#i might be oversimplifying this situation

[yrlocalghost]

you know. i feel like chara is obviously a very complex character and has a lot of problems and a lot going on, but i always thought that the fact that the whole wanting to kill people from their village was like. not that bad. in and of itself.

[why-animals-do-the-thing]

Sorry if you've already covered this, but I was scrolling socials and saw that the San Antonio zoo got a large donation to expand their savanna habitat. The only thing that jarred me as I read through their expansion plans was apparently they're going to be outfitting some 'safari' vehicles so guests can be taken into the habitat to feed and interact with the animals (from within the vehicle). I was always under the impression that this kind of interaction wasn't necessarily good for either the humans or the animals-- is there a way it can be done ethically?? Anyway, I just thought it was interesting!

Ooo, okay, your question aligned with a thing I've been chewing on for a while, so let's talk ~ethics~ and ~philosophy~ aka this is gonna be a bit long. I do promise I'll answer your question, though!

The first thing I want to note is that you're really asking about two different things, which are almost always conflated these days when it comes to talking about animals: welfare (is the animal happy / healthy / safe) and ethics (is what's happening good / moral / acceptable). It's really important that we distinguish between the two, because welfare is an objective measure of physical and mental wellbeing, and ethics are a human construct that involves subjective interpretation.

A useful but highly oversimplified example of this is the bothering of cats for online videos. Pestering a cat to get a funny reaction once in a while may not impact their overall welfare. Welfare is the cumulative impact of an animal's experiences, which means that single acute moments may not weight heavily on the entire balance. If the cat is healthy, fed well, enriched, and has a good and positive bond with their humans, those momentary irritations for videos might not matter much. That doesn't mean that you or I, as viewers, might not still find bothering an animal for internet clout ethical. We can believe that humans shouldn't ever unnecessarily put their pet through negative experiences, and we can think that doing so just because it brings the human money or fame is distasteful. But! We have to recognize that as used in this example, those ethical stances aren't inherently tied to the animal's welfare state. Many people I know who dislike cat-bothering don't care if the animal has good welfare outside of that situation - they don't like that the situation occurs at all, ever.

So, back to your question. You're wanting to know if it's okay for a zoo to have a drive-through aspect of an exhibit where people get to feed the animals. You're asking if it's safe for the humans and for the animals (which is a welfare question) and if that type of interaction is ethical. I could just tell you that of course it's fine, San Antonio is an AZA zoo and their accreditation only allows them to do "good things" but that's now how it works here (nor is it the reality of accreditation).

The safety aspect is one I'm not worried about. It's actually a pretty common thing for reputable facilities to do some sort of vehicle tour in savanna habitats, whether in the guest's vehicle (safari parks) or on a hay-ride type vehicle (zoos). Many of those allow guests to feed out specific parts of their animals' diets. Offhand, I know Tampa and Fossil Rim both have feeding tours like this in a staff-driven vehicle. It's not specified from the zoo's press release, but I can guarantee you that guests will not be driving those vehicles - which means the interactions will be proctored by staff and what people are feeding out will be carefully regulated. The habitat is going to have rhino, giraffe, zebra, ostrich, and antelope/gazelle, and I'd guess that the drive-through is going to stick to those latter two and maybe additional species. Those are animals where a car is an appropriate safety barrier.

As to if it's ethical to do? It's spiny question, because it depends very directly on the ethical perspectives of the person you're asking. I think it's fine - you may not. Let's break down the different things that come into consideration on the ethical side, and my responses:

"The zoo is commercially exploiting animals by letting people pay to get closer." If the issue is that people paying to get closer to animals is using them for money, well, that's the business model of a zoo (non-profit or not, they still need revenue to operate). So IMHO it's not like it's "less ethical" than anything else the zoo is doing, using that framing.

"Zoo animals should be allowed to be wild and undisturbed by guests driving in their habitats." Zoo animals aren't wild, and their entire lives revolve around humans and the human work schedule. As long as a vehicle entering the habitat doesn't have a negative welfare impact (e.g. they're not scared of it), it's not very different from the rest of the routine of managed care.

"Feeding zoo animals will encourage people to try to feed wild animals." Thanks to obnoxiously viral content creators, people are going to try to feed wild animals no matter what. Doing it in a proctored situation where a staff member can try to do some education at the same time is probably the best possible scenario.

"People just do those tours to get close to cool animals." People are always going to want to touch the animals. If being able to pay for a tour keeps them from jumping the fence to try to pet a rhino, great.

There's one more that I want to talk about separately, because I think it's where a lot of confusion gets generated. It's this idea that "Humans shouldn't be interacting with animals at all, any interaction is unethical and bad for the animals." This is a welfare crossover, but not one actually informed by welfare science in a captive situation. And I think it's because the internet lacks nuance. Yes, it is absolutely correct to say that with wild animals, you should never ever try to feed a deer out of your car (or similar). It is incredibly harmful to those animals on both an acute and chronic timeline. But thanks to the rage-bait algorithms on social media and people endlessly justifying doing stupid, dangerous, bad things (and getting pushback for it), there's been a lot of bleed between the public's understanding of what wild animal welfare is and what captive animal welfare is. Combine that with the reality that captive animal welfare cannot be assessed or diagnosed from a single context-less clip, and that people with strong beliefs and no practical experience with the field/species/individual will pass judgement loudly to their audiences...

The result is almost a reflexive believe in many sectors of the internet that any human-animal interaction that isn't couched as a "rescue" is inherently unethical, for reasons people often can't articulate. Which is why, I think, so often people want to support certain aspects of captive animal management but feel guilty for doing so. I see this a lot in the questions the blogs gets, and I'm glad people feel comfortable asking, because it's important to think through not just the individual instances but the patterns leading us to question them.

So yes, I'd say that a staff-led experience in a vehicle chosen for safety is an ethical way to proctor an interaction between guests and certain savanna species. It will vary by facility - I'm always more wary about guests driving, although many drive-through safaris are fine - and by setup. I think what San Antonio is doing will be fine, though, and will be interested to see / hear about the setup when they start up.

If you've got a question about ethical captive management, I'm always happy to talk about it - but I'd invite you to poke around in your head a little and send me not just your question in the ask, but your thinking about why or why not something might be concerning. It's great practice for understanding why you relate to animal ethics the way you do, and where those beliefs come from.

[dunmeshistash]

Literally right after I saw one of ur Milsiril posts today I saw another person doing a Mithrun analysis with a huge focus on Milsiril only helping him bc of ulterior motives and it makes me sad :( She’s such a soft mum that would teach her children anything. If anything she’s less overbearing than my Chinese mother

What are the arguments? I don't really get what she gets from helping Mithrun. I guess the thing she would be able to get is making him fight the demon.

But like, she's no longer a canary and there isn't really much to hint that's what she wants. This is her part in Kabru's version

My boy really fairy tale-fied his backstory, it just ends with "And from that point onward Mithrun lived only to slay demons. He ate even though he had no desire to eat. He lived on, even though he had no desire to live."

Which is objectively false, in this version it really seems like she lets him live cause he can still be used, but he can't.

This doesn't really look like a killing machine that can be used to fight demons does it. Kabru as usual oversimplified what happened cause as he said "the world doesn't need to know personal things like that"

Again with his timeline vs Kabru's

Utaya started and ended while he was still recovering, 20 years from being saved to being appointed as a captain again. I know elves see time differently but even if we do the divided by 5 that's still the equivalent of 4 years of his life if he was a tallman. I don't think that's a negligible amount of time and honestly I'm happy Ryoko Kui considered that recovery from something so traumatic isn't fast or easy.

I said Milsiril only started to help with his rehabilitation after she retired because of this bit. "Mithrun. I saw a demon in Utaya" the situation from arrival to destruction was at most one year, I can't imagine she was able to leave in the middle of it just to visit Mithrun?

So I always assumed she did it after retiring (perhaps one of the first things she did since she's still in canary uniform)

Even if she left in the middle the earliest this could have happened is 498 so at most from his 20 years of rehabilitation Milsiril was with him for 2. At the most.

To me her smile here is cause she's seeing a way to motivate him to eat

Doesn't really look like someone sinister or with ulterior motives to me, she has her eyebrows slighty furrowed and a forced tight smile. To me it looks like she's worried. The other point is that right before this scene this is what she says

Here she has a soft smile as she remembers that he was someone similar to her. I think she didn't kill him because she saw herself in him, and I think she tried to help him for a similar reason. "It was such a warped, convoluted place built from inferiority jealousy lies and anger" "We might have hit it off pretty well"

She isn't saying that to judge him she's saying that and acknowledging he was just like her. I don't think the fact she relates to him would have been set up right before she tries to motivate him to eat to show "ulterior motives".

If anything I think the ulterior motive she has is that she sees herself in him, and wants to help him to help herself. Which as 'ulterior motives' go I think it's fine.

Everytime I talk about Milsiril I end up with a huge text lmao, I think I might be repeating myself too but I wish I understood the arguments for a sinister Milsiril using Mithrun. I don't really see anything in the extras that could indicate that. And the biggest "proof" is a intentionally abridged version of Mithrun's backstory told by Kabru that ignores all of his interpersonal relationships in favor of a easy to understand cautionary tale.

Oh yeah, and Mithrun's bitchy past self that didn't trust or like anyone saying it,

[mesetacadre]

One mistake that is very common for communists to make (both online and offline, though it's more annoying online) when talking about and participating in trade unions is forgetting both your and the union's place in class struggle.

A trade union is by its very nature a reformist entity that fights partial struggles at best and reinforces the state's management of capitalism at worst. The purpose of any trade union is to represent a group of workers at the a company or sector at the same level of the capitalists who run it to achieve better conditions for the workforce. Two crucial aspects of this are (1) that it simply puts the workers at the same level of capitalists to negotiate, it does not question the very role of the capitalist in the wider economy, and (2) its ultimate goal is always to reform the contract that defines the relationship between the worker and the capitalist, not to remove it altogether. It does not matter the amount or length of strikes the union might organize, or how much they embolden workers to act in their (supposed) interest. Every fight organized by a union is, by definition, reformist. The only situations in which unions seize to have this character are in either a dictatorship of the proletariat, and like any other element of the superstructure it's put to work in the interests of the working class, or a situation with a strong communist party pre-revolution that has been able to influence the union in such a way that it becomes internally aligned with the interests of the vanguard.

Does this mean that unions are worthless and that we should ignore them because they don't immediately acquire rifles and take over human resources? No. What we should do is avoid creating false illusions or misplacing importance on these fights

An organized (that is, in a communist party) communist's role is to elevate the working masses to a revolutionary conscience, so that the party can have the sufficient amount of people, and organizational capability, to exploit the crises of capitalism to their favor. And this never changes, no matter the context of your intervention. When you go to a protest, you are a communist in that protest, not just another protestor. When you do work in a union, you are a communist in a union, not a unionist. This means that your work and your interactions with other workers should always be done as a communist. You may be an active member of a union, in fact that's the main way for organized communists to act in a workplace, if their party does not have the sufficient strength to act on its own. But you're a communist first, a communist who understands the utility of unions to create the seed of revolutionary-political conscience in workers.

And a misunderstanding of any of these two concepts usually manifests in what I see some communists do, which is taking the reformist slogans of trade unions ("fight for a just wage", "united we bargain", or just an oversimplified "join a union!", for example) and parroting them without much apparent thought. Trade unionism and socialdemocracy go hand in hand, these two currents hinge on the idea of promising workers a bigger slice of the national wealth. But the difference between these two, and part of the reason why many more communists are less critical towards unions I think, is that unions take the position of workers, the "underdog", while socialdemocracy deals directly with putting reforms in place. But ultimately they both misdirect the spontaneous conscience workers acquire by the everyday class antagonism towards policies that reinforce capitalism and the system of wage labor through which workers are exploited in the first place.

[fairuzfan]

hello!! I don't know if this is appropriate (pls do not feel obligated to answer) but i was wondering what were ur thoughts on the israeli grass-roots movement Standing Together. I first found out abt them through a tumblr post that shared this substack article (https://theconnector.substack.com/p/if-its-not-helping-then-shut-the). the article immediately put an extremely bad taste in my mouth towards the movement and its founders, but i dont know if i'm being overly-critical of them.

Hey thanks for sending this in. No worries, it's totally ok. I was actually debating whether or not to publish this, mostly because I was afraid this would distract from Gaza, but I decided that it's imperative to stop normalizers from squeezing their way into the movement. Remember, the demands of the Palestinian people begin and end with liberation. Everything else is irrelevant and pointless to the cause.

So first off — I don't think you're being overly-critical of them at all. The first red flag of both this article and the group themselves is that they often exchange "Palestinian" with "Arab" and "Israeli" with "Jewish." That right off the bat shows me they have no respect for Palestinians and see Jewish people and Palestinians as mutually exclusive categories. I've spoken on this blog before about how racist it is to assume no Palestinian is Jewish and vice versa and this group really illustrates the forced division they imagine within their own goals and wording.

The article itself is quite anti-Palestinian in its erasure — it talks about avoiding words like "genocide," and "apartheid," and "ethnic cleansing" because "they are serious people trying to actually get something done." I really don't understand why not using those words makes you a serious person. If anything, it erases a description of how to define what it happening to Palestinians.

The whole redefinition of "peace" in this article and group is just calmness. These people are not advocating for peace in which families are reunited and land is given back — they are advocating for a muted version of the status quo of the current political system, just with less obviously fanatical governments. Peace cannot be attained when the people directly affected cannot have a say in defining it. They won't even say the word "apartheid." It's not some scholarly word with no meaning — it has actual consequences and effects on people (click). Palestinians are tried in military court. Their movement is monitored and restricted. It means that there are different legal systems for different people (click)! If you reject that this exists, then you're not interested in making the lives of Palestinians better — you're only interested in making your own life more comfortable.

As soon as you remove our ability to say words like "genocide" and "apartheid", you remove our ability to determine what happens specifically to Palestinians based on racism. By only saying "Palestinians are getting killed" an Israeli can come in and say "well so am I, by Hamas! Let's work together to end the killing" when it ignores that this is a systematic effort to completely wipe out all trace of Palestinians from the world.

It's like saying, "Don't say you have arthritis, say your joints hurt. And well, that happens to everyone, so let's just find a way to stop all our joints from hurting!" Then you work with people who fundamentally don't understand your pain and symptoms, oversimplifying your situation to the point of malicious universality. Sure, everyone's joints hurt, but my joints are hurting because my immune system is attacking them, not because of old age. You can't help my arthritis the same way you can wear a heat/cold patch to sooth your joints — there are other problems you're ignoring that all work together to cause me systematic pain and might cause bigger problems in the future if left untreated properly.

Similar symptoms don't mean similar causes and ignoring that is fundamentally ignoring the root issue and attempting to trivialize Palestinian's suffering. As soon as you take away the words to describe our situation, it doesn't sound so bad, does it?

Now, basically, the... weirdest part of the article is this excerpt:

People like him in Israel are very aware of how the left here is talking about them, and it’s not helping. “You can call me a colonizer or a settler,” he declared, “but I’m not going anywhere. And neither are the Palestinians.” When people chant, “Palestine will be free,” he said, “we Israelis hear, ‘without you.’ In the same way that a lot of Palestinians hear the ministers in Bibi’s government speak and think they want to do the same thing to them.” The problem as they both see it is that we are caught between two polar opposites. “Hamas believes in Greater Palestine,” Green said. “And on the other side we have people who believe in the idea of Greater Israel.” Indeed, that concept is in the charter of Netanyahu’s Likud Party. “Both sides have very problematic governing bodies,” he added. And the status quo of maintaining the occupation and managing the conflict has been exploded now.

Well, first off, Hamas is not the only one who believes in "Greater Palestine." Palestinians around the globe have been fighting for that since 1948. Second off, it's quite odd that you would center yourself in the wake of the ongoing slaughter of 10,000 people, with no end in sight. Right now, I would assume you'd be advocating for an end to the mass killings first and foremost, but you seem to be more worried about your right to stolen land.

Third, this completely erases the violence done to Palestinians the past 75+ years in favor for a "peace" that will only allow citizens of Israel comfort in their lives. Sure Palestinian citizens of Israel might have more comfortable lives, maybe (although I doubt it). But what about Gaza, which has been ravaged by Israel? What about the people in the Occupied Territories, whose economy depends on Israel, which controls it? What about the millions of refugees around the world who can't so much as see the place where they grew up because they've been exiled? The colonization of Palestine by Israel is not so old — there are people STILL ALIVE who participated in the massacres of Palestinians in 1948 and 1967 and walk around without facing any real consequences for that. My great-grandmother had seen both and she only passed away a couple of years ago. Where is the "peace" for her? Where is the "peace" for millions like her who still dream of going back to their childhood home?

This group AND the article tries to cloud your view into illustrating two opposing groups with equal power. They aren't. Palestinians, unfortunately, endure systematic oppression both within Gaza and throughout Palestine. Each and every time they try to resist peacefully, they've been shot, abducted, or imprisoned. The Great March of Return is one such example. BDS is also an example, yet that has constantly been outlawed by American governments. There have been a plethora of Palestinian artists, writers, and filmmakers who have been silenced or killed for advocating for a Free Palestine. Most recently, this included Heba Abu-Nada who was an award winning poet and writer who was martyred on October 20th after getting shelled by an Israeli missile. Ghassan Kanafani also was assassinated last century. The list goes on. Palestinians have no hope of "changing the system from within" because that internal change will always depend on the mercy of the Israelis that pretend to ally themselves with the Palestinians. Someone in Gaza cannot leave their refugee camp and go back to their ancestral home because no one in this group is advocating for that — and remember, the right of return is an essential part of the demands of the Palestinian people and we cannot ignore that for a forced "peace" that favors calmness over actual justice.

Now as we examine the group themselves, here is their mission statement/goal:

Standing Together is a progressive grassroots movement mobilizing Jewish and Palestinian citizens of Israel against the occupation and for peace, equality, and social justice. We know that the majority have far more in common than that which sets us apart and only a tiny minority benefits from the status quo. The future that we want-peace and independence for Israelis and Palestinians, full equality for everyone in this land, and true social, economic, and environmental justice — is possible. To achieve this future, we must stand together as a united front: Jewish and Palestinian, secular and religious, Mizrahi and Ashkenazi, rural and urban, and people of all genders and sexual orientations. As the largest Jewish-Arab grassroots movement in Israel, we are committed to creating an alternative to our existing reality and building the political strength to make this transformation possible.

Yet again, they are separating "Palestinian" and "Jewish," reinforcing this dichotomy that's so harmful. AND they're interchanging "Palestinian" and "Arab," which erases the diversity within Palestinian society. A group that makes the distinction between "Palestinian" and "Jewish" shows that they are not interested in the restitution of Palestinians but rather solidifying their own position within society by emphasizing a false dichotomy between "Palestinians" and "Jews" with no potential for overlap.

They mention "true justice" but "true justice" doesn't exist if there are no reparations towards the people who have been exiled and displaced, murdered, and tortured the past 75+ years. Justice is not an abstract concept — it is adhering to the demands of the people most impacted by systematic oppression, which is the Palestinians.

Looking at their leadership, there are only a couple of Palestinians with the vast majority of them being non-Palestinian. Sorry, but I'm wholly uninterested in "peace" and "equality" movements that are not made up of majority Palestinians. It's only common sense that you would expect such a movement to be led by Palestinians themselves — but this group seems to use Sally Abed as a token Palestinian who furthers their narrative of wanting "peace" in Israeli society. And even looking at their action items, you can see they make a point about emphasizing safety for the *Israeli* citizens above all else, stating that their far right government does nothing to serve the citizens of Israel. They claim it will also bring safety for Gazans, but how? You can advocate for a change in the government, yes, but if the people in Gaza are subject to getting their rights taken away based on the whims of whoever happens to be in power then no amount of "internal" activism in Israeli society will help them. They will always be at the mercy of the people who have a vested interest in erasing the people of Gaza and the West Bank so that they may take over their land.

Please remember, the civil rights movement of the 60s and the BLM Movement of this century were led by and FOR Black people of the United States because they were the ones making the demands for a change in their circumstances. Because at the end of the day, the people who are the most oppressed deserve the right to decide how their future appears and should not be dictated by the oppressor in any way.

This group tries to make a separation between the "Israeli people" and the "Israeli government." Right away, I have to laugh. They act as if the colonization of Palestine is too old for anyone to remember its origins — no. I had family living in Palestine as recently as '67. Maybe *this* generation didn't choose to settle in Palestine, but the previous generation did. And the generations before that. Before 1948, Israel didn't even exist. Hell, before a couple hundred years ago, BORDERS didn't exist. Not to mention, mandatory conscription means that most civilians will have been directly part of the suppressing forces, making them liable for the material effects of colonization. Why are people so resistant to the idea of undoing colonialism and its effects? I cannot think of any other reason than because they have a vested interest in keeping those borders up, in emphasizing nationality because they're one of the groups of people that is benefited from the establishment of a "Jewish State."

So in that, unless you call for an end to the idea of the "Jewish State" in Palestine, then I cannot think of you as a sincere advocate for Palestinian rights — this group especially plays at normalization of a muted version of the status quo rather than actual justice and reparations. The "Israeli advocates" within this group will benefit first and foremost in their own activism — therefore it's hard for me to view them in a positive light.

All activism for Palestinians should center around giving Palestinians reparations, as well as giving reparations to all indigenous victims of colonization. I think this group only tries to muddy the waters to make people forget what they're fighting for. I honestly do not understand why liberation scares you, if it means that no nation-state will have complete and total power over you and your family.

"Free Palestine" is an anti-colonial movement. Such a thing is possible — but you have to try to make it possible. Those against the unending liberation of all people are one of those who have the most to benefit from the continuation of colonization.

Right now, your main concern should be the people of Gaza and the people of the West Bank, and ensuring their safety and longevity in the face on continued erasure. "Peace" is all well and good but who exactly gets to define that? Who gets to benefit most from it? Unless you can unequivocally answer "ALL Palestinians," then you're not an ally — you're only interested in helping yourselves.

Remember — the fact that we even had to fight for our rights is itself an injustice. At the very least, ask the people who are most affected what they want before you listen to Israelis who have a vested interest in keeping the state of Israel alive.

[vexingwoman]

hi sorry (one of the previous wumph anons): this is completely random and there’s no need to answer this but… you said you got a lot of anons on the topic. What was the general consensus on the whole phenomenon among them?

Just to contextualize this ask: I recently mentioned how the whump community (known for romanticizing the extreme anguish, torture, and trauma of fictional characters) has an abnormally high amount of members who identify as trans men. And more interestingly, that almost all the characters whose anguish this community romanticizes are male as well. Many radical feminists have subsequently discussed why this might be.

I can’t say there is much of a consensus at all. Most theories I received as to why this community almost exclusively romanticizes the anguish of male characters were vastly different, and at times, outright contradictory. However, here are the most common ones:

-It’s a homoerotic fetish. This is an obvious and uncomplicated conclusion to draw; most members of the whump community are simply girls who fetishize male homoerotic dynamics. This effectively explains why the whumpee, the whumper, and even the caretaker are most frequently all male characters.

-Readers have too much compassion for female victims. Many radfems expressed that female anguish is too reflective of reality—especially considering most whump themes are forms of abuse that, outside of fiction, females are the primary victims of. The result is an uncomfortable degree of realism in which female readers may involuntarily project themselves onto the victimized female character. Therefore, replacing the victimized female character with a male helps to dilute the degree of realism and create a necessary distance between the reader and character.

-Readers lack compassion for female victims. Other radfems including myself feel that whump consumers fixate on male victimization because female victimization is expected, eroticized, and trivialized—meaning, female-coded anguish is only recognized as horrifying and emotionally compelling when experienced by a male character. Essentially, female victimization titillates the audience, but male victimization is treated rightfully as a horrific and traumatic incident. Thus, the appeal for male victims is an obvious conclusion; only then is trauma and violence treated as it should and only then is the victim truly treated as a victim.

-Male victims are an intriguing reversal of gendered expectations. Self-explanatory. A handful of radfems stated that seeing a male character in a vulnerable, victimizing, or compromising situation might be an intriguing reversal to the assertive and combative male character archetype. This is a convenient answer, except that it fails to explain why the abuser (or whumper) in these scenarios is still male and not female, considering that a female abuser would also constitute as an intriguing reversal of gendered expectations.

-Male characters are generally more compelling. Again, some radfems have stated that male characters are simply better written, but I find this another highly convenient yet fallacious theory. In my opinion, this is an oversimplified analysis in which female readers fail to consider how deeply, unconsciously, and invisibly their internalized misogyny actually runs, and instead choose to project that internalized misogyny onto the author. I elaborate more on this here.

-Male victims are vicarious revenge for misogyny. This was the rarest and most conflicting answer. Only three radfems expressed that seeing male characters in victimizing situations operates as a form of imagined revenge for either the male character’s machismo or the machismo of real-life men. This is unconvincing not only because of the obvious fact that female readers adore these victimized male characters, but also because the main appeal of this genre appears to be sympathizing and rooting for the male victim. An anonymous asker articulated the issue with this theory quite nicely:

In conclusion, it’s a highly controversial but fascinating discussion. I’ve enjoyed everyone’s commentary so far, even if I disagree with some of it. And I’ve tagged all posts related to this discussion under #whump on my account, in case you want to read through them and form your own opinion.

[sky-kiss]

How about Tav being affectionate/playful with Raphael and him indulging it and secretly liking it :)

A/N: Super short. Have some soft boy.

Raphael x GN!Tav: Sassy said loving Raphael is like owning a feral cat. She’s right.

There’s a marked difference between absent touches and ones with intent. 

He notes it with no small amount of curiosity, sitting back at his desk, pondering instead of working. While the devil was not in the habit of oversimplifying mortal eccentricities, physicality has always been a…lumped sum, as it were. 

Most petitioners were looking to fuck him or a third party, and so what cause did he have to learn? Haarlep took care of his more carnal impulses. A rare indulgence on the side took care of any residual desire. 

And he’s so often busy. 

The problem, then, as is often the case, is Tav. 

The little idiot is tactile, always touching, always clinging. He awakens to them draped across his chest (unacceptable). They’ll brush his fingers with theirs as they move past. If he’s sitting, and they’ve business to attend to, Tav might wander past, never breaking stride, and kiss his forehead or caress his hair or horns. As far as he can divine, there is no intent. 

He demands an answer from them one evening, and the little idiot dares to laugh. 

“I don’t have any motivation, Raphael. It’s just nice to touch you.” 

“A nonanswer. Try again.”

They roll their eyes, standing and fisting their hand in the front of his doublet. It’s an indecorous move, but he’s too baffled by their presumptuousness to stop them. Tav pulls him close and kisses him. Just a brush of the lips. No intent, as they��d so irritatingly put it. They leave.

Everything about the situation frustrates his sense of order and control. He doesn’t understand. 

And the crux of the issue is there’s a very different, very acceptable (he will credit no more than that!) amount of pleasure from these little caresses. Tav might toy with his hair in the evening, fingers carding across his scalp, massaging the muscles at the base of his skull. They might wrap themselves around him in the afterglow. They’ll sit between his spread legs and request he read his work. 

It is…unknowable. Raphael is…puzzled. 

And so, he will keep the little mouse close. If only to solve this riddle. 

[adragonsfriend]

Yoda and the Story of Zhuangzi's wife

We've all heard Yoda's words about letting go in Revenge of the Sith,

"Careful you must be when sensing the future, Anakin. The fear of loss is a path to the dark side…Death is a natural part of life. Rejoice for those around you who transform into the Force. Mourn them, do not. Miss them, do not. Attachment leads to jealousy. The shadow of greed, that is."

It's one of the phrases most often used to call Yoda unfeeling, cold, mean to Anakin, etcetera, and I would like to look at the same lesson presented in nearly the same circumstance, but one with does not have Anakin, and therefore everyone's feelings about Anakin, plastered all over it.

The story of Zhuangzi's wife is a taoist one which was brought up to me as a point of comparison by @tai-feng:

莊子妻死，惠子弔之，莊子則方箕踞鼓盆而歌。惠子曰：與人居長子，老身死，不哭亦足矣，又鼓盆而歌，不亦甚乎。 Zhuangzi's wife died. When Huizi (his friend) went to convey his condolences, he found Zhuangzi sitting with his legs sprawled out, pounding on a tub and singing. "You lived with her, she brought up your children and grew old," said Huizi. "It should be enough simply not to weep at her death. But pounding on a tub and singing—this is going too far, isn't it?" 莊子曰：不然。是其始死也，我獨何能無概然。察其始而本無生，非徒無生也，而本無形，非徒無形也，而本無氣。雜乎芒芴之間，變而有氣，氣變而有形，形變而有生，今又變而之死，是相與為春秋冬夏四時行也。 Zhuangzi said, "You're wrong. When she first died, do you think I didn't grieve like anyone else? But I looked back to her beginning and the time before she was born. Not only the time before she was born, but the time before she had a body. Not only the time before she had a body, but the time before she had a spirit. In the midst of the jumble of wonder and mystery a change took place and she had a spirit. Another change and she had a body. Another change and she was born. Now there's been another change and she's dead. It's just like the progression of the four seasons, spring, summer, fall, winter." 人且偃然寢於巨室，而我噭噭然隨而哭之，自以為不通乎命，故止也。 "Now she's going to lie down peacefully in a vast room. If I were to follow after her bawling and sobbing, it would show that I don't understand anything about fate. So I stopped."

— Zhuangzi, chapter 18 (Watson translation)

Zhuangzi is perhaps gentler than Yoda in the way he presents the lesson; he leads Huizi through his own thought process to his ultimate conclusion rather than stating a pure philosophical ideal, but his circumstances are also different than Yoda's.

Huizi serves as a stand in for a student listening to the story for the first time. He is totally naive to the lesson Zhuangzi has to teach him.

Anakin comes to Yoda as an adult, seeking advice, not as a child whose every decision should have to be monitored by the adults around him. When Anakin is unwilling to share the details of his situation, it is not Yoda's place to interrogate him for those details or solve his problems for him.

Personally, (no one rip me apart for oversimplifying a little here) I do not interrogate my friends for every detail anytime they say they are having a rough time, no matter how curious I might be. I listen to the details they want to share, ask for clarifying details if they are relevant, and if I am told enough to recognize a way I could help, I offer them that help. If they refuse my help, or do not offer me a way to help, I offer what advice or what comfort I can. I do not barge into their life and start making decisions for them, because they are adults with reasonable understandings of the world and are more capable of making decisions for themselves than I am, no matter how much I want to be able to make all their problems go away.

To put it another way, I let go of my curiosity, my desire to prove myself helpful, and my desire for a perfect world in order to respect the autonomy of my friends by allowing them to decide how to live and what help to accept.

Anakin gives Yoda nothing to work with except that he is having visions of the possible pain, suffering, or death of someone close to him. They are in the middle of a war, there is pain, suffering, and death everywhere. The person closest to Anakin that Yoda knows about is Obi-Wan, another adult that can take care of himself. Frankly, even if Yoda suspected anything, Padmé is an adult who can take care of herself.

Anakin is an adult who comes to Yoda for advice, not a child seeking an intervention, and Yoda offers him the best advice he has, in a manner that Anakin clearly understands, because he responds to the speech by asking,

"What must I do, Master Yoda?"

He understands what Yoda is saying and asks more about what it means for him. This is the moment where he implies, truthfully or not, that he is ready to learn the lesson, and that he can deal with the problem on his own. There is nothing else Yoda can to without more concrete details but offer him a final instruction,

"Train yourself to let go of everything you fear to lose."

Sometimes the idea that George Lucas had religious inspirations outside of Christianity when it came to the central themes of Star Wars is greatly distrusted in the fandom, but a lot of Star Wars actually validates the fact that he was interested in a lot more than borrowing Samurai aesthetics. It is more common, in my experience, to see the eastern influenced parts of Jedi philosophy denigrated, misunderstood, and over-simplified than the parts which are influenced by christianity.

To me it is difficult, if not impossible, to reconcile concepts of unconditional love and absolute forgiveness without also understanding what it means to let go of attachment.

[s-b-party]

Nous & Mythus: A Cycle of the Known & Unknown

****Honkai star rail version 1.6/crown of mundane and divine spoilers ahead****

After getting another update to the Simulated Universe & w/ Dr. Ratio coming soon, it’s a good time for me to discuss about these 2 Aeons & give my thoughts/analysis on them!

So who are these two?

They are Nous the Erudition & Mythus the Enigmata

We’ll start off w/ Nous so what does erudition mean? A synonym we can use is knowledge although that might be a bit oversimplified

Erudition often has the meaning of extensive learning whether it’s from books, practice, lectures, etc. The implication is that an erudite person or thing has a LOT of knowledge; think of a person who’s well-rounded but also has extensive knowledge in the many fields/subjects they have learned about, they can be considered erudite (this is reflected in how Erudition Pathstriders function in terms of gameplay, normally their specialty is dealing AoE dmg to multiple enemies at once as opposed to just a singular target)

Nous takes the form of an astral computer, they are a machine w/ many dangling wires visible & a red “eye” in the center, very much mechanic all around; as for their symbol it seems to speak to their concept quite well

If we look at the background, the cylindrical shapes can be interpreted as scrolls which are often associated w/ learning & knowledge; in the center, the abstract shapes seem to make an eye (their gaze perhaps) but I think it could also be taken as a flash of light which could represent “enlightenment” which we often think of as a sort of critical point in one’s journey in obtaining knowledge

Is it possible that the center is meant to symbolize the moment when Nous reaches their own enlightenment?

To name a few of their more well-known factions, we have the Genius Society & Intelligentsia Guild, both of which have members whom we’ve already officially met in the game: Herta, Screwllum, Ruan Mei from Genius Society and Dr. Ratio from Intelligentsia Guild

Seeing as they’re 2 different factions following the same Aeon, that means there’s something differentiating them, presumably their approach to knowledge

You can tell based on the name of the Genius Society what exactly they focus on (geniuses) which is a bit of a contrast to what the Intelligentsia Guild focuses on which is the dissemination of knowledge meaning that they believe everybody should have access to knowledge

The Genius Society doesn’t seem to share their knowledge that easily which we can see based on how some of the members tend to work alone, one even became known for killing some of the other members despite being in the same organization (#4 Polka Kakamond), Ruan Mei often sticks to herself when it comes to her research, etc; as a result it’s a contrast to how easily knowledge flows within the Intelligentsia Guild which even goes as far as to view it as currency in their motto

Although we’ve pretty much met only one character associated w/ the Intelligentsia Guild officially & despite how much of an asshole he may be, there are aspects related to Dr. Ratio that are in agreement w/ the belief of the Intelligentsia Guild

The name of his banner is Panta Rhei/Panta Rei which is usually associated w/ Heraclitus & it often translated to “Everything Flows”; Heraclitus was a philosopher whose focus was on the movement & changes that the universe goes through which sounds similar to how the faction wants to make knowledge easily accessible (therefore making knowledge flow through the universe)

Ngl the convo between him & Screwllum at the end of the continuance quest had me lost for a bit but I got the gist of it; to sum it up Ratio ended up rescuing the researchers who got teleported by Duke Inferno, Screwllum was wondering why Ratio would just stand back & observe when he could have prevented the situation from being dragged out any further since Ratio had the Phase Flame; Ratio explains that the best thing when dealing w/ ignorant people (in this case, the researchers in the space station including the people in the chat who were gossiping about the situation) is to stand aside & observe bc according to him foolishness is the most difficult thing to cure; Screwllum deduces that Ratio was attempting to make the employees realize that they shouldn’t be idolizing geniuses so much; Dr. Ratio is in a way similar to Alhaitham; they both think that geniuses shouldn’t be made into such a big deal or overly revered; in both cases the reverence of geniuses creates a gap between people based on intelligence

Another aspect which I find both funny and fitting is that Dr. Ratio as a 5 star will be available to EVERY player; as it is implied in the livestream, it’s his way of spreading knowledge to the mediocre; as much as he can be very arrogant & rude, it’s interesting to see that he still upholds the belief that knowledge should be available to everybody, not just to geniuses, in his own unique way

4. The last aspect of Dr. Ratio that I want to touch upon is the combination of his title & name: his full name is Veritas Ratio, veritas meaning “truth/truthfulness” & ratio meaning “reason” in Latin; the title doctor comes from the Latin verb docere which means “to teach/instruct”

This may be a stretch but hear me out: when put together, the name (not necessarily the person) Dr. Veritas Ratio gives off an impression of someone who is either qualified to teach others about “truthful reasoning” or a teacher who is truthful & rational (it might not sound like it but this kinda falls in line w/ Screwllum describing him as candid). Something I noticed is that based on what we’ve seen, not many people in the Genius Society go by the title of Doctor; what I’m trying to get at is that there is something to be said about Ratio having the title of someone who is qualified to teach while members of the Genius Society usually do not really seem that interested in spreading knowledge to the masses or teaching them

This isn’t to say that the Genius Society is entirely incapable of teaching, they probably could if they wanted to (keyword: wanted), it’s more so their motivations & values that differentiate them from the Intelligentsia Guild

Getting back to Nous, both factions do reflect specific sides of the Aeon: both are interested in expanding their knowledge but the Genius Society overall seems to be removed from civilization/society or at least a bit distant (matched by the quote describing the knowledge seeker as having a cold core) while the Intelligentsia Guild has a more cooperative aspect in terms of having a network of intelligence which can be seen in the meaning behind Nous’ signal which is explained in the entry of the Genius Society (although the signal is more so reserved for geniuses, it’s still an attempt at having a group of people work together to find the answers to the universe)

Now that we’ve looked a bit at Nous in detail, I’ll talk about Mythus; as the Aeon of Enigmata, they represent the concept of mysteries that can’t be easily perceived & their form is quite interesting to look at

Their name is related to the word “mythos” which usually refers to the stories & arts that help demonstrate values, beliefs, & attitudes of societies

*I found out recently that apparently the word myth is more of a pejorative term for mythos bc it’s more often than not used to describe stories as false or not true so there is controversy around that*

Overall they look like a jellyfish w/ the main body being faceless & legless while their tentacles/tendrils dangle out; some parts of their body have a unique effect on them that resembles oil spills or the surface of a bubble which is probably meant to be the fog that accompanies them; the staircases that come from their body seem to never end & even fade out into the darkness of space

Their symbol is very similar to their form; you can see the jellyfish w/ tentacles flowing down & in the background there is a ring of rectangles that overlap each other which may be referring to the stairs that appear in their art

The usage of the jellyfish is interesting; just like how the ocean can carry them along, the jellyfish can symbolize flow & movement, perhaps it’s to establish how mysteries simply exist in the universe without push or pull from outside forces

I can see them using the jellyfish due to its connection to one of the biggest mysteries of the world: the ocean (or at least the deeper parts of it); if we think about it, space is like an ocean of stars and unknown things so I think it’s kind of fitting using a jellyfish form to represent mysteries but it might be a stretch

Now a few known factions that follow Mythus are the Riddlers & History Fictionologists: both are pretty straightforward in terms of their agenda which is to enshroud the universe in mysteries

The Riddlers create mysteries by altering texts & words while the History Fictionologists create mysteries by eradicating evidence of past events aka history itself

It is interesting seeing how these factions actively create mysteries sometimes to the point of destruction (of texts, history, etc) even though the existence of Enigmata should be able to exist as long as Mythus exists bc Aeons themselves are manifestations of concepts; in some cases, Aeons can die while the concepts they identify as may still persist to the current time

So how do Nous & Mythus even relate to each other in the overall world building ? Their identifying concepts might appear as opposites of each other (known vs unknown) but I think there’s more to it than that

There is a readable item written by Fu Xuan called “Glimpses into the Beyond” where she explains that Nous doesn’t necessarily provide answers but they provide many questions & that “answers may only be found by oneself”

We also hear of Nous doing calculations & trying to solve the mysteries of the universe & since the Enigmata exists, Nous doesn’t have all of the answers due to the existence of mysteries

I think that while they do know a lot about the universe & can represent knowledge, they can also represent the learning process/the journey for knowledge

Something interesting is that Nous in Greek philosophy refers to the ability to process & perceive information so if Mythus is meant to be the representation of the things that can’t be easily perceived, does that still apply to Nous themself when they’re both Aeons?

Also where does that leave their dynamic? They’re enemies of sorts bc Mythus is trying to destroy certainty left by Nous but this is also a relationship where Nous is essentially searching for the answers to the universe’s mysteries aka what Mythus encapsulates, making Mythus their “goal” I guess you could say

Life will always have people who desire to gain knowledge & it will always have things that have not been discovered/figured out; there is one particular thing that I do wonder about amidst all of this: with Mythus wanting an uncertain future, I wonder how this will spell out for one of the most important concepts in many HYV games: fate

I guess we’ll have to wait & see if they’ll connect this to fate in the future 👀

*I hope you guys enjoy the first lore thread of the new year! :3

[leconcombrerit]

A warm hug to Non, or when are we going to stop demanding perfection from victims

It's been forever since I thought about making this post but I've finally decided to write the goddamn thing.

Three disclaimers : one, I haven't yet managed to get past the first third of episode 9, so this whole thing is based on episodes 1-8 at best. Two, I'll block on sight again if I see victim blaming on this post. Finally, I'm by no means an expert on the subject. It's complex, I might get things wrong and I'll have to oversimplify at times for clarity and brevity's sake, please don't kill me for it. It's probably gonna be long enough as it is. I've tried my best to organize my thoughts in a way that would make sense, but. Well. I hope it does.

Trigger warning for mention of suicide, bullying, grooming, sexual assault, rape

Non started as the poor little baby everyone wanted to protect -both the audience and Jin ; for all the shit he got after filming Non and Keng, there are a lot of parallels to draw between him and the audience. Then the dreaded episode 7 happened and all hell broke loose. I won't include screenshots of the disgusting things I read from some viewers about Non, but Jin's reaction is pretty telling already.

The easy explanation would be that he's mad Non isn't returning his feelings, but I think it has more to do with Non not fitting his 'good victim' role anymore. There's sadness on his face, but the dominants are anger and betrayal. Non tries to regain agency and gets crucified for it.

So what's a good victim ?

Non, basically

If you want an examplary blueprint of what society defines as a good victim and survivor, someone worth justice, defending and loving, just take a look at Non. I broke it down in four marks that need to be checked :

-Innocence : none of the person's action prompted the abuse -Moral high ground : the person has values and displays kindness -Helplessness : the person cannot do anything about the situation they're stuck in -Accepting to be saved : self-explanatory. The person has to accept the help that's offered to them, traditionally by a love interest

Non is abused for being poor, something he's not responsible for. He's hardworking, honest, passionate about the things he loves and commits to his engagements. He's kind when talking with Jin. He's resilient in the face of the gang's bullying. None of what he could do or say would make it stop, neither can he help owing Por for a camera he hasn't broken nor get out of Tee's pyramid scheme. His mental illness only increases this impression of vulnerability. Jin doesn't have all these elements, but he's got more than enough to paint a very similar picture of Non as the audience.

As for accepting help, Jin repeatedly offers some -and Non finally lets him in during their conversation on the rooftop. What Jin offers may be little but it's still help ; Non smiles and even gives Jin a shove -what I think is the only time he initiates contact with Jin at all.

"Thank you so much, Jin, for helping me all along." "It's alright, I'm glad to. I just want to see you smile again, Non."

The audience gets even more of Non being happy and grateful to be saved : he calls his "♥" contact for help multiple times, smiles at the reminder to take his meds and, later on, clings to Phee for dear life after trying to kill himself. He doesn't fight him, he doesn't reach for the scattered pills. Hell, even accepting Tee's offer to make money could count as Non agreeing to be saved by everyone around him.

Non checks all the marks. Everyone in the audience is rooting for him, the other boys can all go get impaled on a branch, and Jin looks at him like he hung and lit all the stars in the sky.

Speaking of the other boys...

Tee and Por victims as well but don't get the same amount of sympathy, if any. Tee isn't responsible for being stuck in a criminal environment and can't get out of it ; no one has offered help, so he gets a pass. But he's been shown to be selfish, opportunist, often cowardly and sometimes gratuitously cruel.

As for Por, it's even worse : every actions he takes seems to confirm his dad's opinion of him. The only mark he ticks is accepting to be saved by his mother, which looks very bad taken on its own. I made a post about Por not too long ago if you want more.

The only way for them to redeem themselves and go from 'horrible people who should die' to 'maybe they don't suck they're my poor little meow meows' is penitence. Take Por ; he's the archetype of the rich son who gets abused by his dad and suffers from having so much money. Just like Kang in Dangerous Romance, or Tanthai in Laws of Attraction. Tee ? I don't have names from the top of my head, but he's that hardened jaded guy stuck in a mafiosi network who has to learn to love and be loved again (enters White). Yet the audience learnt to root for these characters.

Basically, nothing is set in stone. Your status as a good or bad victim can shift depending on your actions and the way they're framed. The usual narrative is to get those characters to grow into the acceptable victim pattern. DFF however is going for reverse development (Non, Jin) or stagnation (Por, Tee, Fluke). It makes for gritty yet very realistic storylines ; and while I'm the first to yell that the masked figures should get their ass stat, I also recognize that there's much more complexity to them than this. Except Top. I have yet to come up with a good explanation for what they're doing with Top, but I will at some point.

How did Non fall from grace if he's such a good example ?

Three points : Phee, the paradox of the demand for Non to seek agency but not too much, and his inacceptable betrayal.

Phee as a magnifying factor

I love this kid to bits but Phee's appearance in the flashbacks concurs with Non's flawless image being torn to shreds for a reason. He's a good, strong and caring person who loves and tries to protect Non -something the audience has wanted to do for weeks ; so we all gathered behind Phee and made him our emissary, carrying out the impossible task outsiders to the series' world couldn't : saving Non.

Since Phee voices the questions and concerns of the audience, we are Phee to an extent. Betraying Phee means betraying the hope and love and care the audience has for Non. Phee is the series' moral compass by that point. I'm sure you see where I'm going with this. If not, consider it's a surprise tool that will help us later. When Phee gets hurt by Non or decides he'd be better off lost and dead.

For the record, in this poll Phee gets even fewer votes than White

Seek agency, but not too much

Discontent starts to rise with the helplessness point first as viewers start to question why Non doesn't ditch the group. Why he's putting himself through such trouble. Non changes from being subjected to others' action to being the subject in a grammatical sense. Yet Non has hiw own reasons to stay (how much does the movie mean to him ? How many hours and sleepless nights on the script ? How long would it take for him to find another chance to get enough funding ? How big of a dream is it for him ?). It's the first occurence of the audience claiming to know best what's good for Non.

Complaints quiet down when Non does try to leave for good only to be stopped by Jin. We saw him try, we saw him fail, he really couldn't leave so he's off the hook.

Jin also makes sure Non remains a perfect victim by bringing him back into the group. I'm not accusing Jin of trying to make Non suffer on purpose ; he's a good guy at heart, come fight me to death on this hill. But the only way for him to exist in Non's life is to remain a savior of sorts. If Non leaves, there's nothing to save him from. Which brings us to my next point.

Non must try to solve things by himself, sure. But not too much. Because when you thrash to regain control of your life, you might break a few things in the process. Especially if you have to wrest it away from well-intentioned but firm hands.

He rejected Jin's offers to help numerous times. He looked anything but thrilled when Phee put himself in danger to clear his name. He refused to change schools at first, only to begrudgingly agree when Phee insisted. This insistence is the heart of the matter : Phee is sure he knows best, so he bulldozes through Non's objections and hesitation : he doesn't consult him before asking his dad for help, he speaks in his place when Non doesn't answer his proposal, he puts the bracelet on his wrist. He asks him if he's taken his meds, just in case.

Phee has the audience's benediction in doing so. Part of it stems from our knowledge of future events : we know it's going to end bad for Non. We know he has to get the fuck out. We know whatever decision he makes will be a bad one. Kids and teenagers as a whole are often deemed unable, or not mature enough to make informed decisions anyway. Just look at Non's mother telling him to prioritize his studies so he can go abroad like his brother. Multiply it tenfold for people with mental illnesses ; they get babied on a daily basis. So Non cannot, I can't emphasize it enough, cannot do anything.

All of the above end with Phee getting his way. Non can't win against him, so he chooses to lie instead.

Aside from willing to be in charge of his own life, Non's refusal to let Phee help is also rooted in love and fear. While Phee would offer him an easy way out as he did for the bank accounts, it would most likely only be easy for Non and put Phee in danger. Both their survivals are held in that curt 'no'.

He's already straight up refused help, and now he loses the moral highground by lying (to his perfect holy savior Phee of all people). From here on out, any action he takes will be his -which is what Non wanted ; it's his life, and he won't be a bystander in it. But it also means that he jumped off the pedestal he'd been put on to land on thin ice.

And guess what, Non is a multi-dimentional character in a difficult situation who weighs more than a poor little damsel in distress. Of course said ice cracks. And the Non hate train gets started.

The betrayal

Lying and refusing help to go get it from the worst place he could have had was bad enough. But sleeping with his teacher while he had a boyfriend (Phee, for heaven's sake) ? Unforgivable. Cheating is the BL equivalent of every cardinal sin, the worst of the worst, and no matter the circumstances you'll get roasted for it.

And yet there are circumstances. One, especially, and it's called motherfucking grooming. I won't elaborate on this point cause I've done it over and over already, but Non was groomed by an adult. Does he see things that way ? Probably not. In his mind he's in control of the situation. He can lie to Phee about it because there's no reason for it to backfire. He does what he has to if he wants to save himself, using he one weapon he has : his body. It's cheating, but cheating in a game rigged for you to lose.

Society has two opinions about sex. It's either holy or gross. Take Jin, for instance.

See the look on his face. He's heartbroken, he's sad, he'll live through it. Witnessing Non having sex with his teacher when he has a boyfriend ? Now that's another story. That's a betrayal.

A betrayal of what, exactly ?

Of this goddamn image Jin had painted of Non. The same the audience was given to see prior to these events : Non was perfect and loveable and worth defending, an innocent, pure, helpless baby in need of saving. So when the illusion shatters in what society and especially BL culture hold as the worst action possible, people feel fooled. Stupid, if you will. And they turn their hatred to Non. Non lied to us ! He pretended to be good, dear god, to think I loved such filth ! My heart is so dirty now, ew.

But Non didn't lie. He lied to Phee, but that's it. Everything else was expectations and assumptions. Fail to meet them and suddenly everything is your fault. It's Non's fault for refusing to be dragged along in his own life anymore, Non's fault for lying in order to get some control, Non's fault for lying again not to lose Phee when caught by surprise, Non's fault for listening to Jin, Non's fault for resorting to use his only weapon to get out of a situation he was cornered in, Non's fault for being tricked into thinking any of the decisions he made regarding Keng were his own, Non's fault for everything.

He wanted to claim his life back and made a mistake, yes. He doubled-down on it when he realized it was too much for him to handle. He clung to it and did his best to keep it together. He dared not to be the perfect victim he was supposed to be ; to try when everyone knew he was bound to fail. And you know what, sometimes there's stuff that's someone's fault, consequences they didn't foresee, things they said, slips and falls, and they're still victims, just as much as they were before.

I believe that dealing with his debt himself is as important to Non as finishing the movie is. He's ready to be used and abused (by Keng in the former, the group for the latter) and to break his own heart, values, pride and sanity. He's the most resilient and dedicated character in the show to me.

But the world doesn't necessarily see it that way. So when Non realizes the mess he's made of everything, he fights Keng (who represents his desperate and violent search for complete independence) to reach for the bracelet he got from Phee. He wants help. He needs it. But he's not a victim anymore and any help is denied.

Both Phee and Jin later manage to reconcile their broken image of Non with the man he actually is. Too late to save him, but they still did. I have a hunch that things would have been different if Phee had beat up Keng and taken a crying Non in his arms, holding him tight while whispering none of it was his fault. But our moral compass fucked up, like the hurt kid he is.

What some people did by blaming and hating on Non is closer to the hateful comments he got on the video than Phee or Jin's reactions. They're far worse.

That's the big takeout. What if we stopped stigmatizing or idealizing sex ? What if we stopped demanding perfection and so-called purity for someone's trauma and status as a human being not to be negated ?

Anyway, here's a hug to Non and every victim who live in the paralyzing fear of a single slip. You can make mistakes just like the rest of us. You don't owe anyone perfection.

I'll end this rant on a bright, happy smile. I don't see a good ending for Non, but god knows he'd deserve it.

[gauntletqueen]

the italian boxer isn't a cop, isn't 100% white, and was crying because of her dead dad. she's come out in support of the other boxer people are using her as a weapon against to be racist. the way the olympics and the media is treating both boxers is really fucked up, i do not think the italian woman did anything wrong, she's just a useful tool of oppression people are utilizing against her will

Okay you're part right, part wrong. I've done some more looking into it and I'm glad I did cause it's Nuanced~ Not here to prove you wrong, just gonna list it all out clearly so we can all understand the situation better.

I haven't personally seen any racism coming into the controversy so I don't understand why you're bringing that up, or that Angela Carini isn't fully white. The most I can see is a few mentions of Italian politicians using the situation to try and earn some brownie points by standing behind Angela Carini, but even then they're also latching onto the narrative that Imane Khelif had an unfair advantage, due to her being transgender. She isn't, btw. She's a cis woman,another case of transphobes jumping at any opportunity to try to push their bullshit, even when the target isn't trans, and nobody had even accused them of being trans before that point.

While I can't find definitive proof that Angela herself is a cop, she was raised by cops and is a member of the boxing division of one of Italy's police forces. I can't figure out if that means that she is also an actual cop but that's probably where the assumption comes from.

"she was crying because of her dead dad" is true, but oversimplifying it. Specifically, she's said that her brother and late father were boxers before her, and taught her the sport. She wanted to honor them in the olympics, but the tension, stress and expectations got too much for her in the match against Imane, who it seems fought much harder than Angela was used to. This caused her to have an emotional breakdown. That's all extremely reasonable honestly I can't imagine having to handle to pressure of representing your country At The Olympics, especially not when there are also such big personal stakes. Supposedly she was cited as shouting "it's not fair!" as she left the ring. This is what got transphobes like JK Rowling and Musk to co-opt the story into their bigotted narrative that Imane must be transgender, as transphobic women in the past have blamed their losses on the fact that a transgender woman Was Involved.

It's likely that they might also have used Imane's disqualification from participating in the 2023 IBA Women's World Boxing championship. The organization had declared her testosterone levels to be too high, which supposedly "proved they had XY chromosomes". Since then, the International Olympic Committee has removed the IBA as the organizers of boxing at the olympics due to "continuing irregularity issues in the areas of finance, governance, ethics, refereeing, and judging" So. Perhaps they are a bad judge of chromosomes. Because again, Imane is a cis woman.

Anyway. Angela has stated (translation taken from Wikipedia, the original italian article is behind a paywall) "I want to apologize to her and everyone else. I was angry because my Olympics had gone up in smoke. I don't have anything against Khelif. If I were to meet her again, I would embrace her"

So yeah, she's done nothing wrong, she just cracked under immense pressure, and might be a cop or cop-sympathetic, but that doesn't seem to really have anything to do with the situation. The important thing is that rightwing bigots jumped at the chance to make her a martyr against her will, as you said.

[storybookprincess]

What do you think are Killua and Gon’s greatest personality strengths and weaknesses? Why? What do you love about their dynamic?

my dad has often said to me that there aren't such things as strengths and weaknesses. there are just traits, and they serve you in some situations & hinder you in others. this might be a little oversimplified as a theory, but i do think there's a fair amount of wisdom to it.

all of that is to say that i think gon & killua's greatest strengths are also their greatest weaknesses, depending on the situation. for gon, i see it as his optimism & determination. while they allow him to persevere through difficulties & see the best in others, they can also lead him to be stubborn beyond the point of recklessness and cause utter devastation when his positive assessment of a situation turns out to be untrue

for killua, it's loyalty. he's an extremely devoted friend & capable of deep & profound love. however, he can lose himself in his relationships with others & can be downright callous to people with whom he does not have a personal connection.

as for what i love best about their dynamic, it's unquestionably their devotion to each other. to me, they so embody love as a choice/action. they choose to prioritize, care, and sacrifice for each other time & again & it makes for such a compelling relationship

[gatheringbones]

[“I can say as an adult who’s since spent the bulk of my career reporting on sexual and reproductive health, gender, violence, and identity that the course of my life might have been different if my ninth grade health class had taught us about more than just a house-of-horrors catalog of the different kinds of STIs. Nothing we learned even vaguely challenged the reality that I and all teenage girls had been socialized to attach our self-worth to pleasing others, to make male figures in our lives happy no matter the cost to us, and to regard our own happiness, certainly our own pleasure, as an afterthought. Hyperfocused demand for better, accurate, and wide-ranging sex ed programs in public schools is, inevitably, an oversimplified solution that ignores how not all sex ed is good or even accurate. Rather, bad sex ed and puritanical policing are passed between generations—and who is going to intervene to teach sex ed teachers to teach better sex ed?

The consequences of bad sex ed impact the trajectory of a young person’s life. Shortly after being forced into a sexual encounter at sixteen that I would come to understand in my adult life as a sexual assault, I continued to partake in—on my end—deeply unenthusiastic sexual relationships. As if the discomforts and general awfulness of bad sex weren’t punitive enough, eventually, inevitably, the situation spiraled out of my control. I can still vividly remember being belittled by drugstore clerks on multiple occasions, first when I pooled together savings from my after-school job to buy emergency contraception locked away behind counters, and later when I purchased a pregnancy test. A doctor berated me after I disclosed that I had been having unprotected sex, asking if I were purposefully trying to become pregnant and “throw my life away,” and prompting me to conceal pretty important truths from medical professionals for years out of fear of being similarly shamed.”]

kylie cheung, from survivor injustice: state-sanctioned abuse, domestic violence, and the fight for bodily autonomy, 2023

[swamp-spirit]

Not a doctor, but trying to use my experience as a long term Anxiety Disorder Haver to figure out what could have happened to Jason in Gotham War. Listen, I know comic book science is made up, but let me have my 'fun'.

This is also a lot about how trauma and anxiety chemically works and Jason and Trauma in general.

(Discussing my own anxiety disorder a lot here, so don't click if that might be upsetting. Also please minimize the Bruce discourse here. I wanna talk about Jason.)

EDITS because I wrote this in a fugue state and replaced all words with homonyms

So there's two main elements to anxiety. There's the emotional element, the kind you can deal with in therapy, and the physical element, the kind you can deal with via medication.

I related a lot to Jason in Gotham War, because I have very physical anxiety. Even when I can calmly reason through a situation, my nervous system is very physically reactive to the point where I'll be holding a conversation and cracking jokes while seizing. Unmedicated, like Jason, I couldn't do light exercise without triggering a panic attack.

What Jason seems to be experiencing is an issue with his nervous system. To massively oversimplify, because I'm not a doctor, let's say the sympathetic nervous system is the gas, the parasympathetic system is the brakes, and triggers are the foot that decides when to push the pedals down.

When you're in a situation where you need to be amped up, your body hits the gas. You get adrenaline, faster heart rate, fight or flight, but this state isn't sustainable. First, it's very resource intensive. Second, it's a state designed to Do Something, and is very emotionally stressful if there's nothing to Do. This is why people with anxiety disorders can often function in actual danger, because that's what those reactions are designed for.

PTSD is pretty much 'your body hits the gas because your brain has misidentified a safe situation as a dangerous one due to previous experience'. Jason pretty consistently shows signs of PTSD, which makes sense. He has pretty much never been in a safe situation. Even before he was a vigilante and brutally murdered, being homeless, especially as a kid, requires constant vigilance. Most people of any age develop a level of PTSD after living homeless. Witnessing the death of a parent, (depending on the canon) growing up in an abusive home, and being homeless again while brain damaged and vulnerable could all cause PTSD on their own.

We see Jason be triggered a number of times. We also see him trying to self sooth and manage, to 'hit the brakes'. The 'breath deep' on his door in the new Boy Wonder, his stack of books on trauma and chronic pain management in Three Jokers, ect.

So Jason's already got his foot on the mental pedal. He's already scared, and for good reason. His world has always, always been violent. His behavior in Gotham War looks a lot less like ZEA!Bruce turned up the engine and a lot more like he cut the brakes.

As somebody who's experienced the 'lightly jog, and you have a panic attack', it's pretty much a failure of the parasympathetic side of things. You want some adrenaline for a light run. You need to take in more oxygen, but, when your nervous system isn't regulating, it goes out of control. It keeps amping up until you're breathing so fast that you aren't actually processing the oxygen you're taking in. These heightened states are rough on your whole body. When your body is running danger mode, it's not supporting things like sleep, digestion, and wound-healing.

What makes this more horrifying is ZEA!Bruce seemed to feel this would be permanent, even if Jason tried to reverse it, which means it wasn't just an injection the system would flush. To me, the most logical conclusion would be that the injection would have done permanent damage to the parts of his brain that kick in the parasympathetic nervous system.

This also... wouldn't keep him from killing. Jason is usually a calm killer, not a passion killer. Physical excitement is what the body is supposed to do in violent situations. It's much more likely to cause a panic attack in a safe situation where there's no physical outlet. He can take a shot without nervous system excitement. It would keep him from, or at least interfere with things like: -Jogging -Having sex -Watching emotionally intense media -Handling triggers Like, he definitely wouldn't be able to operate as Red Hood because RH does intel work, extended battles, etc, but he could very much kill.

SSRI's probably would not be that helpful, a serotonin tends to help more with stopping anxiety at the 'thought spiral' part than dealing with the nervous system. SNRI's and beta blockers would be a better bet, though Bruce clearly didn't think those would be enough to let him operate at Red Hood.

So... how is he better? Well, the actual answer is 'comic are bullshit', but let's try and roll with it. The given reason is Joker Gas, which is odd because Joker Gas seems to function like... a neurotoxin? A stimulant? My best guess would be that dying or brain damage in general is kicking in some sort of residual Lazarus healing factor and repairing the physical structure that controls the parasympathetic system.

[boreal-sea]

Hey, I have a question and I was wondering if you could help because it’s really been confusing me lately. If not, for any reason at all, you’d rather not I totally understand. You can just delete the ask.

With a lot of pro-ship arguments I see the phrase it’s “just fiction” and idea that fiction can’t harm anyone. However propaganda is still obviously dangerous and representation is important. I don’t know how exactly the rules are different for these things and I’d really appreciate any thoughts you had on the topic, if you have any. I might be missing some obvious part to this, my brain tends to do that

So it's not that the rules are different, it's that the entire context is different, including the intent, impact and scope.

I used to deal with this mental conflict as well, as a young person. I was raised republican, and one of their big tactics is oversimplifying things. So you learn "violence is bad", and then you see BLM protestors and the January 6th rioters, and the simplified world view says "if you think the BLM thugs are justified, then so were the January 6th patriots - they both rioted, they both fought for their rights against the establishment".

Now obviously, those two situations are absolutely not equivalent when you think about them for longer than a millisecond, but the simplified world view does not want you to think. In the simplified mindset, "destroying property" is always wrong, no matter the reason why. So if you are OK with it in one situation, you cannot disagree in another and vice versa. And that is the mindset Antis have when it comes to fanfic: if propaganda is bad and can negatively influence people, if giant blockbuster movies, famous novels, and popular TV shows can negatively influence stereotypes about people and cause other harm, then it is equally wrong to write about icky kinks on Ao3.

The thing is though, these are not at all equivalent situations. Propaganda is created with the explicit intent to influence people's opinions about a subject area. The scope and impact of famous authors and directors is way, way bigger than a fan author on Ao3 - and big-name folks like that do actually have to deal with the impact of their work. Spielberg regrets the negative impact Jaws had on sharks, for instance.

A fanfic you write for yourself and post on Ao3 for a niche audience of fans is going to get a couple thousand hits, at best. It's very unlikely to ever escape the awareness of people in your fandom. And especially if you have tagged it correctly, the only people who are going to read it in the first place are people who are already into that kink, or who are open to it. It is never going to influence culture at large. My kinky fanfic is not going to have the same cultural impact as Steven Spielberg's Jaws did in 1975. And no, my fanfic is not going to "normalize rape culture".

Any work of fiction can have unintended impacts. This is not a logical justification to not create art. "Problematic art" not only deserves to exist, it needs to exist. If you don't agree with that, then you might as well be on the side of the folks in red states across this nation who are banning books in schools, forcibly rewriting history to erase slavery from the USA's past, and thinking they can get rid of "problematic media" they claim is "grooming their children".

[sidemenxyn]

Platonic!Sidemen x Autistic!Reader

Tw: panic, upset reader, oversimplified, overwhelmed and I believe that’s it.

Sorry if this isn’t what this situation may actually look like. I don’t really know exactly everything I have done a bit of research hopefully this is ok.

Text messages are green.

–—–

Tonight you were celebrating, celebrating your friendship with the Sidemen. You had been with the boys for ten years, you started the channel from nothing to amazing things. And tonight you were going to party and celebrate!

You were dressed in your outfit of choice, you had gone out with Talia, Faith, Freya and Ellie to get your outfits and having a little girls day for yourselves. Your outfit suited you very well, it matched your personality and showed your true colours. You were excited, you were excited to see the boys and everyone there.

You were currently just arriving to the event, you had a lift from Tobi as he didn’t live too far from you. So he offered and you accepted, you had your arm around Tobi’s as you both entered the large room. Decorated in xix and sidemen theme items. You were amazed, you and the boys never thought your channel would come this far; so it was a blessing.

You spotted Ethan and Faith, not too far from the bar. So you walked over to them, “Hey guys!” You waved and gave them a hug each. Ethan spoke “you excited, Y/n?” You nodded “yeah, can’t believe it’s ten years!” He too nodded. Faith put her hand out and said “let’s go and get some drinks, darling.” You smiled and took her hand as you both made your way to the bar. You both got some drinks and started up a conversation.

As time passed more people would arrive and start to fill up the place. You really didn’t expect it to be this many people but you were managing for the time being. You were currently standing with Harry, Calfreezy, Chip and Callux. The boys were chewing your ears off as they drank more and more. But it did help you a little as it was more like a distraction from the amount of people there. You were holding onto Harry’s arm as you felt it was a comforting thing to do.

But as time moved on, you grew more and more anxious. The lights started to become brighter, the smells of different cologne and perfume started to fill your lungs, the more people that were there made you feel like your were trapped and it was getting better.

Although you were feeling more anxious time did continue to fly by, not that it felt like it at all but it did.

You felt awful, everything started to make you feel overwhelmed and overstimulated. You knew you couldn’t handle anymore, so you did what you needed to do. You tapped Harry and spoke “I’m gonna go for some fresh air.” He nodded and said “text me if you need anything, ok?” You nodded and quickly left the overcrowded area.

To be honest with you Harry was planning on joining you anytime soon, he couldn’t take it much longer as he too doesn’t like events like this. But he was able to manage it far better than you did. Deep down he knew something was up, he wanted to give you a minute or two alone so you could get some peace and he promised himself that if you were gone for more than five minutes then he’s coming to check on you.

You stumbled out of the area, you weren’t drunk, just overstimulated. You sat down trying to catch your breath, you started to panic. Tears started to form you felt weak like a sick person with no appetite. You couldn’t bear it no more, Tobi was first to notice you weren’t glued to Harry as you usually were. So he went over and asked were you were “Harry, where’s Y/n/n?” He said “gone for some fresh air but I think it might be more than that.” Tobi nodded. Tobi said “I’ll text Y/n, could you go to the bar and ask for a water?” Harry said “yeah, do you want me to text the boys?” Tobi gave him a thumbs up as he started to text you.

–—–

Tobi: Hey, you ok?

Y/n: kinda…

Tobi: where are you?

Y/n: I’m outside by that balcony area

Tobi: omw stay there, ok?

Y/n: 👍

–—–

You were sat on a bench, phone in your lap as tears fell down your cheeks. You felt like you had been drained of all emotions. You heard the door click then open, you looked over to see Tobi and the boys. They closed the door behind them, Ethan and Tobi sat besides you and the rest sat or stood around you. The boys who stood made sure they gave you enough space that didn’t make you feel more uncomfortable. Tobi spoke “here, Harry got you some water for you.” You gave a small smiled and thanked him. Ethan placed an arm on the back of the bench “would you like us to stay out here with you for a bit?” You nodded as you leaned against him. The boys knew that you were overstimulated so they never mentioned it as it was like a unspoken promise that they’d look after you till you felt better.

So what they usually do is ask you things, like what your plans are tomorrow or what video are you going to film next. The boys knew that they would have to take there time. But they knew that no matter the situation you were in or what was happening around you; they’d always be there and stop what they were doing. This was one of many reasons you loved them. You may not be family, but you friends. But this friendship between the eight of you was just like family.

You fidgeted with Ethan’s rings while the boys were in conversation. You slowly became yourself again, knowing you’d probably ruined their fun you spoke “I’m sorry I probably just ruined your night.” The boys were quick to defend Simon said “no you didn’t, honestly your our main priority over a party.” Harry spoke “I couldn’t of lasted any longer either.” JJ said “Y/n, if you need our help we’ll do whatever it takes, even if this party was for us, we don’t care as long as your alright.” The boys agreed. Ethan looked at his phone and told you “Faith has just texted me and said that there isn’t much people there now. Only close friends and family.” You asked “really?” He nodded and showed a little video Faith made showing the people there. You said “I can deal with that.” You smiled more now.

The boys all gave you a hug each and a kiss on your forehead, a thing they have always down for you, no matter if their in a relationship or not.

You walked back in with the boys and you all enjoyed the rest of the party. The boys enjoyed it way more as there was less people and more people that they knew well. Which made your night a lot better than before. You were glad you had them as friends. The boys always have your back no matter the circumstances. They love you and you loved them.

–—–

Hi! Hope this is what you wanted, sorry if it wasn’t what you had in mind. If you would like to ask for more thing your more than welcome. Anyone is welcome to ask ideas for me to post I’m more than happy to do that. Have a good day/night! 🫶