#is it ableist to tell people to trigger tag American politics posts

[otter-byte]

.

[theexistentiallyqueer]

"but he murdered people”

This is a post about Goro Akechi, murder, its aftermath, trauma, and two things that are in real short fucking supply around here: critical thinking and empathy.

Listen, I’m a veteran of the Dragon Age fandom. If you want to talk about toxic fandoms, they’re your Bible. As far as your Judas Iscariots and Nebuchadnezzars go, I was one of them. I’ve seen it, I’ve done it, and I’m done with it. It’s exhausting to carry that much rage inside of you, to live it actively every second of every day, and to inflict it on other people and laugh about it. So I’ve been disengaged, largely, for a few years. 

And now I’m in the Persona 5 fandom and find myself enthusiastically appreciating Goro Akechi, because who doesn’t love complex, morally flawed, ambiguously gay-coded characters? Shit, maybe you’re not on board, but I’ll sign right up. I’m a relative newcomer, despite being a longtime Persona fan and playing P5 around when it came out, because I didn’t engage with the fandom then. I jumped back in with the Royal announcement and absolutely saturated myself in this vibrant fan space. Invested in the idea of Akechi being explored as a fully fleshed-out character, I find myself following Goroboys. Which is great! Because so far, they’re all great! Nicest bunch of people you could ever hope to meet!

Except there’s Discourse. There’s always been Discourse, I find, but this is my first exposure to it in this fandom. This weekend was my first week of seeing Goro antis active, seeing people I follow, people I like and appreciate and some I considering genuine friends, actively attacked and harassed because they like a fictional teenage character who killed some other fictional people in a fictional world where you, playing as the main character, have the ability to perform a metaphysical lobotomy on people who literally can’t consent. Here I thought the only people who hated Akechi were white cishet men who saw his rage against a parent and said, “Nah, too bitchy for me,” because they’re too afraid to look in a mirror and see Masayoshi Shido’s fascist, misogynistic mug staring back. 

Are you awake yet? Have I woken you up to the fact that Persona 5′s premise is a wish-fulfillment fantasy of “what if I could make the person who took advantage of me when I was a teenager apologize in front of the entire world by using an alternate fantasy dimension to completely violate their brain”?

I see my friends saying, “Wow, it’s amazing how people who hate Akechi can’t leave people who like Akechi alone,” and within an hour they have replies saying MURDER IS MURDER as if they know what murder actually is.

We’re about to get real personal up in here because maybe, only then, will some of you people take the hint that your behavior borders on actively bullying other people on the internet over a fictional character.

Ready? Here goes.

Murder is your mom picking you up from summer camp three weeks after your ninth birthday, driving you to your grandparents’ house, and telling you that when daddy was at work today, someone tried to steal the money, and they had a gun. Daddy was brave and Daddy died.

Murder is blacking out when you’re nine years old and coming to to yourself two houses away on a neighbor’s swing set with crickets chirping in your ears and the crushing reality of never seeing your father again turning your brain into static.

Murder is asking your mother if she asked for the death penalty, and your mother telling you, in a pleading voice, that she didn’t because he was mentally ill and it didn’t feel right. Murder is feeling angry afterwards because you feel like something was taken away from you, and something should be exchanged for that. Because that’s how fairness works, right? If you steal candy from the store, you have to give up your allowance for the next five months.

Murder is realizing you’re an atheist at fourteen and driving past the cemetery where your father’s remains are interred, and having the gut-punching, soul-suffocating realization of what never ever ever actually means. Murder is building an internal cosmology where forever means my atoms and yours, creating new life in perpetuity as the comfort you drag out of the west’s cold, uncaring atheism that never found its own poetry.

Murder is your first two years in college, when you discover social justice and realize the world is bigger than your own life experiences, and that violence at the bottom is a reactionary symptom against violence at the top. Murder is understanding the fact that the man who killed your father was himself a victim of a racist, ableist, capitalist society with a morally bankrupt healthcare system, and that every single one of those things is in and of itself is more hateful than the act of your father bleeding out in the parking lot, in the ambulance, on the operating table.

Murder is your mother confessing to you in college that your father was physically abusive of her and that she had threatened him, only weeks before he was killed, that she would leave and take her daughters with her if he didn’t change. Murder is knowing that your father ran after an armed robber because he was raised by a Sicilian father in a household overflowing with toxic masculinity, and what killed your father wasn’t a man with a gun: what killed your father was the patriarchy whispering in his ear, This theft emasculates you. 

Murder is looking your own mother in the eye and telling her that one day you want to visit the man who killed your father and open your heart to him, because all you can think is, He didn’t plan this. He can’t have wanted this. What must it feel like to kill someone without intending to and then have to live with that for the rest of your life with no one to help you? Murder is the sound of betrayal in your mother’s voice when she responds, disbelieving.

Murder is spending years wanting to at least write to him, and then forgetting, and then going back, because you are a fluid, impermanent, imperfect person with your own flaws and failures and mental issues that hold you back from being the paragon you want to be. Murder is throwing yourself into the left and embracing prison abolition so hard it hurts, because you know that if the state can lock up someone who doesn’t “matter,” the state can lock up anyone. 

Murder is throwing away or selling every childhood thing you ever possessed because you are not by nature a sentimental person, but never giving up that doll you were gifted, the doll you coveted and wanted more than anything else, three weeks before your father was shot and killed. You have no pictures, no mementos, no nothing, but she sits at the top of your bookshelf to this day, a weighty child goddess, the symbol of your torn and labyrinthine childhood.

Murder is having to see a bunch of petty-ass people using actual trauma that real life people have experienced and continue to experience to directly and repeatedly harass your friends online (and yourself, indirectly, by tagging their hateful shit) because you and your friends like a fictional fucking character who, by nature of being fictional, did not actually murder any real existing people.

Murder is building your entire identity around how you sympathize, deeply, with the person who killed your own father, because that takes hard work and deep empathy and the ability to see past a lot of bullshit just to get to that point, and having some fuck-ass anons act like none of that matters because there is (apparently, I must assume) some omnipotent god of justice saying “Fuck you and everything you’ve been through” that apparently only these bullies can hear.

Murder is seeing fandom moralizers talk about murder like they understand it. Like they’ve read this, plus the last ten-plus paragraphs, and decided they know best anyway because mommy and daddy always told them Criminals Are Bad and walked wide-eyed and innocent into a social network overrun with TERFs, exclusionists, and a rotten segment of the political left that acts like some extras straight out of The Crucible.

I have never once been triggered by anything relating to my father’s murder. I cried at the Resurrection Stone scene in The Deathly Hallows, I cried when I completed when I completed the DA2 DLC Legacy after the end of act 2. When I see a parent die, I have an emotional reaction, because it’s familiar.

But the Akechi antis who all say “but he killed people!”, The Akechi antis who say “murder is still murder”?

The murder of my father is still murder. The man who killed him, his murderer, is still regardless a human being, the man who killed him deserves sympathy and compassion and understanding and respect and, above all, a chance.

I am a living example of what’s left behind when someone is murdered. You can walk into the mausoleum where my father is interred, face his headstone, and let the earth open up beneath you and drop you into hell.

So most sincerely, from someone who lost their father to gun violence, to armed robbery, to murder: Stop fucking using our lived experiences as your justification to harass and bully people online for committing the Grave Moral Sin of just liking a video game character.

Between the fact that the American government is keeping real people in concentration camps and a bunch of strangers on the internet liking a twiggy teenage anime boy who used a fantasy world to kill people who don’t exist, which one is actually important to deserve your moral outrage?

You’ll die eventually; fascism won’t kill itself.

[cultsykes-archive]

before you follow

DO NOT follow me if:

- you are homophobic/transphobic/xenophobic/fatphobic/any of those bad -phobics - you are a TERF or SWERF - you are anti-feminism/anti-SJW - you’re racist/sexist/ableist/any of those bad -ists - you're a radical feminist - you support donald trump - you are a republican/right-aligned (sorry. no hard feelings, i respect your opinion [except for conservatives, in which case fuck your feelings, i don’t respect your opinion]) - you are a fujoshi/futa - you are a “MAP”/”NOMAP”/pedo blog/supporter - you’re a kink blog - you’re a ddlg/cgl/whatever other variant blog/supporter (non-sexual age regressors are a-okay tho) - you are a pro-ana/thinspo blog/supporter - you are a cringe culture blog/believe cringe culture still exists - you ship anything that involves pedophilia/incest (allison and luther shippers i’m looking at you) (if you fall under this criteria and you still follow, i will block you)

please ASK to follow me (message or off-anon ask) if:

- you are a legal adult (21+) - you are a cishet... -- ...boy (stop panicking, i just don’t want any Nice Guy™️ White Knights™️ following me. the only white knights welcome here are the awsten kind) -- ...who uses the q word (yes, even when referring to qu**r eye) - you frequently get involved in lgbt discourse (tucute vs truscum, inclusionist vs exclusionist, the q word, etc. doesn’t matter what side you’re on) - you use f*ggot to refer to yourself - you are primarily a k-pop blog. chances are i’m gonna say no but sometimes i allow rare exceptions.

(hey mutuals!! if ur reading this right now and you fall under this criteria, don’t fret!! i followed you back, ur all good dawg.)

things/people im really :/ about:

- melanie martinez - detroit: become human - pretty much every k-pop band and the stannies that follow them (more often than not they turn out to be fujoshis and i’m just really not okay with that!) - xxxtentation - john lennon - halsey - msi (this one is honestly just a personal thing; im v v uncomfortable with a lot of the stuff their lyrics talk about).

warnings/trigger tags:

- i have/will make some posts containing the following, all of which have specific trigger tags:

- guns ( #guns tw // ) - suicide ( #suicide tw / or #suicide mention / ) - drugs ( #drugs tw / or #drug mention / ) - needles ( #needles tw / ) - blood ( #blood tw / ) - death ( #death tw / ) - gore/body horror ( #gore tw / ) - rape mentions ( #rape tw / ) - knives (#knives tw /)

(this list may be incomplete, if there’s any i missed please send them to me)

- developing/ongoing/recent news stories, political events and whatnot with potentially upsetting topics are tagged as #current events

- any other post that may have potentially upsetting/triggering content that i dont know to tag is tagged with #ask to tag (but even if a post doesnt have that tag dont hestiate to still send me an ask to tell me to tag it!!) ((((that last sentence but each time i say ‘tag’ it gets faster))))

- things that i dont tag: alcohol

if you want to talk to me, please DO NOT come into my DMs or my ask box with any of the following:

- lgbt discourse. i’m neutral on all of it. i literally do not care and im not gonna talk about any of it. - political talk. we can get into that when we know each other better. dont come right out of the gate asking for my stance on prison reform or anything. - bandom discourse. please. no wild accusations about the members of my favorite bands from out of left field (as in “oh you know This Guy did x y and z right?? how do u support them??”). and please god stop reminding me about what sebastian did. it’s fucked up, yes, i don’t like sebastian, but i still love remi and emerson. pleaseeeeee stop trying to get me to not like palaye royale. - partially to add on to the last point, anything about how the bands i like “suck” by your standards. I Don’t Fucking Care. - personal questions about my transition. don’t ask what surgeries i plan on getting. don’t ask what’s in my pants. it all traces back to the great nunya dam. ...nunya dam business. 

okie dokie, im done being a super stuck up rule-setting prick.

return to directory - keep scrolling to find my blog content!

on this blog you may find posts about/featuring:

(this is essentially my long list of fandoms)

bands/artists:

- My Chemical Romance - Frank Iero andthe Patience - Twenty One Pilots - Panic! At The Disco - Fall Out Boy - I Don’t Know How But They Found Me - Waterparks - Vinyl Theatre - All Time Low - The Young Veins - YUNGBLUD - Palaye Royale - Troye Sivan - Bring Me The Horizon - Falling In Reverse - Gorillaz - MGMT - Foster The People - blessthefall - You Me At Six - As It Is

youtubers:

- the Cancer Crew (Filthy Frank, iDubbbz, Maxmoefoe) - Pyrocynical - Cody Ko and Noel Miller - Kurtis Conner - Slazo

games:

- Splatoon - Night in the Woods - Overwatch - Doki Doki Literature Club - Skyrim

tv shows:

- Bojack Horseman - Rick and Morty - Aggretsuko - Stranger Things - Steven Universe - Big Brother (i was a Paul stan for 18 and 19, and a Level 6/Tyler stan for 20. just in case that concerns you, because it seems to concern most people in the bb tag here.) - The End Of The F***ing World - Queer Eye - Buzzfeed Unsolved - Brooklyn Nine-Nine (though i have a blog for that) - American Horror Story (specifically Apocalypse... and mostly just Michael) - Total Drama (though i have a blog for that too!!) - The Umbrella Academy (you guessed it... got a blog for that.)

movies/actors:

- John Mulaney - The Breakfast Club - Grease - Love, Simon - Marvel

other:

- bats - birds - anti-fascism - lyric posts - lgbt posts (specifically: trans/gay/mlm posts) - shitposts/memes - tarot cards