#i think it can be very hard for people to understand the way a culture works unless they interact with it

[ray-moo]

>Because the Bible does not specifically say, in originally-penned 21st-century English, these words in this specific order: For the record, it doesn't say clearly that homosexuality is a sin in Hebrew or Greek either.

>there's wiggle room so it must be your bigotry claiming to speak for God. It's less that I'm relying on wriggle room or bigotry, and more that I am saying 'the Bible does not prohibit homosexuality or transsexuality'.

>understanding that principals can be exegeted from God's Word very simply and plainly because it is a supra-cultural Scripture meant to be preserved and applied to modern life as well as the time it was written... Exgesis from God's word is not God's word, and the idea that principles can be infallibly exgeted from God's Word is extrabiblical. You can't just claim it's true.

The Pharisees likely exgeted their laws from the principles they saw in God's word, but Jesus still criticized their laws.

"Then Pharisees and scribes came to Jesus from Jerusalem and said, “Why do your disciples break the tradition of the elders? For they do not wash their hands when they eat.” He answered them, “And why do you break the commandment of God for the sake of your tradition?"" (Matthew 15:1-3)

"And he said, “Woe to you lawyers also! For you load people with burdens hard to bear, and you yourselves do not touch the burdens with one of your fingers." (Luke 11:46)

>it is a supra-cultural Scripture meant to be preserved and applied to modern life as well as the time it was written... People have been reading the Bible for centuries and misapplying so-called clear principles for centuries, people were doing it in the time of the Church Fathers. The Bible cannot be examined without cultural context. In different cultural contexts, the Bible has been used to justify slavery or child marriage.

Like, are you sure you can interpret Deut 25:5-6 without cultural context?

Of course, the principles of God's eternal law are timeless, but I think it's worth being cautious assuming that there is no need to be aware of the cultural context the Bible was written in in order to find the principles beneath the words.

>It's too obvious by any measure of logic, reasoning, and honest translation that God for sure meant that homosexuality is a sin. Then why doesn't it clearly say Homosexuality is a sin in the Bible? I think that deriving from principles is a good way to show that certain activities are actually already banned sins already mentioned in the Bible, but I don't think a major species or category of sins would need to rely on derivation from principles to be known to be forbidden.

>In fact, anything outside His intended design—which is one man, and one woman, united as one flesh in a holy covenant before Him—is a sin. Where does the Bible say that? Whether that marriage is God's intended design, that marriage is between one man and one woman, and that anything outside of marriage is a sin?

We know that not everything outside of marriage is a sin because celibacy is accepted. So then God has at least two accepted paths regarding sexuality that humans can choose. Who's to say there aren't more?

You thought when people painted the "someday you're going to have to choose, for real, between the World and God, you won't be able to walk the line between both" picture that they were talking about martyrdom.

Some extreme. "Trample this picture of Jesus." "Say you don't believe!" "Convert to a different religion!"

You didn't realize that it wouldn't look like that. You didn't realize that when the line gets drawn in the sand, and Jesus is on one side, the other side would look like crying people wailing out, "why can't you just accept me for who I am? Why aren't I enough for you?"

You didn't realize that the choice would be between Jesus the Truth...or a majority of people in the culture making movies, making t-shirt slogans, changing their names, gently telling you that maybe this word in the Bible doesn't mean what you think it means, maybe love just means love, maybe you can have Jesus and whatever sexuality you want.

"Did God really say...?"

You thought it would be something overt. But the bad guys never said, "hey, choose the dark side over the light." They always said, "hey, maybe you don't even know what Jesus said."

The choice is: "It is the Lord. Let Him do what seems good to Him." OR "Did God really say...?"

That's the choice. This is where the rubber meets the road. This is our "choose this day who you will serve." As for me, I'm serving the Lord, and He's holding on to me. He never changes, and yes He did really say.

Hold fast to the truth. It doesn't change. People and cultures do.

[h-sleepingirl]

You Are A Wizard, So Pour Over The Tomes

Hypnosis is magic. It is not just “the closest we can get to magic.” Trance practices in all kinds of forms have served as the basis for mysticism across cultures and human history -- thousands of years. It is not new. It is not western. It did not start with Franz Mesmer or James Braid or Milton Erickson or Wiseguy.

Modern hypnosis stems from a rich human history of fascination and spiritual veneration of the mind’s power. We are practitioners of a comparably new discipline where we can literally change the way that other people experience the world. Their innermost selves are as leverage to us -- putty to us, when we know what we are doing. We can transform others freely. We can give pleasure or pain. We can facilitate experiences that seem to defy reality.

People talk a big game about respecting that power. What they usually mean by that is respecting EACH OTHER. That’s crucial, obviously -- not manipulating, not harming, being a good person.

But what about respecting the discipline itself?

It’s tempting to see what we do as disconnected from the “historical” and “outdated” methods of hypnosis. But we are a part of that history. We are likely hilariously wrong about a lot of things related to trance, hypnosis, the human mind -- what will hypnosis and psychology look like in 100 years? And even as we innovate, we are always building on the techniques and ideas that came before us -- in ways we are often not even aware of. We reinvent; we use ideas from the past unknowingly.

We have a right -- and a responsibility -- to OWN our magic. I am not here to gatekeep and say that this magic is not yours. It IS yours; it’s unequivocally yours. But as a whole we could do more to respect it.

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” And hypnosis is not even a technology that we UNDERSTAND. The only real reason we DON’T see ourselves as wizards is because there is a huge motivation to legitimize hypnosis as a scientific discipline -- and non-rationalist perspectives are looked down upon in our culture. I’m not anti-science (maybe a little -- tongue in cheek) but I do think that labeling hypnosis as “just psychology” is dishonest about how much we actually objectively know about it -- and does a disservice to the phenomenon itself.

I’m not saying hypnosis is literally metaphysical. But I am saying we practice something very powerful without knowing its nature. There are secrets we have tried to suss out about this magic through history that we have written down -- past and present. We actually have tomes of knowledge, records of past experiments and modern inventors.

In the last couple of years, I’ve started teaching/facilitating “text studies” -- classes where we sit down with an excerpt from a hypnosis book and parse through it as a collaborative group. I desperately want to show people that there is value in just critically reading the resources available to us. The clinical texts -- especially older ones -- are hard to read, like they are almost in a different language. But it is amazing the insights we have come to by tackling them together.

These old texts are not pure truths -- there is a lot we’ve improved on over time. But we can learn a lot by learning what hypnosis was like historically. The entire discipline of hypnosis is extremely susceptible to change -- it is defined SO MUCH by how we view it culturally. I just recently was amazed at re-reading some Erickson where he talks about making his subjects daydream autonomously -- as a primary mode and result of inducing hypnosis. Contrast that with today, where if someone’s mind wanders for even a moment, they feel like they’ve failed. There’s something really important here -- a technique from 50 years ago that tells us something we’ve lost in modern practice.

And there are countless examples of this, of people losing and reinventing methods over and over. As I’ve watched our kinky niche grow over just the past 13 years, I’ve watched ideas phase in, out, and in again -- there is both growth and regression of our collective body of knowledge. That’s the nature of things, especially when we operate partially disconnected from the resources that are available to us.

We CAN be connected to the rich human history of trying to unravel the secrets about our minds, and about this thing that gives us enormous transformative powers -- powers that we take for granted.

You are a wizard -- so pour over the tomes.

Read a book. Read an article. Set aside some time and view yourself with the respect of being someone who can study and suss out a magical text. Take notes, look up words and concepts you don’t know. Or just absorb what you can on a first pass and go back later. Read a chapter or just master a single page. Romanticize the aesthetic of sitting with the scent of paper, or as the technomancer with words appearing on a screen.

Read. Own this art. And bring that respect of this art to the people you share it with. I promise you can do things with hypnosis that you have never thought possible.

------------------

This is a little motivational piece (for you and me!) as I gear up to teach "Analyzing Erickson" at Charmed. It's something I feel really passionately about, and I wanted to share it.

Permanently linked/free on Patreon.

[genderqueerdykes]

this is prob silly but i appreciate you being so candid about not interacting with much media (like film/tv/pop culture stuff). it's kind of hard to be on tumblr or really even exist if you're not able to interact with media but it's a big trigger for me so i just... can't. like, i've never had anyone understand that it's not a choice i'm making to be special/different/lazy i just have extreme and unhealthly reactions to most media, except some books and comics. which idk if that's how it is for you (its not my business or anything) but i've never felt seen/represented about it before so im thankful, yk?

i appreciate you for sending this! i don't find it silly at all

i think it's very good for you to acknowledge that you have an unhealthy relationship with most forms of media. i'm sorry that you're going through this, but consuming media is not a requirement nor is it something that you genuinely need for your mental health, so it's okay that that's how you feel. i appreciate this because it gives me a chance to talk about something that is important to me, but people struggle to understand why that is

my parents used to make fun of whatever i was watching or playing as a kid over my shoulder. i used to get relentlessly mocked every time i put on a show i liked or played a game in front of either of them. it caused me to have severe trauma for years where i couldn't watch or play anything around other people at all. i still don't like when people ask me to put on things that i do like for a big group. the stress i feel when other people don't enjoy it is not worth it. i'm still very uncomfortable doing this to this day

i've felt pretty alienated all my life due to this. it seems like now more than ever, media, especially fictional media, is so important to general modern culture that it creates a barrier between people who do and don't engage. and it's not like it's a passive thing, i have people get offended at me when i say i haven't seen a movie or TV show. not talking about anyone on here, or any anons i've answered about media! people have been kind and respectful here. but in my real life and in conversations with other people, i have genuinely been mocked or insulted because i don't engage with most television, movies, books and comics.

i've had people question my autism over this. when i've told people in the past that i do not engage with pop culture, fictional media and so on, i've had people actually say "but i thought you were autistic????" like it's genuinely frustrating that it seems like people have shifted to thinking that autistic people's special interests are always cartoons, games and TV shows. it worries me because at times it feels like people are turning the common definition of autism into Media Consumption Disorder. my special interests are queer history & culture, animals & nature, and medicine & psychology. i genuinely enjoy research, it's something i happily do for hours because it stimulates my brain and motivates me. it excites me just as much as i think fiction excites people who can enjoy it. it's more than okay for autistic people to have a piece of media as their special interest, i'm not saying that its not! but it frightens me that people seem to conflate "autistic" with "loves fictional media".

due to my DID, i can't remember plots. like at all. plots confuse the ever loving hell out of me because i can't keep track of what's going on. real life doesn't have a plot. science doesn't have a plot. i don't know if fully understand the point of a plot, honestly. expecting people to be able to remember such an absurd amount of information in order to figure out something that happens down the road or at the very end feels like a herculean task to me. i can't remember what happened to me 10 minutes ago, there's no way i'm remembering a tiny event that happened hours and hours and hours ago. scripted interactions feel so stiff and unnatural to me

people tell me i'm saying i don't know what they're talking about to "be an asshole". i used to have a best friend who got really into dungeons&dragons and it traumatized me for years because i got into at first, then quickly lost interest once i realized how boring actually playing the game is for me. my friend did NOT take it well. he continued to force me to play. if i would ask him to please change the conversation topic he would start insulting and berating me and telling me that i was pretending to not be interested anymore to be mean to him. he couldn't understand that i grew out of it. he never got any better with this, as he was obsessed with marvel films and would get super pissed off if i told him i had no interest or didn't know what to say to him. it was frustrating because i didn't have a choice whether or not i could like something. it was "if you don't like this, you're an asshole."

and it's not just him that's treated me that way. it's been most of my friends. for whatever reason, when you tell the average person that you haven't seen, or god forbid don't like a piece of media, they take it personally for... some reason. as if i said "no i don't watch that because that's bad" as opposed to what i actually say is "i don't know what that is" or "i haven't seen that". you would not believe how insecure people get when you tell them you don't like a piece of media they like. i'm not sure why people feel like their favorite media is an extension of themselves, but it's an unhealthy relationship. it's not healthy to get offended if your friend tells you they haven't seen a piece of media that you have.

i have aphantasia, which is the inability to picture things in my head. i don't get "sucked into" media like people with clearer mind's eyes do. i don't picture anything cool or epic or fun happening in my head because i can't. as a result, i don't get pulled into shows, i don't get invested in tabletop games, i don't really get that affected by the media that i watch because i am painfully aware that i'm staring at a pre-recorded and scripted show the entire time. i'm painfully aware that i'm staring at an actor in a costume i just cannot get immersed in most forms of media save for very rare video games but even then, i immediately stop thinking about it the second i'm done interacting with it

i just don't listen to music and that one baffles people as i'm punk. most music is just straight up overstimulating to me due to my autism. i'm not saying that music is bad, it just overstimulates the everloving hell out of me. most of the time it just hurts my ears or gives me a headache or triggers my misophonia, which results in me getting irrationally pissed off. it's not something i can control. i prefer to listen to nature sounds, very simple meditation music that is a few simple tones, or nothing at all. i actually enjoy silence. i enjoy not overloading my ears. i enjoy being alone with my own thoughts. i can't think when there's too much noise happening

video games are more enjoyable than anything else due to the interactive element, but that does not mean i am paying attention to the characters or the story. it's very rare that a game can actually make me get interested in the characters themselves. i'm just there for the gameplay. generally i prefer games like rollercoaster tycoon, tower unite and other games that don't have a plot at all and are strictly focused on gameplay. i have no idea how people memorize all the different characters and interactions and story beats in games that have an overarching plot.

it's a personal choice. you're allowed to choose what your hobbies and interests are. if pop culture stresses you out, you do not have to engage. i just straight up do not get pop culture references at all and i've had people laugh at me for it but i just really don't care, it's not what i'm interested in as a person. i feel like a lot of people aren't quite realizing that most popular media is made for profit, not to be something genuinely well written or entertaining. i'm not saying those things are bad but what i am saying is that it's a product meant to be consumed in order for you to help a generally huge company profit. there's very little soul and whimsy when it comes to most AAA games and big box office films. the artistic integrity is severely lacking

anyway, thank you for giving me a chance to talk about this more at length! it's why i'm just very honest about it because i'm not going to force myself to change my interests because some people find how i approach life strange, or take it personally. you're allowed to choose what you interact with and don't. you're allowed to define your own interests and hobbies. and i think you're doing a great thing by acknowledging that you have an unhealthy relationship with pop culture. a LOT of people do right now. it's manufactured to be addicting on purpose. binge watching things is encouraged and is becoming seen as a new norm. i don't think people like you or i deserve to be mocked for approaching life in ways that make sense to us. take care of yourself, i appreciate you!

[unopenablebox]

i can't actually bring myself to name the post i was originally thinking about for various reasons, some cowardly and some reasonably intellectually honest. so instead i'm going to air a bunch of uncoordinated grievances culled from a wide variety of sources

unfortunately i have spent several years being driven insane by random one off tumblr comments about science that i took incredibly personally and now i have a million deranged complaints about how no one is nice enough to me about my job

like. idk. it would be nice if people were willing to extend the benefit of the doubt for ideas like: maybe scientists also know that measurements we use are proxies for the underlying thing, and that might have something to do with why we often try to have three or four different ways of checking for what we hope is the same phenomenon. but ultimately we do just have to try to use the tools that currently exist to look at the world and report honestly on what we think it looks like. "can you believe scientists think x is the only thing that would show whether something is y" look we're just trying to figure something out that we can get to work repeatedly so that literally anyone else can actually check our work. and that's actually very hard to do. ofc these concepts are themselves culturally and historically contingent and a lot of other factors go into the formulation of what an experiment is or how things get solidified as canonical methods etc. but i don't think "we would like to do things that have a hope of being consistently doable so that things can be compared to each other, and people can meaningfully describe things to each other and be understood, and that shapes what experiments we in practice do" is some kind of deeply suspect motivation on either a personal or institutional level and it would be nice if people acknowledged that that is often a driver for what actually is done. sometimes you do what's possible and describable.

or. idk. this one is also kind of about my own interpersonal experience and not a tumblr post, though still kind of about tumblr posts. but like. scientists absolutely make what are essentially personal judgments based on aesthetics or sensibilities about what to study. because there's so much fucking stuff. and it can't all be "what kills the most people" or "what has money available", not least because some of us can't actually keep going day to day on the basis of either of those, but also because even within those the universe is full of stuff. and 1. yes, in fact this means expanding the set of people making those judgments and what kinds of experiences shaped their sensibilities is very valuable, as one of several arguments for improving diversity in science but also 2. we're not, like, automatons gleefully doing Soulless Nonsense while cackling about how we're keeping everyone from learning about the true beauty of the world that real people care about. we're real people also. (it's also, incidentally, not a sick burn to explain to us that we were using human judgment and impulses while we were studying science. we have all lived inside our own brains while doing this and also attended so many seminars where someone helpfully explained it like it was new information.)

like, personally, i think it's really exciting when proteins can consistently arrange themselves on only one side of a cell. because it looks really cool and it's exciting to think about and doesn't obviously fall out of what we already know proteins do. this isn't, like, a sign of a fundamentally corrupt and cold nature that doesn't understand the world's beauty. no one is ever going to pay me lots of money in exchange for my thrilling new results about cell shapes i just think they're really beautiful and interesting. but i resent having to piously announce that i'm really interested in the World's True Beauty and Animals and the Mystical Wonders of Nature in order to communicate this point. i intrinsically value and care about what proteins do and that's the framework i'm operating in and that's the kind of thing that motivates a lot of people in science and it's simply not reasonable to act like that's some kind of evil alien motivation unmoored from the true human impulse. like i actually am mostly doing this because i also really like that kinesin animation where it walks on a microtubule. i just got really into it.

on a separate point, i know that reading scientific papers is hard and a trained skill, and contextualizing them is really annoying, but unfortunately we are just going to have to maintain a saintlike state of mild skepticism about strong claims made in university press releases that are then breathlessly repeated on tumblr. nothing to be done about that right now they'll just say whatever unfortunately. i promise to continue writing bitchy four-paragraph posts about their conceptual limits if and when i happen to notice one i know enough about to evaluate and then also have time to do it

[thoughtscout]

unfortunately, it's hard to interpret this as a good faith argument against veganism itself, because there are several statements made here that do not reflect an accurate understanding of what veganism entails - because veganism is not strictly a diet, nor would the vegan movement ever expect a woman to choose between 'her life' or a chicken's.

"Veganism is a philosophy and way of living which seeks to exclude—as far as is possible and practicable—all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for food, clothing or any other purpose; and by extension, promotes the development and use of animal-free alternatives for the benefit of animals, humans and the environment. In dietary terms it denotes the practice of dispensing with all products derived wholly or partly from animals."

if, for some health related reason, a woman absolutely had to consume an animal product, such as chicken meat, in order to survive, very few vegan people would take issue with that. because veganism is about reducing animal suffering as much as is possible for each individual. generally speaking, we have much lower expectations for 'perfect veganism' from people with limiting circumstances, specific dietary needs or fragile healths. on the whole, we would still consider that hypothetical woman 'vegan' so long as she avoided animal products at every other opportunity available to her, such as: not purchasing fur, wool, silk or leather clothing, not purchasing dairy milk or eggs, not attending zoos or animal sports shows... etc.

as a person living a vegan lifestyle, I wholeheartedly welcome criticisms of the movement that overlap with diet culture: it's very uncomfortable seeing veganism presented as a 'health' movement, and indeed, it can be 'marketed' by certain people/companies as such, a problem that especially effects women due to diet marketing. but that's really not at all what veganism as a political movement is concerned with, and I would argue the majority of animal liberationist vegan people passionately reject diet culture in all its forms. many vegan people also actively try to combat this image by promoting vegan 'junk food', which there is quite a large market for!

the question of veganism and health is not one that can be simply answered by calling it "limiting", "self-destructing" or "malnourishing", because this is a perspective that is quite frankly inaccurate and founded upon misconceptions. I have never once felt 'limited' by my vegan diet - except for when it has not been properly accommodated externally (such as supermarkets unnecessarily putting milk powder in everything, relatives being unsupportive or ill-supplied, or restaurants not thinking they even need to provide a vegan option for some reason). when it comes to my daily meals, in 8 years living a vegan lifestyle, I have never once struggled to secure a filling and nutritious vegan dish for myself to eat.

the truth is, it is completely possible to eat an enormous variety of food on a vegan diet, including fruits, vegetables, pulses and grains - and it is also completely possible to derive all the nutrients a human being needs to be healthy from this diet, provided you do a little research into the nutritional values of certain foods and make sure you're getting all your necessities. I shouldn't have to point out that there are many incredibly strong and healthy vegan athletes, including women, who have large amounts of body strength and muscle mass, perfectly equal to that of any other athlete or bodybuilder. a quick google search will show you many examples.

finally, veganism isn't a movement that is built upon "feeling bad for the animals". it is not simply attempting to answer the question of whether or not it is 'ethical' to consume animal meat for sustenance. the vegan lifestyle is, ultimately, a political boycott rooted in an animal liberationist stance: the idea that no living being should be treated as "property". the legal and cultural definition of animals as such has lead to incomprehensible amounts of animal abuse and suffering, such as: - complete limitation of freedom; imprisonment from birth - endless forced impregnations and sexual violation - a plethora of health complications and extremely low life expectancy - physical abuse and torture from farm and slaughterhouse workers - psychological distress, trauma and insanity - insufficiently humane slaughter methods that do not provide a quick or painless death

the fact of the matter is, the animal agriculture industry is just that - an industry. it is not concerned with feeding the population, it is concerned with turning a profit - and the way they do this is by enslaving animals, imprisoning them for their entire lives, and then brutally killing them and turning their body parts into products for consumers. this is not something to "feel bad" about - this is something to be horrified by, and furious about. veganism channels those feelings into action: everything from protests, targeted political activism, legal pursuits, industrial investigation and exposés, hunt sabotage, and even direct animal freedom action, such as that performed by the Animal Liberation Front. the vegan diet and lifestyle are just specific aspect of animal liberationist political action that an individual can perform.

many people naturally have very strong empathetic reactions when shown farm and slaughterhouse footage, which can clash very painfully with a lifetime of eating meat and defending those actions through cognitive dissonance and cultural conditioning's placating reassurance. however, I don't believe 'having empathy (or at the very least, compassion) for other living beings' is a particularly huge ask - anything else risks manifesting as blatant human entitlement and speciesism, which is already part of the mental plague that is contributing to our alienation from and destruction of the natural world.

you have already admitted feeling this compassion to some degree, which is further evidence of how natural and engrained it is in humans to care about other living beings. it is only our society in which animal agriculture & slavery has been normalized, industrialized and politically protected that keeps us from connecting with these feelings.

I would argue that 'women being raised to be overly empathetic' is an area of feminist thought that applies primarily to critcizing the expectation for women to have empathy towards men in any of the many relationships that can manifest between them (especially seeing as men are conditioned to have critically low levels of empathy in return), though there may be other and more complex areas where this issue can apply, which are certainly worthwhile discussions. in any case, there are even plenty of vegan people who talk about having low empathy levels, and even those who don't particularly care much for animals at all. even so, their ethical values as animal liberationists are what motivate them to take a stance and live a vegan lifestyle.

Why is it a controversial take to say women shouldn't prioritise a chicken's life over their own? Veganism is not feminist, full stop. I get it, I feel bad for the animals too, but the world isn't all sunshine and rainbows, and as omnivores humans need animal products to be strong and not malnourished. Women are raised to be overly empathetic to anything other than themselves. You can't buy into this self-destruction, be on an EXTREMELY restrictive diet, and call yourself a radical feminist. I thought we were fighting diet culture here.

I will go to the gym and eat a steak for every woman that diets herself into being tiny and weak and skinny, don't @ me. A female human being is not a fucking squirrel. Be in a misogynistic cult if you want to, but don't shame other women for not joining it.

[yuri-is-online]

Azul “WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU SHOT PEOPLE INTO THE SKY TO A ROCK?!??!” Ashengrotto

I'd also like to bring up the point that while there's water breathing potions I doubt they have anything to protect from the crushing depth of the deep ocean so I think he'd as freak the fuck out over the fact that humans have been that deep underwater. Very much in a WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING?!? HUMANS CANT GO THERE!” kind of cay

YES

I think twisted wonderland might have something that would allow humans to transform into merfolk, which would allow them to go into the deep ocean depending on the type of mer they became, but the concept of humans going as they are in submersibles is just odd. Then again he supposes your world doesn't have magic or merfolk so they don't have to worry about bothering anyone. Same with going to space, Azul's hatred of flying cannot be understated the thought of going that far up willingly is just so beyond him.

Azul is a very profit minded person, but his specialty and passion lies in hospitality and fixing niche problems. Space and deep sea exploration don't seem like fields he would want to expand his business into. He might be interested in the logistics of investing in those sorts of things? But the actual mechanics would just mystify him. The moon in the fucking sky give him a break.

[sysig]

If the rules are “Catch them all” ZEX already has a leg up (Patreon)

[the-insouciant-scientist]

what are hyakinthos's thoughts on the boatman and the slow boat in general?

Ooh, taking a quick sidestep from the rest of the ask game asks to answer this real quick! Short answer: a little complicated but generally friendly! Long answer: Gotta give some backstory first, bear with me. I have been thinking so much about belief systems vs established canon. Canon says that every human who dies regardless of belief (there may be nuance I'm forgetting but I'm in full speed infodump mode rn so that's a problem for future me) goes to the Far Shore. I say that's... kinda bleak? Also I'm just not a fan of stories where there is only One Real Belief and the rest are played off as silly distraction or whatever, but I digress.

A lot of his everything is based around the idea that both belief and proper death/burial care are important to get people to the afterlife they're meant to be in. Ritual makes all the difference between going to the Far Shore vs the Fields of Asphodel, for example.

His Boatman is Charon, or at least accepts the name. Hyakinthos has a working relationship with him and has probably taken up the oars at least a few times, especially for people who need the extra care in getting to where they need to be.

There's respect there, but there's also a certain... I'm not sure I have the words for it. The idea that death in the Neath is uncertain in so many ways (whether it'll stick that time, whether the person will make it to their afterlife or if they'll slip between the cracks and end up in the wrong place, etc) can be... discomfiting, to him. So while he does hold the boatman in high regard, there's always some little uncertainty there.

(Every so often, by their standards at least, Hyakinthos will bring him a very old obol. The Boatman will always refuse it. This is a ritual of its own. They'll sit for a while and talk anyways, and then part ways afterwards a little lighter.)

[the-good-spartan]

You’re welcome! It’s refreshing to see someone posting accurate responses when it comes to Sparta - there’s just so much misinformation around, it drives me crazy to the point where I try not to look, lol.

I wrote a fairly long break down on the so-called liberation of Spartan women here which may help you in finding the sources you’re looking for - unfortunately, I’m reliant on translations though, so I can only hope they’re accurate to the original. And of course, with Sparta there are very few sources, all deeply biased, so it’s hard (probably impossible) to see the situation at all clearly.

The short version is (after the Lykourgan reforms) there’s really very few ways that we could consider Spartan women as liberated in any modern sense - they could own property, which was very unlike any other polis we know of; and at least when they were young they engaged in physical exercise, and it’s possible this was done with the boys, and in the nude. Which I guess is liberated? Maybe? lol

Anyway - It’s pretty broadly agreed that this ended at marriage, when a woman became her husbands property, more or less - including his right to share her with a friend to produce children. It’s also pretty much not debated that women could have multiple husbands/households.

It’s believed the cultural shift (what we call the Lykourgan reforms, though there was likely no singular change as the ancient writers believed) happened in the 7th century - well after the Bronze Age of the epic cycle, and probably a century after Homer’s work was being set down. So for sure, drawing Helen based on Classical Sparta as we think we know it, is almost certainly wrong.

Of course people can do what they want in a creative space, but the general disregard for history really bothers me. How can they be interested the mythology, in the Epic Cycle, and not care at all about the people who made it? The culture that produced it? I just don’t understand it. To me, you can only understand one by having an understanding of the other. They’re two sides of the same sheet of paper.

Hi! Love your takes and all! What do you think of people talking about Penelope being all buff and strong physically as she was "Spartan?" or that she find Odysseus more attractive with blood plaster on his body as she is "Spartan" or such?. Is it true in the Epics? I read something about a Lykurgus or something..I just want to have a nuanced answer to that, also sorry for the silly question.

You are very kind Anon and I am glad you find them useful

Okay for starters I think this whole thing is a massive stereotype in regards to Sparta that "they are all sexually aroused by blood and violence". I mean yes Sparta as we know had an extreme military outline but it is not like they all just killed around to have fun like a twisted version of Asterix village or something. They valued war and the strength in war of course and they took pride to their warfare and all but yeah I think the whole thing of "oh gosh! Blood! Foreplay for Spartans" is just a joke that goes too far sometimes (although we DO have some exaggerated sources about the Spartans but, surprise surprise, they come from their main rival, Athens so yeah one needs to consider that too. So yeah although the Spartans were strictly military I do not think it is actually realistic to say that they all went like:

lol XD

Two this "Sparta" that they mostly mention is at least 100 years if not more away than the "Sparta" mentioned in the epic cycle. You see the Epic Cycle might have been synthesized at the 8th century BC but the events taking place in it, reflect on the Bronze Age or the Mycenean kingdoms which existed before. These "Spartans" everyone speaks about is usually referring to the Doriean Spartans. The Dorieans were a Greek set of tribes with their own dialect that came down from the north at the year around 1100 BC, around 100 years after the estimated date of the events of the Trojan war and they got to remain to the areas such as Macedonia or Lacedaimona aka Sparta thus we have Macedonians and Spartans speak Doric Greek dialect while Atheneans speak Attic Greek dialect and the Asia Minor greek cities speak Ionian etc Either way as I said the events of the Trojan war happened around 100 years before this Doric Tribe descend much less till the strictly military spartan system to be fully crystallized. So we need to think of that. And even then it is not like the Spartan women were some sort of body-builders who didn't have any sort of binary roles to their society or being active warriors in armies etc (don't mistake them for Amazons guys! Hahahaha!). They did actively excersize more than most Greek cities at that time and they did take part in athletic events more than let's say Athens (Athenean women by n large seemed to participate in sports such as running and those were exclusively for Hera's celebrations) so we can imagine they would be more athletic than the average Greek lady but that doesn't mean they were soldier-trained or anything. The military training was for boys at the city of Sparta. And women still had their own binary roles in their respected society, they just had some more freedom as compared to their Athenean counterparts.

So even if Myceneans DID have a more military form of society or at least based on the findings they did focus on warfare to their art and such and the building of their walls and all they still wouldn't be the same as the doric Sparta that were exclusively military. Could perhaps mycenean Sparta have the basis for the future doric Sparta? Perhaps but I doubt we have sufficient evidence to say they are identical.

Three. I believe that people who wanna desperately depict Penelope as some buff lady, misses the concept of Penelope's strength in the Odyssey. Penelope was not strong because she could fight with the sword. She was strong because she was mentally steadfast, clever and resourceful and enduring and she managed to hold the kingdom of Ithaca steadfast by herself for 20 years. It wasn't about her being buff lady. Homer does seem to imply she was tall and stoutly buillt; see my other post where I mention her physical description in Homer:

but not buff as "I'm gonna kick your ass" buff and all. Homer doesn't mention that any of the Spartan princesses have some specific training (Helen Clytemnestra or Penelope) but later literature implies that they have basic knowledge on weaponry (for example in later 5th century dramas and above Clytemnestra not only is seen wielding a weapon but knowing some basics as to how it was made) but it needs to be said that the posthomeric sources were also influenced by their contemporary Sparta aka the doric military Sparta. Homer doesn't imply that this strict military doric way of life was part of his lore but he does imply that Sparta relies more to its military (as compared to Ithaca or Pylos for example) so maybe he attempts to create the illusion of historical continuation but either way no this whole "300s-like" Sparta was not crystalized yet to the times that Homer synthesized his poems much less to the time of Bronze Age.

And there is no hint that Penelope goes "WOW BLOOD!" that seems to me one of the overused jokes on the internet, again emanating by the whole series of Sparta stereotypes used for comedy. It was in fact Euryclea the one to almost welp in happiness seeing Odysseus covered in blood and that was because Odysseus had killed the men she hated. Penelope doesn't show such a thing. Odysseus also washes himself up to be presentable to her. And even in posthomeric sources Penelope was not linked to physical strength but rather with the strength of her mind and the purity of her intentions (well...except maybe from Parthenius narrative if I recall correctly. There Penelope is pictured as scheming in jealousy against one of the sons Odysseus ellegedly produced and manipulated her husband to kill his illegitimate son)

As for the last part I am not sure what you are referring to? Are you referring to Lycurgus that is mentioned in some later sources as king? I did find for example the reference of Plutarch (who lives much much later) that he implies that Lycurgus lives at the same time as Homer or possibly had met him personally but is that what you are referring to? Either way I assume you refer to the historical person rather than some mythical figure because in homeric realm we do have rulers such as Tyndareus (the king of Sparta father to Helen and Clytemnestra) and Icarius (father to Penelope). It seems that Homer with the mention of the two rulers, even if not directly mentioning it, seems to be winking at the later but still ancient custom of doric Sparta to have two kings but I am not sure if that truly was his objective (and therefore creating an anachronism most likely)

I hope that answers your questions a bit

[elvisqueso]

I am on some bullshit right now, bruh

[iphigeniacomplex]

everyone in the world is either a democrat or a republican. everyone in the whole wide world is a democrat and a republican and america is the largest and most populous country in the world and america is easily the most culturally diverse country in the world because the middle class white people in my state (like a little country) are very different than the middle class white people over there (another little country, once more called a "state") and you could never understand how bad it is in america, the main country in the world. where are you from again? it's bad in america and america is bad but the way that america is run is the only way a country could possibly be run unfortunately. i don't like it but it's the only right way for a country to be run and you don't get it because the main victims of the main country are all here and you aren't. where are you from again? they never told me about that place. i don't think you get that real people live in america. probably because you're a republican. real people live in america and real people are hurt by america but what can you do? god said america has to be like this. god said this because god is real so god is american. you don't get it because you're over there and we're all here in america, the realest country in the world. where are you from again? how can you talk like this with what's happening in america? you're a democrat, right? where are you from again? my country is so large it stretches over yours and presses down hard. it's not my fault that they never told me about that place. my country covers the world. you don't understand how bad this will be for real people in the real world, the first world, the only world. they never told me—where in america are you from again?

[caelum-in-the-avatarverse]

Fandom can do a little gatekeeping. As a treat.

So I finally decided to archive-lock my fics on AO3 last night. I’ve been considering it since the AI scrape last year, but the tipping point was this whole lore.fm debacle, coupled with some thoughts I’ve been thinking regarding Fandom These Days in general and Fandom As A Community in particular. So I wanna explain why I waited so long, why I locked my stuff up now, and why I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m a-okay with making it harder for people to see my stories.

Lurkers really are great, tho

I’m a chronic lurker, and have been since I started hanging out on the internet as a teen in the 00s. These days it’s just cuz I don’t feel a need to socialize very often, but back then it was because I was shy and knew I was socially awkward. Even if I made an account, I’d spend months lurking on message boards or forums or Livejournals, watching other people interact and getting a feel for that particular community’s culture and etiquette before I finally started interacting myself. And y’know, that approach saved me a lot of embarrassment. Over the course of my lurking on any site, there was always some other person who’d clearly joined up five minutes after learning the place existed, barged in without a care for their behavior, and committed so many social faux pas that all the other users were immediately annoyed with them at best. I learned a lot observing those incidents. Lurk More is Rule 33 of the internet for very good reason.

Lurking isn’t bad or weird or creepy. It’s perfectly normal. I love lurking. It’s hard for me to not lurk - socializing takes a lot of energy out of me, even via text. (Heck it took 12 hours for me to write this post, I wish I was kidding--) Occasionally I’ll manage longer bouts of interaction - a few weeks posting here, almost a year chatting in a discord there - but I’m always gonna end up going radio silent for months at some point. I used to feel bad about it, but I’ve long since made peace with the fact that it’s just the way my brain works. I’m a chronic lurker, and in the long term nothing is going to change that.

The thing with being a chronic lurker is that you have to accept that you are not actually seen as part of the community you are lurking in. That’s not to say that lurkers are unimportant - lurkers actually are important, and they make up a large proportion of any online community - but it’s simple cause and effect. You may think of it as “your community”, but if you’ve never said a word, how is the community supposed to know you exist? If I lurked on someone’s LJ, and then that person suddenly friendslocked their blog, I knew that I had two choices: Either accept that I would never be able to read their posts again, or reach out to them and ask if I could be added to their friends list with the full understanding that I was a rando they might not decide to trust. I usually went with the first option, because my invisibility as a lurker was more important to me than talking to strangers on the internet.

Lurking is like sitting on a park bench, quietly people-watching and eavesdropping on the conversations other people are having around you. You’re in the park, but you’re not actively participating in anything happening there. You can see and hear things that you become very interested in! But if you don’t introduce yourself and become part of the conversation, you won’t be able to keep listening to it when those people walk away. When fandom migrated away from Livejournal, people moved to new platforms alongside their friends, but lurkers were often left behind. No one knew they existed, so they weren’t told where everyone else was going. To be seen as part of a fandom community, you need to submit to the mortifying ordeal of being known, etc. etc.

There’s nothing wrong with lurking. There can actually be benefits to lurking, both for the lurkers and the communities they lurk in. It’s just another way to be in a fandom. But if that is how you exist in fandom--and remember, I say this as someone who often does exist that way in fandom--you need to remember that you’re on the outside looking in, and the curtains can always close.

I’ve always been super sympathetic to lurkers, because I am one. I know there’s a lot of people like me who just don’t socialize often. I know there’s plenty of reasons why someone might not make an account on the internet - maybe they’re nervous, maybe they’re young and their parents don’t allow them to, maybe they’re in a bad situation where someone is monitoring their activity, maybe they can only access the internet from public computer terminals. Heck, I’ve never even logged into AO3 on my phone--if I’m away from my computer I just read what’s publicly available. 

I know I have people lurking on my fics. I know my fics probably mean a lot to someone I don’t even know exists. I know this because there are plenty of fics I love whose writers don’t know I exist.

I love my commenters personally; I love my lurkers as an abstract concept. I know they’re there and I wish them well, and if they ever de-lurk I love them all the more.

So up until last year I never considered archive-locking my fic, because I get it. The AI scraping was upsetting, but I still hesitated because I was thinking of lurkers and guests and remembering what it felt like to be 15 and wondering if it’d be worth letting a stranger on the internet know I existed and asking to be added to their friends list just so I could reread a funny post they made once.

But the internet has changed a lot since the 00s, and fandom has changed with it. I’ve read some things and been doing some thinking about fandom-as-community over the last few years, and reading through the lore.fm drama made me decide that it’s time for me to set some boundaries.

I still love my lurkers, and I feel bad about leaving any guest commenters behind, especially if they’re in a situation where they can’t make an account for some reason. But from here on out, even my lurkers are going to have to do the bare minimum to read my fics--make an AO3 account.

Should we gatekeep fandom?

I’ve seen a few people ask this question, usually rhetorically, sometimes as a joke, always with a bit of seriousness. And I think…yeah, maybe we should. Except wait, no, not like that--

A decade ago, when people talked about fandom gatekeeping and why it was bad to do, it intersected with a lot of other things, mainly feminism and classism. The prevalent image of fandom gatekeeping was, like, a man learning that a woman likes Star Wars and haughtily demanding, “Oh, yeah? Well if you’re REALLY a fan, name ten EU novels” to belittle and dismiss her, expecting that a “real fan” would have the money and time to be familiar with the EU, and ignoring the fact that male movie-only fans were still considered fans. The thing being gatekept was the very definition of “being a fan” and people’s right to describe themselves as one.

That’s not what I mean when I say maybe fandom should gatekeep more. Anyone can call themselves a fan if they like something, that’s fine. But when it comes to the ability to enjoy the fanworks produced by the fandom community…that might be something worth gatekeeping.

See, back in the 00s, it was perfectly common for people to just…not go on the internet. Surfing the web was a thing, but it was just, like, a fun pastime. Not everyone did it. It wasn’t until the rise of social media that going online became a thing everyone and their grandmother did every day. Back then, going on the internet was just…a hobby.

So one of the first gates online fandom ever had was the simple fact that the entire world wasn’t here yet.

The entire world is here now. That gate has been demolished.

And it’s a lot easier to find us now. Even scattered across platforms, fandom is so centralized these days. It isn’t a network of dedicated webshrines and forums that you can only find via webrings anymore, it’s right there on all the big social media sites. AO3 didn’t set out to be the main fanfic website, but that’s definitely what it’s become. It’s easy for people to find us--and that includes people who don’t care about the community, and just want “content.”

Transformative fandom doesn’t like it when people see our fanworks as “content”. “Content” is a pretty broad term, but when fandom uses it we’re usually referring to creative works that are churned out by content creators to be consumed by an audience as quickly as possible as often as possible so that the content creator can generate revenue. This not-so-new normal has caused a massive shift in how people who are new to fandom view fanworks--instead of seeing fic or art as something a fellow fan made and shared with you, they see fanworks as products to be consumed.

Transformative fandom has, in general, always been a gift economy. We put time and effort into creating fanworks that we share with our fellow fans for free. We do this so we don’t get sued, but fandom as a whole actually gets a lot out of the gift economy. Offer your community a story, and in return you can get comments, build friendships, or inspire other people to write things that you might want to read. Readers are given the gift of free stories to read and enjoy, and while lurking is fine, they have the choice to engage with the writer and other readers by leaving comments or making reclists to help build the community.

And look, don’t get me wrong. People have never engaged with fanfic as much as fan writers wish they would. There has always been “no one comments anymore” wank. There have always been people who only comment to say “MORE!” or otherwise demand or guilt trip writers into posting the next chapter. But fandom has always agreed that those commenters are rude and annoying, and as those commenters navigate fandom they have the chance to learn proper community etiquette.

However, now it seems that a lot of the people who are consuming fanworks aren’t actually in the community. 

I won’t say “they aren’t real fans” because that’s silly; there’s lots of ways to be a fan. But there seem to be a lot of fans now who have no interest in fandom as a community, or in adhering to community etiquette, or in respecting the gift economy. They consume our fics, but they don’t appreciate fan labor. They want our “content”, but they don’t respect our control over our creations.

And even worse--they see us as a resource. We share our work for free, as a gift, but all they see is an open-source content farm waiting to be tapped into. We shared it for free, so clearly they can do whatever they want with it. Why should we care if they feed our work into AI training datasets, or copy/paste our unfinished stories into ChatGPT to get an ending, or charge people for an unnecessary third-party AO3 app, or sell fanbindings on etsy for a profit without the author’s permission, or turn our stories into poor imitations of podfics to be posted on other platforms without giving us credit or asking our consent, while also using it to lure in people they can datascrape for their Forbes 30 Under 30 company? 

And sure, people have been doing shady things with other people’s fanworks since forever. Art theft and reposting has always been a big problem. Fanfic is harder to flat-out repost, but I’ve heard of unauthorized fic translations getting posted without crediting the original author. Once in…I think the 2010s? I read a post by a woman who had gone to some sort of local bookselling event, only to find that the man selling “his” novel had actually self-published her fanfic. (Wish I could find that one again, I don’t even remember where I read it.)

But aside from that third example, the thing is…as awful as fanart/writing theft is, back in the day, the main thing a thief would gain from it was clout. Clout that should rightfully go to the creators who gifted their work in the first place, yeah, but still. Just clout. People will do a lot of hurtful things for clout, but fandom clout means nothing outside of fandom. Fandom clout is not enough to incentivize the sort of wide-scale pillaging we’re seeing from community outsiders today.

Money, on the other hand… Well, fandom’s just a giant, untapped content farm, isn’t it? Think of how much revenue all that content could generate.

Lurkers are a normal and even beneficial part of any online community. Maybe one day they’ll de-lurk and easily slide into place beside their fellow fans because they already know the etiquette. Maybe they’re active in another community, and they can spread information from the community they lurk in to the community they’re active in. At the very least, they silently observe, and even if they’re not active community members, they understand the community.

Fans who see fanworks as “content” don’t belong in the same category as lurkers. They’re tourists. 

While reading through the initial Reddit thread on the lore.fm situation, I found this comment:

[ID: Reddit User Cabbitowo says: ... So in anime fandoms we have a word called tourist and essentially it means a fan of a few anime and doesn't care about anime tropes and actively criticizes them. This is kind of how fandoms on tiktok feel. They're touring fanfics and fanart and actively criticizes tropes that have been in the fandom since the 60s. They want to be in a fandom but they don't want to engage in fandom 

OP totallymandy responds: Just entered back into Reddit after a long day to see this most recent reply. And as a fellow anime fan this making me laugh so much since it’s true! But it sorta hurts too when the reality sets in. Modern fandom is so entitled and bratty and you’d think it’s the minors only but that’s not even true, my age-mates and older seem to be like that. They want to eat their cake and complain all whilst bringing nothing to the potluck… :/ END ID]

-

“Tourist” is an apt name for this sort of fan. They don’t want to be part of our community, and they don’t have to be in order to come into our spaces and consume our work. Even if they don’t steal our work themselves, they feel so entitled to it that they’re fine with ignoring our wishes and letting other people take it to make AI “podfics” for them to listen to (there are a lot of comments on lore.fm’s shutdown announcement video from people telling them to just ignore the writers and do it anyway). They’ll use AI to generate an ending to an unfinished fic because they don’t care about seeing “the ending this writer would have given to the story they were telling”, they just want “an ending”. For these tourist fans, the ends justify the means, and their end goal is content for them to consume, with no care for the community that created it for them in the first place.

I don’t think this is confined to a specific age group. This isn’t “13-year-olds on Wattpad” or “Zoomers on TikTok” or whatever pointless generation war we’re in now. This is coming from people who are new to fandom, whose main experience with creative works on the internet is this new content culture and who don’t understand fandom as a community. That description can be true of someone from any age group.

It’s so easy to find fandom these days. It is, in fact, too easy. Newcomers face no hurdles or challenges that would encourage them to lurk and observe a bit before engaging, and it’s easy for people who would otherwise move on and leave us alone to start making trouble. From tourist fans to content entrepreneurs to random people who just want to gawk, it’s so easy for people who don’t care about the fandom community to reap all of its fruits. 

So when I say maybe fandom should start gatekeeping a bit, I’m referring to the fact that we barely even have a gate anymore. Everyone is on the internet now; the entire world can find us, and they don’t need to bother learning community etiquette when they do. Before, we were protected by the fact that fandom was considered weird and most people didn’t look at it twice. Now, fandom is pretty mainstream. People who never would’ve bothered with it before are now comfortable strolling in like they own the place. They have no regard for the fandom community, they don’t understand it, and they don’t want to. They want to treat it just like the rest of the content they consume online.

And then they’re surprised when those of us who understand fandom culture get upset. Fanworks have existed far longer than the algorithmic internet’s content. Fanworks existed long before the internet. We’ve lived like this for ages and we like it.

So if someone can’t be bothered to respect fandom as a community, I don’t see why I should give them easy access to my fics.

Think of it like a garden gate

When I interact with commenters on my fic, I have this sense of hospitality.

The comment section is my front porch. The fic is my garden. I created my garden because I really wanted to, and I’m proud of it, and I’m happy to share it with other people. 

Lots of people enjoy looking at my garden. Many walk through without saying anything. Some stop to leave kudos. Some recommend my garden to their friends. And some people take the time to stop by my front porch and let me know what a beautiful garden it is and how much they’ve enjoyed it. 

Any fic writer can tell you that getting comments is an incredible feeling. I always try to answer all my comments. I don’t always manage it, but my fics’ comment sections are the one place that I manage to consistently socialize in fandom. When I respond to a comment, it feels like I’m pouring out a glass of lemonade to share with this lovely commenter on my front porch, a thank you for their thank you. We take a moment to admire my garden together, and then I see them out. The next time they drop by, I recognize them and am happy to pour another glass of lemonade.

My garden has always been open and easy to access. No fences, no walls. You just have to know where to find it. Fandom in general was once protected by its own obscurity, an out-of-the-way town that showed up on maps but was usually ignored.

But now there’s a highway that makes it easy to get to, and we have all these out-of-towner tourists coming in to gawk and steal our lawn ornaments and wonder if they can use the place to make themselves some money.

I don’t care to have those types trampling over my garden and eating all my vegetables and digging up my flowers to repot and sell, so I’ve put up a wall. It has a gate that visitors can get through if they just take the time to open it.

Admittedly, it’s a small obstacle. But when I share my fics, I share them as a gift with my fellow fans, the ones who understand that fandom is a community, even if they’re lurkers. As for tourist fans and entrepreneurs who see fic as content, who have no qualms ignoring the writer’s wishes, who refuse to respect or understand the fandom community…well, they’re not the people I mean to share my fic with, so I have no issues locking them out. If they want access to my stories, they’ll have to do the bare minimum to become a community member and join the AO3 invite queue.

And y’know, I’ve said a lot about fandom and community here, and I just want to say, I hope it’s not intimidating. When I was younger, talk about The Fandom Community made me feel insecure, and I didn’t think I’d ever manage to be active enough in fandom spaces to be counted as A Member Of The Community. But you don’t have to be a social butterfly to participate in fandom. I’ll always and forever be a chronic lurker, I reblog more than I post, I rarely manage to comment on fic, and I go radio silent for months at a time--but I write and post fanfiction. That’s my contribution.

Do you write, draw, vid, gif, or otherwise create? Congrats, you're a community member.

Do you leave comments? Congrats, you're a community member.

Do you curate reclists? Congrats, you're a community member.

Do you maintain a fandom blog or fuckyeah blog? Congrats, you're a community member.

Do you provide a space for other fans to convene in? Congrats, you're a community member.

Do you regularly send asks (off anon so people know who you are)? Congrats, you're a community member.

Do you have fandom friends who you interact with? Congrats, you're a community member.

There’s lots of ways to be a fan. Just make sure to respect and appreciate your fellow fans and the work they put in for you to enjoy and the gift economy fandom culture that keeps this community going.

[lilybecca1]

Wait, Bakudeku is literally considered canon in the Japanese fandom???!!! Like no joke, in Japan Bkdk being canon is actually a widely accepted thing?? Like, let me get this straight.

The manga was meant for Japanese audience mainly, so the romance would also be something that is suited for Japanese audience, not the direct and straight forward approach that non-japanese shows have when it comes to romance. And you guys remember the "Rest of our lives" scene? Well yeah, that's actually a marriage proposal in Japan. In Japan they don't say Will you marry me? Some of the most common proposal lines are literally:

“Let’s spend the rest of our lives together.”

“Having you by my side is what completes me.”

“I can't imagine my life without you in it.”

“I wish I could give you everything, but I hope that this ring is enough.”

"I will protect you forever."

Like bro what?? These are literally Bkdk coded. Like Izuku fr thought once that he can't imagine his world without Kacchan in it. And the “I wish I could give you everything, but I hope that this ring is enough.”?? Replace ring with hero suit and you get the freaking ending of the manga. And I will protect you forever is also so them like I just can't yjxnsjxjnxjdkkxkxkxkxkkdk

I know we were all waiting for Horikoshi to make Bkdk canon in some big way like at the end they're revealed to be together or some confession or some shit but we do forget sometimes that this is set in Japanese culture and in Japan things are very different. Much more subtle and way less straight forward and obvious. Most japanese husbands and wives don't even normally say I love you to each other, because they express love through different ways, like action. And that is very hard for our non-japanese brains to understand cause it's just so different over there and instead of being expressive, love in Japanese culture is more about gratitude expressed through actions and devotion. It's much more symbolic.

So then when we think back on all those Cherry Blossom official arts, well NOW it doesn't seem too far fetched to think it might mean something, does it? For us, all these little hints and symbolism are just that. Hints and symbolism. But for Japanese people? They know how to read it very well and it's common in Japan to express certain things through symbolism. Like "The moon is beautiful, isn't it?" Is a full on marriage proposal line. It doesn't seem like it to us, but to them yes. Also let's not forget we literally have a scene with Deku looking out at the moon and Bakugo too 😭

So, if we look at it in a Japanese sense, and that in japaese culture, love is expressed in a more symbolic way, and through actions and devotion, then it isn't so hard to believe anymore that Bakugo and Deku are actually fully implied canon in the manga. I mean talk about devotion..Bakugo literally spent 8 YEARS to help fund that suit for Izuku. He took "actions speak louder than words" fcking seriously.

Like would it be better if Horikoshi actually made them say they were in love or made then kiss or something? Yeah, but realistically speaking that probably wasn't gonna happen either way. And the fact that the Japanese fandom, who the manga is literally meant for, is fr congratulating Bakudeku for being canon!!!! Like y'all if the japanese fandom thinks that they're canon then it's safe to say that they are. Because in a sense, Japanese people can read and understand that "language" behind those hints better than us. And if they say it's canon, then I bet my ass it is.

TOO BAD I AIN'T FCKING JAPANESE

Like seriously why is it so hard being European. We wouldn't believe something was true until the cold hard evidence was literally laid right in front of our freaking eyes.

[thedreadvampy]

AVAILABILITY. OBVIOUSLY.

'they import a majority of their tomatoes avocados oranges etc and all of them are tasteless' dude you are living in a country bordering on the Arctic circle. the southernmost point on this island is parallel with the Canadian-American border. those SUBTROPICAL FRUITS can only be grown in relatively small quantities under cover and don't thrive here, not do they travel particularly well. I'm not sure why you'd think that was a choice.

"I also notice the prepared foods lack a bit of flavour I'm missing from home" yeah man. That's the uhhhhh the thing I'm talking about in the post above. different cultures are used to different flavours. Your cultural background is a lot different so no things here aren't going to taste like things there. for example to me a lot of American prepared foods have very little complexity of flavour and everything is just Sweet (including bread???? for some reason?????) and/or Salt, and to me that's really bland. to me. because it's not the flavours I'm used to and the flavours I'm looking for aren't there.

Like first of all I literally did not ask about your opinions on British food, this is a post saying 'most foods exist because someone likes them so maybe stop acting like they're gross'. and second "the food quality is lower" yeah man if you are looking for food that's the same as food on a different continent. holy shit our tomatoes and avocados aren't as good as in the environments they're native to? you're kidding! our prepared food tastes different? whaaaaat?

I'm not going around calling Japanese food crap just because everyone I know who has moved there has struggled to find bread, cheese, potatoes or the veggies they eat at home, because Japanese food cooked with ingredients that grow well in Japan and that is made to match Japanese preferences. and even if I don't like it that doesn't mean it's bad, it means I don't like it.

The thing is. Bad/gross food is rarely a DISH - when food is bad it's because it's been badly made, whether because of skills or available ingredients. but a dish p much only exists recognisably and has a name because someone likes at least one version of it.

which is to say. there isn't really a way of naming a dish, school of dishes or specific food culture and going EW ISN'T THIS DISH UNILATERALLY CONCEPTUALLY DISGUSTING without denigrating quite a lot of people.

like you don't have to like it in any form. but it's eaten and shared because it's good to a not insubstantial number of people when cooked right.

(and I don't really understand how you approach that with total incuriosity when it's a dish you haven't tried like. ARE rocky mountain oysters good? Maybe! I would very much eat some to find out!!!!)

this is actually something the British food poll did in a way the American ones I've seen haven't really - they described how the food they're imagining is, specifically, badly prepared (grey meat and veggies; unseasoned shepherd's pie). which is wildly tipping the scales by calling it British Food but. like. that is an on point definition of why that food is gross.

(this also applies to American chocolate, which like. Broad category but I think most of us understand this refers to low-cocoa high-sugar chocolate, probably with bucolic acid. so we are being invited to imagine Badly Made Chocolate not. the concept of chocolate)

personally I just think it's very rarely a good or funny idea to shittalk how gross any given food culture is. partly because food is important and culturally evocative for most people, partly because it's very...alienating? to be like WHO COULD EAT SUCH A THING? just because you wouldn't, and largely because to be frank it says more about you than about the food that you have so little imagination or curiosity that you can't imagine why a food might be enjoyable to folks who aren't you.

yes this includes jello salad, I would like to try it. ONCE. if it wasn't appealing to someone it wouldn't be so widespread.

[yellowocaballero]

There's a genre of post that I see pretty frequently, which can overall be summed up as, "Modern fandom has a culture problem where fanfic authors are treated as content producers instead of community members and their fanfic is treated as a commodity to be consumed instead of a high-effort labor of love that deserves attention and compliments given directly to the author". I agree with 3/4ths of that. I find the part I disagree with very interesting, the same way I find a lot of writeblr interesting, because it's a perspective that I had to work very hard to actually understand.

Because the posts have such a warped view of what writing is and why we post our writing! They say that fanfic fights against the commodified internet we live in, but all they're doing is changing the currency of payment in this attention economy. Another way you can summarize about 70% of these posts is, "My payment for writing and posting my fanfiction is compliments, and if you do not give me those compliments you are not paying. If you give those compliments behind my back, or talk about them privately without giving them to me as well, then you are stealing from me." I don't want to put it like that, but a lot of these posts use words like 'deprive', as if the reader who enjoys the fic without commenting is withholding something from them that they deserve. They use the word engagement, and they do talk about how part of that engagement is just the joy of talking about AUs and ships with other people, but when people say that comments are their motivation to keep writing, what they mean is that validation is their motivation to keep writing. Which is compliments.

I understand that, because I understand that fanfic writers are not immune to the attention economy. But I don't understand how almost every one of these posts talk about how this lack of attention makes them stop writing - that this act of theft is killing their desire to write. I could understand this if they meant 'desire to POST fic' (I don't post fic I think zero people would read.), but they talk about how lack of payment stops them from writing at all.

IMHO, that is what creates a commodity from fic. People want to treat fic as art, but an artist makes art for themself. Art is made because we want to hold parts of skills and ourselves in our hands. If you won't make art if you get no payment, then you have devalued the art completely.

We think of AO3 as this unique site that's born entirely from passion and is filled with fics written for love of the game. But guilt-tripping posts that shame people for not commenting on a fic they enjoy, and that describe how there's no point in writing fic if it's not getting attention, are directly contributing towards the culture of treating fic like a commodity.

I also really want a fandom culture where the relationship between artist and reader is reciprocal, where it feels like a community, and where I get to talk about my fanfic with people. My favorite part of posting fanfic is rambling about it on my blog, because I can talk about my art all day and I love it when people stop and listen. But I love that because I love my own art. If you love your own art, then it'll always have value.

Also Google your username, just trust me, that's how you find The Secret Discussions. Someone made a TikTok fansong of me once. WHAT?

[txttletale]

"you, specifically, are a bad and evil person that all my posts are written to condemn" this is not what i said. i'm sorry for not being clearer. i just feel like everyone in this space, not just you, look down on people who live in the first world as people who willingly don't change anything about how the world works when it's just not that simple. i know you all love to combat this and say otherwise but it will never change the simple reality that for some people it really is very hard, if not impossible, to do anything politically, for a variety of reasons. i'm disabled, i live in a remote part of the country, and i'm bad at talking to people. i don't have the money to just move to a population center or get lessons on how to speak to people. i can't do anything and i feel like every time you or one of the other communists on tumblr talks about the imperial core, i feel like i, personally, am being held to an unreasonable standard that i would not hold anyone else to, if i were in one of your situations. obviously i want things to change. i don't want genocide to be a thing that's constantly happening, i don't want my country to have its tendrils dug into every other country, i want socialism and eventually global communism, and if i could do anything meaningful-- anything at all-- to achieve those goals i would be working on that. but right now that just is not the case for me, and i feel like i'm not alone in that either. i just wish you had like a smidgen of empathy for some of the people living here who don't fit into your stereotype of what a member of the imperial core looks like-- i'm not even trying to say that sarcastically, it genuinely feels like you all don't see us as human. like nyanguard especially seems to think of us as incapable of saving ourselves, and one of the reblogs to my first ask just said they "like to imagine that (i'm) crying as i type this". how am i supposed to react to that? is this how all of you feel about people like me? would your feelings about me change if i lived in another country, or would you find some other excuse to talk down to me? is it really just the country i live in that's the problem, here? i'm not trying to accuse you, i'm asking this question genuinely.

i know it's tempting to respond to this with a snarky comment but please just try to understand where i am coming from. i really am willing to help if i can.

i don't think any marxist seriously has a political theory of imperialism that amounts to "citizens of the imperial core simply choose not to do anything because they are all individually bad people". i mean the whole point of marxism is that economic relations are the ultimate drivers of historical change, not abstract psychological or moral qualities of people.

i'm sympathetic to your situation! the imperial core is a very atomizing place to live, and there are places and situations where there's just no practical path to getting organized and taking meaningful political action in the near future. however, your problem here is:

i feel like i, personally, am being held to an unreasonable standard that i would not hold anyone else to

nobody is posting about you, personally. like at the end of the day you have to learn to either not take posts like that personally or just block everyone who makes them to manage your own time on the computer vis a vis niceness--i don't think it's the responsibility of me or any other communist to constantly provide asterisks and carveouts that we're not talking about the Good Ones Who Have Extenuating Circumstances when we talk about the usa and its material political base.

& in the same way that you ask for empathy for your situation i would ask you to extend a level of understanding to people whose homelands and countrymen and communities have been devastated by US coups and sanctions and invasions, that they have as much a right to express the rage and fury and hurt of that cultural legacy as you do to express your own sadness about your own situation. imagine, for example, how you would feel if your grandparents could not reliably get medicine because of us sanctions. & of course the correct target for these feelings are not random usamericans--but these posts are also not serious politcal platforms, they are venting from people who live their lives under the weight of empire.

if you think what they're saying is unfair to you, then you need to develop the ability to say 'well, i understand why they would feel that way' and move on. like i understand why you are upset, and i don't say this to be dismissive, but as real advice: it is not fair (especially to bloggers from the global south) to essentially rest your happiness and self-worth at their feet and demand that they validate you.

genuinely, i hope this helps. it's all i really have to say on the matter.