#hate hate hate that I have no IRLs to discuss this with

[stupidlittlespirit]

Can you give me more examples of Alex disliking Ford? I’ve always kinda felt it, but I never really had much of a real grasp on it.

Okay so this is the part where I look crazy because I can't give you specific examples LMAO but I'll try to explain what I mean. It's more in what he doesn't say than what he does.

Alex doesn't ever come right out and state 'I hate Ford', but he implies his distaste for him through his treatment of him. The way he hasn't gone harder/more explicit on drawing lines about Ford's abuse, or talking about how Ford suffered terribly during the time he was alone, for example. The way he blames Ford inherently for a lot of stuff that Ford, while not blameless, isn't fully at fault for. It's little things, and I'll detail them below.

TW below: Abuse, discussions of victimhood and irl consequences.

He extends more sympathy to other characters whereas Ford is sort of an afterthought. I don't actually think Alex has fleshed Ford out very well in his own head. Remember when he said that he didn't even know that Bill was going to be the main villain? They were flying by the seat of their pants for a lot of the series and it's quite clear in some elements. Obviously, the series is wonderful, I love it, it's one of my favourite shows of all time and Alex is a true talent, but it's obvious which characters are more important to him. He favours Bill a lot, too, so when his disliking of Ford/being ambivalent about him meets his enjoyment of Bill, only one of those dogs is coming out of the fight alive and it ain't Ford.

I think Alex is a genuine talent, I admire his work and his writing. He seems lovely. But I do also think he lacks in skill when it comes to complex abuse depictions.

I see a running theme that he isn't very good at portraying it specifically via 'unlikeable' characters. I mentioned on a previous post that he did this with Pacifica until people expressed empathy with her, and then he decided to round her out. He stated that himself during an old interview; I can't source it but I remember it vividly because it flagged red in my head that he couldn't see she was just a product of her environment. She's a twelve year old girl, for god's sake, she isn't 'just a horrible person', it makes a person sound like Bill when they beef with kids like that lol.

Another thing is in TBoB, there's a really horrendous page where Ford is tortured. It is visceral and awful, and tbh I wish I'd have been able to ask Alex what his top 5 horror movies were when I saw his talk because the scene is very reminiscent of a lot of my fav horrors.

But anyway, it is literal torture and it is also communicating about how helpless Ford is. He's a victim and a 'weak one' at that. Nothing he can do will stop Bill's abuse, he's stupid for trying, he's pathetic, he deserves it.

Now, that is a take I see with Ford a lot. He deserves it. He's asking for it. And it's a really upsetting one. It's also a common narrative told by people who blame victims for the abuse they suffered.

Not once have I ever seen Alex defend Ford. Not once have I ever heard him say 'Ford didn't deserve this', 'Ford suffered as much as Stan'. Not once.

Considering that he said he took 'inspiration' from his friend's 'toxic' relationships (I also think this is a strange and slightly perverse thing to do btw), I would have thought he might feel more strongly about pushing away this narrative about victims deserving their treatment.

I, obviously, also don't know for sure that he did take inspo from friends; he could well be describing his own experiences and just not feel comfortable saying so because men do suffer a different kind of stigma around being abused. That's fine, he doesn't have to out himself or anything, that would be horrible. But it's just the way he reacts to fans and speaks about the victim (Ford) that makes me think he's a bit more removed from this specific experience than it being personal.

There are many types of abuse. Ford's experience is familial, relationship-wise (platonic, because nothing about his relationship with Bill is romantic in the most basic sense of the term, if anything you can liken that side of things to sexual abuse) and personal. Ford then abuses himself as a reaction to outside abuse. Not his fault, again, but it does happen and it's a common thing for victims to do. I did.

Ford does nothing but suffer.

I truly don't believe that if you loved and cared for your character, you would be willing to watch your audience tear them apart like that after they had already been through so much and were not actually a villain themselves.

Especially if you had, or knew other people who had, experience with that kind of abuse. He doesn't let it happen to Stan, he came down hard on people when they did it to Dipper, and to Mabel, too.

It would kill me to let my OCs be bastardised like that by an audience and I'd be damned if I did a disservice to victims everywhere over something like this.

I think his lack of care is displayed in his treatment of Ford, as opposed to him outright saying he doesn't like him.

I also understand that this analysis also comes from a deeply personal point of view and my own experience with this topic, too.

This is a TV show, it isn't real and I don't need to take it so seriously, but what I do take seriously is seeing the real world reactions of other people. That does hurt. It hurts to see someone who is (very inelegantly and heavy-handedly, btw) depicted as a victim of abuse be laughed at and made into a joke, or flipped on their head and made to be romanticised with their abuser just to make a ship happen.

Fiction doesn't need to be taken seriously except when the lines begin to blur over into real life. We know people are cruel to irl victims and we can see where these lines blur quite obviously.

I think abuse and uncomfortable topics should be depicted, but I also think that as a creator, if you use them, you have a HUGE responsibility to teach and guide your audience into understanding why these things are bad/what makes them so. You shouldn't make jokes about the topic or encourage other people to go off the rails with it.

You can't control people, of course you can't, but you can hold their hand a bit and show them towards the light. If they choose not to follow it then they're probably not bright enough to pick up what you're putting down and that's on them, but you have to try.

Maybe if I hadn't (and my friends and other victims hadn't) been subjected to exactly the same reaction, we wouldn't feel so strongly about this, but it really does feel like a kick in the teeth to see a large number of people behave so grotesquely about abuse.

And just as an aside: I am a victim, I have been/am an unlikeable one, but it does not mean that I deserved what I got and that goes the same for every other 'unlikeable' victim out there.

*deep breath* but other than that I'm totally normal about Ford and not at all mentally ill :)

[curlyfriesgalore]

THIS!!! THIS OHMYGOD 😭 ARUGHFH this perfectly sums up the problem i've been having with the mw discussions about curly (and every character, really, but i'm focusing on him perdominantly). good lord op you are so real for this. i love the way you word your thoughts!

but yeah, i do think that the ultimate issue i'm seeing is that people find it hard to let go of putting curly into either end of the good or bad spectrum (because it's so much easier to do so than accept that these complicated nuances of humanity and circumstance co-exist all together), and in turn, people make it into a battle of who is morally in the right for believing which interpretation of curly's morality is the CORRECT one based on what they've inferred from the game and from their own moral compasses.

by removing that polarizing train of thought and firmly accept the fact that him, the others, and we as individuals are not tethered to either extreme but make decisions which are a combination of both, depending on our situations, and the positive and negative outcomes of those choices will vary—we would ultimately be having much more productive and understanding conversations with one another.

i really do think it's not a matter of whether a person loves, likes or hates curly, because we all have our personal reasons and projections as to why (so i oftentimes find it redundant to put such a focus on that in an analysis), but we should shift our focus away from arguing on whether or not curly is a "good" person (including the others), and you know... not jump to harassing each other for having opposing opinions... so we can dissect his character without taking a nasty jab at anyone who you disagree with 😭 i dunno, just a thought! since this only leads us to becoming even more unnecessarily mad at each other.

but hey, i'm not surprised to see things get so heated like this. i think many of us are having very human reactions for not liking it when people have takes that our brains just cannot agree with, and for associating the characters with ourselves or people irl, either seeing aspects of us in whichever character or hating who in our world we associate those characters with.

honestly, this is just an issue that is prevalent in all spaces where people get to talk about anything, really.

i feel like many peoples mouthwashing analysis is... distorted by a false dichotomy of "good people" and "bad people". "curly is a bad person" "curly is a good person" i feel like trying to determine the characters' morality like santa claus is not exactly the way to think about this game. it makes me think a lot about an excellent video essay on the boy wizard books where op points out that in that world there are "no good or bad actions, only good or bad teams" - that is to say if a character is decided to be "good" they will get away with as much abuse as they like. and i feel like mouthwashing is the opposite of that, there are no "good or bad" people, there are people who do good or bad things and its those things that determine them. you dont have to be a "bad" person to do bad things but also your worst deeds wont brand you irredeemable or deserving of nothing good.

jimmy 100% believes hes not a bad person and bad things just keep happening to him because of everyone else that wont let him be "good", but ultimately hes also just a person that chooses to do more bad than good so if his worst moments dont define him what else is there? everyone else on the ship is more or less aware of their shortcomings and/or simply dont try to categorize themselves like this. swansea is a great example of someone who has given up on trying to be a "good person" and escaped the dichotomy instead of trying to fit himself in a box that doesnt even exist.

i just think discussion around curly would be a lot less heated if we just dealt with the uncomfortable fact that hes not a good or a bad person, hes just a man genuinely trying to do good that keeps failing, for one reason or another. he wants to be good and so does jimmy, we all do, but if we keep focusing too much on being "good people" it becomes a dangerous game.

(also this is why i kinda hate aus and whatnot where jimmy "gets what he deserves", the game makes it very clear that abuse is a bad action that cannot make you better than anyone.)

[gettingwormed]

got my hands on a Glitch in Time and it means so much to me…

[ludinusdaleth]

i wish people realized when someone is talking about characters such as liliana or bor'dor that not one person is asking them to worship at their altars and call them their favorite characters, but just to acknowledge that they were built as People with stories in the narrative. someone comparing them to essek isnt asking you to like them as much as essek but to see how they have all been affected by ludinus's propoganda/manipulation, and why they believe it and got to that point. if your instinct is to call any and all analyses of a villain crazy and indicative of choosing their side, im sorry you're missing out on so much juicy narrative. it will not make you suck ludinus's cock to break down what makes an antagonist tick and compare them to more protagonistic characters whose themes they expand upon.

[danzainosolitude]

Once again I read fanfiction that seems to have been precisely written to deal psychic damage to me.

[seokwoosmole]

Never has my opinion about a non-antagonist character changed so drastically than it has about Shigure ok there might have been some before but right now I can’t think of any.

I went from “Oh he’s just a silly lil guy” to “*sobs* silly *sobs again* DAD” to “ohhhh….silly….pervy😳lil guy” to “ohhhh….silly mysterious guy???” to “oh- oh….😬”

[bakatenshii]

Omg angel have you watched Arcane???

YES I HAVE I HAVE I RECENTLY FINISHED IT LIKE 2 WEEKS AGO???? TELL ME UR THOUGHTS FEELINGS EMOTIONS IVE NOTICED IT TAKING OVER MY TWT IN RECENT MONTHS AND HAD TO JUMP IN!!

[britneyshakespeare]

I don't like to go around assuming people actually dislike me because I'm smarter than them but in the experience I've had with people who do, their problem is not that they're dumb it's that they are rude. However intelligent I may seem, I am never pretentious or disagreeable and I do not make a point of seeming to be better than anyone. In fact I often go to great lengths to disclaim my own talents. And people who view others through the eyes of envy and malice give me no charity in any regard and think it no ill to mistreat me.

[madamscream]

the constant paranoia that if i act A Little Strange i will be killed in the town square and it will hurt the whole time i'm dying vs the fact that everyone i hold dear i've met by being an Obvious Freak and having them decide they liked the brand of weirdo i am enough to keep me close and care about me

[binders-and-beanies]

I’ve said it before I think but. The argument about whether you need dysphoria to be trans is mainly just an argument about the definition of the word dysphoria. People who say you Do need dysphoria to be trans tend to define it as just a state of your gender identity not matching what you were assigned at birth, or just some kind of internal sense that you are trans. People who say you Don’t need dysphoria to be trans tend to define it as self hatred, extreme discomfort with one’s appearance and genitalia, being miserable with life etc.

No room for any in between or for individuals to have personal experience w what dysphoria means for them. Which leads to a whole lot of putting words into people’s mouths and assigning beliefs to people and making up a guy to get mad at and creating mortal enemy Teams about it when there’s really a lot more agreement than we acknowledge. There will never be one universal definition of dysphoria or transness, and I think it would be beneficial if more people approached it with more nuance

[former-leftist-jew]

"Christa... I felt the same. That it would have been better if I was never born at all. The world hated me just for existing. To give countless joy to many people, I gave up my life. But - when I did, I wished from the bottom of my heart. If someday I was given a second chance at life... This time. I would live for no one but myself!"

Ymir (left), convincing her beloved Cyrsta (right) to stop lowkey throwing herself into suicide missions to please the society that openly wish she'd never been born... because Ymir has spent her whole life hating herself for being Jewish "Aldean."

I'll admit, when I first saw this scene in Attack on Titan, I cried for like an hour, and had to process it for like a day. This show understands what it's like to go from a self-hating Jew trying to "pass" as goy, to learning to love yourself and live for those you love, despite the people who want you dead, better than most media I could name.

[swinging-stars-from-satellites]

genuinely though how do I start a conversation/get to know this guy I work with without seeming weird/overeager/awkward? bc I really just want to like... be friends. whether that leads to anything else or not. I'd like to start with that and I feel like there's already a good foundation so like.... Google search: how to act like a normal person

[theindefinitearticle]

I just want to write a quick love letter to my ADHD medication real quick. I finally got back on my correct ADHD medication and then had, no fucking joke, perhaps the most insane rollercoaster of a fortnight within fucking days of getting back on this prescription. If even half of the things that had happened to me in the past two weeks had happened in like, January (everyone's favourite mental breakdown month), when I was on an absurd alternate concoction invented through "idk, here's a bunch of scripts and just see what happens" pharmacist magic ("just call around. I don't know when it will be back in stock. Just keep calling places. Go up a dose. Go down a dose. Try both at once") because America says Australia isn't allowed any more of my medication 😤 no were being too greedy 😤😤😤

Went back on my correct dose, had the insanest two weeks of my life, and got through it only some problems. And with an ultimately positive view on the week and my performance in it. If this had happened in February you would have had to have me committed. I don't even know to what department but somebody would institutionalise me for something.

ADHD medication I love you 🥰

[alectology-archive]

do you guys go around shaming your moms for reading romance novels all the time?

[lord-squiggletits]

I think another thing that annoys me about how prevalent it is for people to read MTMTE/LL and nothing else, is the fact that JRO's depiction of Cybertronian-organic relationships is slanted so heavily in favor of Cybertronians portraying organic aliens as tyrannical racists killing colonies for no reason (Galactic Council, the Black Block Consortia) that love torturing Cybertronians because they hate them so much and don't see them as sentient (that dude who was selling Cybertronian torture dolls to alien races).

And like, something that happens as a result of people only reading MTMTE/LL is that they get this idea in their head that it's Cybertronians who are oppressed by the rest of the galaxy. And an unfortunate.... take that I see as a result of this ends up with stuff like Decepticon/Megatron apologists trying to frame technoist colonialism as basically Cybertronians trying to strike back against being unfairly persecuted and being seen as lesser by alien species? They don't always explicitly say it as such, but I've seen a lot of people try to downplay the whole technoism and colonialism thing by framing it in context to organic racism and how both sides are equally bad or something like that.

Which is not fucking true because if you actually were to read exRID and OP, you would know that there are multiple Cybertronian colonies throughout the galaxy that were created by razing previously occupied organics planets, that Nova Prime (one of the original 13 Primes and the first Prime to rule a united Cybertron) wanted to conquer the entire galaxy which led to the creation of cold construction in the first place, and that the reason organic species hate Cybertronians so much is because Cybertronians were the first ones to go out and start conquering other planets millions of years ago.

It's even more infuriating because you don't even need to read other comics besides JRO's to know this! Tailgate and Cyclonus were from Nova Prime's time and the whole "yeah during those times we liked going out on a fun journey to kill organics for fun hahaha" is brought up at least a couple times in the series.