#inan��

[revindicatedbyhistory]

how i feel about people who blaze posts

[secretmellowblog]

People who try to analyze what happened on Tumblr on November 5th, 2020, often really overstate how much it was actually “about” Supernatural. As someone who has never been in the supernatural fandom ever but dID join in on the hysterical destielposting—it was really more about the stress of the pandemic and the 2020 presidential election.

The two biggest Youtubers I’ve seen try to dissect “what happened that November 5th” in video essays both weren’t American—- and I think that explains why they both tried to explain the hysteria primarily via analyzing the Supernatural fandom/the original show, rather than through the lens of the election. And while those videos are cool, valid, informational, and make lots of really well-considered interesting points— I can tell you that me and almost all my mutuals had literally no knowledge or interest in the fact that “oh supernatural had made nods at the ship in the past but the creators were adamant that I wouldn’t be canon” or etc etc etc etc. the first time I learned about any of that context was way later, watching videos where people claimed that fandom history context (that I did not know anything about) was the actual reason for the hysteria.

But the reality is that people latched on to the Destiel stuff because it was a piece of big useless inane zero-stakes fandom news in a time when we were desperately waiting for serious high stakes election news. We were latching onto a “positive “ piece of inane stupid fandom news in a time of great stress, with all the desperation of a drowning man who latches onto whatever piece of wood will keep him afloat.

The core of the hysteria was that Americans (who make up a huge chunk of tumblr’s userbase) were currently glued to their laptops watching the live presidential election vote counts come in. These vote counts were taking an extended amount of time due to the pandemic causing high numbers of mail-in ballots, resulting in a constant state of Election Day Stress for multiple days straight.

This was also during the height of the Pandemic. People had predicted Trump’s presidency would be bad; no one had predicted it would be this apocalyptically bad. No one had predicted pandemics and lockdowns and hospitals overflowing with bodybags. remember Trump spreading Covid lies and conspiracies?? There were so many Qanon conspiracies about democrats being Satanic child traffickers who had to be put to death, and coup threats were mounting from the right wing side. It seemed like this election was a choice between ‘centrist democrat’ and “apocalyptic right wing conspiracy theory authoritarianism,” in the midst of pandemic conditions that people feared would never ever improve— and it seemed like a close election.

Another major point was that Trump voters were more likely to be antimaskers/Covid deniers, while Biden voters were more likely to take the pandemic seriously— so Biden voters were more likely to send in mail-in ballots instead of risking the in-person voting crowds, which meant their ballots would take much longer to count. And so, in many state electoral vote counts, it would initially seem like Trump was very far in the lead— only for Biden to slooooowly build up an agonizingly small lead as the mail in ballots came in, and then defeat Trump at the very end.

So you’re just watching these news sites giving live election updates, refreshing the page every 2 minutes to see if you’re going to live under a spineless centrist democrat or a literal Qanon Dictatorship. And then you go on tumblr to distract yourself, and there’s more election posting, and more agonizing over the votes, and more stress and despair—-

And then it’s been days and we’re right at the crucial tipping point where it’s anyone’s game and the next few hours will determine whether Trump will win, so you need to keep your eye on the vote count, because the next hours will determine the future of the pandemic and your country and your plans for your entire life—

And then stupid Destiel becomes canon! And it becomes canon in the silliest way possible!

If Destiel had become canon at any other time, it would have been a big goofy tumblr celebration? But we wouldn’t have gotten the insane explosion of hysterical interaction.

The entire core of it was the contrast between the inane meaningless stupidity of fandom news vs the actual stressful election news you wanted to hear! It really is best conveyed in that meme where Castiel says “I love you” and Dean indifferently responds with a piece of important election news.

It’s about the contrast between the low-stakes inanity of fandom and the massive life-destroying stakes of a terrifying election. There really was no reason it had be Supernatural specifically, except that Supernatural was a thing everyone knew basic things about from dashboard osmosis— it could’ve been any other equally huge silly fandom ship news about a ship everyone *knew of* but might not necessarily be invested in (ex. Stucky becoming canon, Johnlock becoming canon, Kirk/Spock becoming more canon somehow, etc etc etc.)

I think it’s true that people who weren’t paying agonizingly close attention to the American election news got swept up in it, and that non American Supernatural fans also were extremely excited for purely fandom reasons — but the entire reason it blew up to an unprecedented degree was because of that core of stressed out terrified Americans glued to their computers watching election results and suddenly receiving stupid fandom news instead, and deciding to just hysterically parodically hyper-celebrate this absurd useless zero-stakes news.

I think it was also all elevated by the fact that, as I said before, this happened at the crucial “tipping point” of the election where the next few hours would determine the winner. The fact that Biden began to slowly develop a lead in the hours after made it feel, hysterically, as if the hours after Destiel became canon was somehow the turning point where he began to win; so celebrating Destiel felt like celebrating that slow turn towards victory.

The tl,dr is that it’s so important to Remember the Fifth of November …..in preparation the inevitable hysteria that will happen in the presidential election on November 5th of next year. XD. Personally I’m rooting for Johnlock or Frodo/Sam to somehow become canon in the eleventh hour right before the democrats win

[caruliaa]

staff still hasn't given me polls, what should i do?

🟪🟪🟪🟪🟪🟪🟪🟪🟪🟪 their moms 69%

🟪🟪🟪🟪🟪🟪🟪 their dads 31%

grace image os i get to look at her

[lightbubbee]

i hate gay people

[jd-kitty]

Poor Fan

(this video was posted on Brian's Twitter btw to those people who don't have Twitter)

[goddamnshinyrock]

new contractor at work has only seen me twice (both on zoom): tuesday and today. I did laundry yesterday (wednesday) and it did not occur to me that I had grabbed the same shirt AND tank top as tuesday until we were in the middle of a meeting.

It’s not a basic plain black tee or something either, it’s a reasonably memorable green and light purple plaid flannel worn open over a light green tank top.

this guy is going to think I only own one shirt.

[phoenixkaptain]

I really want to explore Tim “rich kid” Drake spending time with his friends and them just slowly realizing that Robin is even weirder than they thought.

Like, Arrowette complains about some press event or something that her mom wants her to go to and Robin just starts listing off advice and unspoken rules and tells her to absolutely avoid the shrimp cocktails unless she wants an early out, in which case the correct amount to eat is one and a half shrimp with only a bit of cocktail sauce, which will be enough to change her complexion and convince people she doesn’t feel well and allow her to escape to the restroom, then she just needs to slip out one of the windows-

Or Wonder Girl commenting on, like, a science fair project or something and he just goes “Science fairs are the worst. Everyone wants to buy your services to make them something, not understanding that you’re richer than they are and that an insult to you could lead to you buying their parents’ companies if they don’t shut up. They’re lucky I have an even temper…” WG: “…wat.”

Superboy is like “man, Superman’s trying to convince me to clean my room. What should I do?” and Tim just stares blankly at him because nobody has ever told him to clean his room before and he’s never cleaned his room before and he had no idea Clark was so cruel and-

Impulse: “Hey, Rob, pass me a can opener.”

Robin, staring into the drawer, fifteen can openers right in front of his eyes: “We don’t have one.”

I just want Tim to inexplicably not know some things because he’s never had to know them. I want him to explicably know things because he had to know them. I want the things he does know and the things he doesn’t to be totally backwards to everyone, who are all wondering why Robin knows how to hotwire a car but does not know how to work a vacuum cleaner.

[apuff]

this is like christmas eve for emos

[bixels]

In case anyone who’s not on Twitter is wondering what it’s like now, I just got punched in the throat by four random consecutive discourse posts on my timeline as follows:

>bojack horseman is pathetic and anyone who likes “cartoons for adults” should have their harddrives checked for cp.

>anime is/isn’t carried by black culture, citing dandadan referencing a rihanna dance in its intro (it was a qrt exchange so both sides were present).

>angel dust is good sa victim representation and the person who made that video essay about them needs to be cyberbullied (or the inverse).

>this random stranger online made a post about how they’re bisexual and a trans ally but aren’t interested in trans people romantically or sexually, let’s make assumptions about their failure as a queer person and also dox them.

So that’s what you’re missing out on.

[anghraine]

It's interesting (if often frustrating) to see the renewed Orc Discourse after the last few episodes of ROP. I've seen arguments that orcs have to be personifications of evil rather than people as such or else the ethics of our heroes' approach to them becomes much more fraught. Tolkien's work, as written, seems an odd choice to me for not wrangling with difficult questions, and of course, more diehard fans are going to immediately bring up Shagrat and Gorbag.

If you haven't read LOTR recently, Shagrat and Gorbag are two orcs who briefly have a conversation about how they're being screwed over by Sauron but have no other real options, about their opinions of mistakes that have been made, that they think Sauron himself has made one, but it's not safe to discuss because Sauron has spies in their own ranks. They reminisce about better times when they had more freedom and fantasize about a future when they can go elsewhere and set up a small-scale banditry operation rather than being involved in this huge-scale war. Eventually, however, they end up turning on each other.

Basically any time that someone brings up the "humanity" of this conversation, someone else will point out that they're still bad people. They're not at all guilty about what they're part of. They just resent the dangers to themselves, the pressure from above, failures of competence, the surveillance they're under, and their lack of realistic alternative options. The dream of another life mentioned in the conversation is still one of preying on innocent people, just on a much smaller and more immediate scale, etc.

I think this misses the reason it keeps getting brought up, though. The point is not that Shagrat and Gorbag are good people. The point is that they are people.

There's something very normal and recognizable about their resentment of their superiors, their fears of reprisal and betrayal that ultimately are realized, their dislike of this kind of industrial war machine that erases their individual work and contributions, the tinge of wistfulness in their hope of escape into a different kind of life. Their dialect is deliberately "common"—and there's a lot more to say about that and the fact that it's another commoner, Sam, who outwits them—but one of the main effects is to make them sound familiar and ordinary. And it's interesting that one of the points they specifically raise is that they're not going to get better treatment from "the good guys" so they can't defect, either.

This is self-interested, yes, but it's not the self-interest of some mystical being or spirit or whatnot, but of people.

Tolkien's later remarks tend to back this up. He said that female orcs do exist, but are rarely seen in the story because the characters only interact with the all-male warrior class of orcs. Whatever female orcs "do," it isn't going to war. Maybe they do a lot of the agricultural work that is apparently happening in distant parts of Mordor, maybe they are chiefly responsible for young orcs, maybe both and/or something else, we don't know. But we know they're out there and we know that they reproduce sexually and we know that they're not part of the orcish warrior class.

Regardless of all the problems with this, the idea that orcs have a gender-restricted warrior class at all and we're just not seeing any of their other classes because of where the story is set doesn't sound like automatons of evil. It sounds like an actual culture of people that we only see along the fringes.

And this whole matter of "but if they're people, we have to think about ethics, so they can't be people" is a weird circular argument that cannot account for what's in LOTR or for much of what Tolkien said afterwards. Yes, he struggled with The Problem of Orcs and how to reconcile it with his world building and his ethical system, but "maybe they're not people" is ultimately not a workable solution as far as LOTR goes and can't even account for much of the later evolution of his ideas, including explicit statements in his letters.

And in the end, the real response that comes to mind to that circular argument is "maybe you should think about ethics more."

[buddydacote]

[marvelousmop]

I think the funniest way to learn a movie is in the public domain is that, if you go to its Wikipedia page, you can just watch the whole thing

You can just go to Wikipedia and watch "Plan 9 from Outer Space" if you want to. Not sure if it's the most ideal way to watch it, but nothing's stopping you

[mecachrome]

lando and oscar attempt to draw each other

[theshitpostcalligrapher]

what would yall name my beverage?

It's a cup of a teabag of the cheapest orange pekoe that dollarstore money can buy with a shake of twinings looseleaf earl grey, about a spoonful of wildflower honey and a bit of milk

[ugisfeelings]

my hot take on the awful nuclear war movie discourse is that i do actually think there is a way to create a critical but sympathetic biopic abt the jewish leftist/communist scientists involved in the manhatten project, who at the moment of 1942 did earnestly (and had reason to) view themselves as part of an urgent struggle against global nazism, and which can cut thru the usamerican imperialist apologia hero-fetish impulse and lay bare the genocidal devastations left in the wake of continuing us counterinsurgent militarism across the continent and pacific (which means addressing the anticommunism!) w/o resorting to white man existentialist handwringing. such a film however, would not be politically commensurable as a bajillion dollar summer blockbuster directed by christopher nolan!