#but the antisemitism really wants to make everyone here believe that we only exist as a subset of white european christians

[butwhypants]

Israel is absolutely not a settler colonial state what the fuck. I have no idea where that started, there are like a million different criticisms at the current government you can make but it is not a colony? What the fuck?

Like, if you want to call the current Israeli government far-right, you can do that. If you want to call them a theocratic police state, you can do that. Those are all genuine criticisms that can be responded to, and used to shape a better world for both Israeli's and Palestinians. You don't need to make up some hogwash about Benjamin Netanyahu being a fake Jew or an evil convert to justify criticizing his current government! Fucking Goyim! Just say you don't like the police state! It's fine!

[shizucheese]

So about that Dropout Tweet...

There's a common trend in influencer/ content creator apologies, where the person doing the apology will say they are sorry for the harm that they did, claim they are taking ownership of it and using the whole situation to become a better person, etc. etc. Usually in a way that makes it sound suspiciously like it was written by ChatGPT.

And then they'll go on to say something along the lines of "But we've been getting a lot of death threats guys, and that's bad!" As if the fact that they're getting death threats somehow absolves them of at least some of the guilt of whatever it is that made the apology necessary in the first place. As if it means they're the real victims here.

Apparently Dropout decided to just skip the "ChatGPT apology" part and jump straight to the "We're getting physcal and legal threats" part. Followed up with them once again saying they support Palestiniens and ending it with "We reject antisemitism, Islamophobia, and all forms of bigotry, and welcome all to our platform who treat others with respect, empathy, and human dignity."

And they did it on Twitter, and only Twitter. You know, the website that's notoriously overrun by Nazis. Nothing on Tumblr or Instagram, where the original statement that sparked all of this (which has since been taken down) were posted.

@dropoutdottv, @samreich, this is not listening to the Jewish members of your community who are speaking out about antisemitism. This is reinforcing the antisemitism that those Jewish members of the community are speaking out about. Because what this Tweet does is paint everyone who spoke out against the antisemitism in your original post with the same brush as the people who were sending you threats.

Which, let me be clear, they should not have been doing and I wholeheartedly condemn.

But the actions of the people sending you threats of violence and threats of legal action do not invalidate the things being said by the people who haven't threatened you with anything worse than a boycott. I have literally seen people say "the fact that they got threats just proves they were right." Is that the outcome you were trying to achieve with this?

People who did bad things get death threats all the time; refer back to the beginning of this post. Does that make their critics wrong then, too? Or is it only now, when the accusation being made is that a nerdy comedy network beloved by people on the left did an antisemitism?

I honestly can't tell if you have no publicist helping you out with one, a bad publicist that needs to give you your money back, or an evil genius publicist that knew that if you made a post like this one, it would distract from the fact that you're being accused of antisemitism, maybe even act as a dog whistle to to paint anyone who accuses you of being antisemitic of being "Zionists" (meant in the derogatory way, where people claim they're only talking about people who uncritically support the Israeli government and their actions in Gaza, but then in practice will use it against anyone who believes Israel has the right to exist, including those who want a two state solution, whose hearts break for the people in Palestine, and call Netanyahu a fascist and probably want him gone more than even the people calling them "zionists" do). Maybe even make up for all of the subscriptions you're losing over this and even gain a few by catering to the antisemitic leftist crowd.

Is that really the kind of culture you want to cultivate? If not, then do better. Acknowledge the Jewish voices that are speaking out. Listen to them. And do it in a way that doesn't bring up any other marginalized group. Because like...fuck, man, I reject Islamophobia, and all forms of bigotry too. And I'm sorry you guys are receiving threats; that truly does suck and I hope everyone that works for you guys are staying safe.

But you're specifically being accused of antisemitism. Can you really not reject it all on its own without including other forms of bigotry in the same statement?

And do it on a platform that *isn't* run by an infamous antisemitic, and overrun by more antisemitics? (You can turn off comments and reblogs on Tumblr and comments on instagram, in the same way you disabled replies on your Tweet, you know.)

Here, I'll even write the statement for you: "Earlier this week, we made a statement regarding accusations that Dropout was platforming zionists. At the time, we made a statement focusing on our support of the Palestinian people. We stand by this statement. However, we have received feedback from several members of our community that some of the things that we said were inappropriate insensitive to the Jewish people. "Zionist" and "Zionism" mean different things to different people, ranging from "people who support the Israeli government's actions in Gaza" to "people who believe that Israel has a right to exist and the Jewish people have the right to self-determination." We had meant it in the context of the former definition, but we understand that many Jewish people identify with the later, including many people who are disgusted by the Israeli government's actions in Gaza, and we should have been more sensitive to this fact. Additionally, we would like to reiterate that, to our knowledge, nobody who has appeared on Dropout has openly stated support for the Israelie's actions in Gaza, and several of those accused have voiced their support for a free Palestine. We would like to take this moment to remind everyone that just because a person is Jewish, and may have ties to Israel, does not inherently mean they condone the actions of the Israeli government in Gaza, and to suggest otherwise is antisemitic. We at Dropout reject all forms of antisemitism and are committed to providing a safe space to everyone regardless of religion or ethnic background. We apologize if we made the Jewish members of our community feel like that was not the case."

See how easy that was? I feel something like this is the bear minimum, and if you had said the things in the last three paragraphs from the start, you could have avoided having to say everything in the first two paragraphs and the apology at the end.

That's...pretty much everything I have to say on the matter. To anyone reading this: Do not use other Jewish people to silence Jewish voices.

Do not use people of other marginalized groups to silence Jewish voices.

Just...maybe just listen to what we have to say without twisting our words and putting words in our mouths? Maybe?

Thanks for reading.

I'm so tired.

[slyandthefamilybook]

Who is the antisemite?

I've made many a post about the nature of antisemitism, and I don't expect I'll ever stop. But I've made relatively few posts about antisemites, who they are, and why they are. I don't mean to make a list of every antisemite in the world; I wouldn't be able to finish it before I died at my keyboard. Instead I want to explore a bit into the nature of antisemitic belief and what draws people to it, in the hopes of helping people recognize their own behaviors. This won't be a thorough taxonomy, but will focus on something I believe is at–or close to–the heart of the issue.

When I tell people antisemitism can have a racial component the response I usually get is, "but Jewish isn't a race so you can't be racist against Jews!" Now it's true that "Jewish" is not (currently) one of the accepted racial categories (up until some time in the 1950s you could list your race on U.S. censi as "Hebrew"), but that's not exactly what I mean. What I mean is that there's a pattern of thought that's part-and-parcel of racism and racist ideas, even if it's not always deployed against what we would consider a race. That pattern is bio-essentialism–the belief that there are certain inherent and largely invariant differences between discrete groups of people. This, for example, explains the significant overlap between racism and transphobia, if not always in practice than in thought. If you believe these differences exist along racial lines, it's simple enough to map them onto sex as well. Bio-essentialism is not the only driving force behind racism, but it is a significant one, and one that can be reasonably used as a predictor of racist thought. In this sense, focusing on phenotypes common among Jews (prominent noses, dark curly hair, olive skin) can have a racial component, and can result in behaviors and attitudes that behave like racism, even if Jews aren't a "race".

So we have racial antisemitism, and from here we can sit around and postulate on other alchemical combinations; the intersection of antisemitism and sexism, for example, resulting in stereotypes about nagging Jewish wives, overbearing Jewish mothers, and the Jewish American Princess. The intersection of antisemitism and patriarchy, creating anxieties about weak or effeminate Jewish men. Antisemitism and classism; antisemitism and homophobia; antisemitism and anti-theism; and on and on. But what about anti-Jewish antisemitism? What do we find that makes people hate Jews for being Jews?

I'm going to lean fairly heavily on Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition by intellectual historian David Nirenberg. It's a fantastic albeit excruciating read, and I highly recommend everyone–Jewish and not–pick it up from their local library.

Much like the habits of bio-essentialism characterize much of racism, obsession with blame is (I believe) the core driver of anti-Jewish antisemitism. Specifically blame of the other, although that's generally merely step two in the process. Jews occupy a fairly unique position in the world in that in the vast majority of places where we live we don't really belong. We're treated as guests, reliant on the grace and magnanimity of our hosts to ensure our protection and survival. Part of this is our own doing; throughout the Diaspora our struggle to cohere to our identity has set us apart from everyone else. We don't like to assimilate any more than we have to. But it would be wrong to place the blame for our status entirely on our shoulders, so I will not do so. For the purposes of this post let us take it prima facie that Jews maintain a role of perpetual outsiders–among the nations of the world but not of them.

Throughout history this status has allowed our hosts to define themselves in opposition to us. Jews, who never really belonged, became emblematic of whatever ill the current society, religion, or philosophy decided was most pressing. We gave people opportunity to externalize their own faults, to shift blame from themselves and their comrades to nefarious interlopers. To recontextualize their responsibility to themselves into a Manichaean (I use the word deliberately) struggle between darkness and light. If the anxieties of the day centered around hypocrisy, Jewish Rabbis were the hypocrites you should strive to be unlike. If it was infidelity, it was the Jewess temptresses who were to blame. If it was greed, it was certainly the Jewish bankers who were at fault.

Perhaps my use of past-tense verbs is misleading; this is still the nature of antisemitism today. But this is certainly also how it began. The urge to excise culpability is a fairly common one. It crosses cultural boundaries and expresses itself in toddlers the world around. And so whither the Jews went, childish vindictiveness followed.

When we understand how antisemitism is used as a tool, we can begin to understand the work it does for those who use it. Antisemitism is the antidote to critical thought, to skepticism and self-reflection. It creates a "them", not in reality but in the mind. It explains failure not through any self-conscious rumination, but in the creation of vagrants, infiltrators, and saboteurs.

It now becomes clear why nearly every conspiracy theory is antisemitic, or rapidly hurtling in that direction. One of the cornerstones of conspiratorial thought (as expounded by Michael Barkun in A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America) is the belief that the conspiracies are composed out outside forces. When neo-Nazis compose their "Every Aspect of _____ is Jewish" flyers, they can hardly focus on the fact that the vast majority of the people they blame are American. Americans are the in-group and as such cannot be at fault. Jews are an easily accessible out-group, in part because Jewishness is so "sneaky" (you can be Jewish and not even know it! Even Wikipedia can't seem to decide when someone is Jewish or not!). When people believe that the CIA was responsible for assassinating John F. Kennedy, it's never in their capacity as red-blooded patriotic Americans; it's always the result of insiders from Russia, China, and ultimately, Jews. Even conspiracy theories that don't explicitly name Jews are engaged in antisemitic thought, so long as they seek to pin events on the actions of "them". There's a reason "they" has become memetic in neo-Nazi circles; those who are "them" are most assuredly not "us".

It also becomes clear how and why antisemitism traverses political boundaries, and infects discourse left, right, and center. The extremes–the far-right and far-left (for all the usefulness of the political spectrum, which is not much)–are more prone to antisemitic thought precisely because they are so far from the norm. The more you see wrong with society the more you seek those who are responsible. (Again it's important to note that "antisemitic thought" in this context refers to the habit of looking for outsiders to blame, and does not always map perfectly onto open bigotry toward "real Jews".) When England is close to being a perfect country, it is only through the actions of the Jews that it is prevented from becoming so. When Sovyet communism begins to collapse in on itself, it is certainly the Jews who are accused. It is never "us" or "we"; it is always "they" and "them". And in a fit of cruel irony, when antisemitism becomes un-fashionable, the "no-true-scotsman" fallacy is often deployed, assigning the use of conspiratorial bigotry to impersonators and pretenders.

So what can we do? What can we learn, and how can we change? We can start by resolving to think critically, to not take the easy answers. We can look inward, not outward, and find things to improve in ourselves, rather than assuming that our faults are not our fault. We can be skeptical of conspiracy theories, of people who want to direct our anger in ways that serve their own goals. As always, we can protect and uplift Jews and Jewish communities worldwide. We can orient ourselves toward finding solutions, instead of finding reasons for why we can't. We can unlearn the thought patterns, cliches, and habits of antisemitic thought, or that lead to antisemitic thought. We can stop trying to look for the bad people, and start trying to be the good people.

[xclowniex]

I want to talk about allegations of jew face aka claims that someone is faking being jewish.

On one hand, people do fake being jewish. Last year, at pro Palestine protests, JVP handed out shirts with "not in our name" on the front and "jews say ceasefire now" on the back, to people at protests. Some of the people who recieved and wore the shirts were jewish, but there were also non jews given the shirts and wore them. This shirt is still available for sale on the JVP website. Non jews who wear the shirt are doing jew face, as the shirt implies they are jewish.

Then you have blogs like one which was deleted a few months ago, who claimed to be a jew but was actually someone from Iran. Whilst there are jews in Iran, the blog was claiming to be a Jew in the US. So safe to say, it was an Iranian psyop as they were antisemitic.

Conversely, there are many antizionist jewish bloggers who get falsely slapped with the accusation that they aren't really jewish. 10% of jews worldwide are antizionist or non zionist (someone who doesn't believe that countries should exist, and therefore believes both Israel and Palestine, along with every other country should no longer exist).

And it is actually disgusting when an antizionist jew gets slapped with claims that they aren't actually jewish. A jew is a jew is a jew. Someone's opinion does not strip them of their jewishness.

This post was something I have been wanting to talk about but the thing which motivated me to write it is a post I saw listing behaviors that if someone who says their jewish does, then they aren't really jewish.

And I agree with this in some capacity. A lot of those behaviors are indicative of someone faking being jewish, but no group is a monolith and there could be real jews doing that behavior. I'm giving the benefit of the doubt to that poster and assuming they meant it as a loose rule and not hard criteria.

Some of the behaviors listed were people only saying they were jewish after Oct 7th, jews who post antisemitic content, and blogs which go beyond criticisms of Israel and is literally just xenophobia and that's all they post.

And yes, that are all things which jew fakers do. They only claim to be Jewish to gain a sense of being reputable. However I have spoken with jews who are really jews, who do engage in that behavior. Do I agree with that behavior (excluding claiming to be Jewish only after Oct 7th)? No, I do not. I think it's terrible. But does that made a person less Jewish? No. The reason I excluded the only claiming to be Jewish post oct 7th is because for some jews, being jewish wasn't something they want to advertise on their blog. Whilst I have said I was jewish on past blogs I've had, on this one, it wasn't till after Oct 7th did I make it known here. Which for those who never knew my old blogs, which would be everyone as I was cyberstalked by an ex and would delete blogs when my ex found them, it comes off as if I'm suddenly claiming to be Jewish post oct 7th.

There is also another claim commonly tied to claiming antizionist jews are fake jews, which is that antizionist jews must have no connection or limited connection to jewish culture. That they were either not raised with jewish culture or if they were, as an adult they no longer practice even secular judaism. And whilst again yes, this is true for some, it's not true for all.

There is a popular antizionist jewish blogger on here, which has spoken multiple times about how they practice jewish culture and religion. It would be stupid to deny it because of a political belief.

This post as ended up being far longer than I intended, so to hurry up and get to the point, I do not think we should fake claim jews unless there is hard proof that someone is faking being jewish.

Hard proof can be a person claiming prior to not be Jewish, if a blog is revealed to be a psyop, or if you personally know the person running the blog and know for a fact that they aren't jewish.

[ca-suffit]

This antiblack campaign the fandom just tried to kick up again (to avoid talking about the real issue with Nalyra) reveals how powerless they're starting to truly feel now.

They don't have many users left to vilify so they're putting people on blocklists who are brand new (I was here 3 days lol) or not even really in the fandom. That looks goofy and desperate but then it keeps going. DMing strangers to say "the truth" isn't about racism and "talk to me if you really want to know about anything." Everyone's reblogging those blocklist posts now and adding large commentary suddenly, when before they often fully sat it out. They're doing this in a group to look like they have larger numbers and are "revealing" there's a "big secret bullying problem"....except nobody believes them. Because there's plenty of accounts who are out here saying this shit straight to their faces and they pretend we all don't exist. All of this group has to manufacture drama solely because they just don't want to talk about harmful shit they actually do.

Neil has to make an antiblack statement she made suddenly be about antisemitism towards her, Nalyra's antiblackness is "actually" fans upset about shipping and "what's REALLY coming" in S2, showmey0urfangs is always happy to show up with her dumb screencaps and villain monologue nobody asked for so she can make her everlasting outrage about popular black fics and "feminized" Louis sound deeper than it is, Virginia suddenly cries about IRL issues and wants to leave the fandom because she wants to distract from the Nalyra receipts, Keybearer accused another black fan of trolling people and getting accounts suspended on twitter in 2023 when a Marius fan eventually confessed to it and his eternal shame for that means now every black fan except him is a bully (despite nobody talking about this ever anymore except him), chicalepidopterare mocks a black fan for blocking her "because I thought we were supposed to talk about racism" and then poorly tries to frame any retaliation against her to look like bullying ("see, they're misogynistic, they're bullying my art, they're mean for disliking these ships!").

To quote Claudia here, "You must think me an idiot." And the big cherry on top is also how none of these losers can stand to hear any mention of race....in the fandom of the show that nonstop talks about race. They're using very basic (and meant in a gentle, loving way) teasing of Jacob as proof that black fans are racist against Jacob too, black fans hate Jacob's white wife. People hate Lestat for being white too (what?). They can write crap meta all day about Lestat letting Louis "rape" him and only white victims (Lestat) being real victims to the evil black and brown "true" manipulators (Claudia, Louis, Armand) but gentle teasing from black fans about Jacob's haircut is the real racism. Okay lol. Care to tell us again why you think Delainey's Claudia looks "less innocent" now then? This 3D chess you think you're playing isn't playing how you think for anyone else.

I also notice that afaik there's not a single black American in this group. Idek if there's many Americans of any kind in the group. It's been a lot of shaming to black Americans specifically though, again from the show that's focused on black Americans....by people who aren't black Americans.

"There's people pretending to be black so it's okay to keep hating this whole group." It's not enough you already nonstop shit on black fans as it is, now you have to try to angle it as if none of this could be authentic in the first place. Vile behavior. For what? Tumblr isn't even a platform that pays you for whatever clout you have, so really what is the point here. In a small ass fandom on top of it. Some of you have pretty grown kids too, this is extra sad. It makes all the jumping through hoops to coddle Lestat's behavior make sense though, if you're the same kind of person yourself. Anyway, maybe you don't actually know everything because race exists in the real world beyond how Anne Rice wrote about it in her useless books! You make books written by a racist white woman your whole personality and guess what your outlook on life is going to be.

It's been really pathetic to especially watch any fans of color move more to this extreme bullying side as time has gone on. It will never pay off to promote white fandom ideals. These accounts you're trying to cuddle up to aren't even that big. The fandom outside of the tags actually has much more popular posts, supporters, and fics...although that's also half of what this all is actually about, fic numbers. Again, these are grown adults obsessing over this. We could have a whole different fandom if this group didn't exist and keep wanting to gatekeep everything and be the only people who get praise about anything.

It's no surprise that people who worship Anne Rice have major ego problems themselves. It's been fucked up to deal with but the good thing now is that big egos have big collapses eventually and that's what we're starting to see happening now. People are sick of you and able to see through your basic ass manipulation techniques. People just want to have a fandom, they're not here to worship fans who want to be dictators. Nobody is here for your fragility, losers.

[pettytiredandjewish]

Are you pro-Israel or pro-Palestine?

I honestly don’t think it’s any of your concern but if you really want to know my “stance”, I’ll tell you. You may or may not like my answer but I’m at the point where I really don’t give a flying F. So here we go-

A little background about me-I’m not Israeli, I’m from the states but my great-grandparents on my mom side left Germany sometime a little before WW1 due to antisemitism (they were Ashkenazi Jews.) Not everyone left and the ones who did stay ended up in the concentration camps/ghettos during WW2. Honestly if my great grandparents didn’t leave Germany- well there is a high chance that I wouldn’t be here and that this family tree branch would be non existent.

I’m gonna be honest I’m a “zionost”. There is no safe place for Jews. A lot of countries made it known for many years and they are still making it known to this day. Not only is the land of Israel is considered holy (I’m not super religious but I do recognize and respect that it’s a sacred and holy site) but it is also considered a safe place for many Jews who had to leave their own homes due to all the antisemitism/hate/etc. I’m not an “anti-Zionist”. Did you know that one of Russian’s leaders during- I believe the Soviet Union created that term as a way to help destroy Jewish culture during that era? That term just rubs me the wrong way.

I constantly worry about my friends and family. I worry about mine and their safety. I have to keep looking over my shoulder when I leave the house or when I go to the store, it to work… I know my parents worry too and I know my mom is secretly happy that I attended Shabbat services via online. I don’t want to think about what would happen if something happened to me or to my family/friends. But I don’t hide my “Jewishness”. I love being Jewish- I’m not ashamed of it. It’s a beautiful culture but it also is sad too. The history is not all butterfly’s and rainbows. We (Jews) have suffered for generations but we also overcome everything that people throws at us. Are we traumatized? Probably yes, but we don’t give up. We work hard to keep our culture alive so that we can keep passing it down.

The situation in Israel and Palestine is/has always been messy. It’s like a pressure pot- every little issue and conflict has been cooking up for some time. And every once in a while someone will let some steam out- to help let out some pressure but if you keep it covered and not let out the pressure, well it’s all going to build up and explode. And il that’s what’s happening here. That’s what we’re seeing now. This is the aftermath.

So to answer your question- I’m “pro Israel”: I think that Israelites have the right to live there. It’s their home. They did not colonize it. It is also not an apartheid state. Really people- please read a dictionary to understand these terms that you keep throwing out. Gaza’s government has been unstable for some time and it did eventually fell to hamas control sometime earlier 2000’s(?) for those who don’t know and or still in denial about what they really are- hamas is a terrorist organization. They’re not a resistance group of freedom fighters “fighting to save their people” cuz they don’t give a damn about their own people. They a literally using their own civilians as human shields. They’re stealing resources that’s mental for the civilians and using it themselves.

Also quick question(s) but why is Israel getting blasted for defending themselves after Oct 7? Is anyone gonna call out the other neighboring countries for how they are handling the situation- why aren’t they opening up their borders for refugees? Also why are most of y’all blaming Israel citizens and well- Jewish people in general- i mean I know the answer to this (*cough* most of y’all hate Jews and are using this as a reason to unmask yourselves).

I honestly could keep going- I’ve mostly kept this to myself, so it’s building up, but to be “nice” I’m gonna stop there for now. I don’t know what your “stance” is and I really don’t care per se- the whole situation has been stressing me out like crazy. If you don’t like my answer to bad so sad- I’m no one’s “good Jew”. If you or anyone have any questions you can ask but if you say some antisemitic crap I will block you and depending on my mood- call you out on it too. Have a happy holiday.

Am Yisrael Chai

[peachypizzicato]

The Five Of Cups: An Open Letter to Dorian

Hey everyone! Welcome back to my soapbox (or, if you see this and by some divine happenstance don’t know me: Hi! I’m Felix! Or Anemone. I go by many names.)

As you can tell by my Big Boy Letters, I’m comin’ to talk about kind of a serious subject. At least, it’s serious to me anyway. I wanted to talk a bit about the game The Arcana. You know the one. The definitely not at all divisive one. That Arcana. (/s)

(Warning: I will be touching on depictions of racism, misogyny, anti indigenity, antisemitism, and just general mistreatment of marginalized people!)

TLDR; The Arcana is full of harmful portrayals of marginalized people and the fandom at large ignores it at best and encourages it at worst. The best thing we as the community can do is make it abundantly clear to the company that this is not okay and should not continue.

To be completely upfront here, I’m not going to be going in-depth on every single problem with the devs or the distributors or anything. We’re all busy people and there’s not nearly enough time in the day. But what I am going to do is touch on a few things I’ve witnessed firsthand that I think are worth sharing with the wider community.

One of the behaviors I’ve noticed most often is what I can only think to call… Strange treatment of the love interests. Not by everyone, mind you, but on a startlingly normal basis. Now, what do I mean by “strange”? Well, it really depends on the character honestly.

With Asra, much of the portrayals feel significantly more sexualized than that of their peers. Drawn and portrayed as if their body exists to be ogled by someone else rather than lived in by themself, y’know what I mean? That, combined with blatant orientalist imagery baked into much of their designs, makes for a feeling of feast or famine when seeking out content. And this isn’t even to comment on the intense focus on them as defined by their relationships to others– namely Julian– and all of the mischaracterization that comes with that.

It’s not much different in regard to Nadia, if you can believe it. The image of “step-on-me-queen dominatrix” cultivated by the original writers persists in the community, with overwhelming focus put on her body and her sexuality over anything else. Anyone who’s known me since I discovered the game knows I actually really liked her at first, but it’s hard to have a genuine attachment to a character who seldom even gets to have a personality outside of basic traits and Having Tits.

Julian is, admittedly, a difficult one. I am not jewish myself, but I’ve heard testimony from jewish fans that his portrayal is less than ideal (to put it lightly). At the very base, his design itself is riddled with common antisemitic imagery and was based primarily on a real brown-skinned jewish man whose melanated skin they excluded, surely coincidentally (/s). but it goes even further than that (depicting a jewish man as a bloodsucking vampire, anyone?). I don’t claim to speak for any groups I do not belong to, but with the knowledge I do have it simply makes things uncomfortable to witness.

Muriel. Oh, Muriel. Again, if you’ve known me for any significant amount of time, you probably knew I was dreading this. But as much as I’d like to think nothing could ever be wrong when he’s around, there are definitely problems. Now, I could go into all the issues with the way the writers concocted his route, his story, his character as a whole (brown man with a ~foreign~ type of magic lives in solitude in the woods and is “in tune with nature” to the point of communication, very original /s), what I really want to touch on here is how this informed the way the community treats him. Listen, I’m not gonna sugarcoat this, a lot of Muriel fans are not subtle about their (most often white, but not always) savior complexes. More times than I care to remember I’ve seen him babied, treated like he’s incompetent, made at best into an animal to be tamed and at worst into an uncontrollable monster. I’ve seen pieces of fanfiction call him, a very blatantly indigenous-coded character, a real actual slur. Not to mention how watering down the trauma he faced has become something of commonplace. And this isn’t even an exhaustive list of ways he’s mistreated! For as much as it makes me angry, it’s also extremely saddening. The devs and writers made one of their most genuine kindhearted characters into a metaphorical punching bag, and the community has only continued swinging for years afterward.

But, I think I’ve made my point. Moving on.

Portia is a combination of problems I’ve already touched on. Conveniently, all of the stereotypical traits that Julian inherited happened to skip right over his little sister. What didn’t skip over, however, was the gene of being shamelessly and gratuitously oversexualizing of her. Take a look at any of her CGs; most if not all of them are centered on her chest or otherwise use color and design to draw the eye there. Every one of her sprite outfits are low cut to show varying levels of cleavage. And the few vocal fans she does have only serve to perpetuate this over and over again. To be completely clear, there’s nothing wrong with characters who embrace their sexuality. That goes without saying. However, for being the one “plus-size” love interest– which really in this case only means short and curvy– the emphasis on her body over anything else about her is startling and sad.

Finally, we find Lucio. Our one ethnically white male love interest. You may be wondering how a character like that could possibly receive “strange treatment”. Or maybe you’re not. I will elaborate anyway. The biggest problem with Lucio, with the fans and absolutely with the teams behind the game, is and has been for the longest time the complete and utter lack of awareness of his role in the world and the consistent retroactive rewriting of his character. What I mean by that is this: Lucio, originally and in every route but his own, is blatantly written to be an unforgivably cruel and immoral man. He seeks the best treatment he can get while cityfolk all but die in his streets, he takes advantage of the kindness and generosity of others and punishes their trust. There are many assumptions that can be made but we are shown explicitly that he can know Asra, a child (as an adult himself), and make sexual advances on them in adulthood with absolutely no guilt. He blackmailed Muriel into being and staying his slave and in turn forced him to perform brutal public massacres for an indeterminate amount of time: all we know is that it was long enough for a colloquial name to become well known and for his appearance to grow unkempt and haggard. All this plus more things that I don’t even have the time to list. And yet, he is arguably one of the most popular characters. Take two steps into the fandom at large and you’ll see countless postings about how his childhood was so tragic and how he’s so very sorry, he’s just a little oopsie whoopsie uwu soft boy! The few times I personally have seen his horrible actions even addressed by his fans was to underplay them, to insinuate that he has it worse than anyone he hurt. In spite of, or maybe even because of his extensive list of broadly observable crimes, he thrives in the community. The people love him. I don’t think I really have to explain why this in particular is so extremely chilling to me.

So, with all of these things laid out… What now? We’ve acknowledged the problems, there’s pages upon pages of other posts outlining ones I didn’t even cover here, so now what do we do? What’s the solution?

The answer to this isn’t quite cut and dry. There’s no simple solution to murky waters that run as deep as these do. But, for what it’s worth, I have a few suggestions I’d like to propose.

First off, I understand that all of the routes are finished. They had all completed well before the Dorian acquisition, I’m fully aware of that fact. However, in regard to said acquisition, I feel as though Dorian dropped the ball when transferring the property to their own app (and I’m not even talking about the writing of the tales, which is its own can of worms). Rather than simply copy-pasting the routes from the existing app, things could’ve been redone, remade better. Problems could have been solved now that the game had gained new life. This was much of the inspiration behind my own reworking of the concept, to address the problems and fix them. I don’t even believe that it’s too late for them yet; routes have only just begun being uploaded to the Dorian app, in theory there’s still room to reconsider things.

But that’s the problem. I don’t believe that the crew behind Dorian really cares. I don’t believe the original development team or Nix Hydra crew really cared. If the people involved really cared about these problems, there was ample time within the last nearly five years to fix things. They did nothing. They continue to do nothing. People like me shout endlessly into the void, hoping someone will hear and actually listen to the issues happening within their game. But they don’t care. They continue to make money, they continue to draw in players, why should they? If racism and misogyny and every other form of bigotry under the sun doesn’t hurt their bottom line, why change anything? Why care, why change if the community at large not only ignores it but actively encourages and supports it? Why listen to criticism if you can just block it and soak up praise from your unconditional fans? Why?

As I said, I don’t have a simple solution for any of this. But I’ve made personal choices in my own life to give less of my time and money to the company. If I want merchandise, I seek out independent artists. If I want to see or read something again, I can find screencaps. As much as I miss certain things, I don’t play the game anymore. I can’t help being attached to characters who have been important to me for as long as I’ve known them, but what I can do is make purposeful choices in response to the affection I feel. Maybe my singular actions won’t mean anything to them, but specifically and purposefully refusing to support the profits of a fundamentally flawed game that doesn’t even have the self awareness to be ashamed of itself means everything to me.

Thanks for listening. I hope anyone who happened to make it to this point can take something good from my impassioned ramblings.

[ultramaga]

"a fascist won an election for the first time since 1933" Leftists call everyone "fascist". What evidence is there that he follows Mussolini's principles more than Biden does? Or Biden did, before the senility kicked in? "a court decided not long ago that it's allowed to call him a nazi" What court? In September 2019, a German court ruled that describing Höcke as fascist was not libellous. However, a later court ruling in 2020 ruled against the FDP politician Sebastian Czaja for stating that the court ruling had classified Höcke as a fascist.[28] So there's nothing there about the NSDAP, which is hardly surprising as he would be a medical miracle to be alive after so much time. There's no Nazis. At best, you could say he's a neo-Nazi, but since that term was watered down too, it's just an empty noise now.

Wikipedia is written by socialists, but even they can't seem to find anything fascist he has said or done, let alone something Nazis would say or do. “The big problem is that one presents Hitler as absolutely evil. But of course we know that there is no black and no white in history.“ https://web.archive.org/web/20210728210315/https://www.welt.de/politik/deutschland/article162616473/Bjoern-Hoecke-hat-eine-irritierende-Ansicht-zu-Adolf-Hitler.html Yes, that's correct. You would see the same in any of the texts of modern history that we studied in school. But if you are going to say Hitler is absolute evil, then you should be including the others who were exactly the same, like Stalin and Mao and Pol Pot and ... basically every communist leader in the history of communism. Leftists will never acknowledge that there is no morality test that you can use to distinguish communism and fascism. It's just branding.

Where's the antisemitism? This is the closest I can find. It's actually a neutral statement. "Höcke gave a speech in Dresden in January 2017, in which, referring to the Holocaust memorial in Berlin ... stated that "we Germans are the only people in the world who have planted a memorial of shame in the heart of their capital"[48] and suggested that Germans "need to make a 180 degree change in their commemoration policy".[49][50] He's not wrong, and people have been arguing worldwide that Germany doesn't need to focus on WW2 for fifty years now, and that the hairshirt is counter-productive. Is there really any point in telling young Germans to be ashamed for something they didn't do? Does it actually reduce antisemitism to tell people to be ashamed for their birth? Or does it make people feel oppressed, and be more susceptible to actual fascists who promise pride instead? Ironically, if you want antisemitism, you just look at the Leftists here, who have been screaming for a Jewish genocide for about a year now. Leftists are FAR closer to actual Nazis.

These are the things Nazis actually believed in. Until Höcke espouses most of the ones that are unique to Nazis - and nationalism doesn't count, the Chinese are and Soviets were very nationalistic - then HE IS NOT A NAZI, and unless he wants to shave his head and run about in Doc Martens, he's not a neo-nazi, and if you want to say he's a fascist, then you have to stop saying the same word to the person who demands you clean up after yourself at lunch time.

"i am scared."

Yeah, yeah, of course you are, do you need a fainting couch? If you wanted to genuinely solve the problem, you'd have to look at why it might be a bad idea to force mass migration onto the Europeans. You want to know how a genuinely dangerous movement could come into existence?

At some point, either the indigenous population resists, or it ceases to exist. I would rather see that resistance as being peaceful, wouldn't you? So why do Leftists demand that the indigenous people of Europe have no right to exist? And do you really think they will kneel and bare their necks to the machetes, if it comes to it? Or flock to an actual fascism as an answer?

today a fascist won an election for the first time since 1933. here, in germany.

i don't care if it's just one (out of 16) states. björn höcke is a fascist. a court decided not long ago that it's allowed to call him a nazi. bc he is one. not "far right" or "conservative" - he is a nazi.

here. in germany. and he just won an election.

it hasn't even been 100 years.

i am scared.

[thatstormygeek]

"What recent discourse is exposing is something I’ve been trying to say for years now, which is that there is little The Normal Ones who call themselves "conservative" and rally around the Republican banner care about more than being recognized as the only normal ones by everyone else, specifically because it is this recognition that powers their supremacy. They demand that license, and they’ll use bullying and the threat of punishment to get it, and all too often they receive it from a cowed opposition and a lazy public."

So for a week the whole discourse seems to have been a tug of-war over who the real weirdos are. Conservatives believe it is everyone but them, and to prove it, they issue sneering statements about the existence of everyone but them, which seem predicated on the idea "hey look at this fucking weird person who shouldn't exist but does," and then suggest what sort of punishment is appropriate to ensure that such people are excluded and punished. Regular decent people, meanwhile, have noticed that an exclusive license on normalcy is some real weirdo shit to demand and sneering about the existence of diversity to secure that license and use weirdness as an excuse to punish people is some real weirdo shit to do, which is probably why Walz's framing has taken hold. "Listen to them speak," Walz said in the interview, "listen to how they talk about things." It's a good idea, really. We should listen to conservatives in general and Republicans in particular. They've been calling their political opponents vermin and saying they've been poisoning the blood of the people and promoting the vile antisemitic replacement myth and many other pieces of direct Nazi propaganda, and in recent months their long-tied piss-haired reality-show-pretend-billionaire candidate for president has carved out some of the time he usually uses for praising dictators to blather relentlessly about Hannibal Lector, almost certainly because he doesn't know the difference between political asylum and an insane asylum. And yes, they're saying that Kamala Harris isn't really Black and not really a parent, and that her husband is a "crappy Jew," and frothing at the mouth because they've decided that an Olympic boxer who is a cis woman isn't a cis woman, and they talk about passing laws forcing sex to stop being about fun and start being about consequences, and if that's not enough for you, here comes their large fermented Cabbage Patch doll of a vice president, Junior Development Vance. The veep hopeful has been attacking single women and childless women and just women in general, though we must be fair and admit that he's affirmed he loves his wife even though she "obviously isn't a white person", and that is awkward since he is a top leader of a political movement that wants to end birthright citizenship and enact mass deportations, and is pretending to not understand how mixed-race identity works. Vance has been going after childlessness in general, which could make sense given that he belongs to a political movement that wants to force nine-year-old rape victims to give birth and to ban all contraception and treat all women as nothing but an empty vessel for a future fetus, but is bizarre when you consider he is representing a political movement that wants to ban fertility treatments like IVF; and he's also a big proponent of fun new conservative policies like state menstrual surveillance of all people who can give birth, and restricting their travel to ensure their compliance with anti-abortion laws, and, again, all of this is simultaneously just loonbat flappywing bugshit weirdo shit and also deeply authoritarian and creepy and unpopular with most people and also very much within the mainstream of Republican political intention, and also exactly the sort of thing that crowds of well-fed comfortable pink-faced people waving signs that say MASS DEPORTATIONS NOW really seem to love. And honestly I could go on for three times as long, four times, ten times. It's just a relentless stream of vile supremacist bigotry and misogyny and hypocrisy and counterfactual nonsense, and has been for years and years and years, and I mean my god who besides fascist sickos aren't sick of it up past their eyeballs by now?

Some of these ways of being abnormal were permitted to a degree, others were not. They were permitted by The Normal Ones, who had the license to decide what identity was, and to establish the strictures which that identity must remain, outside of which that identity could not stray. It was normal to be white. It was normal to be a Christian. It was normal to be a man with a job, and it was normal to be a woman who was a man's property. It was normal for children to be viewed as property of the parents, which (see previous point) meant the property of the man. It was normal to be straight and cis. It was normal to be able-bodied and employed. More importantly, though, these were the only normal things to be. To not be those things was to be abnormal, and to be abnormal was to be at the mercy of The Normal Ones. Abuse—by those who were normal, of those who were not normal, used to be normal—and not ever acknowledging how all of the most normal forms of abuse were abuse was most normal of all. It was perfectly normal to be racist, misogynist, a religious bigot, as a way of defending and maintaining normalcy, which was a way of defending who did and who did not have the right to make decisions about what identities would be permitted, and to what extent the permission would be allowed. So rape was normal, and bigotry was normal, and exclusion and threats and punishment and murder of those who committed the offense of trespassing the established boundaries of what ways of being human would be permitted by normal people was normal. But more and more of us are moving on from all that. We're done with it. Imperfectly, to be sure, haltingly, no doubt. Sometimes it feels as if we've been scaling a mountain face and only recently passed through some clouds, allowing us a view, previously obscured, of what lay above—and so the distance we've come often only affords us a better view of how much further we have to climb. I know some would like to use the daunting climb looming above us to claim that we haven't climbed at all. But, if we are attentive and look downward long enough, we can see, peeking through the clouds, the vast prospect of rigid and supremacist normalcy we've left behind. We can see all the ways of being a human that used to depend upon normalized bigotry for permission to exist but which now give themselves their own permission to exist, without seeking any other. We can see more and more identities that are now considered normal, and more and more of the abuse that once was granted as normal is now recognized, from loftier vantage, for the abnormal perversion it is. ... What recent discourse is exposing is something I’ve been trying to say for years now, which is that there is little The Normal Ones who call themselves "conservative" and rally around the Republican banner care about more than being recognized as the only normal ones by everyone else, specifically because it is this recognition that powers their supremacy. They demand that license, and they’ll use bullying and the threat of punishment to get it, and all too often they receive it from a cowed opposition and a lazy public. So there's a danger to "weird," as some are pointing out, because exclusion based on abnormality is what supremacy runs on. We will probably do well to move on from "weird" in due time—both for this reason, and also because conservatives are doing what they always do whenever they face a new line of attack, which is to simply co-opt it and swamp it until the sheer volume of I'm-rubber-you're-glue makes the word start to sound like nonsense.

What saying "weird" means in this context is that it's normal to want government to help people, and it is abnormal to want it to harm people. It's normal to be part of and to celebrate an ever-increasing diversity of identity, and it's abnormal to want to control and define everyone else's identity. And, crucially, it is dismissive of supremacy. It says to supremacists. "If you are going to behave in such a topsy-turvy and indecent manner, I will oppose you, but I will not take you seriously." The trouble with trying to beat The Normal Ones by debating them on policy is it frames the nature of the fight as a policy disagreement, obfuscating the real problem, which is that, underneath their steaming hillocks of bullshit and hypocritical rationales and bizarre conspiracy theories, they are cruel bullies with strange hang-ups and violent intentions.

[nyx-fey]

ASK BOX RULES

For simplicity I will be referring to my character as squid-dude and using they/them in the rules list, but they have many nicknames (no actual name yet) and they use just about any pronouns because they are an extension of me and are just as gender fluid as I am.

Will be updated in the future if need be.

1. Please do not introduce squid-dude to lemons! They will be terrified ! This is a sfw blog and I want to keep it that way- They will happily accept hugs, pets, and forehead kisses though.

(If I am working on a /nsft project I will gladly talk about it in depth in my soon to exist /nsft side blog. They will only be vaguely referenced in a sfw manner here)

2. No hate! You will make them sad. Squid is pro LGBT+, BLM, feminism, and honestly any movements that try and combat systemic oppression. They believe everyone should be able to live as they wish so long as it's not hurting others!

3. NO HATE!!! Putting it twice because squids do not believe in hurting others! Squid-dude is anti-TERF, anti Palestinian genocide, anti war on Ukraine, and anti-nazi!

(do not try using current events to justify your islamophobia or antisemitism. That is a horrendous thing to do when war crimes are being committed on children in the name of colonialism)

3. Please go easy on the Politics! Squids can only understand so much! He does love talking about good news though! (This is 100% only for my own benefit, I can only stand to think about the dangerous mess of my countries politics, and the actual genocides going on right now for so long before it sends me into a doom spiral. I know it's selfish, because there are people right now who don't have the ability to step away from what is happening to them. But I also have a really hard time believing that anything I do online will have any positive effect in stopping the rampit suffering we are seeing unfold right now. It is not a brand of hopelessness that I can stand to dwell on very often.

I swear I am boycotting and donating and writing representatives and protesting in real life- but I really, really need a place where I can pretend that the real world doesn't exist for a bit and it's with squid-dude. Do not mistake my silence on this Tumblr blog specifically as a passive complacency with current events- please)

4. Squid-dude doesn't like fighting! They have a soft little body and would do terribly! They will not get into fannon discourse with you because fandom is supposed to be fun! (But they will talk to you about the things they like if you are nice to them)

5. Please be nice to squid-dude! They are trying their best! Using any slurs around them will get you kicked off the beach! (You will be blocked)

6. Squid-dude doesn't want broken robots rusting on their beach! Spam bots will be kicked out!

7. Squid-dude has many tentacles, but they can only write so fast! They will try to answer your ask as soon as they can, please be patient with them!

8. Squid-dude loves horror and spooky friends, but don't go making messes on their beach! Keep it sfw and don't do excessive gore!

9. Sometimes squid dude needs a break! And they will return to the ocean to takes naps at the bottom of the sea floor! (Sometimes I can get overwhelmed by nothing in particular and may close my ask box, it will be temporary I promise)

10. Squid-dude loves meeting new people but mean strangers can be scary! (If someone is being a problem anonymously I will turn off anonymous asking)

11. Squid-dude is not required to answer your ask if it makes them uncomfortable! They will hide in their shell instead!

12. Have fun! Spend time with squid-dude whenever you want! They don't follow a human sleeping schedule! Ask them about their collection of things, what they're working on, see their drawings, or just sit on the beach with them! They likes to be pet, given treats, taken on adventures, and just generally interacted with!

[a-witch-in-endor]

I really hope this isn’t disrespectful, if it is please feel free to ignore and I’m very sorry. I saw your recent post about diaspora and as someone who has gone their life never really knowing anyone irl who’s jewish and all I knew about antisemitism in school went as far as giving context for the Holocaust, just that antisemitism existed in Europe and was growing during the time.. I knew that the Jewish people had been persecuted in centuries before that, but never really the why of it. After reading your post I was wanted to try to find out why, and I feel so baffled rn. Christianity is not only a gigantic perpetrator of homophobia and an excuse for modern bigotry, but it’s also an origin of anti-Judaism in the early centuries? (If the articles i found were accurate in saying that Christians blamed the Jewish for the death of jesus) Doesn’t that mean that the prejudices that lead to the Holocaust were Christian-originating/perpetuated? How on earth can a religion that calls itself the “love thy neighbor” one be okay with this? How is the Church still around?? How can Christians justify themselves believing in a god and Church that has spread so much hate?

… my large bias against Christianity aside, it reminds me a bit of how social media and algorithms nowadays are designed intentionally to induce feelings of frustration and anger because statistically your investment in the thing/paying attention to it lasts longer and is more immersive. I wonder if it’s because of the .. “united prejudice” that has allowed Christianity to survive and grow throughout the centuries, spreading its ideas of hate and prejudice against the “other”, the outsider, while offering a sense of community and small little “love thy neighbor/thoughts and prayers/you’ll go to heaven” nonsense to the individuals who join and stay. It’s so evil. But I’m curious to hear more of your perspective on this. It’s easy to be upset in my own little bubble, but i wanted to ask more for your voice and perspective on the subject, if it’s okay. Thank you for reading either way and I hope you have a wonderful day ^^

Hi anon, I would have liked to reach out to you privately as there's a lot to parse here - so do feel free to unanon yourself if you want to chat.

I feel like there's a lot of pain here, which makes me wonder if you come from a culturally Christian background? I think that with these things, it's easy to get lost in the weeds of guilt, but we need to remember that there is a difference between being the recipient of privilege and being the guilty party. I know that might not always be in vogue to say, but you're not to blame for other people's harmful actions. Reducing antisemitic harm by recognising the weight of it is important. Getting crushed under that weight helps nobody.

(If that's not what's motivating you here, then please feel free to ignore. I don't mean to be patronising. It just felt like you were crying out under the weight of something that shouldn't be crushing you.)

To your more technical question about Christianity:

Antisemitism is a tricky thing to define. As long as tribes have existed, there have been insider-good-outsider-bad notions. For the first thousand or so years of our existence, things happened to the Jewish people which were awful, but were also typical. The Assyrians decimated the Northern Kingdom, and then the Babylonians destroyed the Temple and brought us into exile. When we returned to the native homeland and rebuilt our Temple, the Greeks came in and desecrated the Temple with idol worship and banned the study of Torah. Were they targeting us for being Jewish? Sometimes yes, because monotheism was a weird and wild concept. But they were doing the same thing to everyone else.

Our relationship with the Romans was also pretty terrible, but... well, the Romans didn't always have wonderful relationships with the indigenous peoples they were oppressing, y'know. We weren't really unique there. Again, something something monotheism something, but it was still fairly even-handed.

Christianity is, I think rightly, seen to be where antisemitism changed from general disdain for the Other to an insidious and in some ways unique hatred. I don't want this to turn into too much of an essay, but I'll list a few reasons this happened, which are not just "Christianity is evil at its core" (I don't really think many religious cultures are; religion is a natural human response to the search for meaning, so it's rare it's that rotten):

Christianity has a baked-in disdain for Judaism, because the originators of Christianity were all Jews who were engaged in criticism of their own culture, and this got lost when it became a Gentile religion. Jesus almost never spoke with non-Jews and his message was utterly rooted in Jewish custom and culture. I've lost count of the number of times I've explained to a random Christian friend what their own scripture is referring to, because the NT was written with the assumption that you understand its context. When the NT paints Jews with a broad brush, it is the way that we would speak about our own in-groups. However, Christianity after the time of Jesus quickly became a Gentile religion, and the Gentiles who were reading their scriptures understood that disdain for Jews from an outside perspective instead of an inside one.

Christianity then started to gain political power, and the early Church Fathers engaged in pointed anti-Jewish rhetoric because they were struggling to maintain boundaries. In those very early days of power, the Christians were moving into Gentile territory, but on a ground-level, they were still engaging with Jews because... well, monotheists (kind of) are going to interact with one another over the pagans, right? This led to some confusion among the laity, and the early church fathers were concerned that those blurry boundaries were going to cause issues. So they started preaching against the evil Jews to get their good Christians to separate themselves.

The second Jewish exile begins, and the native homeland is all but closed for business. Jews had a first exile and a smaller diaspora due to the Babylonians, but it was short-lived. We were able to return to the homeland and rebuild, albeit with restricted power. The second exile - the one we're arguably still in - is what led to the sprawling Jewish communities you know today. From the first century until the 20th, there was no place for Jews to go with any sense of guarantee of staying. This meant that Jewish communities would rely mostly on one another, and be seen as overly weird and unwilling to assimilate and convert. Before modernity, there was an assumption that Jews could and should convert to Christianity, which would solve the Jewish problem*. Lots of forced conversions occurred, but it didn't generally go well, because forcibly-converted Jews were suspected of... well, secretly retaining their Jewishness. And actually, a lot of them did, so it was a pretty accurate suspicion. Then a lot of Jews were killed under that suspicion.

In the Crusades, the Jews were the "enemy at home". Christian soldiers were marching off to war with the Muslims, but the Muslims were so far away. They would often attack Jewish communities either en route or instead of continuing farther, because the fervor to attack the enemy didn't really require you to march all that way.

Because Jewish communities didn't want to assimilate, they were often pointed at as an explanation for bigger problems. Yeah yeah, I know we all learned the term "scapegoat" in school, but it's important here. You have the mixture of: 1. they should be Christian because Christians are Good and Others are Bad, 2. they absolutely refuse to assimilate and like to be very insular, and 3. they're right there around the corner! This was a terrible mix of issues, because then when a little boy turns up dead or an illness spreads, there's a very easy finger to point. And the world is much easier to live in if you know whose fault a problem like that is. (And then add to that: Jews got less sick because we have religious rules about, um, washing our hands.)

Racialised "science" gets added to the mix. The term "antisemitism" was actually coined as a replacement for "Judenhass", or "Jew hatred", because there was a desire to say that Jews were racially different, not just religiously different. This was happening as race "science" was happening more broadly. While beforehand, the Jew could theoretically convert to Christianity and the Jewish problem could be solved (though that wasn't necessarily the case in practice), now, the Jewish problem was seen as inherent.

Money lending lends to conspiracies about Jewish control of capitalism, etc. I'm just bored of explaining this, but the bottom line is: the Christians made us deal with money lending because they wouldn't do it themselves but it's necessary for a functioning economy, and then they blamed us for making money. This is where you get conspiracies about Jews running the world from. What I hope you can see in that brief (and very much incomplete) history of antisemitism, lots of things are rooted in the cultural genesis and theology of Christianity, but it's not as simple as "Christians invented antisemitism". Let's be clear, for a start: antisemitism exists very firmly in non-Christian areas of the world, too. It might not have been like this without Christianity, but it also wouldn't have been like this without Christianity switching to a Gentile majority, without the Romans so thoroughly destroying the Jewish homeland, etc etc etc.

I mentioned harm-reduction rather than guilt above. If you're interested in harm-reduction, then one of the best things you can do is recognise where wider culture has pushed you into buying into prejudices. Here are some hallmarks of modern antisemitism that are very much rooted in the above: conspiracies that Jews run the world and are behind big catastrophes; beliefs that Jews poison the wells and drink the blood of babies (yes, people still believe this, but it's more common in the Muslim world than the Christian one now); stereotypes about Jews loving money; ideas that Jews are overly hostile to the countries who have so nicely taken us in and not murdered us recently, usually because we are too insular or because we won't eat everything; believing that Jews are the only people who don't deserve to have any self-governance even though it's been proven time and time again that Jews can't trust Gentile governance; defining terms to specifically exclude Jews; ideas that Jews are secretly not the "real" Jews; claiming the Jewish God (or "Old Testament" God) is bloodthirsty as opposed to the loving Christian God (said by people who have never read the Bible, I assume); concepts that you can't trust Jews because they only care about other Jews... and there are many more, unfortunately.

Anyway, it's really late and I didn't mean to provide such a long commentary. I hope this was helpful in some way? Feel free to message me if you want to chat more.

[maglors-anion-gap]

I’m glad you feel like it’s well-balanced, @niennawept, there was a lot for me to juggle here!

Tbh I think the silm tagging thing is that more people follow “silm” tags/ people are separating silm/satellite text characters out from hobbit and lotr characters. That said, making a point of referring to what draft one is pulling from when conducting more niche/focused meta is a good way to place the canon in its context (time period, revision history, whether or not it’s linked to other alter-canon events that were scrapped in the published silm and therefore one negates the other etc).

At the same time, I don’t believe that when people are writing fic or making headcanon posts that they should be required to delineate sharply between silm-only and HoME-only characterization. Non-meta transformative work is fluid and compositional in such a way that the writer may collage many pieces of information over each other to build a compelling narrative. The preservation of certain disparate elements in fan works is a feature not a bug.

Now, the publish silm does contain the ghosts of many elements referred to in HoME and satellite texts, even if it doesn’t say the quiet part out loud. My original post was, in part, referring to the general pushback some people get when they bring up “the quiet parts” in the silm. The issue in that case is that the published silm canon itself is being used to silence that discussion. No, one can’t really assert that the petty-dwarf/nargothrond relationship in the published silm is the same as in alternate drafts, or that Finrod remains the same across drafts. And you’re right! The attempt to force a cross-draft canon here impedes discussion.

However, the character building done around the petty-dwarves, and the relation there to existing prejudice and canards, remains in the Silm. The petty dwarves are more pitiful and less hateful, but they are still lesser, alien, unassimilatable, remnants of the past that are disappearing back into their “appropriate” place in the prehistoric past. I’m using these phrases deliberately because these are concepts directly tied to both Christian antisemitism and Christocentric colonialism, and we can see them pop up again in LOTR with regard to the treatment of Gan Buri Gan. I think shaming anyone for silm-only engagement is crappy and childish. But I did want to offer additional context that my post was in response to pushback against the idea of a certain flavor of bias across texts, and against the idea that the loud parts of certain texts may still be present quietly in the published silm.

Still, I do agree about the headcanon policing, and I would expand it outward to encompass crack and joke posting as well. I have seen a recent spate of discontented grumbling about all of the above. Someone will make a teehee joke post, which approached in good faith, is acknowledged to be funny but about as nuanced as one liners usually are - they’re not. But then, they’re also not Designed to assert anything - poor faith makes it easy to read an assertion into it however. And the Tolkien fandom is a bit pedantic (I am covering my face, don’t look at my now-2k rb chain) so everyone pulls out Their Tomes to decide if they’re allowed to laugh at the one-liner, or if it’s asserting something un-canon (intolerable!).

I've been mulling something over lately. It's almost a given that one will find questionable elements to older texts; some are overt and some sneaky even to the modern eye. There are, undeniably, many such elements in Tolkien's work, and they cause a lot of trouble for marginalized readers and for fan creators grappling with it in relation to meta and fic.

That the Silmarillion is a largely-omniscient myth-text narrative, composed from a variety of drafts, the discarded versions of which we also have access to, further compounds the issue. Who has read what? Who samples from what? How deeply do some themes pervade both the text and the fandom? There are discarded portions that raise eyebrows (and thankfully, were edited out at some point). However, there are moments where those discarded portions shine through the cracks in exposition, dialogue and reasoning left in the official composite text by the sweeping style of the narrative. The composite can be seen to still rest on certain narrative and valuational presuppositions of Tolkien's - presuppositions he assumes the reader to share.

In the text, of course some have value or more of it, some have honor or more of it, some overcome darkness while some naturally succumb to it. The narrative certainty in these characterizations rests on these lurking (racist, antisemitic, ableist) presuppositions, and in some cases handwaves any deeper exploration or explanation.

There seem to be two fan solutions to reckoning with a cross-draft-consistent bigoted theme. 1) Write meta that explores its traits and manifestations in the text and syncretizes canon assertions with authorial biases, and/or fic that directly addresses the in-text impact of these biases. 2) With an awareness of the bigoted themes, create headcanons, new verses, and fic that subverts, rewrites, or negates the original theme. The former refuses to allow the presuppositions of the text to become the presuppositions of the fandom. The latter allows (particularly marginalized) fans generative space, fodder to create anew, breathing room, and expanded perspectives. Different functions, parallel purposes, both important.

Because it's fandom, and it's large, and our idea of on-the-side fun and not our job or our marriage, we do not have the same preferences for how we go about dealing with these textual issues or the cohesive pressure to be like minded (even as we recognize the need to deal with them). One person's way of reckoning with textual biases or gaps may strike another as reaching too far from canon to be of appeal. This is a common reaction to headcanons, canon divergences and alternate universes, and crack or humor, particularly in the tolkien fandom. However, personal preference is not a basis for asserting that someone is reading the text wrong, especially when the issue at hand is one of reparative analysis and creation.

I am drawn to the issue of the Petty Dwarves. Most information on them comes in pieces from disparate drafts and satellite texts. Some information was erased entirely from the published Silmarillion. However, many people have noted the continual issues in Tolkien's treatment of the Dwarves, the iterative issues with his treatment of the Petty Dwarves, and rightly begin to link the two, plumb them down to their connecting factor, and begin excavating the silences in the narrative which Tolkien allows to be filled by presupposition.

I have found that people who cite personal preference may bring up canon elements to excuse or disprove certain readings; I would argue that the canon elements cited are less often exculpatory of our faves and more often proof of deeper biases, proof of biased presupposition as a stand in for rich characterization. Let me explain. We hear from the Sindar that the Petty Dwarves are reclusive, aggressive, and territorial (on this they base their initial assessment that the Petty Dwarves are two-legged animals for hunting). We hear from the Dwarves who cross the Blue Mountains later that the Petty Dwarves descend from expelled Dwarves who were the smallest, weakest, most conniving and self-serving, and violent persons. At one point, Tolkien describes the Petty Dwarves as older residents in Beleriand than both the Sindar and the eastern Dwarves, and the original inhabitants of Nargothrond, and it is them who Finrod hires to finish its construction. Tolkien describes the Petty Dwarves as agreeing to do this under false and duplicitous pretenses (for what reason, he doesn't say); later, Mim tries to kill Finrod (again, the narrative is sparse on motive), and Finrod alternately outs the Petty Dwarves from Nargothrond or pays the other Dwarves to turn them out. Tolkien evidently means for this to paint a picture of a group of people who are inherently wicked, cannot help but be so, are hated and pitied (for one does not preclude the other, and all good people should pity bad people, after all), and bring about their own diminishment. There's the in-universe justification for it.

I mean to explore why it is not satisfactory to leave the matter alone at "the Petty Dwarves brought about their own downfall." To begin, why does Tolkien rely on the characteristics he does when describing both the Petty Dwarves and Dwarves in general? These are multiple pieces of bigotry at play, chiefly some old antisemitic stereotypes (which have already been unpacked at length and by Jewish fans who are more knowledgable than I; if other have more to add, please do so). But I will give it a try.

First, Tolkien never pins down why the Petty Dwarves are expelled westward, only vaguely pinning it on their inborn characteristics. One old piece of antisemitism held that Jewish people were smaller and weaker than gentiles; Jewish men are still held to be less masculine, which can be traced from a medieval supposition that Jewish men menstruated. Coupled with the ableism of expelling the stunted and the inutile, Tolkien describes here a sort of itinerant and pitiful scrounger who does not belong in a society to which it cannot contribute and into which it cannot assimilate. The concept of vagrancy and the homelandlessness (consider the antisemitism in the concept of the cosmopolitan Jew, and Tolkien's deliberate linkage of Dwarves and losing their homes), is further connected to antisemitism by the Petty Dwarves being duplicitous, self-serving backstabbers toward Finrod, who Tolkien sets up as innocent and trusting enough to sleep unguarded near Mim, further juxtaposing the two. Furthermore, the gentile assertion that Jewish people are violent is escalated to accusations of blood libel and sorcery. Tolkien may not go that far, but he ties this predisposition for violence into the passage about Nargothrond, and their territorial defensiveness and their aggression toward the Sindar. Jewish people have long been stereotyped as insular, traditional, and cold to outsiders (consider the gentile furor over "goy"). All of this passes under the surface of the text - where Tolkien does not elaborate, this rises to the surface to color the reading.

When fans identify these elements in the text (and realize they are very similar to Tolkien's handling of the Dwarvish sacking of Doriath, or gold sickness, or Dwarvish isolationism as a whole), they begin to investigate the places they show up in text. The meta they write must try to syncretize the canon of what is said with the authorial context applied in the characterization. The fic they write must try to fill in lazy gaps left, and to imagine and then confront the missing exigence to the conflict while refuting the antisemitic presuppositions upon which the text relies in place of characterization.

Because it's fanwork, some people may have concepts that you think miss the mark or push further with assertions than you think is logical. However, no one who is in good faith creating, exploring, or trying to remedy the issues of the text, can be accused of using their ideas as a cudgel against canon or against others. Discussion is welcome, when it is conducted in good faith as well.

Relying too heavily on the surface-level assertions of canon to shoot down these musings at times verges upon what I have described above: leaning into the in-world justifications of hierarchy and subjugation to excuse the real-world hierarchies upon which these presuppositions are built. It is not so important how or when the Sindar realized the Petty Dwarves were people: what matters is that Tolkien created a character group, designed to be hated and pitied but never respected, onto whom he mapped real world stereotypes, and set them up in events where these stereotypes lead. It's highly worth considering why we are defending portions of text that are inherently bigoted. The whole broth here is the issue, but people are quibbling over whether they've fished out a potato versus a turnip.

[loveatfirstwriteblog]

A Complete Analysis of Harry Potter

Like a lot of kids, we probably grew up on Harry potter. We were obsessed and rightly so. The universe created in the world of Harry Potter was, and is, a hugely successful one because of the fact it gave kids a world where magic exists! It seemed to be a great world to live in and it made even better with the fact that it included elements of empowerment, Whether it be showing girls can be just as successful if not more in various pursuits(Hermione), or the fact that even if you have a history of bad events, you can have a good heart(Hagrid), Harry Potter teaches us a lot.

JKR has written a mind-blowing plot in a world of magic, wizards, witches, wands, potions, friendship, love. Our inner-five-year olds--and actually most of our young adult selves too--jumps around excitedly at the beautifully penned words that creates an exit out of this world and into one where magic does exist. 

As you get older, though, you begin to think of Harry Potter in a more critical fashion. The thought of “oh my god, it’s magic” no longer completely overrides my mind, but more of “but what are the laws regarding this? Can people just do this whenever they want? Are there no ethics?” 

No matter how much we’re going to expose the flaws and plot holes in HP now, we’ll always love the books--we grew up on them! But some things just niggle you as you get older, and that’s what we’re going to be focusing on in this post.

Something I adore about the HP books is that everyone, including the “good guys”, has flaws. Harry has a “save the world alone, do first, think later” complex, a driving force that makes him go save Sirius, Ron is very, very insecure to a point where he ditches Harry twice, probably when Harry needed him the most, Hermione is a judgemental, narrow-minded nag (her thoughts on Luna, divination, Trelawney, basically anything that doesn’t fit her black and white world), Molly Weasley is misogynistic and blatantly favourites her children—probably being one of the main factors behind Ron’s insecurities, Arthur is condescending towards Muggles and makes several comments you cringe at while reading the books as a young adult/adult, Sirius, Snape, and Lupin still haven’t let go of their childhood grudges and hatred, etc etc etc. 

These flaws are what make these characters so three-dimensional, so layered, so human. But the problem was, most of these flaws are never intentionally acknowledged. And honestly, that could have been such a good character arc, because the main characters are mostly students. No student is the same through their teenage years—they change, they evolve, they get over their flaws, they try to better themselves. I would have loved to see Ron becoming his own person, Hermione opening her mind up a little, etc. 

Neville is not one of my favourites, but I love his growth and development, from someone who was scared of his potions professor to a man who faced down Lord Voldemort. Ginny Weasley could have had character development, from the trauma she went through in second year, but that was never written in.  She went through this terrifying ordeal when she was only twelve years old, and jump to a year or two later and she’s absolutely fine, with no transition from her trauma whatsoever.

Some of JKR’s characters are brilliantly written and fleshed out, but some of her others lack the structure and complexity that usually comes with being vital to the plot—Ginny Weasley for one. Her internalised misogyny also plays a huge part in the way her female characters are written. We see this again in the case of how she wrote the character of Ginny. 

Ginny Weasley is not a favourite of ours (if you don’t know that by now). She feels a lot like a convenient male daydream—when she waits for Harry to notice her by dating other guys, gets annoyed by Hermione “not knowing quidditch”, etc etc—and fits the “not like other girls” archetype too much, almost like she was made for it (hint hint). She’s portrayed to be strong-willed, spunky, and independent, and I love the idea, but I really don’t see it. To me, she’s a very shallow character, the least fleshed out one. 

Just like James Potter wasn’t necessarily redeemed just because JKR said he was, and Ginny isn’t interesting just because JKR writes that she is. 

Hermione also fits the archetype, but she’s JKR’s self-insert, so we really can’t say much about that. 

To make things worse, Ginny and Hermione are pitted against each other in a very subtle way. Ginny is the sporty, pretty, flirty girl who’s never single from book 4. Hermione is the not-conventionally-attractive, nerdy girl who’s had a few dates here and there but never a relationship. They’re very different characters (the only thing they have in common is the archetype) but they’re against each other in the defence of Harry. 

Another place where JKR’s misogyny shows up is the way other girls are written. Lavender Brown is shown as vapid and immature, just because she likes clothes and boys and didn’t know how to handle her first relationship. Cho Chang is perceived as shallow because she’s emotional. Pansy Parkinson is seen to be throwing herself at Draco Malfoy. The Weasleys hated Fleur because she was beautiful and sexy and French, and that was ever really resolved in the end (Molly accepted her, but we never got Ginny’s and Hermione’s opinions again). You see where we’re getting at? The typical “girly girls” are portrayed as insipid, shallow, emotional, and boring, while girls like Hermione and Ginny are seen to be fun and multilayered. 

The problems with Harry Potter don’t just stop with non-fleshed out characters. There are plot devices that go unacknowledged, issues like blood purity—which is the basis of Voldemort’s tyranny—are never really resolved, huge Chekhov’s guns that aren’t fired. 

A common misconception, which if cleared up could probably expose a load of problems in wizarding society by itself, is that the wizarding world is racist. It’s not racist. Muggles and Muggleborns are not a different race, they’re a different class, at least according to pureblood wizards. Mudblood is a classist insult (a direct reference to nobility blueblood and aristocracy).

Another factor that wasn’t talked about but made the HP world so complex and realistic is the inherent classism in every single pureblooded wizard, including the Weasleys.

 The “Light” wizards all operate on the notion “at least I don’t kill or torture Muggles”. The Weasleys refuse to talk about Molly’s squib cousin who’s an accountant, the Longbottoms were so desperate for Neville to not be a squib they nearly killed him trying to force magic out of him, Ron makes fun of Filch for being a squib, thinks house-elves are beneath him, and confounds his driving instructor in his mid-thirties, the ministry workers kept obliviating that muggle at the quidditch World Cup, etc. 

This could have been a metaphor for how small prejudices and microaggressions (kind of the wizarding equivalent of white privilege) enable discrimination and murder, if JKR had actually acknowledged it. 

The parallel to Nazi Germany is very twisted and definitely shouldn’t be taken too far, but the Nazi ideology grew on the basis of everyday antisemitism, “that’s not that bad” little things. Voldemort’s circle and army grew because the wizard superiority complex festered and blew up in some people, egged on by a deeply classist society. 

Ultimately, Harry Potter has very, very shoddy worldbuilding, the kind of worldbuilding that’s obsessed with answering the “what” of the wizarding world, rather than the “how” or the “why”, which is strange, considering that fantasy or dystopian-era novels’ driving plots and conflicts are usually answering the questions the worldbuilding raises--The Hunger Games and The Shadowhunter Chronicles are two of the best examples of brilliantly written YA fantasy and dystopian novels. 

In HP, however, the main plot just avoids the questions the worldbuilding brings up like the bubonic plague. 

Voldemort’s agenda is built on prejudice towards Muggles and Muggleborns, but the plot just validates the negative perception of them—at the end of the day, being a wizard is what’s special. The Statute of Secrecy is the foundation of the main concept—blood supremacists believe wizards shouldn’t be hidden away—but only vague, barely-there answers are given to why it exists (a Chekhov’s gun that was never fired). 

There are love potions that function like date rape drugs (even Harry was given one by a girl who wanted him to ask her out), potions that force people to tell the truth, potions that literally let you disguise yourself as another person, but the ethics are never talked about, and the laws are so lax that three twelve-year-olds broke them and were never caught. 

But at the same time, the worldbuilding is so authentic, because it transforms the wizarding world into straight-up fridge horror. The everyday horrors are just accepted and rolled with. A corrupt government, constant obliviation of Muggles, slavery that isn’t even talked about. These things aren’t obvious to us as readers, or to the wizards as characters, because they match up to the real world, which is filled with things that are horrifying if you dig deeper. The multiple, normalised forms of abuse, police brutality, the violence in prisons that nothing is done about, the glaringly obvious cultural problems we have with consent, etc. 

The abusive authoritative figures in HP, like Rufus Scrimgeour, Cornelius Fudge, Dumbledore, Umbridge, etc, are so authentic because real-life politicians and people in high places of power behave that way, and their abuse is excused. 

The wizarding world is just like the real world. Corrupt, prejudiced, messed up, but if you’re privileged, or at least have certain privileges, you’re probably not going to notice. The ultimate problem is that the plot doesn’t acknowledge a lot of fridge horror things are messed up either, which is why it miserably fails. 

[maxarat]

Hey hi hello, trans Jewish Autistic kid here. Who hyperfixated on Harry Potter so hard it's my ceiling fan.

We live in what's known as an Attention Economy, at least partly. You can pay for labor or you can pay for attention. You know why ads exist? Because the more times someone sees something, the more likely they are to buy/support it. The more people who see it, the more likely it is someone will buy/support it. It's the same with media. Remember when Velma came out and everyone hate watched it? Attention economy. Also JKR has literally said people continuing to talk about her stuff makes her feel supported in her bigotry and it makes Jewish people and trans people like me feel incredibly unsafe, even with a "fuck jkr" attached. If you want to be a good ally, you can start by letting us know you're safe

No one is fucking villifying you for liking it as a kid, or even if you still do. No one is saying you can't enjoy HP privately. But talking about it, talking about JKR, *is* paying her, not just directly, and encouraging her bigotry. This is true of most people, but JKR has explicitly said it's true.

If your "fuck JKR" were sincere, you'd actually listen to the people affected by here instead of crying about how mean we are. We kinda have a right to be mean when it's our lives at stake (and it is our lives at stake. Open a history book if you don't believe me)

And "maybe they're not very good?" That's bullshit, if I'm being frank. I will concede that they are well written. Not as well as they could be, because my ADHD only lets me reread really really really good books and I tried with Harry Potter, but they are well written. The problem with the books is the aforementioned attention economy, aswell as the fact that JKR's racism, antisemitism, ableism, and queerphobia are intrinsic to the text. It's hard to see as a kid, but it's there if you look back. If you need me to explain I will. But can we please stop pretending that Harry Potter is good?

Fandom Problem #4152:

obligatory "fuck JKR" but i hate how people act like if you even just mentioning Harry Potter is the same thing as depositing money directly into her bank account. Like yes don't monetarily support a bigot, don't buy the game, don't buy official merch, but there's already a god damned theme park, what real difference is it going to make if someone TALKS about Hp without tripping over themselves to reassure everyone that it is indeed boring lame trash and was never good in the first place. She doesn't make a cent off of other people writing fanfiction or whatever.

[wizardysseus]

i was thinking about once upon a time (abc) in bed this morning so i decided to write this list

subject to change, since awhile ago i was in the middle of season 6 when they took it off netflix and i never quite got around to picking it back up. i’m gonna finish if it kills me i promise

top 5 things about once upon a time

5. anna frozen

when ouat introduced frozen characters, most fans decided the show had jumped the shark. they were not wrong. however, it was this very thing that allowed the show to be fun again! after an excruciatingly bad season 3 (we will get to that), bringing on anna and elsa literally transported directly from their own unaltered story in cheap ass versions of their unaltered movie costumes allowed the show to let loose and do... basically whatever it wanted. this became the hallmark of the show for those who stuck with it: absolutely not making sense at all, but being fun about it. post-season-three ouat becomes a totally different soap opera from season one, but by god you are never bored.*

personally, the flashback episode where anna annoys rumpelstiltskin and gets the better of him and he’s so fucking mad about it is like top 10 episodes**

4. 2x16 “the miller’s daughter”

this episode is just another personal favorite. it exemplifies what this show was really good at when it was good, and also where everything went wrong. i think cora is a great example of a good ouat villain, i think the twist on the rumpelstiltskin story is great, i think the dramatic beats really work.

...and in typical ouat fashion, cora immediately dies and two more villains we don’t care about at all are introduced. (sonequa forgive me you know i’m in love with you but tamara was nothing. it’s not your fault.) yes we get that great scene of snow aggressively doing archery practice while listening to “bad reputation” but was it worth killing off a compelling villain just as you’d dug into her story?

3. the commitment to regina’s redemption

and lana parrilla in general. i mean i’m gay and she’s hot but the worse the show got, the more acting lana gave it. and this is just speculation, but i think lana is more comfortable with drama than with camp? because regina becomes a much more interesting character as someone conflicted and on the path to redemption than as a villain. and by god, they were gonna redeem regina.

if only she had been gay we really could have had it all.

2. rumpelstiltskin

the sweet spot with rumpelstiltskin for me was seasons one and two when he was unabashedly bastard, there was an attempt to make him sympathetic but nobody except belle actually liked him, you weren’t quite sure how much he knew, he was pulling all the strings, and he was just really fucking weird. it will surprise no one who follows this blog to hear that that is my type of wizard.

1. season one

it’s a good season. it’s a good season. there are some bad things about it, but it was extremely watchable. it was doing fairy tales with occasional disney nods in a (mostly) cohesive fashion. the lore and the magic hadn’t sprawled out of control yet. it had the strongest relationship, imo, between emma and henry, and emma and snow. as for iconic episodes, most of the greats are here, plus sebastian stan as the mad hatter and giancarlo esposito as a series regular. the crowning moment for me is the scene at the end of skin deep, when regina confronts gold in the town jail and he reveals that he remembers his real name (after beating the shit out of belle’s dad with his cane obviously). god. that is some good television.

worst 5 things about once upon a time

5. the adoption politics but everyone knows this one.

4. WASTING the talent

you had the love of my life sonequa martin-green and gave her nothing. you somehow scored oded fehr as jafar and gave him nothing. you had giancarlo esposito and regina literally forgot he existed. i will kill you

3. rumpelstiltskin.

it’s no secret that robert carlyle was acting circles around most of the cast; my opinion is that the showrunners felt that if they committed to either his redemption or his villainy, they would never find someone else with the talent to fill his shoes as bastard wizard. so they flip-flopped on him every half-season, which ruins his story longterm, slowly kills the light in robert’s eyes, and gets reallllllly old. it’s also no secret that my favorite rumpelstiltskin is bastard wizard, but they screwed over belle BIG time in the process and for that i will never forgive them.

also like. the rumpelstiltskin fairy tale is antisemitic to begin with and they did not minimize that by comparing him to a lizard and naming his storybrooke counterpart mr gold. they just. did that.

2. THE FUCKING NEVERLAND ARC GOD IN CHRIIIIIIIIIIIST THAT HALF-SEASON IS EXCRUCIATING

1. captain hook

*it’s my opinion that if you are bored, you’re watching a hook-centric episode. every time i dropped the show and forgot about it for months at a time, it was because i had been in the middle of an episode about hook and just could not get through it. how do i describe all the things i don’t like about what killian hook jones did to the show? with subpoints!

1a. the episode where gold gives him back his hand and he never changes.

**this is actually the same episode i mentioned about anna and, like i said, it’s one of my favorites and not at all boring. look, i’m not pretending this list isn’t subjective as hell.

remember when hook blackmailed mr gold into magically reattaching his hand, which gold has been keeping in a jar, because hook has a date with emma and wants it to go well? but also, gold tells him that if he reattaches his hand with dark magic, it will turn him evil? and then hook spends the episode doing evil things, only for mr gold to tell him “i was just messing with you! the hand was not evil, you gave yourself permission to be evil ;)”

yeah, that’s basically hook’s mo.

1b. episode where emma tells him his brother is lying to him and he learns the exact wrong lesson from this and never changes.

so emma goes to the underworld to get hook back after he dies (while being evil and doing villainous things). they find his brother down there, too, and emma senses that he has a dark secret (because he does) and is lying to them (because he is). but hook always idolized his older brother, so he won't believe her. when emma confronts the brother directly, hook interrupts to rant to her about how he knows what this is ~really all about.

actual dialogue:

HOOK: i don't need proof to know what's really going on here. emma, when are you gonna admit that this isn't really about my brother? EMMA: what else would you think it was about? HOOK: us. you think if you can prove that liam is a villain, then i’ll somehow feel like i was less of one.

who... would EVER come to that conclusion. and why is the lesson he learns at the end “perhaps i do deserve saving after all” (another direct quote), and not “NOT EVERYTHING IS ABOUT YOU, BECAUSE EMMA WAS LITERALLY RIGHT ABOUT YOUR BROTHER LYING TO EVERYONE”????

1c. the emma dark one arc, where hook never changes.

this would be the arc that leads up to the above underworld arc, and it is deeply dumb, entertaining, and hard to explain. suffice it to say, during this whole arc, killian (along with emma) has all the powers and ~~~Darkness~~~ of the dark one (formerly rumpelstiltskin). unlike emma, he is not aware of this for most of the season. the moment he finally finds out, he turns on emma and goes through with all the revenge plans he’s apparently been holding onto since season two.

it’s supposed to be sympathetic, because emma made this choice for him to be a dark one, which is clearly awful, when he didn’t want it. so i get that. but on the other hand, it is..... boring. because (a) it's nothing we haven't seen him try to do and fail at before, his motivations really aren't that complex. and more importantly, (b) he was the dark one the whole time! the only thing that changed, that made him act evil, was finding out about it. at that point, it's not the ~~~Darkness~~~ making you do evil things. it’s just you. because you’re a dick.

how is this arc resolved? well, he dies. after the underworld arc (which i very much enjoyed tbf), a sizable part of robin hood’s death episode is devoted to people telling emma to slow down and grieve for killian, since at least two arcs have revolved around her inability to let hook go when he is literally dying or dead. (it’s been said a million times but being his girlfriend really sucked the personality out of emma and i miss her.) and in the end he just... comes back anyway. no explanation given; he says it must be a reward from zeus for killing hades... while he and emma make out literally in front of the coffin of robin hood... who actually died fighting hades. killian died half a season before. while he was evil. and emma reverts to tearful girlfriend.

it’s insulting. it’s grating. and it is a Killian Hook Jones Guarantee that his episodes will involve some measure of this.

like, is it more or less the same shtick that the writers kept giving rumpelstiltskin, too? backsliding and screwing over his love interest who gets less and less say in the matter? yes. definitely. the crucial difference is that i, personally, love rumpelstiltskin, while i find hook boring and not self-aware. but clearly i have had a lot of fun complaining about him! again, this is not an objective list.

conclusions

this show ran for 7 years. it got cancelled not because it deserved to, but because no one liked the soft reboot. it was on until 2018.

[babbushka]

Imagine making a character who is ethnically Jewish but not culturally Jewish, very culturally Jewish, and trying to shove that head cannon down everyone’s throats.😸 I understand having head cannons and everything 100% but trying to force other people to accept them as true is just wrong. If a movie chacter states that he didn’t grow up culturally Jewish and still isn’t culturally Jewish, why try to make everyone believe that he is? You feel so strongly about Flip actually being culturally Jewish and that being a fact but why? The movie and what his lines in the film are based on this issue, prove everything you claim to be true, as false. I think instead of trying to strongarm everyone into believing what you want to believe, you should be open to other interpretations of a character and let others have an opinion.

I really don’t know how many times I have to explain myself about this, but in the vain effort to attempt to get people to understand, I offer these four points. 

Firstly, I don’t force anyone to do anything. If someone doesn’t want to read my interpretation of a character, that’s fine, they don’t have to read it. I make it very clear upfront the sort of Flip that I write, and I have for the past 3 years. If that’s not your jam, then fine. But you continuing to read/follow and getting angry that I’m somehow forcing writing that you clicked on down your throat, isn’t my problem. The beauty of a fictional character is that we can take the basis of what canon has given us and expand on it in our own ways. I’m not trying to convince anyone, or make anyone believe anything. I’m just posting my interpretation of the character. On occasion I bring up the antisemitic practice (because yes as much as you don’t want to think it is, it’s antisemitic) of people erasing his Jewishness or replacing it with another religion, but that’s only when people come here asking for my opinion. 

Secondly, I do feel strongly about Flip being culturally Jewish because I am, in fact, a Jewish person. And I, as a Jewish person, found Flip’s story and acceptance of his identity to be compelling and relatable. I feel so strongly about him being culturally Jewish the same way that I feel strongly about modern!Kylo being culturally Jewish, or Luke Skywalker being gay. I know it may be hard to believe but sometimes people like seeing themselves represented in the media that they consume. And sometimes people have to make that content happen for themselves, because god knows no one else will. And sometimes, very rarely, people are finally given a character that might represent them. Maybe it’s only in some small way, but it’s better than nothing -- and more importantly, it’s the seeds that content creators get to use to write the stories that they wish were being told. 

Thirdly, the lines and everything he says in the film point in a direction of vagueness that’s the whole foundation for my interpretation. His entire character arc is about him coming to terms with his identity and how he’s been passing for a goy his whole life. The literal point of his arc is to show personal growth and change through the way he reexamines his place in the world, and his privilege. I offer you these (rhetorical) questions in return: Why can he not then go on from that point after the credits roll, to want to get in touch with his culture and heritage? Why can he not decide post-canon to explore his Jewishness? Why is it always such a point of contention where people have to scramble and say “but he’s not REALLY jewish!!” any time a Jewish person tries to cultivate a Jewish character? The Flip & His Jewish Wife AU is just that, it’s an AU. That writing exists in its own particular universe and I make sure to note that. But why is it always a specifically Jewish AU (about a canonically Jewish character) that constantly gets brought under scrutiny for being unrealistic or OOC? In a fandom where we can explore so many incredible things, why is wanting to explore a Jewish man’s relationship to Judaism the most damning thing possible?

And lastly, I cannot stress how frustrating it is to constantly be told that my Flip is too Jewish, when he is one of the only canonically Jewish characters Adam has played that I actually enjoy. I cannot stress enough, how frustrating it is, being a Jewish creator and constantly having to defend why I would possibly find comfort in a Jewish character, why I would want to write a Jewish character to be more accepting or aware of his Jewishness -- especially from strangers on the internet who could very well just move on with their lives if they don’t happen to like the way I write. Fandom at large has made it excruciatingly clear that they don’t like Jewishness in their fanworks, but that’s genuinely truly not my problem. Whatever weird hangup people have about seeing Jewish people write Jewish characters having fulfilling and fleshed out lives and backstories is also not my problem. 

TLDR; Write what you want, and read what you want. But don’t police a Jewish author on when and how she should write Jewish characters that bring her comfort, or how she should feel when Jewish characters are treated with such obvious prejudice, especially when there are so fucking few to begin with.