#censored slurs

[starry-beetle]

on twitter I was like “what would lobo ( from dc comics ) vs hiei look like” and drew this

[carby]

Freak! Cunt! Fag! Dyke! Tranny! Bitch! Bastard! Thrussy!

Rent lowering/twitter user killing gunshots to get the self-inflated anons making their cringe exit announcements out of the way.

[the-trans-advice-blog]

Btw stop sanitizing queer spaces!! They’re not meant to be palatable they’re meant to be safe. Obviously be respectful on an individual level but never be scared to be you and say what you want. I’m a fag and a tranny and I’m proud of that fact.

[badpanini]

[ya-what--ya-erster]

newsies is important because it teaches us that we don’t have to be treated as less just because we’re kids.

[noxexistant]

“remove all mentions of ‘crip/cripple’ from newsies” is quite literally the worst take i have ever seen and i am not exaggerating

[ghosthovnd]

hello pressure community

[aroaceleovaldez]

i hope this doesn't sound like a silly or weird thing to send you, but i'm autistic and have long thought of nico and a handful of other riordanverse characters as autistic and i love your posts about why nico in particular seems intentionally autistic-coded. but i've been thinking, if rick did intend for any of his characters to be autistic, why wouldn't he say so outside of the text at least? i can't think of a good reason why not, when he goes out of his way to be explicit about so many other characters' various marginalized identities and has confirmed things like reyna being asexual outside of the original text. so it gives me this nagging sort of doubt that maybe rick just made nico come off as so extremely autistic coded by accident, somehow. if it wasn't an accident i do kind of wish he'd say so because there's next to zero explicitly stated autistic representation in, like, any media so it'd be nice to have here even if not strictly necessary. either way though, like i said, i love your posts and i agree with you 100% about autistic nico! some others i like to think are autistic are annabeth and leo.

(Most of this is gonna be kind of a tangential ramble to your point and i apologize in advance just bear with me)

This actually touches upon something I've been meaning to do a write-up on recently, which is: depending on the coding, that is our explicit statement. In most coding, actually, that's kind of the point. (Also something something Death of the Author.)

You may have noticed a recent trend across media of characters saying things directly rather than expressing them in a natural way, and often this includes incredibly stilted dialogue of characters explaining things in very politically correct, wikipedia-esque descriptions and terminology that make absolutely no sense for the characters' personalities or mannerisms. This is born out of the idea that if something is not stated in explicit terms, no amount of evidence below an outright direct exact statement will ever count - if two characters of the same gender have an explicit kiss and wedding on-screen, it doesn't matter because they never said the word "gay," etc etc.

In PJO, prior to more recent books, we get plenty of examples of characters explaining parts of their identities without direct statements. Percy never needs to say in outright terms that he has PTSD from Gabe - and it doesn't make sense that he would! He's 12! He's never been diagnosed for that. He probably doesn't even know what PTSD is really. But we, the audience, know without a doubt he has PTSD, because it is clearly expressed to us. That is coding. Tyson is coded as having down syndrome. Nico is coded as being autistic. It doesn't make sense for Nico to turn to the camera and explain that he's autistic and what that means, because he definitely never got diagnosed for it and probably doesn't know what that means cause the diagnosis literally did not exist when he was growing up - and heck, autism terminology was still kind of getting sorted out back in 2007 when TTC was published, so it's unlikely we could have feasibly gotten any exact terminology wink-wink-nudge-nudges short of something like how Percy outright mentions other students called Tyson the r-slur in Sea of Monsters. And in fact we see that same exact style of coding with Nico later on in the series. Nico never turns to the camera and says word-for-word "I am gay, I am mlm, here's me wearing my exact pride flags" (until TOA/TSATS, which... did the exact thing i mentioned about characters speaking like theyre trying to get a good grade in therapy, or giving a powerpoint presentation). But it is never unclear that HoO is telling us outright that Nico is gay. It's not just hinted at. It's there, in your face. But entirely because no one ever outright says "gay" specifically it's technically still only coding. We know he's gay, we know the characters have trauma/ptsd, etc etc. We don't need it spelled out - that's just kind of condescending. It's like if you said describing a character with "eyes like moss" means they were "green-eye coded."

Nico being autistic-coded isn't hidden. It's not a secret. It's very overt. If you know what autism looks like, well, yeah, there he is. Even if you only know very vague 2007 media presentation of autism, Nico in TTC is easily recognizable enough as autistic because that's the point. Tyson is easily recognizable as being coded as having down syndrome and it's very clearly very intentional! It's just never spoon-fed in exact terms to the reader because it's not necessary! You've already been told the information necessary to tell you what is up with this character, so just plainly going "oh they're [x] in exact terms" is very much telling-not-showing and feels redundant. And while there are places for that kind of thing, most of the time it's very unnecessary. Sometimes coding is subtle, sometimes it's obvious, and yeah there are times where writers code characters unintentionally, but the textual evidence is there, and that's the whole point.

And that's what Death of the Author is about - it doesn't matter what the author intended at the end of the day, because if it's in the text it's in the text. You can look at author intent to try and figure out what that text means, but the text is the text. A Separate Peace is a very classic example - author John Knowles denies there being homosexual subtext, and meanwhile one of the protagonists living in 1942 puts on a pink shirt while saying he doesn't mind of people think of him as gay. What the author says after the fact doesn't matter - if it's there, it's there. So Rick saying anything outside of the books is completely irrelevant. And Rick talks about this a lot - he actively tells people that his statements outside of the books are just his own thoughts, but what's in the books is what's in the books, and if the text supports it then that's all the evidence you need.

Nico specifically is a case where yeah, he's clearly autistic-coded. It's very obvious and very obviously intentional when he's younger, and as the books progress it remains a background trait of his but is still notable (except for when it gets forgotten in TOA/TSATS like everything else, including the adhd/dyslexia, but i digress). It's a clear pattern within the first few books that Rick is intentionally including. It doesn't make sense, especially for the year the book was published, for the reader to be directly told in explicit terminology that Nico is autistic, because the reader is already being told that Nico is autistic.

And yeah, Rick doesn't mention Nico being autistic-coded outside of the text, but he also doesn't mention Tyson being coded as having down syndrome. He also said one time that Percy doesn't have PTSD at all, which is very incorrect starting from book 1. Again, Death of the Author. Whatever Rick says outside of the books does not matter, because he already said it in the books. And there's plenty of other stuff in the books that Rick doesn't touch upon, particularly relating to character identity - did you know Leo is Native? Sammy mentions that the Valdez family is Native in Son of Neptune but we don't get any specifics and then it's like never brought up again anywhere. That happens all the time in the series - and outside of the series - Rick can't possibly address every single point to confirm/deny everything from the books. That's what analysis is for! And that's why my blog exists 👍

[the-meme-monarch]

something i see a lot in books is like. capitalizing a word where it really doesn’t need to be? like for an example in Who Censored Roger Rabbit they spell toons as Toons. and i understand it’s probably supposed to make it clear that this is a deliberate Word For Something That The Author Kinda Made Up but like. to me it stands out too much. humans are just humans. a cat would still be a cat and a dog a dog. but toons are Toons. idk i think it just feels unnatural and unnecessary. if toons are natural to the world here why do you need to capitalize the T

[a-dragons-journal]

I lurk on therian and alterhuman spaces online to try to learn more and hopefully be less bigoted towards a often hated group of people. Are, um, are there actual slurs for therians, otherkin, alterhumans, etc.? Because if so I really want to make sure I'm not using any of those. English is my third language and I know I've said offensive things before not realizing it at the time. I don't want to repeat that mistake.

No, there are not. Occasionally you'll see someone claiming "kinnie" is a slur, but this is almost always a troll, and even when they're sincere, they are frankly just wrong. It doesn't have the weight needed to be called a slur. It is a derogatory word (at least in its origins), and many people are wildly uncomfortable with its similarity to the slur "tranny" (it's been speculated that it was directly based on that slur; from what we can tell that doesn't seem to be the case, but we'll probably never know for sure), but in and of itself it's not a slur.

We're frankly just not well-known enough as a community to have slurs aimed specifically at us. The closest you get are ableist slurs that get aimed at us now and again (such as "retard").

[cvnt4him]

Someone wrote this on my katsuki post w an insecure reader 💀💀💀

What's crazier than their comment is the fact that they happen to have like the same name as someone who likes my fics n shit🤕

Dk man ta is weird😭

[flagellant]

Do you have sex with your parents.

Do you?

[antxnous]

r u lgb cuz ur gun pink

thanks for the inspo mootie 😼🤭 @radroqch

[balkanradfem]

fatherless sl*t

the way I wish this was true.. not only my father would be dead but I would be out there having sex with women.... we need to make this happen

[narcissisticpdcultureis]

hey stay safe yall 💀 @/somethingred7 is going around fakeclaiming people. i cant say how many people theyve messaged privately but i can see theyve fakeclaimed another system and i thought i'd send out a warning

[homestuckconfession]

the concept of the slur replacement project feels a bit like historical revisionism? especially considering how much i see people recommend it as the recommended way of reading homestuck. it's sanitizing down the more unpalatable bits of homestuck to make it seem more friendly and wholesome (which seems incredibly common among homestuck fans in general, especially among those who like to pretend the epilogues never happened, which is a whole other discussion i won't get into rn), and that just feels weird. not to mention the execution of it is very poor in general. the "future arachnids grip" joke is funny actually, and the change they made to make it "later arachnids grip" not only makes it a weaker joke (as it was initially a play on how the concept of gayness isn't really a thing to trolls), but also introduces an inconsistency in the writing, as it only does this change for vriska, drawing more attention to it. there's also a fucking... random bit where iirc for one line they replace a mention of bill cosby with... gnomeo and juliet? i think? which is not only a baffling decision that they don't, but is technically introducing an anachronism because that movie didn't come out until 2011. the writing they used to replace things in general just doesn't feel very homestuck-y, and it always feels clunky and awkward.

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