#especially if these are victims or people knowledgeable of the topics you're portraying.

[eenochian]

it’s very funny how this fandom suddenly cares so much about sensitivity, meanwhile no one was up in arms about folks calling valeria shit like “cartel mommy” and simping for her. and, if you point this out, you get told that it’s “less important” or incomparable. way to tell victims of cartel violence that they don’t matter. y’all can’t preach about sensitivity and mindfulness while doing the exact opposite of that.

sensitivity is something that needed to be brought up a long time ago. people need to be mindful about the content they’re engaging with and producing. COD and its characters are based on very real issues and very real situations, mindfulness is needed for every single character.

seeing this only be brought up in the context of makarov and graves is honestly so, so frustrating. they’re not the only problematic characters that you need to consider when making content. western militaries like the US and UK are incredibly controversial and have devastated vulnerable people and their countries. price, ghost, soap, gaz— any member of the military, especially the special forces, is problematic. they’re not good people and should not be treated like saints, nor should they be idolized for what they do.

that all being said, the concepts of “be mindful and sensitive when making content” and “let people enjoy problematic media” can absolutely, 100%, co-exist. art is not meant to be a paradigm of moral goodness, it has always been a medium for people to explore things that are considered "taboo" in a safe space. there's a reason why "dead dove: do not eat" exists as a genre – with proper warning and precautions put in place, people can explore darker topics. for some, it's morbid interest. for others, it's a way of coping with trauma and experiences they've had in real life.

i want to repeat this just to make it very clear: be mindful and sensitive with the content you're producing. do not romanticize topics that should not be painted in a good light. don't minimize the impact of characters' actions or act like people are in the wrong for being uncomfortable with them. in this fandom especially, people treat atrocities like jokes because we're becoming desensitized to them. it's up to every individual to ensure that they don't forget how impactful a lot of this stuff is in real life. war is not a joke. terrorism is not a joke. people dying is not a joke. do not romanticize any of these things in your content, even if you're exploring the different sides of the people behind these things.

humanize the characters all you want. horrible people are still people, after all. humans are not one-dimensional beings. humanize them, but do not romanticize them.

be kind to victims, be sensitive, and be mindful about what you engage with. no one is perfect, no thing is perfect, but we can always do better. we need to approach every topic through this lens instead of picking and choosing who to support. everyone is deserving of it, everyone is entitled to basic respect. we don't need to compete and argue over who has it worse, we just need to be better across the board. support real victims. don't let media warp your perceptions of reality. be conscious of the content you make and consume.

[damianbugs]

Hi!! First I just wanted to say your fics have been an inspo for me to write my own fics and I enjoy them immensely. Second, I’ve been wandering something and I want to ask something about how Jason Todd is portrayed after his death.

I don’t really understand why so many just kind of lie? Or exasperate who Jason Todd is and isn’t. Like the Cass and Bruce scene in front of Jason’s grave, or that scene in Gotham Knights where Alfred tells Bruce “Jason was determined to disobey him.” I know out of universe it just has to do with the mischaracterization of Jason but I’m having a hard time on finding an in universe explanation. Is it out of guilt? Out of misplaced love? It’s confusing me a bit

first of all, thank you!! i'm so glad i could inspire you that is truly the highest complement i could receive <3

secondly, this is a really interesting discussion! you're right about how in a meta way it's the deeply routed classism in jasons writing, as well as many writers (example: grant morrison) just really hating jason for some reason and doing everything they can to make him absolutely insufferable. not even in a cool evil villain way, but in an embarrassment point and laugh kind of way.

for the purpose of this discussion lets (with much difficulty) ignore the writers predispositions and implications and just focus entirely on what this means for the characters. it's good you mention the cass and bruce at jason's grave scene, because i think that example alone is a good way to deconstruct some of character's (for this post: bruce's) perspective of jason's death.

to summarise before dumping a billion paragraphs developing the point; let's not dance around it and accept that much of people's understanding of jason's death falls into the victim blaming variety, but in such way that the characters don't seem to realise that's how they perceive him, which is almost worse than them purposely retelling it in such a way. as well as that, aside from this indenial misunderstanding of jason, i think this shows the sort of flaws the other characters have.

Detective Comics #790

at first glance this seems like a really touching and emotional moment where bruce is sharing his grief with cass (especially when the entirety of #790 is about bruce struggling to do just that), but then you really read it and you're like what the fuck... why are we standing in front of this kids grave slagging him off? not only are we hearing all of bruce's regrets about how he raised jason as opposed to his son's actual death, but we are dragging steph into this too.

to bruce, jason's death is an accumulation of everything he let the boy get away with finally reaching it's tipping point. that jason's ambition to "prove something" lead to his seemingly inevitable demise.

now i do think it's important to note that WE (the readers) know jason died saving sheila. that despite being beaten, betrayed and left for dead, he tried to save someone and paid the price for it. no one else knows that, because the two people that did are dead. as a result, bruce is left with the facts that;

prior to his death, jason was acting uncharacteristically (<- important point) violent and aggressive towards himself, borderline passively suicidal. bruce himself acknowledges this.

that jason ran away from home in search of someone who may or may not be his mother. this is because losing his parents is a hurt jason has still not healed from and a topic bruce has handled badly in the past (example: willis todd). jason does not trust bruce enough to tell him about this.

once they find his mother, jason is instructed to not get involved in the joker related problem. to the extent of bruces knowledge, jason reveals himself as robin, and decides to get involved despite the instruction not to. either because he again, didn't trust bruce to believe he would handle it, or that jason was trying to prove something to bruce, to sheila, or to himself.

sheila dies, jason dies and bruce is the only one alive from the tragedy with only half the story.

All of this can be found in A Death In The Family, but I don't feel comfortable sharing panels of it given where the story takes place right now.

bruce spends the next few years blaming himself at any given point, but the blame is misplaced. bruce feels as though HIS negligence of JASON'S personality and HIS allowance of JASON'S freedom as robin is what allowed JASON to go and die. instead of seeing what he knows to be true about jason (his empathy, his kindness, his grief and loneliness) bruce can now only see how his allowance of all these things played a part in JASON disobeying him (whether maliciously or not) and dying.

in short, bruce is projecting big time onto his dead kid.

bruce is, as per usual, coping with loss by antagonising it. he did the same with babs, with steph and later on with damian. for a character like batman, who upon failing immediately turns these losses into lessons (for himself and all those forced to comply), it's the only way he seems to 'move on'. if he can understand that jason died because of all the things bruce let him do wrong, then he can convince himself that the guilt he feels for it is necessary. that jasons death is on him and that it mattered.

unfortunately, in order to do that, bruce is indenial about what he LITERALLY KNOWS ABOUT JASON! it's not like he was an absent father to jason in the slightest. but hey, if he can vitiate jason's enthusiasm to help people as jason's impulsiveness to fight (two things that can be true but not in accordance to the context he describes them in), then the blame is on jason for being brash, and on bruce for being lenient.

he shoots jason in the foot and himself in the knee to keep them both down. because, well, jason's dead anyway, and bruce unfortunately isn't. this is the closest thing they'll get to sharing the truth bruce knows he's missing and he knows it's his fault for favouring the mission of his son — so at the expense of jason, bruce lets them both be the lesson to learn from.

it is why jason is used as a cautionary tale, and why bruce is so unstable on allowing people (especially children) into his life emotionally. the second robin is a lesson for any young vigilante eager to join the mission, and batman's part in the death is a lesson for bruce wayne to... be even more emotionally untrustworthy? instructions unclear.

the final part of the grave scene is also important, because bruce is admitting that he is not so different to jason. that "for some of us [Bruce and Cass] there is no turning back". he is projecting these flaws about jason not only because that's the only way he can cope with jason's death, but he is projecting these flaws because regardless of what actually happened, he (and cass) are destined to meet the same fate. jason died for a multitude of reason that bruce may or may not have caused knowingly, and these reasons only exist because bruce knows them to be true in himself and anyone else damaged enough to find themselves on his side of the blurry line.

so, now looking a bit less zoomed in, i think it's unfortunate that jason's time as robin is often perversed by the people who should know better (bruce & alfred), and while it is bad writing on jason's character, it is great writing to show the flaws in the characters around him.

especially how it shows that grief is not always something that can become healed. bruce's guilt about his parents death amounts to something hopeful (batman), but his guilt about jason's death makes bruce cruel and childish.

tldr: no one knows the true story, so they compensate from what they do know — but by doing so they project and misinform existing characteristics of jason in order to compartmentalise the gravity of his tragic death. bruce is unable to cope normally and everyone is forced to follow the same fate, because batman's lessons are rarely wrong, even if they cause ten other problems and misunderstandings to understand.

[sylvanas-girlkisser]

Wait wait I'm confused. What do "orc-sized cocks" have to do with black man being killed? Is there some missing context here?

I will admit there's a lot of background knowledge required to see the issue with that particular phrase, as it is, sorta incidentally a culmination of a lot of other issues which, especially if you're from a white and/or sheltered upbringing you might be blind to.

Content warning for discussions of rape and racism.

So, first of all black men have long been (and still are) fetishized as powerful, animalistic and hyper sexual; epitomized through the idea that black men all have abnormally large penises. Intelexual has a really good video about this topic which unfortunately is only available on her patreon, but you can watch the teaser to get a brief rundown of the topic HERE.

This myth about black male sexual prowess has long been used as a way to enact violence upon black men by white people. For example during the time of slavery, white women caught having sex with or straight up raping their slaves would use this myth to paint themselves as victims of the black man's aggression to preserve their "purity" when in reality they of course held ALL the power in the relationship. Similarly, white men would attempt to "prove" their "masculine superiority" over the supposed inherent animalistic masculinity of black men; through acts like castration, buck breaking, and raping married black men's wives. Khadija Mbowe talks a lot about this, such as in THIS VIDEO.

Later a black man having raped a white woman became the go to excuse to justify lynchings, an excuse you still see carry over to this day with the way white (womens) tears are used to weaponize the police against black people. As well as a number of tropes found in interracial and cuckoldry porn.

I feel like it should go without saying but black men aren't genetically predisposed to having incredibly large genitalia (black male sex workers oftentimes wear prosthetic dicks, in order to adhere to the fantasy desired by white audiences).

What does any of this have to do with orcs you ask? Well orcs as a type of fantasy creature, were invented by Tolkien and portrayed (by Tolkien's own admission) using anti-Asian imagery of the time (as well as industrialized imagery more on that later). They were portrayed as short, ugly, cowardly, violent and with a taste for raw meat.

That's a pretty far call from the modern incarnation of orcs, which originated with the hugely (and I cannot emphasize this enough HUGELY) racist creator of DnD: Gary Gygax. He popularized the image of orcs as large, muscular, violent, dimwitted, sexually aggressive creatures with low brows, wide lips and deep voices; who live in tribes and survive by raiding "civilized" cultures. It was only in FIFTH EDITION, they stopped including a line in the half-orc racial description about how the majority of half-orcs are the product of male orcs raping human women.

If you feel like there can be drawn pretty clear parallels between orcs, and racist representations of African cultures, there's a reason for that: Gygax was a completely unapologetic racist. Again, before Gygax, orcs were not tribal, they were industrialist, living in barracks and destroying the environment to fuel their warmachine. LegalKimchi has a really good video about the racism inherent in DnD (and DnD adjacent) worldbuilding, which you can find HERE.

And a lot of the authors that came after Gygax might not have been quite as bad, but they replicated these tropes in order to represent an inherently evil culture so you know, lets not pretend that the fantasy genre for most of its life time hasn't been OVERWHELMINGLY white.

Which brings us back to the infamous "orc sized penis". Because the issue is very specifically with the lack of contextualization in the story in question. The line is dropped off-handedly as the first reference to orcs in the story, with the only context being that it is larger than a large human penis. We have no other knowledge about orcs at this point in the story, it is not expected that we will need more knowledge; that we can use our genre knowledge to extrapolate from this one line what orcs will be in this story - I.E. a stand-in for white womens fetishization of black male bodies, that gives you an easy shield if people accuse you of racism.

Also, lets not pretend that white sapphic communities are immune to this kind of fetishization either, just because it doesn't map one to one on to sapphic material. We have all seen that kind™ of Fareeha Amari content.

Sidenote but speaking of fetishization of black women, Tee Noir has a really good video about that topic, though again mostly focused on heterosexual relationship. You can watch it HERE.

[fialleril]

in the anabasis verse, how do anakin and padme fit together as people? what do they actually like about each other? i get the feeling you're constructing a much healthier relationship than canon; how does that work out? you always have the best meta about how people work as people, as directly opposed to george lucas's complete lack of comprehension of how real life human emotions work (exhibit a: "my heart is beating... hoping that kiss will not become a scar") and i'm really curious!

Hey now, be fair! Anakin’s dreadful lines in canon would actually work really well...if they were just delivered in a completely different tone.

Like, “My heart is beating... hoping that kiss will not become a scar” as said in the film is painfully melodramatic and ridiculous. But the same line delivered deadpan? Hilarious. Or said with dramatic flair while throwing a hand over his brow and swooning backward over the arm of the couch? Amazing.

What I’m saying is the dialogue as is actually could have been really cute and funny if it just...didn’t take itself seriously. You missed such an opportunity there, George.

tl;dr: Let Anakin be a dweeb.

But I’m supposed to be talking about Anabasis. And as this is probably gonna get long, here’s a cut.

I am indeed attempting to portray a healthier relationship than in canon (and also a much healthier relationship than in the previous version of Anabasis, which is terrible and literally no one should ever read it). Which is a little bit ironic, when you think about how they started: on opposite sides of an ideological war.

But that’s the backstory. (You can read more about the general backstory of Anbasis here, and the development of Anakin and Padme’s relationship here.) By the time of the main story, they know each other pretty well, and they’ve got at least the foundation for a strong relationship (though definitely not without some bumps that need to be smoothed out).

That relationship is built, strange as it may seem, on trust. They trust each other because (to use Tatooine language) they survived the storm together.

In that final confrontation with Palpatine, Padme fully expected to die. Instead Anakin turned on his Master to save her. And when Palpatine detonated his transmitter, Anakin fully expected to die. Instead Padme did everything she could to save him.

That moment has become the foundation of their understanding of one another. Padme knows that Anakin found something in her that he valued above his own life, and even (and maybe more significantly) above a lifetime of conditioning to obey his Master. Something that could inspire a man who told her his own name as a kind of almost-shameful secret (because it was not the name his Master gave him) to turn on the Master who had taken everything that he was, and to take himself back.

And Anakin knows that Padme stood there and faced her death and refused to call him anything but Anakin. He knows that she challenged his Master for him. For Anakin. No one had ever done that before. Anakin had never even thought it was possible that someone might choose to fight Master for him. (And then she emptied an entire blaster cartridge into the Emperor’s face at point blank range. They had to do a genetic test to get a positive ID on the body afterwards. That’s....that’s incredible.)

When Anakin wakes up to find he survived his transmitter explosion and is now in Jedi custody, Padme is the person he trusts. The only person he trusts. He sets out to destroy his Master’s empire completely, and she’s the one he gives the information to.

And Padme trusts him. She trusts his information, and she makes sure the newly restored Republic acts on it. Before anything else, they’re a team on a mission. The restoration of democracy is Padme’s primary concern, and the destruction of every part of Palpatine’s legacy is Anakin’s. So their goals are aligned, if not identical.

But it’s not all huge, dramatic moments and epic revenge plans. There’s also all the little things, the things that draw them to each other in ways they’re only just beginning to discover, now that they and the galaxy are free and they’re both learning how to live a “normal” life.

And a big part of that is Anakin learning who he is. This is a recovery story - for everyone, but especially for Anakin, who’s escaped a lifetime of conditioning and is suddenly faced with sometimes overwhelming questions like, “What do you like to do? What are your hobbies? What’s your opinion on this topic? Where do you want to go on our day out? Do you want to fly the speeder?” etc etc. So he’s discovering himself at the same time that he and Padme are discovering each other.

Anakin’s a speed demon, which isn’t new knowledge, exactly, but he hasn’t actually indulged that side of him in a long time. (“Do you want to fly the speeder?” was a question that left him reeling, because that was never allowed before.) As it turns out, Padme also sometimes feels the need for speed, and she can be reckless herself at times. (The real victim here is Obi-Wan, who’s on Vader-watching duty for far more of these joy-rides than is at all fair.)

Padme’s a politician with a deep love of democracy who is also, at this point, more used to working as a rebel agent than as a representative in a functioning democracy. Anakin understands that surprisingly well. He’s more than familiar with the shadow side of politics, too. He was raised by Palpatine, so his political knowledge isn’t really surprising, but Padme finds that, as infuriating as it can sometimes be, she really appreciates his blunt, almost brutal approach to political issues. His refusal to wrap harsh truths in pretty political language is refreshing, and she can talk to him in a way she can’t talk to her friends in the Senate. They don’t always agree, of course, but that isn’t always the most important thing.

They make each other laugh. Anakin is, in fact, a giant dweeb under all of that conditioning, and it turns out he’s a bit of a romantic, too (which Padme honestly was not expecting). They tease each other. Padme does terrible impressions of her senatorial colleagues and Anakin does his best imitation of a scandalized high society type.

Anakin likes to cook, and Padme likes to eat the food he cooks, so that works out nicely. He’s got a couple of gardens under glass where he grows culinary herbs and the plants used in his tzai blend. Padme’s never been much of a gardener herself, but she does love visiting gardens and public green spaces. Once she surprises Anakin with a visit to the Coruscant Grand Conservatory, because he’s lived on the planet for most of his life and never been. They spend the day excitedly tugging each other from biosphere to biosphere and generally acting like kids on a field trip who have escaped their teachers.

Honestly a lot of their relationship is like that. These are two people who were never really allowed to be kids - not for long in Padme’s case and not at all in Anakin’s. They’re discovering the world with and in each other. Neither of them really knows how to live as a civilian in peace time, and there are times when the concept of being able to do something just because you enjoy it and want to do it is almost too much to wrap their heads around.

Anakin is actually really good for Padme in that way. Because she has some experience with people who are survivors of conditioning and she knows how important it is for Anakin to reclaim himself, to find out what he likes and to do things simply because he enjoys them. But Padme isn’t always so good at taking time for herself. So when she does some of these things with Anakin, it gives her space to just have fun and cut loose for a while, too.