#if anyone takes me out of context or attacks me for this i'm simply blocking them. thank you

[circular-bircular]

Mmm. I caught a few free minutes today to sit down and respond, so let's unleash this one, shall we?

Below the cut is an ENORMOUS ask, and a (incredibly long, as much as I may try otherside) response. It's about the recent "censorship" (???) drama.

TL;DR: Everyone is allowed to be angry in life, and policing that is kind of outrageously infuriating, especially in spaces where people struggle with things like emotional regulation! I'm allowed to be upset and express that upset, just as much as anyone else. Me expressing frustrations isn't "demonizing" people or attacking them, and I'm sorry if it comes across that way. If you feel I'm attacking you by posting on my own blog how I'm upset about something, or feel I'm attacking you by reblogging posts on tumblr to dissect ableism in articles you yourself posted... Figure out that feeling, or block me? Good lord.

I am not posting anything more about this topic. Please don't send asks about it, or I will simply be deleting them.

Okay. For context, these two asks (combined below) came in about 3 days ago. I was wondering if I should post them in a different format to slim them down, but genuinely, I think I want to present this as I received it. Here it is (with your system name censored, anon -- I recognize your concerns about harassment):

abt frameaclouds post :: politely + trying to come to the table not to argue but to point this out I dont think you can blame a blogger for seeing people reblogging their post from you legit screaming "how dare you" or "fuck you" at them and them then assuming that it's probs best to just block and keep back from that whole group of folks. I liked some of your additions and thought they were interesting as one of frameaclouds followers.... but the way you and others focused almost entirely on nitpicking LB Lee's stuff and some ways things were phrased (ex. - like point 3; all frameacloud said was that DID does not require trauma. you then... agreed and shouted at them?), and the way a lot of you jumped to calling it censorship and silencing when frameacloud refused to engage afterwards, really kind of makes it look like you're interpreting their post and actions in the worst light possible. it makes it seem like you're coming from a place of bad faith. you mentioned some cool perspective in your reblog, where you talked about how it came off to someone who had your specific background and knowledge and what u found the issues to be, but you haven't done the reverse: you haven't considered how your reblog was going to come across to an otherkin whose been around for a really long time and who is probably used to dealing with tons and tons of trolls who are going to take what they say in the least generous way possible, twist their words, + use it to belittle and harass them. like this is an otherkin who's been around since the grilling times and usenet days. and a bunch of people who seem to be in ur circles citing back to the post and kind of beating their chests about it even tho frameacloud is making a point not to fight or argue about it and to just block and move on...and u urself described ur response as a 'rant' which has a pretty diff connotation than 'discussion' or 'criticism'...well its likely to just project that kind of image further, that ur just here to flame war, even if thats not what ur doing or how u want to come across. ik that's how it came across to me and even after seeing some of ur past posts on ur blog that i really liked im still a little skeptical that this ask isnt gonna be either trashed mocked or taken out of context by u or someone who follows u. and also i want to remind people that like......... u r not owed access to anyone on socmed. frameacloud and any other blogger is allowed to block anyone for any reason. and its unhealthy to say that ur owed other ppls blogs and posts to platform on. respect other ppls boundaries without villainizing them cuz otherwise ur just opening up a can of worms to lie in. and ik u said in a later post that theyre well within their rights to block u but u also reblogged a post before that calling it censorship. so like... this is what i mean about coming off as disengenuous and troll-y, stuff like this is why even if i liked some of ur reblog i wont rb it. if i rb it and end up deleting it later am i gonna be told by others that im 'censoring' u? if i make a mistake and say something wrong in a tag am i gonna get jumped with a 5k word essay from four different ppl telling me how much i suck? its a hypothetical but only sorta with whats been happening on ur blog and elsewhere in this discussion. its bad form and its not super fair to frameacloud who still hasnt done legit anything yet but block ppl and i really cant say enough how much i dont blame them with some of whats been said n what sort of conclusions ppl r jumping to abt them. (also now that im thinking of the context if u did come across as bad faith engagement to frameacloud then they probably didnt respond to ur ask because it screamed BAIT to them cuz ik in their shoes id think the same. i mean their blog 99% runs on queue...the last post they reblogged that wasnt on their queue was ONE post on the 11th from their boyfriend and be4 that ONE on the 9th...all while u have someone gossiping in a prev ask that they 'often do this'. i can see frameaclouds POV)

like i swear im not trying to start a fight but can u see how this comes off. claiming u want a discussion and then thanking someone who is calling blocking censorship, saying that theyre in their rights to block but then posting an ask that says this blog that makes maybe like two or three original posts a month "does this often", the original aggro all over the reblogs that stem from ur first reblog in the reblog chart... like frameacloud is the one who blocked first but u have to srsly consider why they did + why they refuse to engage at all + what it looks like to ppl outside of the type of syscourse ur used to, like them and like me. if u want ppl to listen, then this isnt a good way to promote the kind of discussions u say u want. it just drives ppl away and maybe it feels temporarly vindicating but its not helpful. i want to see the things ur talking abt talked abt more but if its always going to be like that and theres no way for it to be less like trekking thru a field of mines where someone might blow up at u for something u dnt even realize is wrong at the time then i dunno

...

So, first off, I apologize profusely to everyone for how long-winded I am. I write a LOT, a habit I have always, always tried to break, and I now realize just how much it is to see thousands of words in response to things. This is nearly 1k of words I woke up to right before leaving for my vacation. Talk about wild to read right after waking up. (I also apologize because what follows is similarly so long winded and I cannot figure out how to not do this).

I attempted to write up my response. Took a full day and a half, writing and writing and writing. And here's the thing, I wrote around 3k words trying to explain my perspective, trying to acknowledge what I agreed and disagreed with from your asks, from your perspective, and just...

Dude, I am so fucking done with this shit. Not your asks in particular, but with syscourse in general.

This ask presents me with a damned if I do, damned if I don't scenario. I could leave it to rot in my inbox, but then I'm a hypocrite for not engaging with discussions about things, which is what I say I want people to do. I could finish writing up my 3k+ word response, but then my words are going to be twisted as they always are because I'm long winded and I am just trying my best to (probably over)explain myself.

Or... I can just. Explain as briefly as possible here what I'm feeling, thinking, and doing.

So... Here goes my best shot.

One:

First and foremost, I could care less at this point about frameacloud. Good fucking lord, I have tried to keep their username in my head through all of this, but it's genuinely so hard and I just end up scrolling up. I have never interacted with this user before this, and I clearly won't be again. My beef is not with them. I could care less about this user or their business; they are a tumblr user who exists. Wow!

My upset was about how the conversation was cut off. That's all. That's it. Wow, it sucks how all conversations are cut off when people block others for any reason. I hate how long MY blocklist is, strictly for my mental health. I hate how many people I have to block to keep myself healthy, because it cuts off communication. Is it... condemning myself to saying, "It's a shame that they cut off communication like that" when I've blocked plenty of very vocal syscoursers?

No. As I've said numerous times through all this, people should be able to block whoever they want. Even if I talk about how upsetting that may be, I mean absolutely no ill will to the person who literally should not know I'm talking about how upset I am, because said person has me blocked.

Two:

I don't care why they blocked me. Maybe they personally hate me, maybe they heard about me from who-is-page or whoever (I know I've bumped heads with them in the past once or twice before), maybe they thought I was a troll, maybe they thought I was overly angry, whatever-

That literally means nothing to me other than " :( Fucking goddamn it, that means my response will be hidden."

What I am upset about isn't that they blocked me; I'm upset that the conversation was cut short and hidden in all aspects. By that I mean, I don't care I was blocked and hidden; I care that every single user who reblogged either me or SAS's reply was also hidden. Like. Every single tag was. I don't know if that's tumblr's doing, or OPs doing, or what have you, but again -- it doesn't matter.

All I'm saying is "damn, buddy, that sucks."

Three:

They didn't respond to my ask, and I mentioned that in my follow up post to show I tried to reach out genuinely. I didn't want people to think I was posting this without trying to reach out originally. That was all. It was once again me complaining that the conversation was completely cut off, regardless of the reason why it was cut off.

And here's where I'll address the elephant that I see, or at least the first one.

I'm allowed to be however angry I want on my blog, on my posts, and in my life. I'm allowed to shout, curse, and be pissed off. And no, they don't need to engage with it, and no, I don't need to be happy about that fact.

This is a tumblr blog, sir.

I'm not a medical professional or a debater on a stage in front of a podium. I'm a 26 year old trauma survivor who got upset about a fucking severely ableist post. I think I should be allowed to be a bit pissy about it.

Being told so frequently recently that I need to "be nice to convince people" is such whiplash, because less than a year ago, I was that person. I was the person telling everyone to let go of their anger, to be nice to convince the other side, that everyone needs to be polite. I did this so much that I literally was known as the Respectability Politics Syscourser. That was a legitimate label I used. I was told so often that I was a filthy centrist and that I was worse than homophobic bigots because I was trying to get everyone to just be nice to each other. I got fucking harassed for simply posting "Everyone should respect each other" to the syscourse tags.

Is that healthy?

A topic I discuss most frequently with my therapist at the moment is reclaiming anger. I struggle severely with loyalty and fawning, convinced that if I show any negative emotion whatsoever, I'll be hurt and shoved aside and abandoned by those I love. (Ouch). Here's just a few things I've learned in the past year or so:

Anger is the part of you that knows you deserve better.

Anger is a form of self-love.

Anger is a secondary emotion; what emotion lies under it? (This is the one I struggle with the most)

In... Fall of last year (the exact month escapes me), I ended up blowing up due to how long I had kept myself censored and kept myself "polite" for others. Due to how much anger I'd shoved aside and kept under wraps for the benefit of others. Because being angry would "reflect badly" on me and my friends; because it would make what I had to share less accessible to others.

... I'm done with doing that. Therapist's literal orders. In fact, if my therapist had his way, I would not have a system blog, be part of any system servers, or talk to anyone online who has DID, because the fact fucking is, none of you are safe to talk to. It will always be a triggering space. (Thankfully, my therapist also acknowledges that he is a singlet, doesn't know my brain, and that I am my own person who can make my own choices).

If OP of the post decided to make a big huge post blowing up in anger and frustration at how horrible I am, good for them. If you block me out of anger, good for you! I do not care, because I will be happy you are doing what is best for you. I am happy OP did what's best for them.

And equally, upset that a convo about ableism was hidden.

That brings me to:

Four:

Out of all the shit said and reblogged through that little single blip on the syscourse radar (I think around 10 posts out of 20 in that single 24 hours), I do regret posting that ask about OP "doing this often". That one is on me, and tbh, I'm gonna delete it. It was drama, and I do try to avoid that. I hardly added anything to it, and while I know my perspective on why I posted it, I also acknowledge that it'll do literally jack shit to explain why. So I'm just gonna delete it and move on.

But in everything else, I was only lamenting the fact that every response was hidden beyond those agreeing with OP.

I thanked Candlelight (the first user to call it censorship from what I can see) for stating that the responses were all hidden, but moreover, for mentioning that they didn't agree with everything I said. I spoke on that post primarily driven by anger at Lee's ableism. I KNOW it was not a perfect post. That's because I'm not a Perfect Debater(TM).

All I wanted was A DISCUSSION ABOUT ABLEISM!

(Note: This is commonly seen as yelling; for me, via text, I see this as EXTREME EMPHASIS. Sorry it apparently comes across as yelling! I see it as yelling a bit in my mind, but I can see how the TONE is lost in those cases. Right now, my tone is exhausted frustration, but I see no need to ACTUALLY raise my voice at you.)

I think that's the thing that's pissed me off the most. Everyone and their brother wants to either agree or disagree with me about censorship. I have my own thoughts on censorship (it's basically always bad, but there's nuance on all things, is exclusion censorship, etc etc) but those are not relevant because nobody has even fucking addressed the ableism.

The articles -- linked by OP, but who gives a shit at this point -- came off as ableist. I reblogged OP's post because they are the ones who posted the ableist articles to the DID tags. That is how tumblr is used, is it not? And yes, I expressed my anger... at the articles... on the post that had the articles...

And OP hid those critiques for their own reasons... and I lamented that they were hidden... so I made a post about it while explaining the context ('Hey if you're wondering why I'm making this big huge long post AGAIN, OP blocked my response and everyone elses, and yes I have tried to resolve it, but this one's plan B for getting the word out that these articles and ideas are really harmful online')

Uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuugh. You see why this is so hard to keep short, right? I surely hope so. There's a LOT to tackle here, and a lot of emotions, and a lot of different topics/nuances.

FIVE: RAPID FIRE ROUND (With Review!)

I don't care about otherkin spaces or know shit about them. They're triggering for me. Bluh.

I don't blame OP for blocking me.

I don't hate you or want to attack you for this ask, sorry you feel that way.

If someone deletes a reblog, I just assume they made a mistake reblogging it? Do people attack others for this shit?

I nitpicked Lee's response because Lee's response was the most ableist shit I've seen in a bit, and I did that on OP's post because they're the one who posted it.

I didn't agree that DID does not always need trauma? I explicitly said it is always trauma based? I'm so confused about that point.

Is "Ranting" seen as trolling now? I use "rant" to mean "Shit, I went on for a LONG time." It's synonymous with ramble for me.

I don't know how to break it to everyone, but posting online means it is inherently unsafe, and someone may attack you or blow up at you. It's the world wide web. It sucks. (That doesn't mean it's deserved or that I endorse that behavior; it's just... life).

Ugh.

At the end of the day, I just want to be able to have my fucking disorder and scroll tags about my disorder without seeing:

It doesn't need trauma to form

Traumagenic systems are 'obsessed with suffering'

Endogenic systems are 'healthy' forms of plurality (As opposed to DID)

Yknow. Syscourse in general.

And similar shit.

Is that too much to ask??

Anon; I know this doesn't address all of your points. I KNOW I haven't gone point by point like I wanted to. My original draft did that, but I only got halfway before hitting 3k words, and you seemed... really adverse to a long ra- ramble, not rant. Sorry? Ugh.

Just take this, and I hope this topic doesn't come back to me, because I'm kinda done with it entirely at this rate.

[roguemonsterfucker]

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

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

Get ready for an image heavy post.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thank you all.

[daz4i]

i posted a quick thing abt it earlier but now i’m posting a whole rant. tw antisemitism as well as mentions of terrorism under the cut. i would actually appreciate it if my goyishe mutuals try to read it despite the length

it’s actually making me really angry how easily antisemitic lies are spread on this site, especially under the guise of leftism. you’re using people’s good will to further a destructive agenda, and every time a jewish person speaks up against it we’re brushed off as aggressive, racist (bc correcting goyim about their misinformation is apparently the same as hating palestinians?? for some reason??), or literally attacked for *checks notes* saying we actually don’t want to be murdered or hate crimed in some other way

it’s especially common with american or british goyim to apply the logic of their own countries to the israeli-palestinian conflict and refuse to listen to anyone pointing out how it’s way more nuanced than just “big country steals land from natives just to get stronger” even if that’s what you see on the surface, and part of it is because of said antisemitic lies

there is historical - not that far history either, we’re talking 70, maybe 80 years ago, there’s people still alive who went through this - context to it all, most of it being THE LITERAL HOLOCAUST, YOU KNOW, A GENOCIDE JEWISH PEOPLE WENT THROUGH, 6 MILLION OF US DIED, WE STILL HAVEN’T REACHED THE AMOUNT OF PEOPLE WE HAD BEFORE IT SINCE THEN BECAUSE IT WAS THIS DESTRUCTIVE TO OUR PEOPLE, that’s the reason why israel even exists in the first place. that’s not even considering hate crimes and other cases of terrorism targeting jews still happening around the world.

people saying zionism isn’t tied to judaism are either lying or are severely misinformed. zionism’s whole point is wishing for jews to be able to live and practice their religion in the country promised to them by god, aka zion, aka israel. that’s literally it. don’t let goyim make you think otherwise, don’t let them make you think it has nothing with religion, this is antisemitic propaganda and you are falling for it. (this whole rant started bc i saw a post of someone talking about how dumb and for some reason racist it is to say antizionism is antisemitism and i wanted to bite someone fr bc i KNOW they’re not jewish they’re just an antizionist and didn’t like being called antisemitic for it so they demonized the jewish people who called them out on it. please don’t put shit like that on my dash thank you)

i will admit that the modern definition of zionism slightly changed - not to most jews tbh, more to a very loud (and dangerous) minority within us, and that’s how we got to the current situation of oppressor-oppressed. i am more than willing to admit the israeli government is committing awful acts driven partially by racism and thirst for more power, especially with how right leaning it’s been for years now. we shouldn’t ignore this either.

however, hating israeli people for committing the awful crime of... being born... in a place........ IS antisemitic. i won’t blame palestinians who hate us, but i will definitely call out anyone else for that. do you hate every american person for simply being born in america because of what the actions of their government? no? okay, then what’s different about the israeli people? 🤔 hmmm really makes you think 

if your argument is “but you all serve in the military and therefore taking part in the oppression” i’ll have to remind you that:

military service is mandatory at 18 years old for 2-3 years

refusing to serve with no actual reason for it (like a disability of some sort for example) means you go to prison as well as get a huge stain on your future in general, so obviously almost all 18 y/os would prefer to serve and just get it over with rather than risk it

most of the soldiers in the idf are teenagers who may have gotten some basic training, a good majority of them probably doing office/computing jobs or stuff more similar to volunteer works but in uniform rather than going on the field and engaging in any form of violence 

which like. i can’t tell you what your opinion should be obviously but i think these are some things you should consider when you form one, not about the conflict itself but about the idf or israeli individuals 

also automatically assuming every israeli person supports the government no matter what is just dumb. we’re not a hive mind. our last prime minister and trump’s ex-bestie netanyahu stayed in power for this long by taking advantage of political loopholes basically (and tbh that’s how our current racist prime minister got the role too) rather than fair democratic elections (also even if he just got elected that doesn’t mean every single israeli person agrees with him, that’s just how democracy works. his supporters aren’t even a majority because we’ve got so many parties in every election cycle - another reason why you shouldn’t apply american or british standards to this country). viewing us as this one being that just wants to kill and steal land is antisemitic

on that note, the whole “thieves” thing ppl have abt israel is also antisemitic. for some more historical context, jews have been called thieves for centuries and we’re constantly blamed for most problems as well as for “taking over” everything because a lot of jews worked in banks and took care of money in many countries in europe, so when people had problems they dumped it on us. that’s part of where the whole lizard people conspiracy theory started from, too (on that note, don’t joke about it, yes not even about mark zuckerberg no matter how much you hate him, i hate him too but that’s no reason to make antisemitic jokes about a jewish man) 

even today, jewish people face violence and terrorism. just two weeks ago in chicago a jewish man was assaulted and synagogues and jewish schools were vandalised and sprayed with swastikas, for example. you can’t pretend antisemitism is irrelevant to this - the reason israel even exists, the reason the un decided it should exist, is to avoid cases like this. i’m only 23 years old but i remember when i was in like, middle school, there was a surge of french jews moving here after a wave of antisemitic hate crimes. this is still an issue and yes, this affects the conflict, because these people - as well as anyone being born here - need to live somewhere, obviously. you can’t talk about how we need to be kicked out of this country when this is what happens when we live anywhere else. you can’t say “never again” but then ignore what needs to be done for jews to actually be safe (i DON’T mean wars and killing palestinians or kicking them out of their homes, on god no one take me out of context and assume i’m implying something like that. i mean finding a place for jews to live and be safe). you can’t say “punch nazis” but constantly fall for their propaganda, they WILL use your good will to trick you into hating us. 

basically, i’m just asking you to pay attention, and to think before you keep spreading misinformation or sometimes even purposely malicious propaganda. 

is the person saying what does and doesn’t count as antisemitism actually jewish? no? probably propaganda, or best case scenario, a misguided person who thinks too highly of themselves. either way don’t engage with what they say and i’d say even block them, even if you think they make some good points.

is this post talking about the israeli government, or about israeli people? if it’s the latter, it’s antisemitic. at the best case scenario, it’s a person not thinking their words through, but this is still spreading dangerous ideas. don’t spread them even further. 

is a post condemning an israeli individual (most obvious example: gal gadot) for serving in the army? if you’ve read this post you already know it’s a little more nuanced. as i said, make your own opinion on the matter, but let it be an informed one rather than hating someone for something they didn’t have much of a choice in. 

also while i’m at it (didn’t know where else to put this rant sorry it’s a little off-topic), thinking all jews/israelis are white is racist - there’s more historical context like the holocaust and years before it that i’m not even sure i can explain (find any post complaining abt mother gothel’s design in tangled it’ll surely do a better job than me), but there’s a more obvious thing: a lot of jews are just. not european. honestly when it comes to ancestory, i’d argue no jew actually is (bc we’re originally from israel, aka the middle east) but obviously after so many years of assimilation it’s not exactly how it works and like everything regarding humans, it’s not black or white. still, most people in israel especially are a mix of multiple ethnic origins from across the world and it’s just unfair to brush it off to, again, apply western logic to a country that’s fundamentally different to justify your hate as being “woke”.

just. everything about this is very nuanced and complicated, because that’s how humans are. blind hate will get you nowhere. educate yourself if you can (i’d say start with the basics, read about the holocaust first, why and how it started and what led up to it). apply critical thinking before spreading infromation you’re not educated about and consider who posted and why they did it. talk to more jewish people, israeli or not. and stop putting antisemitic bullshit on my dash please i am begging you this shit is shortening my lifespan- 

[firelxdykatara]

Hello! I say this in the kindest way possible, but can you please provide evidence that theowelspeaks is a terf? I'm a black zutara shipper and for years have really felt shoved by the fandom and it hasn't been my safe space. But YOUR blog and you made me feel better. I'm not in your discord but you're being accused of racism. I don't follow the owlspeaks and wanna support you but if you're being accused of racism why are you calling someone a terf?

Can you please show where they are a terf? I'm only asking this because I really REALLY love you and I support you. And if they are a terf, you need to provide evidence. It is heavily suspicious when a person of color calls out a white woman on racism and you don't address the accusations but just call them a terf. I want to support you I really do because you made me feel comfortable in the fandom, but I need to see concrete evidence that they're a terf. Never mind, I saw the whole situation and honestly I'm disgusted I ever follow or looked up to you. You're literally no different from other racist white shippers. I think there went my love for zutara.

I'm going to take this at face value--not that, on any real level, I actually believe you were a follower of mine or did anything close to due diligence, because if you were or had then you would know that I never actually called that blogger a terf--and answer as respectfully as I can. Mostly because I want anyone who has genuine issues with anything I've said or done to know that despite whatever's going around about me right now, I am willing to listen to criticism if it comes from a place of good faith.

(You can think whatever you want about my insistence on 'good faith', but the fact is that I have weathered being slammed with accusations of pedophilia and other horrible things over differences in headcanon of shit like character ages or writing a fic set years post-canon because I felt like it, right down to the insistence that I'm a horrible racist because of my url, so no. I'm not going to listen to someone slinging slurs and buzzwords in my inbox just because they claim to be a poc. And before that sets anyone off, the slurs I'm talking about are aimed at my queerness. I do not consider being called racist or a white bitch or whatever slurs, because they aren't.)

First of all, once again, I never called that blogger a terf. You can easily read my post about them for yourself and see that--ctrl+F for the term 'terf', and you will not find it. Why? Because I called them out on peddling radfem rhetoric, (which they are) not for being a terf. All terfs are radfems--it's in the name--but not all radfems are terfs, although all radfem rhetoric is exceptionally harmful to queer people in general, and queer poc more than most, as is the nature of intersectionality.

Anti-kink rhetoric, and the insistence that some kink is inherently harmful and that no one could legitimately have these kinks or fetishes without being mentally ill or traumatized, is radfem rhetoric. That's where it comes from, that's where it leads to, and I'll be honest here, 'radfem' is not an identity label. It's an ideology. You do not get to parrot core tenets of that ideology and then claim to not be a radfem. That simply isn't how this works.

Furthermore, I have no idea who the person behind theowlspeaks blog is. I will take them at their word that they are not white, but that doesn't exactly narrow things down--and considering the fact that they chose to put me on blast for their small but dedicated ring of followers rather than actually coming to me personally first about any of this (their blog is very obviously a burner, and it wouldn't have been that difficult to approach me since I've only ever turned anon off once, for one night to give myself some breathing room, and otherwise my asks and DMs have always been open), I have no reason to actually care about what they're saying. But I point out the lack of knowledge of their identity because a) they didn't even reveal themselves as not white until.... yesterday? or something, when they were directly asked about it, and b) trying to frame this as 'white woman accused of racism calls person of color a terf' is... disingenuous at best given the fact that I have been calling them a radfem (which they are) since well before they posted that screenshot and my name wound up on their blog, so you got the order of events just a little backwards.

I blocked them initially because of the radfem rhetoric they were peddling about kink and fetishes, and I have the right to establish that boundary. This blog is for me, it is my space, and I do not have to expose myself to views I find gross or harmful just because they dress it up in faux-woke terminology and try to pretend they actually care.

If they cared about real people more than the fictional characters they are so adamantly 'protecting', then they wouldn't have brushed off the actual racism (from one of their followers--they're more than happy to blast me without any evidence, but that's hardly out of the ordinary for people like that) that was brought to their attention by refocusing the discussion on the fake people who literally can't be hurt by any of this because they don't exist. They wouldn't be ignoring the two woc who chose to contact them and tell them why they made the choices they did regarding both the discord and the smut week event, while being perfectly happy to platform anons who may or may not be who or what they say they are.

I, for one, am not going to apologize for caring more about real people than fictional characters. I'm not going to apologize for thinking it's absolutely ludicrous to pretend that fiction is somehow harmful just by existing, especially when it's appropriately tagged so that anyone who finds the content harmful can avoid it. I'm not going to back down from these opinions just because a handful of people have apparently decided I'm a horrible person because of it. And I'm certainly not going to apologize for thinking it's despicable that someone who was not involved in the conversation chose to leak out of context screenshots rather than privately contacting any of the people involved or even going to any of the mods, before going right to an anonymous blog. You may not care about me or my mental health, but I had panic attacks because of that leak--not because I said anything untoward in that screenshot, not because I've ever said anything in that discord that I wouldn't happily stand behind on my blog, but because I no longer felt safe. And I am not going to bare my trauma to a complete stranger to justify that lmfao.

So, like, think what you want to. I'm pretty sure that blogger is getting high off of the drama they are creating, none of which would actually have happened or been any real issue if more people were able to think, gee, maybe this work that is tagged with things I don't want to read about is not for me! Maybe I shouldn't read this piece, since it would probably upset me, and there's plenty others around for me to consume! I do not trust that blogger's intentions. I do not trust that they actually give a shit about any real people, or they wouldn't have posted an out of context screenshot of... literally nothing tbh, when they had no right to and are now protecting the identity of the person who leaked them instead of giving a shit about any of the real people in that space who no longer feel safe because we aren't sure who we can't trust.

But you've already made up your mind, and I can't change that. I genuinely hope you have a nice life, and find fandom spaces more suited to your tastes.

[mayfriend-archive]

Totally understand if you're not up for it and fully recognize the ronald mcdonald dom/sub anon vibes which is an AMAZING post btw but like...now i'm curious, what the hell did Lord of the Flies anon DO that got him blocked for the discourse? like...i just can't wrap my head around high school lit being...uh...that inflammatory i guess?

Okay so, I'll start by saying I've had a new anon from apparently the same anon saying they are NOT the person I blocked, just a rando making the same points, but I'll answer your question anyway just to set out why this person in particular got blocked, out of the several thousand who reblogged/commented on that very successful addition to the LoTF post I made.

First off, I added the 'real life Lord of the Flies' story because I thought it was a good story. I had read about it only a couple days beforehand in Humankind and, after reading out the entire chapter to my parents who weren't very interested, I was excited that there was not only a post where it would be relevant to post, but that I wouldn't be hijacking it, as it was already rejecting the widespread interpretation taught in many schools, that humanity is inherently savage.

When making the addition, I a) did not think it would get more than a couple reblogs, because the post was already at 50k notes and I figured anyone that might be interested would already have seen it, and b) I did not know the very specific context that prompted William Golding to write the book; all I knew was that he had been a teacher at a public school (basically, the poshest schools in the country - think Eton, Harrow, very 'old money' places that pump out Conservative politicians by the bucket-load 🤢) who hated his job and the boys he taught (which, valid), and new information I'd been given in Humankind - that Golding had said to his wife one day, "Wouldn't it be a good idea to write a story about some boys on an island, showing how they would really behave?" - which had no mention of The Coral Island by R. M. Ballantyne, which I have since learned was the text that Golding loathed enough to write an entire novel in refutation of - and included what I considered a very telling letter from Golding to his publisher, in which Golding wrote of his belief that 'even if we start with a clean slate, our nature compels us to make a muck of it.' Another Golding quote that I believe portrays his belief in humanity's 'innate savagery' is that "man produces evil as a bee produces honey."

Obviously, the author of a book putting forward the case for humanity's inherent goodness was going to oppose Golding's hypothesis; Bregman not only noted Golding's literary accomplishments and beliefs, but his personal life.

When I began delving into the author's life, I learned what an unhappy individual he'd been. An alcoholic. Prone to depression. A man who, as a teacher, once divided his pupils into gangs and encouraged them to attack each other. "I have always understood the Nazis," Golding confessed, "because I am of that sort by nature." (Humankind by Rutger Bregman, p. 24-25)

I have bolded the part about him as a teacher, because it is incredibly relevant to the original post that I commented on, which begins with a comic of a teacher locking her class in to see them 'recreate' Lord of the Flies, something which the follow up comments before mine staunchly reject as both misunderstanding the point of the book, and the fact that it took the kids in Lord of the Flies a significant amount of time without adult supervision to go 'savage'. This misreading of the text is widespread enough that when Golding won the Nobel Prize for Lord of the Flies, the Swedish Nobel committee wrote that his book 'illuminate[s] the human condition in the world of today'. Whether or not they misread it is beyond my expertise - they do at least mention the factors of the outside world neglected by many when analysing the book, but still seem to believe it says something about human nature as a whole rather than just, to quote thedarkbutbeige 'British kids being rat bastards' - but Golding quite happily took his Nobel prize on this basis. Which, in fairness, I would too. It's a fucking Nobel prize.

It was with this knowledge, and this knowledge alone, that I stated in my now very, very widely read comment that Golding 'wrote the book to be a dick', in response to the tags of the person I reblogged from. As I said, I now know that Golding did not write the book (solely) because he hated the kids he taught, but as a response to The Coral Island and the general idea that clearly the British were inherently civilsed, whilst the people they colonised and enslaved were inherently savage. So. That's the background.

The anon - or rather, the person I thought was anon - was the sole exception out of dozens of replies, who instead of telling me about The Coral Island politely decided it was time to go ALL CAPS and regurgitate points already made by thespaceshipoftheseus, and implied that the only reason that the real life Tongan castaways didn't go all Lord of the Flies was because they weren't British. Not because they weren't surrounded by violence like the boys in Lord of the Flies, or there wasn't a World War ongoing, or that they weren't the upper, upper, upper crust of a class-obsessed society like Britain - but because they weren't British. A complete inversion of the concept that Golding was trying to get across - now, instead of all of humanity being equally prone to savagery in the right conditions, it was solely nationality that determined it. As in, the British were inherently savage, but nobody else was.

I, trying for humour, made the terrible mistake of replying to them.

I won't lie, I was absolutely blown away that this was real life. What I think they were trying to do was be that Cool Tumblr Person who, after somebody's been shitty on a post, goes to their blog and sees something Damning in their about/description. In an ideal world, I imagine I'd have gone nuts or done something Unforgiveable. In what I can only call the rant that followed, they stated several times that I needed to go back to high school to get some 'proper literary analysis' skills and that the story of the Tongan castaways was completely unrelated to the point at hand which. I mean, I disagree, considering that I made the addition, but I couldn't get my head around how commenting on a post that was already rejecting the thesis that the 'point' of Lord of the Flies was that humanity was inherently savage and was, in fact, about how kids - British or otherwise - learn how to function from the adults around them, and that traumatised, terrified children aren't going to create a mini-Utopia, and put forward a real life example of how without the key additions of an ongoing world war, a colonial Empire and the subsequent mindset of thinking you are 'inherently civilised' and therefore can't do anything wrong, actually, people just want to take care of each other.

A friend has since asked me why I even have 'england' in my description. To be honest, it's a timezone thing - I talk to a lot of people online who don't share my timezone, and it generally makes me feel like if I don't reply immediately because it's 3am, they have the tools to see that I'm not in their timezone and not just ignoring them. I did consider changing it to 'british' or 'uk' after it was... 'used against me', I guess, simply because I didn't want to deal with it, but you know what. No. Not gonna do that. I am from England, and I have never hid that fact. I have a tag called 'uk politics', during Eurovision I refer to the UK's act as 'us' (even if I really, really don't want to. Because James Newman slaughtered that song and it was downright embarrassing), I regularly post stuff in my personal tag about where I live (and mostly complain about this piece of shit government). If people really think my nationality makes every point I make null and void, then they don't have to follow me or interact with my posts; tumblr is big, and I am one medium-small blog very easily passed over.

I did reply to them, trying to explain the above, but their next response really just doubled down. Because I used the word British instead of English - foolishly because the posts above mine focused on Britishness, and also because although Golding was English and taught English kids, the pro-Imperialism author of The Coral Island, R. M. Bannatyne was actually Scottish so, ding ding ding, falls into the 'British' category - they then decided that I was somehow trying to pretend I wasn't English and made all the same points, before ending with this doozy:

At this point, I knew there was nothing to be gained from replying, because if we're whipping out conditions like they're pokemon cards then there's no actual conversation anymore, and I'm not going to start mudslinging like an identity politician. They made up their mind, and I figured there could be no harm in letting them think that they 'won' by blocking them instead of replying.

Until the ask. INNATE ENGLISH SAVAGERY did, I'll admit, make me think it was them, back again. I even thought up a really good response approximately 12 hours after I replied, I was that sure. Until the second message came in, and said they were just someone who came from the post and made the same point by chance. So the saga draws to a close... for now.

It may have been them, it may not have been - the anon feature makes it impossible to be sure, but as the second message I got said, we're in a heatwave. It's too hot to argue. And I've just written a goddamn essay about a book I dislike anyway.

My pasty English ass is going to go melt. If there's Disk Horse, do not tell me. I am Done™

[kendrixtermina]

Since you seem to enjoy analyzing stories I was wondering if you have any advice on what to do when your mind narrows in on critical aspects? I usually really enjoy analyzing media but recently I found that my mind tends to hyper-focus on aspects that I don't like even when I'm actively trying to ignore it and focus on what I do like. So I was just curious if you have tips for dealing with it and/or getting out of this mindset. Thanks and I apologize if this isn't the right blog for this!

Ugh. This is a big question and I’m not sure I’m qualified or immune to complaining. But I consider myself honored, I’ll try my best to answer it. 

There’s three things you can do here

a) Try to find out where it’s coming from. 

Cross-examine yourself active listening wise. Your reactions can generally come from two places: What you’re actually looking at, or yourself. 

Is everything annoying you as of late because you are angry? Are you having a bad week because of something in your private life? Are you sensitive because some larger tendency in RL/society is pissing you off? Is it even anger? What are you feeling and why? Does it really have anything to do with this movie etc?

Or is it something about the work itself? Does it remind you of something that happened to you? Does your displeasure come from a value that is important to you or a pattern that you believe to be a bad influence on society. 

Really try to put into words what it is that makes you feel this way while keeping in mind that your feelings, your reaction to the work and the work itself are separate entities. 

I’d remain open to the possibility that you have a legitimate gripe here. If you personally can’t enjoy a work either because a subjective factor or an objective flaw that’s a dealbreaker for you, you shouldn’t force yourself to like it because your friends do or because it didn’t do anything “unforgiveable”. Deciding that it’s not your cup of tea needn’t be a moral judgement on everyone who made the work or everyone who likes it. 

On the other hand you might find it easier to enjoy it if you acknowledge the flaw and put it into definite words, tell your inner critic that you heard them and then continue. If you try not to think about something you automatically end up thinking about it. 

b) Keep in mind that there are many valid stories and that all of them are worth telling

A lot happens on this green earth. Consider the following cases:

A1: A small, lithe person is mistreated by a big strong one

A2: A small, lithe person mistreats a big strong one and pretends to be the victim appealing to their small ness

B1: An eccentric kid is labeled as disordered just for being eccentric and because the teachers don’t want to deal with her 

B2: A serious-minded kid has an actual anxiety disorder and experiences stigma because of it and people not understanding that it’s real and debilitating

C1: There is a socially awkward, nerdy character. She is eventually revealed as autistic and her friends accept her just as she is. 

C2: There is a socially awkward, nerdy character. She comes out as aroace and all her friends support her. It is emphasized that she is actually as affectionate as everyone else and preconceptions to the contrary were just bigoted misunderstandings. 

C3: There is a socially awkward, nerdy character.  She finds a significant other who loves her even though she is socially awkward, and her love leads her to discover more communicative passionate sides to her personality. 

Clearly, for each of these scenarios, there are going to be people who relate to some but not to others. If you’ve got an anxiety disorder you’re going to relate to the story with the anxiety disorder, and if you were mis-labeled by incompetent teachers you’re gonna relate to that. But both actually happen in real life. B1 is me B2 is one of my sisters. You might even say they’re caused by some of the same intolerant attitudes. 

So ask yourself:  Is any of these intended as a “fuck you” to the people who would rather have the other ones? If in one particular story the character was mistakenly labeled by incompetent teachers and never had a real disorder, it it saying that no one has real disorders? If the small and lithe character turns out to be the victim, does it mean that big and strong characters are never victims? No of course not. 

 - You can criticize it if the story outright makes such statements and it is vital to do so (see next paragraph), but if the point in the story is just that this particular character was wrongly labeled, or this particular small character was the victim, then it’s simply telling a different story, not at all making a point about whether real disorders or big strong victims exist. 

What’s cathartic or empowering or meaningful to people is as different as people themselves. There’s a good chance that there won’t be an exact match between you or any given authors. 

Often the problem is not the stories that are there, but the ones that are missing. It’s not per se bad to have “girl gets rescued by prince” stories, it’s only bad if they’re the ONLY stories. The solution is more stories. 

Obviously there are exceptions to that like stuff that outright includes negative stereotypes or unquestioned bad behavior treated as good, 

c) Focus on constructivity and context instead of loaded labels

The above was more about perceived flaws this one is about real indisputable flaws. Flaws that are important to point out.

The number one goal here, if you really care about stopping harm and not anyones egos,  should be to get people to stop doing it. 

Sometimes in extreme cases making someone out to be a bad person and warning of them is exactly how you stop harm, but often time its not and getting obsessed with “punishing bad people” while losing sight of “preventing harm” does zero to help the people actually being harmed. Or worse than zero, if you associate a worthy cause with frivolous squabbles. 

Some people just don’t care and will never change their ways but you won’t ever convince those. You need to convince everyone else. All the ones who are maybe just ignorant and didn’t know better, or never had to form an opinion about this. Even if the maker themselves won’t change opinion, you can sway those. 

Imagine a bigoted religious person. how are you more likely to convince them? Get them to stop being religious, which is probably a part of their identity? Or try and argue that equality is, in fact, compatible with their religion? If you step on people’s egoes they will be attacked and block/dismiss all you have to say. Not only will they not change, they’ll dig in their heels. In the worst case, they’ll now start thinking that your Reasonable Position is incompatible with their identity. 

Again some people are determined to have their egoes stepped on and will be insulted no matter what, but those are not the target. 

This isn’t about appeasing assholes, it’s about creating change, because that will stop harm. So instead of throwing negatively changed emotional labels at people (which activates the ego and the emotions) try talking about cause and effect and consequences, to talk to their reason. Explain how the consequences happen. 

For similar reasons, try to think of solutions. You don’t want to destroy the work, you want to make it a better work that more people can enjoy without being distracted by unnecessary flaws. 

Avoid: 

“X is a [negative label] who [buzzword] a [sympathy-drawing label]!!! Why are [entire social group that contains people you want to convince] like this?!”

Instead:

“I know that this was probably supposed to express [intention], but it comes off like [unfortunate implication] and given [harmful social tendency] it might have been better to do [alternate redendition] “

Example #1: “The intention in scenes like in the original Blade Runner, several James Bond Movies or in the Original Star Wards trilogy where the original male characters was probably that these protagonists being suave guys know that the girls really want them to screw/kiss them. The authors know this because they created the characters, but IRL you cannot actually read anyone’s mind and what often happens IRL is that person A proceeds without really making sure that the other person is comfortable, and then they freeze up in fear though they don’t want to have intercourse, and ends up horribly traumatized. There’s not enough general knowledge about the “freeze” part of “fight-flight or freeze”, or good consent education and it would be irresponsible to make this worse. 

All it would literally take to fix it is to have the girls explicitly show that they want to kiss/have sex.”

Example #2: “A lot of horror fiction slaps the names of real diagnosable conditions on what are basically violent monster villains. It’s only natural to wonder what’s going on in the minds of killers and monsters and try to want to contextualize this, but it is vital to keep in mind that there is currently a lot of stigma against people with mental ilnesses, and that depictions like this can make it worse and make it hard for actual real-life people to get jobs and housing. 

If you’re going to use the names of real-life diagnosable conditions you should be committed to researching them and writing the characters realistically while being mindful of the stigma and the social impact that wrong renditions would have and not make a freakshow out of it. 

Alternatively, if you just want to do an unrealistic horror movie killer, don’t use the names of real conditions that real people have.”

d) Refresh Button. 

Especially because you’re saying that this isn’t your default mode and that it feels like some recent thing that you don’t really want. 

- take a break, busy your mind with something else, give the subconscious time toprocess and old perceptions time to settle. Then come back to it. 

- Try sort of looking at it from a new perspective, to deconstruct it from the bottom. What dothing really mean? What are we really told about the characters and events? Try processing it all new from the ground up without “common widom” 

- Things that aren’t explained on screen aren’t necessarily plot holes. There’s a difference between a contradiction, something that can’t fit together, and something that can fit together you just don’t know how. Deduce. Speculate. This is where your logic and imagination come in. 

- Maybe watch a new person react to it for all new input like a reaction vid on youtube

e) Outside Data. 

Same as above - People are basically really sophisticated Boltzmann machines/ statistical learning algorithms. I#m the least to want to admit that but to a degree we’re all influenced by the Data we take in. 

If you’re surrounded by a lot of material and soucres that pick apart every little thing in media, it’s natural that it would arise as a thought. 

If you don’t really want that in your life, filter it out. 

I hope this was of some sort of use. But I stress again that I’m no kind of authority on any such things and that many others might pick this apart as blasphemy. 

[poorquentyn]

I'm re reading IT right now (slowly, as adult life is getting in the way) and was wondering what other bad storytelling choices you thought king made besides the. Uh. Sewer scene? Its been years since ive read it and nothing else really stood out to me as poor storytelling that i can remember. I'll read it for myself eventually but was curious of your thoughts. Love your blog!

Thanks! Stephen King often veers into caricature with his supporting characters, and It is no exception. The way he describes Eddie’s mom and wife physically goes well beyond the narratively useful purpose of establishing how their weight disorders have intertwined with Eddie’s hypochondria and into “ugh fat people are gross” territory. I don’t think King has conscious malignance in this area, because he finds a proper balance with Ben: the latter describes in realistic detail how he lost weight over time, his mom is upset that he’s eating less but is presented humanely (as someone who associates her son eating a lot with her doing well as a single mother), and King manages to avoid shaming Ben for his weight while also acknowledging that Ben personally feels a lot better about himself after having shed it–or rather, because of the confidence he gained in himself by taking charge of the situation. The idea here is not “Ben needs to lose weight because gross” but rather “Ben needs to be in control of his body.” 

The good doesn’t wipe out the bad, nor vice versa; gotta consider them both in context. Main characters are naturally going to get more nuance than supporting characters, but necessary shorthand can easily turn into harmful caricature. And of course, a storytelling choice that seems solid in isolation can become a problem within the work as a whole. Beverly is sexualized throughout It in a way that’s often very unpleasant to read, associated throughout with violence and misogyny. Sometimes this works, as a way of peeling back the layers of petty ego driving a man’s man like her husband Tom; he explodes at her in their introductory scene because her paying attention to Mike’s call instead of him makes him feel like he’s literally not there. Other times it doesn’t, like when King lingers on the “smell” that Bev and her father “make together” now that she’s reaching puberty. We don’t need that to get the point that Bev’s father has inappropriate feelings for her–we got that from Bev’s mom asking if he ever touches her. When you put both sides of the coin together with the infamous sex scene in the sewers and the amount of time spent on whether Bev will choose Ben or Bill, it starts to look less like King was taking a stand against objectification by showing its omnipresence than that he simply didn’t know what to do with Bev as a character without constantly making reference to sex, rape, assault, and molestation. While she does get some right to response on these matters, I don’t think it’s nearly enough. It pushes back against a mindset that casually treats women like objects, but fails to establish a counter-narrative rooted in the female characters as individuals, fleshed out beyond their relationships to the men around them. It’s less a question of Does Stephen King Hate Women than one of imagination and empathy. 

Of course, some flaws are lessened by context, rather than enhanced by it. Take, for example, our protagonist William Denbrough, a blatant author insert. Bill is a popular horror author (check) whose books are increasingly being adapted for TV and film (check) and who has a rather tense relationship with critics and academics (double check). The latter is spelled out in an extended flashback to Bill’s college days, in which he takes a stand that ought to be very familiar to anyone steeped in modern media discourse:

Here is a poor boy from the state of Maine who goes to the University on a scholarship. All his life he has wanted to be a writer, but when he enrolls in the writing courses he finds himself lost without a compass in a strange and frightening land. There’s one guy who wants to be Updike. There’s another one who wants to be a New England version of Faulkner-only he wants to write novels about the grim lives of the poor in blank verse. There’s a girl who admires Joyce Carol Gates but feels that because Oates was nurtured in a sexist society she is “radioactive in a literary sense.” Oates is unable to be clean, this girl says. She will be cleaner. There’s the short fat grad student who can’t or won’t speak above a mutter. This guy has written a play in which there are nine characters. Each of them says only a single word. Little by little the playgoers realize that when you put the single words together you come out with “War is the tool of the sexist death merchants.” This fellow’s play receives an A from the man who teaches Eh-141 (Creative Writing Honors Seminar). This instructor has published four books of poetry and his master’s thesis, all with the University Press. He smokes pot and wears a peace medallion. The fat mutterer’s play is produced by a guerrilla theater group during the strike to end the war which shuts down the campus in May of 1970. The instructor plays one of the characters.

Bill Denbrough, meanwhile, has written one locked-room mystery tale, three science-fiction stories, and several horror tales which owe a great deal to Edgar Allan Poe, H. P. Lovecraft, and Richard Matheson-in later years he will say those stories resembled a mid-1800s funeral hack equipped with a supercharger and painted Day-Glo red.

One of the sf tales earns him a B.

“This is better,” the instructor writes on the title page. “In the alien counterstrike we see the vicious circle in which violence begets violence; I particularly liked the “needle-nosed” spacecraft as a symbol of socio-sexual incursion. While this remains a slightly confused undertone throughout, it is interesting.”

All the others do no better than a C.

Finally he stands up in class one day, after the discussion of a sallow young woman’s vignette about a cow’s examination of a discarded engine block in a deserted field (this may or may not be after a nuclear war) has gone on for seventy minutes or so. The sallow girl, who smokes one Winston after another and picks occasionally at the pimples which nestle in the hollows of her temples, insists that the vignette is a socio-political statement in the manner of the early Orwell. Most of the class-and the instructor-agree, but still the discussion drones on.

When Bill stands up, the class looks at him. He is tail, and has a certain presence.

Speaking carefully, not stuttering (he has not stuttered in better than five years), he says: “I don’t understand this at all. I don’t understand any of this. Why does a story have to be socio-anything? Politics… culture… history… aren’t those natural ingredients in any story, if it’s told well? I mean… ” He looks around, sees hostile eyes, and realizes dimly that they see this as some sort of attack. Maybe it even is. They are thinking, he realizes, that maybe there is a sexist death merchant in their midst. “I mean… can’t you guys just let a story be a story?”

No one replies. Silence spins out. He stands there looking from one cool set of eyes to the next. The sallow girl chuffs out smoke and snubs her cigarette in an ashtray she has brought along in her backpack.

Finally the instructor says softly, as if to a child having an inexplicable tantrum, “do you believe William Faulkner was ‘just telling stories’? Do you believe Shakespeare was just interested in making a buck? Come now, Bill. Tell us what you think.”

“I think that’s pretty close to the truth,” Bill says after a long moment in which he honestly considers the question, and in their eyes he reads a kind of damnation.

“I suggest,” the instructor says, toying with his pen and smiling at Bill with half-lidded eyes, “that you have a great deal to learn.”

The applause starts somewhere in the back of the room.

Bill leaves… but returns the next week, determined to stick with it. In the time between he has written a story called “The Dark,” a tale about a small boy who discovers a monster in the cellar of his house. The little boy faces it, battles it, finally kills it. He feels a land of holy exaltation as he goes about the business of writing this story; he even feels that he is not so much telling the story as he is allowing the story to flow through him. At one point he puts his pen down and takes his hot and aching hand out into ten-degree December cold where it nearly smokes from the temperature change. He walks around, green cut-off boots squeaking in the snow like tiny shutter-hinges which need oil, and his head seems to bulge with the story; it is a little scary, the way it needs to get out. He feels that if it cannot escape by way of his racing hand that it will pop his eyes out in its urgency to escape and be concrete. “Going to knock the shit out of it,” he confides to the blowing winter dark, and laughs a little-a shaky laugh. He is aware that he has finally discovered how to do just that-after ten years of trying he has suddenly found the starter button on the vast dead bulldozer taking up so much space inside his head. It has started up. It is revving, revving. It is nothing pretty, this big machine. It was not made for taking pretty girls to proms. It is not a status symbol. It means business. It can knock things down. If he isn’t careful, it will knock him down.

He rushes inside and finishes “The Dark” at white heat, writing until four o'clock in the morning and finally falling asleep over his ring-binder. If someone had suggested to him that he was really writing about his brother, George, he would have been surprised. He has not thought about George in years-or so he honestly believes.

The story comes back from the instructor with an F slashed into the tide page. Two words are scrawled beneath, in capital letters. PULP, screams one. CRAP, screams the other.

Bill takes the fifteen-page sheaf of manuscript over to the wood-stove and opens the door. He is within a bare inch of tossing it in when the absurdity of what he is doing strikes him. He sits down in his rocking chair, looks at a Grateful Dead poster, and starts to laugh. Pulp? Fine! Let it be pulp! The woods were full of it!

“Let them fucking trees fall!” Bill exclaims, and laughs until tears spurt from his eyes and roll down his face.

He retypes the title page, the one with the instructor’s judgment on it, and sends it off to a men’s magazine named White Tie (although from what Bill can see, it really should be titled Naked Girls Who Look Like Drug Users). Yet his battered Writer’s Market says they buy horror stories, and the two issues he has bought down at the local mom-and-pop store have indeed contained four horror stories sandwiched between the naked girls and the ads for dirty movies and potency pills. One of them, by a man named Dennis Etchison, is actually quite good.

He sends “The Dark” off with no real hopes-he has submitted a good many stories to magazines before with nothing to show for it but rejection slips-and is flabbergasted and delighted when the fiction editor of White Tie buys it for two hundred dollars, payment on publication. The assistant editor adds a short note which calls it “the best damned horror story since Ray Bradbury’s "The Jar.” He adds, “Too bad only about seventy people coast to coast will read it,” but Bill Denbrough does not care. Two hundred dollars!

He goes to his advisor with a drop card for Eh-141. His advisor initials it. Bill Denbrough staples the drop card to the assistant fiction editor’s congratulatory note and tacks both to the bulletin board on the creative-writing instructor’s door. In the corner of the bulletin board he sees an anti-war cartoon. And suddenly, as if moving of its own accord, his fingers pluck his pen from his breast pocket and across the cartoon he writes this: If fiction and politics ever really do become interchangeable, I’m going to kill myself, because I won’t know what else to do. You see, politics always change. Stories never do. He pauses, and then, feeling a bit small (but unable to help himself), he adds: I suggest you have a lot to learn.

You can easily imagine this argument–a timeless appeal is being ruined by lefty college kids and their postmodern analyses–being made today by an alt-right YouTuber out to cleanse the game industry of SJWs. Throughout It, King keeps cutting back to an image of a librarian reading “The Billy Goats Gruff” to a group of kids, the latter enthralled (King tells us) by the primal purity of the kind of monster stories upon which both King and Denbrough have built their careers. “Will the monster be bested…or will It feed?” That’s King declaring that Bill’s his professors were wrong to wave aside his short horror stories. See? See?! I made it, and you pretentious eggheads were wrong to ever doubt me! This aspect of It is frankly embarrassing, especially as time marches on and we see how this mindset has taken root in the next generation.

But! While King very clearly believes this stuff, he’s also self-aware enough to include auto-critiques in his writing. Stan’s wife Patty picks up one of Bill’s novels and dismisses it as practically pornographic in its horror imagery. King goes too far in casting Patty’s dislike of Bill’s work as reflecting a lack of imagination on her part, but he then goes on to sympathetically explore how the grounded relatable struggles Patty has faced (anti-Semitism, her father mocking and dismissing Stan, their inability to have children) have led her to consider “horrorbooks” as shallow escapism. The real world, It admits, has horrors beyond anything the Kings and Denbroughs can come up with. “Werewolves, shit. What did a man like that know about werewolves?” 

Later on, when Ben is telling his triumphant story about calling out a high school coach who taunted him for his weight, Bill gently notes that as an author, he has trouble believing any kid really talked like that. That’s King using his self-insert to wryly poke fun at his own oft-overheated dialogue. Self-awareness and self-deprecation are absolutely vital to making a book as thematically and structurally ambitious as this one work. 

And while some of It’s politics make me cringe, other aspects make me perk up and take notice. King wrote It over the course of four years in which HIV and AIDS became a national crisis that was being largely ignored by said nation’s government. There was a growing conventional wisdom that the afflicted deserved their punishment and should be more or less left to rot. This was all part and parcel with the ascension of the religious right in American politics, especially within the Reagan White House. A huge part of the Reagan narrative (as we see in the “Morning in America” ad, also released while King was writing It) was a portrait of lily-white small-town America as a social ideal being beset by all sorts of ills that the left was either letting happen or actively supporting, and The Gays were most certainly among them.

It opens with a scene that seems to dovetail with that narrative: an idealized ‘50s small town in which an adorable innocent white boy from a good Christian family is horribly murdered by (what seems to be) a nightmarish external force that takes advantage of that innocence. Already, you can see a potential Reaganite spin–It as the Other, the “bear in the woods” threatening the ideal of Derry. 

But that’s not what It is about. The second chapter jumps forward a generation, into the mid-1980s in which King was writing, and onto a scene of violence that cannot be wrapped into the meta-narrative of the religious right. Three men attack a gay man on a bridge, their delicate sensibilities offended by his flamboyance. They beat him within an inch of his life and toss him over the side…where he finds It waiting for him with a gleaming sharp-toothed smile. Both the victim’s boyfriend and one of the assailants tell the cops and lawyers involved about the demon clown who finished the victim off, but the powers that be cover it up for the sake of a successful prosecution.

The idea being that they’re dealing with the symptoms, not the disease–the violence, but not the hand-me-down hate driving it. The bereft boyfriend tells the cops that he tried to warn his new-to-town lover that despite its cheery appearance, Derry is a “bad place,” one positively crawling with “AIDS is God’s punishment” homophobia. Moreover, he whispers through his tears, he realized while staring into Its silver eyes as It ate his true love that “It was Derry…It was this town.” 

So while the first chapter seemingly wrapped the era’s conservative politics in a cozy semiotic blanket, it was only baiting the hook so that the second can rip that blanket off like a Band-Aid. As Reagan strolled to re-election with 49 states at his back, as the Democrats’ convictions wavered and they began to drift rightward, as thousands of Americans wasted away while their government and so many of their fellow citizens watched pitilessly, here comes Stevie King to stick his middle finger in the Moral Majority’s face and say: gays aren’t the monsters, you are the monsters, you are the ones eating your children. He built a thousand-page Lovecraftian epic around that idea, and made it a bestseller. How fucking awesome is that?

Again, it’s all always going to be complicated. The good not only coexists with the bad–they’re often inextricable. The author who slipped a rant against leftist academics ruinin’ his storybooks into It is also the guy who now declares his support for BLM and his disgust for Trump, and It is both a deeply flawed work and one of my very favorite novels.