#but sometimes it's crazy to me that there's people out there who DONT think it's toxic and harmful to the both of them

[creatingblackcharacters]

i have a question im seeing an influx of elphaba/glinda fanart based on the movie but sometimes im not sure if the artist drew Black hair correctly? i wanna reblog but i dont wanna promote art that doesnt draw Black hair correctly but i also dont want to be overly critical of the art? im using my best judgement but sometimes it feels like none of the way people draw Black hair looks right and i have to lower my standards i feel like im going crazy scrutinizing elphaba’s braids every time i see art on my dash is it supposed to be like that (i am poc but not Black)

It's maddening, isn't it?

You're talking about lowering your standards and being less critical, but the standard is "depicting a Black woman as she looks". That's the bare minimum! Cynthia Erivo said that she intentionally chose microbraids for Black girls to see that style on screen- choosing not to depict that style as is, is tantamount to saying "fuck them Black girls and their rep".

So! This is a CHOICE that you have to make!

Do you choose antiblackness for the sake of your enjoyment? Do you accept that you'd rather be antiblack in order to feel comfortable, to feel included, to feel "more sane"? Because you've said the quiet part out loud- be willing to accept that you'll be letting antiblackness slide for fun! But it's easier!

Or, do you choose to keep your standards, and accept that it is, ultimately, lonely? And yes, it is sad and hurtful and crazy that in order to be included, you have to accept racism (and you're not even a part of the group being demeaned this time). You can choose antiracism, and accept that it means seeing just how normalized racism really is in your spaces, and just how unwelcome being Black really is. And that is hard.

Me personally, I usually choose the latter. It is lonely, and 8/10 I cannot share the art of the "Black" character I love. But I think it was Che Guevara that said "If you tremble with indignation at every injustice then you are a comrade of mine." 👍🏾 My integrity means a lot to me- if they don't respect me, I gotta respect me, and I respect those who own up to the hard choice.

[soggy-fishsticks]

there's a lot of reasons why I don't like sefikura as a genuine ship (have mercy on me) but why does every sefikura fanart/fic read like this:

[gingerswagfreckles]

Hey everything is getting so crazy and infuriating so I'm making a lot of posts about gentile antisemitism and I just wanted to say that to my like 5 or 6 gentile followers who actually reblog this stuff despite the inevitable backlash and ostracization that comes with being associated with Jews nowadays, I see it and I really really really REALLY appreciate it. Beyond what I can really articulate.

[natandacat]

The notes are so funny bc here are the 'downsides of being an only child' that are literally not unique to being an only child and more of a parenting/situational thing really:

- "It's lonely!/Siblings are built-in friends!" One of my brothers played with me out of a sense of necessity because we were not allowed to be with other kids and he deeply resented me for that, which made for a bad relationship and me being extremely alone all the time anyway. I'd rather have skipped the hatred (on his part) and heart break (on mine) and gone directly to playing alone. I have literally never had an intimate conversation with any of my 3 brothers (except literally One time with one of them) but I've had countless of horrid fights (with me or witnessed). Hell is other people, etc.

- "All the attention is suffocating!" I was monitored 24/7 and pretty much never left alone, up to a point where my bathroom time was also monitored. My brother actively and voluntarily participated in the monitoring at some points.

- "You get unconditional support as an adult!" I've been in a lot of trouble since I was 17 and they've never helped, not materially or emotionally.

-"You have more people to build happy memories with!" My brother got married 3 days before I was back in the country (he set the date way after I had bought my plane tickets and also he actively chose to hide it from me) and still blames me for being upset because "it was a ceremony for closed loved ones only anyway" (I guess I wasn't counted!). That's just the most egregious examples in a long, long list.

I get grass is greener ect but what bothers me is that it reinforces the idea that sibling relationships are *always* a net positive, in a very "nuclear family is sacred" way

Like I'm not venting for the sake of it, I've been no contact for 4 years and it's great, I'm just frustrated that it's so goddamn hard to get people to acknowledge sibling abuse, or even get them to *not* perform shocked incredulity at the idea. Especially on tumblr, THE website where people talk about parental abuse all the time and understand that sometimes you really cannot salvage the relationship and it truly is detrimental

All I'm saying is stop assuming that things would be better with a sibling around. You don't know that! Believe me, things could be so much worse with a sibling around.

The good news is you get to choose your friends and siblings as an adult! :) Life can be sweet not matter who your nuclear family is! You're not a failure for not experiencing the hegemonic ideal of siblinghood! It's okay!

[oh-cramity-its-amity]

i love my friends so much. i feel like yesterday i had a lot of shit going on in my head and i woke up to my friend explaining things in a way that put my mind at ease. i dont feel as anxious anymore because i know i was overthinking. i think my dad said it best when he told me that he thought my wonderful brain of mine just wants to think problems are bigger than they actually are. he is right! im just inexperienced in life and half of the time im scared im doing something wrong but- HEY. i need to be more confident in making mistakes. making mistakes doesn't define me as a person!! i need to stop worrying about doing life right and just live for the sake of living and doing what makes me happy!!!!!!!

[neige-leblanche]

idk i do need to think more abt how ppls personal experiences interact w their Fandom Behaviors esp now that im less caught up in a specific fandom that was rlly bad about that lol

[l-cereta]

oh my god u know the hrt is working when u get genuinely white girl drunk

[justinefrischmanngf]

i need to stop giving people my instagram i think like it’s not conducive to appearing in people’s lives and then disappearing i think i should start a number/email/letterboxd only policy because i am in such a good place to meet people and then just disappear and that’s all i need from life rn and instagram is hindering me massively in that i’m literally going to start doing this

[zemnarihah]

much to think about.

[stupidnaturals]

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[ironmanstan]

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[heyitslapis]

The argument of "well people are offended by ANYTHING these days, so thats their fault not mine and i dont have to change my behavior just cause im 'offending them' haha got'cha!" doesnt make any fucking sense to me either bc like. I remember when i was like 13/14, when i had just gotten a tumblr, i used to call girls "chicks" without giving it any thought. it was just a word i was raised hearing. I wasn't doing it in a hateful manner and my goal wasnt to be offensive, but still, someone was uncomfortable with me using that term used to refer to women. I received a simple anon that said "hey do you mind to not use the word "chicks" (when referring to women), it makes me uncomfortable". And you know what? I told the anon no worries and that i'd not say that word from there on out.

It didn't hurt me to find another word, the word wasnt special to me in any way, i didnt take offense to it, because i was unaware that i was causing harm, so its not like it was an attack on my character, and i knew the anon was coming to me for a minuscule, easy to grant request. The word held no real meaning to me, but to someone else, it did, and because i dont want to hurt people on purpose or to have people feel like im not a safe space, i adjusted my behavior AND my vocabulary accordingly. it was no skin off my back, and i was happy to do it because i was able to help someone else feel safe around me/my blog. No, i dont HAVE to cater to peoples requests, and i dont HAVE to change my vocabulary just because someone else has an issue with what i say, but why would i not? it doesnt inconveinece me, it doesnt harm me, its not much extra effort to spend .2 seconds thinking of a different word to use, and that teeny tiny grain-of-sand sized request meant something to the anon who asked it, so why would i argue or fight or piss and moan about a single little word? why is that so hard? why is common courtesy, mutual respect and kindness such a chore to these people? why do you so desperately want to defend your right to be mean and harsh and callous toward people? what do you gain? arent you tired?

[bionic-penis]

Erm !! Lil rant in da tags bc !! Erm !!

[inbabylontheywept]

by tradition, the first day of the camp was spent pranking the group next to us. our prank was ziptying the zippers on their sleeping bags together. we figured one of them would sleep with a knife, because we all slept with knives, because we were dangerous maniacs and half the danger of a dangerous maniac is that they tend to think that they are Actually Normal. so. obviously that didn't pan out, and instead they got stuck in their sleeping bags for like half an hour and because their scoutmaster slept in their car and couldn't hear them yelling, they actually only got out when one of them went full caged animal and chewed through the plastic. which meant they had time to make it to the axe throwing station, but they did miss breakfast.

the scale of our victory was impossible to understate. it was an epic prank. unrivaled. the best in years. we knew they were going to retaliate, and we both feared and craved it. maybe i'm still a maniac, but that feels like a common thing, right? do well adjusted people that are not maniacs crave Judgement?

(serious answers only please, from people who would never spoon a knife.)

anyway, the next day we got back to our camp, and the neighors had skipped dinner to just come back and fill all our tents with pinecones. which was like, a decent prank, i guess, but it probably took them an hour to fill all the tents up, and it took us like 15 minutes to tip the tents out, and as a return volley to the ziptie prank it was incredibly underwhelming. we felt a little cheated.

so our scouting group held a council, and we agreed, unanimously, that our prank was 100% better and theirs sucked and that there would be no escalating tensions because we were the clear victors. they'd had their chance to retaliate, and they failed, and so the war was over. that was it.

we agreed on this. we swore. but madness is a relative thing, and in our group of maniacs, we still had J. i have many, many J stories. too many. i biked up to school with him from 4th grade to 8th, and i saw him get hit by cars thrice. he'd just swerve into the road sometimes. one time on a rainy day in 4th grade, a car splashed me, and before i could even consider my response J yelled I GOT THIS and then he blitzed off after the car. i didn't see him the rest of the day. i was so anxious i barely slept that night. i saw him the next morning and he told me that he'd chased the car until it got to a gated community and then he'd climbed over the fence and looked in peoples garages until he found the one with the car, and then he'd ripped the hood ornament off and broke their window. then he gave me a hood ornament to a different brand of car from the one that splashed me and i didnt tell him because i didnt want him missing more school. i want you to mentally adjust your mental model of the things a 9 year old is capable of doing to include chasing a car for five miles, hopping a fence, breaking into a garage, and vandalizing a randos car.

and that's just the tip of my J stories iceberg.

the point of all this is just to say that J was so crazy that he made us knife spooners look like accountanting enthusiasts.

so we agreed the war was done, and we shook on it, and then J, in the name of friendship, in the name of honor, in the name of avenging our pinecone filled tents, snuck over to their camp that evening and fornicated with a watermelon that they'd been saving in their cooler.

i want to emphasize, again, that this was not the consensus of the group. that is not a prank. like i know it seems like we dont know what pranks are because of the whole ziptie thing, but even we knew that fucking someones food is not a prank, it is a crime, and a sin, the kind of weapon that had only been ethically used once in history by Horus in his battle against Set and none of us dumb assholes had owl heads.

so.

the next day went pretty well. we threw some more axes again, which is a valuable and important skill for children to learn i guess, and we learned how to tie knots, which is a skill that turned out to be far sexier than i ever expected, and i learned how to light fires with a magnifying glass, which was great. i'm looking back at this, and i am actually just now beginning to realize that the clear and obvious point of scouting is turning child sociopaths into apex predators.

and then the day ended, and we went back to our camps, except for our leaders, who had a sort of Scout Leader Meeting they were going to have for a few hours at least. it was built into the camp, that day was supposed to be our day to chill as a group, and make peach cobbler, and just be buddies.

except, as it turned out, our neighboring group's alternative to making peach cobbler was eating their watermelon. so at some point they opened their watermelon, and woo boy. oh man. you think catholics hated seedless watermelons? you should see how much mormons hate seeded ones.

so we were chilling by the fire, and then we heard screaming from the camp over, but we didn't pay much mind to that because there are many reasonable explanations for a group of 10ish children to scream simulanteoulsy, such as wasps, which are abundant in arizona, and then the screaming got closer, which did not bother us because there were many reasons for a group 10ish children to scream and run towards us, for example, wasps, which are abundant in arizona, and then we noticed they had large sticks on them, which we figured were perhaps being used to drive away the wasps, which are abundant in arizona, and then they arrived and they started beating the shit out of us, abundantly, in arizona.

so we ran into the woods.

now, at this point, we had no idea what was up. we knew that the camp next to us was out for blood, which was crazy, because we'd actually locked them in fartproof bags for 30 minutes and they'd barely done anything back, and were trying to figure out what could possibly have happened that could drive them to Terrible Violence when we realized that J was cackling like a witch that had learned how to order children off of ebay.

so we politely asked J what the hell he had done, and he politely explained that had "done" their watermelon, and we politely beat him with large sticks because life is nothing but endless cycles of violence.

we were still being chased by the other camp btw. so it was them, chasing us, chasing J, and then they got tired and went back to their camp, and we chased J a little longer because we were mad we'd all been walloped with sticks, and J did not care because he was a supernatural entity whose only weaknesses were Needles and Fire, and then we got tired and went back and J kept running, and we just kind of figured he would come back eventually.

he did not.

we went back to our tents, and we waited, and J did not come back. we stayed up all night, peering into the forest, worrying. our leader came back, and we did our best to hide our battlewounds, and he either genuinely did not notice or simply accepted this as part of Boyhood. then he went to bed, and we waited, and waited, and waited. And Waited. and did not sleep.

eventually, we convened again, and we agreed that if J was not back by after breakfast, we would have to tell the scoutleader about what exactly had transpired. and we really did not want to do that, because it would have meant that everyone would have gotten in a very large amount of trouble.

morning came around, and J still was not back. we went to breakfast, and we ate very, very slowly. we were afraid the other camp was going to continue their war with us, but they actually looked fairly frightened. one of them actually came to us and asked for a truce, and we agreed because we truly felt bad for them. like, yes, they did beat us with sticks, but J fucked their watermelon. we werent complicit in the watermelonfuckening but they didnt know that, and it was definitely the kind of crime that left one outside the bounds of the social contract.

and then when we could eat no more bits, when breakfast was almost done, right when i was getting pushed to go and tell the scoutleader that we needed to find J, he arrived. he was sleep deprived, and noticeably scraped and bloody, and tied to his belt was a blood squirrel tail.

and i asked him, J, where did you get that? and he said, don't worry man, it was already dead, which did not answer by question and gave me several more.

the camp ended that day, and the other groups avoided us like the plague, and it was not until some weeks later that we were able to piece together what happened.

J, in his sojourn through the forest, managed to find (or, possibly, make) a dead squirrel. he then cut off the tail to keep on his belt, because he was a weird little freak like that. he also took the dead squirrel, and he skinned it, then he tied it to a little crucifix made of wood, and he left it in the other scouting group's camp. which is why they were so scared of us.

it was such an unhinged thing to do it actually sobered us up for a while. scouting became a scary thing for us. we'd found something dark and primal there, in the place where no adult could see, and our appreciation of J as a wild ride kind of changed into seeing him as something truly dangerous. we had a sense wherever he went, something terrible would follow, and the only way to escape it was to not be there when it arrived. and so piece by piece, the scout group dissolved. it wasnt until he moved out of that ward that the rest of us started daring to go back to scouts.

and for the final epilogue of the tale:

i have a little brother who was friends with a younger cousin of J's, and the two would go to parties together in highschool. and sometimes J, who was in his early 20's at that point, would show up at the parties, and it was unsettling in such a way that it just became a known risk at parties with the cousin. and at one party, they were playing truth or dare, and J wasn't even in the room, but someone asked him the Truth of how he always knew how to find the cousin, and J said the cousin's mom had mentioned she was worried about him and the parties so he'd put a tracker in his car. and when he saw that the cousin was out of the house on weekends, he'd made a visit by, just to make sure he was safe.

then he left. and every single person at that party went over that poor kid's car. they searched the wheel-wells, checked underneath it, the works, until they found the tracker. then because they were clever, they didnt break it, or throw it away, or anything that would've given away what they'd done. they just gave the tracker to the cousin, who put it in his glovebox. and on schooldays, he'd take it with him, so J could see him in the parking lot. and on weekends, he could leave it in the garage, so he could go to parties with out Hell coming with him. because everyone that met J - every single person - knew that the only way to be safe from him was to be far, far away.

[euniexenoblade]

since we're talking about call outs lately, i've been called out many times, most of which are made from lies and sometimes by altering screenshots, but the most effective call out i ever got was like, in early 2015 there was a tumblr user everyone knew was a terf, but she would say "actually i support trans women" this was before crypto terfs were as talked about so the language wasn't really there to say "hey this person is a crypto terf." but yeah some people put posts of this woman on my dash and i made a random post on my blog "why do yall reblog her shes a terf" and of course she searches her own name daily, found my post, and replied to it that me calling her a terf was racist. that was it. no other interaction. but she went on all night talking about me being racist and just making things up as she went "oh i bet she says the n word all the time irl" kind of shit that had, like no basis? But her follower base took it 100% and i literally had thousands of anons telling me to kill myself, trying to goad me into being racist (didnt work), and the most concerning thing was i got hundreds of anons being like "what was the point of doing hrt if you still look like that, you should kill yourself." It was like, violent and overwhelming. and on top of it I'd get random young teenager trans people who followed her and bought into her bioessentialism showing up in my messages being like "you give trans people a bad name" "you're why transphobia exists" etc etc it was fucking crazy.

but i lost like, no followers because everyone around me understood, this woman was a terf. this all set up the real one though.

later in the year a teenage "communist" trans girl made some snarky comment about me being racist on a post of mine blowing up. i ignored her cuz like, who cares it's just some random teenager. but i guess people were looking for a reason to hate me cuz that blew up, lots of people just took that at face value no need to investigate. when someone finally did send the girl an ask being like "hey how is she racist" she replied "I dont remember but I know she is" and even more people just took this as 100%. the thing is, i do remember her being one of those "you make trans people look bad" terf following young trans people, it's not that she didn't remember, it's that she didnt want to admit she followed a terf and she believed a terf just saying shit. I lost like 3/4s of my followers, i had a lot of people i thought were my friends just stop talking to me, and going forward every time i got a call out there would usually be a line of like "also she's racist, everyone already knows this" all cuz this girl needed to make a snarky comment cuz she just loves terfs.

the thing about the "i dont remember" bit is it made some weird game of telephone. "I dont remember" became "oh she's racist, i think she says the n word" which became "she called black bloggers the n word" like people just made shit up about me and connected it to this call out. and when id be like this isnt true id be met with a "this is just known, youre a known racist" and it's like, to this day i will still find people be like "hey good on you for growing as a person and not doing that any more" and its like I NEVER DID IT TO BEGIN WITH