#i just see a lot of discourse on the ending no matter what version it is and honestly

[euniexenoblade]

tl;dr version: a very frequent and more recent flavor of trans exclusionism, transmisogyny, and transphobia at large has started to bubble up as an overpowering, overwhelming (and fake) acceptance of gnc cis people.

The actual long version:

Trans people, especially trans women, when they want to come out or explore their gender are often met with loved ones, family, or friends telling them "you can just be gnc, you don't know you're actually trans, men can be feminine, you should try that before scary life changes" we often talk about how this is a move by abusive, transmisogynistic people in our lives, who pretend to to care about gnc people, but in reality it's just transphobia manifesting as a false support. They often manipulate trans people into not pursuing transition and then lay on all the manipulation to convince us we were so silly to think we're trans afterwards.

Though there's a lot of people who still see it as honest support for the gnc, most of us are pretty clear that it's transphobic. But, another way this takes form is from other trans people, there are a lot of trans people with internalized transphobia who only view the existence negatively and when you talk about people potentially being trans, you activate their rapid internalized self hate: how can you say that? You can't know someone else's gender! You're forcing them to be trans! Men can be gnc! You're actually the transphobic one!

You also see it take form as things like "egg prime directive." "You can't tell the egg they might be trans!!!" Yes, you can. And you probably should. Trans people are not some mythical once in a blue moon thing. We are everywhere. There's lots of us. Being trans is not a bad thing, it's simply just a thing. Acting like you can't tell people they're trans is treating trans people like we're dirty secrets, a thing to be ashamed of, you're treating it like an insult. The truth of the matter is, telling someone they're exhibiting things associated with trans people can help speed up the process, less dysphoria to agonize over, less confusion as to what's going on, you can help kickstart a path to happiness.

But these people don't. Cuz they don't *want* people to be trans, and very specifically don't want people to be transfem. I don't need to get into the polls that showed most transmascs think telling a friend they might be a trans woman is morally wrong, you've seen it already. I don't need to tell you about how a transfem mentioned a specific person in the media seemed transfem, just for people to harass them (idk pronouns) off the site, just for people to confirm that yes - the individual in the news was likely transfem. And with that realization didn't come an apology, didnt come a new understanding, the trans and "pro trans" harassers stuck to their guns "recognizing transhood in others the way you see it in yourself is the same as transvestigation, the right wing transphobic conspiracy theory!"

This topic has been talked about a lot this past year, with the egg joke discourse, people getting harassed and ran off the site for correctly mentioning someone seems transfem, the constant harassment and blog deletion of trans women, the onslaught of harassment from the transandrodorks and terfs, etc etc. but I feel like it never gets correctly classified as a form of exclusionism. We easily recognize truscum exclusionism as what it is: "youre nb? You don't try to pass? You don't shave? Lol fake trans" it's the blue hair with pronouns schtick. It's gatekeeping the community. But, in the same respect, the "you can't just say people are trans" "it's ok to be gnc!" anti egg joke types of people are just as exclusionary. One end it's "you aren't a true transexual" and the other is "be gnc instead, being trans is a bad thing."

It's the projection of internalized transphobia into a policy. You can't tell anyone they're trans because you don't see trans people as anyone, you see them as weird monsters. That's a really depressing form of exclusion, but exclusion all the same.

[thewebcomicsreview]

so what's your take on the recent "stonetoss is a much better comic than haus of decline because it has fewer words" over on twitter?

I really wanted to reply with a snarky dismissive one-liner. I had one written and everything, but then I wanted to make sure I understood the context and looked into this and ugh. Now I have to explain Twitter drama, this sucks.

Okay. Christ.

Haus of Decline makes this comic

The comic pops up again, and a person named Basil sees it and has a take that it has too many words.

As arguably the most prominent Webcomic Critic out there (which is the say, the only one still doing it), I kind of prefer the wordless version as well, but it's a matter of taste, more than an "objectively correct" take.

Basil then follows up on that take with a rather spicier one

It's worth noting here that Basil is saying Hans Kristian Graebener is "better" in the sense that they believe it's more effective propaganda, not in their own personal opinion of quality. And that's....arguable? For one, Haus of Decline isn't really trying to be left-wing propaganda, it's just shitposting, and for two I think Hans Kristian Graebener's effectiveness is way more complicated and sophisticated than just "brevity". And for three, saying Hans Kristian Graebener is "better comics" is really ill-advised, especially given some context I'll reveal shortly.

Haus sees this, calls Basil a moron, and it turns into a dumb stupid internet argument where both people look bad. And being, again, the top Webcomic Critic, I can confirm that sometimes when you call a webcomic bad the creator will get mad at you over it and that's just something you have to expect and live with and try not to beclown yourself in response to. I don't think Basil responded well here, and "just learn to take criticism" is a pretty common and loaded phrase in Webcomics Discourse. Still, whatever. A questionable take led to a short slap fight. That would be the end of it.

Except. The context.

Seven or eight months ago, Basil made this tweet.

Which is a far better tweet, and is now a meme used by liberals in intra-left twitter discord fights to dunk on the anti-voting Trump-curious twitter left. This tweet also came around the time Will Stancil was whipping a lot of normie liberals to push back against the anti-Biden narrative and obviously the election itself has led a notable shift in the vibes where you're seeing a lot more "Biden's not that bad" takes and even a bit of "Actually, Biden is good and I'm tired of pretending he's not" in leftist spaces. And if you follow my personal account you'll know that my vibes have also shifted in that direction a lot. Basil obviously didn't cause the shift, even Stancil didn't, it was the election, but it's their name on the top of the tweet that's used as an anti-anti-voting meme that the left still doesn't has a great response to, so a lot of leftists fucking hate Basil. The kind of passionate hatred you only feel when you're getting clowned on by Matthew fucking Yglesias. So there's a huge hate mob against Basil in the way that hate mobs tend to occur.

This all attracts the attention of Hans Kristian Graebener, who pops out a comic taking a shot at Haus over this. Which is, honestly, a much better example of why Hans Kristian Graebener is effective propaganda than the brevity thing, because god damn did that pour gasoline on the fire, and....well....tldr:

My take is that this whole fight is incredibly stupid, no one involved looks good, and the only one benefiting from it is the literal fucking Nazi.

[rpfshippingpolls]

Do you ship it?- RPF edition!

Heya gamers- do you like rpf? If so, send in a ship and we’ll see what others think!

Inspired by @do-you-ship-it-polls but not associated with them!

Also check out @new-proshipping-polls!

RULES

NO DISCOURSE REGARDING RPF ITSELF. If you don’t like rpf, please just block this blog and move on with your day. I won’t engage in any discourse, but any hate sent to me will be deleted and anyone being a dick in the notes of a poll will be blocked. This is meant to be a positive space

This should go without saying but nothing pedophilic or involving minors in general. Also, no incest (I’m personally uncomfortable with it but if you ship it yall are fine idc)

Originally I had a rule about no ultra-pieces of shit but then I started getting a lot of Stalin yaoi so honestly no rules anymore. I’ll decline things that make me personally uncomfortable tho

Regarding MCYT ships: I’ll be polling based on the content creators and NOT the characterized versions they play. If you ship the content creators, then send them my way! But if you just ship the characters, then don’t submit them here

I literally always screw up when getting pictures or writing names btw sorry gang

I don’t have discord so if you submit an image that’s a discord link odds are I probably won’t be able to access it, so I’d rather you use other image sources. If you really want to use that image and can’t find another way, just dm it to me.

Also: the key word in “real person fiction” is “fiction.” In the end, we all need to acknowledge that these ships aren’t real (and if the people in question are together irl, understand that their relationship is different than how it is in your head). These are fictionalized versions of celebrities and we shouldn’t intrude on their personal lives by harassing them or their loved ones- especially their partners. No matter what side of the argument you’re on for rpf, just be civil and respectful and we’ll all be fine!

SUBMISSIONS

And here’s the google sheet for this blog! Submissions in green have been posted, submissions in grey are posts that have been queued, submissions in yellow are ones with an image link I can’t access so are on hold, and submissions in red are ones I’ve rejected for any reason (the last column is one I’ve added to explain why). This is manually updated by me, so don’t expect this to be accurate 100% of the time.

[blackpilljesus]

I've not dated or had close relations with moids in years. I've been on the path to spending the rest of my days as a single childfree woman & committing to it as an osawoman. During this time here's what I've learnt, shorter version here:

This lifestyle is a privilege - being able to exist without having to directly depend on a moid romantically/sexually is a luxury. Know the privilege you have and how you can take full advantage of it and keep yourself set. We arent living this way solely bc we're smarter, we were just momentarily luckier. Most women are a political/natural disaster away from losing everything. Bear this in mind; along the way think of "what if" to best start preparing yourself.

Dont bother justifying your ways to people - Most wont and dont want to get it. Save your breath. By getting into back and forth arguments over not marrying moids & not having children you are digging a deeper hole for yourself by giving them more fodder to counter. They wont change their minds. End the conversation short & move on.

You cant save everybody - Ditch the saviour complex. We all get dealt bad hands in life; some worse than others. Other peoples lives arent your responsibility, there's only so much you can do because you've got your own issues too. Besides some are too far gone, you'll only end up drowning or being burned trying to save others especially if they dont want saving.

Recruitment is a waste of time - I often see extensive discourse around this topic w/ some women trying so hard to recruit others into this lifestyle or being separatists, wgtow, etc. All this does is waste time that can be spent on building instead. If some women dont get it oh well it's not the end of the world (although every woman does get it, they're just doing what they can t survive) it doesn't matter long term TO YOU because if you're serious you dont need other womens understanding/stamp of approval to build a network/resources for women; you can get started without them; heck some may join once they see the value like how so many women broke up with their partners after watching the barbie movie. Some women are more focused on recruitment than living the single childfree life they claim to be about and it consumes them - dont let recruitment consume you. Besides other women willingly engaging with moids buys you some time; those who know - know.

Most activism is a waste of time. Things only change when it benefits those in power but they will never relinquish their power entirely. It's great to put knowledge out there for others to learn but getting into discourse having to justify yourself & being swallowed by your activism will do more harm than good. Most activism is a stepping stone at most for the next chapter of your life. Learn to game the system instead of changing the system.

Focus on yourself. Everything as we know it is rooted in the system that has been perfected over the millenias. The problems of misogyny, racism, ableism, etc have existed before we were born and will exist after we die (part of why im not birthing into this mess). Trying to change it is a losing battle. This doesnt mean dont advocate or care about anything but look out for yourself first & be comfortable learning to existing between the cracks. It'll be quite the exercise tho as we've been socialised to prioritise others.

This is not a lifestyle one simply chooses it's something that chooses you. This isn't for everyone, those who know; know. If you require a lot of convincing or handholding then it isn't for you.

It gets lonely. Not because of not having a moidfriend; even when partnered with them many women still feel lonely. It's because most women are moid centric / obsessed and would want to be partnered with an xy someday or already are. Very few women truly commit to or understand this lifestyle irl tbh. Even my moots who are separatists or just single & childfree are halfway across the world. However that said, many women in the community can also be toxic; holding each other to high standards and there being constant bickering. You can befriend moid partnered women but be careful with them. We're surrounded by the system, existing out of core elements of it will come with a degree of isolation but on the bright side there's also peace if it all goes well.

Less is more. The less you say to others the less ammunition they have to hit you with. Bragging about this lifestyle to our predators will only make things harder because they've already got a huge upperhand. Too many of us moving in one go will bring unprecedented waves we're not ready to deal with. See 2, 3, and 4.

Ignorance is not bliss. Completely cutting off from xys including knowledge of their evil will make you unprepared should a threat strike. Not understanding moids nature is how some women think things are as easy as getting up and walking away without considering security & other factors then get suprised when moids strike. I'm not saying drown in true crime & xy evil but dont stray too far you lose touch of reality. Side note this is why women are gaslit about moids nature so that they dont have the chance to effectively prepare. Stay informed. I constantly learn from the women around me. Pay attention to xy motives & tactics. The power they hold, possible moves they may play etc. You wont be able to know/guess everything but stay in the loop nonetheless.

You will make mistakes be prepared to learn

It gets easier to control your attraction to moids overtime (if you're osa) as your focus is elsewhere as you realise there is a more fulfilling world out there beyond marriage & kids. Also life is just so much better. I know most women want the fairytale prince charming or an angel nigel but it's just not happening. Especially in a world like this. The freedom to be able to exist as a person & not a slave/punching bag for a rape ape is BLISS. You get so comfortable with it you wont wanna be with moids anyway especially when you see what other women go through. (Side note this is why women are pushed to being with moids as early as possible so this level of enlightenment is never reached & instead all women know + become accustomed to is suffering at the hands of moids).

As time passes and you mature into this lifestyle you can tell who's new and who's got skin in the game. I wont elaborate here as it'll digress and this note is long as is but those who know; know.

There's so much work to be done it'll last a lifetime. This lifestyle ain't easy. It strays from the norm so the typical guardrails that come with traditional options are out of the picture. The good news is that you can spend time crafting your own blueprint to follow or share with others who are willing. There's such little in terms of infrastructure & resources for single childfree women and yeah xys will likely try to destroy these things but at the same time if it can be done go for it and bear xy threat in mind we gotta start somewhere.

A purpose/guide is important. It's something that's going to guide your life through the ups and downs because it wont be a smooth ride but it'll be something that can make you in situations that break you. This isn't a "fuck you" to moids directly, it's about ourselves. Seeing this lifestyle as some type of "gotcha" against moids will only make things harder and lowkey misses the point of decentering them. I have my reasons for never getting married or having children that are solid (if you need inspiration checkout r/breakingmom on reddit). True comes from seeing something as bigger than yourself; find a purpose in this line of life to keep you going.

Invest in yourself. Personally, financially, etc. Pretty obvious but especially now that you're going to be more alone you need to be able to count on yourself more. With enough investment it can help other women too.

Invest in female network. No gyn is an island. Even though I'm not much of a social person the friends I have make my life better; they've been supportive but also honest. Also support female centric spaces online & offline; they're all that we have lest we be banished to the silo prison of the "nuclear family" or exploitative misogynistic communities.

Get comfortable disassociating/cutting people off. If you want to survive some things/people will simply just have to go.

You arent owed anything from other women, but you dont owe them anything either. The operating word here is owed, I aint saying women shouldn't help each other - I'm saying dont feel entitled. The feminist "girls support girls" schtick is bullshit. We're in a cold world full of ruthless oppression where everyone is just trying to survive however they can; in many cases it helps women survive when they turn on other women instead of on moids. Solidarity works because those who have solidarity politically speaking are people with power, it works in their interest to stand & work together as to keep + maintain their privileges in society so there wont be much female solidarity as in many cases it's not worth it to women long run. It aint right but that's how they perceive it so watch your back.

Everything is political. Always remember this. Many (privileged) people try to downplay politics & its effect but it runs our world which is why they want you blind to it. Pay attention.

There's merit to being around like-minded women even if it's just online. Like I said before it gets lonely. Very few women are willing to face & accept the truth about maIes. Being around like-minded women can be depressing sometimes as they drop blackpills bitter than you can initially handle but at least you dont feel so isolated/crazy.

[shannonsketches]

lays on the floor i am once again thinking about the goku geets foil in terms of their experience and perspective and parenting

tl;dr: Goku sees letting his child do serious battle as a gift, and Vegeta sees it as a failure.

a lot of the 'goku's a bad father' discourse comes from how he trains/puts Gohan into fights and either doesn't know or doesn't realize that Gohan wants to be a scholar and not a warrior; the reason Gohan keeps joining the fray is because he doesn't want to see people he loves get hurt, right, because that's been his entire experience since Raditz showed up (and remains so until Cell dies).

The discourse re: The Cell Games is interesting though, examining the 'how could Goku not know/how could Goku volunteer his child so blithely' etc and his similar attitude toward the kids fighting in Super('s manga), and it's part of why I say/write/read Goku as deeply inconsiderate but never malicious (and this does tie into the foil with Geets lemme just); Goku's experience with serious combat is fun, and exciting.

Goku volunteering Gohan to fight Cell was something Goku considered a gift to Gohan, to be able to flex his power and go all out on an enemy that could handle it/required it -- that's something Goku wishes he had the power to do, especially at Gohan's age! That's super exciting to Goku. It's not pageant mom forcing her kid to do what she wanted energy, it's Goku being sweet and pure and sharing something he thinks he has in common with his kid. Vegeta says Saiyans live to fight! Goku's entire life has been spent bonding with competitive martial artists! It never occurred to him that someone so naturally powerful and talented wouldn't enjoy fighting.

And Goku does not read subtext, that's not a skill he has, so by the time Piccolo spells it out for him, he's genuinely sorry to have put Gohan in that position.

But in Super('s manga), the larger picture of Don't Put Children in Traumatic Situations still doesn't really occur to Goku, because he doesn't consider battle traumatic, no matter how emotionally intense it gets. Goku doesn't hold onto things. Goku lives and lets live, as long as he doesn't have to kill you. That's his super power. It's why he can be friends with all of these people who have done him and his loved ones and his planet so much harm. He consistently ends earth-shattering battles with, 'that was fun, let's do it again sometime'

Vegeta, on the other hand (see I told you I'd get here, I promised), has had the complete opposite experience. Vegeta considers others heavily, it's what made him very good at being malicious. Vegeta does this for survival. Vegeta's climb to the top is for the vantage point, not the view. He's not looking to the stars dreaming about what else it out there. He's squinting at the dark trying to kill whatever it is before it kills him and his home and his family. again.

Vegeta is a child soldier, who has distinct recollection of his culture being built on the rearing of child soldiers. By the times the cell games come around he is experiencing having a child for the first time, and after seeing (a future version of) that child die in battle, he seems to take on a much different opinion on letting kids fight.

Vegeta comes from a culture in which you send your child off-world to conquer a planet, alone, once they're old enough to walk. The stronger kids go into war zones. Vegeta was giving strategic orders to fellow elites by the time he was five. He was treating Gohan like a soldier when he was five.

But, by the Buu saga, Bulma tells Gohan that Vegeta says Trunks is old enough now to start proper training -- when Trunks is eight years old. Even then, Vegeta's telling Trunks not to push himself too hard in the gravity room, to stop and leave when it's too much for him to handle. Vegeta kills himself trying to prevent Trunks and Goten having to fight Buu. He jumps in to protect the kids when the fight gets too intense in Yo! Son Goku and Friends Return. He begs the kids not to fight Beerus in Battle of the Gods when he's barely conscious. He snaps at Goku any time he suggests them for intense battle in Super('s manga).

Vegeta sees it as not being strong enough to handle a problem, Which totally definitely doesn't have anything to do with some kind of deep-rooted trauma about placing the responsibility of making up for your weakness on your children that Vegeta's had to deal with since becoming a father and he for sure doesn't take it personally when a parent volunteers children to solve problems they had nothing to do with. He's fine! It's fine.

He does not want Trunks or Goten anywhere near a real battlefield (Bulma and/or the other adults seem to be helping to enforce this; in Res F, Trunks and Goten are not invited to go to the Freeza fight, and in the Moro arc both of them were asked to go be rangers in 17's absence again, complaining that nobody told them there was a fight happening at all), because it's got nothing to do with them. They shouldn't have to fight for their -- or anyone else's -- lives. That's the adults' job. That's his job.

Because to Vegeta, it is a job. Soldier, guardian, prince, lord, whatever. It's a role he has to fulfill, and his pride (and a whole lot of trauma-informed necessity) drives him to be the best at it, period, the end. It's an obligation that he must fulfill, because he's decided he's personally responsible for [gestures to the earth] all of this and its survival. It's where he keeps all his stuff!

For Goku, it's a game. He just wants to fight the strongest guys, and it's his understanding that everyone else wants that too. If he's not the best, GREAT! That's more to look forward to. A whole new rabbit to chase to who knows where. It's adventure! It's exciting! So of course the kids would want to get in on it! He LOVED doing this kind of stuff when he was a kid.

Goku has two hands! ...for former villains Vegeta and Piccolo to try to wrestle away from all the other, much worse villains who do not want to play with him.

[autolenaphilia]

I’ve recently seen some The Rocky Horror Picture Show discourse. And like people are questioning if Rocky Horror is transmisogynistic. Of course it does. Dr. Frank-N-Furter is intentionally a transmisogynistic villain. That’s the point.

It’s intended as ironic of course, as deliberate camp. The musical is intended as a parody of old sci-fi and horror movies, mixed with a camp drag aesthetic inspired by the contemporary glam rock movement. The mad scientist villains in the movies being parodied were often queer-coded, and vaguely effeminate.

So to parody that, Frank-n-Furter goes far beyond the queer-coding, and is outrageously effeminate and evil. He rapes people, kills them with an axe and serves them for dinner and force-fems them to take part in his climactic stage show. He is a Frankenstein parody, who literally makes an artificial man in order to fuck him (a joke about Frankenstein I’ve seen on tumblr). And does it all while wearing stockings, a bustier and heavy make-up. He is deliberately the ultimate evil man in a dress trope, referencing Psycho and all effeminate mad scientists in media.

That Frank-N-Furter isn’t explicitly a trans woman doesn’t matter. The musical deliberately blurs the line. The line “I’m just a sweet transvestite, from Transsexual, Transylvania” is like a perfect encapsulation of how horror movies treat transfemininity. “Men in dresses” (transvestites) trans women (transsexual) and a symbol of predatory horror movie villainy (Transylvania) are all conflated, making a pun of out how they all begin with “trans”.

Of course, it’s intended to be ironic. It’s a parody of queer-coded villainy in old horror movies by turning it up to eleven, so that you can’t take it seriously. The whole movie has this drag show camp aesthetic that it celebrates, and the supposed representatives of heteronormativity, Brad and Janet are turned in the end. Frank-N-Furter becomes a symbol of a hedonistic queer liberation “Give yourself over to absolute pleasure.. Don’t dream it, be it.”

This is the clear intent of Rocky Horror, and it’s how it became a “queer classic”. Does it work? I’ll admit that I enjoy the movie version. The glam rock aesthetic is fun, the songs are catchy, and they keep coming at a quick pace. A lot of it is admittedly that I love the old horror and sci-fi movies it’s parodying, so my cultural touchstones are similar. I’m the kind of person to get a thrill out of knowing that Frank-N-Furter at one point uses the exact same prop that Peter Cushing used in the second Hammer Frankenstein movie.

That is a different question however from how well it succeeds at subverting the transmisogynistic tropes it handles. Even in the most sympathetic possible account of the musical, it’s doing the equivalent of handling live grenades. Is it the creators tropes to subvert in the first place? Is it the fans?

Let’s talk about Rocky Horror’s creator, Richard O’Brien. He is certainly a weird and contradictory person, he identifies as a third gender and “70% male and 30% female“, and is using estrogen. So arguably he is a transfem enby and thus transmisogyny-affected. But he’s also a transmisogynist who doesn’t believe trans women are “real women”.( I would like to know what exact percentage of “female” as a transfem person turns you into a bad fake trans woman.)

Of course the important thing about O’Brien is that he is rich. He is in a vastly different class position than the majority of transfems. So while he may be taking estrogen and living as a third gender, he is simultaneously isolated by his own wealth from the effects of the transmisogyny he bolsters in the media (see Caitlyn Jenner for another example of a wealthy transfem doing the same thing).

And O’Brien is rich because Rocky Horror is a huge success. The stage show has seen tons of productions, the original ran for 7 years in the West End, and the movie is a slow but certain money maker, with probably the longest theatrical run out of any movie in history. He is swimming in residuals.

This raises the more interesting question of Rocky Horror’s position in the wider culture, and it’s status as “queer media”. It’s a movie which is just not passively watched but celebrated and performed by its fandom. People show up in cosplay to showings, “shadow casts” perform while the movie plays. And of course the original stage musical is still performed.

So we have to ask ourselves, what are people performing? And who is performing it? And I’ve already answered the former question earlier. Rocky Horror is largely an ironic performance of transmisogyny. And the fact is, the majority of people doing that performance are not the main targets of transmisogyny. They are largely TME cishet, queer and trans people. It’s “ironic” transmisogyny to be sure, I think most fans of Rocky Horror who have any understanding of what it is doing view Frank-N-Furter as the true hero of the show. But is it really their thing to be ironic about? Are transmisogyny-exempt people really the people who should reclaim with irony and camp transmisogynistic tropes in horror media? I don’t think so, and that’s why there is so much resentment about Rocky Horror from transfems. And it’s creator doesn’t help, because while he’s arguably transfem, he also spreads transmisogyny in the media.

It illustrates a lot of things, for example how imprecise “queer” is as a description of people. It’s an umbrella term, and does group together people who have much in common. But it also erases the material differences within the community. Queer people aren’t all equally oppressed.

So Rocky Horror status as queer media, as a campy celebration of queerness and parody of anti-queer tropes in genre films is kinda grating. Because it enables TME queer people to perform and celebrate Rocky Horror, because they are queer and it’s about “queerness”, when there are specifically transmisogynistic tropes parodied in the musical. It isn’t really their place to do so.

It appropriates specific transmisogynistic tropes in the media by thoughtlessly subsuming it into the general anti-queerness which it is part of.

Of course there are transfems who got to explore their gender at Rocky Horror showings. But I think the reason they did that is because mtf crossdressing is accepted as part of a camp ironic performance in such a context. It makes it feel safer to perform femininity in public, because you can backtrack and say it’s purely ironic. That’s no different from the comedy crossdressing in American Halloween parties, and I think we can all agree those are often transmisogynistic.

And of course, Rocky Horror is an example of how cis men can perform femininity, and get celebrated for it in mainstream society, while escaping the effects of transmisogyny that transfems experience, and in fact often furthering that transmisogyny. It’s often a (negative) performance of transfemininity, in which actual transfems play no part and are mocked.

Tim Curry is a very good example. He made his career from playing Frank-N-Furter, and he probably couldn’t have done that if he was actually transfem, and not just crossdressing for an ironic performance on stage and screen. Like I don’t have anything against him in particular, quite the opposite, he’s one of my favourite actors, love him in everything from Clue to Muppet Treasure Island to Gabriel Knight. My objection is to the patriarchal and transmisogynistic system that favors cishet men like him.

Speaking of crossdressing on stage, the drag culture which Rocky Horror is inspired by of course has a complex history. It’s deeply rooted in both African-American and queer culture, and transfems have played major roles in drag. But Rocky Horror is if anything even an appropriation of drag culture. It represents drag’s commercialization and recuperation into the mainstream. It took drag out of the gay bars being raided by the police and onto the more respectable West End stage, making a lot of money in the process.

Rocky Horror beyond any qualities it has as a stage and film musical, due to its popularity represents a lot of complex issues. It’s important to queer culture, but it also represents the commercialization and recuperation of queer drag into the cishet mainstream. And within the queer community, it is a shining example of how TME queers can appropriate specifically transfem struggles as their own. It shows how cis men can gain wealth and fame performing transmisogynistic caricatures (even if they are ironic and don’t mean it).

I’m not saying if you enjoy the musical that you should stop enjoying it. But maybe if you are TME, Dr Frank-N-Furter is not your “problematic queer icon” to reclaim.

[anothergameofwickedgrace]

Okay I'm starting this post off with saying I do not tolerate discourse. I will block immediately. I am posting my own thoughts and opinions, not looking to debate. Just stop reading if you don't like it.

This may be an unpopular opinion, but it's still one I feel very strongly about .

I don't want Millie to keep the baby. She should abort it. They shouldn't have kids.

I know a lot of people like to fantasize about them having kids, but I fucking hate it. Why is it bad to have a happy couple so dearly in love that doesn't have or want kids? Why is that always invalidated in media?

I'm so very tired of every fucking time a woman gets pregnant in a show, she ends up keeping it. For once, can we please see someone choose to not have kids? As a person who has never wanted kids, it's so disheartening to see this play out like that time and time again. It makes me sad.

I also don't think she wants it. I think she's scared Moxxie does.

Think about it. She's the oldest of 5 kids (and a girl). She definitely grew up helping raise them. There's no way she wasn't parentified to some extent. A lot of people who grew up like that end up not wanting kids because they spent their own childhood being a 3rd parent.

She also doesn't seem the type to want them in general. Nothing about her makes me think she'd dream of or want to be a mother. It also puts a huge damper on the life she's currently happy living; she'd have to stop doing the job she loves. Everything would have to change.

Now on to Moxxie. I think she'd be right in worrying he'd want to keep it. He had a shitty family and having a chance to have a happy version of his own is probably appealing. He's super kind and responsible, and I think he'd make a great dad. I feel he'd be very excited about a baby.

But I don't think that'd make Millie happy. (Though I think she'd definitely feel pressured to keep it if Moxxie wanted it.) In the end, Moxxie would come around because his wife and her happiness matters more than a hypothetical child. That he's happy with their current life. That Millie is enough for him and he doesn't need a kid for their lives to be fulfilling and happy. That it's perfect the way it is.

(Also, people please figure out what you'd do in this kind of situation before getting married. You should both be on the same page from the start if it were to occur.)

[imagine-a-sanctuary-like-this]

My (cautious) thoughts about the Good Omens/NG happenings

I've not been in the Good Omens fandom for a couple years. Season 2 briefly re-ignited my interest, but after watching it, I basically lost interest for good. A mix of things drove me away, I think mostly that (1) I thought Season 2 quite poorly-written, and, more relevant to this post, (2) I'd grown a little tired of the Neil Gaiman idolizing that I'd seen in the online fandom spaces.

So that said, I care little about the S3 90-minute-feature situation (though I'm glad the remaining fans will get some closure). And, of course, I do not know if Gaiman actually did all what he's being accused of - that doesn't really matter to what I'm about to discuss. More interestingly, this puts me in mind of something that's been bothering me about many fandom spaces, and I wanted to pen (digital pen?) my thoughts.

To me, what seems to be going on right now's a good demonstration of why over-attaching yourself to a fandom and idolizing creators, especially those that you see as your 'political ally', is probably not a great idea. From what I've seen, GOmens fans aren't just upset but rather deeply personally betrayed. This reminds me (distantly) of the Joss Whedon craze when BTVS fans basically elevated him to 'writing god'/genius status, and all but worshipped him (as seen in many notes to fanfics written in the early 2000s).

In my view, a similar but much more personal 'idolization' happened with Gaiman. (more under the line thingie)

A lot of fandom discourse (that I've seen) doesn't seem to get that creators, no matter how politically aligned with one's own views, aren't fictional characters, they aren't one's friends, nor are they 'comfort people'. I mean, I guess they could be insofar as you make them into your 'comfort people', but it's through no action of theirs. Nothing wrong (of course) in taking comfort in an author's work, but clearly for many it's a far more personal thing that just that.

Another thing: interacting with the creator's work and social media presence, one is NOT interacting with them, nor really getting to know them. Sometimes fandoms seem to forget this and kind of just perpetuate this made-up version of the author that shares very little with the actual human being that exists somewhere out there in the world, has flaws (small or... not so small), and probably occasionally acts dishonest, petty, judgmental, selfish, etc. in the best of cases. That it doesn't happen publicly doesn't mean it never happens at all. Attaching oneself to a made-up, idealized version of an author (making it 'YOUR Neil Gailman', 'YOUR comfort author') probably feels nice, but it kind of distorts reality. Makes you feel like the author's a lot personally closer to you than they actually are, like you know them better than you actually do.

It makes sense why this happens: no one likes to feel that the creator of something they love's not a great person. At least, it's hard to come to terms with this suddenly. I had a similar (though much less intense) experience with this one creator, S, whose content on medieval armor/weaponry I enjoyed very much. Later, S turned out to be... not such a great person. And yeah, it felt unpleasant, precisely because I liked the guy's content AND I liked his public persona, and ended up disappointed in both. Because I liked both in connection to each other, not independently. In this case, it didn't take long to separate the artist from the content, but in cases like GOmens emotional investment runs much more intense.

But so I think this is a big part of what's happening here with the NG situation: quite a few GO fans have let it get to that stage where they've identified so strongly with a creator through his works, political support and public persona that they felt like they actually deeply knew them. All the info going against that seems to come as not just a disappointment because NG did something immoral (which, if the allegations are true, he obviously did!) but rather a very personal betrayal. The sentiment I'm seeing seems to be less 'oh, this guy I liked isn't really who I thought he was, this sucks', and more 'I have been betrayed/hurt/deceived', as in 'me, personally'.

On the same note, I feel like this relates, too, to the 'x is so precious', 'x needs to be protected at all costs', 'x can do no wrong' kind of mentality about favourite authors, which seemed pervasive in the GO community (at least when I used to run in those fandom circles a couple years back).

So in my mind, we're seeing (and, in some cases, feeling) the natural conclusion to undue author idolization. It never really pays to forget that authors, like all public figures, only show a small part of themselves, and letting your imagination get away from you with just that part... well. Maybe not a great idea?

(I'd love to hear others' thoughts on this! Leave a comment if you disagree, think I've missed an important or interesting detail, or just to express your take on this)

[eddo-tensei]

"YOU JUST WANT HER TO STAY THE SAME!" - A short essay on the misconception of why people wanted Chloe to be redeemed.

Interpretations are important when it comes to understanding media and despite what some people may say, there's never "one true interpretation" of a piece of media. At this point, it's been at least a couple months since the fifth season of Miraculous had ended and it's been at least a month less than that since the movie had premiered. In both cases, even though she just barely qualifies as being a main character in the franchise, Chloe had become a hot topic in both iterations. In the show, she started out as your stock mean girl archetype, started to gain some depth in Seasons 2 and 3, and then suddenly nose-dived into being the resident Hate Sink come Season 4 and onwards while any bit of depth she had was stripped away from her. In the movie, she started out as relatively the same as she did in the show, but what's interesting is how her progression in the movie was handled in that there barely was any progression for her in either path. There wasn't a path of redemption written for her, but she wasn't thrown into the Hate Sink like what the latter half of the show did with her. In fact, even though the movie gave her an extremely petty motivation to bully Marinette, she's somehow better than how the show depicted her because she actually has a motivation, albeit a petty one, and yet she's somehow shown to be less of a monstrous psychopath that the show tried desperately to make her out to be. Granted, I do feel like something is lost with Zag retconning out most of Chloe and Adrien's past friendship, but the rest of the writing for Movie Adrien more than made up for that because Adrien actually feels like his own character instead of someone morphed into an accessory for Marinette. Same goes for Movie Marinette for that matter because even though they don't have a backstory together, Chloe's bullying of Marinette actually holds weight and Marinette felt more like a genuine introvert than the neurotically creepy mess she was in the show and to whom the writers spent the last season desperately attempting to justify the questionable actions of. All that said, the movie did a lot of right in terms of characterization and while Chloe, Nino, and Alya had reduced roles, they were still written pretty nicely and I hope to see this version of these characters again should Zag pen another sequel.

Even so, it led me to think about something that's been bothering me concerning Chloe and the discourse surrounding her. Even now, especially after how the fifth season's finale played out, the debate for whether or not Chloe should've been redeemed is still ongoing and it's very clear that the show had only served to strengthen those who said she never deserved to be redeemed to begin with. While there's a lot to debate over this, I do feel like there's one particular idea among those who are against a redemption for Chloe that's just completely wrong and deserves to be called out. Namely, a lot of people who argue against Chloe being redeemed seem to have this assumption that those who do want that are defending all of Chloe's actions or worse, that those who are pro-redemption actually just want Chloe to remain the same character-wise while she gets to be a hero again. Honestly, it's baffling that people would believe that Chloe fans who wish for a redemption just want Chloe to remain the same bully she always was even though that is literally the opposite of what most Chloe fans want and completely goes against the point of her having a redemption arc to begin with.

Now the reason I said this is the opposite of what MOST Chloe fans want is because there are indeed some fans of Chloe who do think she did nothing wrong and that she should be given the hero spot because Marinette is just being stupid. These fans usually come from people who get most of their ideas for Miraculous from watching goons like CyrusLovesOwlCity and to put it simply, these people are wrong and should not be taken seriously. Frankly, they're no different from any Marinette stan or Adrien stan who argue until they're blue in the face about how their respective characters did nothing wrong while violently salting any other character, including each other, that did something even slightly negative to their favorites. Those people do not deserve to be allowed in any polite conversation involving Miraculous regardless of which character they do it for.

In any case, despite what people might think, a lot of Chloe fans do want to see her change and stop being a bully. They want to actually watch her learn that what she's doing is wrong and thus improve herself. Of course, the showrunners seem to vehemently disagree with the concept of her ever becoming better and actively shoot down any possible hint of that happening. People will argue that there were never any hints to begin with and that Chloe fans are just being delusional, but that's where interpretations come in. While one could easily just say that Chloe is just impossible to redeem and one can even dive deep to even find reasons as to why that is, people can also look deep enough to find reasons as to why Chloe CAN be redeemed. While there's no true evidence that Chloe had a hidden heart of gold, there is evidence to show that she's much more sensitive and insecure than she lets on, primarily seen in any episode where Audrey is a primary character. Moreover, while Chloe is more of an overt bully in the movies, the scene of the ball towards the end of the movie does indicate that while Chloe still has a front, she does respect Marinette to an extent to the point of allowing her to dance with Adrien. This latter scene does seem to lean more into what Chloe fans actually want in that even though she is a bully, she's also starting to grow and it does seem like there's hope that she could get out of that role instead of just getting worse and being treated as a worse person than someone who attempted genocide and someone who wanted to erase reality.

With all that said, I feel like one more thing that needs to be addressed is that some people seem to believe that Chloe fans only complain about the show's writing when Chloe looks bad. While it may seem like cope, when people are complaining about it for multiple characters that arguably span the entire show, I don't think they're just complaining because one character is written in a bad light. Kagami, Nino, and Alya are just some of the other characters that come to mind when talking about how bad the writing is and of course, when Marinette and Adrien get their awful moments, a lot of their fans seem quick to jump to bringing up "bad writing" as a complaint as well with them often rewriting these characters to fit how they themselves view them. Frankly, if those fans are allowed to just create their own versions of these characters, I don't see why Chloe fans shouldn't be granted that same luxury for Chloe herself.

Overall, while the future of the show is uncertain, it's clear that Chloe's fandom is never going to truly disappear no matter how much people try to make that happen. All that said, you shouldn't just assume that a Chloe fan just wants her to get away with everything and be treated as a hero without having to change. Ultimately, you shouldn't just accuse a fan of Chloe of defending all of her bad actions just because they want her to be better. Save that negative energy for the people who unironically say that she did nothing wrong and then actively salt other characters for her. This is a lot to write, but I really wanted to get my thoughts out there and hopefully clear some things up.

Also, people who say that Marinette is somehow the true bully do not belong in the Miraculous fandom. Simple as.

[thecurioustale]

We Are Seeing How a Pressure Campaign Works, and It Is Very Dirty

(I originally wrote this on Thursday but held off on posting it so as not to oversaturate my posting with political stuff. But it still nags at me each day, so I am finally posting it.)

[UPDATE: Immediately after posting this, I read on The Washington Post that Biden has just dropped out.]

Following up on yesterday's post, I want to point out and call attention to the pressure campaign to push President Biden out from his reelection bid, because I don't know how many people on here (or in the public generally) have the political acumen to recognize and understand what is happening, and this sort of phenomenon, though subtle, is critical to recognize and understand if one wishes to be good at analyzing and understanding the news—not just on this one subject but in general, especially news about politics and business.

Here's the short version: The drop-Biden faction is making a full-court press to get rid of him; they are dead-set on it; and their strategy is "Lie over and over again until it actually becomes true." The news has been full all month of conveniently-anonymous sources making claims that the drop-Biden faction is winning: that the Biden campaign is privately imploding, that more and more people in the Democratic Party establishment and other relevant circles are abandoning Biden and leaving him more isolated than ever, and that even Joe Biden himself is beginning to recognize that his candidacy is "untenable" and he might not be able to stay in the race.

Almost all of these anonymous claims were almost certainly lies at the time they were made, but (sometimes) became true later.

This is an important part of how a pressure campaign works: You try to redefine reality. You frame the opposing side's position as completely untenable with no way forward. You frame your targets as trapped and fatalistic, as if they are caught in a slow-motion train wreck and can see what is coming but are helpless to stop it. You assert that more and more people who are relevant to the matter are realizing and accepting this "reality" and getting on board with the "practical" alternative—which may be risky, yes, but is better than doing nothing. And you give cover to all of this, which is essentially a campaign of gaslighting and lies, by blanketing the discourse with public statements by prominent, relevant individuals who make the case for your side and put their faces and reputations behind it. Following the assassination attempt against Trump, the drop-Biden faction lost a lot of steam...until Representative Adam Schiff (who is extremely respected in Democratic politics and was basically a trump card for the drop-Biden faction) came out and said Biden should exit the race. It worked, and the issue flared back to life and has become more intense than ever in the past two days [Sunday update: and in the several days since].

In politics there is much that never goes public, but I have absolute confidence that, except with the possibility of the past several days, Joe Biden has been nothing less than categorically committed to running for reelection, and that he was telling the unconditional truth in saying so publicly. I think his reflective conversations with family and aides immediately following his performance in the debate ended with him reaffirming that position, and I think he has held that resolve until this most recent and acute phase of the crisis. Biden is not the kind of person who would have played it any other way. I think there was no fatalism and sense of resignation in the Biden campaign, no "slow-motion train wreck," none of it. I think Biden had made his decision to stay in, and the campaign was getting on with campaigning.

I want you to note that President Biden and his representatives keep saying that Biden is staying in the race. The drop-Biden faction keeps saying "The President has an important decision to make"; Biden says he's made it; and the drop-Biden people keep saying "The President has an important decision to make." In other words, for them there is only one correct decision, only one decision they are willing to accept.

Notably, very few of these anonymous claims of the Biden campaign's disintegration have been explicitly confirmed by named sources on-the-record. When you look only at the verifiable facts, it still looks like the drop-Biden faction is on the outside, trying to make hay out of a nonissue and not getting very far with it.

In other words, the Biden campaign wasn't going to unravel on its own. The drop-Biden faction is solely responsible for what is happening.

Pressure campaigns usually don't work, because it's usually very hard to unravel power centers from the outside. What makes this one different is that almost the Democratic Party leadership, the Democratic megadonor class, and (of all things) the mainstream news media all seem to be in on it. Their tactics are working because they have the firepower of the biggest fleet in the sea. When it came out today that Representative Jamie Raskin had written a private letter to Biden to urge him to drop out, for the first time I got the feeling that the drop-Biden faction is actually going to succeed. Apparently Joe Biden had the same reaction, because the latest news as I write this [on Thursday] is that he is reconsidering his commitment to staying in the race. [Sunday update: So far, this reporting has not panned out. The drop-Biden people are now saying that Monday is going to be the big day.] Raskin, Schiff, Pelosi...these are just about the most respectable names there are in Democratic politics. President Obama is reportedly in on it, too, though I've heard other reports that he's not. Numerous governors and senators are publicly in on it. Both Democratic leaders in Congress. Not even the president can repel firepower of that magnitude; it's exactly the sort of "expel-the-foreign-object" autoimmune response that we all so dearly hoped the GOP would have done to Donald Trump in 2015, or if nothing else in the aftermath of his defeat in 2020.

This isn't just the usual "Democrats hate to win" that I mentioned in my first essay. It is almost unthinkable that the entire leadership of a major political party in the US—the healthy major political party, no less—would be so quick in joining a cabal to expel its own sitting president in the July before the election—and seemingly on such a capricious basis! Joe Biden has not behaved meaningfully differently since the debate than he had been doing before. He's the same Biden! It wasn't anything that happened in the debate that caused this degree of galvanization within the Democratic establishment to occur. And it's not just that Biden is down in the polls; Democrats are routinely down in the polls the summer before a presidential election.

To give due consideration to the drop-Biden faction, there must be something else motivating them. Perhaps they have decisive evidence that Biden's cognitive abilities are much worse than is publicly apparent, though I would have a hard time accepting that based on my own witnessing of the President's public behavior in recent weeks. I don't care if he's slow up the stairs of Air Force One. I don't care if he doesn't immediately reocognize a longstanding acquaintance in a busy crowd. I don't care if he flubs his words or speaks quietly. Those things are not dementia; they are a part of aging and there is a difference. So are all these brilliant Democratic VIPs just that dumb? I have a hard time accepting that. So what else might it be?

Perhaps the fascist menace and the specter of a second Trump presidency spooked them like horses and they've lost rational control. Despite their smarts, their savvy, and their long years of experience, I can believe such a thing happening of them. This is something I've studied a lot over the years both as a student of human nature and to deepen the quality of my fiction-writing. Humans, even the best of us, can get caught up in a kind of mass hysteria sometimes. The Republicans are running a convicted felon who wants to end democracy (or rather pervert it to his own use, which is the same thing in practice) and yet is somehow clearly ahead in the polls. America feels like it is turning a corner into something dark and terrible, and both right-wing propaganda and now increasingly the mainstream traditional media are behaving in a way that insinuates that this might be acceptable and even desirable, and in any case is likely if not inevitable. I think they really might be spooked, in the sense of having gone collectively insane.

(Just a quick tangent here to say that Jake Tapper in particular, on CNN, has carried a LOT of water for the drop-Biden faction. I never liked his dour attitude to begin with, but I am disgusted by him after what I've seen in recent days.)

Another possibility is that perhaps this really is the rare conspiracy-coup to actually succeed, and now we are simply in the "snowball effect" stage where the political gravity has changed and everyone who wasn't part of the original conspiracy is just getting sucked into it by its sheer size and force as it rolls on down the news cycle.

And of course there are always a few Democratic stragglers down the ballot in tough reelection campaigns who care more about their own self-interest than anything else.

Whatever their motive(s), and to hearken back to my central thesis in the first essay, the drop-Biden faction lacks the confidence of its convictions. They do not have consensus, and they are not-so-secretly trying to push Kamala Harris off the ticket too. That's why they won't say her name as the obvious replacement when they call for Biden to exit; that's why they frame her natural replacement of Biden as a "coronation" i.e. undesirable; that's why they're calling for an "open primary" despite the fact that we already had a primary election and the formal nomination is in less than a month. And they don't have consensus on who the replacement should be; they are jockeying on this question as we speak. They are a conspiracy at war with itself—weak and self-serving and despicable. This is some surreal bullshit.

And it is incredibly dirty. This is dirty politics. This is party leaders and zillionaires overturning our vote as Democrats to choose Joe Biden to be our party's presidential nominee (and, implicitly, Kamala Harris to be his running mate), with no clear replacement in mind except "not Kamala." This is wrong, and it is fucked up.

And I'm going to tell you right now: It has probably cost us the election. We are probably going to lose because of this. If Joe Biden stays at the top of the ticket, he has been devastatingly damaged by this relentless summer pressure campaign against him. The nature of the supposed problem at the root of all this—Biden's age—is a genie that can't be put back in the bottle. Now that the entire nation has seen just about the entire Democratic party establishment panicking that Biden is not fit to be president, it is extremely difficult to imagine Biden winning this election.

But the thing is, Biden was by far our best shot at winning. He is a stronger candidate than people give him credit for. If he does step aside, Vice President Harris will also almost certainly lose, because she was always a weak candidate, because it's so damn late in the election cycle, and because America is a racist, sexist cesspool sometimes. If Harris takes Biden's place, our best hope is that Democratic messaging can successfully frame this debacle as "We listened to you, the people, and are giving you change: a young, vibrant candidate!" But it's a very, very long shot.

And if both Joe Biden and Kamala Harris get ousted by this cabal, then we are in the worst position of all, because millions of Democratic voters are going to feel betrayed and cut out—and from what I am hearing, this revulsion will be centered in some of the most critical Democratic constituencies, most notably the black community, which has largely been sticking with Biden through this and is well aware of the campaign to not only oust Joe Biden but also push out his black vice-president. [Sunday update: AOC came out and basically said the same thing: The drop-Biden faction wants to drop Harris too; behind the scenes they are fighting among themselves for power.)

Whatever happens, we are probably going to lose in November. Not just the presidency, but both houses of Congress. And I want you to know that the drop-Biden faction is to blame. Some of the best names in Democratic politics—people I still respect, though my respect for them has been firmly damaged by this

But more importantly, to get back to my main point tonight, I want you to recognize that this is what a large-scale pressure campaign looks like. "Lie until the lie becomes true." Is Joe Biden going to drop out? Everyone but Joe Biden keeps saying that he is, including the media (who really shouldn't be saying anything either way).

It's going to take me a long time to understand why this happened, if I ever do. And I also have new questions about the news media that I didn't have before. Jake Tapper on CNN has been the most glaring example of this, but it is media-wide: They've been pushing for this. They want this story to be the top story, and I get the sense that it's as much because of a desire to get rid of Biden as it is a matter of ratings and clicks. The Republican money and connections in the mainstream media want it for obvious reasons: It's the first story in years that distracts from Donald Trump, and it also happens to be just about the most damaging story imaginable for the Democrats. And the Democratic money and connections in the mainstream media seem to be an integral part of the drop-Biden faction, and why they want this to happen is still an open question for me, because from the outside this is like a self-inflicted mortal wound. These idiots have all but destroyed our chances in an existentially critical election.

This is so, so dirty. The Democratic Party, and the mainstream media, have both done America dirty. And I don't understand why they would take leave of their senses like this...but I sure don't like it. And this scenario actually runs afoul of my private list of Democratic Party yellow and red lines that would threaten my support for the party. We are well past the yellow line. You do not overturn elections, even if they are primary elections, so that some invisible back-room cabal can pick our new president and vice president. You just don't do it. We fought to put an end to these back-room dealings; the people should pick the nominees of their party. If neither Joe Biden nor Kamala Harris is on the ballot this November, I will have to have a serious think on what I will do.

Whatever does happen in November, the results-oriented thinking from the drop-Biden faction and their stooges in the media is going to be insufferable. If we lose with Biden at the top of the ticket, the drop-Biden faction will blame everyone but themselves, even though they themselves will have been by far the single biggest factor in weakening him as a candidate. If we lose with Harris at the top of the ticket, that same faction will say we should've had an open convention rather than defaulting to her, and again there will be no admission that the drop-Biden faction caused a series of events where she became the presidential nominee. If we win with Harris at the top of the ticket, the drop-Biden faction will say they were right all along to get Joe Biden off the ticket. And if we win with Biden at the top of the ticket, only in this one scenario will the drop-Biden faction be discredited in the way it so richly deserves to be. In every other scenario, history will be rewritten by the faction to glorify itself and erase the truth of what really happened.

I am quite upset about all this, really really upset, and as someone who mostly retired from news and politics a couple of years ago, I foresee a firmer and broader-reaching recommitment to that principle in my future after this election. For the first time I am finding myself seriously thinking about what will happen with a full Republican government next year. They are not happy thoughts.

It makes me wonder, "What was it all for?" Why does it even matter that I teach you how to recognize pressure campaigns in the news, if this is what America does with all its riches of knowledge?

Anyway, that's the last I'll say about any of this for the time being. For those with the energy to do so, please recognize that a cabal is trying to steal the election, and it is on our side.

[americascomic]

Hello. I sat here for a good 30 minutes trying to think of best how to ask this question without giving the online version of an annoying exposition dump, so I hope this somewhat makes sense: I’ve found myself, increasingly, having conversations with the more tenderqueer-esque queers in my life surrounding slurs- specifically slurs like faggot and tranny. I’m a trans guy, and I was told by another trans guy of the genre of person i just mentioned that only gay men can reclaim the word faggot, and trans women can reclaim the word tranny. I thought this was a stupid and gatekeep-y idea, and told him so, but i have been genuinely wondering if this is just a manifestation of terminally online induced queer infighting or a form of ignorant transmisogyny on my part. Is tranny a slur directed at and only to be reclaimed by trans women? Or is it just another tick in the barrel of a long line of slur speciation discourse?

I think the short answer of who can say what slur is "this is terminally online bullshit"

And my second answer is "this is a conversation that mostly people under the age of 30 have, and people mostly online have." I think the age is important - it's feels like it's a developmental phase a lot of queers go through, where they negotiate their identity." So, like I'm patient (if a little irked) when I see it on my feed. Or hear some dipshit socially awkward t-femme at Bluestockings rudely chime in to a conversation I'm having with a friend.

and I sometimes put it as a hypothetical;

I'm telling you right now, as a trans woman, in my lived experience, people of your exact intersecting identities are only allowed to say the word "tranny" on a Tuesday and "faggot" on a Friday. If you forget, remember 'tranny' and 'Tuesday' starts with 'T' and 'faggot' and 'Friday' starts with 'F'

Like, that's absurd for me to ask. And so I think that kind of forces the thought that at the end of the day I'm the one asking it. There'll be no consensus on this issue.; you have to decide for yourself whatever or not to respect one point of view over the other.

We say "listen to black people" but I had this moment in my life where IRL I did a call-out of Nazis in my community and a Black friend told me that I was talking over people of color and another thanked me for speaking up in a way that they wouldn't be listened to. Who is right? Neither. Both. You have to decide for yourself and have a strong sense of race. Same with interacting with our own queer community.

Who can say what queer slur where and when is a thing that can never be litigated online. It's such an interpersonal person-to-person thing. There's no pundit square that can fit all slurs and all identities and all experiences.

in the case of the teen in the previous story who told me not to use the word "tranny," I immediately retorted that people say that word to me on the street and spit at me, which means they recognize it as a thing of power and so I will use that power. And I don't think she'd ever had copped to it, but I think changed her mind because she was saying "tranny" over the next months.

I think for some of this shit, us trans women policing who can say "tranny" is us just doing a proxy war for transmisogny. Like, we get transmisogny in our community, an AFAB person queer person of some type who could probably leverage their privilege against us says "tranny," I can see it irking some. But, have you met a trans woman? Everything irks us. We're reprehensible.

And, I think in terms of your conversation and your friend. I dunno, I think of who-gets-to-be-lesbian discourse. I see so many people online twist in the wind trying to justify to others that they're a trans masc lesbian, or a non-binary lesbian or a bisexual lesbian and I'm kinda sitting there on my ass wondering why they're trying so hard to get probably the dumbest people online to justify our identity. Like, we're hear, we're queer, get used to it. I sometimes feel of the matter that we're all a mass medium as one and just going about shit without apology as a way to force people to confront our humanity.

Iffen you want my personal feelings on the matter, you're just as impacted by the codified violence of the state that's imposed on us and so we're all faggots at the end of the day. But the t-girl sitting next to me might feel differently, and you have to negotiate with that. Sometimes times calls for moments of respect and sometimes it's a matter of saying "fuck it" and doing the thing you know how it is.

If you would like, I can draw you a card that says "Amber, a hot trans woman, says I can say 'faggot'"

Finally, I'll say I wrote a couple paragraphs for you so I'm going to force you to return the favor and just challenge you to sit on your ass and ask yourself in honest ways what the word means and what it means to you and what's beautiful and what's ugly about the word. That - an internal process - a lot more valuable thing worth to litigate then everybody in-community being cops to each other.

And then after that, I always like to challenge people to look beyond the debate. This post I made on the matter is about a dead trans teen. It's nice to debate words, but it's also nice to look out at our wonderful, annoying community, name problems we see that creates material struggle, and then imagine solutions.

[cidnangarlond]

who are those guys in your dni (the curiouser)

emet-selch is this guy (in an edit I made):

short version he's thousands of years old and wayyyyy back in the days of PARADISE shit hit the fan and the world started uhhh ending. so half the population gave themselves t. this isn't gonna be short but anyway half the population gave themselves to make this god to save it etc etc things get even worse AGAIN somehow and to save the remainder of the world venat aka hydaelyn (capital g God in ffxiv) splits the world into 14 shards. now emet-selch manages to survive this "sundering" intact along with two of his colleagues and/or friends and they go well we know what we have to do now. which is merge the 14 pieces back. now each of the 14 "shards" has life on it. whole populations and lands and one expansion happens entirely on one of these shards and you visit another in the expansion after. there's more details with that which are very fun but basically there's life on these worlds. and emet-selch (and lahabrea and elidibus) really do Not care they are going to be exterminating like. millions of lives. and they do that! they destroy SEVEN DIFFERENT SHARDS! and fuck up most of the thirteenth so it's irreparably damaged but still around

emet-selch also went "HRMMM how can I sow maximum discourse in eorzea to bring about these horrible moments called "calamities" in which one shard is merged back with the source... oh I know!" so he founds this military empire garlemald the garlean empire (he possesses the body of a man named solus and builds the country up and declares himself emperor) to go forth and conquer and occupy lands and enslave and conscript those who live there and cause war and many other issues. to ensure the maximum amount of human strife possible. he does all this because he *checks notes* misses his friends from thousands of years ago and also *flips page* tells you directly multiple times he does not feel bad for killing what is likely millions of people and that he felt entirely justified in what he did.

unfortunately people are in love with him regardless. I think he's a great villain he's a sarcastic smarmy asshole who does a lot of posturing and he's deeply fascinating but my GOD people ship their characters with him to the high heavens for some reason. like okay "I miss my friends wah" is an insane justification for doing All Of This and he May have been tempered/under the thrall of a god for thousands of years but brooo it's been millennia just give it UPPPP it's mainly his fans that are super fucking annoying to me they try and justify everything or just loudly and unabashedly defend him. like no I want that fascist dictator DEAD I want that soggy ancient man DEAD. or at least they're so loud about their ship that that's all that matters and just will not shut up about it. OH and emet-selch is a title not his real name his REAL NAME believe it or not is HADES so you can imagine! when people write about their character in The Before Times who their soul Originally Was what name they give their character!!! it's not original in the least!!!!!

he's very snape-esque. there's a large overlap in my mind of him and his fans and snape and snape wives.

okay NOW onto zenos. pictured here alongside an old discord message:

(not pictured was them saying "he looks like he'd call me a slur" which is accurate! he probably would!)

he is emet-selch's great-grandson. he is an asshole and more or less like psychosexually obsessed with you because you're the only one who has ever posed an ounce of a challenge to him and that's why he becomes so obsessed with you and fighting you.

he's viceroy or something of one nation, ala mhigo, that garlemald has occupied for many years now and also of another, doma, in the far east, though he has this lady yotsuyu (she's an antagonist and also hot and has a shitty backstory and she DOES kill her abusive family members so. that's cool) as the acting viceroy of doma. either way he sees anyone not garlean as beneath him and refers to not only you but literally everyone else as "savages" ESPECIALLY the people who live in ala mhigo but yeah.

he just like. kills indiscriminately. he has this giant metal fucking thing with three different swords in it that he took from people he killed and lets this thing chose which sword he's gonna use at random. he treats killing as a sport he's gone pro in "wanton slaughter" he can and will and Does cut people down for no reason other than he wanted to. negative conscience. doesn't care he's crown prince of garlemald. also, emet-selch as solus "dies" thus causing a brief succession crisis before varis (zenos's dad) becomes emperor and then zenos kills him causing a full-blown war of succession in garlemald which tears the nation apart and so many different members of the royal family are fighting for the throne and ultimately all of them fucking die from killing each other and zenos naturally does not care or feel bad he's just like UGH WHERE'S THAT CHAMPION OF EORZEA (aka You)... WHERE ARE THEY... and his gay jester fandaniel is there also now he's fun.

anyway doesn't care he's in line to throne he just craves bloodsport and power and getting stronger and after you kick his ass he kills himself because he's. happy about it. that he was bested. but then his body gets possessed by one of emet-selch's old besties elidibus to cause More problems and then zenos's soul hops into another body and makes his way back before elidibus is like god you're so fucking stubborn FINE take your fuckass body back I already fought the champion of eorzea in your body I've got other shit to do more pots to stir.. goobye

fortunately when you and him fight at the end of the universe you kill him (HE BETTER BE DEAD OR I'M GONNA BE PISSED!!!) and leave him there so hopefully HOPEFULLYYYYYYY he doesn't come back. his backstory is varis fucking sucks and was a shitty father and now zenos is Like That as a result there's a short story somewhere about his childhood and this guy he had train him and then ultimately killed him and decided he was going to keep fighting and killing people to get stronger and now here we are. his fans are also so fucking annoying I hate this blonde bitch I do not think he's hot I don't care if he's got some weird predator/prey mentality when it comes to you/your character and him he's a fascist prick and I'm glad he's dead AND I HOPE HE NEVER COMES BACK. THIS BLONDE BITCH IS DEAD AND IT IS GOOD HE IS DEAD. WE DO NOT NEED TO RETURN TO HIM EVER

making fandaniel aka funnydaniel aka damndaniel his silly gay jester was fun BECAUSE. fandaniel was one of emet-selch's besties from way back when but Did get sundered so they found his soul and went Remember Who You Are and shoved him in the body of a gay little freak named. oh my god why can't I remember his name that's so funny. I had to look it up. fandaniel gets put in asahi's body. asahi was OBSESSED with zenos oh my god he saw this man cut down doman ninjas and samurai who were trying to protect their homes and their land and asahi went I Want Him. unfortunately for him zenos never gave him the time of day and died unrecognized by his favorite homicidal maniac. asahi was also the adoptive brother of yotsuyu and she killed him so good it was so cathartic *chefs kiss*. who cheered who clapped because I did. anyway so when damndaniel turns up in asahi's body - by the way when these guys do all that it's like putting a costume on to them they don't retain memories or anything of whoever they're in - he's all DO I LOOK FAMILIAR TO YOU MY LORD... and zenos is sitting there like "*checking his nails* ...no." look up the fandaniel cutscenes those are funny he's a fun villain.

but no yeah zenos he fuckin sucks I think his fans are super annoying too and also he's blonde. OH he changes into this class/job called Reaper and as such an entity from the void is attached to him he gives it souls in exchange for his powers and abilities. and you get to meet who this void being is because after he dies they change back into a human person (kinda) and HER NAME the name shes given anyway is ZERO and shes cool as fuck

what if you were from a doomed shard and ended up becoming a voidsent attached to a homicidal bastard fascist maniac and when he dies you become a person again and now you have to relearn how to be a person because it's been A LONG TIME and you learn the joy of spicy foods. and also you're a lesbian

[tonydaddingham]

Some of the posts you've reblogged lately have clarified some of my thinking about how Gaiman has reworked the characters from the original text. In the novel, Aziraphale and Crowley have at base the /same/ flaw: they evade thinking about the ramifications of their actions by displacing everything onto their "job" requirements. To which the novel says, no can do. Aziraphale has his moral epiphany at the airfield before Crowley does, but it is by and large the same epiphany. Most of the rhetoric about offloading responsibility goes to Crowley, either directly or in free indirect discourse, but he's also the dominant viewpoint character of the two. For that matter, we are told how Crowley /feels/ about where Aziraphale has led him, morally speaking, but we aren't privy to Aziraphale's interiority during this moment. In a sense, though, that doesn't matter, because there's no reason to believe that the sense of liberation is any different.

In the series, though, Gaiman ramps up the tension in S1 and S2 by splitting up their problems. Crowley still has the "but it's not my FAULT" moral flaw, considerably amplified with even more suspiciously unreliable narration, and he still thinks about his work for "head office" as just that, a job. But Gaiman rewrites Aziraphale so that, as other people have pointed out, he thinks about being an angel as an identity (and being a demon, for that matter). I think you can make a good case that unlike in the novel, in the series neither character fully grasps how the other conceptualizes himself. This is one of the reasons that the novel's moral epiphany doesn't happen in S1, and can't happen in the same way in S3. Crowley nudges Aziraphale as though he were nudging him out of a job, not as though he's nudging him into an entirely different sense of personhood. Aziraphale praises Crowley's goodness because he essentializes it, seeing it as a sign that Crowley's demonself is continuous with his former angelself ("you were an angel once"). In S2e1, we have the very telling dialogue in the coffee shop where Crowley knows all of Aziraphale's "voices," but doesn't understand why it ought to set off fire alarms for him that Aziraphale so needs to report to him for praise. This sits alongside the tension in the Job minisode, in which Crowley is openly disaffected with both Heaven and Hell, but doesn't see the situation in the same existential terms as Aziraphale does. The end result is the S2e6 car crash, in which each character proposes to the other in a way that solves their /own/problem.

LWA i’m guessing that this is you - let’s face it, noone else sends me asks like this - but by some chance that it isn’t, congratulations anon you sound just like them (and now i’m slightly terrified that there might be two of you lurking around my blog).

also - apologies that it took such a long while to come back to you; my original response was approaching half a dozen pages just for aziraphale alone (and i wasn’t done by a long shot), and then i remembered to great disappointment that tumblr isn’t exactly the forum for such a long post (future rhi: haha you played yourself, this is still a mammoth response). at which point, i basically had to rewrite it all over again, condensing it (future rhi: you failed) down into what i’m hoping are my key points. i wish i was joking when i say that you’re currently reading what is probably the fourth or fifth version of this response.

i think where a lot of disconnect happens in how we view aziraphale’s journey throughout both seasons stems from thinking that the concept of being an angel is all-encompassing, instead of potentially also being multiple layers that aziraphale has steadily been shedding throughout the story. personally, i think there are three distinct areas around aziraphale’s identity as an angel; heaven, god, and being good. a lot of these overlap and intertwine with each other, for sure, but i think it's too much to ask of aziraphale, as the audience (and crowley), to be able to abandon it altogether in one fell swoop. being an angel is not the whole of what aziraphale is - this much is evident - but to his mind, it's the core. dismantling that, stepping away from that, and finding who he is might be without the overarching expectation and pressure of being an angel is no doubt terrifying... and potentially we're not giving that struggle enough credit.

to my mind, he disconnects from heaven fairly early on in the narrative, as far back as job, and continues through the ages with a sense of fear - or, at best, trepidation - from them. however, this tenuous allegiance carries through to s1 when it severs entirely with the call to the metatron; i truly do not see any instance after this point chronologically where aziraphale has any fondness or loyalty to heaven as the institution, nor the archangels. he is unique in being an angel that has experienced the fullness of earth and humanity, and this has influenced him fundamentally into being an angel that is so 'other' from his peers that he's by default unrecognisable, almost alien, and is deprecated and dismissed as a result. it's the very first modern scene we see of him in s1 - putting him in direct contrast with gabriel (arguably The angel of abrahamic religion; the one that nearly everyone recognises, and considers to be the epitome of What An Angel Should Be). crowley has similarly influenced him through the ages; he's made aziraphale think outside of the dogma that heaven instils as being the irreproachable, righteous, Good Side - as well as encourage him in his hedonism and self-interest (literally the reason why they both endeavour to stop the apocalypse in the first place) because it is important to aziraphale personally, and he takes pleasure and happiness from it. aziraphale "[keeps] up appearances" for the sake of complying with heaven and not raising suspicion, but is ultimately "an angel who goes along with heaven as far as he can".

aziraphale's relationship with god is little more complicated, but again - i think aziraphale reaches the stage where he is shown time and time again that god chooses to be distant, and not to act or intervene*, which is something aziraphale cannot fully reconcile. as he sees it, hell does bad things (as does heaven, as is demonstrated with the apocalypse), and where you have the power to stop it, you should. equally, if you have the power to do something good, you should do it. he takes literal issue with this in job, where he learns that god is resolutely refusing to intervene in whatever hell is cooking up for job and his family, and he instead chooses to defy this and go to crawly to beseech him to not hurt them (obviously not realising that crawly has reached that page already). he holds out hope that god will do the right thing, but the storm comes from hell, starts early even, and god does not stop it - would not have stopped it, even if the children were above, and not in the cellar.

he cannot reach any other conclusion than crawly must be right, and god in fact wants the children to die. when it comes to the lie, and aziraphale resigning himself to falling for it, i do wonder how he reconciles this after he doesn't fall - my thought currently is that aziraphale believes that god has seen his 'transgression', and chosen clemency - to forgive it - but aziraphale fears she may not do so again. it makes sense that aziraphale then is so resistant to the Arrangement later on, and then why he appears so set on not helping thwart the apocalypse because that would be going against the plan (despite, yk, evidently agreeing with crowley and privately wanting to stop it as much as crowley does). this is once again shattered by the call to the metatron; aziraphale holds out hope that the almighty will fix everything, surely this is the time where they would intervene, job and his family is one thing, but destroy the entirety of their creation? but... god won't even get on the call with him. that to me is, once again, where aziraphale lets go that particular strand of what makes him an angel - as far as i can recall, we see no instances in 2023 where aziraphale declares any outright loyalty to god or to heaven*, even going so far as to initially reject heaven (and god, presumably, by extension) - "i don't believe there's anything left to be said, i've made my position quite clear" - until he is given the opportunity to... fix it? improve it? mend it? restore it? semantics, but "make a difference" plainly recognises that how it currently exists, or how it currently functions, is wrong.

*although, ultimately, this is arguably the only moral solution for god as far as humanity is concerned. an omnipotent and omniscient being should not get involved, nor even a vaguely powerful one (i'll take "free will" for 500, alex).

*i've said it before and i'll say it again; where aziraphale says "but heaven! it's the side of truth, of light, of good", this to me is not aziraphale saying that heaven is itself good. that would be in direct conflict with his willingness to "make a difference". if he thought heaven was perfect as it is, 'making a difference' wouldn't even come into it. to that end, he knows it isn't - and instead i see it that aziraphale thinks these are the qualities that heaven stands for, what it ought to be... not what it currently is.

last thing on god: aziraphale even literally steps into god's shoes in ep5, during the ball - it's all very well, admirable even, that he hosts and crafts the ball to be a curated environment where maggie and nina might realise that they have fallen in love with each other, he thinks he's doing the right thing by intervening... by getting involved. but as you say, the book epiphany hasn't happened for them at the end of s1, not even in s2, and aziraphale hasn't learn the lesson of why "messin' about" might actually be the wrong thing to do. in fucking about with the ball, he completely tampers with the free will of not only the girls, but everyone else. nina reflects this back at him, and it visibly unnerves him that she does so; he is removing free will from all present (or, attempting to in nina's case), but is doing what he considers to be right and ergo what he thinks god should do (in his eyes). he doesn't reach the free will realisation, at least not as far as is evident to the audience, and it is clear that when the issues surrounding playing god are highlighted to him (by both nina and crowley), he chooses to dismiss it. he is doing what he thinks is right, but in doing so is literally demonstrating the shortcomings he has in his faith in god.

but aziraphale and the concept of goodness? ah. this, to me, is still the key part of his identity that he is struggling to let go of. aziraphale by the point of s2 accepts that he is not perfect. the first meaningful scene we see of aziraphale in the post-s1 timeline is his interaction with maggie; he forgives the rent, does a kind and compassionate thing, but very readily recognises that he did it for his own self-interested motivations and prioritising himself first (so far as to look uncomfortable when thanked for it by maggie, and referred to as an “angel” as a result - aziraphale knows that his motivation was not angelic at all). a ‘younger’ aziraphale, i do not think, would have so openly admitted to this, and instead would have laboured it as a purely selfless, kind, and benevolent thing on his part... and it would have taken crowley probing further to get it out of him that he did it out of self-interest. this doesn’t preclude that aziraphale was being kind to maggie - kindness is in the perception, not the intention (imo) - but he accepts his shortcomings as far as being an angel is concerned, and the freedom of breaking away from heaven grants him the freedom to do so. but contrast this with his taking-in of gabriel. aziraphale is not stupid, and is evidently frightened, anxious, and suspicious of him turning up at the bookshop, but what becomes clear to him is that this is genuinely someone under threat, in trouble, and lost; yes, he gets frustrated with the situation, but he offers gabriel/jim sanctuary, and is set in this decision before crowley even enters the picture. he makes the clear assessment that the wanker-that-is-gabriel is not the being sat before him, and instead chooses the route of kindness.

aziraphale is not always a good person, and there are multiple instances where this is proven, but there are equally just as many instances that show that he is - and i think he accepts that he is someone that is a mixture of both. that being said, this is still something that he is self-conscious about (if shax's jibes at him in ep6 is anything to go by), but it stems more from a place of aziraphale feeling that he is not enough for heaven, or for god - that even, perhaps, he doesn't deserve to be an angel; i don't think it's out of place to say you can accept the traits that make it so you do not fit in (and in fact be glad that you do not), and yet still feel ashamed and anguished that you have been rejected for the same. there is a case to be made that this in part may be why he accepts the metatron's offer to return to heaven and run it - that it's an offer from the voice of god himself, in acceptance of who aziraphale currently is - but i do wonder how far aziraphale believes this.

now is finally time to start bridging the gap to crowley, because it is clear that being good is paramount to aziraphale. however, the issue is that the sense of being good is paramount, and he still conflates it with what is right. crowley is not to blame for this, but he is undoubtedly a guiding principle in how aziraphale develops this sense; crowley constantly challenges aziraphale on his rigid, often deontological mindset of "the action must be good for it to be the right thing", and instead makes him consider the wider, consequentialist picture; that sometimes, "the action might be a bad thing, but if it results in a good thing, that is the right thing". he reaches, therefore, the conclusion that if crowley ends up doing the right thing, he therefore must be good - and ignores all of the events, all of crowley's behaviour, that point to the contrary. hell, he even ignores all of crowley's own protestations to the contrary. as you say, aziraphale essentialises it.

maybe aziraphale does think that crowley is, at his core, the same person he was as an angel, but... personally, idk how far i currently interpret this to be the case (my thoughts are more along the lines of 'crowley is, regardless of being an angel or a demon, a good person, and that's what counts', but maybe i'm optimistically giving aziraphale more credit than is due). in any case, upon reflection, aziraphale has not learnt from the 'shades of grey' argument... not in relation to crowley. sure, i think aziraphale accepts that he himself is a light shade of grey, but crowley? i don't think he fully comprehends that that same school of thought must apply to crowley too - crowley is not a wholly good person, but arguably is an often dark one who sometimes chooses to do good things/knows when not to cross the line - and therefore lands on the expectation that crowley would return to heaven with him to do good - because that's the right thing for a good person to do. aziraphale has turned to crowley, and holds him to the same ideal to which he previously held in heaven, and arguably in god. these are entities that aziraphale thinks ought to stand, and perhaps originally stood, for "truth, light, and good", and when that went down the shitter in reality, aziraphale has turned to his own reality and found crowley instead. the faith - and comfort that it brings - had to go somewhere. that is not a responsibility crowley should shoulder, under any circumstance, but in not recognising that aziraphale is doing it, aziraphale hasn't been dissuaded from it either.

but hey, let's finally discuss crowley (and if you're still reading... incredible). look, i've made no secret of my... criticism? of crowley, and to reiterate not only what you said in your ask, but also what we've discussed at length; crowley is not a reliable narrator. this, regrettably, makes me reconsider accepting what are posed as core principles of crowley's character. he does not give a consistent account of the fall; whilst what he does say may be, at best, piecemeal snapshots of the events that led to his fall and, at worst, be completely false altogether, the conclusion is the same - there is something missing, and i'd wager that it is something that he doesn't want to admit, confront, and/or reconcile with. add this to his reluctance, or outright refusal, to accept accountability for his actions on a number of occasions, as well as his tendency to skirt around or fudge the truth, and i naturally do not default to taking his word as gospel; that's not to say that i think he has a nefarious, hidden agenda hiding away (obviously not), or is an entirely reprehensible character, but from an audience perspective i think if we're to anticipate some Major Revelations in s3, this is a key place to start.

one quote, from s1, that sticks out to me is, "crowley was all in favour of armageddon in general terms, but it was one thing to bring it about, and another for it to actually happen." this literally is the summary, for me, of all of crowley's ouroboros/boomerang/"this will no doubt come back around to bite me on the ass" characterisation. if i (contrivedly) rephrase this, it reads to me as 'i'm not that bothered about the end of the world and humanity in theory, and happy to add in bits and pieces that would make it happen, but i will have an issue as soon as we start gearing up to press the big red button'. as such, i think we have to contend with the fact that crowley may not be as moral as has been widely accepted. maybe i'm assuming too much, but if you were truly of moral standing, presumably even the notion of setting out plans to destroy the earth would be a big no-no, if you are in fact against the apocalyse because it would mean the destruction of humanity. but of course, this would presume that crowley has any way in which he can viably refuse (which, he doesn't) - to which end, therein lies the dichotomy of the nuremberg argument. is it an immoral action when you don't have the room to consider the moral option? regardless, does that absolve you of consequence?

this would also, presumably, be at odds with AWCW's objections to armageddon as put to us in the pre-fall scene, right? so, to me, the conclusion i reach is this; first, that AWCW obviously does not want the stars, the universe, to disintegrate as a mere bookmark in the wider 'great plan', but this does not come from an altruistic viewpoint; it comes from a more selfish one. and that's totally fair - i probably too would have issues with spending my entire (and at this time, 'entire' is unquantified) existence building and creating, only to see all of my work go down the drain as if it's nothing. but - i do not see it as him having any ulterior, selfless consideration for humanity. second, crowley likes earth, but for the convenient and clever things that exists because of - and in concurrence with - humanity. the reasoning he gives to aziraphale for stopping the apocalypse is just as true for him as it is for aziraphale. there is the line of "you said you would be testing them, but you shouldn't test them to destruction...", an echo of his sentiment at the flood, that gives weight to crowley privately wanting to stop armageddon for humanity's sake. i agree with this assessment on the whole; that crowley holds it as an equally strong and valid reason for thwarting it. but i think it is also fair to at least suggest that this reasoning may also stem from crowley's own personal feelings about the fall - a group of angels that were, presumably, tested to the point of their own destruction - and how god, in his eyes, perhaps should have learnt from that event before planning to do the same to her Ultimate Creation. this, for me, is a little more in line with his characterisation as has been presented so far. 

but then again, crawly seems to be acting selflessly in the job minisode. i, once again, am largely inclined to agree... but for the sake of exploration, i do wonder how far it's entirely selfless, or altruistic, and instead how far it's a projection of thwarting god in the sense of rectifying his own punishment. a case of 'i went through this and it's shit, humanity doesn't deserve the same thing the same thing to happen to them', vs. 'i went through this and it's shit, and now she's up to the same old bollocks because she's awful, so im going to thwart it as a big fuck you to god'. maybe there is no real distinction, or maybe it's a bit of both at the same time, but the former would more strongly suggest to me that, looking at the parallel between job and the fall, crowley was the entirely innocent party in his fall just as humanity is/was, which i don't personally buy. 1827 and preventing elspeth's suicide is a little closer to the mark where selflessness is concerned; "you have sinned very bigly - trying to kill yourself?! it's not on!" strikes me that crowley is now acting out of the interest of keeping elspeth out of hell, where it is pretty clear Bad Things occur. there are other clear instances of good too* - he gets the humans out of bookshop in ep5 and brings back mr brown from hell, he treats jim with kindness once he establishes for his own peace of mind that he's not a threat, and he protects maggie from being accosted by demons (and this is not to mention how he, on the whole, treats aziraphale). suffice to say, crowley is clearly capable of selflessness, and doing both the good and right thing, but i do think that he doesn't necessarily act with selflessness and goodness as his default motivation. there are enough instances to suggest that he isn't a completely moral character.

*now that im thinking about it, it seems that it's largely when the threat of hell specifically looms that crowley is at his most selfless..? hmm.

crowley does centre around the thinking that being an angel/demon as like a job - and tbf to him, it's not an overly out-there conclusion to arrive at. heaven and hell are presented as corporations and they're referred to as "head office", he is given a workload and told to report back, he stretches the truth about what work he is personally responsible for in those reports, and crowley describes himself as a 'former demon' (as if he ever stopped being one - even as a fact of being, he is a demon). so yeah - to him, it is a job. and as you say, he assumes that aziraphale sees it the exact same way which, clearly, he doesn't. crowley states that he never asked to be a demon which may well be true, but it's equally possible that he was given the option to step away from heaven and god, and took it (not knowing that becoming a demon would be the result), to my mind, it's almost like he got sacked from a start-up because he didn't like the direction the company was going and Had Things To Say/actively resisted and denounced it, and then was forced to work in a - in multiple ways - a worse work environment. it's an understatement to say that he's under no illusions that hell is awful, and he too "goes along with [them] as far as he can". however, i'm not entirely sure that we have reached where crowley has his "as far he can" moment like aziraphale has - the fact that he says to aziraphale he said no to hell, when he absolutely didn't, rings alarm bells. 

as explained above, aziraphale doesn't see it in this way at all; what i think crowley finds difficult to understand is that aziraphale's experience of being an angel is very much different to crowley's. aziraphale has existed for millennia on earth as an angel, and aziraphale’s purpose and meaning is wrapped up in being an angel, in everything that it entails, and specifically being an angel that has walked amongst humanity. just as aziraphale is never fully able to empathise with crowley’s position as a demon, and all that occurred to get him there, crowley is just as unlikely to fully empathise with the importance aziraphale places on his own angelhood. in comparison to crowley's situation in being sacked from a start-up, a hypothetical fall for aziraphale would be like being sacked from a business that, whilst you may not agree with them in the majority, has provided you with a career that is the only thing you know how to do, continues to pay for your home and benefits, and without it would leave you stripped of any purpose and meaning, and no idea on what it makes you/where it leaves you without it. and even then this doesn't really scratch the surface - again, aziraphale doesn't see being an angel as being a job.

the final fifteen is where all this comes to the surface. when the two of them individually have their backs against the wall, with no discernible way out, they have very different responses. aziraphale fights, and crowley flees. heaven is a seemingly insurmountable problem that stands in the way of them being left alone (and being together). aziraphale's response is to try to change it, to fight. crowley's response is instead to flee the situation entirely. this is the same with armageddon - another seemingly insurmountable problem - where aziraphale's response is to go above everyone's heads and dial 9-9-god, and crowley's response is to flee. neither of these responses are wrong, both are completely valid, and i genuinely think it is equally possible to see the situation from their individual perspectives. but neither of them understand the other's. aziraphale, who sees crowley as a good person who will do the right thing, doesn't understand why crowley won't fight with him, won't do (as he sees it) the right thing in making heaven what it always should have been, and is instead choosing to flee. crowley, who sees aziraphale as someone who like him as quit his job and wants nothing more to do with either of their former bosses, doesn't understand why aziraphale is choosing to fight, won't prioritise them, and won't go off with him. once again, both are equally valid thought processes to have, but are borne out of being rather significantly off the mark in understanding the other, and instead thinking that the other will act in accordance to what they individually believe the other to be.

[grovelin-green-goblin]

Why Should we Play Glitchy Games?

How many times has this happened to you? You booted up a new game, you got it day one, and it has some glitches, and you aren’t too fond of the graphics, so, as such, you stop playing it and don’t really come back to it. You go back to whatever you were playing before and whenever your friends talk about it with you you always remark on how you couldn’t get past the way the graphics were. Some time passes, and you decide to watch a video on it, and you realize you missed out.

I think we’ve all been there, and that’s nothing to be ashamed of, lots of people judge books by their covers or just by the first few pages. But it doesn’t always have to be this way. Even if a game is unpolished, has poor graphics, or is glitchy, should stick with it. If not for just the sake of seeing what’s on the other side.

Talking about video games, it’s also easy to get caught up in the details. I’ve seen so much discourse about the graphics of games and how powerful the consoles are, it’s almost like the games themselves stop mattering at a certain point. It’s become more of “how close can we get to a movie without just making a movie?” Now, granted, multiple years during the Game Awards, Geoff Keighley and other speakers have spoken about how they hope to see video games get even closer to being like movies. While I’m all for advancements, and granted this is mostly from Playstation and Microsoft’s AAA output, they all play so close to one another, and if that’s not happening, Playstation is remaking The Last of Us again.

So, what’s the point? All these games look the same, and while there’s depth to them, but at the same time, there’s a lack of variety in the actual genres. So many of these games have become samey. There’s not enough variety, but with the actual content of the games, there’s not too much actually covered. So much of this has become a discussion of graphics and less about the games themselves. The discussion, and focus, should start to veer towards the actual content of these games, not just the performance and graphics.

Now, sometimes, the contents of the games aren’t completely polished, but I’ve seen so many stories of people playing these unpolished games and having a great time. A big example is Super Smash Bros. Melee, a game that has become renowned for its glitches such as the Wavedash and L-Canceling along with the roster’s unbalanced nature has made it an enduring classic for two decades, or Pokemon Red and Blue, games that, while a complete experience, are held together with duct tape and a dream, allowing for Arbitrary Code Execution, a way for people to make precise inputs, rewriting the game while the game is being played due to an insecurity in the game’s coding, allowing again for new discoveries to be made and be played for decades. So much so that people are still finding new techniques and the hierarchy of characters' competitive comparisons to one another to this day. Along with games that haven’t aged well or were unpolished, some games are made with glitches in mind, whether for comedy, like Goat Simulator, or simply that a glitch inspires a whole new concept. One of the most influential examples being Street Fighter II, where the designers found that different attacks had ending lags and could also be strung into each other, allowing for concept of combos to be born, and essentially creating the basis for all modern fighting games.

Now some may say that, no, playing unpolished games leaves you with a frustrating experience, with constant crashes and choppy, inconsistent frame rates. An example of this that I can think of is the Steam version of Fallout New Vegas, a game that, in general, is colloquially considered one of the best video games in the Fallout series, if not in its genre. But, due to the game not being developed for PCs first because it was first developed for the PS3 and Xbox 360, the game’s development being 18 months, and how old the game is, the Steam version is riddled with lots of bugs and frequently crashes. Despite this, however, the game still sits with an overall review average of “Very Positive” on its store page. Why is that? People found that, despite all the issues, players still love the game and found ways to not only work around the crashes, whether through toughing it out or modding the game to tighten up the experience, preventing these crashes from happening. This even happens now, with online games, like Fortnite and Fallout 76. These games, for as popular as they are, there’s always glitches that come with new additions and get fixed as they come, and they release with these glitches. People still play them. Even a game that came out three days ago, Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom, has framerate drops and a strange lack of anti-aliasing, but guess what? I’m already halfway done with it, and I believe it’ll get fixed within time, whether as a patch or it was intended to work better on whatever this Switch successor will be. The point is, even if these games have these problems, a lot of the people who pull through usually end up at liking games like this.

Of course, this doesn’t work for consoles, but usually these don’t go that far as an issue.

All in all, even if the games aren’t polished or have glitches, it may still be worth it to play them. While, that doesn’t mean you can excuse extremely poor performances, you might find that you can still get enjoyment out of them, and can still be worth your time.

[ludiharambasha]

Hey! So I saw your anti atla posts. I was intrigued.

I have to ask, how would have liked the show to go about Zuko? How to handle him and his plot and arc? And what do you think about him as a character in general?

Hi, sorry that it took me so long to answer this ask, and this is sadly because I am not sure I am able to provide a satisfactory answer. (This is going to be very long). I will try to approach this from several angles.

In short, Zuko's entire conception is one I have a problem with. Zuko is not a character the writers tried to do something with and failed or wrote in a confusing, messy way that could be bettered with some tweaks- Zuko is exactly what the authors of AtLA wanted him to be, and it is their artistic vision that I have a (and at the same time don't- this will be clear to you as you read on) problem with. Not just Zuko, but Iroh as well, and I think this character arc stems from the privileged background of the authors, and a larger context of Western popular art, something I discussed in greater depth when I wrote a couple of posts about The Hunger Games.

Now, there are three angles I read Zuko and his redemption arc from:

1. Redemption arcs generally being indicative of poor or mediocre story-telling;

2. Zuko as a Western, colonial fantasy;

3. Zuko as a character in media intended for children.

I think this is the most organized way I can argument my feelings and thoughts about him as a character.

1.

It was fairly obvious that Zuko was a character fallen from grace that will see glory by the end of the story. From the moment he first graced the screen, it was apparent that he would go through a redemption arc, and that his character was all about that. There are some blogs that I will add here that might have a lot more to say on the issue (I will tag them in an edited version of this post if they would be ok with me tagging them), but redemption arcs are indicative of, at best, juvenile, at worst, flat out bad writing. Redemption arcs are really fine in children's literature because of their didactic nature, but in writing intended for older audiences they should not be treated seriously.

Art really isn't about instilling morals into the audience - art is supposed to make the readers'/observers' ideological, sensory and moral world challenged in interaction with it - art presupposes the already existing morality of the one interacting with it, not a blank slate onto which the art is supposed to leave an imprint. This notion that art is about didactics is a very outdated, passée idea that resurfaces every now and then, usually in think-of-the-youths type of discourse. Art is the fruit of the author's sensory, ideistic and moral world, and innately expresses something about the auhor and the world as they percieve it-it is not meant to indoctrinate or instill something, but to provide someone's perspective on a phenomenon or idea. This does not mean that art cannot be evaluated because it is personal; its merit is decided through analysys, usually of theme(s), characters, motifs, etc., of their quality, inventiveness, coherence, and so on. It is a delicate matter and not all critics agree on every work; moreover, there are different schools of methodology of the analysis of literary works; they do not agree on many things. There are good resources on the internet where you can find more info on lenses, approaches, etc.

I cannot say that evey literary lens or critical approach condemns redemption arcs (some classics with this arc include A Christmas Carol); however, there are two very good reasons to be vary of them in fiction. A) they are moralistic, and b) they are predictable, and these two reasons are somewhat intertwined.

I've already said quite a lot about didactics and moralizing in fiction earlier, so now I will try to focus on why this impacts characterization poorly and give more focus to reason b). When I say predictable, I mean that the character that this character arc goes along traditional lines of a certain archetype, and never once goes beyond them or manages to state anything new about the convention itself or break out of its confines. Zuko starts as a prince fallen from grace and ends up as the new Firelord- there is nothing in his story that even once nods to the fact that anything else was going to happen (him failing to redeem himself in book 2, only to then be consumed by guilt and finally be redeemed for realz is also an incredibly common pattern). There is nothing transgressive or challenging to constructing a character like this. There is no profound idea that Zuko brings forward with his presence in the story. How can someone genuinely say that writing a character that has been written a MILLION times before in the EXACT SAME way to be good? We laud stories that say something; creating a character like Zuko is akin to butting into a conversation, not because you genuinely have something to say, but just to hear yourself speak. Redemption arcs are the death of character- if we know where the character arc is going to go, the readers' perspective is not challenged. It is failure to tell a unique, authentic story.

Redemption arcs are enjoyed because they deal with a commmon fantasy that we CAN do better and be better, eventually. Very few follow up on this and become better people, but reading about people that do sure is reassuring. This creates this self-righteous feeling in the reader for aligning with the right cause. This has a very clear moral and instructive tone - do better. When art is made to instill values is when the art ceases to be creative. This does not mean that art is and should be devoid of morality; on the contrary, art is meant to engage your morality through self reflection. When you read about deplorable characters doing deplorable things, there is no need for the narrator to outright say 'this bad' - how you feel about actions of the characters is inherently a moral excercise. (Why should anyone celebrate art that insults the readers' intelligence and their ability to make moral judgements?)

At the heart of redemption arcs is that they are digestible, easily understood, and reaffirm the goodness of the reader. It is the most simple, juvenile type of writing there is.

2.

There is a reason why Zuko's redemption arc (and many others of the like) have a particularly strong appeal - they are reassuring to white, Western readers. They play into another, more disturbing fantasy - the sins of one's colonial past can be undone, forgiven and forgotten. If a prince of an empire that committed genocides, military occupations, and so on (there is a very long list of the crimes the Fire Nation committed), can be redeemed and become better and help the oppressed people, then so can they (they won't, and don't really intend to, but the fictional realization is enough!). There is also a reason why the fucking beach episode is beloved in AtLA fandom- it goes through the motions of 'humanising the Fire Nation' and showing them full of just some random, 'normal' kids that just live normal lives (in the eyes of the 1st worlders). It is the ultimate justification of white Western conformity, ignoring how this conformity keeps oppressive, violent systems running. Aang's culture being wiped off the face of the Earth, showing us the torture Hama went through, seeing Katara never find peace about her mother being killed by a Fire Nation soldier, never getting to see Jet get justice for the murder of his parents, all the environmental damage the Fire Nation caused is extended as much or less sympathy than privileged kids from the Fire Nation. Let that sink in. Zuko is just the most glaringly obvious realization of this motif.

Zuko's redemption arc is reflective of Westerner's feelings about colonialism and racism. This guilt is something that is part of them, as one has to be painfully stupid to be oblivious to their nations' pasts- everything around them reflects their vile history. They either choose to double down on this fact and percieve themselves as victors and their past as full of glory, others have trouble dealing with the gravity of these facts. And Zuko's moral dilemmas, his failures reflect this "revelation" and (surface-level) abhorrence towards imperialism. And it reflects a more awful truth, that these people seldom truly recognise the true implications of their own involvement in these systems - they often see colonialism as these sins of the past and systems divorced from their own involvement, and not the sins of both the past and present they actively contribute to - and Zuko also realises the faults of the Fire nation not based on what he personally did or has seen with his own eyes; he truly starts to recognise the evils of the Fire Nation when confronted with his past and his lineage. It is not the institution of the Fire Lord and the immense power it carries that has led to these heinous crimes, or the militarism- it is particular people that need to be brought down. Zuko, despite being a war criminal just like his father and sister, is absolved of what he did de facto. Just like the primary audience of AtLA would like to be.

Another thing to note, one that is not analytic but entirely subjective on my part, is that I cannot brush off the feeling that Zuko's redemption is more strongly motivated by Zuko's feelings of inadeqacy, rather than a developed sense of justice (this one is more up to interpretation, as there is proof n the story for and against this assertion).

3.

Redemption arcs and Zuko I don't have a problem with if we are looking at AtLA through the lens of mediocre standard children's media. Children's media should be didactic, because children learn a lot from engaging with the environment, and media is a particularly influential one. A child will not be capable of detecting all the implications of AtLA as a narrative - for them, it is enough to see a simple character like Zuko. I just cannot stand it when people delude themselves into believing he is written well, he's average at best.

That is all I have to say on the matter, for now. Thank you for your question. Take care.

[queerfandomtrifecta]

I’m late to the Hazbin Hotel stuff, but I’ve binged it a few times recently and just have to say that I’ve never seen an abusive relationship that looked so much like mine portrayed so correctly (as in both accurately and in being completely condemned by the narrative) as Angel and Valentino.

I’ve seen a little of the discourse on this and I’m gonna add my thoughts under the cut.

Gonna start by saying 1. I was lucky enough to get out of my eight-year long abuse/DV situation in 2019 and I’m safe and okay now 2. I know everyone’s experience is different and I’m specifically talking about my experience of being in a long-term abusive situation and don’t mean to diminish anyone who’s experience with SA/DV was different than mine and 3. this is all high praise for what the show did, because it may not sound like it at first because it is legitimately hard for me to watch, especially the first time through.

I’ve realized I’m probably rambling out of order at this point and I apologize to anyone who’s chosen to read these words I just had to shout into the tumblr void but oh well.

Yes, I read the trigger warning at the beginning of e4. I braced myself because that one is typically fine with a heads up for me, but I still wasn’t prepared. I barely made it through that first watch because it didn’t warn about the DV tied to the SA. I’d already barely made it through the scene in e2 where Angel Dust is listening to voicemails from Valentino because jfc it’s so painfully accurate. I heard some of that stuff verbatim from my abuser. Word for word exactly the same.

The other part that’s accurate is how self-destructive Angel is as a coping mechanism and his reasons why. “If I end up broken, maybe I won’t be his favorite toy anymore. And maybe he’ll let me go.” It’s. So. Accurate. To my experience at least, which is one that looked a lot like their whole relationship.

“Loser Baby” is absolutely fine with me. Because again, it’s so accurate. Having someone sit with you and say “hey, I clearly see that you’re not being treated right no matter how hard you try and fake things, and that you’re at rock bottom and not doing good things with the ways you’re dealing with that, and I’m here for you anyway” is what pushed me to finally leave. My now-best friend who at the time was my co-worker who’d just been hired a few months prior is the one who said it to me. He saved my life in more ways than one and I’m forever grateful for it. I’ve read a few things saying the song was calling Angel a loser in a victim blaming way, and that’s not how I took it at all. Admitting how much things suck, saying that aloud, including the ways I’d changed for the worse was crucial for me in the process of leaving and trying to heal afterwards.

“Poison” wasn’t even the part that was difficult to watch for me, even though those scenes are (mostly) what earned e4 the trigger warning at the opening. But the lyrics hit me hard. “My story’s gonna end with me dead from your poison.” I lived this for years. I can’t overstate how much this was the reality of my experience. I thought that was how things would end up for me. I didn’t think I’d have a way out from this person who was both hurting me and making me the absolute worst version of myself possible. I was so sure I’ve of those two things would eventually be the end of my story. I’m very very lucky it wasn’t and I’m grateful for the resources I had that let me leave when I could.

This was a whole lot of rambling to really just say I’ve never felt so seen and respected by the representation of abuse in a piece of media. Maybe it’s because I’m coming off feeling weird about things in OFMD2 and withholding saying any on that because reasons. But I can definitely weigh in accurately in the abuse plot line in Hazbin and it’s all praise from me. Would I have avoided watching it if I’d have known how big of a plot line that would be? Yes, probably. I would’ve at least read spoilers ahead of time to try and gauge it. I nearly stopped it a few times because I wasn’t expecting it to be so painfully close to my own experience and shown so blatantly instead of being implied off-screen.

But am I glad I watched it? Absolutely. Mostly because the narrative so clearly frames everything as capital-b Bad. And I’m grateful they showed what they did how they did, and even more grateful and that the narrative (which is specifically working with a major, prominent, surface-level text theme of redemption/redeem-ability) frames Valentino as an irredeemable villain for his role as the abuser, while also giving Angel Dust three-dimensions in his own flaws that he’s responsible for. It’s done flawlessly imo. And I’m glad I watched it, even though it was hard.