#he is portrayed as an abusive oppressive asshole.

[tentenismybitch]

just watched the neji chronicles filler ep for the 1st time and there's so much to it

like okay i know fillers aren't canon or whatever but:

hiashi apologizing to neji 🥹

TENTEN'S CASUAL OUTFIT 😍

tenten going to check on him! neji talking about hyuuga clan shit in a way that clearly implies she already knew about it!! besties!!!

this takes place immediately after his fight with naruto. like after publicly outing the clan's tea and his resentment, he comes across a clan elder who demands that he go save hinata at the expense of his own life. this is actually so fucked up

kiba expressing resentment towards neji & saying neji probably won't try that hard to save hinata and tenten immediately yelling at him!!

tenten being like "I AM COMING WITH YOU! YOU WILL NOT DO THIS ALONE" supportive queen

TENTEN'S DRAGON BOMB JUTSU? THAT'S NOT EVEN A FUCKEN NINJA TOOL, SHE STRAIGHT UP HAD A FIRE DRAGON SEALED IN HER SCROLL ???

neji bragging about tenten when the kids express surprise that she stays behind to ward off the mud dogs alone 🥹

hiashi saving neji. hiashi going out of his way to save neji. like, again, i know fillers aren't canon but hiashi's characterization in the show is insane?? like he disowned and bullied hinata for being weak, straight up saying he wouldn't care if she died. but then he apologizes to neji after his match with naruto and in every appearance after seems like a caring father who is actually concerned for the well-being of his children, including neji??? like seriously what is UP with him

neji saying he was narrow-minded and selfish for hating hinata was some straight up BS. yes, sure, it's not hinata's fault the the clan is the way it is but i think neji being resentful that he is the strongest genin of his generation and a literal prodigy within the clan, but still his life purpose is to protect this girl who is not as skilled as him just because his dad was born a few seconds later than her dad, is totally justified and not at all selfish. i know this is a shounen and this episode isn't canon and it isn't meant to be realistic but neji going from "i am a caged bird with no freedom who has this curse mark placed on me so i am at the whims of the main house" to "i was so selfish for hating you i am sorry" in the course of, like, 2 hours is SO ridiculous

anyway this ep has been great fodder for my "naruto but if team gai were the protagonists" au fic that i'm writing 10 years too late

[feministfang]

Three brave women beat up a shopkeeper in islamic republic of Pakistan for harassing them and all the Pakistani men are so pissed off that they’re sending death threats to those women for taking action in their own hands instead of tolerating and calling some male authority or police. That piece of shit also filed a case against those women for abusing him and as a citizen of this trash country, i can tell he will win the case.

A 20 years old girl, Sania Zehra, was brutally tortured, raped and murdered by her husband, syed ali raza bukhari, when she was pregnant with her third child. This also happened in Pakistan on 8th of July. Now the same men are silent over this or trying to shove the issue of Palestine on feminist pages posting about Sania’s case because "far worst things are happening in the world". Meanwhile, Pakistani women are busy dick worshipping the victim’s father because "he must be so traumatised after losing his daughter like this. oh poor man!" As if that bitch isn’t at fault for making her daughter marry that old beast when she was probably 16.

Celebrities here are more concerned about men’s deteriorating mental health in this country as these lunatics think catering to men’s feelings will somehow fix them. What else can you expect from them when the entire world outside has progressed, but these dumbfucks are still portraying the same old cringe fairytale stories where a simple beautiful, but unfortunate girl falls in love with some ugly psychotic man and tolerates his abuse because "that’s true love 😍" and in the end, she’s successful in fixing him.

But when we speak a word against the atrocities women face in this country, all these people lose their minds and try to silence us to ensure the image of their fuckin country is not at risk of defamation and the lovely Pakistan can become an example of how peaceful islam is. Pakistani men (and most women here as well) are intolerant when it comes to the vilification of the image of their country and religion. And their asses start burning when they see someone ruining it. They even stoop so low to the level of satanism that they would not hesitate to send death threats to anyone making them look bad globally. A girl i was friends with on FB wished Malala another gunshot on her face by Taliban because of her anti-marriage stance.

This is why i urge y’all to please don’t stay silent on the issues women are facing in Pakistan. I never see global feminist pages talking about female oppression in this garbage country. Some feminists living in west also act like brown men are somehow better than white men and they’re more oppressed than white women because of racism, or that muslim men are better than christian bigots. Stop victimising brown muslim men. Not only are they hideous but also the misogyny the south asian society has shoved in their assholes is extremely disgusting and they keep shitting it on women everywhere they go, including white women.

I wouldn’t expect support from brainless libby feminists as they’re probably busy pulling their pants down on their favourite OF platforms or fighting misandry online, but i would love to see all the radfems speaking up for south asian women. Please make it known globally how the Pakistani islamic community is constantly oppressing women day by day.

Use the examples i stated above. Speak up for Sania Zehra!! Demand justice for her globally, and keep bashing corrupt Pakistani law system. Also, don’t forget to defame their religion. These people are most protective of their culture and religion. I don’t see any hope in this country for women, but there’s a chance they will start taking action and give proper justice to the victims in order to protect their so called dignity.

[codenamesazanka]

idk how to feel re: spinner's 'octopus' comment. on the one hand, i like seeing him portrayed as bitter (who can blame), maybe even hypocritical in that bitterness, but man. surely there were better ways to show that. this is spinner we are talking about, after all. was that comment that necessary. it does feel like a weird attempt at propping up deku, and remind us that, even if he's sympathetic, spinner is still a villain who "chooses" the path of shittiness (like you said). unlike deku, endeavor or even hawks (as though those have done anything other than say a few nice words and admit that they did wrong). doesn't feel like it's there not to give spinner depth, but to remind us that heroes are indeed the greatest

Hi anon, thank you for this ask!

I agree with you - this is a dark side I can/would/do like to see in Spinner. Bitter, and who can blame him! But hypocritical in that bitterness. Angry and vengeful and petty and hurtful, because that is what grief and hurt can do to someone. I'm not opposed to it!! It is a very real thing that happens. Internalized bigotry. Being a hypocrite. Simply being so hurt and miserable that you grasp for exactly that same hurt to fling out - because you know it hurts, you know exactly how it hurts and haunts, how effective it is. The best weapon in the arsenal, one that's always been there, long before you were ever a part of this. Because it's there, you reach for it. I understand such feelings very well and am always on the lookout for it to be portrayed!

It's just obvious there's no intention of exploring that. As you said, it's not to give Spinner depth. It's not a look into how systems of oppression and discrimination wears a person down, how anyone is susceptible to it, how this shit is so tough and messy and awful, and so we must find solutions. It's none of that - it's Spinner being a villain who "chooses" the path of shittiness. Possibly his very last line in the whole story. 😔

You can try to read those intentions into it, but it's supplemental. The average reader don't have to at all. I don't begrudge anyone who has a worse opinion of Spinner after this. That line is there for that purpose. Shoji has no relevance in this conservation, and Spinner himself brings up his origin of anti-heteromorphic abuse. Spinner going out of his way to call Shoji an octopus is unnecessary except as one last lasting impression and strike.

Spinner is an ungrateful asshole, and Deku is the kind boy who tried. Villains ultimately deserve most of what they get, and Heroes are the greatest.

Sorry to just repeat your lines, anon, but I must, as you're 100% correct.

Thanks again for the ask!

[firedragon1321]

It's Kieran hours again. Today I wanted to ramble about him, and also Carmine being an asshole. Spoilers for Teal Mask and possible spoilers for Indigo Disk (based on leaks) below.

So it's already obvious that Carmine's mistreatment of Kieran plays into his insecurity at the start of the game. The player is also at fault (hiding the truth about Ogerpon from him, spending time with only Carmine, and turning the other cheek to his mistreatment, amongst other things). Note when I refer to "the player" here, I mean the in-game avatar, not the actual human player. Others have agreed that we needed the choice to avoid hurting Kieran's feelings.

As an extension of that, we also needed the choice to confront Carmine. I know we couldn't because Teal Mask leads directly into Indigo Disk, and Pokemon games are linear by nature. But as a grown-ass adult who recognized the toxic dynamic between the siblings, I wanted to take Kieran and hide on Oni Mountain.

And it was all little things adding up to one oppressive hammer of discouragement. Constantly brushing him off, treating him as unimportant, etc. This behavior of Carmine's isn't exclusive to Kieran- the player is treated like shit until they earn her respect. But the player is from out of town. Kieran had to deal with this behavior for his entire life.

Carmine isn't evil like Lusamine (debatable due to Nihilego poison) or Ghetsis (I will get to these two in the readmore). But her behavior is still unacceptable. It's what made Kieran feel so small to begin with.

When he's finally given a chance at friendship and kindness, Carmine snatches the player, too (from his perspective). When he has a chance to catch Ogerpon, the player does instead, and he has to watch. At this point, the player is on Carmine's "side", and an extension of her lifelong psychological control over her brother.

There are rumors/leaks that a Pokemon may be controlling Kieran to a degree- similar to Lusamine- as the situation worsens. But even without this behind the scenes action, Kieran's behavior is understandable. He had two chances at friendship, snatched away by the girl who thinks he amounts to nothing and the apparent lapdog at her side.

So why bother with friendship at all? Why not become stronger and stronger, and bowl down everything in your way? It worked for the people who hurt you...

I want to veer off into other games with similar plot beats as a point of comparison. I put it under a readmore for people who don't care and for length. I'll probably add a reblog after Indigo Disk to conclude this ramble.

While Sun/Moon did a great job at portraying abuse, it didn't do a great job at resolving it. Lillie forgives Lusamine, Gladion is left to flounder, and Lusamine is resolved of increasing amounts of blame with each adaption. USUM and the anime make this issue progressively worse, with the anime barely addressing Lusamine's true nature, save one episode where it's treated as her "caring too much". I made an entire post about Gladion because this issue pisses me off. While Lillie's forgiveness of Lusamine makes sense for her character, it shouldn't be required of Gladion, Guzma, or any of her other pawns.

In Black and White, Ghetsis is not only called out on his shitty behavior, but N isn't obligated to forgive him. This remains true in all adaptations. Once Ghetsis drops the act, the game is bold enough to call it "abuse" without using the actual word. It understands that what happened to N is disgusting and horrible. In many adaptations- like Pokemon Generations- N is able to confront him- and by extension, his feelings- directly.

I also feel like Kieran is Wally if Wally wasn't a pushover. The player crushes his dreams of battling in a gym at his uncle's command. While his health is a concern, there is literally no reason he can't battle the gym. He only has Ralts and will likely lose. But he's prevented from even trying- by the person he considers a friend, no less. Wally doesn't show up again until near the endgame...where the player crushes his dreams again.

Wally takes it all with a smile. Kieran doesn't.

For Kieran specifically, I feel like they'll go the Sun/Moon route over the Black/White route. Which concerns me. If Kieran apologizes to Carmine even if he did something bad in Indigo Disk- I will throw up. He doesn't have to forgive her, or even the player.

[the-path-to-redemption]

Just saw your Queendom post and this is why I will never forgive Weiss. I don't care if you grow up alone in your privilege home with a deadbeat dad and an alcoholic mother. You view Fanus as this evil race and saw them as nothing more than trash and when you told you sob story to Blake about how your family business was going down hill because a group of fanus attacked your fathers supplies. Oh I'm sorry but did you know that you father is using those same fanus who are being exploited in YOUR FATHER MINES?!?!? AND NOW ALL OF A SUDDEN THESE FANUS FIGHT BACK IT EFFECTING YOU PRIVILEGE LIFESTYLE?

And then you have the bitchudcity to make Blake of all people to feel guilty? When it is HER own people being oppressed and YOU are worried about your family company?!

And dont get me started on how they portrayed Flynt to be the rival of Weiss during the games. He has every right to be mad at your family because your family is monopoling every small business. I would to if my family business got ran up out because of your family. I don't want your shitty apologize for being a Schwarz! I want you to ACKNOWLEDGE that this is what your family has done to people and that they are victims. This is not about you feeling guilty because the truth of your family crimes makes you uncomfortable!

Fucking hell anon, you spitting.

Here's the thing with Weiss; while not an excuse for her bigotry, most of her racism and classism come from ignorance. Particularly, the ignorance of how her family, the company's ethics, and its overall legacy truly are. She didn't know the extent of Jacques' slave wage and exploitation of Faunus workers until Blake told her. She didn't know about the monopolization of her family over smaller businesses even in Atlas. What's important to realize is that her ignorance and bigotry are the versions that should be most aware of, because they can be present in any of us in the audience.

Let me be clear, I do agree with what you said. Weiss' constant victimhood has been a frustrating point in her character and has extended into the narrative surrounding the structure of the World of Remnant as a whole. No one wants to admit that Weiss has been wrong beyond the Beacon era, at least, not in any way that yields actual substance. She never apologized to Blake or any Faunus until V7, and even then, it's nothing more than a "sorry that my family sucks" and she refuses to actually do anything to change that societal dynamic of exploiting the Faunus. She didn't even show public support for Robyn, who was running against her asshole dad, or even show up to any political rally/event that could give her an opportunity to show her supposed support for Faunus, denouncing her past racism.

And with Flynt, she didn't even do shit for him in Atlas. You're right when you said that she didn't acknowledge the damage that her family has done to families like his so that she can have a much more luxurious, albeit abusive, home life. She is still marginally more privileged than another Atlesian, Flynt, and he's not even Faunus.

Her form of ignorant bigotry isn't outwardly malicious like Jacques' is, but it is still dangerous. Because it can be present in any one of us because of generational social norms built upon these bigoted beliefs, it's extremely disappointing that Weiss never truly got the chance to learn by herself. She always had to have someone tell her that she was a cock to them, and all she could give back was a flimsy ass "sorry". Nothing truly changes, Atlas was still a shit show, and Weiss barely put any effort into doing what she said she would do.

Actions speak louder than words.

[copaganda-clobberfest]

What’s the white fang? Srry i don’t watch rwby

The White Fang is an organization made up of an in-universe minority group, the Faunus, who use violent (but successful) means in the hopes of achieving a set goal, being getting basic fucking rights for their people who, up until around the time the show begins if I recall, were being ENSLAVED.

But while in the first 3 seasons they were treated as Team Rocket Grunt: Black People Metaphor edition for our white mains to beat around, around volume 4 things quickly became incredibly sickening for me.

First of all, introductions of characters such as Fennec, Corsac, and Ilia— all of whom are non white characters even outside of their Faunus heritage, the former two being Muslim-coded and the ladder Lakota respectively— and said Lakota girl coming from a not-too privileged standpoint of someone who was orphaned by human doings, when her parents died in a mining accident that was never prevented by the company they worked for.

These characters are BAD Faunus, portrayed as violent and with the two Muslim-coded characters being portrayed as weirdly cult-y? (one basically kills himself/gets himself killed for the cause. I wish i was joking*) and the indigenous girl needing to be tamed by her much whiter friend due to her having been protesting “wrongly.” Indigenous people who protest against their treatment are to this day (as the bigotry and oppression faced by native peoples hasn’t gone away one bit) labeled terrorists.

The White Fang… are written to be terrorists. Terrorists who just want to take over the other and rule because “they (Faunus) are the dominant species.” This straight up sounds like propaganda you’d hear on the news during 2020. Shoot me.

The allusive leader of the white fang is barelt a character because she gets fridged the moment we see her and yet there is something to be said about her allusion. She is based of Shere Khan, a character from The Jungle Book,

written by the same guy that wrote the infamously racist “White Man’s Burden” poem in support of colonization and social Darwinism.

And then we get to Adam. Arguably the character apart of the white fang we saw THE MOST of, who in season 5 is suddenly this cruel, heartless asshole who only wants the Faunus to take over the white people I mean the humans.

And then in the season AFTERWARDS it’s revealed oh he never cared about the Faunus AT ALL HE JUST WANTED POWER BECAUSE HES JUST AN ABUSIVE ASSHOLE CUNT AND BTW you know the scene? The scene the writers included so that the viewers REALLY got just how evil Adam truly was?

They revealed Adam got fucking branded in the eye like a slave would be in 1800’s America. I wish I was kidding I really really wish. Branded with the initials of a human-owned, rich white company with… a German name. Schnee. Why do I point this out?

The name, Adam, is a Jewish name. It’s Hebrew. Fuck this show.

(sorry this is super rambly Anon just this topic makes me really mad in particular. Again, sorry!)

Edit:

*I worded this wrongly. He simply died for the cause, not outright offed himself or anything. My mistake. Still not a good look at all, but mistakes are to be corrected when I see them.

And no, this is not me trying to be some… “abuse apologist” for fictional characters. I am simply pointing out the fact the character was written this way, but also, what such a decision reflects onto the rest of the story. Plus… the (frankly poorly handled, that’s another day’s discussion) abuse storyline isn’t what we’re talking about. It’s the fucking racist writing perpetuated in this show.

But similarly to how it went in the show, the abuse storyline was able to cover up the racism for most people, as it nearly did me on an initial rewatch. Just like how Hama’s justifiable feelings towards the Fire nation were covered up by her blood-bending other people. The Flag-smashers’ ideals being covered up by them being terrorists. Killmonger wanting to improve the lives of black peoples globally being partially covered up by… you get the point.

Reblogs are turned of on this post for the meantime because I don’t want to start drama on what is meant to be a fairly harmless poll. Sorry for that.

[lastoneout]

This legit might be a contender for the worst addition to this post, incredible, everything you just said is wrong!

I used the words fatphobia and diet culture because those are real things that effect people of all genders and sexualities, and it ABSOLUTELY hurts men.

Fat men legit constantly have to deal with the assumption that they are more misogynistic and predatory straight-sized men and are viciously attacked as a result even when there is no proof of them ever treating women poorly. Fat men are photographed in public without their consent and mocked by people for simply existing. They get offered unsolicited advice on weight loss, are taken less seriously by doctors, encouraged to maim their bodies in the name of becoming skinny. Almost every male bully in a cartoon is depicted as fat, despite fat children statistically being the victims of bullying rather than the perpetrators. They are almost never portrayed in fiction as desirable or heroic or just as a person who deserves respect. I can think of dozens of fat villains, and barely any fat protagonists.

Hell, they even ARE victims of misogyny and transphobia/homophobia, like when they are mocked for having "man boobs" bcs being feminine when you're a guy is shameful, and thus get pressured to over-perform hyper-masculinity to be treated like people(just like fat women are forced to over-perform femininity to be respected). Clothes for men aren't made for fat bodies, just like clothes for women. They can be kicked off of airplanes because existing as a fat person makes others uncomfortable. They can't sit in certain chairs, and hostile architecture makes it so even benches are unaccessable to them.

And while I hate giving James Corden attention it is kinda fucked up that when he got into a beef with prominent asshole and anti-vaxxer Bill Maher it was bcs Maher just assumed he must be a stupid glutton who eats whatever he wants and ignores doctors exclusively because he's fat. Dude didn't know shit about Corden's private life or eating habits, he just assumed. That's fatphobia!!

This isn't hard to miss, it's abundantly clear if you spend even a few minutes listening to a fat man talking about his experience. Hell for some of these you don't even need to hear from a man, it is just there all the time right in front of us, we're just conditioned by our society to not view fat people as people and ignore the way they're treated.

Now I do think women have to deal with the intersection of fatphobia and misogyny in a unique way that is worth discussing, but acting like no one else is affected by these socioeconomic forces of bigotry to the point of assuming they legit are just misogyny and we don't even need other words for them is completely contrary to reality.

Plus, denying oppressed people the language to talk about their experiences is some fascist bullshit that is primarily used as a way to simply get them to shut up, because if they can't articulate the ways in which they are being harmed no one will take them seriously. You can't report a abuse if you dont have a word for it. It's transparently a ploy to get undesirable people to stop talking entirely, and one of the first steps to destroying them completely.

Please spend some time in fat liberation spaces and listen to the myriad of different voices who have suffered due to systemic fatphobia and the way capitalism pushes it on in the form of diet culture, because you will quickly see this is 100% not a phenomenon that primarily targets women.

I know this is a tiny part of the wider problems born of diet culture, fatphobia, classicism, and racism but like god the idea that "healthy" food must inherently taste bad has completely ruined us as a society.

[incandesang]

some thoughts on iwtv episode five. blanket warnings for discussions of trauma, domestic violence, and sexual assault.

maybe it’s just me but i really do not understand the people saying that enjoying horror means you have to enjoy drawn out scenes of domestic violence? i think that take is incredibly stupid, and it undermines a lot of the more nuanced feelings people can have towards the genre as a whole.

horror is a genre that often allows for people to see the worst of human nature, and by extension the worst of themselves. you see all your dark potential laid out in front of you, and the consequences of that darkness, whether they be good, evil, or something in between. i’m not going to pretend that domestic violence doesn’t pop up A LOT in horror media. we have all seen the it movies, and read enough stephen king (honestly this is a weird thing to look into w this guy but i’m not getting into it here i’m just using it as a har har moment to lighten up the post) to know that it is very deeply engrained in the genre; whether it should or shouldn’t be is another discussion entirely, and one i’m not going to attempt in this post. the thing with the characters portrayed as abusers is that, at the end of the day, they are still bad people and audiences aren’t meant to identify with them. beverly marsh’s husband is terrible and we are meant to hate him, carrie’s mother is awful and we are meant to hate her. the only two examples i can think of off the top of my head being from stephen king’s works, again, says a lot about stephen king and his sort of consuming role within the horror genre, but i’m just gonna save that one for another day.

this probably isn’t the best example, but one of my favourite fictional characters of all time is john constantine, who is the protagonist of the contemporary horror comic series ‘hellblazer’. john constantine is, on the surface, not a good guy, and his comic isn’t about him getting better. he doesn’t. he is just as much of an asshole in the 2018 run as he was in the original 80s run (which ran for 300 issues and went well into the 2010s) but despite how much john sucks, audiences are never turned off from him. we see all the awful things he did, with a particularly harrowing issue being dedicated to the horrors he committed as a child to try to force his father to love him, and the consequences that had on his family as an adult. despite john being a professional occultist and exorcist, he’s still a man who is trying to do right by himself, but doesn’t know how to push past his deep self-hatred, or overcome the very literal ghosts of his past that haunt him throughout the series. he’s the reluctant antihero and our point of view character. we see john as a man fighting his demons (which are given physical form throughout the series) and trying to reach for redemption that he doesn’t believe he deserves. john constantine sucks. as a person, he sucks. despite this we still identify with john and want him to succeed, despite all the terrible things he has done to the people he loves and cares about.

in the 2018 run of hellblazer, john’s arc has him giving victims of unjust, oppressive systems, and domestic abuse the tools they need to get revenge against the people and systems that have hurt them, all the while neglecting his son, or actively traumatising him. themes of domestic violence and abuse follow john throughout the series. he is the traumatised son of a traumatised father, who then passes his trauma onto his own son.

he’s a morally grey, very complex character written extremely well.

the vampire chronicles are very heavy in those themes as well. generational trauma plays a huge part in the series, and a lot of the characters come from toxic family environments, or toxic environments in general. to the best of her ability, anne made sure the characters carried the beliefs and views of their times in regards to religion, sexuality, and etiquette, which made for a very fun cast! to see people who lived through the rise and fall of the roman empire talking to a guy who was born in the 1950s is really incredibly fun and this difference in time-based cultural influence opened up a lot of paths for interactions and relationships between the characters, whether they were explored in canon or not. these characters are so extreme and do terrible, terrible things to each other, all the while trying to be better in their own eyes (i can’t just say ‘better’. marius exists and this man continues to get Worse). a lot of these guys suck! they are awful people! but we enjoy reading about them and hearing about their worldview because at the end of the day, they’re trying. their wants and desires are relatable, and so are the things that hold them back from that. armand may be a little freak gremlin but he’s OUR little freak gremlin goddamn it!

i’ve noticed that one of the things that draws people to the vampire chronicles is that every single character is very morally grey. you can either back and forth for hours about if they are good people or not, and that sort of discussion can be a lot of fun to engage in! my feelings towards lestat are very similar to my feelings towards characters like john constantine. they are people who, for better or worse, love in a way that is very all-consuming, and gets destructive very fast when that love is not reciprocated. there is nothing wrong with characters like that. they’re fascinating, and this idea that they love so much that they destroy is always really fascinating to see on page, or on screen, but this, being a destructive trait, needs to be handled with a certain degree of care and nuance, and that was certainly missing from ep five. there was nothing grey about that. regardless of if it ‘really happened’ or not, that scene was put there for shock value alone, and it wasn’t good shock value, it was a lazy ‘bran the broken’ way out of things. even if it didn’t happen, we were still made to watch a very violent scene of domestic abuse that ultimately could’ve been replaced with a nasty verbal argument, or even just the gradual resentment of lestat for his ignorance, his cruel parenting, and dismissal of louis and claudia’s problems that they face as black people in this time period. this didn’t need to happen. there are signs that it didn’t happen, or at least that it didn’t happen the way that it did, but it’s still there. if it didn’t happen it serves no purpose other than to serve as shock value traumaporn.

unlike in hellblazer, the domestic violence is handled with no nuance. there is nothing that can be done to ‘fix’ this, fans are not going to want to see louis and lestat together again after this, and they probably won’t want to see lestat at all. it was very jarring, both as a horror fan, and as a vc fan. your protagonist can be a shitty person. they can destroy their own lives, push their loved ones away, and hurt the people they care about. but there’s a line that shouldn’t be crossed, and it was crossed here. it was irresponsible, and it was unnecessary, and whatever route they take to try patch things up, it opens up room for more controversy. i really feel for the people with mental health issues who identify with lestat (myself included) and have spent years re-contextualising his behaviour, just for all your hard work to be undone like this.

it was evident from that episode that rolin jones wrote himself into the same hole that anne did in her 1994 film draft script, wherein making a more sympathetic lestat, claudia’s attempt at killing him felt unjustified. i don’t think he understood that it didn’t need to be justifiable to the audience, only to claudia; provided she had a reason to do it that she believed was concrete, it could’ve been done in a way that worked. rolin jones was not intelligent enough to write himself out of his hole, and didn’t understand the source material well enough, so he slapped this scene in as justification for claudia’s actions in the coming episodes.

the thing is: he had done more than enough to warrant that sort of reaction from a teenage girl. when i was fourteen i remember hating my father and having (admittedly terrifying) vivid dreams where he was dead, so his absence wouldn’t hurt me anymore, because it wasn’t a choice he made. i remember hating my stepmother and my stepsister because they were closer with my dad than i was. children are jealous. teenagers especially, are jealous. claudia takes after lestat, she ‘doesn’t like sharing’, and she doesn’t want to have to share her father with his shitty boyfriend, and to be honest!! i wouldn’t want to either!! anyone who has been in a situation like that would understand where she was coming from, and there would still be grounds to say that what she did was ‘right’, or we would at least be able to understand why she did what she did, and how she got to the point where she believed that was a necessary course of action. again, we don’t have to relate to her, just understand that she is a traumatised, terrified child who loves her adoptive father very much, and that she has the physical strength and instincts of a vampire.

i think i will make a seperate post about claudia in this episode, because what was done to her is awful, and follows a really concerning trend of sexual assault portrayals in hollywood and the idea that sa is needed for personal growth, especially in teenage characters.

but idk. that’s maybe all i wanted to say about this particular thing. maybe.

[seattlesea]

bad representation in the riordanverse

Racism:

-Gave Hazel and Piper gold and ‘kaleidoscope’/brown-blue-green changing eyes and pretty much went ‘Let’s add some characters of color but they cANT HAVE BROWN EYES THAT’S NOT PRETTY ENOUGH’ as if whitewashing isn’t more than just the skin.

-East Asian characters: Riordan pretty much went 'Here are my East Asian characters- one of them looks like a fat baby on steroids and is super undeveloped, his mother is strict and cold, and all the others are just described as 'Asian' because different countries in Asia don't exist and there's obviously no difference between Japanese, Chinese, and Korean'. His portrayal of East Asian characters went like this: Frank: Chinese, chubby, hates himself, underdeveloped, described to look like a 'Chinese Canadian baby man' and a 'panda' as if that's not stereotyping, and only learned to love himself when he looked hotter.  Drew: Asian, villainized, rude, shallow, vain, and selfish. Ethan: Asian, rude, evil, a traitor, and deceased. Grandma Zhang- rude, strict, cold, traditional, and deceased.

-Hazel: Has gold eyes. Has 'cinnamon brown' hair even though dark brown or black hair would be way more inclusive and realistic. Had a mother portrayed as a rude and selfish witch who sacrificed, used, and trafficked her own child. Was the only character called or described as a witch while African-Americans were usually accused of witchcraft just for their skin color. Was the only character who was cursed. Had a mother who literally practiced voodoo. The only African-American character in the series before ToA who isn't dead (but she also died). Was paired with a sixteen year old guy even though African women are constantly forced with older men and that's blatantly racist stereotyping. 

-Piper: Had 'chocolate brown' and then 'mahogany' hair? Has kaleidoscope eyes. Put a feather in her hair (which is stereotyping)- and it was an eagle feather, which is also wrong because eagles are extremely sacred to First Nation tribes and only spiritual leaders or warriors can wear it or it has to be gifted by an Elder of the tribe, and Riordan basically went 'Feathers are very important and it's racist to make a character wear one at inappropriate times but I'm going to make my character wear one as a cute accessory to make her look cool, pretty, and headstrong and to add to her 'Aesthetic'’ even though Cherokees didn’t wear feathers (which proves he did the bare minimum of research). Constantly oversexualized (56% of First Nation women are sexually harassed and Riordan had the audacity to put Piper in an 'embarrassingly low v-neck' and to have her constantly drooled over by a WHITE MALE and have her sexualized by her 1000+ mother without her knowledge or consent).  It's said that her father was from a reservation in Oklahoma...but there are no reservations in Oklahoma, only cultural centers (which also proves that he did the bare minimum of research).  She's the only First Nations character and she's the only character (besides Nancy Bobofit) depicted as a kleptomaniac (First Nations people are constantly called thieves by racist assholes). “The week before, he’d turned down several million dollars to play Tonto in a remake of The Lone Ranger. Piper was still trying to figure out why. He’d played all kinds of roles—a Latino teacher in a tough L.A. school, a dashing Israeli spy in an action-adventure blockbuster, even a Syrian terrorist in a James Bond movie. And, of course, he would always be known as the King of Sparta. But if the part was Native American—it didn’t matter what kind of role it was—Dad turned it down.” (The Lost Hero, page 165). So her father is fine with playing an extremely racist and stereotypical Middle Eastern role but not a First Nations role. Uses a cornucopia as a weapon (how she got it- cutting it off a half-bull- is disrespectful to her culture as hurting an animal is banned and she used a cornucopia- a symbol of Thanksgiving- as a weapon). Cut her hair, which is basically taboo in First Nations culture.

-Samirah: Had an arranged marriage (at age twelve, and she believed that she was groomed to be married to a rich and respectable family and nothing else). Ripped off her hijab in front of tons of male characters. The only Muslim character. The only Muslim character and she's the only character who married her cousin (you're supposed to break stereotypes, not enforce them).

Thomas Jefferson Jr: Said that he was thankful to the British for not siding with the South during the American Civil War even though they needed the South's cotton (but they didn't side with the North either). AKA a black man and son of a freed slave was thankful to Britain for not openly oppressing him? And at the same time he was named after a racist slave-owner.

Reyna: She's brown and her entire story revolves around her being independent, strong, alone, and self-sufficient but also desperately needing love and support but then Riordan says that she can't get her heart healed AKA she went through an abusive home, killed her father, left her sister, felt alone her whole life, worked a two-person job alone for months, and had to put on a brave face for others throughout all this then was literally told 'Shut up no one wants to hear about your struggles, just suck it up and deal with it’ and have you seen all the shit brown girls have to go through and keep silent about it? 

Extra: -Latino, Puerto Rican, African-American, Chinese-Canadian, East Asian, First Nations, etc. characters and the two most powerful, best, and most skilled characters and who the stories mostly revolve around are two white guys AKA white supremacy.

-"Harriet Tubman, daughter of Hermes, used many mortals on her Underground Railroad for just this reason" and that World War II was caused by a child of Zeus and a child of Hades fighting very blatantly erases the shit those people went through and Riordan just went 'Let's use these racist movements as little easter eggs in my story'.

-Thanatos, who was chained and enslaved, is described with dark skin.

-Riordan writing the characters went a little something like this: Drew: You get common Eastern Asian features like dark hair and eyes because you're arrogant, selfish, conceited, and rude, and because you're an antagonist and you're going to be used to make one of my protagonists- who has unique traits- look good so you're going to have the basic, 'boring' physical traits so the readers know who's the more superior of the two of you. Leo: You get common Latino features like curly dark hair, dark eyes, and light brown skin cause you're the weird, hyperactive unattractive one who's very flirty but constantly gets rejected and you're the only main character without a love interest and the only way you can get a girlfriend is when she's forced to fall in love with you through a curse. Frank: You get common Chinese features like dark hair and eyes cause you're the fat unattractive loser who catches the eye of the African character who already has unique and 'special' traits so you don't have to be super attractive. Reyna: You get common Puerto Rican traits like dark skin, hair, and eyes cause you're the stoic, lonely, intimidating, and cold one who wants all the guys (two white guys for that matter) but none of them want you and they both have girlfriends with traits like blonde hair and gray and kaleidoscope eyes so the readers know who are the more interesting couples.  Piper and Hazel: You two get eurocentric features because you're the main characters I have to set apart from everyone else- including other females whom I'm going to make one of you rivals with- so the readers know who's more superior so I'm giving you unique eye colors that literally cannot be found in humans so I'm going to try to validate it by saying that it's from something mildly associated with your godly parent even though neither of them have those traits. Riordan basically said that the common features are bad and boring and that unique and special features- aka features not found in those ethnicities- are good and cool. Also- if gods don’t have DNA how can their traits be passed down to their demigod children checkmate Riordan.

-Cecil Markowitz is the only Jewish character in PJO and the first thing used to describe him is "That kid, always thinking about the potential payout".

-Lavinia said that she was going to bring her date to her bat mitzvah even though you don't bring dates to bat mitzvahs or bar mitzvahs and she said that it was 'awkward' to tell her rabbi that someone was going to be her date even though you don't explain your guestlist to your rabbi, and they're most likely not even going to be at the party.

-Only three Latino and Puerto Rican characters (Leo, Reyna, and Hylla) and all three came from abusive households.

-Leo said 'Mamacita' as if that's not stereotyping.

-Made Nico ‘pale’ even though he had olive skin and gave him black hair and dark eyes despite Italians usually having light hair and eyes just to add to his ‘Goth Boy Aesthetic’.

-Hazel described Pluto to look like Adolf Hitler.

-Carter Kane said that Elvis took African-American music and made it sound like rock 'n roll and described it as cool- like no it’s cultural appropriation. 

-Leo was abused and Riordan thought that it'd be funny to make all the other characters line up to punch him and then try to make it look funny. 

-Gave almost every single POC character a white name and sometimes gave them white first names and POC surnames, and Reyna and Bianca are the only POC characters with names from their culture/native language and one of them is dead and reborn as someone else and the other’s full name wasn’t revealed until the fourth book in her series and she hates using it.

-Made two POC characters with names from their culture- Samirah and Olujime- go by white nicknames (Sam and Jamie) to make it ‘easier to read’ despite having white characters with the same amount of syllables in their names (like Annabeth) that didn’t go by nicknames.

-Never actually described the characters of color with physical traits from their ethnicities (Reyna, Hylla, and Leo with big eyes, thick eyebrows, brown hair, wide noses, full lips, etc., Piper with almost-oriental eyes, shovel teeth, high cheekbones, black hair, etc., Nico with light or brown hair and eyes, olive skin, a narrow nose, etc., Hazel with a wide nose and lips, dark brown eyes, black or dark brown hair, big eyes, thick eyebrows, etc.).

Anti-LGBTQ+:

-Nico was forcibly outed by Cupid and Riordan and the fandom didn't care and the only thing they thought was 'Aww, he has a crush on Percy! So cute!' AKA romanticizing a forced outing. 

-Riordan said that he didn't want to make Reyna lesbian or bisexual because he thought it'd be stereotypical making her LGBTQ+ because she didn't want men anymore even though she could've been bisexual all along but Riordan casually dismissed the idea of that saying "Having a girl end up with a woman after dating men is a bad stereotype" and basically said that real bi girls don’t exist.

-The Hunters of Artemis were made so Artemis/Diana could protect those girls from men and their behavior towards women but Riordan dismissed lesbian relationships- even though nothing about that was said in real Greek mythology- meaning that he thinks that women need protection from other women just as much as they need protection from men.

-Alex Fierro is the only gender-fluid or transgender character and she/he’s seen as rude, snarky, and sharp and Magnus could magically tell when Alex changed gender.

-Riordan said that he wouldn’t make Reyna a lesbian because of stereotypes despite the reader asking if Reyna was going to get a girlfriend, not come out as lesbian AKA Riordan thinks ‘Girls liking girls’ is automatically ‘lesbian’ and completely dismissed bi, pan, poly, omni, etc. girls.

-Used a self-insert to make fun of wlw readers who saw themself in Reyna and thought she could be a cool character to relate to.

-Enforced LGBTQ+ stereotypes like the cold-hearted Asexual, the flamboyant bi/pan, the snarky gender-fluid, the emo gay, the laid-back and rebellious lesbian who dyed her hair pink and chews a lot of bubblegum, etc.

-Has one-hundred fifty-five characters total minus gods/goddesses, Titans, giants, nymphs, dryads, satyrs, monsters, etc. and only has fifteen confirmed LGBTQ+ characters (do the math, that’s exactly one out of ten regarding OCs).

-Only one character that isn’t cishet.

-Saves most the LGBTQ+ for the side characters or only confirms characters LGBTQ+ once they’ve become a minor character despite being a main character before.

-Only stated that Reyna was Asexual outside of his books and on Twitter as if that’s not exactly what J.K Rowling is doing.

-Used the LGBTQ+ community to make Piper seem like the ‘special snowflake’ and to set her apart from her siblings to make it seem like she’s better than all of them and used Hera/Juno and Aphrodite/Venus as excuses for his homophobic mindset that believes that straight is the default cause “Suddenly, much of what she and I had talked about started to make sense. Not being defined by Aphrodite’s expectations. Or Hera’s ideas of what a perfect couple looked like. Piper finding her own way, not the one people expected of her” in synonymous words is 'The expectations for love and the idea of a perfect couple are a heterosexual relationship, and anyone who 'finds their own way instead of the ones people expect' are different'. ‘Different’ and ‘default’ are antonyms AKA if he thinks that LGBTQ+ people are ‘different’, he thinks that straight is the ‘default’. Remember- an author writes their own personal beliefs.

-Josephine is the only black LGBTQ+ character.

-Reyna is said to be Asexual despite feeling sexual attraction towards Percy cause no one likes someone five minutes after knowing them and it’s anything but sexual attraction.

-Magnus and Alex are the only LGBTQ+ relationship whose growth and development is actually shown in the story (while there was also Apollo and Commodus, Piper and Shel, Will and Nico, Apollo and Hyacinthus, Emmie and Jo, Lavinia and Poison Oak, etc.).

-Riordan never canonically said the name of any sexuality and is clearly uncomfortable with the LGBTQ+ community shown by his little to no writing regarding physical affection and deep emotions in his LGBTQ+ relationships.

-Only added in LGBTQ+ relationships for publicity- Percy Jackson and the Olympians release dates: 2005-2009. 2005-2009: LGBTQ+ support was nearly at an all-time low. No LGBTQ+ characters, relationships, or references in the books. The Lost Hero-The Mark of Athena release dates: 2010-2012. 2010-2012: LGBTQ+ support was still very low. Still no LGBTQ+ characters, relationships, or references in the books. The House of Hades release date: late 2013. Mid-2013: the giant spike for LGBTQ+ support and allies. One confirmed LGBTQ+ character. The Sword of Summer release date: late 2015. 2015: LGBTQ+ support was good and gay marriage was legalized. A few LGBTQ+ references but no confirmed characters. The Hammer of Thor and The Ship of the Dead release dates: 2016-2017. 2016-2017: LGBTQ+ support was quite high. Two confirmed LGBTQ+ characters and the first canon LGBTQ+ relationship and kiss. The Trials of Apollo release dates: 2016-2020. 2016-2020: LGBTQ+ support was very high. More LGBTQ+ characters confirmed in one book than all the other series combined. Kind of obvious he was just following the public opinion.

-Legit said ‘Reyna can’t like girls cause she has had crushes on guys before’.

Ableism:

-It was heavily implied in The Battle of the Labyrinth that Rachel Dare had schizophrenia/psychosis but it's never brought up again.

-Grover's fake feet made it look like he was disabled from the Mist and it was said that he was bullied because of it but it was never brought up again.

-It was said that Tyson looked like he had down syndrome from the Mist covering his one eye but it was never brought up again. 

-It was stated that every character but Frank has ADHD and dyslexia but never actually showed any symptoms after Percy Jackson and the Olympians and characters like Piper and Leo were even able to read English writing throughout The Lost Hero and the only symptom of ADHD Riordan showed through his characters was ‘a lot of fidgeting’ as if that’s not a blatant stereotype. 

Pedophilia:

-Luke, a twenty-two/twenty-three year old had a crush on Annabeth, a sixteen year old. That's a six-seven year age gap. 

-The only two girls put into relationships with much older men are black (Hazel and Sadie).

-Hazel, a thirteen year old, got together with a sixteen year old guy. Hazel's crush on Frank is normal- a girl having a crush on an older guy, but Frank's crush on Hazel is disgusting- an older guy looking down at a child and thinking about making out with her.

Misogyny:

-Aphrodite's kids are seen as useless, weak, snobby, shallow, vain, and selfish just because they’re feminine. 

-Riordan portrayed Aphrodite’s kids as feminine despite Aphrodite being the goddess of love and beauty, not femininity, as if romance and beauty are reserved for women only. 

-Piper is the only 'tomboy' child of Aphrodite and she's portrayed as tougher, stronger, and better than her feminine siblings (and it's portrayed that way multiple times throughout the story like other characters telling Piper she’s "-tough for a child of Aphrodite").

-Piper immediately stereotyped and disliked every single feminine character like Drew and the rest of the Aphrodite cabin just because they liked makeup and skirts as if that’s not shallow criticism. 

-Feminine characters like Drew, Isabel, Khione, and Medea are used or even created solely as antagonists to make Piper- the tomboy- look better.

-Calypso is the only feminine character and she sucks at everything. 

-Riordan’s take on female characters: Drew: a vain, rude, selfish, snobby, and bitchy mean girl. Silena: a shallow traitor. Reyna: a cold-hearted robot. Piper: internalized misogyny that was never brought up again. Calypso: an island whore. Athena: a rude, aggressive bitch with no emotions. Aphrodite: shallow, vain, conceited, and self-centered. Hera: completely evil with no backstory added into it. Marie: an evil witch who selfishly used and sacrificed her daughter.

-The Hunters of Artemis were blessed by Artemis to protect them from men but Riordan made it only about the men in their lives (again) and portrayed the whole 'losing men' thing like it was a burden and that they're 'giving men up' even though they join the Hunters to leave men. He distorted the original meaning of the Hunters- protecting women- by making it about the Hunters hating and being forced to leave men even though they're asking to have no men in their lives, cause that's the point of it. 

-The Amazons and Hunters of Artemis despise men and literally attack them if they so much as speak as if sexism is reserved for women only.

-Portrayed femininity as weakness (and masculinity as strength, it’s even in the word- tomBOY).

-Constantly pit women against women for the sake of romance and love triangles instead of normalizing women getting along despite liking the same people and let the female’s relationships get controlled and influenced by the men in their lives.

-The men always outpower the women in powers and skills. Riordan’s portrayal of powers and characters- Percy: You’re going to have epic water powers and can even create your own personal hurricanes and even though you’ve only been canonically training for eight months total you’re going to be the best swordfighter despite multiple characters having years more training than you. Jason: You’re going to be able to fly, control lightning, create storms, and electric shock people into another dimension. Leo: You’re going to be able to create and control fire and blow shit up with just a screwdriver. Frank: You’re going to be able to shape-shift into any animal you want, even a whole dragon. Nico: You’re going to be able to control darkness and shadows, literally teleport, and raise a whole army of undead soldiers. Reyna: Powers? Nah, your only ability is to lend strength to others as if that benefits you at all. Annabeth: Powers? Nah. Piper: You’re going to be able to manipulate and seduce people and are literally going to use your body and attractiveness as a weapon and your power is literally called charmspeak. Hazel: You have more powers than all the other characters combined that can literally destroy anyone in less than a second but you’re never going to use them or even remember that you have them cause screw the female character being more powerful than the males. 

-The men always accomplish the most incredible feats and if the females ever do accomplish something great (Reyna healing the riff and defeating Orion while the Hunters and Amazons couldn’t combined, Annabeth going through Tartarus, Hazel learning to control the Mist, etc.) they are never praised or rewarded or all the credit goes to the men. 

-Ares/Mars in real Greek/Roman mythology was the feminist patron of the Amazons who loved his daughter very much and killed a rapist but was portrayed as the dumb, cruel asshole who loved nothing but bloodshed and tried to kill a twelve year-old kid who was trying to help him while Poseidon/Neptune in real Greek/Roman mythology was a greedy, short-tempered, and arrogant asshole who raped almost as much women than Zeus/Jupiter but was portrayed as the kind, caring, and gentle father figure. 

Fatophobia:

-Frank is the only chubby character and he hates himself because of it, was constantly fat-shamed, and only learned to love himself after he got rippling abs, muscles, and looked hotter (because fat = ugly in Riordan’s mind, even though it's not). 

-Clovis was depicted with a pot-belly and Drew described him as 'repulsive'.

-Dionysus/Bacchus is also depicted with a pot-belly and he's portrayed as a useless, rude, lazy, and drunken asshole. 

Lookism:

Basically how Riordan wrote his characters- Percy, Annabeth, Jason, Reyna, Hazel, Piper, and most minor protagonists: You’re all going to be super attractive, have at least one character or more pining for you, have your looks constantly commented on, and some of you will even use your looks as a weapon cause that’s not obvious sexualization cause you’re all the main characters and protagonists that readers need to know are the protagonists. Nico, Leo, and Frank: You three are originally portrayed as unattractive but at some points are described as cute and two of you are insecure about your looks cause you’re scrawny and chubby and one of you hates yourself cause of your body and only learn to love yourself once you magically gain abs cause more muscle obviously equals more attractiveness.  Luke, Silena, Chris, and Ethan: You four are going to be super attractive because you’re traitors but all of you make up for your actions and decide to help the demigods and become protagonists again. Octavian, Bryce, Michael, Titans, giants, etc.: You all are the antagonists so you have to be super ugly with multiple physical imperfections cause you’re not allowed to be attractive since you are against the protagonists and I have to set you guys apart and show the readers who’s the better and more superior character. 

-Frank hated himself cause he was chubby and only loved himself once he got skinnier and gained muscle through magic but even then was called ‘cute like a panda’.

-Leo was described as scrawny and unattractive and was insecure about being short but even then was called ‘cute in a scrawny way’.

-Piper had facial imperfections and even a pimple on her nose but once she got claimed all of those disappeared and they stayed gone even after the blessing washed off despite all the magic being gone and only then was Piper’s looks commented on multiple times. 

-Lester/Apollo hated his appearance cause he had a little flab and acne and his physical imperfections were used as comedy by making fun of it as if insecure readers don’t exist.

-Percy and Annabeth had one canon physical imperfection- a gray streak in their hair- and that magically washed away.

-None of the other characters were described with any physical imperfections like pimples/zits/acne, body hair (despite none of the characters having the care or time to wax or shave), bushy/frizzy or messy hair or eyebrows, big or small hands or noses, blackheads, super thick or thin eyebrows, blemishes, birthmarks, scars, stretch marks, braces, lazy eyes, yellow or chipped teeth, eye bags, glasses, moles, dimples, love handles, flab/fat, visible veins, freckles, etc. unless it added to their ‘aesthetic’ despite none of those being bad and saves it only for the antagonists as if ‘physical imperfections’ = ‘evil’. 

Bias:

-Riordan portrayed the Romans as cold, cruel, ruthless, strict, and overall horrible despite them being the more inclusive camp regarding family and godly parents, have multiple families and rules that ensure their camper’s safety, and hold the nicest characters in the series while the Greeks are portrayed as fun, wild, reckless, silly, and cool despite holding the most prejudiced and rude characters, outcasting and ostracizing characters of certain godly parents just for their parentage, stereotype almost every single cabin, and make some campers without siblings live, sleep, and eat alone. 

-Every Greek traitor (Luke, Silena, Ethan, and Chris) were portrayed as powerful, kind, attractive, and awesome and each made up for their actions but each Roman ‘traitor’ (Octavian, Bryce, and Michael, and only one of them are actually a traitor) were portrayed as unattractive, cruel, ambitious, ruthless, and extremely weak and never actually did anything useful.

-The Greeks were part of the Union and the Romans were part of the Confederacy (adding on to Riordan adding racist movements as fun little easter eggs in his stories).

-Four out of seven of the main Seven are Greek.

-There are at least 70+ Greek characters and less than thirty named Romans.

-The Battle of San Francisco Bay was used for the sole purpose to weaken the Romans and make the Greeks seem stronger than them and while the Greeks went through two whole wars, their camp laid almost completely untouched but the moment the Romans are introduced, half their population is wiped?

Romanticization:

-Romanticized Annabeth judo-flipping Percy AKA romanticized physical abuse/harassment (emotions, angriness, feelings of love and affection, ‘they went through a lot together’, etc. do not excuse hitting someone) despite Annabeth knowing where Percy’s Achilles Heel was and not knowing he lost it and flipping him on his back anyways (if Percy didn’t lose the Achilles Heel, Annabeth would’ve killed him).

-Romanticized Leo killing himself to see Calypso again and to take her off her island AKA a romanticized suicide.

-Romanticized Calypso yelling at and insulting Leo and Annabeth insulting and canonically lowering Percy’s self-esteem AKA romanticized verbal abuse/bullying.

-Romanticized Will trying to help Nico through his loneliness and depression as if that can’t be portrayed as someone just wanting to help another person AKA  romanticized mental illness.

-Romanticized every character kissing another character without asking first and without their consent AKA romanticized sexual harassment.

-Romanticized Piper taking advantage over Jason’s amnesia and mental state and jumping onto him despite knowing there might be a girl he couldn’t remember AKA romanticized manipulation.

-Romanticized Piper and Annabeth’s possessive, overly-jealous, and controlling behavior over Jason and Percy (even before they were canonically dating).

-Romanticized Nico being forced to confess his crush on Percy AKA romanticized a forced outing.

Rick Riordan:

-Refused to apologize for his actions even after being called out by people from the groups he was writing inaccurately and stereotyping (Muslim, Jewish, African, First Nation, lesbian, gay, Puerto Rican, etc.) and tried to make himself look like the victim.

-Claimed he was being ‘bullied’ by readers half his age who were just pointing out his books’ racist flaws.

-Showed time and time again that he is not willing to listen to the voices of minorities.

-Clearly didn’t do his research on ethnicities, sexualities, religions, etc. shown by how he got the simplest things wrong.

-Tried to say that he- a straight white man- was right when people of the actual groups he was writing about (gay, First Nation tribes, etc.) were wrong.

-Used excuses like having a ‘headstrong’ and ‘stubborn’ character who wants to ‘show their culture in their own way’ for his stereotypes. No, Riordan, you want to show the culture that way, not Piper. She’s a fictional character, you’re real. Dumbass.

-Literally said ‘Sorry I put feathers in Piper’s hair, I can’t change what I wrote in the past and I didn’t know that sensitive readers existed’ then continued to write feathers in Piper’s hair in the future books. 

The Fandom:

Note: Not to all of the fandom, obviously

-Draws Piper with light skin, light hair, and kaleidoscope eyes with feathers, hippie bands, and beads (yes, it's canon, but you're allowed to change it if it's blatantly racist, and the bead and hippie band thing was created by the fandom and that's also stereotyping).

-Almost always draw Reyna, Hylla, and Leo with light skin and Caucasian traits (props to the few artists who drew them with the right skin tones).

-Draws Hazel with gold eyes, ‘cinnamon’/light brown hair, and an adult body.

-Sexualizes female characters by drawing them in sexy and revealing clothes and giving them all the same exact sexy, slim, and perfect hour-glass shaped bodies.

-Almost never include physical imperfections, muscle, scars, stretch marks, etc. in drawings.

-Fancasts white actors for characters of color and puts actors/faceclaims of white people or people of different ethnicities in the moodboards or aesthetics for characters of color.

-Participates in cultural appropriation by wearing feathers when cosplaying Piper and wearing a hijab when cosplaying Samirah.

-Supports Riordan, tries to defend him, and condones his clearly racist and bigoted actions just cause they ‘like the books’ (if you are straight, white, and/or cishet, I definitely don’t want to see you trying to defend a fifty-five year-old multi-millionaire who is clearly racist, sexist, homophobic, and transphobic).

-Romanticize physical abuse, verbal abuse, mental illnesses and panic/anxiety attacks, etc.

-Ship pedophilic, manipulative, abusive, and wrong relationships.

-Barely allow others to have their own opinions (looking at you Perachel haters) without yelling at, insulting, cursing out, and/or even threatening them for liking or disliking different things than them including ships, characters, books, plots/faults, and Riordan himself.

-Straightwashes characters like shipping Nico with female characters or setting him up with a female character in fanfics.

-Whitewashes characters like drawing Hazel and Piper with eurocentric features, Reyna, Hylla, and Leo with white skin and Caucasian traits, Nico with white/pale skin, etc.

-Try to excuse and explain abusive, manipulative, possessive, and overall very wrong and toxic behavior.

-Fail to recognize and/or admit the toxic, racist, homophobic, sexist, transphobic, wrong, abusive, etc. faults in the books, ships, and characters just cause they like them.

The Percy Jackson franchise does not add good representation. You can still like the series as long as you don’t condone Riordan’s racist and toxic writing and actions and don’t try to ignore the horrible and stereotypical faults just cause you don’t want to admit that your favorite or childhood story is horrible. 

[quibble-squibble]

You’re absolutely right that this behaviour exists in real life and is a dangerous to communities and activist groups- however that’s not what I’m saying is bad abt this interpretation:

What’s bad about this interpretation is that we cannot- I repeat CANNOT- divorce Adam’s character from the racial biases of the writers who wrote the story. We cannot divorce him from the botched racism storyline, and we cannot divorce him from the story specifically taking a stance of respectability politics. (ie using a reactionary caricature as a “cautionary tale” in favour of the palatable “good minority” who asks for rights nicely)

The problem, out of several, is that Adam is just “toxic jerk” and is being portrayed as an abusive toxic jerk when he was originally set up as a radical leader of a civil rights organization (I’ll round back on this topic more)

Which is very very insulting, it’s a very harmful stereotype bc as I said- this is a reactionary caricature. The secret minority supremacist who wants to commit genocide against the majority- they have to be stopped!

That’s a racial caricature. That’s reactionary propaganda. Flat out that is where this idea originates and that’s we cannot and should not erase it’s existence within the story by trying to make a serviceable message out of it.

Back on that “toxic masculinity”- that’s also an issue. Adam is a character- there are writers who DECIDED to make him be a toxic asshole, specifically a toxic asshole as opposed to (narratively) the palatable Woman (Blake), that he’s just a coward and pathetic and needs to be taken down by the Good Minorities

That’s also really bad. It’s bad to play “good minority, bad minority” without excessive research and knowing what you’re doing- which the writers did. And it’s bad to demonize minority men (and I specify minority men bc marginalized men are so quickly demonized in lieu of palatable moderate women) for being angry at their oppression

Because that’s also what Adam was a caricature of- minority anger at the majority.

The show has already shown to demonize anger at the majority, ex Blake’s anger at Weiss’ racism but dismissed with Weiss never having to apologize.

Adam is just that demonization in full.

And the divide between him and his narrative opposition, Blake, really shows the interests of the writers when playing this good minority bad minority game: the dangerous radical man vs the upper/middle class moderate woman

Adam was a child slave. That’s what he was, and he was brutalized but those in power over him who branded him like an animal. A viscous, lasting hate crime.

Blake was part of a well off family (upper class within Menagerie) in a big house in a faunus nation with two parents who loved her and all her needs met.

These two are not the same.

Now! I’m not saying that your upbringing and how privileged it was determines your viability status as a minority- but it does inform your natural biases, and how you stand in life.

Blake is the “palatable” option, the “good minority”. This cannot be divorced from the fact that her and her politics (as given and shown within the story) are much more moderate and frankly- ALSO damaging to the faunus community!

It’s racist and stupid to tell a bunch of faunus that the fact that YOUR house is on fire is something FAUNUS did when YOU are the one who set it on fire.

It’s racist and stupid to ask the minority to “prove” that they’re not bad ppl to the majority. Marginalized people have time and time again been peddled the same rhetoric with different layers of paint on it- all boiling down to the idea that maybe their oppression would just STOP if they acted “correctly”- it won’t and it doesn’t and peddling this model minority rhetoric is racist and wrong.

This is why the faunus plotline is entirely respectability politics, the faunus in the white fang were “too mean :(“ when asking for rights, what minorities REALLY need to do is be Good and Help The Majority and That’s The Right Thing To Do!

…the fact that it’s literally stated that this has never worked in the past, that Sienna & Adam’s methods were actually working, and that Blake and Ghira didn’t come up with any game plan to make their “asking nicely for faunus be treated like people” goal actually achievable this time is never brought up.

The show doesn’t present it as wrong bc the show and the writers believe Blake the Moderate White Woman* is the morally correct option to the scary and dangerous radical.

*(this phrase has little to do with whether you personally hc her as whatever ethnicity- in this allegory Blake is very much the moderate middle class white woman who preaches respectability politics while ignoring that that tactic hasn’t worked.)

Call me crazy but I’ve seen how easy it is for politically moderate white woman like Blake to not infiltrate* but RISE in communities and have us fighting our own and caring more about “optics” than surviving as a community and looking out for each other.

*it’s also not accurate to say Adam (or Blake or whoever) “infiltrated” a community- he is a faunus he is by default part of that community, you can’t infiltrate a group when you’re already part of that group

The interpreted message that “marginalized groups need to be wary of toxic jerks who might take power within the community!” Falls completely flat when you actually consider the actual political messages tied to that.

Because they aren’t talking about actual viewpoints or politics that are detrimental to the community and it’s activism- they’re talking about those dangerous radicals who are secretly evil abusive jerks and cowards and can’t be trusted.

The tropes Adam is playing into, what his character is founded on, is specifically racially charged reactionary propaganda about civil rights groups. It’s not about people who rise within communities due to detrimental politics bc that would require a much more nuanced perspective and understanding of civil rights and activism which the writers did not have.

People who talk about the white fang and the faunus and the issues with these plot lines aren’t “taking it at face value”, taking the white fang plot at face value would be point blank buying what the writers are saying (“mean white fang bad :(, nice white fang good!”).

People in the fandom (like me although I don’t talk nearly as much as some others, who make even more points abt this topic), especially PoC, have been talking about these issues for years and years since volume 1. Several points of the plot have been deconstructed, the racial biases pointed out, the double standards pointed out, the white moderatism pointed out, and we’ve been dismissed, degraded and in some cases threatened for daring criticize this plotline.

I’m not saying you’re wrong for having an interpretation of a plotline that differs from mine, I’m saying that within this fandom there has been a pattern for the last several years for people to ignore and whitewash the issues with the white fang plotline in favour of “well it wasn’t handled the best but the message was well intentioned!” and especially in the case of Adam “but he was a bad guy!” “I can’t believe you’re defending an abuser!” Which has effectively been used to silence and stamp out discussion of racism.

Bc you can’t discuss the white fang plotline without bringing up Adam’s treatment. Adam cannot be divorced from the white fang plotline and it’s politics. And Adam being a problem in how and why they chose to represent him like that is vital to discussion of the shows racism.

Although I am saying that framing this interpretation as “more interesting” than discussing the racism is kind of shitty. Like yeah, discussing the racism within a botched racism plotline isn’t exactly fun but we’re not doing it a fun activity, we’re doing it to try and educate people on why these portrayals are bad and how they harm communities they claim to be supporting.

But really the ultimate thing this boils down to is this- That’s not the message they were sending and the reasons we should not pretend it was is bc by doing so we would be glossing over and once again erasing discussions of the racism within the white fang’s writing and Adam’s.

In a better researched show, your interpreted theme would be a really good point in talking about the multiple faceted aspects of activism and the people it draws to it, how there are some people who will use whatever excuse available to them to gain power over others. Because you’re right- this does happen and it is dangerous and reductive to the community and activist groups.

But that’s just not what they were saying. (Or even, that’s not what they said.) And the issue with this interpretation is not it’s existence or concept in a vacuum but that in this fandom space it is yet another way to whitewash, push aside, and water down discussions of the racism within the show that people (like me and others) have been trying to get the fandom as a whole to take seriously for years.

I think both things can be true: 1) The White Fang/Faunus racism storyline could have been handled better than it was.

2) “Don’t let toxic abusers take over progressive movements, ‘cause their egoes will run them into the ground” is actually not a bad message all things considered.

[ufonaut]

now that it’s finally over i gotta say i’m still thinking about how absolutely abysmal three jokers is but most of all how geoff johns, a man who’s been in the comic industry for more than a decade, isn’t simply a bad writer but fundamentally misunderstands everything that’s come before him. he, like scott snyder, writes a bruce wayne that is an absolute narcissistic asshole with very few redeeming qualities, instead of -- as better writers have managed again and again -- a traumatised man trying to prevent what happened to him from ever happening again, a man who cares deeply and genuinely and tries to help as much as he can. believe it or not, at this point in time, it’s more revolutionary to portray batman as an actual hero and a fundamentally good person rather than whatever antihero stance geoff unsuccessfully tries to go for

similarly, geoff’s writing is always annoyingly full of conflicting and nonsensical themes. giving the above motif to joe chill doesn’t do anything a random mugging wouldn’t do (a twist of fate! victims of circumstance! if you wanted to lean on the parallels between bruce & joker then the randomness of their respective tragedies is the way to go) except shift the blame for what we’ve been taught to read as One Of The Worst Things To Ever Happen on the shoulders of people experiencing genuine systematic oppression. batman’s existence is uncomfortable to justify when you get into those kind of discussion, i get it! i do! but this is the verifiably cold take of a person who watched joker 2019 and thought arthur was the bad guy, not the billionaires and people in power making his life hell

conceptually making something out of the wayne murders isn’t bad per se (telltale did it wonderfully with the mob hit thing, a personal fav) but the above looks like a very unfortunate pattern in the context of geoff’s villains often being activists supposedly taking it too far by wanting to ensure universal healthcare and stopping homophobia & racism etc (the stargirl ISA), people rightfully fighting against what’s basically a universe-wide attempt at a fascist regime (sinestro vs the guardians) or mentally ill gay characters who’d never never been antagonists until geoff got his hands on them (todd rice/obsidian in jsa 1999, who geoff goes as far as to say might’ve been “born bad”). like, what’re you trying to say here, geoff? do you see how This looks?

another one of geoff’s Worst Offences in three jokers is also definitely how deep his misunderstanding (or hey! maybe hatred) of tkj seems to run. tkj was envisioned as the final batman story precisely because alan moore could not see joker’s cruelty rising above what he did to barbara, that was the unthinkable and it had been reached. end of story. and i agree! pushing joker’s edginess with every present day comic has made him absolutely unbearable but most of all, in the immediately relevant sense, geoff johns has clearly heard tkj is one of the most critically acclaimed batman stories in history and his takeaway was “oh its because joker shot barbara” rather than the actual reason (humanising joker). portraying pre-joker as an abusive husband and would-be father when moore clearly & intentionally avoids that

(”i don’t see him as a violent man so his fists aren’t bunched up or anything like that”, tkj script)

(”the anger is obviously directed at himself rather than at his wife”, tkj script)

and having bruce say he’s known joker’s identity since the moment they met because he’s ‘batman’ but has chosen to protect jeannie ‘cause she’s in some sort of witness protection type deal is, quite frankly, absolute bullshit. the tragedy of tkj is that The Man From Before was a completely average person, maybe even a good person with dreams and aspirations but so insignificant and invisible that he leaves no trace behind when he disappears. he’s not an everyman, he’s a nobody in the most real sense! a person that’s become untraceable through the hand life’s dealt him! the complete opposite of bruce and yet ending up at the same crossroads! why would pre-joker even go through all the trouble of getting involved with the red hood gang in the hopes of him & jeannie never worrying about money again if he didn’t care about her?

on that subject, is it really so hard to understand that joker is doing his whole plan in tkj not because he is a monster (no such thing) but because he sees himself as one and is trying to prove that anyone exposed to as much trauma as him would react the same way? joker’s thing is never about dying with batman or senselessly destroying lives or what have you but about proving it’s not just him. it’s a very base human desire of wanting to know you’re not the only one who’s ever gone through this

that’s why the miracle of bruce saying “maybe i’ve been there too” hits so hard when it’s meant to

the killing joke remains one of the greatest batman stories precisely because it never once claims joker is more than a man, whereas three jokers is doomed to fade into obscurity or be remembered as yet another geoff johns catastrophe

[clouds-of-wings]

THANK You for your "Melkor was the asshole interrupting it with his dumb ringtone" post. that made me so happy-@outofangband

No problem, the way part of the fandom tries to paint Morgoth as a rebel and Eru and co. as oppressors is a bit of a pet peeve for me.

I mean I see where the impulse comes from - Tolkien modeled his divine powers after Catholic Christianity and "the Christian god is oppressive and Satan and the demons are cool rebels" is a common sentiment nowadays. But while I can see why people think that about Christianity, Tolkien didn't give Eru and the Valar any of the traits that make the Christian god seem like a tyrant. In Tolkien's creation myth, God aka Eru made his creatures to be free and Morgoth is the one who keeps trying to enslave them. Which is also a valid interpretation of the conflict between the Christian god and the devil, one that is obviously more popular among Christians.

So you have Tolkien operating in a Christian tradition that sees God as benevolent, his creation as perfect and his creatures as inherently in tune with their creator, but a lot of his readers are more at home in the opposite narrative. Many may have been forced into restrictive forms of Christianity, been abused under the guise of religion or left the faith at great personal cost. Or they were seen as "disturbing the peace" for not falling in line even in a non-religious context. So Morgoth seems like an attractive, relatable character, a fellow rebel against the suffocating timeless order. But the text just doesn't support this interpretation, because Tolkien's view of Christianity is integral to his world-building and he wasn’t interested in portraying God as a tyrant.

[greysunshinexx]

i would say: make people uncomfortable with the status quo. that is the catalyst for change.

we are very comfortable where we are today, but how many indian movies have you seen recently with a female lead? a movie in which a female character has more personality than "girlfriend character"? we dont even notice it because its become so normalised in indian cinema. but we must not be complacent. we need to make people uncomfortable, remind them that this is not right, its not accurate to reality, that movies that portray women like this are, in fact, misogynistic. throw that word around, wield it to their discomfort. only then can reparations be made, and progress can blossom.

they will say "its just a movie, chill out" but we must not listen. in today's contemporary society, movies shape culture, and vice versa. sexism and misogyny prevail in our country, ugly dregs of white nonsense left behind by the british raj. how many women in your family believe with all their heart that it is a woman's duty to be subservient? how young did you learn to stay away from men and how young did you notice that creepy assholes stare at you if you wore leggings on your commute to school? how often is a woman stuck in an abusive arranged marriage told to bear it because thats what she should do as a good wife?

how many indian movies have you seen where the man pursues the woman to no end? how many where its implied that the only things you need to get a woman are cunningness, perseverance and sweet lies? in how many movies does the woman actually stand her ground and say no? in how many is she portrayed to have secretly liked him all along? in how many were the means of how he "got the girl" were dubious at best, but it was played off for laughs?

now, how much of what young boys learn about courtship and love is from movies?

any sane person would see that this is not normal. this needs to be abolished. if this culture needs undoing, then we must start planting roots everywhere we can, and that includes movies. start portraying women as people with rich inner worlds, as capable, as intelligent, ambitious and driven, as their own people. remember, many indian men dont realise women have personalities until they have a daughter. that terrifies me, and it should terrify you too.

if you took away anything from rrr, i hope you learned that to end oppression, the oppressed must unite, revolt, and never ever stay silent.

now that rrr is literally renowned worldwide, and ssr is getting all the praise and fame he deserves for his work, we should try not to lose sight of the fact that he is, despite being an incredibly creative mind and a skilled director, an unrefutably sexist man. like, not to bring anyone down, but dont idolize him, yknow? hes talented, but flawed, and i dont want anyone to take the rose and leave the thorns behind. recognise the achievement, but scrutinise the misogyny, because thats the only way progress will ever be achieved.

[wxldchxld]

So again, this isn’t the blog for this, and I should really just make a personal where I complain about everything, but I’m going to do it here anyway. If you don’t want to read this, don’t look under the cut.

I haven’t been private about just how much I feel like His Dark Materials fails anyone who has done more than read the books once when they were a kid. I have a very long standing love affair with the original His Dark Materials trilogy, because I grew up in an extremely restrictive religious household and didn’t get to experience them as a child. I have read the entire series through every December for several years now, and each time I read it I love it a little more. I feel like The Golden Compass/The Northern Lights especially is one of the greatest children’s stories I’ve ever read. It’s simple, it’s clean, it’s filled with dynamic and interesting characters, and everything in it serves a purpose. 

And I have a lot to say on the way the show treated Lyra as a character and how they made her little more than a prop in her own story, and how that makes the story really boring to sit through, but I’m going to put that on the back burner for now. Because I don’t feel like anyone is noticing the kind of casual sexism that this show is really guilty of, and I think we should be.

This is a pretty negative look at the show so i don’t want anyone bitching at me saying why watch it if you don’t like it. Take that logic and apply it here. If you don’t want to listen to genuine critique, don’t read this.

I’ve said before that Mrs. Coulter is probably one of my first “bad older woman I shouldn’t love but do” characters. My first read through of the books was when I was in my early twenties and kind of coming out to myself. I had spent years denying the fact I was a lesbian all the while secretly hating myself for being unable to force myself to like men. Mrs. Coulter came about in my life at a time when I was learning to let go of my self hatred and accept who I am. Yes, Pullman intentionally put her in there to be someone the reader is infatuated with. He wanted her to be beautiful and intoxicating and dangerous, and she was, but it hit me on an even deeper level than that. Because I identified with her. Not because I spent my time casually abusing children, but because I always felt like she was a victim of the system she was born into. A system that devalued her as a woman. A system where her ambition was demonized and looked down on. One that led to a loveless marriage, a heated affair with a bad man, a shameful fall out, and the loss of her child. Her violence, her cruelty and calculation, isn’t just a character trait, it’s a symptom of the Magesterium’s oppression. 

I feel like the show attempted to highlight this, and I honestly go back and forth on whether or not it’s a good thing. We get scenes like the one where she’s talking about heights with Lyra, and the haunted way she looks into the distance and says she’s always wanted to jump. We see how she can separate from her daemon and how often when one of them is vulnerable, the other purposefully pulls away from them (something that did not happen at all in the books). She’s portrayed as a traumatized, mentally ill woman. And it’s both beautiful and---kind of cringy seeing my personal view of her be so plainly portrayed on the screen. 

You see the problem I have with this is that no matter how deeply I sympathize with Mrs. Coulter as someone who struggles with a mental illness myself, she abuses children. She is the quintessential abused becomes the abuser trope, and if this is true, I have to ask myself how much can we really hate her? Is it ok, especially in our current social climate, to portray a mentally ill woman as a villain? To what degree is it ok to blame a victim of trauma for traumatizing others? There’s no easy answer to that question and I think that’s why Pullman left the reader to decide for themselves how much of a victim vs villain Mrs Coulter was.

I don’t mind asking and engaging with these questions, especially since I feel like the show was geared toward and older audience destined to ask them anyway. However I want to take a hard turn now and look at Lord Asriel. Because the problem I have is not, in essence, with how the show portrays either character on their own, but in how it portrays Asriel in contrast to Marisa.

I always kind of felt like Asriel was a character that Pullman didn’t really give a shit about. Maybe he did and I just missed it, but just in the way he talks about other characters verses Asriel---Idk.

Asriel is Marisa Coulter’s opposite. In the context of the first book, they’re both villains but at opposite ends of the spectrum. He’s a straight, white, noble, manly-man who is also a genius. It’s not a hard leap to assume that he wouldn’t have gotten half as far in life without the social privileges he got from all of those things. Asriel was never really someone I could sympathize with because he was always an example of just how differently the system treats straight white men, even when they disagree with them. Despite being a blatant heretic, a convicted killer, and a disgraced nobleman, he’s still seen as powerful and someone to be respected. Colleges fund his research, he still has a personal servant, and even as a literal prisoner, he’s allowed to do whatever he wants. Unlike Marisa, he hasn’t had to carve out a position for himself in the world. It’s already there. 

He is the epitome of privilege---and in the books he acts like it. Asriel is cold, selfish, intimidating, and abusive. The only sympathetic moment he has in the first book is when he shows open terror upon seeing Lyra coming to his workshop in the north. He’s scared only because he doesn’t want to kill his daughter, and personally I think he was only so terrified because he knew that if she stayed he would do it. Once he finds out Roger is with Lyra, he immediately goes back to not giving a shit about her.

Book Asriel is never sorry for how he treats his daughter and at the end of The Golden Compass/Northern Lights he not only blatantly doesn’t care about what will happen to Lyra if he leaves her behind, he tells Marisa that she shouldn’t care either. He tells her that Lyra hates her and that she’s squandered the two chances she had to be with their child. Right up to the very last pages of the novel he just---doesn’t care. 

Asriel in the show is, to put it simply, is toned down. He isn’t so much of a blatant asshole. When Lyra talks, he doesn’t immediately dismiss her or dominate the entire conversation. It’s very subtle in the way they change him. His threats don’t hold a lot of weight, his body language doesn’t ooze with intimidation and power, and when he talks to Lyra he shows clear emotion. He softens and listens to her, even if he doesn’t change his position. This comes off as portraying him as a man who is more compassionate than he really is, and who is, perhaps, even regretful that he must kill Roger. They completely cut the scene where there is a violent fight between Pan, Salcilia, and Stelmaria that results in Lyra falling down a snow drift and Asriel just----not responding. He turns around and walks into the light without mentioning that she, for all he knows, just fell to her death. He’s not sad or concerned. And while I’m sure they likely omitted this scene for budgetary reasons, it has a big impact on his character. He didn’t leave Lyra to her death; he instructed his man servant to care for her and help her escape.

So what am I really trying to say in all this? What’s the point? Is it so bad that we’re giving characters more depth than a children’s novel allowed them to have? Well... yeah. Because of the way they chose to do it.

They chose to make Marisa more damaged, but they also made her much more violent. They turned up the things that made her bad and scary while toning down Asriel’s worse qualities so much that he kind of feels like a victim, which is a gross when his character is meant to be the epitome of cis white straight privilege.

[animentality]

I'm getting angry replies in my Gillette ad posts and I just wanna say.

If you're a man who doesn't do anything that ad was denouncing...then WHY would you be offended by it?

WHY would you be angry and say "not all men are like that?"

Obviously not, if you know you aren't that man.

Or maybe you are. And it angers you to be called out.

Maybe spending all your time dismissing women's valid criticisms of your privileges or their fears about being out alone at night or hatred of being catcalled in public is what makes you an asshole, not being the "core" problem.

Complicity can be more evil than the crime itself.

And ignorance is no excuse.

As far as I'm concerned every man that whines about the Gillette ad can only be one, or all, of three things.

1) the type of shitheads portrayed in the ad. offended of course, because being a shithead is fun and part of "muh" identity. you all can go to hell and tell the devil he left his toothbrush at my house.

2) shitheads who claim women don't have any problems ever and it's in fact men who are the most oppressed by the tyrannical feminist women who abuse men and guilt them into feeling like rapists. Offended of course because they don't care to listen to women's experiences and never believe a woman over a man ever. will always be the type to pull out statistics about more men being homeless than women even though we all know statistics are affected by a multitude of things and can never unilaterally mean just one thing.

Also? No one fucking said men are all garbage or didn't deserve to be taken care of. Feminism at its core asks for equality, and feminism that is based on true moral principles and not self serving egotism asks for a better humanity in which social justice can be achieved.

The Gillette ad literally also asks that we teach boys to be kind to one another, to girls, and to themselves. It also asked for girls to be kind to themselves.

I don't understand how this is an "attack" on all men.

3) the hardline neutral who insists that he doesn't care about feminism or masculinity or whatever, he just thinks the ad is trying to bank off of social justice culture to get more attention.

Which is not wrong, per se, but why not?

I feel like those who are rubbed the wrong way by this ad just don't understand that if you're not a complete shithead, you can forgive it for being "cringy" or "weirdly executed" or whatever criticism you want to throw at it.

If you fundamentally believe in its message, you won't have a problem with it.

If you do fundamentally have a problem with the ad, then you're going to come up with any excuse, neutral or not, to hate it.

"the sjws are taking over" "I hate virtue signaling" "I am no misogynist but this ad is sleazy for trying to bank off social justice"

This ad is not the Pepsi commercial.

It's not banking off of revolution as a hip and cool thing.

It has a message and sure it has little to do with shaving, but the product it's selling has to do with symbols of masculinity doesn't it?

It's relevant enough.

The truth is that if you're enraged by this ad, you're not neutral.

You have this belief in what it means to be a man and apparently that means harassing women with impunity, and then mocking them and claiming it doesn't ever happen, or if it does, then it's not "by you" so obviously it never happens.

I mean seriously, how egotistical do men have to be to watch this ad and say well I've never harassed a woman personally.

So clearly they never get harassed and anyway they're all liars.

Honestly.

Get over yourselves and either realize you're not one of the "bad guys" in the Gillette ad.

Or realize that by supporting the "bad guys," you become an accomplice to that kind of behavior.

And that makes you just as bad, if not worse than them.

[seventh-semblance]

I finally realized why I don't like Adam being portrayed as being an abusive, obsessed, crazy dude. In a story like RWBY there are many characters, a complex story, and a short time to develop all of them. Therefore the screentime each idea gets matters more than in a show with more time to develop things. What you see about a person sticks with you longer. Adam until the end of volume three was portrayed as a radical freedom fighter. His people are discriminationed against and he will take drastic measures to aid them. He's wrong, of course, but almost justified. Violent movements exist in real life as well as in fiction. It's hard to maintain peaceful ways in the face of violent oppression. Adam used to represent a serious, real life moral debate. But then he went crazy in V3 and stabbed Blake. And now he's just a crazy oppressers who stalks the only thing with tits who listened to his crazy ideals. And that's not good if we keep in mind that he was supposed to be the Malcom X of the faunus equality movement. By making Adam just oppressed and crazy it paints the picture that if you want to use radical moves for freedom you're nothing but a crazy, violent asshole. And that's bad representation of an entire philosophy. I'm not saying that Adam was the sole follower of that ideal but he was the only one who mattered. Ilia followed him but then switch sides early on. She was a good representation of how you can change you're mindset but that kind of doesn't matter when the moment is just shown as Bad™. The only other real follower of this ideal was the old leader of the White Fang who literally died the first time we met her. And there's the two fox guys who are just evil. So basically, you're either peaceful, nuetral, or evil and crazy. Ilia's story wasn't about how you get stuck in angry after being discriminated against for years and have to work to change your mindset to truly change things, it was just another person with a tragic backstory who turned evil then not evil. The writers of rwby have ruined the faunus storyline by painting the entire movent as either you're good, neutral, or literally Satan how dare you. Adam's character is just the most prominent display but unless they introduced a new symbol for the aggressive side the entire metaphor of faunus/ poc/ lgbtq+ will be terribly done.