#how invalidating

[justanotherignot]

@traceofexistence asked for these and I was more than happy to do it.

[everythingwasnormalhere]

There's so much wrong with "everyone is a little bit autistic"

Yes, allistic people might know a lot of facts about the things they like. Yes, allistic people might get a bit overwhelmed or underwhelmed sometimes. Yes, allistic people might not get an expression sometimes, mostly if it's the first time they hear it.

That doesn't make them autistic.

Those traits only make someone autistic when they become disabling. Because, big shock, autism is a disability. Yeah, even if someone is low support needs, because that doesn't mean they don't need any support at all.

Saying "everyone is a little bit autistic" is like saying "everyone struggles with this, so suck it up, you have no right to need help". Which is just pure ableist bullshit. It denies the fact that autistic people have higher support needs than NTs, no matter where in the autistic spectrum they are. We're not "neurospicy", we're disabled, and denying this fact is denying us the right to get the help we need, we deserve, to have a good life.

(yes, this rant is just because I made the awful decision of listening to "neurospicy (interlude)" by Jax. honestly I'd rather be called a slur than listen to that shit again.)

[elkian]

So I never really questioned Kabru and Mithrun's dynamic given what's coming up, but that episode really emphasized some stuff to me. We know already that long-lived races, particularly elves, have a tendency to dismiss the other groups as being childlike. But the sheer infantilization that everyone, and specifically Kabru, have to deal with in that episode really hammers it home.

When Kabru mentions his adoption, pretty much all of the Canaries start immediately treating him like a toddler. And we know from flashbacks in the manga that he received pretty much the same treatment from his adopter - I wouldn't say he was quite treated like a favored pet, but it's much closer to that than any kind of healthy relationship dynamic.

So when Mithrun stands up, gets in his face, looks him eye-to-eye and says: "You're plotting something. I'm going to find out what.", that? That is the first time in this scene - maybe in his life - that an elf takes Kabru seriously. Mithrun has his own thing going on, but regardless of his reasoning, he addresses Kabru as a person and an adult. As someone with complex motivations who could potentially trip him up. I don't doubt Kabru has in the past used that infantilization to his advantage, but it's blatantly obvious that he doesn't enjoy it. Who would? So Mithrun starting their relationship by treating Kabru as a peer explains a lot about their dynamic down the line, in my opinion.

Kabru doesn't have to prove his humanity, his personhood, his adulthood to this man, one of a group infamous for how they treat younger species. It must feel like one hell of a paradigm shift.

EDIT: I've seen it pointed out on this post and others that Kabru also shows Mithrun understanding and decency and sees him in a way that others haven't been and I think that's a very important parallel and good point.

[redcheekdays]

hawkeye & trapper's four (4) goodbyes

[dailyjermasparkle]

I've seen a lot of stuff going down on tumblr and I just wanted to let you all know that all aromantic, asexual, and aroace people are valid members of the LBGTQIA+ community. It doesn't matter if they are cishet or not.

[bucksboobs]

I do think at some point in the not too distant future, the 911 fandom, at least on Tumblr, is going to have to reckon with the fact that despite M!slash being the main driving force of the fandom, gay men like myself are in the vast minority (I think a recent poll put us at something like 6% but it didn’t separate bisexuals by gender so it’s hard to say how many mlm are actually in the fandom) and in the same way being a gay man doesn’t exempt him from being incidentally or purposefully misogynistic, being some other flavor of the rainbow doesn’t prevent someone from perpetuating homophobia against men who love men.

At some point the jokes about how Tommy is just here for dick or should just get dick and move on (when he’s already made it very clear that he wants a relationship with Buck) are going to start to sound like hypersexual stereotypes of gay men. At some point the constant push to get them to break up as soon as possible and for Tommy to die or get shipped off to Arizona or wherever is going to seem less like regular ship hate and more like wanting a gay male character to be punished for daring to seek a relationship with a man in the first place. We obviously aren’t there yet but I do think we should be aware that it is fast approaching.

[khaopybara]

oh no, p'jojo said kantbison are a lovers to enemies story. kantbison are doomed.

firstkhao characters whenever they have the slight attempt of animosity between the two of them:

[branwinged]

so, someone called cersei a white feminist on one of my posts (not putting them on blast, don't seek them out), and i feel compelled to point out that contemporary comparisons like this don't always work well.

westeros is a pseudo medieval world with no history of a feminist movement and where all women are systemically barred from possessing political authority in their own right. power is derived from their male relations, specifically fathers and husbands. see, the way catelyn has to rally the men in her father's name when she tries to arrest tyrion in agot. in such a world, when characters like cersei and rhaenyra desire to gain the same social and legal benefits afforded to men, to denigrate their efforts right out of hand (which is often what labels such as 'girlboss' and 'white feminist' are accomplishing), is on some level, refusing to engage the premise.

i don't feel it's insightful to call these characters white feminists because their political reality is very different from ours. this doesn't even work as a criticism of the way they're written by the author, because the text certainly isn't neglecting racial and class issues in order to simply tell a story centred around the personal empowerment of two highly privileged women. they are both royalty who still enjoy power derived from an unjust feudal hierarchy, power which they have exercised to maintain their positions in said hierarchy. but at the same time, the desire for meaningful participation in the politics of the realm is not being condemned. nowhere is the implication that they shouldn't have tried to resist their socially ordained marginalisation at all. and we know the feudal patriarchy of westeros won't allow a woman to possess political power in her own right without the constant threat of hegemonic violence. this is the tragedy of both characters. westeros doesn't respect their authority and in order to command that respect they must go to war, but their support of patriarchal institutions and methods of violence eventually makes them tyrants. and the miserable end that rhaenyra meets (one that cersei will likely share) is critiquing both the hegemonic violence required to ascend and keep hold of the iron throne and the misogyny inherent in the system.

asoiaf is historical fantasy, the thing about stories set in the past is that you're being invited to consider a world with different models than ours. not everything is going to have a 1:1 contemporary equivalent, especially not in a fantasy series. and when readers try to force comparisons anyway, they ignore the actual social systems that influence and explain the motivations of these characters, and also often end up creating dishonest, far less sympathetic versions of them (see, alicent being seriously labelled a tradwife). and finally, these characters are narrative tools in service to the story. cersei and rhaenyra are not a moral lesson in the "right" or "wrong" way to resist gendered oppression, but simply one aspect of asoiaf's exploration of women navigating power in westeros. catelyn and alicent are another.

[lyculuscaelus]

So lately I’ve been seeing a lot of posts asking people to stop trying to make Odysseus look nice in their works cuz he’s a “messed-up person in the mythology”. Your opinion is valid however I have but one thing to point out:

You want to know who started all this? Who started to “make Odysseus look nice” in the first place?

It’s Homer. It’s nobody else but Homer himself.

A non-Homeric Odysseus would try to murder people out of his own interests. He’d murder Palamedes without remorse (and we’d be cheering over this but it’s a murder after all), he’d attempt to murder Diomedes just to get the Palladium himself, he’d volunteer to kill Astyanax…meanwhile you wouldn’t find any mention of either Palamedes or Nauplius in Homer’s poems, neither did he mention anything abt the Palladium heist (and Diomedes necessity did not happen until Conon’s version), the death of Astyanax, the distribution of war prizes, etc. And all the details in the Odyssey seemed to deny the existence of Nauplius’s vengeance at all, so Odysseus would not take any of the blame.

A non-Homeric Odysseus would be depicted as “cruel, treacherous”, meanwhile in book 10 of the Iliad Odysseus was not mentioned to have killed anyone during the marauding, neither did he promise Dolan anything at all. The negative interpretations are denied by these details subtly put by Homer.

A non-Homeric Odysseus would be widely known as a “coward” for only shooting arrows from afar. But Homer gave him a spear and had him absolutely slaying in both the Iliad and the Odyssey. That part of Ajax’s speech was invalid already.

Most importantly—a non-Homeric Odysseus would be having kids everywhere else, and the loyalty to his own wife as seen in the Odyssey is no where to be found. Meanwhile his lineage was a single-son line made by Zeus in the Odyssey, and his love for Penelope was one of his main drives, especially seen in book 5 of the Odyssey. He loved his family as a loving parent—something you don’t get to see in most of the non-Homeric writings—for most of the time they followed a different tradition indeed, in which Odysseus wasn’t half as nice as in the Odyssey.

TL;DR: in case you haven’t noticed, the characterization of the Homeric Odysseus was quite different from a non-Homeric version of Odysseus. It’s not that Homer didn’t know of the existence of other versions—he knew them too well, which is why in his version of the story, you don’t get to see any mention of them.

[bixels]

I'm not getting into The Giving Tree discourse...

[trappedinafantasy37]

Since Minthara presents an exterior shell made of steel, and she's sometimes mean, and is an absolute badass in battle, she is often treated and perceived as someone who feels no emotions. And this often occurs to individuals who do put on such a tough exterior. It also does not help that many people perceive evil characters as incapable of doing or feeling anything other than evil. That love and evil are innately incompatible.

But Minthara is not emotionless, she does feel things. Sadness, grief, fear, loneliness, anger, anxiety, paranoia, vengeance, love. She can laugh, she can tell jokes, she can cry, she can smile, and she does get upset at things. If anything, she is emotionally repressed and emotionally guarded and the times where she does really express her more negative and vulnerable emotions is when it becomes too much to hold back and it comes out a little over the top. We have to remember she comes from a society in which such outward emotional expression would be rewarded with social punishment, religious scorn, or even death. So she really doesn't have the healthiest mechanisms to express her emotions.

She hides what she feels all the time as a means of keeping herself safe from punishment. She keeps it to herself cause she does not want you to see her as weak, as she would have been in the past. And she certainly does not want you or anyone else to punish her for it either. She hides behind little pet names and even using words from languages she knows you don't understand as that is the only way she feels safe being vulnerable with you. In her past, her love was rewarded with new wounds and new scars. She is terrified to open up to you, fearing that you will hurt her because she loves you. That her love for you won't actually be enough to stop you from hurting her. And she will only ever admit she loves you in contexts that have a high risk of death because there's really not much for her to lose at that point so she may as well tell you.

She also has a habit of intellectualizing what she feels and experiences so that they appear as "rational" and "logical" rather than emotional and to distance herself from her emotions. She says it takes a sharp mind to have sympathy for someone who suffers unnecessarily. She is trying to make it appear that emotions like sympathy is a matter of the mind, not the heart. That it is a mark of intelligence, because otherwise it would be the mark of weakness.

She blames herself for her own torments, like she deserved the awful things that happened to her. She frames the situation like she is more at fault and more deserving of blame, than the people who hurt her. It is the only way she can find any reason in what happened to her and any reason in her tormentors actions. That she did something wrong and induced someone's wrath upon her, rather than acknowledging that the person who hurt her is just a bad person.

She deserved what Ketheric and Orin did to her because she was "weak, passive, proud". That her emotional state had blinded her from the trap that was set, giving Ketheric and Orin ample opportunity to attack her. That if she hadn't felt those exact emotions, then it wouldn't have happened. She could have seen the trap coming, or she could have fought back.

Or if you attempt to tell her that her childhood was rough and her mother abused her, she immediately deflects by saying, "it could have been worse" and therefore, what she did actually experience wasn't really that bad. And yeah, sure, maybe she needed certain lessons given that she lived in a cruel and dangerous society like Menzoberranzan where she had to be prepared for violence at all times. But trauma is not born of love, it is born of fear, of pain, of agony, and her mother still tried to kill her. Regardless of her mother's intent, it was the first broken bond of trust and it left a mark on Minthara. Where she began to believe that her mother would torment her for torments sake, and she had doubts on whether or not her mother actually loved her.

When you encounter the first Orin imposter, it's pretty damn obvious she is terrified. And you kinda gotta squeeze it out of her to admit that she's afraid. Where it's "I'm afraid of Orin because she is capable of this, this, and this, and you should be too" rather than "I am afraid of Orin because she hurt me." And she begs you, BEGS, to keep her safe because she knows her fear makes her vulnerable to Orin.

She doesn't even truly acknowledge that she wasn't at fault for what Orin did to her until Orin is dead. She doesn't start putting the blame on Orin until Orin is dead. She doesn't go through the emotional process of sympathizing with herself until Orin is dead. And she doesn't admit that she undoubtedly has trauma, until Orin is dead. She gets so wrapped up, and so lost in her own fear and paranoia that she never has the room to properly process the things that happen to her. That her primary concern right now is keeping you, the others, and herself safe and her emotions can wait because wallowing in them will only make her weak. Only does the distance of death give her the room to start healing. Only problem is that there have always been threats and they never end, they never stop. So it is rare for Minthara to ever have a moment of peace and safety to work through what she feels and they just get backed up. Ignoring your problems does not make them go away.

So you wanna know what will happen when an embrace Durge betrays her? She will fall to her death, a knife in her belly, blaming herself for your betrayal. All her worst fears have come to pass and you were indeed a lover who hurt her because she loved you, and that she was a fool to ever trust you at all. That if she didn't love you, maybe you wouldn't have hurt her. She doesn't understand your reasoning, she can't make sense of it, she doesn't know why you'd betray her, so it must have been her fault for thinking you'd be different. That if she hadn't been so loyal, so devoted, that she could have been spared. That her belief that you would rule together is what damned her. She will die blaming herself for her own murder before she ever gets a chance to start blaming you.

[blackbatcass]

listen I know it’s kind of corny and inaccurate to act like every single person in the dc universe knows each other and is besties but it IS endlessly funny to me to follow the web of connections and see how many degrees removed from each other everyone is.

like look at the arrowfam okay. ollie and dinah are together, ollie is homoerotic best friends with hal, dinah is homoerotic best friends with babs. roy is dating dick, has a kid with jade, and is basically an adoptive father to both grant emerson and rose wilson. connor is dating kyle and is constantly followed around by eddie fyers. mia is friends with a lot of the second gen teen titans kids, had an on-again-off-again thing going on with steph for a while, and is currently dating sienna. emiko is besties with courtney and some of the other recent teen titans. sin has a small army of protective aunts from the birds of prey. the real question is how far does it go before ollie puts a cap on the number of people who are invited to family brunch on sundays

[emerging-jew]

Okay here's my spicy take:

It's really convenient for white westerners, especially Americans, to have the stance that being indigenous expires a certain time after colonization and I think that stance isn't pushed back against nearly often enough. And to go a step further I think the take is itself a subtle act of colonization

[pluralhottakes]

sometimes pro endos and anti endos should just. chill. interact. don't limit yourself to only interacting with people with morals that are 100% the same as yours. everyone's all "no one is perfect" until the imperfection is that they don't agree with you on something. like no actually flaws aren't just skills people aren't good at, they're also moral things

tl;dr just chatting with people who disagree with you is ok and not everything is about syscourse

.

[transmascutena]

there are several different translations of rgu and sometimes they make sentences have completely different meanings between them and it drives me a little bit crazy

like this moment in the first episode.. these things are both accurate insights into utena's character and motivations but they're also completely different from each other. idk which is more accurate to the original japanese, maybe it's a sentence that can mean both depending on context or something?

[deoidesign]

I've been told my comic feels like it was written by AI.

I suppose I'm not trying to be groundbreaking. I'm not interested in pioneering genres. I'm not writing for the purpose of literary analysis.

But written by AI...?

I'm already someone who has my humanity questioned. My identity erased. My existence disrespected. It could be worse. Anything could be worse.

But AI?

I spend weeks writing single scenes, toiling over the implications of single lines. I have goals. My writing has intent.

If you cared to read deeper, perhaps you'd see the themes. Maybe then you'd see the value. If you tried to analyze it maybe you'd see something there.

Maybe you'd see me.

Someone told me my comic seemed like it was written by AI.

And my humanity was denied one step further in that my voice was not seen in the work I've poured years of my life into.