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summerlinenss · 2 months

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I no longer believe the actor who claims abuse on the Time Bandits set. Please read this all. I did my best to explain my reasons. I apologize for any rambling.

Paramount has issues with safety on their sets. They have issues with their HR and resolution departments. That is proven fact and has happened more than once recently, even resulting in lawsuits. I don't deny they were injured as they have record of that and Paramount has stated they paid their worker's comp claim, but I would take everything else they claim with a Rock of Gibraltar sized grain of salt.

Especially since they're just now trotting out that damned letter Taika signed as "proof" he and the entire cast, crew, and production companies are all white supremacist, pro-genocide zionists.

"Taika who signed that Biden letter" is a direct quote from the actor in a comment. They shared a post from an Instagram called "Zionists in Film" that purports to "out" supposed celebrity zionists. That post is Taika with falsehoods about the letter he signed plastered all over it. I don't know about all the celebrities listed, but there are several I know are anything but zionists and are listed there for doing literally nothing wrong.

The actor said nothing about the set being packed full of zionists until six days ago, starting with a post about Apple firing pro-Palestinian workers (I don't know if that's true, but either way it's not about Apple TV). The post from Zionists in Film about Taika went up five days ago. Everything else about the incident had been up and untouched since May. There is no other "evidence" that I've seen, be it quotes from the actor or anecdotes from anyone on that set that points to anyone being a zionist. Obviously I don't know each actor and crew member's stance personally, but when all a person who was on set with them can say is that Taika signed a letter, it doesn't look very convincing.

Also, the biggest and most obvious strike against their claim that the place was chock full of zionists? They were only on set when filming began in 2022 and filming wrapped entirely in early 2023! I/P has been a conflict for decades, I know, but your average joe did not care about "zionists" or even the conflict as a whole (regretfully) until after Oct 7th. So why, after all these months and two years after they left the set, do they suddenly start claiming it was a den of genocidal zionists?

I also don't believe every single one of the hundreds of people on the TB set was out to get them specifically. The entire cast, crew, and all the production companies involved are made up of misogynistic white supremacist queerphobes who only hated them just because they're Asian and nonbinary? What about the black guys in the cast? Or the little people? Or the women? Or any of the countless other minorities working on the show in any capacity, such as the no doubt large Maori presence? It was somehow just them who was despised by everyone, including those other minorities?

So yes, the actor deserves proper compensation for their injury, assuming their claim that Paramount didn't pay enough to cover their bills is true. But every other thing they said? I don't believe a word of it anymore. I was listening and accepting until they started screaming zionist. Now they come across as nothing more than a person with a bone to pick because they didn't get all the money they wanted. They just shot their credibility in the foot.

(I'm sending this essay to you because while I don't have a twitter account and can't get one, I have still seen idiots using this actor's "proof" to hate Taika, his fans, and Time Bandits as a whole. I just needed to put some fact checking and discussion somewhere.)

i want to just start with a disclaimer that, as anon said, i’m aware of the actual claims that have been made and read through the statements both from the actor and the paramount reps and it’s clear that they experienced some form of physical/emotional distress on set. no one is denying that. so i’m in no way attempting to diminish or disregard their experience.

that being said, i’m going to be 100% honest and say this as carefully as i can, but i’ve had an extremely off feeling about this since i first read about it. not in the sense of “well they would never allow that to happen so you’re obviously lying,” but there’s just something i really can’t put my finger on about this actor’s intentions that genuinely feel rooted in something vindictive rather than actually seeking personal justice.

just for comparison for anyone who hasn’t read the statements, i’m going to leave a link and screenshots of those here:

at first i honestly tried to take everything they were saying in good faith, but it’s at the point where it feels like they’re just making accusations of every controversial thing possible and waiting to see what sticks so they can get a pay-out to keep them quiet. it was originally a costar physically/psychologically abusing them and no one on set caring or believing them. now it’s escalated to:

- alleging the set was full of open and vocal zionists spewing a “pro-genocide” agenda

- claiming in advance that paramount is going to use AI to dub over their scenes

- apparently being both mad that they were “forced to leave” the show and mad that they’re going to still be in the show at all

- claiming they were gaslit and threatened by producers to the point of becoming suicidal

- calling them all “colonizers” (which if they are referring to taika and jemaine i think that is highly inappropriate and tone deaf)

- claiming they were digitally erased from stills because the producers are too scared to show their character and address what happened

- claiming they were originally in all 10 episodes and had their part reduced out of spite

- sharing headlines alleging all little people roles were cut from the show (which they weren’t) and alleging the cast was full of only white men (from the trailer alone the majority of the cast is literally bipoc and afab people)

- implied they were specifically discriminated against for being queer/non-binary and asian (although they are seemingly nowhere near the only lgbtq+ or AAPI cast/crew member so i don’t even understand what they’re talking about)

i’d also like to point out that i noticed one of the cast members is a queer and disabled rights activist (who seems like a lovely person btw) who has expressed nothing but total positivity and gratitude towards the show and absolutely everyone involved. and yes, of course, everyone can have different experiences, but i sincerely doubt someone who dedicates their spare time to fighting discrimination would stand by and not speak up if a costar was being abused or mistreated.

like you mentioned, the zionist stuff is all pure bullshit. and people who cry “zionism” to win their own personal conflicts typically don’t have a grasp on what it actually means. i don’t know how many times i’ve said by now that taika has literally been openly opposing the israeli military’s occupation of palestine on social media for the past six years minimum. i’m gonna be blunt and say any arguments people are still trying to make that he’s secretly an evil zionist because he (or probably his publicist) signed a letter that he likely didn’t even read and just assumed said “hey let’s keep freeing hostages and stop the violence” are just rooted in antisemitism at this point. i’m not sure about everyone else, but i do know that many people working on the show have been openly and vocally pro-palestine and even signed ceasefire letters, including jemaine and rachel house (i believe madeleine sami may have a cameo as well). and as you mentioned, anon, most of the general public (including i might assume this actor in question) didn’t become aware of or actively start speaking out against the occupation of palestine until this past october, which in no way coincided with the show’s filming. so i don’t get what they’re trying to prove besides the fact that they know buzzwords, honestly.

i’m also aware that this isn’t the first time this individual has done this kind of thing. they literally have a whole subcategory of their wikipedia page dedicated to allegations and accusations of abuse and discrimination they’ve made against others. and granted, some of the claims they’ve made are valid and i hope they got some sort of retribution. but a lot are also pretty big reaches and feel much more like attempts to “cancel” people they don’t like or had a hard time working with (e.g. they went on a bit of a smear campaign calling seth rogen an abuse apologist because he’d been friends with and “enabled” james franco in the past and deserved to never work in the industry again).

i’m not gonna be that person and say “well i know them and they’re good people and would never do these things,” because frankly, we don’t know anyone and incidents do happen. however i find it extremely questionable that this is literally the first time in about a decade of following their work that i have ever heard a single person have a remotely negative experience working with taika and/or jemaine, especially when all anyone else has ever said is specifically how safe and inviting and comfortable they make their sets for everyone. it also seems really bizarre and downright out-of-character to me that either one of them would not only refuse to help a cast member in distress, but that they’d go out of their way to mock and threaten them, all for the sake of protecting some B/C-list actor on an apple tv series of all things. i know for a fact taika has fired and recast abusers/people with allegations before for bigger projects, i don’t see why he wouldn’t do it again if necessary. and as the “insider source” in that article mentioned, i understand why they said they waited so long, but it still seems awfully convenient that they didn’t make any of this public until nearly a year and a half post-filming (and just a couple of months before the show was set to be released), despite apparently being in such life-altering turmoil.

i seriously do feel awful saying it, because again i don’t doubt there was an injury and emotional distress/discomfort being on set (or that HR was probably a goddamn pain to deal with), but it truly just doesn’t feel sincere or like they actually want to find a resolution. it really feels to me like either paramount didn’t fulfill their obligations of required support/compensation (which yes is obviously fucked up) or the actor in question didn’t get what they thought they deserved in support/compensation, and now they have a vendetta against everyone involved in the production and are determined to establish martyrdom to get them all “cancelled.”

#asks #anon #time bandits #taika waititi #jemaine clement #cw: abuse mention #long post #i wasn’t going to address this because i didn’t want to diminish someone’s obvious trauma #but this whole thing has just seemed very… yeah.#that’s all i’m gonna say let me shut my mouth now 🫶

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techiekittie · 3 months

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Kemi Badenoch, the equality minister and part of the Conservative Party, has said many transphobic things like blocking laws to ban conversion therapy, purposefully misgendering trans women in a leaked recording, and supporting the LGB alliance (which excludes trans people from queerness).

Meanwhile, David Tennant, a popular Scottish actor starring in Doctor Who and Good Omens, is a great ally to the queer community. While not being queer himself, he is very supportive of LGBTQ people, often wearing a nonbinary pride pin to support one of his (unknown) children, consistently speaking out about gay and trans rights, and posting about equality online.

His words have had an extremely positive impact on many queer people (especially his fans), and he won the Celebrity Ally LGBTQIA+ award for his support.

During his speech, he expressed more support for the queer community, saying:

“…acknowledging that everyone has the right to be who they want to be and live their life how they want to live it as long as they're not hurting anyone else should merit any kind of special award or special mention, because it's common sense, isn't it?”

He also criticised Kemi Badenoch (the transphobic woman I mentioned above) in his speech, saying:

“We shouldn't live in a world where that is worth remarking on. However, until we wake up, and Kemi Badenoch doesn't exist any more – I don't wish ill of her, I just wish her to shut up.”

This has sparked controversy amongst the Conservative Party, who has recently been attempting to form policies to limit “transgender ideology”. Rishi Sunak, the MP leading the party (and running for PM in the general election, though expected to lose by a landslide) has openly opposed trans people, making many transphobic comments on live television during the election debates.

He opposed David Tennant’s speech by saying on Twitter:

He uses the word “women”- plural, though Kemi Badenoch is only one woman, and the only one David Tennant criticised in his speech. Some have speculated that he is trying to garner support from feminists, pandering insincerely to them.

Kemi Badenoch has also responded on this on Twitter, saying:

Ironically, she campaigns heavily against policies banning conversion therapy- which often uses traumatic experiences to associate queerness with trauma, making the person avoid their own sexuality and identity, leading to PTSD for most. This endangers many women, including trans women and lesbians, yet she opposes policies designed to keep them safe from these traumatic situations.

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gaypolls · 6 months

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Submission Guidelines/Disclaimers

First, things to keep in mind when you submit:

there is a limit of 12 answers for polls, and on this blog one of those answers will always be 'show results,' to allow for people that the poll doesn't apply to to see without skewing data. so in reality you have a maximum of 11.

there's also an 80-character limit on the options

SO, if you go over those limits, know that I will take it into my own hands to decide which answers to omit and/or how to re-word it to fit the limit.

even otherwise, expect that the wording of your submission may be slightly altered in order to be more inclusive (when it doesn't affect the data), or because i think you missed an option that you probably meant to include, or just to make it sound less clunky. if you have an issue with any changes upon posting, i'm happy to hear you out.

currently there is no wait time, but if things go as expected, soon enough it'll likely be about a 4-5 day wait between the time you submit and the time it gets posted

if your poll is addressing a very small group, don't be surprised or angry when the 'see results' poll is the biggest. that needs to be there to keep data from being skewed by anyone's curiosity.

Base Guidelines For Submitting:

poll must be related to gayness in some way. it doesn't have to be directed exclusively at gay people, but it should center same-gender attraction. if you have a poll in mind to direct specifically at bisexuals, there's @mspecpolls

it CAN be a general LGBT poll, but if it's specific to something that has nothing to do with gay attraction, you're better off submitting to another blog. there's @transgenderpolls for trans stuff and @aspecpolls for ace/aro stuff.

it CAN be directed at a specific type of gay person, such as gay men, lesbians, specifically trans lesbians, nonbinary mlm, gay poc, disabled wlw, etc - literally you can address any specific gay group you want, just make sure to say so.

...this DOES include 'cis gay men/women/people' but tbqh you're gonna have to provide a good reason to be excluding trans people from the poll

in general if you want to explicitly exclude people who have a nonconforming relationship with gender, you better explicitly say so AND have a good reason. otherwise it'll be assumed that all sorts are included and if your options don't reflect that, i will change them or reject the poll.

it CAN relate to sex (i expect many polls here will be), just try to be tasteful about it. like, as long as it sounds like you're trying to collect data rather than arouse people lol

What would make me NOT post a submission:

as mentioned previously, if it's excluding subgroups without a good reason

if it's an opinion poll about the validity of any particular type of gay person. "validity" is a moot topic and i'm not going to encourage it, and in any case i'd like the focus of this blog to be about recording experiences (real, undeniable, forever in stone) rather than opinions (always changing, meaningless)

pride discourse polls, lol

anything that tries to pit issues against each other. no "which intercommunity issue is more important to you? ableism? racism?" like cmon

if it's just way too niche and would make a pointless poll. if a poll is "who's your favorite lgbt character" and then you've got 11 options from different TV shows, you gotta know that most of the ppl who see that poll will NOT have seen ALL those shows, so they'll really just be voting for the show that they know. it's just dumb.

if it's something like "gay people: do you like pineapple on pizza?" or some other question that doesn't actually have anything to do with being gay. if you wanna send something like this, make your case for why it's relevant that the poll is directed at gay people.

if it's some other obviously offensive shit, obviously. no racism or whatnot here.

FAQ:

Who counts as gay?

Like most of these guidelines I'll continue the same sentiment from the trans polls blog: We self-define here. But I will stress answering in good faith and understanding what any given poll is asking and what definitions they're using. If you're, say, nonbinary and bisexual in a way that makes all your attraction gay, or you're gay in a very specific way (like nb4nb), or you call yourself gay bc you're mostly gay but you're technically bisexual, or you're definitely homosexual but don't actually like to call yourself gay, etc, it'll likely just depend on the poll. It's totally up to you to decide if it includes you or not, or you can always ask if you want to be sure.

Though if it's not explicitly stated that the poll excludes transmasc lesbians or transfem gays, or other trans/nonbinary gay people, you should still for sure assume it includes you.

Why isn't there an option for X?/You missed an option.

Sometimes I may genuinely miss an option, but 9 times out of 10 the lack of the option is either due to the poll limits on tumblr, or because it goes against the point of the poll. For example, if the question begins with "If you're in a relationship," then "i'm not in a relationship" isn't going to be an option. If the prerequisite of the poll doesn't apply to you, then what you click is "see results." If it's something a little less concrete, polls will usually include some kind of "other" option anyway.

Can you make more polls for X type of gay person?

*I* make polls based off what I'm personally curious about. If you're curious about something, submit it!

Do you know that some people are gay in very unconventional ways that your polls aren't accounting for?

Yes, I know. When there's room on the poll, I try to be inclusive, but often there's not, and that's really the main thing there. However, I will admit that a secondary reason is that when a poll is addressing exclusively gay people, the fact that they're only attracted to one gender is relevant, regardless of whether or not it would still be gay of them to be attracted to more.

Can you get rid of the 'see results' button? Or can you not include it on this particular poll? I only want X people to respond. This poll is ONLY for X people.

If a poll is on this blog, it's for everyone, questioning and simply curious people included. It's also not going to stop curious people from clicking if there's no 'see results' button. It ensures that the data doesn't get skewed, and gathering data is what polls are for. It doesn't hurt you to see a big see results bar. The data is still there. If the bar does wind up obscuring more significant data, that means the poll was addressing too small of a group to begin with. And that's NOT the end of the world. This blog is far from the only place where you can get information about other gay people's experiences.

#mine #not polls

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dollyrots · 1 day

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💣 dustin st. james

[ archie madekwe, nonbinary, he/they ] — whoa! DUSTIN ST. JAMES just stole my cab! not cool, but maybe they needed it more. they have lived in the city for 29 YEARS, working as a/an BODY PIERCER / BASSIST. that can’t be easy, especially at only 29 YEARS OLD. some people say they can be a little bit IMPULSIVE and UNAPOLOGETIC , but I know them to be SPONTANEOUS and SELF-AWARE. whatever. I guess I’ll catch the next cab. hope they like the ride back to QUEENS! — (nine, 34, cst, they/any, none)

triggers: maternal death, arson, juvenile incarceration, drug use

general

full name: dustin anthony st. james preferred name: dustin or dusty (to friends) date of birth & age: march 31, 1995 & 29 place of birth: queens, ny zodiac (sun) sign: aries gender & pronouns: nonbinary & he/they orientation: bisexual spoken languages: english

education: dropped out of art school occupation: body piercer, bassist, ( & starving artist )

parents: ---- st. james, father (wanted connect!); maria st. james, mother (deceased) children: none pets: none relationship: none

faceclaim: archie madekwe hair color & frequent style: black & natural/afro eye color: dark brown height: 6'5" scars: mostly cigarette burns all over him (he's clumsy and chain smokes ok) tattoos: a few small ones; wants a half-sleeve on his left shoulder downwards piercings: ears, septum, & left nipple

handedness: right sociability: a very loud introvert emotional control: easily triggered which usually results in rage drug usage: nicotine cigarettes, practically chain smokes; marijuana, daily; nicotine vape, when he can't have cigs (and it's not the same) alcohol usage: socially, has been known to act out & cause problems with authority when drunk phobias: police (and not much else)

personality traits: talkative, disorganized, sporadic, chaotic, spontaneous, impulsive, reckless, street smart, easily angered, wears his emotions on his sleeve, sarcastic, arrogant

biography

dustin st. james grew up in a wonderful family until he didn't, but he was mostly grown up by that time anyway. his mom passed away when he was 17 and in the prime of his life; he would be the first to say that he has yet to recover. dustin began rebelling against everyone he cared and did not care about, because what was the point of staying in line anymore? with no mother alive to disappoint, he settled for what definitely would have disappointed her — setting a church on fire. days after, he was named as the culprit, arrested, and spent seven months in a juvenile detention facility. he could have been out in only four months, but his flippant attitude toward law enforcement and authority in general did not serve him well. gratefully, after he turned 18, his record was completely expunged as per his plea agreement. now, dustin still likes setting fires (physical and metaphorical), but after court-ordered therapy, he has found... other ways to cope with his emotions, and particularly with his anger toward society, the government, and "god itself." he drinks too much, chain smokes, starts fights, all things that growing up he never imagined he would do. at one point in his life, he was a good kid. he is self-aware enough to be able to identify when everything changed, and he knows the death of his mother was the direct cause of his decline, but he sure as hell won't change how he is today for anyone or any reason. he is nothing if not unapologetic.

wanted connections

— family ( especially his dad! ).

— co-workers & regulars.

— ride or dies.

— mischief makers.

— drug dealer(s).

— exes & current flings.

— more details on the way !

#boroughs.intro #dustin.#death tw #arson tw #incarceration tw #drugs tw

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mourningmogaicrew · 2 years

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hi!!! I saw u mention agabpunk before? is there anymore info u have to elaborate on it? would it include being an agab but choosing to identify as a different agab (not just gender but AGAB bc u reject the one u had) or wanting to not have an agab or have it revealed to people? Honestly interests me so much I have a lot of feelings on it and would love to see more terms related to these concepts .. bc I want to id as a different agab and also agables and don’t want people to know or assume mine at all

OHnim sorry for asking I didn’t realize asks were closed I wasn’t trying to request anything btw

Even though coining requests are closed it's still okay to request information about something!

AGABpunk is a label I made up a couple months ago to match other labels like dyspunk or amatopunk. Basically going against social norms and radically accepting things.

It was just one word idea I came up with (along with AGABqueer, AntiGAB, AGABf*ck, etc) to describe people who reject being defined by something they were labeled as decades ago.

I've had a couple people say neoassignments/AGAB-rejecting terms could fit under AGAB non-conforming, and that's true! But I wanted a more specific term to describe the movement in general. The original ask (here) was less "I don't conform to the AMAB/AFAB binary" and more "I am intentionally going against that binary, I don't like the normalization of that binary, etc".

It's kind of like the difference between gender non-conforming and terms like genderpunk, genderf*ck, or gender piracy. They're much more active (loud? rebellious? queer, even? I don't know a good word for it).

People have been playing around with this concept for a very long time, with jokes and sayings like: "I was assigned trans at birth" "not amab or afab but a secret, new third thing" (slur warning ->) "I'm actually afag" "not amab/afab, I'm aPerson" "I wasn't amab or afab, I was a baby". I have heard all of those and more and figured that making neo terms was just the next level of that.

And here are some terms that you may be interested in anon:

-AGABless: not identifying with an AGAB.

-A?AB: viewing your AGAB as irrelevant, or not wanting to tell it to others.

-SAGAB: self-assigning your sex/gender.

-AXEAB: assigned xenogender at birth. The link goes to the archived assigned kenochoric at birth (AKAB) coining but if you scroll down you'll see AXEAB too.

Plus some terms I've made up:

-A_AB: assigned nothing at birth. When you think that you weren't really assigned a gender/sex at birth, you were just a baby that the doctor looked at and wrote things down for. After all, things like recorded weight (and name, if you're trans) also become practically irrelevant as you develop into a person.

-A[]AB (or A⬛︎AB): AGAB-redacted. Refusing to tell people who don't need to know your AGAB, and feeling like it's an invasive question. This especially goes for nonbinary people who are constantly being asked "but which one were you born as?".

-ÆAB: assigned gender/neogender/xenogender at birth. For anyone with a weird gender, or multiple of them, who wants to say that they've always been that gender in a nontraditional way. Kind of like MtM/FtF for binary trans people. The name has the "e" from gender and I combined it with the A. AAAB and AKAB can potentially fall under this.

-AGABvoid: kind of like AGABless and inspired by gendervoid. Why won't you tell people your AGAB? Why don't you have a connection to it? Because it's missing, that's why! You've somehow lost it. (This was written in a very joke-y way but feel free to actually use this term)

It could also be possible I guess to identify with multiple, conflicting, or all AGABs (panAGAB???). For example I know some intersex people will call themself both AMAB and AFAB but perisex people can also do that.

#kind of a long post. oops #mourn says stuff #ask #agabpunk #agab non conforming #assigned nothing at birth #agab redacted #agabvoid #agabless #a?ab #aeab #æab #neoassignment #assigned xenogender at birth #assigned neogender at birth #assigned kenochoric at birth #mogai #mogai coining #f slur tw

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syekick-powers · 2 years

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honestly if in your post complaining about transandrophobia you compare transmascs talking about our oppression in any way to white women using fake tears to win arguments, you have lost all right to complain about transmascs talking about our oppression. not only is the comparison just watered down misgendering (some transmascs don’t mind being referred to as women, but a huge majority of us DO FUCKING MIND), it’s also completely false because like a good 65-70% of the people i see talking about transandrophobia are fucking trans MOC and nonbinary transmasc POC talking about how racism, transandrophobia, and antimasculism intersect in how they are oppressed.

don’t you love how trans men and transmascs are not allowed to say our oppression is rooted at least partially in misogyny without 2000 r/a/d/fe/m-adjacent shitheads claiming that we cannot POSSIBLY face misogyny because we’re not women, checkmate transandrophobia truthers; but then the moment it’s remotely rhetorically convenient to compare us to cis women (esp white women), we are suddenly guilty of all the prejudice of the most privileged of white cishet upper-class abled neurotypical women, even if the majority of trans men and transmascs are not even CLOSE to being privileged in the ways that particular group of women are?

i swear to god transandrophobia deniers have like three recycled arguments against transandrophobia and just constantly cycle between the same already-debunked talking points like a broken goddamn record. just shut your fucking stupid mouth and don’t interrupt conversations you clearly have no understanding of. you can, in fact, not join a conversation when you don’t know anything about the subject. you don’t have to inject a fucking hot take into every single discourse out there. just close the post editor and go outside for 10 minutes and wonder if your opinion is actually warranted or if maybe, just maybe, you have internalized internet social media hot take culture too much and are sticking your nose in somewhere you’re not welcome and where you have nothing to contribute. install a few more filters between your brain and the post button and fuck off.

#sye's babbles #if you try to argue with me in the notes of this post i will block you #im not interested in debating transandrophobia deniers #i don't care what you have to say #you can suck my Tdick

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innuendostudios · 3 years

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youtube

I was invited to give a talk on GamerGate over Zoom in early 2021. I've long been frustrated that there isn't a good timeline of GG and its origins on YouTube. When people ask "what the hell was GG anyway?" they often get referred to my or Dan Olson's videos on the subject, but both of them were made while GG was ongoing, and presumed a degree of familiarity on the part of the audience. There was just too much to say about what was already happening to spend time getting the audience up to speed, and it was safe to assume our audiences had enough context to follow along. But time moves fast on the internet, and many people who now care about such things weren't there while it was happening, and are lacking the necessary context to follow the better videos. For a long time, I've only been able to direct them to RationalWiki's timeline, which is excellent but so exhaustively comprehensive that it's likely to scare off first-timers.

I realize an hourlong lecture isn't necessarily helping matters, but the first 20-or-so minutes of this video are my attempt at streamlining the timeline such that people can be up to speed on the most important stuff fairly quickly. The rest is talking about what it all meant, how it prefigured the Alt-Right, and using it to better understand digital radicalization.

This video was made with the help of Magdalen Rose, who edited the slides to the audio while I was laid up with a back injury. Go sub to her channel! And please back me on Patreon.

Transcript below the cut.

FUCKING VIDEO GAMES? FUCKING VIDEO GAMES. THEY MADE DOZENS OF PEOPLE MISERABLE FOR YEARS OVER VIDEO GAMES! NOT EVEN FUCKING VIDEO GAMES, FUCKING ARTICLES ABOUT FUCKING VIDEO GAMES. THIS IS WHAT PASSES FOR LEGITIMATE GRIEVANCE. ARE YOU KIDDING ME WITH THIS SHIT??

Hi! My name is Ian Danskin. I’m a video essayist and media artist. I run the YouTube channel Innuendo Studios, please like share and subscribe.

I’m here to talk to you about GamerGate, and I needed to get all that out of the way. I’m going to talk about what GamerGate was and how it prefigured The Alt-Right, and there are gonna be moments where you’re nodding along with me, going, “yeah, yeah I get it,” and then the sun’s gonna break through a crack in the wall and you’ll suddenly remember that all this is happening because some folks - mostly ladies - said some stuff - provably true stuff, I might add - about video games and a bunch of guys didn’t like it, and you’re gonna want to rip your hair out. By the end of this, you will have a better understanding of what happened, but it will never not be bullshit.

Also, oh my god, content warning. Racism, sexism, antisemitism, homophobia, transphobia, rape threats, threats of violence, domestic abuse - I’m not going to depict or describe at length any of the worst stuff, but it’s all in the mix. So if at any point you need to switch me off or mute me, you have my blessing.

Brace yourselves.

Some quick prehistory:

In 2012, feminist media critic Anita Sarkeesian ran a Kickstarter campaign for a YouTube series on sexist tropes in video games. And, partway through the campaign, 4chan found it and said “let’s ruin her life.” And a lot of the male general gaming public joined in. And by “ruin her life” I’m not talking 150 angry tweets including dozens of rape and death threats per week, though that was a thing. I’m talking bomb threats. I’m talking canceled speaking engagements because someone threatened to shoot up a school. I’m talking FBI investigation. The harassers faced no meaningful repercussions.

And in 2013, Zoe Quinn released Depression Quest, a free text game about living with depression. They received harassment off and on for the next year, most pointedly from an incel forum called Wizardchan that doxxed their phone number and made harassing phone calls telling them to kill themself. The harassers faced no meaningful repercussions.

(Also, quick note: Zoe Quinn is nonbinary and has come out since the events in question. When I call Zoe’s harassment misogynist, understand I am not calling Zoe a woman, but they were attacked by people who hate women because that’s how they were perceived. Had they been out at the time things probably would’ve gone down similarly, but on top of misogyny I’d be talking about nonbinary erasure and transphobia.)

Okay. Our story begins in August 2014. The August that never ended.

Depression Quest, after a prolonged period on Greenlight, finally releases on Steam as a free download with the option to pay what you want. In the days that follow, Zoe’s ex-boyfriend, Eron Gjoni, writes a nearly 10,000-word blog called The Zoe Post, in which he claims Quinn had been a shitty and unfaithful partner. (For reference, 10,000 words is long enough that the Hugos would consider it a novelette.) This is posted to forums on Penny Arcade and Something Awful, both of which immediately take it down, finding it, at best, a lot of toxic hearsay and, at worse, an invitation to harassment. So Gjoni workshops the post, adds a bunch of edgelord humor (and I am using the word “humor” very generously), and reposts it to three different subforums on 4chan.

We’re not going to litigate whether Zoe Quinn was a good partner. I don’t know or care. I don’t think anyone on this call is trying to date them so I’m not sure that’s our business. What is known is that the relationship lasted five months, and, after it ended, Gjoni began stalking Quinn. Gjoni has, in fact, laid out how he stalked Quinn in meticulous detail to interviewers and why he feels it was justified. It’s also been corroborated by a friend that Quinn briefly considered taking him back at a games conference in San Francisco, but he became violent during sex and Quinn left the apartment in the middle of the night with visible bruises.

Off of the abusive ex-boyfriend’s post, 4chan decides it’s going to make Zoe Quinn one of their next targets, and starts a private IRC channel to plan the campaign. The channel is called #BurgersAndFries, a reference to Gjoni claiming Quinn had cheated on him with five guys. A couple sentences in The Zoe Post - which Gjoni would later claim were a typo - imply that one of the five guys was games journalist Nathan Grayson and that Quinn had slept with him in exchange for a good review of Depression Quest. Given the anger that they’d seen drummed up against women in games with the previous Anita Sarkeesian hate mob, #BurgersAndFries decides to focus on this breach of “ethics in games journalism” as a cover story, many of them howling with laughter at the thought that male gamers would probably buy it. This way, destroying Quinn’s life and career and turning their community against them would appear an unfortunate byproduct of a legitimate consumer revolt; criticism of the harassment could even be framed as a distraction from the bigger issue. Gjoni himself is in the IRC channel telling them that this was the best hand to play.

The stated aim of many on #BurgersAndFries was to convince Quinn to commit suicide.

Two regulars in the IRC, YouTubers MundaneMatt and Internet Aristocrat, make videos about The Zoe Post. Incidentally, both these men had already made a lot of money off videos about Anita Sarkeesian. Matt’s is swiftly taken down with a DMCA claim, and he says that Quinn filed the claim themself. (For the record, in those days, YouTube didn’t tell you who filed DMCA claims against you.) Members of the IRC also reach out to YouTuber TotalBiscuit, who had been critical of Sarkeesian and dismissive of her harassment, and he tweets the story to his 350,000 followers, saying a game developer trading sex for a good review might not prove true, but was certainly plausible.

This is where GamerGate begins to get public traction.

Zoe Quinn is very swiftly doxxed, with their phone number, home address, nudes, and names and numbers of their family collected. Gjoni himself leaks their birth name. The Zoe Post, and the movement against Quinn - now dubbed “The Quinnspiracy” - make it to The Escapist and Reddit, which mods will have little luck removing. The Quinnspiracy declares war on any site that does take their threads down, most vehemently NeoGAF. People who defend Zoe against the harassment start getting doxxed themselves - Fez developer Phil Fish is doxxed so thoroughly, hackers get access to the root folder of his website.

In what I’m going to call This Should Have Been The End, Part 1, Stephen Totilo, Editor-in-Chief at Kotaku where Nathan Grayson worked, in response to pressure not just from The Quinnspiracy but an increasing number of angry gamers buying The Quinnspiracy’s narrative, publishes a story. In it he verifies that Quinn and Grayson did date for several months, and that not only is there no review of Depression Quest anywhere on Kotaku, not by Grayson nor anyone else, but that Grayson did not write a single word about Quinn the entire time they were dating.

In response, The Quinnspiracy declares war on Kotaku. r/KotakuinAction is formed, which will become the primary site of organization outside of chanboards. The fact that their entire “movement” is based on a review that does not exist changes next to nothing.

Some people start to see The Quinnspiracy as potentially profitable. The Fine Young Capitalists get involved, a group ostensibly working to get women into video games but who have a Byzantine plan to do so wherein they crowdfund the budget and the woman who wins a competition gets to storyboard a game, but another company will make and she will get 8% of the profits, the rest going to a charity chosen by the top donor. 4chan becomes the top donor. They like TFYC because the head of the company has a vendetta against Zoe Quinn, who had previously called them out for their transphobic submission policy, and he falsely accused Quinn of having once doxxed him. 4chan feels backing an ostensibly feminist effort will be good PR, but can’t resist selecting a colon cancer charity because, they say, feminism is cancer and they want to be the cure to butthurt. They also get to design a character for the game, and so they create Vivian James, who will become the GamerGate mascot.

Manosphere YouTubers Jordan Owen and Davis Aurini launch a Patreon campaign for their antifeminist documentary The Sarkeesian Effect and come to The Quinnspiracy looking for $15,000 a month for an indefinite period to make it, which they get.

In what will prove genuinely awful timing, Anita Sarkeesian releases the second episode of Tropes vs. Women in Video Games, and, despite not being a games journalist and having nothing to do with Quinn or Grayson, she is immediately roped into the narrative about how feminists are ruining games culture and becomes the second major target of harassment. Both she and Quinn soon have to leave their houses after having receiving dozens and dozens of death threats that include their home addresses.

After being courted by members of the IRC channel, Firefly star Adam Baldwin tweets a link to one of the Quinnspiracy videos and coins the hashtag #GamerGate. This is swiftly adopted by all involved.

In response to all this, Leigh Alexander writes a piece for Gamasutra arguing that the identity that these men are flocking to the “ethics in games journalism” narrative to defend no longer matters as a marketing demographic. Gaming and games culture is so large and so varied, and the “core gamer” audience of 18-34 white bros growing smaller and septic, that there was no reason, neither morally nor financially, to treat them as the primary audience anymore. Love of gaming is eternal, but, she declared, “gamers,” as an identity, “are over.” Eight more articles contextualizing GamerGate alongside misogyny and the gatekeeping of games culture come out across several websites in the following days. GamerGate frames these as a clear sign of [deep sigh] collusion to oppress gamers, proving that ethics in games journalism is, indeed, broken, and Leigh Alexander becomes the third major target of harassment. These become known as the “gamers are dead” articles - a phrase not one of them uses - and they make “get Leigh Alexander fired from Gamasutra” one of their primary goals.

Something I need you to understand is that it has, at this point, been two weeks.

Highlights from the next little bit: Alex Macris, a higher up at The Escapist’s parent company, expresses support for GamerGate; he will go on to write the first positive coverage at a major publication and cement The Escapist as GamerGate-friendly. Mike Cernovich, aka “Based Lawyer,” gets GamerGate’s attention by mocking Anita Sarkeesian; he will go on to hire a private investigator to stalk Zoe Quinn. GamerGate launches Operation Disrespectful Nod, an email campaign pressuring companies to pull advertising from websites that have criticized them. They leverage their POC members, getting them, any time someone points out the rampant racism and antisemitism among GamerGaters, to say “I am a person of color and I am #NotYourShield”; most of these “POC members” are fake accounts left over from a previous, racist disinformation campaign. Milo Yiannapoulos gets involved, writing positive coverage of GG despite having mocked gamers for precisely this behavior in the past, and gets so much traffic it pulls Breitbart News out of obscurity and makes it a significant player in modern conservative news media.

[Hey! Ian from the future here. This talk mostly addresses how GamerGate prefigured the Alt-Right strategically and philosophically, but if you want a more explicit, material connection: Breitbart News took its newfound notoriety to become, as its Executive Chair phrased it in 2016, "a platform for the Alt-Right." That Executive Chair was Steve Bannon, who threw the website's weight behind The Future President Who Shall Not Be Named, and, upon getting his attention, would then go on to become his campaign strategist and work in his Administration. So, if you're wondering how one of the central figures of the Alt-Right ended up in the White House, the answer is literally "GamerGate." Back to you, Ian from the past!]

In what I’m calling This Should Have Been The End, Part 2, Zoe Quinn announces that they have been lurking the #BurgersAndFries IRC channel since the beginning and releases dozens of screenshots showing harassment being planned and the selection of “ethics in games journalism” as a cover. #BurgersAndFries has a meltdown, everyone turns on each other, and the channel is abandoned. And they then start another IRC and things proceed.

It goes on like this. I’m not gonna cover everything. This is just the first month. It should be clear by now that this thing is kind of unkillable. And I worry I haven’t made it obvious that this is not just a chanboard and an IRC. Thousands of regular, every day gamers were buying the story and joining in. They were angry, and no amount of evidence that their anger was unfounded was going to change that. You could not mention or even allude to GamerGate and not get flooded with dozens, even hundreds of furious replies. These replies always included the hashtag so everyone monitoring it could join in, so all attempts at real conversation devolved into a hundred forking threads where some people expected you to talk to them while others hurled insults and slurs. And always the possibility that, if any one of them didn’t like what you said, you’d be the next target.

To combat this, some progressives offered up the hashtag #GameEthics to the people getting swept up in GamerGate, saying, “look, we get that you’re angry, and if you want to talk about ethics in games journalism, we can totally do that, but using your hashtag is literally putting us in danger; they calling the police on people saying there’s a hostage situation at their home addresses so they get sent armed SWAT teams, and if you’ll just use this other hashtag we can have the conversation you say you want to have in safety.” And I will ever stop being salty about what happened.

They refused. They wouldn’t cede any ground to what they saw as their opposition. It was so important to have the conversation on their terms that not only did they refuse to use #GameEthics, they spammed it with furry porn so no one could use it.

A few major events on the timeline before we move on: Christina Hoff Sommers, the Republican Party’s resident “feminist,” comes out criticizing Anita Sarkeesian and becomes a major GG figurehead, earning the title Based Mom. Zoe Quinn gets a restraining order against Eron Gjoni, which he repeatedly violates, to no consequence; GG will later crowdfund his legal fees. There’s this listserv called GameJournoPros where game journalists would talk about their jobs, and many are discussing their concerns over GamerGate, so Milo Yiannopoulos leaks it and this is framed as further “proof of collusion.” 4chan finally starts enforcing its “no dox” rules and shuts GamerGate threads down, so they migrate to 8chan, a site famous for hosting like a lot of child porn. Indie game developer Brianna Wu makes a passing joke about GamerGate on Twitter and they decide, seemingly on a whim, to make her one of the biggest targets in the entire movement; she soon has to leave her home as well. GamerGate gets endorsements from WikiLeaks, Infowars, white nationalist sites Stormfront and The Daily Stormer, and professional rapist RooshV. And hundreds of people get doxxed; an 8chan subforum called Baphomet is created primarily to host dox of GamerGate’s critics.

But by November, GamerGate popularity was cresting, as more and more mainstream media covered it negatively. Their last, big spike in popularity came when Anita Sarkeesian went on The Colbert Report and Stephen made fun of the movement. Their numbers never recovered after that.

Which is not to say GamerGate ended. It slowed down. The period of confusion where the mainstream world couldn’t tell whether it was a legitimate movement or not passed. But, again, most harassers faced no meaningful repercussions. Gamers who bought the lie about “ethics in games journalism” stayed mad that no one had ever taken them seriously, and harassers continued to grief their targets for years. The full timeline of GamerGate is an constant cycle of lies, harassment, operations, grift, and doxxing. Dead-enders are to this day still using the hashtag. And remember how Anita had nothing to do with ethics in games journalism or Zoe Quinn, and they just roped her in because they’d enjoyed harassing her before so why not? Every one of GamerGate’s targets knows that they may get dragged into some future harassment campaign just because. It’s already happened to several of them. They’re marked.

(sigh) Let’s take a breath.

Now that we know what GamerGate was, let’s talk about why it worked.

In the thick of GamerGate, I started compiling a list of tactics I saw them using. I wanted to make a video essay that was one part discussion of antifeminist backlash, and one part list of techniques these people use so we can better recognize and anticipate their behavior. That first part became six parts and the second part went on a back burner. It would eventually become my series, The Alt-Right Playbook. GamerGate is illustrative because most of what would become The Alt-Right Playbook was in use.

Two foundational principles of The Alt-Right Playbook are Control the Conversation and Never Play Defense. Make sure people are talking about what you want them to talk about, and take an aggressive posture so you look dominant even when you’re not making sense. For instance: once Zoe leaked the IRC chatlogs, a reasonable person could tell the average gater, “the originators of GamerGate were planning harassment from the very beginning.” But the gater would say, “you’re cherry-picking; not everyone was a harasser.”

Now, this is a bad argument - that’s not how you use “cherry-picking” - and it’s being framed as an accusation - you’re not just wrong, you’re dishonest - which makes you wanna defend yourself. But, if you do - if you tell them why that argument is crap - you’ve let the conversation move from “did the IRC plan harassment?” - a question of fact - to “are the harassers representative of the movement?” - a question of ethics. Like, yes, they are, but only within a certain moral framework. An ethics question has no provable answer, especially if people are willing to make a lot of terrible arguments. It is their goal to move any question with a definitive answer to a question of philosophy, to turn an argument they can’t win into an argument nobody can win.

The trick is to treat the question you asked like it’s already been answered and bait you into addressing the next question. By arguing about whether you’re cherry-picking, you’re accepting the premise that whether you’re cherry-picking is even relevant. Any time this happens, it’s good to pause and ask, “what did we just skip over?” Because that will tell you a lot.

What you skipped over is their admission that, yes, the IRC did plan harassment, but that’s only on them if most of the movement was in on it. Which is a load of crap - the rest of the IRC saw it happening, let it happen, it’s not like anybody warned Zoe, and shit, I’m having the cherry-picking argument! They got me! You see how tempting it is? But presumably the reason you brought the harassment up is because you want them to do something about it. At the very least, leave the movement, but ideally try and stop it. They don’t, strictly speaking, need to feel personally responsible to do that. And you might be thinking, well, maybe if I can get them take responsibility then they’ll do something, but you’d be falling for a different technique I call I Hate Mondays.

This is where people will acknowledge a terrible thing is happening, maybe even agree it’s bad, but they don’t believe anything can be done about it. They also don’t believe you believe anything can be done about it. Mondays suck, but they come around every week. This is never stated outright, but it’s why you’re arguing past each other. To them, the only reason to talk about the bad thing is to assign blame. Whose turn is it to get shit on for the unsolvable problem? Their argument about cherry-picking amounts to “1-2-3 not it.” And they are furious with you for trying to make them responsible for harassment they didn’t participate in.

The unspoken argument is that harassment is part of being on the internet. Every public figure deals with it. This ignores any concept of scale - why does one person get harassed more than another? - but you can’t argue with someone who views it as a binary: harassment either happens or it doesn’t, and, if it does, it’s a fact of life, and, if it happens to everyone, it’s not gendered. And this is not a strongly-held belief they’ve come to after years of soul-searching - this is what they’ve just decided they believe. They want to participate in GamerGate despite knowing its purpose, and this is what would need to be true for that to be ok.

Or maybe they’re just fucking with you! Maybe you can’t tell. Maybe they can’t tell, either. I call this one The Card Says Moops, where people say whatever they feel will score points in an argument and are so irony-poisoned they have no idea whether they actually believe it. A very useful trick if the thing you appear to believe is unconscionable. You can’t take what people like that say at face value; you can only intuit their beliefs from their actions. They say they believe this one minute and that another, but their behavior is always in accordance with that, not this.

In the negative space, their belief is, “The harassment of these women is okay. My anger about video games is more important. I may not be harassing them myself, but they do kind of deserve it.” They will never say this out loud in a serious conversation, though many will say it in an anonymous or irreverent space where they can later deny they meant it. But, whatever they say they believe, this is the worldview they are operating under.

Obscuring this means flipping through a lot of contradictory arguments. The harassment is being faked, or it’s not being faked but it’s being exaggerated, or it’s not being exaggerated but the target is provoking it to get attention, which means GamerGate harassers simultaneously don’t exist, exist in small numbers, and exist in such large numbers someone can build a career out of relying on them! It can be kind of fun to take all these arguments made in isolation and try to string together an actual position. Like, GamerGate would argue that Nathan Grayson having previously mentioned Zoe Quinn in an article about a canceled reality show counts as positive coverage, and since Grayson reached out to Quinn for comment it’s reasonable to assume they started dating before the article was published (which is earlier than they claim), and positive coverage did lead to greater popularity for Depression Quest. But if you untangle that, it’s like… okay, you’re saying Zoe Quinn slept with a journalist in exchange for four nonconsecutive sentences that said no more than “Zoe Quinn exists and made a game,” and the price of those four sentences was to date the journalist for months, all to get rich off a game that didn’t cost any money. That’s your movement?

And some, if cornered, would say, “yes, we believe women are just that shitty, that one would fuck a guy for months if it made them the tiniest bit more famous.” But they won’t lead with that. Because they know it won’t convince the normies, even the ones who want to be convinced. So they use a process I call The Ship of Theseus to, piece by piece, turn that sentence into “slept with a journalist in exchange for a good review” and argue that each part of the sentence is technically accurate. It’s trying to lie without lying. And, provided all the pieces of this sentence are discussed separately, and only in the context of how they justify this sentence, you can trick yourself into believing this sentence is mostly true.

So, like, why? This is clearly motivated reasoning; what’s the motivation? What was this going to accomplish?

The answer is nothing. Nothing, by design. GamerGate’s “official” channels - the subreddit and the handful of forums that didn’t shut them down - were rigidly opposed to any action more organized than an email campaign. They had a tiny handful of tangible demands - they wanted gaming websites to post public ethics policies and had a list of people they wanted fired - but their larger aim was the sea change in how games journalism operated, which nothing they were asking for could possibly give them. The kind of anger that convinces you this is a true statement is not going to be addressed by a few paragraphs about ethics and Leigh Alexander getting a new job. They wanted gaming sites to stop catering to women and “SJWs” - who were a sizable and growing source of traffic - and to get out of the pockets of companies that advertised on their websites - which was their primary source of income. So all Kotaku had to do to make them happy was solve capitalism!

Meanwhile, the unofficial channels, like 8chan and Baphomet, were planning op after op to get private information, spread lies with fake accounts, get disinformation trending, make people quit jobs, cancel gigs, and flee their homes. Concrete goals with clear results. All you had to do to feel productive was go rogue. In my video,

How to Radicalize a Normie, I describe how the Alt-Right encourages lone wolf behavior by whipping people up into a rage and then refusing to give them anything to do, while surrounding them with examples of people taking matters into their own hands. The same mechanism is in play here: the public-facing channels don’t condone harassment but also refuse to fight it, the private channels commit it under cover of anonymity, and there is a free flow of traffic between them for when the official channels’ impotence becomes unbearable.

What I hope I’m illustrating is how these techniques play off of each other, how they create a closed ecosystem that rational thought cannot enter. There’s a phrase we use on the internet that got thrown around a lot at the time:

you can’t logic someone out of a position they didn’t logic themselves into.

Now, there are a few other big topics I think are relevant here, so I want to go through them one by one.

MEMEIFICATION

So a lot of interactions with GamerGate would involve a very insular knowledge base.

Like, you’d say something benign but progressive on Twitter.

A gater would show up in your mentions and say something aggressive and false.

You’d correct them. But then they’d come back and hit you with -

ah shit, sorry, this is a Loss meme.

If I were in front of a classroom I’d ask, show of hands, how many of you got that? I had to ask Twitter recently, does Gen Z know about Loss?!

If you don’t know what Loss is I’m not sure I can explain it to you. It’s this old, bad webcomic that was parodied so, so, so many times

that it was reduced to its barest essentials, to the point where any four panels with shapes in this arrangement is a Loss meme. For those of you in the know, you will recognize this anywhere, but have you ever tried to explain to someone who wasn’t in the know why this is really fuckin’ funny?

So, now… by the same process that this is a comics joke,

this is a rape joke.

I’m not gonna show the original image, but, once upon a time, someone made an animated GIF of the character Piccolo from Dragon Ball Z graphically raping Vegeta. 4chan loved it so much that it got posted daily, became known as the “daily dose,” until mods started deleting every incident of it. So they uploaded slightly edited version of it. Then they started uploading other images that had been edited with Piccolo’s color scheme. It got so abstracted that eventually any collection of purple and green pixels would be recognized as Piccolo Dick.

Apropos of nothing, GamerGate is a movement that insists it is not sexist in nature and it does not condone threats of rape against the women they don’t like. And this is their logo. This is their mascot.

If you’re familiar with the Daily Dose, the idea that GamerGate would never support Eron Gjoni if they believed he was a sexual abuser is so blatantly insincere it’s insulting… but imagine trying to explain to someone who’s not on 4chan how this sweater is a rape joke. Imagine having to explain it to a journalist. Imagine having to explain it to the judge enforcing your abuser’s restraining order.

Reactionaries use meme culture not just because they’re terminally online but also because it makes their behavior seem either benign or just confusing to outsiders. They find it hilarious that they can be really explicit and still fly under the radar. The Alt-Right did this with Pepe the Frog, the OK sign, even the milk glass emoji for a hot minute. The more inexplicable the meme, the better. You get the point where Stephen Miller is flashing Nazi signs from the White House and the Presidential re-eletion campaign is releasing 88 ads of exactly 14 words and there’s still a debate about whether the administration is racist. Because journalists aren’t going to get their heads around that. You tell them “1488 is a Nazi number,” it’s gonna seem a lot more plausible that you’re making shit up.

MOVE FAST AND BREAK THINGS

Online movements like GamerGate move at a speed and mutation rate too high for the mainstream world to keep up. And not just that they don’t understand the memes - they don’t understand the infrastructure.

In an attempt to cover GamerGate evenhandedly, George Wiedman of Super Bunnyhop interviewed a lawyer who specializes in journalistic ethics. He meant well; I really wish he hadn’t. You can see him trying to fit something like GamerGate into terms this silver-haired man who works in copyright law can understand. At one point he asks if it’s okay to fund the creative project of a potential journalistic source, to which the guy understandably says “no.”

What he’s alluding to here is the harassment of Jenn Frank. A few weeks into GamerGate, Jenn Frank writes a piece in The Guardian about sexism in tech that mentions Anita Sarkeesian and Zoe Quinn. In another case of “here’s a strongly-held belief I just decided I have,” GamerGate says this is a breach of journalistic ethics because Frank backs Quinn on Patreon. They harass her so intensely she not only has to quit her job at The Guardian, for several months she quits journalism entirely.

Off the bat, calling a public figure central to a major event in the field a “journalistic source” is flatly wrong-headed. Quinn was not interviewed or even contacted for the article, they were in no way a “source”; they were a subject. But I want to talk about this phrase, “fund a creative project.” Patreon is functionally a subscription; it’s a way of buying things. It’s technically accurate that Frank is funding Quinn’s creative project, but only in the sense that you are funding Bob Dylan’s creative project if you listen to his music. And saying Frank therefore can’t write about Quinn is like saying a music journalist can’t cover a Bob Dylan concert if they’ve ever bought his albums.

And we could talk about the ways that Patreon, as compared with other funding models, can create a greater sense of intimacy, and we also could comment that, well, that’s how an increasing number of people consume media now, so that perspective should be present in journalism. But maybe it means we should cover that perspective differently? I don’t know. It’s an interesting subject. But none of that’s going on in this conversation because this guy doesn’t know what Patreon is. It was only a year old at this point. Patreon’s been a primary source of my income for 5 years and my parents still don’t know what it is. (I think they think I’m a freelancer?) This guy hears “funding a creative project” and he’s thinking an investor, someone who makes a profit off the source’s success.

The language of straight society hasn’t caught up with what’s happening, and that works in GamerGate’s favor.

In the years since GamerGate we have dozens of stories of people trying to explain Twitter harassment to a legal system that’s never heard of Twitter. People trying to explain death threats to cops whose only relationship to the internet is checking email, confusedly asking, “Why don’t you just not go online?” Like, yeah, release your text game about depression at GameStop for the PS3 and get it reviewed in the Boston Globe, problem solved.

You see this in the slowness of mainstream journalists to condemn the harassment - hell, even games journalists at first. Because what if it is a legitimate movement? What if the harassers are just a fringe element? What if there was misconduct? The people in a position to stop GamerGate don’t have to be convinced of their legitimacy, they just have to hesitate. They just have to be unsure. Remember how much happened in just the first two weeks, how it took only a month to become unkillable.

It’s the same hesitance that makes mainstream media, online platforms, and law enforcement underestimate The Alt-Right. They’re terrified of condemning a group as white nationalist terrorists because they’re confused, and what if they’re wrong? Or, in most cases, not even afraid they’re wrong, but afraid of the PR disaster if too much of the world thinks they’re wrong.

ACCOUNTABILITY AND CONTROL

A thing I’ve talked about in The Alt-Right Playbook is how these decentralized, ostensibly leaderless movements insulate themselves from responsibility. Harassment is never the movement’s fault because they never told anyone to harass and you can’t prove the harassers are legitimate members of the movement. The Alt-Right does this too - one of their catchphrases is “I disavow.” Since there are no formalized rules for membership, they can redraw boundaries on the fly; they can take credit for any successes and deny responsibility for any wrongdoing. Public membership is granted or revoked based on a person’s moment-to-moment utility.

It’s almost like… they’re cherry-picking.

The flipside of this is a lack of control. Since they never officially tell anyone to do anything but write emails, they have no means of stopping anyone from behaving counterproductively. The harassment of Jenn Frank was the first time GamerGate’s originators thought, “maybe we should ease off just to avoid bad publicity,” and they found they couldn’t. GamerGate had gotten too big, and too many people were clearly there for precisely this reason.

They also couldn’t control the infighting. When your goal is to harass women and you have all these contradictory justifications for why, you end up with a lot of competing beliefs. And, you know what? Angry white men who like harassing people don’t form healthy relationships! Several prominent members of GamerGate - including Internet Aristocrat - got driven out by factionalism; they were doxxed by their own people! Jordan Owen and Davis Aurini parted ways hating each other, with Aurini releasing chatlogs of him gaslighting Owen about accepting an endorsement from Roosh, and they released two competing edits of The Sarkeesian Effect.

I say this because it’s useful to know that these are alliances of convenience. If you know where the sore spots are, you can apply pressure to them.

LEADERS WITHOUT LEADERSHIP

One way movements like GamerGate deflect responsibility is by declaring, “We are a leaderless movement! We have no means to stop harassment.”

Which… any anarchist will tell you collective action is entirely possible without leaders. But they’ll also tell you, absent a system of distributing power equitably, you’re gonna have leaders, just not ones you elected.

A few months into GamerGate, Randi Lee Harper created the ggautoblocker. Here’s what it did: it took five prominent GamerGate figures - Adam Baldwin, Mike Cernovich, Christina Hoff Sommers, Milo Yiannopoulos, and Nick Monroe, formerly known as [sigh] PressFartToContinue - and generated a block list of everyone who followed at least two of them on Twitter. Now, this became something of an arms race; once GamerGate found out about it they made secondary accounts that followed different people, and more and more prominent figures appeared and had to get added to the list. But, when it first launched, the list generated from just these five people comprised an estimated 90-95% of GamerGate.

Hate to break it to you, guys, but if 90+ percent of your movement is following at least two of the same five people, those are your leaders. The attention economy has produced them. Power pools when left on its own.

This is another case where you have to ignore what people claim and look at what they do. The Alt-Right loves to say “we disavow Richard Spencer” and “Andrew Anglin doesn’t speak for us.”

But no matter what they say, pay attention to whom they’re taking cues from.

AD CAMPAIGN

George Lakoff has observed that one way the Left fails in opposition to the Right is that most liberal politicians and campaigners have degrees in things like law and political science, where conservative campaigners more often have degrees in advertising and communications. Liberals and leftists may have a better product to sell, but conservatives know how to sell products.

GamerGate less resembles a boots-on-the-ground political movement than an ad campaign. First they decide what their messaging strategy is going to be. Then the media arm starts publicizing it. They seek out celebrity endorsements. They get their own hashtag and mascot. They donate to charity and literally call it “public relations.” You can even see the move from The Quinnspiracy to GamerGate as a rebranding effort - when one name got too closely associated with harassment, they started insisting GamerGate was an entirely separate movement from The Quinnspiracy. I learned that trick from Stringer Bell’s economics class.

Now, we could stand to learn a thing or two from this. But I also wouldn’t want us to adopt this strategy whole hog; you should view moves like these as red flags. If you’re hesitating to condemn a movement because what if it’s legitimate, take a look at whether they’re selling ideology like it’s Pepsi.

PERCEPTION IS EVERYTHING

One reason to insist you’re a consumer revolt rather than a harassment campaign is most people who want to harass need someone to give them permission, and need someone to tell them it’s normal.

Bob Altemeyer has this survey he uses to study authoritarianism. He divides respondents into people with low, average, and high authoritarian sentiments, and then tells them what the survey has measured and asks, “what score do you think is best to have: low, average, or high?”

People with low authoritarian sentiments say it’s best to be low. People with average authoritarian sentiments also say it’s best to be low. But people with high authoritarian sentiments? They say it’s best to be average. Altemeyer finds, across all his research, that reactionaries want to aggress, but only if it is socially acceptable. They want to know they are the in-group and be told who the out-group is. They don’t particularly care who the out-group is, Altemeyer finds they’ll aggress against any group an authority figure points to, even, if they don’t notice it, a group that contains them. They just have to believe the in-group is the norm.

This is why they have to believe games journalism is corrupt because of a handful of feminist media critics with outsized influence. Legitimate failures of journalism cannot be systemic problems rooted in how digital media is funded and consumed; there cannot be a legitimate market for social justice-y media. It has to be manipulation by the few. Because, if these things are common, then, even if you don’t like them, they’re normal. They’re part of the in-group. Reactionary politics is rebellion against things they dislike getting normalized, because they know, if they are normalized, they will have to accept them. Because the thing they care about most is being normal.

This is why the echo chamber, this is why Fox News, this is why the Far Right insists they are the “silent majority.” This is why they artificially inflate their numbers. This is why they insist facts are “biased.” They have to maintain the image that what are, in material terms, fringe beliefs are, in fact, held by the majority. This is why getting mocked by Stephen Colbert was such a blow to GamerGate. It makes it harder to believe the world at large agrees with them.

This is why, if you’re trying to change the world for the better, it’s pointless to ask their permission. Because, if you change the world around them, they will adapt even faster than you will.

THE ARGUMENT ISN’T SUPPOSED TO END

Casey Explosion has this really great Twitter thread comparing the Alt-Right to Scary Terry from Rick and Morty. His catchphrase is “you can run but you can’t hide, bitch.” And Rick and Morty finally escape him by hiding. And Morty’s all, “but he said we can’t hide,” and Rick is like, “why are we taking his word on this? if we could hide, he certainly wouldn’t tell us.”

The reason to argue with a GamerGater is on the implied agreement that, if you can convince them they’re part of a hate mob, they will leave. But look at the incentives here: they want to be in GamerGate, and you want them not to be. But they’re already in GamerGate. They’re not waiting on the outcome of this argument to participate. They’ve already got what they want; they don’t need to convince you GamerGate isn’t a hate mob.

This is why all their logic and rationalizations are shit, because they don’t need to be good. They’re not trying to win an argument. They’re trying to keep the argument going.

This has been a precept of conservative political strategy for decades. “You haven’t convinced us climate change is real and man-made, you need to do more studies.” They’re not pausing the use of fossil fuels until the results come in. “You haven’t convinced us there are no WMDs in Iraq, you need to collect more evidence.” They’re not suspending the war until you get back to them. “You haven’t convinced us that Reaganomic tax policy causes recessions, let’s just do it for another forty years and see what happens.” And when the proof comes in, they send us out for more, and we keep going.

The biggest indicator you can’t win a debate with a reactionary is they keep telling you you can. The biggest indicator protest and deplatforming works is they keep telling you in plays into their hands. The biggest indicator that you shouldn’t compromise with Republicans is they keep saying doing otherwise is stooping to their level. They’re not going to walk into the room and say, “Hi, my one weakness is reasoned argument, let’s pick a time and place to hash this out.”

And we fall for it because we’re trying to be decent people. Because we want to believe the truth always wins. We want to bargain in good faith, and they are weaponizing our good faith against us. Always dangling the carrot that the reason they’re like this is no one’s given them the right argument not to be. It’s all just a misunderstanding, and, really, it’s on us for not trying hard enough.

But they have no motivation to agree with us. Most of the people asking for debates have staked their careers on disagreeing with us. Conceding any point to the Left could cost them their livelihood.

WHY GAMES?

Let’s close with the big question: why games? And, honestly, the short answer is:

why not games?

Games culture has always presented itself as a hobby for young, white, middle class boys. It’s always been bigger and more diverse than that, but that’s how it was marketed, and that’s who most felt they belonged. As gaming grows bigger, there is suddenly room for those marginal voices that have always been there to make themselves heard. And, as gaming becomes more mainstream, it’s having its first brushes with serious critical analysis.

This makes the people who have long felt gaming was theirs and theirs alone anxious and a little angry. They’ve invested a lot of their identity in it and they don’t want it to change.

And what the Far Right sees in a sizable collection of aggrieved young men is an untapped market. This is why sites like Stormfront and Breitbart flocked to them. These are not liberals they have to convert, these people are, up til now, not politically engaged. The Right can be their first entry to politics.

The world was changing. Nerd properties were exploding into popular culture in tandem with media representation diversifying. And we were living with the first Black President. Any time an out-group looks like it might join the in-group, there is a self-protective backlash from the existing in-group. This had been brewing for a while, and, honestly, if it hadn’t boiled over in games, it would have boiled over somewhere else.

And, in the years since GamerGate, it has. The Far Right has tapped the comics, Star Wars, and sci-fi fandoms; they tried to get in with the furry community but failed spectacularly. They’re all over YouTube and, frankly, the atheist community was already in their pocket. Basically, if you’re in community with a bunch of young white guys who think they own the place, you might wanna have some talks with them sooner than later.

Anyway, if you want to know more about any of this stuff, RationalWiki’s timeline on GamerGate is pretty thorough. You can also watch my or Dan Olson’s videos on the subject. I’ll be putting the audio of this talk on YouTube and will put as many resources as I can in the show notes. The channel, again, is Innuendo Studios.

Sorry this was such a bummer.

Thank you for your time.

#video essay #alt-right playbook #Youtube

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meridaism · 2 years

Note

Merida calls Leezie “pretty” from her pov over 20 times, gets so distraught and upset about Leezie getting married that she blocked out the fact that a literal god of death and destruction declared ruin unto her and her entire family literal hours earlier, took the time to stop and SMELL Leezie as the two of them were hiding away from the Dasátach and then followed that up with an afterthought of “I'm so glad she's not getting married and I'm so glad we're here together, pressed up against one another, together,” then afterwards she stood and held Leezie by her waist firmly and, in front of a bunch of men, said “My heart near to broke when I found out she was getting married, that's how close we are.” Then later on, asked her why she'd want to get married, to which Leezie replied with how she'd want her husband to refer to her as “Ms. Leezie” whenever she woke up and vice versa, then Merida calls her “Ms. Leezie” when telling her goodnight and vice versa routinely for whenever they go to sleep. Then the morning after that, she is intimidated by the men and asks where the women are as opposed to being around men. Then, when visiting an island predominantly inhabited by independent, self-made and self-taught women, Merida literally short circuits at how many women there are. All of this in the CANON SEQUEL TO BRAVE AND TO MERIDA’S STORY, AND she has a CANON NONBINARY LOVE INTEREST whom she says “You look like someone girls would fancy. But, that's just the body, isn't it? The face you're wearing. That kindness is you, though, whether you're in that body or out of it. That's Feradach.” to. And you people expect me to believe she's straight or at all interested in MEN???

All of this plus the playlist Disney themselves made for Merida’s internal character which have songs in which Merida sings from her heart including love songs exclusively towards women and female-aligned people. And her already being completely disinterested in men canonically throughout the entirety of Brave.

All of this being literal canon confirmation of Merida being a lesbian and these people still really wanna go “Well I mean Disney didn't confirm anything, so 😒” ???

Disney owns Brave, Bravely, and the Walt Disney Records Spotify account where there's so much book canon, movie canon, and Walt Disney Records Spotify “Be Brave” playlist canon material altogether of Merida being a confirmed lesbian, so it wouldn't even matter what Disney said at this point. Merida is a lesbian and there's nothing anybody can do to change that.

#merida #brave (2012)#bravely (2022)#maggie stiefvater #canon lesbian merida #disney #pixar #lesbianism #disney lesbian #lesbian princess #lesbian #lesbian pride #lgbtq+ pride #happy pride 🌈#pride month #f/m merida shippers and m//rricup shippers don't touch this post leave her alone she's a lesbian

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coochiequeens · 3 years

Text

51 deaths in 2021 is not a crime wave.

A least 4 black women and girls are killed per day.

In 2020, there were 5,295 records for missing American Indian girls and women tallied by the National Crime Information Center, including 578 records that were still "active" by year's end.

In Mexico 10 women are killed per day.

So many women are killed per day we don’t even have stats for 2021. Yet all we hear about is how the trans community uses every death, including one that was a hit and run victim and may have had nothing to do with being trans, to encourage a victim mentality.

Two more violent deaths of transgender Americans have just been reported, both from December, bringing 2021’s total to 53. It was already by far the nation’s deadliest year on record for trans people.

Za’niyah Williams, a 21-year-old Black trans woman, died after a hit-and-run car crash in Houston December 20, TransGriot reports. She remained unidentified for some time and was misgendered by police and media outlets. But her loved ones have come forward to identify her.

“You were loved and will always be a part of me!” a cousin wrote on social media. “Fly high you beautiful butterfly.” A friend posted that Williams was “a very sweet and smart young lady and always ripped the runway when she dressed up.”

“Za’niyah Williams was a bright soul who at 21 years old had the world in front of her,” Tori Cooper, the Human Rights Campaign’s director of community engagement for its Transgender Justice Initiative, said in a press release. “It is horrific that her life was taken from her by an unknown assailant who drove off without a care. She was also misgendered in initial reports until she was identified by her mother. We must create a society that respects Black trans women and all transgender, nonbinary, and gender-nonconforming people. Although we honor them in death, they deserve to live, and they deserve justice for the crimes that too often end their lives.”

The Harris County Sheriff’s Office asks that anyone with information call (713) 221-6000and reference case number #2112-07879.

In Albuquerque, N.M., white trans woman Nikki Turietta, 31, was found shot to death December 31, TV station KOB reports. She was found in her home, shot in the head. Turietta was also initially misgendered by media.

Jen Struck, Turietta’s aunt, described her as “a character” and “just completely free spirit.” Turietta had grown up in Albuquerque and had returned there a few years ago after traveling all over the U.S. and internationally, Struck told KOB. Turietta had just celebrated the holidays with her family.

“We’re just all in shock,” Struck said. “I don’t think it’s really set in for some of us yet.” Violent crime has been rising in Albuquerque, with a record 114 homicides in 2021.

Turietta’s death remains under investigation by Albuquerque police. “We want justice,” Struck said. “We’re desperate for answers. We want to know what happened. Somebody’s got to know something. They didn’t commit suicide.”

“It is horrific that on the last day of 2021, yet another transgender person was killed in what has been a record year for fatal violence against transgender and gender-nonconforming people,” Cooper said. “This violence has been unceasing, but so too must our efforts to combat it never stop. We must commit to creating a safe and affirming culture for transgender and gender-nonconforming people.”

#51 deaths in 2021 is a tragedy #51 deaths is not a crime wave #Media needs to cover the murder rates of real women

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bottomharrykingdom · 4 years

Note

(1) I don’t mean to be rude or ignorant, I just come from a sheltered upbringing and just want to understand and learn. Harry being transgender confuses me. Obviously he hasn’t confirmed his gender or sexuality to us explicitly. I just don’t see how he’s transgender because he’s not becoming or going to be in future, a women. Also could calling him transgender not be offensive? Not in a transgender is bad way but assuming his femininity means he want to be a women...

(2) my gay friend finds it upsetting that just because he’s feminine people assume he wants to be a women. Could speculating his gender be offensive to Harry? Once again I really don’t mean to upset anyone, I genuinely just want to learn and be more open minded. I’m really sorry if I’ve offended anyone through my questioning! Just to clarify and I may not fully understand it but I don’t think transgender is bad or anything, you should be authentically yourself!! Please help me learn!

Hi! You're not being offensive at all, it's really great that you're trying to educate yourself 💖

Trans is an umbrella term for anyone who isn't cisgender, not just a term for those transitioning from their birth gender to another. So when we call Harry trans we aren't calling him a woman, we're saying he could identify as pretty much anything that isn't cis! The reason we call him trans specifically is because he used a trans flag on the cover of Fine Line.

People have been theorizing that he isn't cis for years, but it wasn't until Harry identified with the trans flag himself that people started using 'trans'.

The reason Harry's album is believed to have references to his gender identity isn't part of an invasive conspiracy theory, it's interpreting the queer coding deliberately present in his art. If you look further there are many references to transhood in Harry's music and appearance, from using trans and nonbinary colors, to referencing books with trans themes, to working with artists who push for gender nonconformity. Harry doing all of this is a form of queer coding, a core part of LGBT culture in which queer people communicate their identities with each other in a way that keeps them safe from society's prejudice against them.

Many people are under the impression that if Harry were really trans he would say it outright. That the person who releases intimate music and refuses to explain the meanings would one day give a lengthy interview explaining his gender identity, and that we must wait for this day to say he's trans. That society has become so accepting of the LGBT community that his wellbeing and career would face no negative consequences. And that because of this any belief that he's trans is absurd. But they couldn't be more wrong.

If you aren't aware, LGBT people are the largest target of violence in the world. As progressive as you may think society has become towards the LGBT community, 2017 recorded the highest number of single-homicide related deaths in the LGBT community since 1996. The majority of those deaths? Trans people. The average lifespan of a trans person is just 30 years. Rejecting the possibility that Harry isn't comfortable with the world knowing he's trans, and would find solace in hidden messages and symbolism that register to trans people as a way to safely communicate with them, is a cruel trivialization of the actual risk of harm trans people face and the subsequent fear for their safety at the hands of the public.

With that said, no one thinks Harry is trans just because he's feminine. In fact, most of the things that make people believe he's trans have nothing to do with femininity. Femininity is not inherent to any gender. No one thinks Harry is trans because he wears nail polish and did two photoshoots last year in a dress and fishnets. That's very silly! And the trans people who recognize their experiences as trans people in Harry are not silly at all.

If you want to understand where the belief comes from, check out these masterposts 1, 2, 3 and our 'trans harry' tag! Our 'femme' tag also includes all the references to Harry being feminine and/or doing something relating to the female gender.

There's years of instances, really! It isn't any individual one that indicates Harry is trans, but the collection of them as a whole. A single puzzle piece doesn't show you anything, but when you put enough of them together the full picture is revealed! It's important to see all of these instances as a unit, and not argue over the implications of one single reason. Gender is a complex thing and everything can mean different things to all of us! Trans people are very aware of this. It has been through careful and mindful observations of Harry that have lead them believing certain actions have particular ties to gender.

Beeing trans is a wonderful thing! A small group of fans believing Harry is trans could never hurt him. The conversation comes from a place of so much love and support! There's a lot to learn and none of us can really know anything for certain, but what's important is keeping an open mind and supporting trans people. Because whether that includes Harry or not, you're still supporting trans people! And in the end, that's what matters most 💖

#asks #princess #trans harry #bhk

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metanoiamorii · 3 years

Text

Wip Re-Introduction: A Rope In Hand

❛Horror is like a serpent; always shedding its skin, always changing. And it will always come back. It can’t be hidden away like the guilty secrets we try to keep in our subconscious.❜

♧ Title: A Rope In Hand [ARIH]

♧ Status: First Drafting

♧ Point of View: Third Person, flexible between a few

♧ Genre: Dark Fantasy, Supernatural, LGBTQ+, Action, Drama

♧ Warnings: This story revolves around the occult. There will be talk of witch hunts and trials and cults. There will be torture methods used to gain confessions, and these methods will be justified under religious belief. There will be toxic and abusive relationships, particularly family; finding an escape from them, and healing from the trauma. There will be homophobia, transphobia, misogyny, and colonization. There will be major character deaths, but I can spoil after the book ends the main characters do get a happy ending. Each chapter and scene posted will have personalized warnings, but these are the main things to expect.

♧ Featuring: The majority of the characters will be LGBTQ+, from pansexual, homosexual, to asexual; genderfluid, agender/nonbinary, and transgender. Each character is complex and morally grey. Yes, they will do things that are blatantly terrible, or actively good. Overall, they will be morally grey and questionable at best. There will be complex world-building, from both the universe it takes place in, and the religious pantheons brought up. The religions brought up will be polytheistic and animism-themed. The romance between the major characters will be slow-burn enemies to friend to lovers, and them learning to love themselves through one another. There will be an exploration on generational healing, and unlearning toxic, and bias believes.

♧ Setting: The setting is influenced by Victorian London, and Medieval Ireland. There will be mention of other places, primarily western Europe, the Ottoman Empire, Ancient Rome, Eastern Asia, and Napoleonic France.

♧ Synopsis:

In the town of Arkaley, in the northwest of the Duchy of Ruairc, the people have been plagued by bad fortune and crime. Attacks of bandits on the road, raids from pirates on the shores, untimely deaths of children and young women, elected officials coming out corrupt; there is no end in Arkaley of the suffering the locals endure.

Rationally, to explain such a bad string of luck, there is only one possible explanation: Witchcraft.

The Duchy of Ruairc already has a history of witchcraft: the Ó Ruaircs turned out to be witches, the Abondé incident in Salem, the Liathain incident in Trakee; the Ruaircs have their record. Perfectly acceptable for everyone to assume the worse of the Ruairish, as they have proved to be nothing but.

To prove his worth, the young Reverend Prudence Clemency Frye, takes up the task of quelling this coven of witches and heading this witch-hunt. Young and naïve, witch only knowledge from books and little hands-on experience, he’s unprepared for this challenge. When he finally leaves the town, well… everyone would rather put this incident behind them.

♧ Tease:

My darling dear, a knave so clear

You appear, so bravely near;

Do you hear my darling dear, sneers of austere jeers?

Behave, my dear, when I am near;

For peers will lear, in their fear,

Allow me o' dear our persevere

So my fave you appear

And volunteer a slave so dear

in an atmosphere we fear.

my darling dear, wave so clear

Depravely as we leave, and give a souvenir;

My lips to yours, as you crave in these fallin' years.

Be brave darling dear, and give into hearts o' queer.

For mine you be, your darling dear,

To the stars you have swore in love, so crystal clear.

My peers shall sneer, but whore I be, and you I crave

Oh so bare. slurs and glares, just listen to my prayers.

Kiss me love, and leave o'they to a'crave

In this atmosphere that we fear

Their own, o' pure, knave so dear.

♧ Excerpt:

".... This is wrong." Prudence finds the words slipping from his lips, voice a quiet whisper; a breathless tone of voice. He allows his fingertips to falter against scarred skin, watching as Mastema turned his cheek, he pressed himself into the palm of Prudence's hand. Eyes closed, a smile curled on his face. Prudence couldn't help but smile at the scene, but slowly, slowly, slowly, he rescinded his hand; breaking the hold.

"Revered..." Matching his voice, Mastema replied. Maintaining such a soft voice, as he shifted himself forward on the bed. One foot to the ground, the other drawn beneath himself. Over Prudence he leaned, resting one palm to the sheets, the other lifting to seize Prudence's hand before he could recoil back. "You have made me feel something in which I've never felt before..."

From where he laid, Prudence could only form a soft frown. He knew he could draw his hand back, the grip was far from tight. But he didn't. He laid there, allowing Mastema to hold his hand. "... This is wrong, Mastema."

Mastema frowned; he matched the reaction Prudence wore. Through it, he forced a half-smile, tightening his grip on the other's hand, and forward he brought Prudence's hands to kiss the knuckles. "... If this is wrong, I do not wish to be right."

At the response, Prudence shook his head. "It is not for us to be right or wrong, the gods—"

At the angle he sat, Mastema shifted once more. He dropped Prudence's hand, to lean forward; to lean in close. Both of his palms found the other's cheek, as he touched their foreheads to one another. "... Do not force your will onto another." In that soft whisper, he spoke. Eyes closed, breath drawn in. "Is that not a Commandment of our Creator?"

"I..." Prudence faltered. In, he drew his breath, to try to steady himself. "... I did not take you for the religious sorts."

"I'm not." Mastema all too quickly retorted. But as he was, he laid; this proximity. "But you are."

♧ Characters:

The Order of Witchesbane

Prudence Clemency Frye; The Reverend

Half Fae/Half Human • Intersex • Genderfluid • He/They • Homosexual • Homo-demiromantic

The bastard son of Lord Zachariah Frye. Raised by his father, with his mother dying young, he took to following in his footsteps. He became a religious young man and an active witch-hunter. A part of him desires his father’s acceptance, his praises; the other part despises his father and everything the man stands for. In recent years, he has joined the De La Cruz household, becoming an apprentice beneath the famous Witch’s Advocate; upholding the beliefs that not every witch is evil and has foul intentions, and the ones that mean harm are the only ones that should be hunted.

Zachariah Frye; The Bloodhound

Human • Male • He/Him • Bicurious • Aromantic

The oldest living member of the Order. Now he is the man that holds the face of the Order, who you think of when they come to mind. Cold. Vindictive. Despotic. Violent. He is not a good man. He is firm in his beliefs and stubborn to change. Once his mind is made up, he cannot be reasoned with. He is blindly convinced of his beliefs and his cause to eradicate every living witch, unfazed if he has to fill a few innocent thousands in the process.

Calisto Ferzan Hermengildo Melchior Lorencio De La Cruz; The Witch’s Advocate

Half Fae/Half Human • Amab • Nonbinary • Genderfluid • He/They • Asexual • Aromantic

A witch-hunter in title alone, Calisto has been making enemies since he could first talk. He’s always enjoyed being the underdog, going against the expectations of society, being ridiculed by his peers. The sole reason? Proving them wrong. To ridicule his own peers for their outdated beliefs, he’s taken to defending witches, proving them innocent of their ‘crimes’, and going on to help them to set up a life in a country more accepting of witchcraft

The servant of Calisto, never seen far from his side. He is a servant in name alone and is more-or-less an assassin, a hitman for Calisto. Held in contempt by Athylian society for being a foreigner, he often treated by others more as a slave than a servant. To help be unseen, to help the De La Cruz Household, Michelotto endures the treatment and goes as far to be perceived as ignorant, alongside him being born a mute. Keeping his true intents and intelligence duly guarded, only a handful are aware he is also a witch.

Myk'loumihr [Michelotto Dougal] Siavash; The Man-Servant

Witch; Amab • Agender • He/They • Asexual • Aromantic

Austin Duvine; The Lord Without A Ring

Half-Human/Half Fae • Amab • Nonbinary • He/They • Pansexual • Demiromantic

One of the younger members of the order, Austin relies on his father's wealth and name. He doesn't care for responsibilities, he doesn't care for hard work. He's a playboy at heart. He's fit to hold social events, and use his natural talent to gib and fib his way through life. He'll keep his mixed feelings to himself, struggling with doing the right thing or upholding tradition.

Alistair Lavine; The Witchfinder General

Human • Amab • Agender • He/They • Bicurious • Aromantic

The best friend to Zachariah and his right hand. Where Zachariah is business and lacks charms, Alistair can charm a crowd and hold their attention. He knows how to feign being an ideal human, without letting on his own bloodlust; he's a monster in human skin. At the end of the day, unlike Zachariah, Alistair does have morals and standards he will abide by, even if they come back to ruin him.

━━━━━━━━━━

The Vakari Coven

Ausrine Baoghal; The Lady

Witch • Female • She/Her • Bisexual • Aromantic

The woman in charge of the town, widowed and inheriting the right to rule as her husband had no heirs. She is a manipulative and dangerous woman, eager to commit any sin or crime for more power. She, in truth, cares only for herself and would feel no remorse if she had to turn on one of her coven to further her own agenda.

The magistrate and also the chief policeman of the town. He maintains a calm, but manipulative personality. As a front, he presents himself to be fair and just, liked and favored by the people for genuinely caring for them. While in truth he has his own heinous and sinister agenda, aiding Ausrine in her plans.

Leary O'Laoghaire; The Magistrate

Witch • Male • He/Him • Bicurious • Aromantic

The oldest member of the coven, Dairine lives under the guise of an elderly woman, who lives alone with her children and grandchildren already leaving her to live their own lives. She is a kind and understanding woman and cares for the younger witches in the coven. She will not support Baríon with her agenda, nor does she care for the servant girl, she even despises the so-called ally Ausrine claims to have and who they all adhere to.

Dairine Ó Séaghdha; The Crone

Witch • Afab • Agender • She/They • Asexual • Aromantic

The acting servant of Barion, Anisha’s true loyalties lie elsewhere. She stays within the town, serving the coven while acting as the eyes and ears of someone, the person who is truly pulling the strings. She is the one to relay information and letters between the coven and her master. She is a quiet woman, that keeps her head down and her mind to herself. She only shows her true, confident and demanding, nature behind closed doors with the coven when they dare to question her.

Anisha Kaur; The Servant

Witch • Afab • Demigirl • She/They • Asexual • Aromantic

The charming son of Leary. Many whisper that is part fae, due to his charm, if it’s true or not many are unaware. He is a very sophisticated young man, that has managed to wrap the entire town around his finger. While on the surface he is alike his father is a caring, compassionate, charming young man, something sinister brews beneath. He is devious, demanding, domineering.

Nathir O'Laoghaire; The Magistrate’s Son

Half-Witch/Half-Fae • Amab • Agender • He/Him • Bisexual • Aromantic

Being the baker's daughter, Liannah helps around the bakery and family business. Unlike the company she keeps, she is a reserved young woman. She is polite and maintains her manners with whomever she is dealing with. She has the patience of a saint and rarely loses her cool. Liannah is a woman with a calm demeanor about her, being a woman many are comfortable around due to her peaceful and calm aura.

Liannah Ó Buachalla; The Baker’s Daughter

Witch • Afab • Genderfluid • She/They • Asexual • Panromantic

Ausrine's bastard son she had with a spirit she bargained with for more power. Since he was young, he was raised by the servants of the house, and the coven, over his own mother; the two have more of a business relationship over a family one. Since he cares less about what his mother does, he spends his time with Liannah and Reyes, either at the bakery or getting into trouble somewhere. With Reyes as an influence, Mastema is a flirtatious man that enjoys scandals and making the most of life

Mastema Baoghal; The Knave

Half-Witch/Half-Spirit • Amab • Genderfluid • He/They • Pansexual • Demiromantic

Rochan Misra; The Charlatan

Half-Witch/Half-Spirit • Amab • Queer • He/She • Pansexual • Aromantic

A foreigner to the Coven, born and raised in the Duchy of Incali. At a young age, he became a traveling charlatan, recently settling within the coven only as he befriended Liannah and Mastema and enjoyed their company. Now, he is the local bad influence: scamming locals out of their money at the taverns, wooing and seducing young men and ladies alike, always trespassing and vandalizing something. He is trouble but has a heart of gold when it matters.

ARIH: : @hekat-ie, @writings-of-a-narwhal, @silent-creed

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Taglist:

General: @endlesshourglass, @writerray, @poore-choice-of-words, @alexwritesfiction, @primusesgiantmetalballbearings

Both: @cecilsstorycorner, @little-boats-on-a-lake, @hazard-writes, @egg-shark

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