#i don't like to reblog posts just to argue but op very much started the post with 'i wanna start shit' so

[honeybabymp3]

also i guess to each their own but the idea that jack doesn't make good music with her Um did we suddenly forget about out of the woods. i also dislike various songs by them and largely dislike midnights but cmon

[raayllum]

Since there's a new sock playbook happening and it's slightly different than the old one, thought I'd nip this one in the bud. In the past week three (3) different blogs have been made to rebuttal my and other's posts about the theory that Callum will free Aaravos. Which, fair enough - people can disagree and if I don't like what someone is adding to my posts, I can block 'em on both my side AND my main.

But, granted, that only works if the person respects the blocking boundary.

So here are some of the new signs:

Blog has left the old 'three words mashed together' schtick and is implementing a usually 2 word TDP themed mashup

Blogs are all mostly TDP with another fandom worked in

Blog is randomly made, reblogs posts in the other fandom, and then makes their foray onto one of my or other's posts to rebuttal

Known potential socks (in order of apparent appearance):

Virenhunter. Seemingly made on August 17th, reblogged my posts and others. Lied about wanting to not clog up my notifications since I was OP of the post they were arguing on and I had blocked them (simply because, so they had to make a new post - which is fair - but then offered up a false excuse.) Dragonrecap. The similar naming structure, quick appearance, and reblogging one of my posts to be contrarian in such close order is what initially made me suspicious this was a sock / burgeoning harassment situation.

Moonabovemoon. Same previous tells, also recently made, reblogged one of my clearly theorizing but also very much joking posts (note my own tags of "tone gets increasingly unhinged" and hordika asking a question of how I have also answered many many times re: Callum doing it to save a loved one).

As always, I don't really care if people disagree, but it's obtuse to 1) shove it onto multiple posts, 2) ignore blocking boundaries by making socks to get around it, and 3) specifically, repeatedly target things I've made or posted (mocking my "predictions achieved" tag when it's existed since 2019 and has had nothing to do with these theories until they started happening, mocking a post I made where I mentioned s5 being like a victory lap for my characterization of Callum not really caring about being Lied To when 5x01 proved that too, etc). when I tag everything accordingly in multiple ways for tag blocking purposes, I encourage people to block me, and you can use tumblr saviour to ensure you don't see any of my posts unfiltered on your dash.

Either way: PSA for the fandom, the usual old tells of "isn't Rayla so cute and small and Callum is so strong and principled," has a new front. He cannot / refuses to be reasoned with, cannot manage to have a respectful disagreement without either losing his cool or playing the victim when he's called out for it, and has a habit of targeting marginalized creators in particular (which given the sexism towards Rayla makes perfect sense). Best thing to do is just block and not engage as much as you can, and keep on enjoying the various theories and interpretations you like in peace. 👍

[anghraine]

[This is eventually about P&P, but takes awhile to get there]

My best friend and I had a debate about whether there's an ethical component to being wrong about something when you are perfectly capable of being right. That is, we were discussing circumstances when you are equipped (through ability and/or access to information) to reach a legitimate conclusion and simply don't. Is this morally wrong?

We weren't talking about fandom stuff, originally, but about politics and how misinformation spreads less through an abundance of bad actors than through maybe one or a few bad actors, plus a ton of people who simply don't check (or sometimes even care) that X thing fitting their worldview is true.

We've all done this, I'm sure, but the first example that came to mind for me was a viral post that went around back when the US Republican Party had a majority in the House of Representatives. The post in question was started by a popular more-leftist-than-thou blog, and was about how the latest Republican evildoing had garnered some Democratic votes, too, and thus Democrats should not be seen as all that different, blah blah. I knew people who approvingly reblogged it! Meanwhile in reality, not a single Democrat had voted for the thing, and the OP was either lying or (more likely) made an assumption without checking that it was true.

So we were talking about whether that mistaken assumption (supposing it was a mistake for the purposes of discussion) had a moral dimension—is it morally wrong to make a mistake of that kind? Is it morally wrong when it's so easy to check if a major Congressional vote is party-line or not, but okay when it's not so much an objective fact that it's easy to get reliable information about? What about the people who uncritically reblogged the post, who might also have checked? Some are people I otherwise respect, so ...?

Nevertheless, my friend is much more inclined to be forgiving about this kind of thing, and we did end up talking about how it applies to less momentous matters. John Wiltshire, for instance, wrote a passage (and later an essay) about Darcy's smile and how some critics have flat-out rejected Elizabeth's memory of him smiling at her, even though it's explicitly mentioned multiple times by Austen. Sure, a formal critical analysis that argues that Elizabeth is retroactively manufacturing the existence of those smiles is fundamentally mistaken and (however unintentionally) misrepresenting what happens in the novel. That's irritating to be sure, but is it wrong?

Even I wouldn't argue that every statement that turns out to be mistaken is a moral misdeed. But I do feel that there is a moral component to understanding the world around us as well as we are truly capable of doing.

And then I reblogged that earlier post about how Elizabeth's judgmental wit is glamorized and idealized, but leads her to make serious mistakes of judgment, though the consequences of those mistakes are mainly felt by Elizabeth herself, and to some extent by Darcy (whose shitty proposal makes it difficult to feel that badly about Elizabeth's excoriating refusal, even where she's partly or wholly wrong about him).

Darcy repeatedly dismisses Elizabeth's misjudgment as not really that big of a deal and certainly not a moral failure. Elizabeth does see it as a moral issue, though. This is in part because her misjudgment led her to actually do something (throw Wickham's lies in Darcy's face as part of her rejection, which could have made it very easy for Darcy to reject the whole). But it's also because she personally had solid evidence of Wickham's duplicity and inconsistency, and the abilities she prides herself on could have led her to see through him, she just ... didn't, due to her vanity and prejudices.

This colors the entire rejection for Elizabeth; she regards her actions as despicable and, in retrospect, humiliating, despite Darcy taking pains to excuse and forgive her misjudgment at the end of the letter. Even months later, she thinks of her refusal as wrongly petulant and acrimonious. Despite Darcy's own mistakes, Elizabeth is grateful that he values her judgment enough to forgive the manner of the refusal and the objective mistakes within it, and to identify where her criticisms are legitimate and then act on them. When he's blaming himself after her engagement, she's the one who points out that her behavior that day at Hunsford also merits reproach, which Darcy denies.

Undoubtedly this is partly because he loves her and is inclined to forgive anything she says or does. But there is that question of whether she actually was wrong—not just mistaken, but failing ethically—to believe Wickham. I've noticed that fandom (and even more, pop culture takes) tend to shrug off her role in the Wickham subplot and to elide her worst accusations in order to represent her rejection as purely righteous and accurate. I find it annoying both as a Darcy fan and as someone who really likes Elizabeth's overall character arc in the novel and sees it as the heart of the book.

But so much of her mistake with Wickham is a mistake in personal judgment. She's wrong about pretty much his entire character, and also wrong about Darcy in some pretty damn significant ways. And it occurred to me that maybe some people feel more like Darcy in this respect—a private error in judgment, however severe, is not a moral misstep, it's just a mistake and everyone makes mistakes.

But one of the things I like about Elizabeth, and have for a long time, is that when she's confronted with her mistakes, she's willing to turn the harshness of her judgment on herself as much as on others. She can be an ethically demanding person but not hypocritically so. Even when she's no longer angsting over her mistakes, she doesn't forget that she made them or cease to regard them as failings on her part. She doesn't sentimentalize her conduct or motives when they are not truly sentimental, but based more on pride and vanity.

I respect that a lot—I don't think most people, then or now, are willing to face themselves the way Elizabeth does, refuse to soften their culpability, and still come out with a sense of dignity, humor, and entitlement to respect. And I feel like treating this as ... you know, Elizabeth is just so great that she treats an understandable mistake as a moral misstep, etc, undercuts the psychological journey/arc of her character.

But I'm biased, because I do tend to judge willful ignorance and willful mistakes more harshly than many people do. So maybe part of the reason that Elizabeth's mistakes in judgment seem very significant to me, on a par with Darcy's failings, and also why I respect how she handles those mistakes once she's aware of them and see it as essential to the novel, is because my own philosophy can be pretty harsh on this point.

It does make this a very rewarding novel for me, though!

[roguemonsterfucker]

I thought the harassment over the Thrawn thing had ended, but I was wrong so now I feel forced to defend myself. All people involved have either been anonymous or blocked me, so I can't explain myself directly to them but I believe this stemmed from a misunderstanding.

I will own up to being rude in my responses, but I hope y'all will understand that I felt very attacked from the very first message directed at me.

Get ready for an image heavy post.

It all stated with me seeing this post in the Thrawn tags:

I saw a few other Thrawn fans making their own posts, indirectly responding to this criticism, so I went ahead and made two separate posts of my own.

Below is the first one, which responded to the OP's take on Thrawn's loyalty to his people, the Chiss. I hope you can see clearly from this post that I am myself a defender of Thrawn in many ways and very much a fan of his.

The second post is where the trouble started. I see now that my wording, taken without the context of the original Anti Thrawn post, looks like an attack on Thrawn fans. That was not my intent, though I see now how it looks that way. I was simply explaining my own view of calling myself a "Thrawn Apologist."

Now he's where the trouble really started. Someone very active in the Thrawn tags and who has followed my Thrawn blog for at least a week or so reblogged that with an addition that I took as very aggressive and patronizing. I felt very attacked by the response's wording and it didn't help that the person called me "hon," which I have always found a very upsetting thing to be called. I know it is sometimes meant in a kind way, but the combonation of the aggressive tone of the message and the patronizing "hon" put me on the defensive.

That said, I personally don't think my respond was rude or anything initially. I simply asked what they meant by their message, because I wasn't really sure what they were taking issue with, and in the tags put as kind of a message as possible to ask them not to call me hon in the future.

I should add that my pinned post says this: "I'm nonbinary. Please don't call me a guy or a girl or any other gendered term."

And I have had to previously ask people not to call me "girlie" and other gendered terms because I am a trans person and those terms trigger dysphoria for me.

Now here is where I did become rude and I freely admit I was very short with this person. I hope you can understand why from the above explanation that I was on the defensive and already a little upset.

At this point, I didn't realize that what this person's actual issue was was in fact that they felt I was attacking "Thrawn Apologists" because they apparently didn't see the initial Anti Thrawn post that I was responding to.

I didn't understand why anyone would argue over the semantics of "warlord" versus "war criminal" and I was becoming a bit distressed because I knew I had seen someone call Thrawn a warlord somewhere. I hadn't just pulled that word out of my rear end. And after doing further research, I found that I hadn't in fact made it up. It's Legends (not canon) now, but "Warlord" was in fact a title given by the Emperor to some of his military commanders, so whether Thrawn meets the definition of our world's warlord or not is a moot point.

Regardless, this is were the hateful messages began. The below message came from someone that clearly follows the person that took issue with my use of "warlord."

This person blocked me before I could respond and explain that the reason I didn't like being called "hon" was gender dysphoria.

I did start to think at this point that maybe this was over more than just me calling Thrawn a warlord so I made a post, to which the original person arguing with me responded.

But apparently that wasn't enough for them to seek out context or ask or give me the benefit of the doubt. And still at this point, I didn't realize that this person and others were under the impression that I was insulting Thrawn Apologists.

For the below screenshot, I have no idea why my main's username is listed as the account because it's definitely on my thrawn sideblog. Regardless, I recieved a reply that I responded to via screenshoting because I didn't want to reply with my main in the comments. Keep in mind, I still had no idea that people were upset that I was insulting Thrawn Apologists, though I was starting to get the sense that it was more than just semantics of whether he was a warlord or not.

And it was after this message that the person I was arguing with apparently decided I was making fun of them and they blocked me and made their own rant post about me, which is when I realized the issue wasn't whether Thrawn was a warlord or not, it was that they felt I was insulting Thrawn Apologists. But of course, they blocked me at that point so I couldn't defend myself.

Firstly, I think it's clear that they never saw my additional posts explaining that "warlord" was a title within the star wars universe. And secondly... I'm very confused as to why they call me an "idol." I made it clear in many of my posts on that blog that I never intended for people to follow it. It was a place for me to collect Thrawn posts for myself.

Also, they seem to think I was making fun of them with my response above, which wasn't my intent though I do see how they would feel that way. As I said, I was already on the defensive because of the aggressive wording of their very first message to me and it was only made worse by followers of theirs calling me a bitch.

I understand that I was rude in many of my responses. I own up to that. But I don't think that justifies some of the hateful messages I have been sent because this person reblogged my post without understanding that it was not intended to insult fans of Thrawn.

I have been sent many hateful messages to my thrawn blog now because of this. I thought it was over after this person posted their final rant about me but it has continued.

So... I just wanted to post this so that I could get it off my chest.

I know I was rude and I apologize. But I hope it's clear that my intent was misunderstood. Perhaps that is my own fault. But I still don't feel it justifies messages like this:

I never intended to attack apologists. It was a response to a hateful message in the Thrawn tags calling apologists annoying. I was laughing at the idea of being called an apologist myself, not at the idea of apologists existing.

I am sorry to those hurt by my words. I wish I could explain myself and apologize directly but I will respect the block and not go around it.

Thanks to anyone who made it reading this far. If you saw my previous posts from last night, you'll know yesterday was rough in many ways. And the weeks ahead will be rougher. I'm in really bad shape (unrelated to the above, though I can't say it helped =/) and I have appreciated all the kind messages I've received.

I won't be around tumblr much. I really should avoid it completely while I heal. My queue posts 5 times a day, so if you don't see any posts outside of those then I'm not back yet.

I'm sorry I didn't pick someone to take over the confessions blog. I can't deal with that right now. But rest assured that the queue is full for quite a while and when I'm able, I'll try to figure out how to keep that blog alive somehow.

Thank you all.

[obstinatecondolement]

So I started writing basically this post as a reblog of something else, but then I closed the app by accident without saving it as a draft, and apparently drafts don't get autosaved on the mobile app, so let's try this again.

(Lol, okay, and then I did it AGAIN. Wrote a bunch more and then didn't save my draft before switching over to the Firefox app to look something up quickly >.<)

Basically, the post I was responding to was arguing that increased awareness of anxiety as a medical condition had led to people expecting that others should be expected to manage their distress and prevent them from being triggered rather than doing the work of reflecting on if their feelings were rational or irrational, if their reaction was proportional to the real threat presented if it did exist, and why they had that reaction to the trigger in the first place. And just, like, generally getting better with situations that provoked discomfort and recongnising the value and validity of things that were uncomfortable or even distressing to you (even if not to you then to others).

And, like, it's not that I entirely disagree with this take, but I do think there is nuance to be had here. I do not think that the binary proposed by that post, where you could avoid triggers as much as possible and ask that other people help you to avoid them (which is the wrong thing to do) OR you could work on your distress tolerance so that you could manage being triggered better and work on desensitising yourself to things that trigger you so that it was less of an issue (which is the right thing to do), is a useful framing of this topic.

I think that it's entirely reasonable to assume that the OP never meant their post to be read as a universal mandate and that they just kind of wrote it off the cuff and thought that the nuances were obvious and didn't need to be spelled out explicitly, because they didn't expect people other than their followers to read it, so no hate to OP (who I believe is deactivated anyway, and so unlikely to read this, but, y'know).

But, anyway, here are my thoughts on this.

The TL;DR (and boy is it ever TL) here is: it depends.

I think that it is not always maladaptive or unreasonable to avoid triggers. I also don't think it is unreasonable (usually) to ask people to accommodate you in helping you avoid them. However, I don't think that it is (always) unreasonable for people to say that they cannot or are not willing to accommodate you and that you should then try to find other strategies to manage or avoid potential distress.

To give an example: I have an extremely severe phobia of rats.

Even when I tell people this they usually don't understand how badly I am affected by this phobia being triggered, because apparently a lot of people are a bit mildly icked thinking about rats due to their bad rep, but then when they meet a nice, cuddly pet rat they are won over, even when the cuddly rat in question is sprung on them unexpectedly.

If I see a rat in real life, it often takes me hours to stop shaking and months to stop having intrusive thoughts about it.

This is completely irrational. The real danger of me being physically harmed by a rat is vanishingly small (particularly when it is dead, which I will also be triggered by to the exact same degree).

Also, they are very friendly pets who are loving and intelligent and many of my friends have had/currently have/would like to have rats because they find them so nice. But knowing that makes absolutely no difference.

I know exactly why I am phobic of rats—I was told a scary, but fake thing about them as a very young child about their bites making you die immediately of the Black Plague and that if they saw you they would, at all costs, bite you. I was then told by another child, who I told about my fear of rats, that you are never more than ten feet away from a rat. I guess I thought I was having constant near misses with a series of extremely unobservant rats? But whatever. I got so badly upset whenever I did see a rat that, even after I knew both of these things weren't true, the panic response had become hardwired.

As a child, I used to be so afraid of rats that there was a period of time where I couldn't be outside in my own garden without immediately climbing a tree, and I would only come down when one of my parents could carry me from the tree to the door. And when I found out as an adult that rats are good climbers and, if they really wanted to, they could have climbed up a tree, I got severely triggered. "Are you afraid they are going to get you in the past?" my sister asked me. Yes. Yes I was.

So... rationally examining and understanding this anxiety is not going to, on its own, make it go away or make it easier to tolerate.

This phobia severely impacted my quality of life back when I was hiding in trees every day and couldn't sleep at night because I couldn't stop obsessing over rats and triggering myself, and I could have benefitted from exposure therapy that would have desensitised me to my phobia at that time.

It is not as limiting to me now though. I am now usually only triggered when I actually see them, and, although being triggered does affect me badly (still not as badly as when I was younger though), it happens infrequently enough that it is not preventing me from doing things that I want, or have, to do.

I do not currently want to pursue therapy to help me overcome this phobia, or make being triggered by it specifically less distressing, because the distress I would experience putting the work into doing that, combined with the time commitment and expense involved, is not worth it for me, given that my current strategies for avoiding the trigger work most of the time.

This may change in the future, if the cost-benefit shifts.

If a close friend whose home I visit, or someone I was dating, had or wanted to have a pet rat, I might want to pursue exposure therapy so that I could go to their place to see them without being triggered (currently, I would be triggered, although not as severely, by knowing it was in the house even if I never saw the rat and was never in the same room as it). It would be completely unreasonable for me to ask someone not to get a pet rat so that I could continue going to their house and, while it would not be unreasonable, imo, to not go to someone's house anymore if going there would trigger me, I would like to have the option in those cases. Particularly if the hypothetical person with the pet rat would be inconvenienced by only being able to see me outside their home and it would make it harder for them to maintain their relationship with me.

Also, while we have not had an infestation in years at home and the last several times it happened it was just mice*, I would, ideally, like to be able to cope with that eventuality better than I currently would be able to. I would also like to be able to help with dealing with a potential infestation, because I don't think it would be fair to put the people I live with in a position where they were forced to deal with everything alone if that happened. Currently, I live with enough people who this is not an issue for, and it's such an infrequent thing, that I don't think I am taking advantage. But, again, this may change in the future and I may want to proactively take steps to be in a position to help if we have a rat infestation.

So, while it may be something I revisit in future, I'm okay with just being phobic of rats and avoiding that phobia being triggered to the best of my ability at the moment. And I think that's okay and not maladaptive of me!

Now, there are obviously some phobias and triggers that limit people's quality of life and options available to them. Apparently buttons are a very common phobia and some people with severe button phobias have trouble leaving the house. In my opinion, it is a better option to try and work on distress tolerance and desensitising yourself to the trigger in those situations. But I don't think that even then it's an all or nothing thing where you have to go straight from not being able to leave the house in case you see buttons to not trying to avoid them at all. While you are working on these things, I imagine that it is probably helpful to manage potential exposure in stages that may feel distressing, but not unmanageably so, especially when you do not have a trained professional to support you when you're dealing with being exposed to the trigger.

There are also triggers and phobias that, I think, you have a social responsibility to work on to the best of your ability.

If you are a white person who is made anxious by being around black people because you are afraid of them then your anxiety is real and the feelings are real, but you are also still being racist. These kinds of anxieties can have potentially fatal results for black people who someone felt "threatened" by.

Similarly, if you are anxious, due to trauma from sexual violence, about the potential for predatory men to enter women's bathrooms while posing as women, with the intention to harass and abuse, then some of the solutions you propose might be effectively mandating trans women out of existing in public spaces. That's not okay! Ever! The fear you feel is real and the traumas that caused it are real, but your anxiety is not based on the true likelihood of this ever happening and making sure you never feel this anxiety by policing who goes in what bathroom is, not might, going to harm others in very real and material ways.

If you can't, despite your best efforts, overcome these kinds of anxieties, then the smaller harm to society is for you to sometimes be distressed by irrational anxieties rather than accomodate your anxieties in ways that encroach on the human rights of others.

And anxieties do not have to be based in bigotry to be unfair to others and for accommodations you might want to be unfair.

If, for example, you had a parent whose feelings you had to tiptoe around or they would explode in anger or distress, and as an adult you cannot communicate boundaries or tolerate disagreement to the point that everyone in your life is tiptoeing around you and analysing their interactions with you hypervigilantly, or that's what you expect of them, then that's something that you should work on for others, even if you're not motivated to do it for yourself.

You should also, when avoiding triggers, try to take as much responsibility as you can for limiting your exposure to them. If you read something that has a content warning that would have let you know that it might be triggering for you, and you are then triggered, then the person who wrote the thing that triggered you is not at fault. They are also not necessarily at fault if they did not provide a content warning.

You are perfectly within your rights to unfollow or block people/not read the work of people who enjoy things that trigger you. If you do not want to do that, you are also within your rights (usually) to ask them to provide a content warning. They are also within their rights to say no, and the appropriate response then is to find other ways to either avoid the trigger or improve your distress tolerance.

To return to my rat phobia example, I have every conceivable tag relating to rats that I can think of filtered on Tumblr. Photos do not trigger me as badly as real life rat-viewings, but they still do affect me and I want to limit how much I see them as much as possible. If someone posted a lot of rat photos, I might unfollow them. If I didn't want to unfollow them, I would ask them if they could tag for rats, and if they were unable or unwilling to do that I would unfollow them with no hard feelings and, if we had an existing rapport, might ask for other ways to stay in touch. If they agreed to tag for rats, but then couldn't always remember to do it, I also might unfollow them.

I could do more to limit my exposure to photos of rats on Tumblr, however. I tried filtering the body of posts as well, briefly, but that was taking out 70% of my dash and the vast majority of the posts filtered were not rat related at all (I think the filter was catching everyting with the letters r-a-t in that order). So, given how infrequently the issue came up, I accepted that sometimes I would see an untagged rat photo.

If I couldn't accept that, I would have either dealt with never seeing any words with the letters r-a-t in that order on Tumblr, or I would have stopped using the site. It would not have been reasonable to expect everyone to stop posting rat photos, or even expect everyone to tag for them.

Now, I said that it was not usually inappropriate to ask if something could be tagged, so when, in my opinion is it inappropriate to ask? Again, when it is an anxiety based in bigotry or which is harmful to express to the person you are making the request to.

For example, if you are triggered by seeing self harm scars then that is an entirely valid trigger to have, and one that can be extremely distressing, but asking someone to trigger warn ordinary images of their own body, as opposed to images specifically and intentionally depicting self harm injuries and scars, is not really okay imo.

Requests like this can also sometimes be unreasonable, depending on the context, even if in other contexts they would be entirely okay to ask. For example, it's very reasonable to DNW depictions of or references to incest in a fandom exchange sign up, but if you also request Jaime/Cersei fic then it becomes a much less reasonable request.

Similarly, if you are on Tumblr, you are implicitly agreeing for your posts to be reblogged and liked by others, unless you make them private or unrebloggable. It is reasonable to expect not to be harrassed or verbally abused in reblogs, but it is not reasonable to expect that people will self-police themselves to make sure they're not on your DNI list before they like or reblog a post of yours they see randomly on their dash.

I, for years, requested that people ask me before they reblogged original posts, because I had several text posts get a lot more notes than I wanted, which provoked a lot of annoyance and/or anxiety for me. But, like... people absolutely could have said no and that would not have been unreasonable of them. I was basically asking people not to use the website in the intended way, because I was born in the 80s and I still used my Tumblr as a LiveJournal. And, like, if people really couldn't or wouldn't agree to not reblog my original posts, then "no one is forcing you to post to the 'reblogging stuff' website" would have been a very fair point to make to me.

Tbf to me though, I did realise that if I put something in a tag that people were likely to be browsing, it would be unreasonable to expect that they would have read my bio and known that I didn't like my original posts to be reblogged without being asked, so I didn't do that as much as was possible to try and limit the potential for things breaking containment on me end. When posts with specific words started showing up in the tags for those words, that kind of screwed that up for me, tbh, but I did what I could. I think I blocked like one or two people who reblogged my stuff without asking first, but I generally just gritted my teeth and moved on.

Now that you can make posts unrebloggable, I just do that if I don't want it to explode on me. When I like... remember I can do that. But if someone reblogs something and I realise, hmm, should have made that unrebloggable, I just turn reblogs off so it doesn't happen again.

But, anyway, long story short: if you lie down with dogs (post rebloggable, public posts on Tumblr) you can expect to get fleas (have your posts interacted with by people, who you may not like or agree with). "DNI if you are over 25" is not a reasonable boundary, imo, and certainly "Freaks DNI" is not. My "DNI: anyone" request probably wasn't very reasonable either.

Long story even shorter: you implicitly agree to being exposed to some things, or to risk being exposed to them, when you actively choose to engage with certain works or activities or go to specific places.

By reading a fic tagged "balloon animals" you are agreeing to read about balloon animals (and, if you have a balloon animal trigger, then you have to weigh up if it is worth the possibility of reading something with untagged balloon animals before you click on a fic, because it is not something most people would think to tag for). By watching a movie with a certain rating, you are agreeing to potentially see the things that are required to have that rating. If you go to your friend's house after you know that they have a pet rat, you are agreeing to be in the same house as the rat (and if you go to someone's house without asking if they have a pet rat, you are agreeing to the risk that they might have a pet rat and you will be in the same house as it).

You can still be upset by it and you can leave/hit the back button/turn the movie off, but no one did anything wrong to you.

I don't think that if you have certain anxieties that you should just suck it up and it's your fault for having the problem in the first place and the only appropriate response is to just Not have the problem or to have the problem and deal with the distress without taking any measures to limit your exposure to things that make you anxious. I also think it's totally okay to ask for someone to tag for balloon animals if you like their other posts but the photos of their clown college coursework is provoking anxiety or triggering you.

So I guess the slightly longer TL;DR of all this is:

Having irrational anxieties is not a choice and understanding that they are irrational does not always help you to not have them.

It is okay to try and avoid having those anxieties triggered.

It is usually okay to ask for people to help you avoid things that trigger you. It is also okay for them to say no.

You should try to be aware of what triggers your anxieties and find ways to manage them, whether that is by limiting your exposure to them or improving your ability to tolerate the distress caused by them or working to make them less distressing to you.

Sometimes it is not reasonable or acceptable to ask for certain accommodations to avoid certain anxiety triggers and you should find other ways to manage your anxiety in those cases.

Sometimes your reaction to your anxieties and how you try to deal with them can be harmful to others and you should try your best to be as considerate as possible of other people with how you react to distress and how you avoid it (ideally, though, not to the point of scrupulosity that is harmful to you and makes you avoid asking for help when you are struggling, in case it is difficult for other people to deal with... this is a hard needle to thread, personally).

*Which was also triggering, not because they were mice (unusually compared to most people with similar phobias, I am not phobic of other rodents), but because I was worried they were rats and the sounds of them in the walls was triggering.

[larktb-archive]

So like I'm retreading well worn ground but like yeah there absolutely is transmisogyny involved in call outs like this. No this does not absolve people of their wrong doings or make give them carte blanche to be predators but like people are totally unwilling to examine the way in which transmisogyny can influence the way they behave in callouts like this. I am not going to name names but a number of people have done the "I don't care what gender you are" which just smacks of "I'm going to ignore the ways in which as a tme person I can subconsciously perpetuate transmisogyny".

Like if someone said "I don't care if you're black, white, brown, blue or green" we'd recognize that to be white people trying to remove themselves from the ways in which white supremacy is pervasive and runs through all currents of society but when we do so for gender we suddenly seem utterly incapable of recognizing that yes even when someone does something wrong transmisogyny informs the virulence of the response.

I would like to point out this whole thing started with a cis woman being called out this time and yet people still focused on the transfems. And you can argue that's because they put themselves in the center of the conversation but I feel as though that occurred because of transfems hypervisibility and the fact that their tme counterparts are very willing to hide behind them and let them do all the talking for them. With multiple tme people coming out to play defense for these people but not saying the quiet part out loud (which is they believe that pedophilia is not a result of power relations surrounding the autonomy of children but an innate illness that is okay to indulge in if you "theoretically" don't hurt anyone) it's interesting how the callout with dozens of names is still majority transfem in spite of these defenses. Sarah Z is not on the callout and the cis woman who started this whole debacle by being a disgusting bastard that should be flayed alive is a mere footnote alongside the transfems she's exploiting.

In the callout, anons who just submit lists of transfems without evidence are used as a proof and multiple spurious links such as "this person liked a post once maybe" are also used as proof. I never reblogged the original callout because it's bad and just poorly done even if there's truth to it. A version of the callout included at least one person who did absolutely nothing wrong and when I confronted the OP they just did not give a shit and doubled down.

Like these are problems and ignoring them gives people like this more ammo because they will just hide behind the fact that yes people will come down on transfems much harder than they do for tme people. If we (as in you tme people) do not work through these issues and actually confront your own transmisogyny in a way that matters then like these people will continue to exist in transfem spaces where they can exploit other transfems because that's who they're going to exploit.

[ablednt]

[Singlets DNI with this post specifically it's an in community discussion]

Not to start talking about this again but if any of my fellow white followers still do this please don't call your self-made headmates tulpa or use the term tulpamancy. I don't think most of the people using it do so to be malicious but here are some reasons why you should use alternative terms

It's cultural appropriation no matter how you want to look at it. The term was adapted from a religious practice in Tibetan Buddhism that has quite literally nothing to do with systemhood. Like it cannot be a case of this culture or religion shared with us because we're completely misusing the concept. If you're not a part of a religion don't use terms derived from sacred parts of it for non-religious purposes that's very disrespectful. (A lot of people want to argue this point but Tibetan Buddhists have spoken out about this before and though a lot of people use this point to demonize all self-made systems I've seen sources who don't do that and still request another term be used)

The term doesn't make sense etymology wise and the only arguments I've heard from systems who use it instead of an alternative are "it just sounds cool [because I think things from other cultures are just cool and aesthetic]" (this ties in to a problem in the witchcraft/pagan community but that's a different discussion) and "this is what I'm used to using [and I am the victim here for being mildly inconvenienced]

There's SO many better alternatives. There's self-made headmate/system, there's parogenic/parotive, there's specific terms that explain how you formed them like textform, and there's also the basic terms like headmate, system member, etc. Not only do these have no culturally appropriative origins but they actually describe the experience rather than just "sounding cool" and hell even if none of those do it for you there's a lot more and you can coin your own you have the power.

It makes people uncomfortable. This, I think, is the more important point. Like even if it somehow magically turned out that historically it was fine (it hasn't done that) you should still be prioritizing what people and systems of color have been telling you. We've seen a lot of people voicing their discomfort over the term and it seems to be a symptom of a larger racism problem within the system community. So when you double down and dig your heels in over something small like this it's setting a bad precedence and making people uncomfortable. At the end of the day you really should care about other people enough to do something small like this.

Now before anyone misinterprets this or tries to co-op it for exclusionist purposes here's some notes

Self-made systems are real and valid and also they're not giving themselves a disorder. Self-made plurality as a cultural and healthy practice is acknowledged indirectly in the DSM5 as being separate to DID/OSDD1 for people who still worship psychiatry.

I do Not condone fakeclaiming or harassment and will not tolerate it in this space. Any interaction that makes an attempt to so much as insinuate that self-made systems are not real systems or are less valid than other system will result in an immediate block.

[Going to also go ahead and say don't reblog this actually, I think if this one breeches containment it's going to be ugly and I don't feel like having to make a bad faith discourse blocklist actually]

[gisellelx]

I've got to object HEARTILY to Esme being Jewish. Domestic abuse is anathema in Jewish culture (with the exception of *maybe* some very very fundamentalist sects), and it's canonical that her parents knew Charles was physically hurting her. I don't care what time period we're talking about, Esme's parents would have taken her home and she would have recourse to a divorce. That headcanon is not awesome, it's extremely culturally tone-deaf.

Oh you have decided to come into my inbox to talk about someone else's headcanon. Well, strap in, anon, this is going to be a semi-long post because there are four separate things this ask makes me want to talk about. tl;dr--this is interesting and useful, so why not direct this comment in a thoughtful manner at the OP? First, let's talk about headcanons. Headcanons are what in the trade are called backstory. They're the stuff that you, as the author, know about your character which may or may not end up on the page, but which should influence what does end up on the page. When you're talking to the writer of a source, there is a "right" and a "wrong" headcanon because the author actually does know what they had in mind (or at least, they should; I happen to think that is often not the case for Stephenie Meyer). But when it comes to fans reading between the lines, making up their own headcanons to guide their own engagement with characters? There's no such right and wrong. There're some things that are better supported or less supported, either by canon itself or by history/circumstance, of course. We can agree or disagree on them, or argue about why one makes more sense than another, but when it comes to it, we aren't the originators of the canon so unless they're running contradictory to the canon, they're not "wrong" per se. Second. Esme as Jewish. This is a piece of Twi Renaissance fanon with which I happen also to HEARTILY disagree. While I happen not to be Jewish and don't know this particular piece of information you've offered, anon, there are two big reasons why I think her being Jewish is a nonstarter: one, the Jewish population in Ohio was very small in 1911 and mostly in Cincinnati, which was the largest city at the time, not Columbus. It was also very insular--a Jewish family was not particularly likely to horse-and-buggy it to the city to see a doctor. I agree, the way Esme's parents behaved is much more consistent with Protestant, Calvinist Christianity, which would make a ton of sense for the middle of Ohio at the turn of the 20th century. I've never fully fleshed this one out in my head, but I'd be leaning toward Methodist. The second reason I disagree with it is that it strikes me as very unlikely that Carlisle would be open to marrying a Jewish woman. This is a rant suited for another day, but please never mistake my curiosity for Carlisle's character as a blanket condoning of everything he is and stands for. He's quite racist, which we see in canon, he's pretty misogynistic, and he doesn't experience much contrition for the ways his actions harm others. The religion he was raised in would've taught him to be derisive of Jewish people, and the circles he moved in thereafter would not have offered very many opportunities for him to change his mind. So I am starting from a base of assuming that Carlisle is pretty anti-Semitic. I think he probably woke up on this front around the Holocaust. These things are actually why I find him so compelling--he's pretty deeply prejudiced about a lot of things and it means he has great blind spots I can exploit as a writer. Okay, onto thing three. So why would I reblog something and tag it with my "awesome headcanons" tag when I don't agree with every single word? Because it's interesting and fun and sharing fan content makes the world go 'round. And consistent tags make it easier to navigate old content. But shouldn't I be really clear that I don't agree with that one part just be sure that no one mistakes it for my idea? Well, imagine if every headcanon or meta someone shared was followed by a bunch of reblogs of people going, "Well, actually I don't like this part even though I agree with most of these..." this place would stop being fun real quick. I lived through a time in this fandom when fic authors told their readers to go fuck themselves in their author's notes, when people created whole blogs and livejournal communities just to anonymously make fun of anyone whose fic was remotely popular, where it was seen as totally acceptable to drag people's

personal lives out in the open and mock them for whatever personal thing they mentioned having done in service of you know, just being human and talking about their lives.

That sort of constant fighting makes you not want to engage with other people. Most of us just took our balls and went home. So I'm not going to do that to another fan because I enjoy being a fan with other fans. This is also the same reason I don't spend a lot of time going "I know you all love calling Esme Jewish but I disagree because this this and this other this"...like, that's just not fun for anybody, even if I can support my position well. I will quietly hold my own headcanon over here and I'm going to not jump on somebody else about theirs.

But what if the thing somebody said actually could be unintentionally harmful? Am I telling you to just shut up about that? Part four: your very odd decision to anon into my inbox about headcanons from someone else. What you've offered here is really useful information, because as you point out, it suggests something negative about Jewish people (an already marginalized group) that isn't true and therefore is harmful. So here's a much more useful way to address that. Rather than going anon into the asks of a person who reblogged it, which doesn't get you anywhere, you could choose to either thoughtfully engage the OP, or you could reblog it yourself and say, "You know, this particular headcanon is actually problematic. You may not know this, but domestic violence is actually very frowned on in Jewish culture and it's very unlikely her parents would not have taken her back in. That they didn't suggests she's not Jewish. To suggest that she is Jewish would ascribe this untrue awful behavior to Jewish people which, given the extent to which Jewish people were and are still persecuted across the globe, is a thing you don't want to do, even unintentionally in good fun. So I just want to make you aware." The latter is probably the better option, in part because then you'll ascribe your own blog to the comment, and people can know it was your well-supported point. You'll then allow yourself room to let the OP rebut directly about why they followed that particular headcanon in the first place and what they think of your critique of it. But since it's not actually my headcanon, and one I don't actually hold, I'm afraid you've come to the wrong place. Thanks for the soapbox, though.

[cacodaemonia]

I'm not adding to this to argue with anyone, and idk what op's follower count is like, nor do I care. But I would like to comment on two parts (second part is under the cut):

people don't come here to network, and it's a little strange to look at your followers purely as a means of distributing your own content.

Some people do. That was why I joined Tumblr in like 2010 when I was doing freelance illustration. It's quite literally an income stream for some artists who do commissions.

For the majority of us who are not hoping to support our livelihoods by sharing work on Tumblr, the complaints regarding low interaction are not about 'distributing our own content.' I've said it a dozen times and seen other people say the same thing: it's about having some sense of community and shared interests with people—not pointless numbers of likes on a post.

I couldn't care less about likes on Tumblr or kudos on AO3; if someone enjoys what I made for my own enjoyment and then decided to share free of charge, what's wrong with me wanting to hear from them? Most artists (including gif makers, podficcers, etc.) and writers on this site aren't here to churn out 'content' for randos who give nothing back. We're here because we love a thing and want to share our creations with other people who love it and will scream about it with us.

I just... don't understand why that seems unreasonable to some folks?

whether you're an artist or a memeposter or just a regular fucking person with 12 followers, YOUR own followers are your primary audience. as in, the people who saw your art and liked it so much they decided to stick around. and those people are very likely sharing your stuff anyway.

I 100% agree, except they're not sharing it. And I have no idea what it's like for other people who have shared art or fics on Tumblr, but over the past few years, I've still been getting lots of followers. And yet, things like reblogs and comments have only gone down. I'd say that, by the time I stopped posting my stuff on Tumblr about six months ago, I was usually getting far fewer than 100 reblogs on fan art (even days or weeks after posting them), which is about 2% of the people who followed me at that point. And most of those reblogs had no tags, so they were still very impersonal.

So no, I don't expect people who don't follow me to interact with the things I share. But I'd much rather have 100 followers who actually treat me like a human being than thousands who take and never give back.

That's why I like AO3 for sharing fics and art: so far, at least, the attitude of, "I deserve fics and art without even acknowledging the people who make it" hasn't permeated the community over there as much.

Finally, I'm not even writing all this for my own benefit; with the exception of a few events, I don't share my work here and don't plan to start again. But I think it's important for Tumblr users to try and consider all this from the perspective of people who are still sharing their creations here.

Imagine if someone irl said they like the things you make, and you just finished something, so you run over and show it to them. How would you feel if they looked at it and just walked away without a word?

Sure, participation isn't compulsory, but fandom wouldn't exist if everyone acted that way. :/

i agree that its a little strange to see just how big the discrepancy is between active users who post and reblog things and passive users who limit themselves to liking posts and/or voting in polls... but i also resent this idea of like. compulsory participation.

if people want to lurk, let them lurk. does it align with the core idea of a microblogging platform? not really, no. but tumblr is a public website and maybe its high time for some people to get more comfortable with the idea that you're always going to have a silent, invisible audience on the internet, who will read and watch and look at and listen to your stuff without making themselves known. thats the main difference between closed social networks like facebook, where you have total control over who sees what, and (semi) public platforms like tumblr.

yes, the whole like/reblog ratio thing has gotten worse recently, and im sure there are a lot of newcomers who simply aren't sure how to get started with a blog of their own (it definitely took me a while to start reblogging things when i first joined. and it was another few years until i eventually started making my own posts lol) and its good to encourage them, but i dont see how guilt tripping people is going to change anything, especially wrt artists

people don't come here to network, and it's a little strange to look at your followers purely as a means of distributing your own content. whether you're an artist or a memeposter or just a regular fucking person with 12 followers, YOUR own followers are your primary audience. as in, the people who saw your art and liked it so much they decided to stick around. and those people are very likely sharing your stuff anyway. next come the people finding your posts via tags. but anyone beyond that point--your followers' followers, and their followers--those people aren't part of your immediate community. they're random strangers who are here to curate their own little blog in whatever way they like. they're individuals with particular interests and preferences and not simply an abstract ~audience~ waiting to be fed. this idea that people who come across your stuff outside of your own little bubble, and like it, then somehow also owe you a reblog is incomprehensible to me. every single day i see art on my dash from fandoms i dont know and dont care about. and sometimes i click like just because it's well-made. that doesnt mean i want it on my blog

[adhd-hippie]

See!!! The issue I'm having with this is that you talk so much about neurodivergency, which is cool!!

But you're coming into fandom spaces (which are historically VERY populated by nd people--autistic people started the concept of fandom as we know it, and I argue that it would be pretty hard to find someone still into the original Star Trek that isn't some type of neurodivergent) and trying to force us not to talk about it? You're trying to force us to see the world through your eyes, you're trying to get neurodivergent people to shut up and view the world in YOUR way. That post was about a very specific scene from Supernatural, and you're one of the people derailing it and telling us that it's not valid to talk about. You are very specially talking down to children for showing neurodivergent traits (interacting with special interests/hyperfixations).

If you're not going to jump at the opportunity to talk down to a teenage boy about how his love for trains/mechanics/any more typical AMAB display of autistic traits isn't valid, why are you jumping on someone who likes a television show? Once again, it was about a very specific scene in the television show. You can't claim to support neurodivergent people and then speak over the ones you don't like. Autism and ADHD have always been huge parts of fandom, to the point that many people consider them to be inseparable.

Hi, so when I commented on the post, there were no tags marking it as a supernatural post, so I thought I was commenting on just a random post stating "love is everything" Once I knew it was about fandom I remarked that I was wrong and 100% in agreement with OP that yes Supernatural is all about love.

So you see my problem is that everyone else is allowed to make mistakes but I've been harassed for 3 days because I commented something on one random Supernatural post (that I wasn't even aware was a Supernatural post because the fact that it was a Supernatural post was only marked in the tags and I commented on a reblog) and I'm somehow telling autistic people they're wrong for being into fandom.

Please do go away.

[vacueabissi]

I was thinking about how parasocial relationships online are damaging nowdays kids' ability to properly interact with others, but then I remembered that it's not only kids.

Like that time I joked under a post (made by one of those very famous tumblr blogs that despite there is no checkmark hierarcy and no visible followers count, famous blogs do exists and have a lot of influence here) and one of their followers started to argue with me about how my joke was non-sensical, trying to "defend" op from me. (Mind you, I barely made a geeky joke under OP post because OP said something that a well known fictional character would say.) I was very dumbfounded, not because I couldn't understand why my joke didn't land on that particular person, but because I couldn't grasp (not even today) why they felt the need to "defend" op and bring "clearness". Among the thousands upon thousands of likes and reblogs and comments, did they think that OP actually cared about my little innocent joke? Did they care about someone trying to argue with me? Did they even SEE ours two interactions? I believe OP was busy doing something better than checking the notes under the post hoping for one of their followers to shield them from my joke. But when I checked onto that person blog, to see how old they were or if they understood the punchline at all, I was expecting them to be under 18 or something, and yet they were 20+. Which leads me to think that adults as well can fall victim to parasocial relationships, despite our generation growing up with internet safety tips being drilled in ouir brains during our school years.

When you feel like the person you follow on a social media app, that gives you content to consume, is your friend and wants you to "shield" them from any possible negative interaction with someone else online, and you feel like you know each other despite you being just a number among the thousands and thousands of notes... you should stop, put down your device and talk to someone in real life that is close to you. As much as I hate saying this because it makes me sound like an asshole... touch some grass and breath deep.

One day, a social media content creator will ACTUALLY build a cult around themself and you all will follow victim of it because you don't know the basic tips to internet safety.

[ravenlikesbooks]

It is absolutely refusing to let me copy and paste my tags to add ALT text or an ID I am so sorry. It's my tags from when I first reblogged this post.

ANYWAYS OP themself asked me to continue so I am. Because what else am I gonna do on this 6 hour bus ride? (Edit: count weird billboards mainly)

So the thing about Gem is that (with the exception of Empires S1 which is big sad) all of her series are canonically connected. So really if we wanna do a full analysis we should start back at like X-life, Legacy, or her singleplayer worlds. But that's a lot of prelude so I'm just going to jump in starting at her introduction to a lot of the current fandom via Hermitcraft.

So Gem meets a lot of these people for the first or second time. She's flung into the world in a ditch next to Pearl, and within minutes is introduced to the way the hermits play - that of course being a lot of death. She lives and dies and lives again, making friends. Boatem throws themselves into the void like multiple times a minute.

And then the world ends. Suddenly roleplay is a major aspect of this world as well. The moon grows in size and people start making hideouts, space travel, cults. Anything to try and survive. Gem enjoys the roleplay, she's good at it! And when the moon finally crashes she leaves, having fun all the while.

Next season, she comes back.

This on its own is not monumental. She comes back, does some roleplay, builds a base, starts a head dungeon, etc etc. At the same time, she joined Empires Season 2. This is where things get really important. Gem says it herself, she's basically playing dress up. Even from the beginning, before she revealed she was the same person in all her series, she repeatedly emphasized that she decided she was a princess. No claim to the crown, no heroic deed, nothing. For all intents and purposes, she just waltzed in and declared herself princess. Hell, you could argue that unlike many other kingdoms, within universe Dawn didn't even exist until Gem decided it did. This quote is actually from her "I survived 100 days in a minecraft flatworld" video but I feel it applies here anyways. "I also decided that since I am the only sign of intelligent life in this world, I get to be queen."

All of this is to establish that Gem Does Not Care. You can be as nice to her as you want, but if she thinks messing with you will be fun she will do it no hesitation. Gem does what Gem wants, and there is very little you can do to stop her.

Sometime through Hermitcraft s9, Gem learns about another server some of her friends have - a death game.

I want to emphasize this real quick. A death GAME. A game. About death. The game is death. Death is the game. Everyone understand that? Great.

So Gem helps Etho train, before getting thrown in herself to play Cleo's role. And Gem? She loves it. You can see how much she enjoys the chase, how much she relishes in the adrenaline. When Bdubs tries to warn her about Scar she brushes him off, because she's not afraid to take him.

So of course the natural next step is for her to join the games (remember that: games) herself, and as herself.

Gem has fun, as she always does. And that's why the ending of secret life is such a big deal.

Gem views this as a game, and always has. And slowly she realizes that nobody else does. And this comes to a head at the very end when it's the final few. When she tells Pearl "I thought we were friends". And Pearl and Scar kill her.

But she goes out with the most hurt yet still obviously roleplay scream she could have "A 2v1? You guys are gross!"

That's the thing about Gem that makes her so volatile. She is, canonically, the same person everywhere. And with that, more lore heavy servers she is quite literally a character playing a character. Normal pleasantries and tactics like the fawn response Scott tries to appease her with don't work on her, because life is a game, and where's the fun in predicability?

So yes, to quote myself quoting OP once more: "Gem is not a fawn. She's the entire fucking forest."

coughs. Everypony who wishes to hear about scott secret life episode 7 and is old enough to catch their own prey please gather under pride rock or whatever the fuck they say to call an emergency meeting these days. I need everyone to know why this episode is so unusual for him… I take back anything I have ever said about gem in my entire life that implied disinterest; Gem and her zombie apocalypse scared the SHIT out of Scott. NOBODY HAS EVER MANAGED TO DO THAT BEFORE.

[gold-rhine]

i don't consider this an attack, i consider this kinda pointless tbh? like wiki in not reliable source for overall narrative. its good for getting quotes from specific quests when you know exactly what quotes you want, but thats it. if your source is just "wiki says so", i dont see much point of discussing tbh?

like, your entire paragraph starying "As for realms, the leylines and currents are proven by the Enkanomiya quest" has no actual quotes and gives no reason why dragons are not connected to leylines. i played enka quests, including the event, and i saw nothing of the sort. i'm not claiming i have perfect memory, i could have missed something, which is why i ask for specific sources - like i gave with skirk archon quest dialogue or neuvi's profile stories. you just stating things with no proof and most of these things have nothing to do with my op.

i don't know what you're arguing at this point. "Ley Lines are all across Teyvat and they connect the Realms together, we know that because Irminsul grows upside down and it’s leaves are found in the Abyss/Void Realm." - so then your initial statement is wrong by your own admision?? you started with "leylines are a thing of Human Realm, while the other realms have their corresponding currents." ??? you contradict yourself. your only major point about my own post was that saurians are not connected to leylines, now you're saying of course they are connected to leylines. you're just moving goal posts tbh.

"But still. Irminsul is connected to the shared memory of the world, not personal memory" - yes, it is personal memory???? we see several times actual ghosts appearing bc of ley lines disorders. with personal memories. raiden's second quest with inazuma soldiers and raiden's personal teamaster is the most obvious example bc everyone has to play it to get boss drops, but every time ghosts appear in genshin is bc they are leaking out of ley lines. moreover, we saw ghosts of personal memories, retaining personalities in night kingdom in the natlan archon quest itself.

about dragon speech, in the very op and then in later reblogs i mention enka experiments - "although previous research indicates that screening is unnecessary — vishaps are, one and all, adapters par excellence", "Perhaps it might be more accurate to say that vishaps always had their own methods of communication, and what they are displaying here is their ability to learn."

but i guess hydro vishaps dont count bc egeria was not against dragons??? as if it somehow influences dragons intellegence levels??? how?? yeah, random geovishaps don't talk bc they are hostile to humans and never interacted with them otherwise. overall vishaps are not often forced to live with humans, bc they generally don't want to, but if they do live, they learn on human level.

also, i have no idea why you're talking about azhdaha having contact with ancient dragon civilization or dvalin learning from venti. my point is not that dragons innately know human language. my point was that vishaps are sentient beings on the level of humans, which is easily shown by how they can learn human speech just from contact, and saurians are NOT, because they live with humans for generations and can't communicate. tbh i don't see much point of dragging this anymore as it's going in circles regarding my own points and, again, i'm not fact checking your personal theories\timelines. i don't find it fun talking in walls of text without specifics i can check, sorry.

another thing, if natlan had leyline tree and it was destroyed (or mostly destroyed), can this be reason saurians are less intelligent than vishaps? like they are smarter than animals, but dont seem fully sentient and they can't talk! we know all vishaps are as smart as humans and can learn human speech, given enough time they turn into sophisticated yappers, but every vishap can learn to talk given exposure to humans, not just powerful and old ones. in enkanomiya they did experiments on vishaps and found out that any vishap can learn human speech at least on a child's level and they will improve with time. we meet a hydro vishap shapeshifted into melusine on Erinnyes who doesn't even have a lot of human exposure and still can talk and cooperate with humans.

so how is that saurians live with humans their entire lives and still can't communicate more productively than "rawr!!" ???? how is that the natlan's dragon quest that no one could pass in 500 years is just simple actions like walk through a room and touch a thing?? it would not be hard for any vishap to do, you didn't need a close friendship bond to do quests together with Erinnyes' vishap, bc like. thats a person, you just communicate what you want from them and they do it, its not hard! what was done to pyro vishaps to turn them into saurians

[tetosynthv]

i appreciate your apology and i appreciate you owning up to being hostile/not handling this properly, and i want to reassure you that it's fine and i get the point you're trying to make too. again i'm not here to start drama LOL i never was and still am not

i will be 100% blunt with you, i am not being a dick and wasn't being a dick, and i won't apologize for it. i'm always happy to admit i was wrong if i was, but any hostility or aggressiveness or emotion that you see in those messages are not actually there, but i can understand you're only perceiving it that way from your own trauma. i was 100% chill and none of those asks are emotionally driven and aren't even remotely done with the intent of hostility or arguing. i think people tend to get a little too...? eager to take confrontation as aggression but i am a full grown adult and i really have better things to do with my time than get upset and heated over things like this. because as you said, yes, this is a very minor instance of someone bastardizing my trauma, so i'm not going to get totally bent out of shape about it. but i am still allowed to gently approach someone telling them what they're doing is wrong and harmful and apply clarification where is necessary. i approached this situation with maturity and the intention to spread awareness and understanding of how issues like this can affect real victims, and now OP is posting and reblogging posts about cult awareness which is Honestly all i wanted was for there to be more awareness being spread about it and taking the topic more seriously

again i wish to stress that even "oh my god i love this character so much" ""cults"" are harmful and adding to the issue too, and continue to add normalization and stigma behind the actual label of what cults are. i approached OP with the intention of telling them that what they're doing is harmful and nothing more as a hopes that they would understand and either stop using the label or at least be more vocal about spreading awareness or educate themselves more on the topic. because honestly, IMO, if you actually understood cults to a more intimate degree i don't think you would WANT to use them in a joke-like context. again using my same point again: if you wouldn't do it about things like trafficking rings, why is doing it with cults suddenly okay?

i agree that it's okay to make jokes about your own trauma to cope (at least to an extent before it gets too unhealthy). but to my understanding, correct me if i'm wrong, neither of the founders of this blog HAVE cult trauma or experiences with actual cults. you are not 'desensitized' to cults or cult related trauma, you just simply don't understand cults on a more intimate level and have no direct experience with them to actually feel the emotional outrage you should be feeling. this isn't meant to be belittling or say "you don't actually care", i mean this in a 100% serious way, even my friends who care heavily about me and care about my trauma do not fully grasp the weight of how serious it is for me and don't have experience or education surrounding cult trauma to actually BE sensitized to it to begin with. because honestly cult trauma is only something that's so difficult to understand without experience

emotional regulation is something that's incredibly important to practice and achieve, and it's something i recommend looking into through therapy (if you have access to it, i understand not everyone can). having the skills to step away and catch your breath and refrain from acting on emotion and let yourself cool off before saying anything is something that i highly recommend looking into and practicing. it's helped me a lot to, when i get emotional, take a moment to vent about it in private and get my thoughts together before approaching the issue directly. at the very least being able to have a 2nd opinion or making a draft or Something to look over and reflect on puts a little bit of a pause between you and your direct response to avoid letting yourself lose control of your emotions

i understand you're just trying to explain, and i appreciate your POV, and i understand a lot of the "overexplaining everything to avoid misunderstanding/conflict" thing because i have OCD which causes me to do the same thing LMAO i just want to let you know that a lot of your response does feel like making excuses for yourself (particularly the "i was on my period and grumpy" part), but don't worry too much about it because i still get your point and i'm not upset or mad about it or anything

why exactly are you so dead set on using the term cult anyway? what exactly does the word "cult" have that other alternatives don't? seriously ask yourself this question and then reflect it on real life instances of cults and ask if you would say the same thing. because with how you're responding to me it doesn't seem like you're actually taking it seriously at all, assigning roles like "blood ritualist" doesn't seem like something you'd do if you took cults seriously either, i don't understand

why do you care so much?

[zwoelffarben]

I'll be brief. I'm sorry you misinterpretted my reblog. Because

Me: "cursed with knowledge of harry potter"

What part of this makes it seem like I like anything about harry potter? You came in with expectations and projected those expectations onto me despite my providing textual evidence that I'm not what you expected.

Me: "but"

and "but" a conjunction but does not negate the preceding clause: it contrasts the postceding clause with the preceding clause. "Sally like cats, but Jimmy likes dogs," doesn't mean Sally doesn't like cats. It means that Sally likes cats, Jimmy likes dogs, and these two things contrast each other.

PI: "...You could read an Android as autistic but now you’ve represented an enslaved autistic person, you can’t just separate and ignore the huge slavery aspect..."

This is where you imply that androids are all allegories for slavery. The implication that there's no way to write an android as just autistic, and if 'you read them as autistic then they're an enslaved autistic.' I grant you didn't say the thing, but the words you did say very much did imply it.

PI: "why are you defending hypothetical stories"

I wasn't agruing hypothetical 'moot points' for internet clout. I was arguing against the very the curtains are blue sentiment in these parts of trashmonkey's response:

trashmonkey: "There are stay-at-home moms in the setting, they don't need allegories." "cut-and-dry, pure and simple."

because it's something I see as harmful and worth of rebuttal. As a writer, a lot of the work I do gets done in subtext, and the curtains are blue as a mode of literary analysis completely invalidates my work and obliterates other peoples' ability to read my work; as well as other works in general. The sentiment expressed in these parts of trashmonkey's reblog reflect, and maybe contribute to, a culture of literary illiteracy, where people can read but they can't interpret the reading.

I very much agree with their conclusion, but they've used an flawed formula to get to that conclusion, and applying that formula to other works causes problems.

when this post is specifically about the fact JKR wrote into a children’s book that the enslavement she subjected a sort-of-human-but-not-human people to was actually pretty ok as long as their owners were nice because slavery was actually their biological destiny.

As to why at no point do I even address the terrible reading by screencapped OP nor rowling and harry potter itself: there are two reasons: firstly, because it's not relevant to what I'm discussing (which is trashmonkeys 'curtains are blue' esque response to the terrible reading). And secondly, because treating such a terrible reading with any amount of credence lends credibility to both it and the work the reading is malanalysis of.

harry potter is a solved problem, entirely uninteresting to debate about, especially with people (like screencapped OP) who argue in bad faith that it's something it's not. harry potter doesn't have multiple readings like complex literary works, it has one reading: that rowling is a blairite that thinks the system as it currently exists is good and any problems caused by the system are actually caused by just 'having the wrong people in power within system' so any attempts to change the system, beyond changing who is in charge of the system, are bad because the system itself is good. Everything, in all her books, reflects that worldview, and nothing in any of her books is about anything other than that. Any other reading which doesn't contribute to this centra thesis comes from either a place of ignorance or from willfully obtuse misinterpretations of the text. In either case, seriously addressing them lends to harry potter an appearence of complexity that it neither has nor deserves.

That's why I didn't bother addressing harry potter and instead started talking about something else. Because talking about harry potter as a serious work of literature is counter-productive, and the less we talk about harry potter, the less relevant harry potter becomes.

So again, I'm sorry you misinterpreted my reblog.

[transmalewife]

"Despite transmalewife's best attempts I can actually tell when they have reblogged my post" lol i blocked you i didn't get a restraining order. i knew you'd read it, that's why i directly adressed you in my post.

But since I am less tired and busy today i will add on to the great points in @totalsidekick 's reblog and respond to specific arguments op raises. not that it will matter much since you don't provide your followers with screenshots of my words you're actually arguing against, just the one instance of me being mean to you. which, fair warning, i probably will be again here, because this is just all very funny to me.

for example "I can't help it. I'm a scientist at heart. I like to study things, to know how they work. I like clear and unambiguous definitions of things."  why are you acting like a repressed seeker of truth when your original adition was a single, pointless, meaningless and smug sentence, absolutely not "persistent enquiry" or rebuttal or anything i actually said

I could repeat myself and say that the post we're discussing is not trying to provide a definition of transness. it has absolutely nothing to do with who actually is or isn't trans. i was just saying that giving legitimacy to the idea that there are people who fake being trans is bad for all trans people. but that's clearly not getting through, so i will pretend like the discussion was actually about who is or isn't really trans and engage with your questions, giving you the benefit of the doubt and assuming they were asked in good faith.

let's start with "The trans community at large seems to be incredibly cagey about actually telling people definitively who is and is not a trans person."

now, this is simply not true. the most common definition of trans is "does not fully identify with their agab". there you have it. case closed. foolproof method of telling you who is or isn't trans. things get more complicated when you add things like detransition or cultures/languages that define gender differently, and the definition can be expanded to include things like "in this specific point in time" or "within the context of western gender norms" but at the end of the day, there you have it. a clear, non-cagey answer most (english speaking, 21st century) trans people agree on

there are of course trans people who do not agree with that, and add very specific requirements, some of which usually only make sense within the american legal and medical system. these are usually the same people obsessed with pointing out "fake" trans people wherever they think they see them, and the same people i was criticizing in my original post. because the thing is. being trans is not easy, both practically and mentally. most people don't just wake up one day and go "ah fuck guess i'm a man". even fewer  "always knew" a nonbinary person, an early transition binary trans person, a trans person who's still years away from realising they're trans, a gnc cis person and a conforming cis person raised in a culture with different norms of gendered expression are indistinguishable from the outside, and no one but them will be able to tell you which they are. some of them won't be sure themselves.

now, you mentioned dysphoria. there was a concept floating around a few years ago that sort of died (if anyone knows why lmk), but i really liked what it represented. "social dysphoria" is the discomfort felt by having to perform the role of one's agab in society. and it is very often intertwined with body dysphoria because, for example, someone might not be that uncomfortable with their breasts in the abstract, but since we do not live in an abstract and neutral world, but a cisnormative and violently transphobic one, the way that they are gendered while having breasts will influence their decision to get surgery.





another thing is, in this very biased and cisnormative world that we live in, it is very hard to conceptualize concepts like dysphoria before you hear of them. it's extremely hard to pinpoint that a part of your general discomfort with your life is coming from a specific body part, and even if you are aware of it, it's hard to tie that in with being trans.  since i can't provide you statistics on this, mr science man, a case study of myself will have to suffice. I started identifying as nonbinary when i was 14. i basically stumbled upon the definition and went oh cool that describes so much of what i feel, i didn't know you could do that. and then i proceeded to repress most of that for years because i was nowhere near a place in my life where it would be safe to come out to anyone but a small group of people. i continued to present a lot less feminine than the girls around me and now i had a word to put to the discomfort i felt when people assumed i was a woman. it took me 4 more years to realise that i had body dysphoria, one more to decide i needed top surgery, two more to raise money and deal with all the paperwork. i had the language, i had the label. but its just really hard to feel that something hurts if you've never lived without that pain.

an example i like bringing up is gluten allergy. i got diagnosed with a mild gluten intolerance by chance, with a random blood test when i was 15. i can't really describe to you how it feels to suddenly realise you've had a stomachache your entire life. that your baseline, your normal is actually pain and that your life can get so much easier if you get rid of that pain. but it's exactly how i feel now, after top surgery. i can look at my body in the mirror without my eyes sliding off my chest like it's not a part of me. i don't spend hours forcing myself to look at it, spiraling into self hate, disgust and despair. i can get up in the morning, get dressed and leave the house, just like that, without spending hours changing my clothes, nauseous and upset. now, i feel normal. now, i have reached the baseline of everyone else.

if you'd asked me when i was 14 i would have told you "my stomach doesn't hurt" because i didn't know anything else. if you'd asked me at 16 i would have told you "yes, I'm trans, but i don't have dysphoria".

it takes years of experimenting and self reflection to even realise what you're feeling is dysphoria. When i was a kid, the voices of the boys in my class started dropping and i always thought it very strange that mine didn't as well, and i started speaking with a lower voice on purpose. i've also been convinced i was meant to be taller my entire life. it wasn't until very recently that i realised those thing were dysphoria by restricting acess to trans identity from people without dysphoria, we are also harming people who don't yet know they have it. people without dysphoria also of course deserve rights and respect on their own, but this enough should undermine that argument.



what else?  "I'm sorry, I truly am, but self-identification as the only form of definition strikes me as completely nuts. Words do not create reality. I cannot simply say "I am actually trans" and become a trans person."" now, this actually has me excited, because i don't need to do the work, just send you to read up on performativity theory, which i'm sure, as a fan of science and reason you're sure to love learning more about. in summary, it means that yes, you can in fact say "I am trans" and become so.  just like you can say "I do" and become married, or say "i promise" and become bound by that promise, or say "I want to be your mother" and adopt, or say "I'm breaking up with you" and become single. some words perform their meaning and in that make it true. sure, some of those involve a lot of paperwork, but you know, so does being trans.

now, I'm not fond of using performativity theory as proof of why people are trans, (I'm not fond of any theory that claims to do that for reasons i'll get back to in a moment) but I do think it's a solid basis for why we should believe them when they say they are.

this brings me to the age old and  most exhausing counterargument "If I can become a trans person merely by saying that I am, then it stands to reason that everybody in the entire world, including me, already is a trans person and just hasn't realised or said so yet." yes. i guess, if you want to be a dick about it, then yes, in theory that's true. but the real world is not theory, it's shit. and in this world, being trans is a fucking nightmare. it's beautiful at times, and i wouldn't give it up if i had the choice, but the fact remains that no one would actually do that in the long term, because the downsides of living as trans far outweigh any potential benefits a cis person might get from it, and that's before factoring in the dysphoria they would get living as another gender. but, if you're offering to prove me wrong, feel free to try it. this experiment could be the big break you've been looking for as a scientist. a few tips: stick to men's razors, they're cheaper and work better than the pink ones on legs too, do not wax your pits, the pain is not worth it. aloe vera and castor oil can help you grow out you hair, and I can send you a link for buying hormones online. if at any point in the experiment you discover a perk that was worth the trouble, please get back to me.

now, the reason i'm not fond of any theory that claims to prove why trans people exist, what is the very core of the issue, is that at this point in time it is not safe to prove that. imagine tomorrow someone discovers "the gay gene" the single undeniable proof. you have this gene, you're atracted to the same gender, if you don't, you're not regardless of social or personal factors or anything else. what do you think would happen? an extinction of gay people. prenatal screenings and abortions of these kids in particular, by homophobes and well meaning "concerned" parents alike, not to mention outing every gay child before they even  know what atraction is, let alone are ready to deal with the homphobia this would expose them too, and of course renewed attemtps to find a kind of conversion therapy that actually works. the world is not ready to learn why people are gay, or why people are trans for that matter.



and that brings me to the thing that bothers me most about all this, which is that this whole vibe of "cis male scientist on a brave quest to find the objective truth" is raising a whole fucking parade of red flags for me, because there is a long history of cis people doing exactly that, reaching the same conclusion i hope you did after reading all this, which is that there can be no objective truth in something so personal, complex, and culturally dependent as trans identity. but then they end up turning around and inventing a theory out of nowhere to support the discomfort they feel when forced to accept that there are things other people feel that they can't understand, and setting back trans rights significantly when those theories become mainstream. I'm sure a lot of trans people reading this (especially transfems) will be able to name at least two of these men offhand, (I will not be doing that because i don't want you to go looking for answers from the worst possible source) but this is a long and sadly proud tradition stretching fer back to at least the 19th century. the way to combat that may be a trans-led search into why trans people exist, but as I've established this would only do harm to us. and most trans people and allies (or at least most trans people and allies doing offline activism) understand that this is a waste of resources. we can't waste energy on a wild goose chase for the objective truth while our rights are objectively more restricted than those of cis people. and thankfully, that activism has a long and proud history too. Magnus Hirschfeld, the creator of the term "transsexual" was a scientist (a real one this time), but his primary concern wasn't finding out why trans people exist, but rather how to make their lives easier and happier. how to safely perform surgeries. how to establish a scientfic framework within which they could get legal rights, getting people "crossdressing passes" to stop them from being arrested for it. there's a really harrowing but also quite touching story where a young person was brought to him asking for a mastectomy, and was denied because he was too young. a few days later he was brough back in after having attempted to cut his own breast off and needed emergency surgery. (source) now, the staff of the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (intitute for sexual science) could have spend all night debating why Gerd Katter was really trans, but instead they opted to stop him from bleeding out.

to wrap up. i think you saying "and it irks me." is really important here. you are a cis man. who is or isnt really trans doesn't really affect your life at all, if you are willing to respect people's pronouns. even if there was empirical proof, requring every single person you meet to provide it would be invasive, ineficient and cruel, so at the end of the day all you can do is call people what they ask to be called and move on. there are things in this world you don't have to know, or cannot know, and that is fine.

I'm done now, btw. I hope you learn something from this, and I will most likely not be responding anymore. in fact, i think you shouldn't either, or at least take a few days to process all this before. do some science, you know, of which most is just reading all the science people have done on the subject before you.

Apropos of this post.

@transmalewife seems to have me blocked, which seems awfully rude and premature for apparently not knowing what I meant. I admit my reply was a little bait-y, trying to provoke the question of what I meant. What I think I meant was that words have meanings, and there should be no meaning of the phrase "trans person" in which I can be included. This is important because, for all intents and purposes, I fall into the same category of people as "fake trans person", which, according to the original post, doesn't exist.

It's perfectly true that the genders of various trans people are often policed by sorts who have no right to determine that kind of thing! But I would never go so far as to say that fake trans people don't exist, simply because I don't know the perspective of everybody in the world. I'm not saying it's a wise or even rational thing to do, but maybe there are some people out there who in their minds face incentives within their community or social group to be trans over being cis. It's not terribly likely for any given case, but I'm not willing to discount the possibility.

The thing is, the slippery slope works both ways! Sure, TERFs might say "this trans person is clearly fake; how do we know that's not the case for every trans person? Better start checking the genitals of kids", and that's clearly and obviously wrong,

but if there's no such thing as a fake trans person, then the only requirement for being trans is to say that you are. You might as well say that everyone is trans because nobody but the individual has licence to say otherwise. But the only difference between me and a fake trans person is that I don't tell people I'm trans. The difference between me and a real trans person runs much, much deeper, and would require much more to go differently in my life than merely telling people I was trans.

Right now the trans community is in an awkward position where people are broadly aware of them and the degrees of discrimination they face, but access to the means and ways of transitioning is still largely cut off for most of them, so they have to accept membership in good faith understanding that nobody is lying about their gender identity. And >99% of times that's almost certainly true! But you cannot say that for sure every single time, and my theory is that the greater the trans community's collective ability to access medical options for transitioning as well as social ones, the less they will be forced to take membership purely in good faith, and the more they will be able to develop the means to self-police those edge cases if or when they do occur.