#even having a different opinions

[yuri-for-businesswomen]

i had a friend who was raped as a teenager and had a really strict mum who did not let her go out so she was really lonely. when she turned 18 she started going clubbing and since we live in a city with a big fetish scene, she started going to the kinky venue. since she was young, naive and very pretty, she was immediately roped in by older men who did bondage shootings with her and everything. she started working in the club. to me, she was clearly groomed, but she works in a fetish shop now and is fully immersed in the scene

i have a friend who answered a job ad for a secretary when she was abroad and she and her friend ran out of money but when they arrived there it was a brothel. they both prostituted themselves for several months. they were only 18. she still talks highly of that brothel, how clean and safe it was, and wants prostitution to be legal

i read the gut wrenching biography of a thai woman who ran away from home, whose parents refused her education and treated her brother very preferably while openly hating her, and entered prostitution in sex tourist destination pattaya at only 13. she was paid by men in their 50s first for her virginity, then to piss on her. she exited at 19 and developed psychosis. she defends sex buyers, hates feminists and wants prostitution to be legal

do you see where im going with this? brainwashing is real. despite the obvious facts, the grooming, the system that pushed and pulled them, the men taking advantage of them; they defend it. so yeah, we shouldnt dismiss firsthand testimony and personal experience, but always take it with a grain of salt, always contextualise, always see it as one part of a bigger picture. liberals dont do that and have duped too many people into not doing it either. „if thats her choice its none of our business“ fuck you!

[elodieunderglass]

[hypewinter]

Jazz wasn't crazy. People might argue that burning her childhood home to the ground with her parents still inside would be an indicator of insanity. But how else was she supposed to react after coming back home from college to find out her parents had brutally killed her brother via vivisection?

Dying her hair blonde wasn't crazy either before anyone asked. Plenty of girls dyed their hair when they needed a change. Besides, she could never live with herself if she kept the same hair color as that vile woman.

Admittedly Jazz would have to secede moving to Gotham had been a little crazy but it was the perfect place to start fresh and blend in despite her "quirks". She had even picked out a nice new identity for herself.

Clearly Jazz was not crazy as she had managed to land a job at Arkham Asylum as a psychiatrist. If she were really insane would they have ever hired her? No they wouldn't have.

Jazz was not crazy. She was very much sane. Just like her precious Mr. J.

[rowanthestrange]

A thing I think should be included with Ruby’s abandonment/attachment issues when we’re writing her, is that she was a foster sibling to a lot of kids. Like a lot of kids. She has effectively lost so many siblings and playmates and even babies/very young children she’s essentially had a hand in raising. Her entire life has been loving and losing. And for foster kids getting adopted or reunited with their parents under better circumstances, she will basically have been unable to grieve that properly because it’s a good thing they’re gone and they’re supposed to celebrate it. She’s clearly very loving and caring even after a whole life of that, even though each time they leave a piece of her goes with them.

No shit she’s going to end up with some attachment issues. Especially if she considers herself the lucky one, survivor’s guilt, Carla adopted her and none of the others, who have probably expressed that sentiment to her directly and asked why, in the hopes they could stay forever too, or just jealousy - what made you so special?

Foster children/youths in the UK also have to choose themselves to stay in-touch. Foster carers cannot directly contact the child once they have left their care. A “clean slate” approach is preferred. So if the child doesn’t request to get into contact — and sometimes aren’t told they would have to or are discouraged from doing so — that means losing contact immediately and for good. Does that remind you of anything? Sometimes it also happens very quickly - it is far from unheard of for a foster sibling to go to school in the morning and find out the child they’ve been living with for months has gone when they come back in the evening. Even with warning it could still often be only days. I think you could argue 73 Yards has more to do with Ruby’s experience as a foster sibling than being an adoptee.

And of course the continuous loss of loved ones mirrors the Doctor’s experience with their companions fairly often. Another thing that quietly binds them that most other people couldn’t understand.

[randomalistic]

Wait you guys are actually buying Disney products I thought it was a joke

(READ TAGS FOR FULL CONTEXT Sorry it’s long dies

[castiellesbian]

Supernatural was on so long in the hands of so many people with very differing views on the story they were telling that there is evidence in canon to support almost any interpretation.

[hindahoney]

Wild and revolutionary concept: maybe don't treat converts like trash just because they're converts? And also don't ask someone if they're a convert in a public setting?

[mars-ipan]

y’know i was talking about genderfluidity and trying to find a way to make my body as satisfying as possible for me with my mom and i mentioned not wanting top surgery but instead wanting to get tattoos of the scars and she worried about it coming off as offensive to other trans folks or people who’ve had mastectomies. SO i figured i’d ask the people of these communities myself!

*a realistic tattoo would be designed to look as accurate to actual scars as possible, whereas a stylized tattoo would be more cartoony- think the “eyelash/starburst” scars you see in a lot of transmasc art

reblogging for sample size would help me out a ton with gauging community opinions and such but obvi there’s no pressure :] just looking to know how ppl feel! thanks in advance folks

[pandorem]

Obviously going feral over the Orpheus and Eurydice quote but also can’t get over the fact that Orpheus and Eurydice are real people in this universe. Like Orpheus is literally Dream of the Endless’s son. I don’t have anything insightful to say about it, even via stories repeating and reiterating and that being such an important theme in the Sandman universe and how some truths become stories and some stories are more than true etc etc.

Also now just thinking of Hob mentioning that people have given King Lear a happy ending and Dream saying that it won’t last because all the great stories will return to their original forms (Shakespeare was actually the one to change it to a tragedy, and yes Neil knew this when he wrote that line). Still nothing coherent to say, just about how Charles and Edwin beat the odds and just how much of Dead Boy Detectives is like… a rejection of the queer tragedy we’ve grown so used to. Saw some people groan and comparing it to the mess of Supernatural and superhell etc which is wild to me because it feels like a conscious commentary and rejection of it.

Like. Simon and his internalized homophobia landed both him and Edwin in hell and its both made clear that the in universe reason that they were there is not because they were queer but because of the ritual sacrifice/prank, but that the symbolic and writing reason is because of the internal and external homophobia that the world subjects them to, and it is Simon and Edwin recognizing each other and Edwin saying that the way they are does not mean they deserve to be there, that it doesn’t have to be torture, that gives Simon the way out of hell. It isn’t Edwin confessing that sends him back, a demon interrupts him from confessing. Edwin has to confess at the door back to freedom so he can leave all of that internalized poison behind him back in hell where it belongs.

This post got super away from me and maybe I’ll actually write something coherent about all of these themes one day but yeah. Charles and Edwin at the gates of hell defied the trends of two tragedies, one very very old, and one that (while building off of tragic stories that have been around for ages) is far more recent

[incisorconfiture]

laios and kabru being very explicit narrative and character foils of each other means you're primed to expect some extent of honesty and candor from laios at every turn throughout, even if it's to negative effect, while your impression of kabru means you expect his every action and word to bely ulterior motive or manipulation, even if it's out of good intentions. and how thoroughly this is subverted in the end, when kabru is forced by pressure and circumstance into painfully, awkwardly honest confession and conduct, forced to stand back and spectate instead of trying to pull strings and control. and laios rises up out of nowhere with an underhanded scheme so shocking and thorough it tricks everyone, and suspends them into inaction and speechless disbelief, clearing his path to the throne. i just think it's neat how they're foils and opposites until they embody each other's core traits at some of their most pivotal developmental moments

[sskk-manifesto]

Bungou Stray Dogs: Dead Apple and how “ability users” (opposite to “normal people”) learning to accept themselves through the acceptance of their own abilities is a queer metaphor of acceptance of own's sexual orientation and gender: an essay by me

[cripplecharacters]

I know we (disabled people) aren't a monolith and all that, we'll all have different opinions on what is and is not offensive, but I want to ask if you can explain your opinion on cosplaying a disabled character a little more, because I don't really understand how portraying a character accurately, disabilities included within reason, would be offensive. I could see the use of an aid that other people could be actually making use of being harmful, and I can see not treating the disability in a respectful manner by making a joke of them being harmful, but as far as the inclusion of scar to cosplay a canonically scarred character goes, I feel like excluding them seems more offensive to me, it feels like erasure of the character's disability. If for example someone cosplayed a character I made that I was using to portray my own disabilities, and the cosplayer didn't include those disabilities when they could do so, I'd find that really insulting and hurtful. I guess it feels like too nuanced of a topic for a blanket This Is Good or This Is Bad answer if that makes sense? Sorry if this comes across as antagonistic or hostile, I'm not trying to pick a fight, I just want to understand your perspective.

Hi, I'm fully aware that there is a lot of opinions going either way (from "literally everything is fine" to "abled people shouldn't cosplay disabled characters at all no matter what"). I did a longer reply about the same thing in this ask that maybe will explain some of it better. There are also opinions of other mods on this in our #cripping up tag.

I don't consider not including a character's disability in cosplay as erasure, since to me it's just dressing up as a character with your own body and all. I think everyone should be able to cosplay everyone regardless of what their "factory settings" are, just don't pretend to be a minority that you aren't a part of in your normal life. I see pretending to have a disability for "character accuracy" as more offensive, your canvas for cosplay is yourself and if you don't have that disability then you just don't and that's completely fine. For the sake of not being accidentally insensitive I won't be making comparisons to other kinds of "pretending to be a minority for cosplay", especially since most other examples would be much worse anyway. To me, this whole practice is just... unnecessary. Work with what you have the same way disabled cosplayers shouldn't cover their disabilities when cosplaying abled characters.

I see your example of a potential cosplayer not including the disability in a character that you have made. I make disabled characters too, a lot of them even (probably granted for a mod on this blog). Some of them share my disabilities. And I think that we just have fundamentally different opinions because I'd vastly prefer for someone without my disability to just omit it rather than pretend parts of their face don't move or aren't symmetric. It'd feel like mockery to me, I don't want anyone to pretend to have a facial difference for any reason. If someone tried to dress up as literally me, I'd have the same opinion - do the clothes and goatee, but leave my gait disorder and half-moving mouth out of this. Obviously these things are part of my identity to an extent, and they make me who I am, but pretending to have them to imitate me feels more akin to bullying than authenticity. To be clear I get why you have that opinion, I just feel completely differently about it. And I don't think either of us are wrong or not wrong, it's just a different view of the same thing.

At the end of the day though I don't really care about how people cosplay their blorbos if all they do is dress up and take some photos like most cosplayers do. I just answer questions when directly asked rather than go out of my way to talk about this since in comparison to a lot of other issues this doesn't have big enough of an impact on me to be too bothered by it (if I had to do a list of ableist things I'm annoyed by I can't imagine a world where cosplay would make the list). I'm guessing that most askers don't know any handy person with an FD they can ask that so they come here, and I try to be helpful to the best of my ability.

I think the smartest thing a person can do is read a few opinions of different people and make a decision for themself. There is no one convenient consensus to follow (that I know of?), so it is what it is. If there is a potential cosplayer who is reading this ask and thinks that the asker's opinion makes more sense to them, then that's what they should probably do. The only thing I insist on is that they have fun cosplaying (rather than stressing over what person on the internet is right) because otherwise what's the point...

What I do consider important personally is the original thing I brought up, which is how abled people use facial difference as a costume in order to scare or disgust others. That is insensitive, offensive, and always in poor taste, it spreads misinformation about visibly disabled people and creates a negative image about a whole group of people, a lot of whom dread this time of the year (as mentioned in the article). Talking about this is in my opinion way more important than any Comic Con cosplay of a fictional character will ever be or has ever been, which probably influences my opinion on cosplay. When I think "fake facial differences", I'm reminded of horror villains with make-up that tries and fails to imitate how visibly disabled people look like. I associate fake scars and fake burns and fake skull shapes with this problem strongly, and as you can guess I don't like it at all. I find the authenticity argument hard to believe for myself when what is usually originally portrayed is an abomination of VFX designed to make us look scary; for most of these characters there is nothing good coming out of their "FD representation" anyway. If Freddy Krueger magically started to be shown as abled I'd be glad, not mad that the character who genuinely horribly affected how people from my community are seen is no longer doing that. This might be a radical take, but most existing characters with facial differences literally shouldn't have them. The way they are portrayed shapes how people are seen for the worse and if I had a "disability erasure" button for all the Scars and Voldemorts out there I'd make them as abled as possible.

Is this how all people with facial differences feel? I don't think I can go and ask each of them but definitely no, it's just the opinion of A Guy on the Internet (many such cases!) and rather than anything else I just want to share my view on stuff, so askers can hopefully make a more informed decision - whether that's writing, drawing, cosplay, etc. If someone reads my take and decides that they want to do the opposite, at least they have a bit of context on how some people might feel about it, and I think that's still valuable.

This is my opinion on this and I hope this clears it up more,

mod Sasza

[lloydfrontera]

i can't get over how cute javier is when he introduces himself to ppodong. he's so serious about it that lloyd thinks he's about to question his cover story for how ppodong was summoned but no. he was just thinking really hard about how he should call him or if he had a name. and then when lloyd gives him the go ahead to call ppodong however he wants he just. calls him sir ppodong and fucking shakes hands with him. he introduces himself and shakes hands with the hamster like c'mon that's so fucking cute i cannot stop thinking about it just look at him

it's adorable.

and it's also one of the first times in the novel that you get the sense that 'oh. that's a kid.' it's subtle and lowkey but you can kinda feel that javier is actually excited about ppodong, he's curious about him and really gentle when he meets him. like. he's just a kid. a kid that probably never had a pet before and is now in close proximity with a cute and fluffy little hamster and just. wants to know his name.

it's just. it's very cute.

[doverstar]

actually I love Tentoo and he is the Doctor and it was the only ending for Rose that worked and it is a huge gift to be able to have the man she loves grow old with her, they were always heading for that, y'all be quiet. I 100% understand the angst but it's okay, they're okay, good ending-

[puppyeared]

i feel like im not making any sense but does anyone else feel like there are stories that let u run with them and ones that spell everything out for you

[callixton]

i think the thing to understand abt martha jones is that even after she leaves she is five seconds away from dropping everything and traveling with the doctor at any given time. bc that itch to blow everything up and damn her personal duty to hell in search of a higher call never leaves her. but martha is smart. and rational. and has spent a long fucking time needing to keep herself safe. (bc he comes when she calls but never before.) and so she has gotten very good at keeping herself on the right side of those five seconds. but i do think if ten was a different person (if he could acknowledge how much he needed her instead of just how much he liked her) (if he didn’t feel this righteous martyrdom when it comes to being left alone) (if he cared enough about her to beg. if he cared enough about himself.) i think that her answer no would come crumbling down pretty quickly is all.