#i know your not the type of person to say things that you dont mean

[creatingblackcharacters]

hi there; first, thank you for making this blog and all the lessons you do, i really appreciate them as a Black person because it highlights a lot of struggles i face with fandoms in general, and why i dont interact more in certain spaces. it makes me feel seen

with regards to your questions, i'd also like answers to them from nonblack fans, especially nonblack anime fans. i don't even mean consuming anime with overtly racist caricatures of black characters (because numerous anime fans pirate their anime and never send a cent to the creators anyway), i mean how can they make fanworks of it?

how can they look at something that they are told is wildly offensive, but then defend with "well, this is how it looks in canon"? where is the line drawn between what's okay and what isn't? as long as it's slow and gradual, is there no line at all?

these are probably just rehashings of your own followup questions, so please excuse that, but i do have an anecdote

i joined a casual anime server the other day and a lot of folks were lamenting one Black character's racist design and how often those on social media will replicate it without thinking/caring. The thing that struck me is that, I've checked this character's tumblr tag regularly for a long time. There are always people who will post art/fanworks of this character with his racist design. Yet hardly ever, if ever, (outside of Black fans) have I seen any of these folks- the ones in the discord server- try to talk to artists/writers/fan creators/etc via asks/replies/etc. There's a notable amount of people in that server and a notable amount that agreed the design was outright racist and that they'll never make fanworks like that, and yet still silence

i'm not entirely sure what would be the line, or the "okay, that's enough" moment to spur any of these folks into action. i'm not sure if there is one. the only reason i don't make my own "hey what is wrong with all of you" post and blow up is because I've made a wonderful little friend group in this fandom who get it, and I don't want them to get caught up in whatever happens if I were to make a post like that

And this is just for getting people to stop using the canon design of the character, i.e., to stop drawing him as a racist caricature. This isn't touching on the people who 1) lighten his skintone [he's been horribly whitewashed over time, which has been reflected in some fanarts and fan merch], or 2) give him a looser hair/straight hair texture, rather than his type 4 hair (there's also #3, which is fanfiction with straight up slurs, and horribly racist writing in it that my friend heavily warned me not to read, but that was more of a one-off case and I've had the creator blocked a long time now).

my point being, we (Black fans) can't even get folks to stop with the caricatures, which we have to start with, and then there's even more of an annoying uphill battle with the other stuff. I'm just so tired of all of this; it makes me want delete my own works and turn away from fandom all together because i can't stand it.

trying for polite and assuming ignorance hardly ever works, speaking bluntly doesnt work at all, making public posts hardly goes anywhere (partly because of how rarely people reblog things anymore, partly because it makes people 'uncomfortable' to share this information with others). Black fans so obviously need help to combat this, and yet it's like sitting at a tea party and hearing all these pretty words in this one setting, yet nobody does anything different/better when the party's over/outside this setting.

sorry for dooming a bit, but like, genuinely i would like to know where the line is for nonblack folks? what is the point/are the points where you would speak up against antiblack racism? have you ever considered speaking up? if there's ever a moment you recognized antiblack racism and didn't say anything, why didn't you? did you consider how your lack of speaking up might affect your fellow Black fans? or how Black fans may be interpret this as silent agreement with the racists/with the racist 'norm'?

..those could maybe be alternative ways of asking your last followup question?

(if i've made any blunders or overstepped here, please let me know!)

No, I'm glad you spoke up! I too would like to see answers!

[secretlyofthefeywild]

the only person i want right now i can't have.

[arsenicflame]

(in general, removed from any specific au's where he needs to swim/not swim for Plot)

(personally, i think my stance is that he has some ability to keep himself afloat in calmer waters- on the shore or in a pool- but not in the way where its a particular skill. hes spend enough time dicking around in the shallows with Jack & Sam & Ed to know how to handle himself in water where he cant consistently reach the bottom, to feel comfortable cooling off by a waterfall, but is also keenly aware that if he goes overboard, even in relatively calm waters, being able to swim isnt going to do anything to save his life if a dinghy isnt sent. hes not gonna drown the second he's in the ocean or anything, but hes screwed if the waters a little too rough or its late or a raid and it isnt noticed before the ships a way away.)

[icewindandboringhorror]

"We can get through this by working together, reach out to your friends, community is all we have, a social network will be your security in the world, now is the time to lean on others!"

I do agree, and it's scientifically sound (pretty sure there is data about how people with better social networks live longer and etc) but also....augh..... what about the severe social issues, difficulty to leave the house, physical issues which lead to like zero socialization energy a majority of the time, etc. etc. Social support can be a replacement for structural support, but.. I guess I just wish it didn't have to be. Community is extremely difficult to build, even moreso if you're someone who has issues with social cues or group conversations or even just being around others in the first place. And blah, nuance, of course I'm just complaining or maybe being too negative or maybe misunderstanding, but, I hardly have the energy to brush my hair once every 2 months.. how am I supposed to maintain a wide social network and be active in a Community and Join Groups lol... sometimes it kind of feels like "er.. well if thats my only option then...... ruh roh". It's overwhelming

[nomairuins]

i like overthink everything now it makes me feel so dumb. i used 2 be able to just talk 2 ppl but nowadays every single thing im like Is that actually going to make them hate me. Yes probably. and then i just dont respond which makes ppl hate me. this is how it is

[mantisgodsdomain]

We ought to write more Pokemon fic some time. We want to recreate the Pokemon Manners/Human Manners cheat sheet that we made a few years ago we think that this site would like the Sliding Scale Of Politeness When Greeting A New Pokemon You've Never Met Before.

[netherdevil]

unnormal vivilly dweller thoughts in my head

[snekdood]

i dont think I should have to explain how it's fucked up to tell someone with bpd, someone with an already unstable sense of self, that they're not themself and try to insist you're them instead. I feel like that's pretty self explanatory actually

[hoodienanami]

since were living in this new age of understanding when it comes to how becoming famous (especially tabloid famous/infamous) at a young age negatively effects your mental health and psychological development i think its time that ppl start reevaluating how they talk about the sex pistols

[gibbearish]

are we really back to "oh you support (blank)? name ten people who (do/are) that right now or else youre lying for allyship points and everything you have to say should be disregarded". i thought we left that back in like. 2012 misogynist nerdbro culture

[britneyshakespeare]

Another Thing Wrong With The Former Gifted Kid Discourse, Since I Can't Stop Thinking About It:

people have such an unhelpful tendency to universalize their own experience when talking about the plights and struggles about Gifted Kids™—and what they are talking about is not necessarily invalid, but they're more often talking about their individual responses to their particular schools' policies. This Is Not A Systemic Analysis. it's helpful; i sympathize with you. But You Are Not Dismantling The Inequities by saying this or that happened At Your School when you were a child, and it affected you this or that way because of Who You Are.

example. i always see people talking about neurodivergence in this conversation, which is actually helpful in spotlighting how the Gifted Kid discourse often glosses over such complex intersectional issues. you can talk about how you were Gifted & Neurodivergent and how those experiences lead you to future disappointment. this is, i must stress, valid. but your analysis of your own life Is Not A Systemic Analysis. your experience alone will never speak for how the educational system and trends in policy among schools across the united states affect ALL neurodivergent people negatively because there are neurodivergent people who are Different From You. not to mention that when people point out that very often "Gifted Kid" usually correlates with some degrees of privilege, people push back and go nooooo I'm neurodivergent. people across all other marginalized identities who are systemically disadvantaged by the educational system can be neurodivergent. this does not make you, initially, when you were as a young Kid determined to be Gifted, NOT also in fact privileged.

if you are not ready to discuss experiences that were different from your own growing up, you aren't really engaging in the discourse of how to improve public education in the united states. it's a diiii-verse country we live in. not only in the ways we traditionally think of. when we think of "marginalized" or "oppressed" people, some specific and historically significant groups come to mind. when it comes to advantages that set up a child for future educational success, these broad categories often leave gaps because they lead people to generalizations, and ultimately, fatalism.

but there's really so much hope in early childhood education if we were to make things more equitable, ie like i always say UNIVERSAL PRE-K. these kids who are determined as "gifted" more often than not were just from more enriched home environments that prepared them for learning how to read, write, and do math. it's often not special innate abilities that leads to differences in outcomes for different students, but That's How The Kids Interpret It When Some of Them Are Called "Gifted." they're more often than not, not doing something that's truly exceptional or precocious for their age. they're displaying signs of age-appropriate development, when often, the kids who may be lagging behind them skill-wise just Haven't Practiced Those Skills As Much.

so yes, that's why there's a correlation in things like upper- and middle-class white kids being seemingly more successful in school (and more commonly deemed "gifted") at a young age. it's from privilege. it's not even just the implicit biases of their educators already working in their favor for their race and class. it's the fact that being more privileged, generally, means their family and parents had all of their basic needs provided for. they had more time to read with you. they could buy more development-promoting toys. they probably had better mental health to cope with the demands of child-rearing. if they suffered chronic or sudden physical health issues, they were insured. privileged children are usually less exposed at a younger age to the harshnesses of this world, as every child should be. ALL of these little advantages build up, in terms of what a child can be provided with before they go to school. anything that's going wrong in a child's family system can negatively impact them without them even being old enough to understand it.

you may not think of yourself as Privileged. you might prefer to think of yourself as Gifted. Gifted is so nice, even if it's demoted to Former Gifted. at one point you were told you were superior and it felt really good. and You, reader, i do not know You. i'm not calling You privileged, even if you are! hell, everyone's privileged in some way. i am at the point in the post where for transparency's sake i think i should say I Could Be What Some People Call "Former Gifted". i was called smart as a kid and given special homework sometimes etc. i'm not calling any Former Gifted people stupid for not realizing this either. what i mean is that this kids Are Not Usually Actually Gifted. this is a compliment given overwhelmingly to children who were just simply not deprived. when people say they were once Gifted, they're more often than not saying I Had The Early Opportunities To Learn Everyone Should Have, But Doesn't. this doesn't make you an outlier. It Might Just Be A Sign of Privilege.

[clubpenguist]

friendly reminder that even if youre open about something on your blog, even if you think its so obviously right in your about/description/pinned/whatever, most of the people who will interact with you are not even looking that far at your blog. they dont know your name or your pronouns or your disabilities or your interests or your credentials or whatever you think is just *so obvious* that they *must* be intentionally ignoring it just to hurt you. ESPECIALLY not if theyre a random stranger who youve never interacted with once before, has never interacted with you once before either, and has absolutely zero reason to care about you. its not a personal attack, its just a fact. this is literally the internet

[netscapenavigaytor]

list of possible netscapenavigaytor tags:

something kind of insane and only tangentially relevant

talking about fictional character

hopefully genuinely thoughtful insight and commentary to the post at hand

deeply baring my soul for the whole fucking world to see

"this is so fucking swag awesomesauce badass"

[pascalsrps]

.

[icewindandboringhorror]

Other Misc. Rambling Thoughts on the topic:

(~ !!!!!!!!! if you're just reblogging this post for the Poll section, please reblog the original post without this addition* lol. ~)

(*not that there's anything super personal or weird about the addition, just that it's meant to be kind of casual Side Commentary, not really part of the Main Point Of The Poll, so it would feel kind of weird for it to be emphasized by being included in reblogs unless the reblogs were explicitly about the side commentary, etc..... if that makes sense.. ANYWAY!)

It's neat to read the written descriptions that people are mentioning in the tags, since it's almost like I can see or conceptualize the idea as well, but it's just.. I'm not SEEING it.

Like for example: I can imagine a vase, it's a muted mint green and slightly translucent, elaborate golden birds sprawled down the side in streaks of thin rough watery paint, the base material shimmers gently in the light, there's a small chip where it's cracked on the handle, etc, etc. .. But as I'm thinking about this I see literally nothing.

It seems like perhaps some people can visualize an object first, and THEN describe what they see. But I sort of work backwards. I am building the object in my mind, I can never see it, but it's a collection of concepts. Rather than visualizing all details as a whole at once, I am adding each detail one by one, building onto the IDEA of the thing.

The vase doesn't have a crack on the handle because I just automatically visualized a vase with a crack. It was more that I cognitively understand the concept of a vase, what they tend to be made out of, how they tend to look and feel, the properties they have. So based purely on that knowledge, I can imagine "a chip is something that a vase could have, it would look this way and behave this way" - more like... I'm constructing a bullet point Fact List about the object rather than seeing it.

So if you tell me to imagine an object, I can, in a way, imagine that object in great detail, but it's just.. I'm not SEEING those details, more just knowing it's qualities in a purely conceptual way. Sometimes in the tags when people are like "yeah I can see the skin of the apple, texture, little dots on the surface" it's like… I can imagine that too, I can know it's there, but just with no visual attached.

I guess rather than SEEING something and going ''ah. I know what this looks like because I have seen it''. I more just skip that visual step entirely and go ''I know what this looks like, I just randomly have a list of information about the concept in my mind.'' etc. Maybe similar to how sometimes in dreams, even though a house may look completely different and be in an entirely fake 'dreamlike' environment, you just somehow KNOW intuitively that it's meant to be your childhood home or something. Even when it looks nothing like it in reality. There's a built-in base knowledge of the properties or information of some things within a dreaming mind, etc.

--

This also makes me wonder about like.. how storytelling and myth is so important to cultures all across time. Or how this could tie also into concepts of religion.. etc. etc. If so many people really can kind of conjure these vivid images in their mind, then maybe that's part of why certain things are so meaningful to them? Like a "religious experience" being something you can actually really SEE/feel/lingering with you in your head, rather than just abstract words on a page, detached purely theoretical ideas, etc... hmmm

.

Plus also just for average emotional stuff too, even outside of broader cultural conceptual attachments..

Like, I don't think there's a direct 1 to 1 link (obviously not all people with mental illnesses that significantly reduce their emotional or expressive capacity also MUST have aphantasia or vice versa), but it's interesting as someone who DOES also have a much more lessened emotional range/pretty flat affect/etc. etc. to think like.. Maybe I WOULD be more emotional, in a way, if I could have these vivid experiences..?

Perhaps memories would hold deeper significance if they could really stay with me vividly. Or storytelling would evoke more of a deep emotional reaction to me if I could really picture and feel the things that are going on. If things were more TANGIBLE in my brain, rather than always merely conceptual highly abstracted ideas.

Kind of like, it's probably easier to get over the death of a pet or something, if after not seeing them for an hour you already don't remember what they looked like (beyond just a vague fact list of traits), and you have no vivid memories or mental reminders of them (beyond just factual information stores). COGNTIVIELY you can appreciate the idea of their absence, of course, you still miss them, but there's just no remaining visceral sensory ties. A very "out of sight, out of mind" sort of thing in terms of attachments, memories, emotions, etc. Maybe certain things are easier to "get over", when you're not having constant mental sensory reminders that occasionally rekindle your feelings about the event or etc.??

(like for example, maybe someone could remain angry about an argument longer if they could vividly replay it in their head over and over again. VS just like.. 'Yes I can factually recall the fact I had an argument, and I do have knowledge stored about what precisely was said, but any sort of sensory data such as sights/smells/feelings, etc. from the actual moment of the event are long gone and can never be conjured again in my mind." etc.)

Which again, I think lessened emotional permanence and image permanence in the mind are NOT inherently linked, can all be caused by different things for different people. And, since I can't visualize anything in my head, maybe I'm misunderstanding how it happens and the effect it may have on stuff like remembering things you miss or replaying arguments, etc. etc. But it's still a little interesting to think about, if they could influence each other to some degree.... :0c --

Lastly, It's also weird because I'm actually pretty good at estimating distance and spaces? I can quickly assemble furniture without an instruction manual, pretty easily have a concept of how much space a chair may take up in a room, how two mechanical parts might fit together - BUT, I am literally not actually visualizing anything. I cannot see 3D objects in my mind at ALL. It's like.. just based on the pure List Of Facts About Things Which I Have Observed.. I can intuitively go "oh this works like this/this is this size" just because.. I know it's that size. I don't have to see anything to know..?

But then on the other hand, I'm terrible at directions without a map (I guess because a 3d outdoor environment has WAY more complexity than like.. "Will this square fit into another square?"etc. lol ).

BUT, I also draw/sculpt/etc. entirely without references, and seem to do mostly okay at that..? Like.. I can't even remember the last time I actually used a reference or looked at anything whilst drawing. It's all muscle memory, and me just adjusting as I go until something "looks right" on paper, I never have a set image in my head (or external reference) before hand.. Hrmm....

AND.. I used to say that I had a photographic memory when I was younger, which I know NOW is not true (I always thought it was just an expression, not that people could literally see things in a photographic way). But what I was describing is, I do often associate information with imagery, just... without imagery....

Like "Oh, I know that I took my medicine earlier today because I have a distinct memory, a snapshot of a moment in time, of me rattling the pill bottle in my hands as I looked up at a stop sign while in the back seat of a car". When I say this, I can't ACTUALLY see/feel/hear a pill bottle, or vividly picture a stop sign, but it's more just a factual recall, of. Even though I don't see these things, I know they happened, the information of them happening (me hearing a sound and also looking at a stop sign at the same time) has been stored in my brain as a memory, a collection of linked facts. --

As for other senses, I cannot taste or feel anything in my head AT ALL.. wild that some people mention that. I mean, again, I can have a purely factual recall as if reading a textbook, knowing the information of 'X item typically has X texture, therefore I can imagine what it may be like to feel it' or 'X usually has this taste' etc. - but I can never actually experience those senses in any capacity in my mind alone. I would say audio is my strongest mental sense (maybe a 2.5 or 3 (if it were translated onto the above scale where 1 is most vivid and 5 is nothing)), then visual (4.5 at most, usually 5), and then taste and smell and such are just complete 5, absolutely nothing, I didn't even know people could experience taste or feeling just in their mind alone.. lol...

I know this is just a silly bad quality random screencap of a screencap that I found on facebook lol, BUT it's a succinct enough image to easily describe the concept in a quick/accessible way hopefully :

-

(and of course, feel free to elaborate in tags, etc.! (especially elaborating about other senses as well.. can you "hear" in your mind just as well as you can "see"? taste? etc.) It's an interesting topic to me, as someone who's like a 4.5 at MOST lol. I'm curious what option will be the most common :0c )

[snekdood]

What is your most valued stance that exemplifies your centrist disposition?

im not sure what you mean, I dont have a "valued stance" really