason Todd, one of my favourite characters, despite all the shit he gets.

Anyway,, thanks for coming and reading another one of my Jason Todd rants.

[creativestalkerrs]

american psycho: in the lens of a queer woman and the relevancy today

I posted this on my Substack blog as well, subscribe to that for more content. Apart of creativestalkerr’s book reviews.

TW: talks of violence, homophobia, racism, mental health issue, sexism, SA,  (all is to a less extreme then in the book), slight spoilers to American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis. 

what american psycho means in my own world view and why i think it’s relevant today: a book review.

At face value, American Psycho, written by Bret Easton Ellis, and eventually adapted into a film, directed by Mary Harron and starring a young Christian Bale, might just appear to be a serial killer slasher with barely any meaning to it, however, there is much more to go into than just that. It’s a satire on the materialistic lifestyles of the upper class and a commentary on a capitalistic society. Ideas of homophobia, misogyny (including violence against women), racism, and these types of men being awful. The conversation about both the book and the movie have been mostly of men (from what I have seen) and I wanted to give my thoughts on the story through the lens of a queer woman and how it has more impact in today's society than we might see.

American Psycho is from the perspective of a charismatic investment banker, Patrick Bateman who lives a life of wealth in Manhattan. Every day is the same for our character, watches the same television programs, goes to work, listens to his music, kills a few people, goes to lunch with the same group of people, and gets drinks at a new restaurant. The same thing, over and over again. And yes, I said killing people is in this routine, often women. Ellis paints a picture of someone who is stuck in the same routine, that no matter how handsome or wealthy you are, it often feels the same, that murder, or for Batemen at least, is the only thing that makes him feel anything, that he’ll somehow have an impact in this world for the crimes he commits, to have someone, anyone truly cares.

In the video essay created by the content creator, Moon and his video titled “American Psycho: A Warning For Men”, although it focuses on the movie but still holds true with the novel, he states that an important reason why American Psycho taps in the mind of men all around the world is that with today’s world where conveniences and pleasures are at your fingertips, men often feel bored and numb as even the things that brought them happiness no longer satisfy them. This remains true in the story as we see Patrick Bateman, who is wealthy and has modern-day pleasures, become bored and numb to these parts that the only thing to satisfy him is bloodlust. More men in today’s society deal with mental health issues, especially depression and there is no doubt about it that Patrick Bateman is a visual representation of what most men might feel because, in the conversation of mental health, men can often be ignored.

Moon goes on and states how due to this factor, men feel like they lack purpose. I found this interesting in the realm of American Psycho as Patrick Bateman has expressed how he ‘wants to fit in’ and how much people mistake him for others, that he doesn’t have a purpose, and by the crimes he has committed, whether he did them or not, it’s a cry for help but it’s mostly a cry for someone to fucking care about who he is, that someone takes notice of him.

Thus the character of, Detective Donald Kimball. The character and his connection with Bateman I found to be important. He is one of the first people to take an interest in Patrick and his potential crimes and we can see in his monolog on how Patrick feels about this, that he is willing to help Kimball with the disappearance of Paul Owen (Paul Allen in the 2000’s adaption). Despite him being cool and calm, Kimball does notice him to be nervous and Batemen states that “the air seems fake, recycled,” (page 271) This particular chapter shows how Kimball takes interest in him and because of that, we see the mask that Bateman has put on to crack.

How does this connect to the lens of a queer woman and why does it matter now? I already touched on why it’s relevant today, on how the mental health of men has increased, and how Patrick Bateman is a visual representation of how all these men might feel, despite them ignoring the commentary and the satire that Ellis has stated, they believe that the story of American Psycho is for them. It’s not. In fact, I could argue that it’s for no one but as a reference point of how men can and have been, how mental health and lack of purpose is the true enemy in all this. Not women, not LGBT people, not minorities but their own self. Within a capitalistic society, as more people have more convince in the palm of their hand, the more the mask slip.

As a queer woman, I see the treatment of both women and gay people in the novel, using slurs in casual conversation and degrading women and stripping them down to only objects. Viewing WLW relationships as a sexual fantasy solely for men's enjoyment and we see the violence of these women at the end. Now although this was set in the late 1980s, it still holds up today as the sexualization of lesbians and bi women is still an issue we see today, as a threat to women and overall LGBTQ people. This type of language in the book is a byproduct of Bateman’s colleagues and surroundings, what he talks about, and what he views, due to the fact there are no personal connections between him and the people around him, including the relationships that are supposed to be personal. The only way to connect with these people is to “fit in”.

Now, although we see in the book and even in the movie of Patrick talking about social justice, these are just words he says, as he’ll continuously use slurs, treat people, mostly homeless people like shit, sexually assault women, and of course, kill people, you often wonder why he says the things he does about social justice. Is it an act? If so is it for himself or the people around him? Especially when another scene with the same people he turns a hand and talks about how women are just to have sex with, that they don’t have personalities. It makes me, personally, question why Bateman does this.

Although I could go into every small detail and relate it back to today’s society, I won’t, as I believe that American Psycho can be such a universal story that anyone can have their own ideas on and I encourage people to read the novel and dissect their own ideas on it, how they see Ellis’ writing in their own lens. We can all agree, however, that capitalism can lead to the destruction of the mind and even a generation of not only men but the groups that are often targeted by Bateman’s crimes. That no matter how much you make, you will often feel purposeless and unnoticed in today’s society especially now that everything is becoming more and more instant.

The last thing I want to say is; don’t idolize Patrick Bateman.

A word from the author: Sorry I’ve been gone, new writing lessons and other writing content in the New Year. I have been reading a lot more and want to do mini essays like this. Hope you enjoy and I hope you have an awesome 2023!

[uselessheretic]

i feel like i see the thing relatively often where someone will say that ed's not actually that mentally ill, fans are just racist and also somehow this is izzy's fault because the only time he shows symptoms of mental illness is through izzy supposedly. even though in episode four alone we see him talk about suicide ideation, how discontent he is in life, and how burnt out he is.

but when people urge others to add an antiracist lens to their analysis and point out the historical racism within the psychiatric system it seems like?? they think that the only explanation is for ed to just be a lil depressed and that poc who are otherwise perfectly fine are constantly being slapped with extreme diagnoses. which, that is a thing that happens btw. people will call the cops on and forcefully institutionalize black folks who they have disagreements with and weaponize psychiatry against them.

that said, when talking about something like the uneven diagnosis distribution between poc and white people of schizophrenia (since that's something that's been researched) it's not that doctors are talking people who are otherwise perfectly mentally healthy and attributing their behavior to mental illness (although again it does happen.) usually though what people are referring to is how doctors are quick to diagnose poc with schizophrenia before doing their proper diligence and going over the other possibilities including histories of depression, trauma, and abuse. certain traits they exhibit are overemphasized and others minimized or ignored. a black person and white person may show the same exact symptoms, but the doctor will first have the white person tested for PTSD or BPD and try alternative treatment plans, while marking the black person off before considering other possibilities.

it's dangerous and disturbing where poc will be put through a series of medications that do not help, receive no treatment for the actual root of the problem, and then in the process often be criminalized as well since there is a much greater social stigma and forced state control over people diagnosed with schizophrenia.

i just feel like if you're gonna talk about ed and misdiagnosis through a racial lens, it'd be more accurate for him to immediately get diagnosed with something like schizophrenia without the doctor doing anything more to look into him. ignoring things like his history of child abuse and how trauma can cause certain responses. or for something he said metaphorically to be taken as literal where he might describe himself when angry as "the kraken" and the doctor marks that down as a sign of delusions. overemphasizing verbal expressions of angers as signs of violence. hearing ed say "it feels like my boss is out to get me" where he means that the boss keeps picking on him and it feels racially motivated, and the doctor puts on the record that he suffers from paranoia.

also just saying but there is actually a LOT out there you can read about māori mental health and the issues surrounding NZ's system. about 1 in 3 māori adults meet criteria for a mental disorder and this is a result of a racist health system, poverty, and, very importantly, colonialism. but like? i promise you don't need to create your own theories on how ed's identity interacts with mental health as if you're the first person to considered that. kaupapa māori mental health services are literal resources in place to address māori mental health needs within a cultural context. like! it's very cool actually for these things to be made available through hard community work that rejects colonialist psychiatric systems and instead utilizes a holistic and indigenous approach to wellness.

idk it's just so much more complicated than ignoring ed's very real mental illness and writing it off as no biggie. tbh it feels very um american centric as well to make assertions about relationships to mental health and race without ever acknowledging the specific community history here and that this isn't a new conversation. if you want to say you're examining ed through an anticolonialist framework then it would help if you did literally any work to find out what that looks like currently.

[secretsofthewilde]

About your post about misogyny in fandoms and shipping spaces, I do 100% agree how a lot of female fans do have internalized misogyny based on how they navigate fandom spaces. It doesn’t have to be extreme like hating all women, but people do have biases where they tend to gravitate to more male-dominated shows or would justify why they hate m/f or f/f bcuz it’s uncomfortable for them to write about the female body due to personal reasons. Which i used to be as a teenager but overtime i learned to come to terms with my own version of feminitity and became more comfortable with writing m/f ships. Sometimes when i see that brought up, im like “okay dont u see there is a problem there? like u discomfort of the female body has some ties to misogyny and u cant just write it off as an excuse for the majority of female fans.” Even the defense of the lack of female characters is also flawed due to the fact that some ppl would desperately two male characters together even tho one character was in two scene for less than 2 minutes yet completely ignore the other female ccharacter that has more interactions with the male lead. You could also throw in racism as this is also always used for WOC and justified as “oh not everything has to be about shipping” when those the same ppl that ship anything and everything in other fandoms

Yes, you are so very right!! And thank you for giving me an excuse to continue to talk about this. (Post anon is referring to is here x)

I tried not to generalise too much in the initial post bc I think there's different reasons and I guess flavours of internal misogyny which contribute to individual fans dismissal of f/f. Your example isn't exactly relatable to my personal experience, but it is one that makes sense to me and is something I assume is the case for many others too (including one of my best friends actually!). For me personally, I knew I was queer around the same time I got into fandom (so quite young), but despite being aware of this I still found myself feeling uncomfortable or even guilty for looking for anything f/f. I think that this was bc there was this ingrained fear that by engaging with female characters in any way I was sexualising them*. Which is ridiculous in retrospect, considering there's no sense of guilt for so many of us to engage with male characters in ways that are actually sexualising them.

Bc of the patriarchal society we live in we tend to see male characters as "neutral" ones (the same way whiteness is considered "neutral"**). By engaging with male characters repeatedly and normalising both the general celebration of them but also the sexualisation or queering of them, we ended up somehow creating an environment where male characters being queerified in fandom is seemingly more neutral than doing so with female characters - by which I mean that we expect to see people in fandom creating and celebrating m/m or m/f ships of male characters in any given fandom regardless of who they are canonically, whereas to do so with female characters is often considered to be unconventional or strange. I mentioned briefly in the post about the projecting of self onto male characters, and I think that's because they offer us a "neutral" character to explore queerness but also just multifaceted characters in general. There's so much more fanworks exploring things like the nature of morality or mental health issues using male characters than there are with female ones. That's because our engagement with female characters is kind of stuck in this area where we can't be neutral with them.

With the way that fandom discourse works nowadays we often analyse our characters as being figures of representation***. This means that even though we are now getting more media with female characters at the front of it, we often view them through the overly critical lens of "how is this representing us?". Even something as shallow as a joke about the character enjoying retail therapy then becomes something that is used as an excuse to tear the character apart, because we don't want to be seeing what we have been taught to view as negative female traits on our screens. Women can be bitchy, they can be jealous, and even evil. We need to learn to recognise that our discomfort in seeing them portrayed as such on our screens isn't always due to being upset about the representation of all women, but rather our discomfort in seeing these traits within ourselves.

*There's something particularly difficult about combating internalised homophobia when you're young and also learning about feminist ideologies where we want women to not be viewed as sex objects. I think this may also be a huge contributing factor for queer fangirls' tendencies to subconsciously project themselves onto male characters.

**'The Matter of Whiteness' by Richard Dyer explains this theory really well and is an academic essay that I highly recommend everyone read. I also think it's a pretty good starting point if you're not familiar with reading academic texts and are interested in intersectionality, racial bias, media analysis etc

***I'm borrowing from Dyer's theory here, which essentially argues that a black character's existence will always be viewed (and judged) as a representation of all black people. In comparison we will watch white characters and view them as their own individual character. To apply this to my above points; we don't question whether it's bad representation for our male lead to enjoy watching action films because we just view that as a character trait of his, whereas we will be critical of the female lead who enjoys watching chick flicks because we will then view her as a shallow representation of women.

[wc-confessions]

Very sleepy rant incoming I just never got this take but

I don’t like it when people argue saying watership down is better than warriors is ignorant of the flaws in watership downs writing because - I don’t think it is?

Look, I know this take isn’t common but. I feel like the innate differences between these books in not only release period and how the authors attempted to fix previous issues speak to how well they are handled, nonetheless the writing because to put it very plainly watership down is extremely well told and written, often poetic at times and it makes great use of multiple literary tools. (“The primroses were over” being used to signify the beginning and “the first primroses were beginning to bloom” to signify the end)

Watership down is a singular book with one sister book (tales of watership down) written by one man in the early 70s, Warrior cats was written in the early 2000s and is series with multiple authors under its belt.

Watership downs most notorious issue is it’s sexism regarding the female characters and how they are commodified by the narrative and thus diminished as individuals when put beside our lead males. Warrior cats has several notable writing issues, including racism, sexism, and in general, a poor tackling of any complicated societal or individual matter. Not only is warriors really outweighing watership down in its notable issues, there’s also another bit of info to talk about here. At the time watership down as published, a majority of xenofiction titles often suffered from a very common issue in early writings; they were heavily male protagonist centric with female characters barely making any appearances/only being of note when they were a male characters wife, child or family member. This is not to excuse some of the decisions made within the novel - but to explain the societal norm at large at the time. Another xenofiction series, the animals of farthing wood had a large list of main characters who were all male, this being altered within the children’s show based on the books. Watership down definitely suffered from the larger issues that plagued most popular works at the time, misogyny being one of them, but Richard Adams, author of the book was made aware of the uncomfortable way the males spoke of female characters and seemingly sought to correct this later on with the publishing of Tales from watership down (basically a spin off book, not really a sequel, it’s purpose is more so for world building and some additional fun little stories for those who liked the first) in which we are given not only a female lead, but another female character of note from the previous book, Hyzenthlay, being revealed to have risen as second in command within the warren. There is an obvious attempt in this book to rectify the issues he’d been made aware of, which does not immediately free the original novel of its flaws, but shows that the author was able to take the critics of his work to heart.

Warrior cats was written in the early 2000s far after the womens rights movement had become a commonly known concept and name in the UK, not to mention the multiple other questionable writing decisions any sane writer would’ve likely turned away from. The series continues to struggle with misogyny and a poor understanding of how to decently portray difficult and dark situations for its young audience. It has made no attempts to correct any errors in judgement made whilst writing segments of the series and often doubles down on those errors which only makes them worse. There is no excuse for the writing to be this poor, no excuse for them having somehow devolved in comparison to a book written a good 30 years before it’s birth. Watership downs dark subject matter is often tied to the authors own experiences in World War II, (the gruesome nature of the story not necessarily the misogyny mind you) and it’s handling of such is very profound. Warriors struggles to even tell some of the most simple stories that have already been told before them in the hundreds by now. Watership down is a standalone book with honestly, an issue that does sometimes degrade the quality of an overall great book - Warrior cats is a series that has the opposite issue, it is built on so many issues that at this current point, stand out moments are the exception and what keeps people sifting through sand. The author for watership down had clear intent with what he wrote for the novel and a vision that readers can pick up on, though how we interpret it will always be different. Nobody can quite tell what anyone on the Erin Hunter team was thinking of when they wrote certain points in the book - nonetheless the artistic intent behind characters like nightheart. Warriors isn’t being artistic at all in how it attempts any of its storytelling - it’s fumbling with itself because nobody can make up their damn minds about what the narrative wants you to feel.

I’m sorry, I just really like watership down even when critically speaking of its issues, I’d even argue that comparisons to watership down and warriors aren’t fair because watership down was a singular book (maybe even in target audience, watership downs target audience is older though kids do read it still, it doesn’t suffer from the obvious genre issues YA books do) with a spin-off we can barely call a sequel and warriors is a series with multiple spinoff books - a better comparison might be guardians of ga’hoole or the previously mentioned animals of farthing wood, but the innate differences between watership and warriors I think only worsens warriors in quality. Watership down isn’t like godly or anything, it’s not pure or perfect and this untouchable sign of quality in the genre, but its still better than the entirety of the warriors series alone and is a better read for people who are willing to give it a shot even with the noted elephant in the room (even with the noted misogyny we do get some important does/female characters like hyzenthlay to the overall story in the book and again - tales from watership down is there if you want more but not necessarily a direct sequel). This might’ve just been me using watership down to make fun of warriors as a series and how bad it is as a contemporary work when compared to an older novel, somehow becoming more backwards than something posted during the 70s in the uk. How do you somehow not only stay sexist but add real life racist stereotypes to your book about cats that’s almost impressive

(Also to note I’m not saying Richard adams was a great dude since i admittedly do not know much about him just to clarify I just think with the issue of misogyny specifically he attempted to correct himself)

[jesse-pinko]

Okay I am going to try and word this very carefully for the benefit of the internet strawman that lives in my head that is already playing telephone with what I’m trying to say butttt as an animal caretaker I’m not loving the way y’all talk about animal welfare. Don’t get me wrong (please) drawing comparisons between how white people treat people of color and how they treat animals is a totally valid way to illustrate how white people often view and treat people of color as subhuman, but lately I kind of feel like this sentiment is being reiterated over and over again without being expanded on in terms of either human rights or animal welfare. I think it’s valuable and even critical to examine the historical context behind white supremacy’s investment in animal welfare, but that it’s a mistake to view the two as inextricably linked. White supremacists will also claim to have a vested interest in children’s rights, which couldn’t be further from the truth if you take even a cursory look at their policies and practices, but the reason they pretend to give a shit about children and animals without bothering to extend this same courtesy to people of color, queer people, etc is because children and animals cannot advocate for themselves, which leaves room for racists to hawk their own agenda under the guise of charity. They are not interested in advocating on behalf of anyone they cannot completely control. Animals aren’t treated well, which I believe was the initial reasoning behind the comparison to racism; that white people abuse people of color even more fervently than they do animals. But that’s a call to end systemic injustice towards people of color, not to forego animal advocacy altogether. We should all care about animals! We should all be working toward educating ourselves about the literal millions of other living beings we share a planet with, whose habitats we are destroying without impunity, who are entirely at our mercy, who are disposed of and exploited and treated more as objects to facilitate human existence than living creatures in their own right, even when they fall into the very exclusive category of beloved. It’s imperative for safety reasons to educate ourselves about animal behavior, not to mention fundamental to indigenous activism to work toward the preservation of their habitats and continued existence on this planet. Also, I fully reject the fundamentally Christian idea that animals don’t have souls, that they don’t have feelings, that they were put on this earth to prop up humanity, that their behaviors and physiologies are all virtually the same because they all fall into the very broad category of Not Human. I agree that saying their mistreatment is somehow worse than racism is misleading, wildly ignorant and offensive, not because animals don’t deserve our protection, but because it demonstrates such little understanding of and willingness to understand the consequences of racism, and because these are really different issues altogether. Animals don’t want or need human rights; they’re not human. They prioritize differently, even the expectation of being eaten is just a normative experience for them, as ghoulish as that sounds. But not being human, or anything akin to human, doesn’t make them automatons, doesn’t mean they can’t feel pain or should be treated unfairly. They are an integral part of all of our lives even if you don’t consider yourself an animal person, and we should try and extend understanding and empathy towards them for no other reason than that they are alive.

[writingway-in-writinghell]

I just want to say, I appreciate your highlighting of the way people of colour expressing discomfort with how Nate and Shandy have been handled is often being ignored by this fandom. It may not be intentional, but all these written interactions are so charged, and excluding Nate, one of the most important characters in the show, from half the episodes of the season while at the same time bringing the character that made his life so unpleasant to the forefront, has so not been sitting well with me. Having him have to “earn” the right to be treated like a person is gross. And Shandy…the offloading of all the problems associated with her hiring onto her, rather than acknowledging Keeley’s failures; the treatment of her as a joke; the way Keeley makes more of an active effort to connect with Jack than she has all season with the “underlings”…it feels like an intersection of racism and classism, and I am just not feeling it at all. Anyway, sorry for the ramble, I just wanted to say, I appreciate you emphasizing the need to believe us when we call out things about this story.

Thank you for your message, anon, and the added nuance to this topic. It’s something I can’t word quite as well, surely due to my own bias as a white European, and the credit for bringing it to my attention lies solely with good folks like you who point this stuff out. <3

See, I didn’t even think of Jamie’s and Colin’s arcs in relation to Nate’s here. I think Jamie’s is a very important story to tell, to show audiences how toxic men were once boys suffering under violent fathers, and how hard it is to break that cycle; and I also love the young queer/queer elder friendship we’re getting. But I also have to… kinda ignore at what cost we’re getting both if I want to take this direction in as it is.

It is jarring to think back on the Richmond team walking out of that tunnel and glaring at Nate like that. There is no compassion. No reflection on what they did to HIM. Only the expectation that he should be thankful that they… stopped bullying him??? That’s fucked up.

And look, I am STILL holding out hope that they’ll somehow address this, that they’ll give Nate the chance to heal from the *Richmond* trauma. He lashed out against Ted in an attempt to get back at Richmond as a whole, I think, and no wonder! How many years has he suffered the abuse coming from Jamie and Colin before Ted came along? How long have the others just watched? Is this a result of Rupert’s management, the toxic coach they had before? Why not address that?!

I think the focus is just way off this season. I wanted to see how Nate deals with the aftermath, and the first few episodes delved right in, even adding Shandy as a mirror to Nate’s arc!

Only to drop it in favor for a narrative that serves us white queer folks, on of which was Nate’s bully. And like. God. I am so conflicted because the AIDS epidemic wasn’t even that long ago! Gay men are still very much struggling. Queer people are still ostracized. There’s a genocide on trans people on its way. I’m queer myself and love what they did in the last episode.

But shouldn’t there be room for ALL of us? Especially, you know, people of color who are also very much still dying at the hands of other white people? What stopped them from doing Keeley/Shandy, for example? Why must it be her white skinny rich boss? (I mean. We know why, right.) There’s so much room for more, and in light of the things they DO get down SO WELL, it’s especially frustrating because the writers seem like they should be aware of these societal issues.

Well. You see me rambling as well now, anon. Goes to show how hard it is to discuss this all in a nuanced manner, especially since I’m lacking so much context myself.

But yeah, this is why we can’t just pick people of color for the roles we write and then change nothing about their arcs. Intersectionality and CRT needs to be mandatory at writing schools if you ask me.

[writingwithcolor]

(1800s Western) non-racist White characters interacting with Black and Native people

Anonymous asked: 

My story has two white main characters who live on the western frontier in the late 1800s (specifically 1877) and will of course have to interact with both natives and Black people at some point. When they do interact with them, I don’t want these characters to seem like they’re all knowing on the interworkings of racism and how it affects people, but I don’t want them to seem racist either. How could I show that they’re ignorant on some stuff without having them be straight up racist?

Writing a fluffier piece 

Lesya will come from a more historically accurate and detailed perspective. I will answer this as if your piece learns more towards escapism, in which you aren’t trying to perfectly replicate true race relations, but more of a “softened” version of history while not explicitly erasing the history.

The white characters don’t need (and should not) be seen or portrayed as heroes or saviors and not “bumbling idiots” either. They can walk somewhere in the middle. They can treat BIPOC with respect and like humans, so normally, as they would their fellow white characters.

Get the racism out of the way (off screen)

Do not make the people they meet in the story the first Black or Native people they’ve ever met. If they truly were more ignorant in the past, which I would assume they were, let’s just assume they got most of that ignorance out of their system off screen some time ago; previous bias shattered and corrected for the most part by actually meeting BIPOC. I would highly doubt they’re perfect and unbiased completely, but just better than before and not actively looking to harm People of Color in the story.

Micro aggressions or larger scale incidents

Including small incidents of racism or prejudice (micro aggressions) would be realistic. After it occurs, it should be corrected or acknowledged in some way, you as the author noting somehow that the racism is wrong (For example, you might show others’ reactions, the character being confronted, acknowledging and feeling shame from their words or actions, etc)

You could also include singular larger incidents of racism or racially charged-events or tragedies in the storyline, for realism, and have the characters affected or comment on the incident(s).

Now, to Lesya for a deeper historical analysis, with a focus on Native American interactions.

~Mod Colette

Writing a more historically accurate piece

As I outlined in White and Jewish Men, Native American Interaction in 1880s, stories set in this time period are on the cutting edge of genocide. One particularly salient source is going to be List of Indian Massacres in North America, which will be able to give you some idea of some levels of non-war deaths by state per year. You can also check out stuff like Magical Person in History, Not Intervening on Human Rights Issues that gives more genocides of that time period, which are often not outlined in sources like lists of massacres, because wars are counted separately.

What this means is: the level of racism from your average white person at the time is going to be way, way higher than your modern white person, and making them “just ignorant” by our standards is going to make them radically progressive for the standards of the time.

This is the era of the Inconvenient Native, where Native people were “in the way” of American manifest destiny. Pick a newly-founded state and you have found a war with the Native population happening. Residential schools are starting to kick up. Reserves/Reservations are starting to force settlement.

Just seeing Native people as deserving to live on the land beside white people would’ve been a pretty radical opinion at the time. Like… really, really radical opinion. You can spot a handful of isolated incidents where like… one town in an area never broke a treaty, but there are maybe a dozen of those across America? It’s really not many, at all.

For context, one of the most progressive American anthropologists around this time period was Franz Boas; he actually founded the American school of anthropology based around his methods of writing down every detail of culture he could find about these Indigenous groups. He was writing it all down because he was under the impression that assimilation would be inevitable and soon all of these cultures would disappear under the heel of colonialism, so best to preserve the old ways before they vanished forever.

And this guy was a dedicated anti-racist who actually saw value in Indigenous communities. He did things like tried to debunk skull shape equating to intelligence in order to get Eastern European immigrants treated better and Black people treated better. 

Like. That’s progressive. Finding the cultures worth recording. Finding reservations worth allocating. And under that progressive thought pattern was still the belief that cultural death and removal of all Indigenous peoples was inevitable. 

I’ve seen an analysis of Huckleberry Finn that says its racism and its denouncing of racism with all of the slurs involved is actually a really progressive take for the time, especially considering it was written within a generation of emancipation happening.

You’re… going to be dealing with characters who are a lot more racist than we are in the modern day. That’s just kind of the bottom line.

Now this isn’t to say that you can or should toss in a bunch of slurs to show that things were different back then. This will, after all, still be read in the modern world, where those slurs are much trickier to handle. 

But you’re going to need to decide a couple of things:

1- where, exactly, it is

I know “the western front” is a catchall and has a collection of tropes akin to Fantasy World 29, but if you want to have some grounding in history, pick a state whose history you feel you can work with and do research roughly in that geographic area. 

This will determine stuff like:

What tribe you’re discussing

What the state policies of genocide at the time were (they will exist, it’s just how severe)

If there are any areas where Indigenous/white relations are good/okay (this will be a needle in a haystack but good luck!)

What are the competing resources (cows vs bison, water-hogging crops in a desert, etc)

Determine what wars were happening which will influence the anti-Native attitudes of the time 

This’ll also help you determine how many cowboys are Black or Mexican (considering Mexico would have owned quite a lot of the West Coast and southern plains all of 20 years prior), which will help you flesh out the demographics of this “Western” area.

2- What your own comfort levels are

Look. Even anti-racist people of the time would be considered racist by today’s standards. See: Huckleberry Finn and Franz Boas above. Huck Finn was really shockingly progressive for having a white character renounce his faith and his family to say slavery is bad and Black people are equal. It uses slurs left and right because that was the language of the time. 

White people then were working with a much different toolkit than what we have now. They were in the middle of debating whether or not Native and Black people were fully human. There were laws in place that said only the first Christians to inhabit the land were the ones who owned it, and no “heathens” could lay claim to it (the Marshall Trilogy of cases, which, btw, are still in effect today). 

If you’re looking for any sort of grounding in historical reality, you’re dealing with that climate. There is absolutely, positively, no way around it. There is no way to make modern anti-racism and modern levels of ignorance fit in anything grounded historically.

And the thing is, the people who would go to settle the West would have been pro Marshall Trilogy. They would have agreed that the first Christians to walk the land were claiming it; why else would they bother moving? A lot of Western expansion in North America was based off attitudes that lead to the Marshall Trilogy going the way it did. 

Are you comfortable with that? Are you comfortable with a white character’s level of ignorance being, at best, “oh you’re not quite human, you should be happy we’ve given you any land at all because we’re such good people to save a slice of our land for you, but I’ll invite you over for a classic American dinner and give you good American clothes”? 

It’s okay if you’re not. But if you aren’t, then you’re going to need to start looking at essentially creating a historical AU where the racism at the time was a lot less, which means colonialism at the time would be a lot less, which means “The Western Front” is going to look a lot different. I cover colonialism in the western genre heavily in the cowboy tag.

But for reference, you can still have people move around if the Marshall trilogy went differently, and people were just exploring for exploration’s sake. It’s perfectly valid to have them explore just for exploration’s sake, but I’d be cautious to paint them as brave explorers just wandering for the sake of wandering in a historically grounded work. That’s veering into historical revisionism, and ignores manifest destiny attitudes. 

But historically, these missions towards the wild west were federal government sponsored specifically to get more land for white America. You start looking at the early settlers and they would have been doing it specifically to gain access to the West Coast because of a belief that they deserved it. Or you have religious extremists or white supremacists founding their own states to write their own history, like those who settled in Oregon and the Mormons in Utah.

It honestly wouldn’t even take much work to establish a different history, since a lot of the laws that made things so toxic were so new at the time. Something as simple as thanking the Natives whose land they’re using, learning how to grow food from the Natives of the region (even a simple line like “the newer settlers hadn’t quite gotten a handle on [insert Indigenous practice here], but the landowners said if they don’t, we’ll struggle to get food in a few years”), and mixing Western structures with traditional structures of the area is plenty to show that Natives (including Black Natives) are equal. 

Other ways to show equality are:

Having the white people be nomadic or semi-nomadic alongside a tribe, should you pick an area where that’s necessary

Western lines for clothing, Indigenous materials; Indigenous materials, Western lines

Food being a hybrid of what actually works well in the region from other regions and stuff local to the region

The bad guys trying to oust Indigenous people from their lands and the white people fighting back along with the Natives

Mixed relationships on equal footing (Black/Native, Black/white, Native/white)

Political marriages between groups

If you’d rather just write fluffy escapism…

Colette’s tips are great! Make Black and Native people equal for literally no reason other than you want the story to be safe for those groups to read. Pick a rough geographic area just to give your Indigenous peoples around this Western Front town a culture (or three, because the Western front is full of nomadic groups), and you’ll be fine.

But it will be historical fantasy, and should really be treated as such. There’s just way too much racism that happened, casually, in the 1800s for anyone to just so happen to be “an average racist person” by modern standards.

If you want to do something historically based…

Then you’re gonna need to resubmit with our Motivations PSA in mind and say what you’re trying to accomplish with this story; the advice will change based off if you’re trying to show history as it was, critique a certain aspect of the genre, or shedding light on where so much racism comes from in modern day.

Cause “not racist” and “the 1800s” don’t compute, sorry. As we have outlined over and over again, the 1800s is a period of pure unadulterated racism with hundreds of colonial teeth and thousands of mass graves.

Trying to shoehorn modern race politics in that period without consciously modifying history and making it obvious you’re modifying history is, in the end, just historical revisionism so white people can feel better about where their wealth and land comes from.

~Mod Lesya

Published Oct 2021

[esther-dot]

There are some BNFs who hate Rhaegar, Viserys and Aerys and some deranged Targs, think that Martells especially Elia and her children deserves better but go ahead and stan Dany. They think Dany is a hero. Because apparently Dany is nothing like her deranged family and breaking traditions of Targ legacy. Dany hero-worship her brother after knowing his deeds and refused to acknowledge her father tyranny would somehow is better than her family. Plus the way they excuse the racism in her story.

I mean, they have a point. If people choose to just stand there and burn, that’s their fault. Dany is a hero and the smallfolk really should consider the consequences of their actions (making Dany, a hero, look bad) when they opt to die.

(I feel compelled to say that I am not being serious there!)

I recently unfollowed a blog I like because they had a little spiral into the “Dany can be the hero even after she mass murders the people of KL” cesspool, and I understand how having so many morally grey characters can make us ignore red flags, but Martin already indicated what he thinks about this issue.

Stannis’s choice to continue on his path of burning people alive will result in him burning his own daughter alive.

Let’s think about that.

The point is that these steps the characters take mean something. They’re being led down a path to their own destruction. These characters aren’t purposing to do evil, they do evil because they convince themselves it’s ok when done in service of their greater good.

Dany kills masters because slavery is wrong but then uses unpaid labor, she profits off of slavery, not because she thinks those things are right, and she certainly isn’t doing them because they’re evil, she just decided it’s worth it to get her throne.

Stannis and Dany are both doing this. It’s an incremental descent, and denying the descent might make fans feel better, but there’s a clear destination. Stannis allows kinslaying to get his crown and will end up killing his daughter. Dany burned a woman alive to get her dragons and will end up burning countless people to get her throne. How can we all recognize the horror of Shireen’s death and deny the horror of Dany burning KL just because many of her victims will be unknown to us? Burning KL is an atrocity and Dany’s point of ultimate corruption, just as burning Shireen will be Stannis’s.

It makes no sense to insist that all the steps leading these characters to such acts don’t matter, or that Dany will be a hero even after she does that. Isn’t that the moment the audience realizes, “oh shit, this is what her choices/experiences made her.” I understand that other than Sansa stans few people will admit this, but I think that’s clearly what we’re meant to do. See and think about the descent of these characters, not pretend that actually what they’re doing is fine and things will be ok for them in the end because they’re a hero, dammit! The group think around Dany and the weird “she’s a girl, we can’t judge her” is bizarre because these are often the same people who think it’s imperative Sansa prove she is no longer shallow by ending up in a romantic relationship with a grown man who assaulted her. If they’re finding fault with Sansa, I’m not sure why they can’t be critical of AGOT Dany pouring oil on Mirri’s head and burning her alive. Actually, it’s weird that a lot of the BNFs are S@ns@ns or adopt a lot of their interpretation, love the Hound, a burn victim, feel immense sympathy for him even to the extent of denying his actions, and still stan a woman who burns people alive. Idk, his wounds sound pretty horrific to me, his trauma pretty severe, if they can extend their sympathy to him, why aren’t they thinking of all the people who haven’t ever murdered a child who Dany is about to burn? All the children she will murder?

Also, Dany specifically says some crappy things about Elia because she can’t imagine blaming Rhaegar for ya know, publicly humiliating his wife and paying what may (or may not) have been unwanted attentions to a teenager. Like, how do you hear that story and think, “Elia made him do it.” How do you read Dany thinking that, and not wonder, “huh, maybe not recognizing that Rhaegar caused this mess is a bad omen for Dany’s ability to understand what her family did to Westeros/how she will be viewed.”

Rhaegar is a real mystery to me because he totally changed who he was to save the world and either threw that aside because he fell in love with Lyanna or he was willing to kidnap/rape her to get his prophecy baby. I really don’t know how Martin will depict it because it seems like both interpretations involve some contradictions to how he is presented elsewhere. Either way, I still hate him because to me, his choices are what led to the death of Elia and her children, and I will never forget little Rhaenys hiding under his bed (it may be the most upsetting line in the series to me). But, even so, his desire was to save the realm, Dany’s is to conquer it. Dany is setting out to cause a war.

That’s Dany’s intention. 

How is Dany the aberration from the Targaryen legacy when she is setting out to conquer and reinstate Targaryen rule? How is that breaking traditions? It’s more of the same. Actually, her whole story is very enmeshed with Targ proclivities and some similarities to Rhaegar specifically. Rhaegar wanted three heads of the dragon which led to Lyanna’s death, and a woman dies in the funeral pyre from which Dany got her three dragons. We don’t know exactly what happened with R/L, and Rhaegar wasn’t there when his family died, but the idea of human life paying for Rhaegar and Dany’s ambition, for their dreams being born in death…let’s not ignore this stuff.

Actually, it’s interesting that Rhaegar’s father was mad and Viserys reads similarly, and we know Aerys was worried about plots and Viserys was showing the same kind of paranoia, and we read them as villains (they are), but their feelings weren’t unfounded. Rhaegar was planning to depose his father (or by another name, usurp him), and Dany effectively did usurp Viserys. Obviously he was abusive and threatening her life so we don’t care, but Dany determined he was no dragon before he threatened her child. Again, I don’t mind, but Dany is planning to take Westeros a la Aegon, she has some ties to Rhaegar’s story beyond just romanticizing him and imaging herself to be him. She’s already burned someone alive and even BNFs admit she will burn KL, so uh, there’s a connection to Aerys. Just because we know her (and some love her), doesn’t mean we can pretend the author isn’t writing this stuff into her story.

I mean, think about what their saying. They’re pretending there is no correlation between Dany burning KL and her father wanting to. How is wanting to do it evidence of Aerys being a monster, but Dany actually doing it doesn’t alter her hero status? How is thinking to do it worse than actually doing it?

If it was right to kill Aerys to prevent it (a universal sentiment in the fandom), then uh, it’s right for Dany to die for doing it.

I do think some people are reacting to our anti Targ sentiment because they’re thinking we are holding people responsible for their parents and that’s unfair, or saying Dany is doomed by her blood. But, that’s why Aegon matters. Bringing Aegon into the story is fun because he and Jon are what allow shades of grey rather than making this a screed against Targaryen blood. The Martells will support a Targ (Aegon) and also fight (Dany) a Targ. The Starks have Jon so they will support and also fight a Targ (Dany). It’s possible for Rhaegar’s sons to have the blood of Targaryens but not actually be Targaryen in the way that means death because ultimately, it’s your choices that damn you, not your blood. But Dany, Dany is a Targaryen in the worst way.

I wrote this sometime after the show ended in 2019 when a Dany stan was accusing us of sexism for saying Dany was a villain:

Even though that’s what I think, let’s say you guys are right though. Maybe the books will be kinder to Dany. Maybe book Dany is a hero, maybe she’ll have a grand romance with Jon before she dies a hero's death saving humanity. But if our heroes run around leaving the corpses of countless children in their wake as the cost of their ambition, I'm not sure that we should want them to be successful. I'm not sure that we should want them to survive.

If our heroes aren’t thrust into war but pursue it, choose to wage it because they want power, if they choose to paint their road to victory with the blood of innocents, well, with heroes like those, who needs villains? (Link)

This is why I call both incarnations of Dany villain. Book Dany is far more nuanced, I get that, but if this was anyone else we all would recognize her for what she is, and it’s silly to pretend otherwise. I guess if I cared about the opinion of the ASOIAF fandom beyond our little circle, wanted to be popular or make money off of them, I’d deny the obvious too. 🤷🏻‍♀️

[rainbowloliofjustice]

I hate how so many people just... lack any kind of critical media literacy across so many different genres and how just about every genre and common tropes, issues, etc. within them just get boiled down to "Oh this is bad because ableism/racism/homophobia" even though the tropes largely have nothing to do with that. It's like they have such a surface-level understanding of something and then proceeds to read into said surface-level understanding in a contest to see who can come up with the most disingenuous, bad faith, uncharitable and just all-around god an awful interpretation of it.

"Characters having prosthetics as an allegory for losing their humanity is ablest because it is saying that if you got into an accident you are a monster." No, you absolute peanut. Robotic parts specifically are an allegory for the loss of humanity in characters that just get rid of their human body because they were being reckless, stupid, thought that it was not perfect enough, too weak, etc. Oftentimes, this is juxtaposed with a character that is a robot but is more human than the cyborg or person that just gets another piece of them replaced with a machine.

Ironwood getting increasingly mechanical parts as he is making increasingly inhumane choices in regards to himself and others is not saying he's a monster because he had an oops boo boo and had to replace his arm. ESPECIALLY when his character is juxtaposed by a character who has a robotic arm (Yang) and a character who is a created robot (Penny). The reason why Yang said that her robotic arm (and even taking pride in it at that) is "just extra" because it is just an extra asset to who she is as a person, but not her whole person. In terms of Penny, she is entirely made of machines but has what amounts to a human heart and compassion because she makes a choice to be kind to people. The allegory here (that y'all failed to understand) is that it is not whether or not someone has prosthetic or robotic parts that determine their humanity, but rather their choices and how they treat others.

It is often also the same in stories where it has characters who have robotic parts such as Alita Battle Angel or anything that genuinely comes from cyberpunk dystopia. Alita (Who is completely robot mind you) is often more kind, compassionate, etc. than characters who are fully human. Hugo and his crew regularly steal parts from cyborgs who've done nothing to him and this is juxtaposed by characters like Grewishka and Zipan who are mechanical and monstrous but not because of their parts but because of their choices. Which is a strong contrast to Alita who is fully kindhearted and has a strong sense of justice and doing what is right regardless of whether there is a price tag on it.

In more dystopian stories wherein no short words, the corrupt government controls technology and spies on its people using it, it can be a question of how much of your humanity (in this instance, privacy and agency over oneself) you're willing to sacrifice for comfort or just because you had to. But of course, rather than looking at these stories as a potential warning that we should make laws that would prevent the government from using technology against its people under the guise of safety, convenience, etc. Or even having people question wtf do they do should the government get so corrupt that it can just hijack someone's arm or even just stop someone's pacemaker because lol why not.

Yeah I get it, it's uncomfortable but unfortunately, the people who need it the most are going to be the people most at risk to a corrupt government which is like... kinda the point.

But anyways moving on

The same can go for when stories use animals as a means of telling stories revolving around discrimination. But ofc people can only see it as a surface-level "racism" and then do their damnest to force characters into being black/poc or white (and for some reason, only those two races) while failing to realize that the reason it was done is that discrimination has more than one axis. I swear this logic is what has convinced me all the talk of intersectionality in activism is just a joke they say to get other people to just shut up and let them speak over them and ignore problems/issues they don't want to focus on. It's like the only thing they can understand is racism and even that racism is only if it is hatred and black people vs white people. And somehow even that is on its most basic level.

The reason stories like Zootopia and Beastars work when it comes to discrimination because it doesn't solely focus on the narrative of race and allows it to explore the implicit and explicit biases of every character that doesn't exclusively revolve around racism. It allows characters to be on the axis of sexism, racism, class, etc. and explore various -isms that are not always "negative" in the sense that it is just hatred, racial slurs, etc. and that it can be the "positive" racism like saying "you're one of the good ones" or that "they're a token to xyz for not being as bad as everyone else."

It allows characters to fall on multiple axes without people arguing whether they have it "too good to complain" because of just one axis of discrimination that they give more weight to than others for some arbitrary reason.

Even when it comes to things like nudity being a symbol of being true to oneself or purity (such as Sailor Moon or Kill La Kill) people manage to, unironically boil it down to just the writers feeling horny and therefore ignore any other kind of lore, storytelling, etc. that revolves around it. They took one thing, scrubbed, bleached, and then nuked it of any kind of context/meta just to say lol writers horny this bad it literally means nothing else even though there are whole ass plot lines revolving around it. Like do you just pick and choose what kind of plot or storytelling is Valid (TM)?

And this extends to things beyond that and I just don't understand how people can lack such media literacy when you can literally go and read anything you want online. Is it because of people being willfully ignorant? Just lacking media literacy for some reason? Only consuming and understanding media that has to have every meaning shoved down their throat like the tentacle down an anime girl's throat in a hentai??? Like there are so many questions as to how people can come up with so many dumbass takes.

[smhalltheurlsaretaken]

MIXED-RACE FAMILIES PSA

So for months now I’ve been wanting to write this whole thing about how mixed-raced families have their experiences constantly disregarded and belittled and how people expect mixed-race kids to ���side’ with an ethnicity over another, or to value one more, and how non-mixed family members can just as often be completely pushed out of the discussion, but frankly I don’t want to deal with the amount of bullshit this site will throw my way if I do.

Briefly though, to expect mixed families to have the same outlook on race as one group of people or another is to deny their unique perspective. To discount any of their loving family members as unimportant or ignorant is to forget that these people are parents, siblings, cousins, uncles and aunts to each other before anything else. To make everything about American systemic racism is to forget that there are, in fact, many equally troubled countries that nonetheless have very different racial issues. To dismiss mixed families’ insight on race relations and to tell them that their outlook is utopic or downright offensive, when some of them live a dream that many people suffered or died to see come true, is to ignore what a beautiful source of joy, hope and wonder these families can be.

So with that, have some of the funniest, most wholesome moments that can come from having a mixed family, because not all of them are constantly struggling or having identity crises:

swapping outfits, wearing each other's traditional clothes, feeling all happy and warm about it

everybody wishing they could have each other's hair

learning to do each other’s hair

the teenage boys teaching each other to do all the different accents and switching between them for comedic purposes

comparing skin care/hair care products, trying all of them out

adapting recipes to each other's ingredients

"what are you EATING?!" frequently, from all parties

the first generation immigrant dad somehow knowing all of the region's secret recipes because he's managed to get himself adopted by all the elders

the white three year old girl going around her kindergarten telling everybody that she's 'part African' because her uncle is black and she doesn't get that she's not actually related to him

the six year old wishing she was mixed because her cousins are the prettiest girls ever

keeping a tally of all the times a cashier or an old lady has assumed one of the kids was related to someone they weren't

joking about 'looking like the adopted one'

a third of the family unit not being related to anyone by blood *or* by marriage, but at this point who's counting. 

more people showing up

the cousins' cousins showing up too

getting introduced to family members by oblivious people, repeatedly

well-meaning member of 'their' ethnicity, or even other mixed people: "This is how [your family members] do things, in case you didn't know" *deadpan look, secretly dying* "Thanks”

woke people making a big deal out of the ‘diversity of the family’ and how it reminds them of [a place nobody in the family is from], the teenagers dying trying to keep the laughter in

people casually discussing the hardcore stuff they did ‘back there,’ said stuff somehow including that time their small boat got capsized by a giant manta ray after they went beyond the coral reef, or watching headless chickens run around (yes it’s a real thing) after killing them for lunch + the people who lived in cities their entire lives staring dumbly

the mixed and non-mixed kids introducing themselves as cousins and getting to enjoy the funniest reactions

“We’re cousins.” (”On est cousines.”)

*blinking* "... But, hmm... How is that?" (”Mais, heu... Comment ça se fait?”)

[evanescentjasmine]

I’m going to talk about a little pet peeve of mine with regard to portrayal of poc in fic, TMA specifically since that’s what I mostly read and write for. 

I suppose I should first start by saying that, of course, poc are not a monolith, and I’m certain there are other poc who have many different views on this issue. And also this post is in no way meant to demonise, shame, or otherwise discourage people from writing poc in fic if they’re doing something differently. This is just a thing I’ve been noodling on for a while and have had several interesting conversations with friends about, and now that I think I’ve figured out why I have this pet peeve, I figured I’d gather my thoughts into a post.

As a result of the fact we have no canonical racial, ethnic, or religious backgrounds for our main TMA cast, we’ve ended up with many diverse headcanons, and it’s absolutely lovely to see. I’m all for more diversity and I’m always delighted to see people’s headcanons. 

However, what often happens is I’ll be reading a fic and plodding along in a character’s PoV and get mention of their skin colour. And nothing else. I find this, personally, extremely jarring. In a short one-shot it makes sense, because you’re usually touching on one scenario and then dipping out. Likewise if the fic is in a different setting, is cracky, or is told from someone else’s PoV, that’s all fine. But if I’m reading a serious long-fic close in the poc’s head and...nothing? That’s just bizarre to me.

Your heritage, culture, religion, and background, all of those affect how you view the world, and how the world views you in return. How people treat you, how you carry yourself, what you’re conscious of, all of that shifts. And the weird thing is that many writers are aware of this when it comes to characters being ace or trans or neurodivergent—and I’m genuinely pleased by that, don’t get me wrong. Nothing has made my ace self happier than the casual aceness in TMA fics that often resonates so well with my experience. But just as gender, orientation, and neurodivergence change how a character interacts with their world, so do race, ethnicity, and religion. 

As a child, I spent a couple of years in England while my mother was getting her degree. Though I started using Arabic less and less, my mother still spoke to me almost exclusively in Arabic at home. We still ate romy cheese and molokhia and the right kind of rice, though we missed out on other things. She managed to get an Egyptian channel on TV somehow, which means I still grew up with different cultural touchstones and make pop-culture references that I can’t share with my non-Arabic-speaking friends. She also became friends with just about every Egyptian in her university, so for those years I had a bevy of unrelated Uncles and Aunties from cities all over Egypt, banding together to go on outings or celebrate our holidays.

As an adult who sometimes travels abroad solo, and as a fair-skinned Arab who’s fluent in English, usually in a Western country the most I’ll get is puzzled people trying to parse my accent and convinced someone in my family came from somewhere. When they hear my name, though, that shifts. I get things like surprise, passive-aggressive digs at my home region, weird questions, insistence I don’t look Egyptian (which, what does that even mean?) or the ever-popular, ever-irritating: Oh, your English is so good!

At airports, with my Egyptian passport, it’s less benign. I am very commonly taken aside for extra security, all of which I expect and am prepared for, and which always confuses foreign friends who insisted beforehand that surely they wouldn’t pull me aside. Unspoken is the fact I, y’know, don’t look like what they imagine a terrorist would. But I’m Arab and that’s how it goes, despite my, er, more “Western” leaning presentation. 

This would be an entirely different story if I were hijabi, or had darker skin, or a more pronounced accent. I am aware I’m absolutely awash with privilege. Likewise, it would be different if I had a non-Arab name and passport. 

So it’s slightly baffling to me as to why a Jon who is Pakistani or Indian or Arab and/or Black British would go through life the exact same way a white British character would. 

Now, I understand that race and ethnicity can be very fraught, and that many writers don’t want to step on toes or get things wrong or feel it isn’t their place to explore these things, and certainly I don’t think it’s a person’s place to explore The Struggles of X Background unless they also share said background. I’m not saying a fic should portray racism and microaggressions either (and if they do, please take care and tag them appropriately), but that past experiences of them would affect a character. A fic doesn’t have to be about the Arab Experience With Racism (™) to mention that, say, an Arab Jon headed to the airport in S3 for his world tour would have been very conscious to be as put together as he could, given the circumstances, and have all his things in order. 

And there’s so much more to us besides. What stories did your character grow up with? What language was spoken at home? Do they also speak it? If not, how do they feel about that? What are their comfort foods? Their family traditions? The things they do without thinking? The obscure pop-culture opinions they can’t even begin to explain? (Ask me about the crossover between Egyptian political comedy and cosmic horror sometime…)

I’m not saying you’ll always get it right. Hell, I’m not saying I always get it right either. I’m sure someone can read one of my fics and be like, “nope, this isn’t true to me!” And that’s okay. The important thing, for me, is trying.

Because here’s the thing. 

I want you to imagine reading a fic where I, a born and raised Egyptian, wrote white characters in, say, a suburb in the US as though they shared my personal experiences. It’s a multi-generational household, people of the same gender greet with a kiss on each cheek, lunch is the main meal, adults only move out when they get married, every older person they meet is Auntie or Uncle, every bathroom has a bidet, there’s a backdrop of Muslim assumptions and views of morality, and the characters discuss their Eid plans because, well, everyone celebrates Eid, obviously.

Weird, right? 

So why is this normal the other way around? 

Have you ever stopped to wonder why white (and often, especially American) experiences are considered the default? The universal inoffensive base on which the rest is built? 

Yes, I understand that writers are trying to be inoffensive and respectful of other backgrounds. But actually, I find the usual method of having the only difference be their skin colour or features pretty reductive. We’re more than just a paint job or a sprinkle of flavour to add on top of the default. Many of us have fundamentally different life experiences and ignoring this contributes to that assumption of your experience being universal. 

Yes, fic is supposed to be for fun and maybe you don’t want to have to think about all this, and I get that completely. I have all the respect in the world for writers who tag their TMA fics as an American AU, or who don’t mention anyone’s races. I get it. But when you have characters without a canonical race and you give them one, you’re making a decision, and I want you to think about it. 

Yes, this is a lot of research, but the internet is full of people talking about themselves and their experiences. Read their articles, read their blogs, read their twitter threads, watch their videos, see what they have to say and use it as a jumping-off point. I’m really fond of the Writing With Color blog, so if you’re not sure where to start I’d recommend giving them a look. 

Because writers outside of the Anglosphere already do this research in order to write in most fandoms. Writers of colour already put themselves in your shoes to write white characters. And frankly, given the amount of care that many white writers put into researching Britishisms, I don’t see why this can’t extend to other cultural differences as well.