#it is abusive to tell people (who aren't harming anyone) that they don't fucking exist just because you decided they don't

[thelunastusco]

If the two sides in an argument are

"hey, we exist and we just want to be treated as real and with respect" (and their supporters)

and

"you're fucking delusional fakers who are trying to ruin our lives and even if you were real you don't belong in this city that your people, in part, helped build, because I said so, so get the fuck out and also go die"

then you don't have two extreme sides.

You have a community, and the abusers targeting them.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[super-hero-confessions]

Bueno Exellente is a registered sex offender who was put on a "hero" team by a raging alcoholic. The current version is married to an amalgamation of human intestines and he can only say two words. He "intimidates" bad guys with the threat of something that is legitimately scary for everyone, but is ultimately no different from the threat of violence which for some reason people are more okay with? If you think that's being portrayed as "seriously" heroic and "haha look they deserve it", I think you missed a couple steps there and "who" the actual joke here is. Hint: it's not his victims, who are portrayed as the sane and reasonable ones by comparison. Just say he's a crack concept that you personally don't like or that you aren't comfortable with rape as a theme, or with the idea that rape could be combined with comedy and move on. Even if he were unironically being used to portray rape itself as "funny", that's still a personal hang up and the complaints are a transparent attempt at censorship that has nothing to do with victims or how they feel. And if violence doesn't bother you as a theme in the same ways rape does when surviving a violent nonsexual encounter can have similar lasting effects on a person, maybe analyze why that is? Why should rape remain taboo in any or certain subjects while violence, murder, even genocide gets a free pass for everything?

There have been a couple rants on here about purity culture in general but what's really telling about the people who support it and censorship is that the rants hardly ever mention Garth Ennis if at all talk about his work, and some were even about defending fan fiction writers instead. People just assume without actually listening to or reading what's being said. If you have to ask: "Well, what about this kind of victim's feelings?", you aren't actually interested in how those victims feel unless it supports your personal biases and calls for censorship which adhere to your views of how purity culture should be imposed. This is just the "erotica" vs. sexual argument, or the slasher vs. "elevated horror" argument. You're just a hypocrite who is facing cognitive dissonance and you don't want to accept it. Do not pretend you care about victims when you participate in purity culture in any format, even rape and comedy. Yes, there are some victims that find comfort in that too. No, they still don't deserve to be shamed for it. Whether you like it or not, personal opinions hold no bearing on what creative content should or shouldn't exist or what artists are "allowed" to create. Creatives can create whatever the fuck they want. To support creative freedom means supporting this without exception, even if you despise what they make and yes, you can still dislike it. Just don't pretend your personal tastes are critique or be an ass on an ass about it, especially to victims and survivors.

I don't care how "offended" anyone is to hear it said that purity culture only harms and silences victims and to support it is to support hurting victims. Like it or not, that is fact. That is proven. There is observed and relevant evidence of this. Deal with the truth and acknowledge it or continue to be the type of person that unironically, unintentionally or intentionally, supports abusers and ignores victims. Purity culture does not help victims and it never will and no one has the right to police creativity, regardless of what it portrays or how we may feel.

[joyce-stick]

I don't really wanna directly respond to this reblog of the Sonohana post cause I don't want to bother or argue with this person and I don't want anyone else to bother them either (please don't) but

(This post is sort of now picking up on that one section of the Adashima essay that I said we were going to follow up on but I'm still a little scared to post this)

I do not think takes like this are good. To my mind, eroge or lewd content featuring completely fictionalized teenaged/ostensibly teenaged characters who are drawn/imagined/played by adults isn't "child porn" any more than the John Wick series are snuff films, and in both cases the reasons why the genuine article is bad but faking it is okay is because doing the real thing causes actual harm to someone (e.g., unethical exploitation of a child, or someone's actual death)

If there isn't actually any harm to be prevented (and there's no evidence, to my knowledge, that lolicon art leads to child abuse), then what you're actually saying is "I'm uncomfortable with this being depicted so I don't think it should be allowed to exist" and I'm not comfortable with that moralism being applied to art in general because I don't think anyone should get to decide what is and isn't off-limits to depict in art. And I also don't think we get to defend some art on these grounds but also make exceptions for things we specifically don't like

It's fine to not want to watch teenagers fuck or read about teenagers fucking, but plenty of teenagers fuck in real life, and plenty of people write about it or make art about it or have experiences to relate about that and they should be allowed to talk about it. People should also be allowed to write about age gap relationships or incest or rape or violence or abuse or whatever other "taboo" things they feel like. These are things that are part of the human experience and people should be allowed to depict and talk about them to any extent they feel like and they shouldn't be required to justify themselves when someone is personally uncomfortable with their art

I've met actual lolicon fans (a fair amount of whom are queer or trans folks) and they do not support child abuse! A lot of people who make or enjoy lolicon art aren't making it to be pedophiles or abuse children, but often rather because they themselves were abused as children and enjoy lolicon because they feel like it allows them a safe space to work through their trauma or whatever other feelings they have and like

I don't get that! Not completely. I'm not one of those people. But I also don't think we need to get it, or that people are required to have experienced child abuse to enjoy lolicon art, or justify to others why they enjoy it.

And also historically when anyone with any power tries to any significant degree to ban "only the bad/icky stuff" it results in a lot of genuine queer art by queer people* getting caught in the crossfire (almost as if that is the intention!), and often those casualties include queer art that isn't in any way obscene or salacious, and anyway

Which incidentally has been a side effect of Steam arbitrarily banning visual novels that are not porn! (or as in the case of that one Sonohana game that got banned, had the porn cut out of the Steam version)

These kinds of takes also really bother me when people bring up Happy Sugar Life or Onimai or Citrus or whatever and imply that these stories are somehow irredeemably morally abhorrent and they shouldn't be allowed to exist. Like... okay, you can not like these things, or not find them meaningful, but, is it actually hurting anyone to tell this story? Shouldn't it be allowed to exist for the people who do like it?

An example in this regard I bring up a lot is this Anifem article on Happy Sugar Life. The author simultaneously argues "this manga helped me work through my shit" but also "this manga is morally abhorrent and should not be read or recommended to anyone ever".

Again, I cannot stress that this story is not a lost gem. I came not to praise Happy Sugar Life but to bury it. The manga ends with a childhood suicide pact, for crissakes. And Shio, just as much a victim of recurrent abuse as Satou is, gets very little depth outside of being Satou’s motivation. Horrifically enough, the manga all but confirms Shiho’s damnation into the same twisted, obsessive cycle that Satou was trapped in until the end. I absolutely needed this manga, and I don’t regret reading it. But good lord, it is not good. This is a guilty pleasure that stays firmly in “guilty.” I don’t think there’s anyone out there I can safely recommend it to—I side-eye a lot of people who like it, especially when they start praising its “awesome yandere protagonist” or its worst possible take on “be gay, do crime.”  And, Christ, I would never plug this to an abuse survivor. I joy-rode this tour-de-madness, but even I still spent a week afterward somewhere between “destabilized” and “no bath or shower will make me feel clean.”

I feel like there's a really absurd doublethink being particularly pronounced here, like, it needs to be qualified that this is a "wrong" piece of art, before they can say "here's why I liked it anyway", and this is a kind of duality you see a lot, where it feels like people are obligated to excuse or apologize for engaging with and finding some merit in the "bad" thing. This feels like a positive review of the manga that is reviewing it favorably from a lens that engaged with the story on its own merits, that also isn't "allowed" to be that, because the writer isn't "allowed" to just say that they liked it or found value in it

and just

Shouldn't people just be allowed to say that they liked things?

I think fiction is allowed to depict emotionally uncomfortable or morally dubious or socially taboo things, because those things are potentially interesting and art is less interesting if it's limited in what it can be about, and I don't think that creating such things or liking them reflects poorly on either the artist or the audience, or that anyone has any business enforcing limits on what's acceptable to depict in art, and people shouldn't be required to present a "why this actually has artistic value and is therefore one of the exceptions from being problematic" take in order to be allowed to like a thing

And also

You can also say that you don't like something without implying it's morally wrong for it to exist, that also

Anyway this post got a bit rambly but also

Read Subahibi, if you think you can stand it

Reading Subahibi is how I and my headmates came to the conclusion that "problematic" art is not ever bad

*not that that really matters, cishet people are allowed to make queer art too, that is how many cishet people find themselves to not be cishet (and many such people find this out through creating porn)

okay so locking reblogs to only certain people doesn't work if you edit mentions to the people in after the fact. Whatever. I will let this be a hill to die on

[sarahowritesostucky]

Anons are off - again 😑Because I asked a pro-Palestine person to please stop violently threatening a suicidal girl, and she got ugly - very quickly.

Anons are off (for now-don't worry beautiful shy smut fans, it's not forever *gently pets head* it'll be okay)

*stops gentle petting and whirls around to face the direction of the pos, scum of the earth folks who started this*

If you have something vile to say to me, you can say it loud and proud under the banner of your blog name. After all, since you've got the moral high ground, there should be no need for anonymity, right?

And if anyone else is being harassed and assaulted for being Jewish or supporting jews and feels hopeless, unsafe, or like they might choose self harm: please DM me. I'll aways be here to talk (seriously: I'm disabled so I spend most of my waking hours on this laptop.)

There are also tons of hotlines you can call to chat with someone--I work for a couple of them! People there really do not mind just talking to you if it's a really sad night. I mean, it's literally what we signed up for, so please make use of them. Lots of options just a google search away!

Don't let nasty people have that impact on you. I promise there is 1000x more kindness in the world than there are these sorts of bigots, even if it doesn't seem like it on your campus or whatever cesspool you've stumbled across on the internet.🤗🥺✡️💖

And if anybody feels the urge to angrily anon me or make snide comments just because I'm trying to cheer up and maybe help a suicidal girl who was attacked for existing while Jewish? Reevaluate your priorities, maybe.

**I live in the US, for those of you who don't know. I'm an atheist. I don't have skin in the I/p conflict. But what I DO do is volunteer at crisis hotlines - three of them - and I can tell you right now, it is fucking scary the stuff I'm witnessing through it.

The number of Jewish students who are being abused, attacked, harassed, physically injured, vandalized, and told that they'd better 'watch their backs', just for daring to be Jewish in public (and even some people who aren't Jewish at all but just look semitic or have a name that somebody thinks sounds like a Jewish name) is highly disturbing.

I have a friend who doesn't even know much about the current I/p conflict, is not Jewish, and her car got vandalized when she was parked near a synagogue. I've talked to Jewish freshmen who are were so excited about their first year in college, but have been bombarded with so much vitriol due to their religion (or, more often: because of nothing but their last name) that they've had to drop out for the semester. Stop being antisemitic bullies! It's ugly, it's not cute, it's not helping Palestinians, and it's going to get one of these completely uninvolved young people killed. Wtf man?!

[problemnyatic]

man i just cant get over how fuckin distracting the idea of morality is in terms of actually like, trying to create a more ethical status quo. People get so caught up in worrying about whether they're a good person, whether people think they're being good enough, who's good and who's bad, and like, man, fuck!!! Who gives a shit what the fuckin' score is!!! There is so much problems in the world and if we waste all our time trying to figure out all the ~hidden signs~ and ~tells~ of who's predisposed to evil, we're never gonna get around to actually doing anything about the actual evil being committed every day on a systemic level.

If someone hasn't actually hurt someone, lay the fuck off the accusations. If you really want to garner a culture that prevents harm rather than simply reacting to it, you need to make causing harm something that can be recovered from. It can't be fucking shameful, because then people hide it. People will avoid pain, so threats of punishment aren't fucking useful. And if you believe doing The Bad Things will get you a world of hurt, then you're gonna get defensive if someone tries to approach you about your own harmful habits!!

I've seen it so many fuckin times, dude, it's insane. Someone will try to be like "hey, you could do this better" or "hey, the way you x hurts me" and instead of like, having a conversation, that person will get up in arms about how they weren't ~being bad.~ Whether it's trying to avoid blame or minimize how bad people think it is, the end result is that nothing actually gets dealt with because people are too busy trying to avoid being seen as a fuckin' sinner.

Who gives a fuck about being a good person? What does "good personhood" actually do? Best I can tell, it's just this label people get to have that says "Don't come after me, your target is someone else." Because if you ask anyone, being a Good Person is about your actions. So... why not just look at those? Ditch the shorthand that flattens everything, and risk the fucking nuance. If you don't have to worry about maintaining your status as a "good person," then suddenly it stops being so scary to scrutinize the ways in which you can actually improve.

And it's not even like you can just, like, get rid of all "bad people" and solve harm forever. If your solution to the ills of humanity can be boiled down to "if we just point a big enough gun at anyone who Breaks The Good Person Rules, no one will want to break them!" then, sorry to break it to you, but you're a fascist, no matter what values you purport to be championing. You still intend to use force to enforce them, and by enshrining those values as The Good Ones, you blind yourself to your own biases and flaws. You loose sight of the fact that you still have to aim that gun. Best not miss, or you'll take out an innocent- that's bad, right? Hope your aim's perfect- and everyone after you, too.

There's always gonna be pain. Always gonna be conflict. There's just too fuckin' many people out there to force the world to homogenize under a set of values that no one deviates from. So you need to be flexible, and you need to let good and bad exist side by side as shades of gray. You need to think of harm reduction not as a destination you reach by restricting the agency People Who Will Do Harm, but as a complex network of social safety nets that ensure that people who wind up in danger have multiple avenues with which to protect themselves or escape that danger, and ensure that the ones who cause that danger have ways to get help.

The world is more complicated than a binary of who's an abuser and who's a victim. People are more complicated than simple predisposition to hurting others. There will never be a set of values so all-encompassing as to ensure no one ever gets hurt if they're strictly adhered to, and there will never be a person on earth so perfect they never fuck up practicing those values. So you gotta fuckin adapt, man.

No more heroes and villains. No more good and bad people. you're more than that, I'm more than that. There's no shortcuts to heaven, no tickets to hell. You just gotta do the best you can with what you have, and course correct as you learn more stuff. What matters is the impact of our actions- they land how they land and we deal with it after. Quit botherin' with what it means and lets just work with what it is, we'll work towards that intent on the way, yeah?

[leatherbookmark]

The ask wasn't bait I promise. It's only that some truly weird people exist online and I couldn't really make discern from your tags whether or not you're on of them?

...this sounds almost charming so okay, i'll bite. if i get in trouble, my blocking finger is nimble and well-trained.

so anon is referring to my taggies on this post when they ask,

and the thing abt my tags is that they're a joke. i am sarcastically parroting the main argument some (many.) people have against "incest" and "incest supporters". namely: incest is gross.

you may notice the distinct lack of a specifying word. "irl incest" or "fictional incest"? to antis, there's no difference. same goes for rape, abuse, pedophilia, whatever else is there. if you read or, gasp!, write about them in any context other than "it's gross, horrible and the worst" -- or god forbid, in the context of "it's fascinating" or (!!!!) "it's hot" -- it's no different from you being okay with committing these acts in real life, or at least approving of people who commit them.

about the word "gross"... antis/fandom police/feelings yakuza have a disappointingly poor vocabulary when it comes to explaining why the things they're so vehemently opposed to are bad. i mean, if you ask them about siken's win/cests, first of all you'll get a lecture about how traumatic incestuous abuse is for its victims, and it definitely is, but it has nothing to do with two fictional brothers consensually and fictionally fucking. zero points, failing grade, come again in two weeks. second of all, they'll tell you it's gross. and disgusting. in case you didn't hear: GROSS. and DISGUSTING.

and it's not just incest. it's pedophilia, rape, abuse, harassment, racist, sexist or homophobic behaviours... even things that aren't wrong per se, but could be if only you looked at them through the lens of worst interpretation possible Also Are Gross. why would an adult want to be friends with a child? that's borderline pedophilia. gross.

they just don't have other arguments, "gross" is their first and strongest*. yuck factor, baby! if you told them they're 2mm to the left from conservatives who foam at the mouth at the mere thought of those disgusting gays and transes and their gross gender ideology that they use to groom children left and right, next thing they'll be marrying animals! teaching preschoolers about consent?! yeah, sure! they're teaching kids to masturbate! -- they'd be furious. it's not true! they're normal, not like those freaks! but it's the same mechanism. the exact fucking same mechanism, this thing is weird and unsettling and i don't understand it, gross, disgusting, wrong bad evil we must fight and eradicate it! or just tell people to kill themselves if we're terminally online twitter youth thinking that incest is commonly accepted as a kink (=already an oxymoron, as kink is not commonly accepted).

*maybe aside from "but if young and impressionable children see this, they'll think it's okay!" which. if the young and impressionable children have porny fanfiction as their one and only source of knowledge about the world... i'd say encountering said porn is the least of their problems.

and in case it wasn't clear -- fictional weird porn is not harming anyone. harassing people who ~get off~ to said weird porn and telling them to kill themselves is.

so am i one of those Truly Weird People Existing Online? idk, anon, that's for you to decide. as for me, it's almost 5am and i'm replying to this ask in good faith instead of writing my rps porn fanfic. might as well just stay up the night now. 😔

[bonebirds]

This got long but I'm fucking pissed. Content warnings for abuse mentions, trafficking mentions, discourse about discourse to prevent future discourse, "proshipper" nonsense, grooming, etc.

This is gonna be the one time I open my mouth about this because haha, hey, years of internalized fear and shame. I'm trying to lay down a boundary and that comes with so much anticipated backlash.

I do, for the record, have a background in Yelling about the crossroads of media/culture/literature/academia/games studies/trauma/capitalism. Which is a wide range and we can thank my comp exams in the PhD for that.

Since this is tumblr I also gotta just do the fuckin' disclaimer before anyone else feels like doing the "if you don't publicly condemn xyz then I'm gonna make your day worse" thing:

I don't participate in fandom and I don't ship things. I'm not about to defend specific instances or pairings because everything exists in subjective contexts, and texts especially so. But also, I have graduate degrees in English and text analysis and lived experience with CSA and trafficking that went on for a long fucking time. And I am very, very tired of being called the worst things you can call a trauma survivor because I don't care about shipping.

I'm not anti-ship, or whatever. I am not down for imposing my own trauma, feelings about it, and opinions on others in order to censor their art. Call me a proshipper if you want -- ignoring the part where I don't write fanfic or participate in fandom -- because I agree with them. I condemn CSA/CSEM, abusers, predators, the entire evil side of humanity but people who write fic aren't that. Neither are people who read it, even the most problematic of the problematic.

People can write, as fiction, as fantasy, whatever they want. There are no real people being harmed. I can distinguish between those things and, again, am a survivor of some very intense abuse. You're welcome to disagree. I'm fine with that if you're fine with me. I don't believe in absolutes when it comes to topics this complicated (and it is). I spent years on the opposite side, actually, because just the MENTION of things like incest or age gaps triggered me. And then I would do the same and get mad at the people writing it.

This is not healthy and it is not healing on either side of the argument.

But also in treating everything like such a monolithic moral purity test, where you're either good or deserve to suffer -- a test that I fail, because there is no room for things like Complexity -- you just spent a lot of time telling me I'm as bad as the people who trafficked me. Because of fiction. Because of fake things happening to fake people, based on an idea in someone else's head, people's real harm and real trauma means we're as bad as their abusers. That is so heavily the implication in so much of this talk. If I don't disregard my degrees, my training, my own experiences, my own principles and take a stand against people shipping things on the internet, I must basically be a predator!

That is violent and fucked up.

I don't want you around here, so block me and get it over with.

I (like a lot of people with trauma histories) use fiction and writing to process and heal. I don't even post them. A lot of that writing, and being able to seek it out, was helpful. It was a connection to someone else out in the world who maybe understood a little bit of the pain and fear and confusion.

There's a difference between fiction and real abuse. And the "but predators use it to groom vulnerable children" angle barely holds water -- predators use anything. Mainstream TV shows. Vending machine snacks. Gumballs. Access to a remote control to change a channel. A lot of things are more accessible and friendly to kids than making them read. Advocating for censorship, especially in today's political hellhouse, is not actually helpful. It just feels really righteous.

Which doesn't mean there aren't those trying to leverage fic to "normalize" abuse and grooming, I absolutely believe they have and do, but that does not justify externalizing your pain and trauma onto others, or policing them, or trying to take control back by claiming an imaginary moral high ground and pinning other people to it. It also doesn't mean that censoring the internet of all things icky to you saves the world, the kids, anything. It just means they'll find easier avenues, of which there are already so many. It also means you're all just attacking people from a place of presumed hurt rather than compassion, curiosity, anything like that.

So.

Anyone whose stance on this entire thing boils down to "you agree with me or you're a secret pedo enabler," you need to leave.

I'm happy to talk about it if you want! I don't think people trying to draw those lines are right but I think they're well-intentioned, until they start calling me shit that triggers entire mental collapses. You know. In the name of saving the children. Which hasn't been a red flag for conservatism and oppression for hundreds of years or anything, either. How many kids do you think are protected by shutting down places they can actually go and talk about the darkest shit in their heads? How many of us just suffer unbearable pain and isolation because the culture around us is shame-based and if you think about things like that, you're Just Like Them?

This ain't about protecting kids, basically. This discourse never has been. It's about being righteous and never examining why that is. It's about lashing out and displacement. I think the concern for victims is real, like I said, but that concern can translate to actual, real help elsewhere. People are DOING the work to make the internet safer. This? Is not that work.

You are responsible for how you manage your trauma and pain, and that has to include not taking it out on others. Full stop. Even when you disagree. Even when everything in your brain is going DANGER ALARMS DANGER ALARMS DANGER ALARMS WE MUST STOP THIS because someone ships something you think is wrong or uncomfortable. It sucks, and it sucks we have to do that, and it sucks we have to learn how. None of us asked to. None of us wanted to end up here. It's not victim blaming to say you're accountable for your own recovery.

But while you are here, maybe consider that the name/shame/blame model hasn't been working either. For hundreds of fucking years. We know shame doesn't motivate people to care, or learn.

But especially when you're weaponizing shame against trauma survivors for recognizing their own experiences in literature, art, stories. We all struggle with toxic shame. Using it against people until they agree with you?

Holy shit just look in the mirror one day, I guess. But block me first.

[system-of-a-feather]

anon that was such an insane thing to say. . . like u do realize that gatekeepers exist right. right. you do realize that if an alter really was that dangerous, someone else in the system would've likely done something abt it. right.

Like I mean even beyond gatekeepers, it's just honestly a huge misunderstanding on both how 1) switching works 2) how amnesia in DID works and 3) the extremely wide breath and variation of experience between people who have DID.

Also largely incorrect understanding on how trauma-based "psychopathy" and antisocial behavior works and functions but I'm largely less academically read on that topic so I'll refrain from saying anything more on that other than that from a personal experience level.

Like honestly, I hate to give the anon any validation on those claims - but I also hate pushing the "people with DID are innocent uwu buns that can't hurt anyone", cause we used to honestly actually be worthy of being on a watch list during the peak of our survival as teens. We had parts that wanted to do and planned to do atrocious shit, but in the end we still didn't do any of the bad shit cause even then there is a lot of time between planning and doing it and a lot of time for someone with DID to cycle to a more stable and sensible part or to talk themselves out of it. Atrocities aren't something you really do just in a "hmmm felt bored decided to do murder".

(Not saying that those who do experience that feeling aren't telling the truth or anything, but getting to the point of actually committing to doing that crap doesn't happen in a vacuum and as a sudden spark out of nowhere and there are a lot of places for an individual to stop.)

I'm firmly against othering and ostracizing traumatized individuals who have had the experiences of very genuinely considering very morally bad and atrocious things because that shit happens when you are raised and used to surviving in a world of atrocious, horrible, and morally bad things. I feel the excessive hard push of "all people with DID are innocent buns" is harmful to those that have actually been "dangerous individuals" as a defense mechanism. It promotes the idea of thought crimes and really encourages those that learned really problematic / harmful ways of survival to be discouraged from seeking help and healing.

People with DID are not more likely than anyone else to harm another, people with DID are more likely to be a victim of abuse than the average person, those are true and good statements; but "People with DID would never hurt someone" and adjacent sounding statements we personally don't like because people with DID still do hurt people sometimes cause its a very heterogenous group with a lot of different methods of surviving post an abusive environment.

But I digress, maybe someone will shoot us for admitting to having been really fucked up in highschool (will not elaborate because that's not necessary and I'm not gonna trot those proudly in public beyond that in hindsight they were obviously fucked up and we acknowledge that) and stating that people with DID can be abusive, dangerous, and harmful; but not anymore than anyone else can be abusive dangerous and harmful

Antisocial abuse doesn't exist, Borderline abuse doesn't exist, Narcissistic abuse doesn't exist, Histrionic abuse doesn't exist, Post traumatic abuse doesn't exist, DID abuse doesn't exist but people with ASPD, BPD, NPD, HPD, PTSD, and DID can still be abusive and thats an important dichotomy to be able to hold up together at the same time to validate all survivors imo.

Either way, I digress. If people dislike this post they can shoot us if they want but like, whatever man - we're just living life now with dreams of making a sustainable commune to feed homeless people. If yall (not at you, 'yall' as in anyone who is upset by this post) wanna judge us for unnamed atrocities we planned to do in highschool over where we are currently in life and where we plan to go, then thats on yall.

-Riku

[adventuringalchemy]

What do you think would Ivor's opinion be on dragons? Before and after their old order enderdragon shenanigans.

Did he go into the fight in awe? In fright? Would he feel sour or would he pity the dragon for what happened to it? To be slain is one thing, to be cheated out of existence another.

If he were to hear about dragons or even encounter one, what would his stance be now?

ANONYMOUS SENT AN ASK .

ouuu, i love this question! so there's a lot of factors that go into this and what makes ivor, ivor so thank you very much for asking!! it's his hidden emotional side, his knowledge, some of the backstory i wrote for him, and his overall personality that makes up for this!

i wanna start with the backstory -- i haven't wrote a full meta for it yet because my blog ain't exactly finished but when i finally get these shitty fucking icons done i'll actually start putting the blog together. anyway, ivor has trust issues and trauma, as seen by him keeping his emotions to himself and having difficulty believing people can be benevolent. his time with the order made him cynical, but people don't just hide their emotions. not without trauma or some sort of belief/abuse/dogma. so, i genuinely believe that when ivor was in his youth, he had an abusive mentor that taught him to be an alchemist with any sort decency, you need to stop having emotions, and put empathy aside. ivor is emotional even though he hates it, and i have full belief that at a young age he had a beautiful outlook on life and saw it as something precious. something that shouldn't be taken for granted. but with an abusive mentor it makes sense that he became so judgmental of people, and began to become reclusive with his own feelings.

with the past he's had, he would have mixed feelings about fighting it. he would know it's for the betterment of people, as the ender dragon was harming the world. his mentor taught him that to live is to judge, and that to judge is to survive. so he would believe that there aren't any second chances if people can't prove themselves. deep down though, he would feel a sense of grief for the dragon. wonder if there would have been another way to go about things so that it can live peacefully instead of being slain.

slain or not, ivor hates the concept of faulty foundation. of falseness. of lies. he doesn't want to be associated with people who are seen as fake idols. regardless of how he felt about the dragon, the sheer fact that soren and the others believed that they could get away with telling people lies made him egregiously upset. it's disingenuous, and as stunted emotionally as ivor is, his beliefs are very sound. some are judgmental, thanks to his mentor, but overall sturdy. and to have that challenged is not something he takes lightly. leaving the order was the only way to go. and i imagine, by the way soren spoke, that there had been use of the command block for a while, even in secret. i have a hunch ivor knew about it a little longer than the others. i wouldn't be surprised if they had a talk about it before the big ender dragon fight, and didn't tell anyone.

ivor would respect dragons, so long as they aren't being a danger. otherwise he would be judgmental. though his youthful view of life has been drastically shifted, he would always respect the creatures from a distance. they're powerful beings of magic proportions and he adores their beauty. but he would know not to fuck with one without being properly equipped, trained, and absolutely ready for the battle. now of course, if it began tearing the world apart and killing senselessly like the witherstorm did, then he would know that it's time to kill it.

yet ever still, there would be a deep part within him that's begging to come out, asking if there's a more gentle way to handle all this.

[pinkiepartypopper]

I totally get why people feel unwell, angry or even scared of Proshippers.

But that doesn't give them a right to judge people they don't even know. People that are anonymous and don't affect you in any way if you'd just leave them all.

Telling people "kill yourself" is making things just worse and literally starting a war. You don't know sho sits behind the Account you shame. You don't know who they are, what they lived through.. how they feel.

Sit back and think who the person might be that you're just telling to remove their whole existence from the World.

We have worse problems then people who enjoy problematic fiction. It is your problem if you cannot tell reality and fiction apart, not ours.

It can be healthy in many ways and giving people their own space while you can stay off their content is just the least you could do.

Not all proshippers are good people, of course not. But so it is with everyone.

Every group has awful people. Acknowledging this is important! But hating on a whole group of people just because they are part of whatever content doesn't fits well.

It's the same with all the hate on Transpeople we get. There have been awful people that are Trans and still were being awful.

Acknowledging their wrong doings is right, but saying all Transpeople are awful and don't deserve rights just for some having been weirdos is absolutely insane.

Back to the OP sayings: The internet will never be free from awful people. NEVER.

This place is a giant universe where everyone can be. The bad part is that you can be anyone and anything here.. the good part is as well that.. well.. you can be anyone and anything here.

We have luck that this place doesn't affect our reality necessarily. And as long it stays like that, there is no problem in doing anything.

Instead of focusing on other, real problems.. we apparently rather disguise ourselves to make each others stay a living hell.

If a proshipper has been awful to you with any other reason than just being a proshipper, you have EVERY right to call them out.

But if they are getting called for simply existing, then thats the same how it is woth Transpeople.

And with so many more.

You have every right to feel unwell with Proshippers, but you have no right to being harmful and use "its just bad" as an excuse.

Because otherwise you aren't better than these Transphobes and generally.

Focus on the real problems, on the real abuse that is going on. The real issues in our world.

And PLEASE Inform yourself about something before you speak up or against it.

It is a psychological coping mechanism to focus your intrusive thoughts or mental illnesses on fiction. It is a healthy tool and skill to form a connection with others that share the same problems.

My therapist adviced me to write and read dark fiction and have proships.

If you come at proshippers, there might be a chance of you being ableist.

And at last: proshippers aren't pedophiles. There could be some. But keep in mind, that it is a mental illness. Most of them are too ashamed or too guilt ridden to do anything darkfic related at all.

They are STATISCALLY the least people that commit child abuse.

It is mostly coined with other mental illnesses and/or fucked up mindset.

And I AM NOT normalizing it. I am seriously and factually speaking about this topic.

Why can't we all just care for each other instead of spread hate and sorrow over things that aren't worth it.

Let's focus together on the real problems and together we might get close to create a safe space in the internet.

A safe-space in a World without ever a whole safe place.

@ users on this site who want to be pro-nsfw and keep the internet from becoming a squeaky clean corporate hellscape: make peace with proshippers and profiction as a whole. I mean it, the internet will never be the pro-nsfw paradise you want it to be if you keep going "I'm for the internet being a weird place of creativity UNLESS you're one of those freaks that makes that kind of content"

[watercolormogai]

hi sorry for the mini vent but i'm so tired of having to say i'm pro para because like... imagine it had to be that way with any other disability. "yeah i'm pro autism." "i'm pro bpd" it sounds so fucking stupid. i don't know if i make sense but what i'm trying to say is that it sucks we have to treat paraphilias differently than any other disability or disorder or mental illness. i hope this doesn't come across as like anti-para or anything im bad with words lmfao

honestly ? v feel the same way

it sucks to have vy disorders painted as so horrible and disgusting , no one would actually ever support them except fake troll accounts . it sucks that theres basically no community (besides the radqueer community , but v'm clearly not in that) where there are a lot of people who understand and accept it . even people who "accept" it go on to talk about how "harmful paraphilias" are gross and immoral and only the "non-harmful kinks people pretend are paraphilias" are good and okay .

it absolutely sucks that v have to repeatedly say that v'm pro-para and still have people have no idea what paraphilias actually are and be against them because of that . like you said , nobody has to do that with any other disability , and even when people put "people who believe in narc abuse" on their DNIs there is really no one in the mogai community who is actually like that . meanwhile paraphiles are constantly painted as so incredibly horrible and wrong that people literally side with TERFs and call bigots "better" for not supporting paraphiles .

a lot of the anti-para shit in the community comes from people not actually understanding what paraphilias are or how they work . if v try to say "well someone with BPD isn't inherently violent and abusive because of their violent thoughts , and paraphiles aren't either" , v'm told that v'm ableist and a horrible person for daring to compare two disorders . if v try to say "people think you can cure being attracted to the same gender , but you obviously can't , so it's not very hard to understand that you can't cure being attracted to a child or an animal" , v get called homophobic and harassed for daring to say that pure innocent gay people are even slightly similar to the gross awful pedos . people who hate something are never just going to see one post and then suddenly change . they aren't going to see a hundred posts and even think about changing . a lot of ableists have said that even if it was their best friend who came out as a paraphile , theyd tell them to kill themself . so the lack of knowledge and understanding is going to take a long , long time to change , as absolutely frustrating as that is .

(plus , the fact that people think that any attraction to minors is pedophilia . that is not true and one of the main reasons why v feel the urge to punch anyone who says "i call maps pedophiles because thats what they really are!!!" because no you idiot map means any attraction to minors and pedophilia is only towards prepubescent children . the terms hebephilia , nepiophilia , ephebophilia , etc exist for a reason .)

it absolutely sucks to have to repeatedly say "yes , v support all disabled and neurodivergent people , yes including paraphiles they are still neurodivergent / disordered" . it should be basic common sense that all disabled and neurodivergent people are wonderful and amazing and your disorder doesnt make you a bad person , but for some reason it isnt . it constantly makes ve frustrated and angry because people choose to believe the media and hate paraphiles instead of just listening and understanding . having to say that v'm pro-para over and over is incredibly frustrating and makes ve just wanna hit things because oh vy gods why cant people just stop being so fucking ableist , but as frustrating as it is v know it's not going to change and until then we will just have to keep saying it over and over until people start understanding .

paraphiles being treated as "worse than" or "different" than other disorders is stupid and just ableism . no disorder is "worse than" any other . every disorder is morally neutral no matter what . if a paraphile hurts someone else , it is not "someone abused me because theyre a paraphile" it is "someone abused me becuse theyre a bad person" . "pedophilic abuse" is no more real than "narc abuse" . if an adult grooms a child , they are a predator , and actually that vast majority of predators are not pedophiles at all and the vast majority of pedophiles never groom / abuse anyone , so they probably arent even a pedophile . "dont armchair diagnose anyone" includes calling someone a pedophile because they hurt a child . dont call your abuser a narcissist because they probably werent and even if they were they didnt hurt you because of their npd they hurt you because they were an abuser . it is the same with paraphiles . treating paraphiles as "different" or "inherently wrong" only pushes them further and further away from any sort of help they may want to find and leads them to hurt themselves and others .

sorry that v kinda went off on a rant , but v have A Lot of opinions about this , as you can probably tell lol

[corrodxdcoffin]

bro ur telling us to get critical thinking skills when you cannot tell the difference between a morally gray antihero and a child abuser who murdered someone and outwardly SAID they would keep him kill him and revive him again just so they could torture him. he ENJOYS seeing other people in pain, especially c!tommy.

You're an apologist for a murderer and an abuser you fuckass. Your statements don't exist in a bubble, there are a shit ton of abuse victims in this fandom who can and DO see the bullshit you post and it is extremely triggering because it all boils down to just straight-up victim blaming.

/// @thebelovedsareback ///

Okay, I was just gonna ignore this because I don't owe anyone an explanation and don't feel like giving it, but there's ine thing I need to address.

C!Tommy apologists aren't the only abuse victims. C!Tommy is an abuser and c!Dream has been abused. I, as an abuse victim, can connect with c!Dream and like him. Y'all wanna say that c!Tommy is a hero for all abuse survivors and condemn all c!Dream apologists and say we're hurting victims, but guess what? Calling abuse victims abuse apologists is just as harmful. You're words don't exist in a bubble either. Fuck off

[king-killaway]

yet there’s incident after incident of rape and violence. are you saying that because a trans woman rapes someone it isn’t bad?? of course not all trans women do that but why do you ignore its existence?? or the sheer amount of people I’ve seen saying that women and esp lesbians deserve to be raped, deserve to be abused and experience domestic violence is truly horrifying. TRAs are some of the most violently misogynistic and homophobic people I’ve ever seen on the internet like you really really hate women. everything women do is terfy in your eyes. women aren’t allowed to speak about their experiences or advocate for their rights without y’all crying transphobe. i used to be such an ardent TRA too.

Where did I ever say women deserve it? Where did I ever deny that trans people arent awful fucking people too? I know plenty of shitty trans people.

And your fucking right, some trans people are god awful, look at Blair White. But hey fuck, you wanna give me your defense of Lily Cade? Because I'd love to fucking hear it.

A women who rapes other women...

Rape is one of the worst things you can ever do to anyone and if trans women are pressuring people into sex that's a shitty thing. But guess what, that's all you ever fucking hear about because society would rather tell the stories about that than about actual progress made by the LGBT community.

You wanna defend Abigail Shrier to me too? How she actually used the names of real life trans men in a book talking about how "transitioning is mutilation" and "a plight upon 'young impressionable girls'". Comparing being transgender to being autistic? So not only is she sexist, transphobic, but also ableist too.

Or do you wanna talk about your guys inherent racism? Serena Williams for example, or even Caster Semenya both forced to take estrogen because of their naturally high testosterone for cisgender women, both black. I don't see y'all rallying to force men with unnaturally high testosterone to not compete in sports?

Y'all wanna help women?

Why don't you petition against the anti abortion laws in Texas? Why don't you cry about the injustices of genital mutilation to women in Egypt? Why don't you do anything about the constant human trafficking happening to girls younger than 12, child brides? Why not about the Mormon cult that still practices sister wives at the age of 13? Or even for women shelters that constantly undergo abuse by the people who run them, being sexually abused just so they can survive?

What about the 16.4 million women that have AIDS or HIV? Poverty struck countries where menstrual supplies are nonexistent? Or the global 22% wage gap?

What about all that?

Sure rape is awful, and yeah some trans people are dicks. But by fucking god, don't you have better things to worry about than the majority of transgender people who aren't harmful?

Fucking hate us for all I give a damn, but you're not worth my fucking time when there are actual fucking things worth doing than caring about some randoms opinion online.

[earlgraytay]

Okay, I'm about to go AFK for the day so I'm not going to go into detail with this, but a couple things:

A) Equivocating between shame and guilt is incredibly dangerous. Bigots and abusers often equivocate between shame and guilt. They use the fact that you feel like you're Bad to make you feel like you need to constantly make amends for existing, usually by doing exactly what they say. If you distinguish between these two concepts, it's much more difficult for them to do so. We need separate words, with separate definitions, for these separate concepts. B) Shunning is not going to do the thing you want it to do. Ever wonder why fundie Christians send kids out on mission trips? If someone who's in a cult gets rejected by the outside world over and over and over again, they're going to feel like the only place that's safe for them is the cult. Nazi groups- and other extremist groups- often function very much like cults. They use shunning from outsiders-- very justified shunning!-- to make their members feel like the only place that's safe is with the goddamn Nazis. They use shunning from insiders- other extremists dropping them like a sack of shit if they don't march in lock-step- to make their members feel unsafe leaving. If everyone outside the group has rejected you for being a brainwashed cultist/shithead Nazi, and everyone inside the group will reject you if you stop being a brainwashed cultist//shithead Nazi.... you're never going to stop being a brainwashed shithead. You need to make it so that people who've been in a cult/extremist group can reintegrate into the outside world with proportionate consequences for their actions. If you don't, you are making it harder for someone to stop being a Nazi. You're playing into the Nazis' fucking hands. C) When dealing with any social ill, there comes a point where what matters is harm reduction. Responsibility is a useless concept if it doesn't reduce harm. Is someone who started doing meth responsible for getting addicted to meth, and are they responsible for any harm they've done to other people while on meth? Maybe, maybe not. But at a certain point, that doesn't matter anymore. What matters is getting them off meth, getting them in a place where they aren't hurting people, and getting them to the point where they can be a happy member of society, right? Extremist ideologies are as mind-altering and as dangerous as any hard drug. It's very difficult to get people to stop believing something hateful, especially if they don't want to stop. But harm reduction is just as important when it comes to dangerous mind-altering beliefs as it is when it comes to dangerous mind-altering substances. ...Frankly, we're probably not going to see eye-to-eye on this, no matter what I tell you. But because of some of the things you've said, I'm going to give you the standard warning. It's the warning I give anyone who talks about shunning with gusto.

If you are in a group that treats shunning as a normal, proportionate consequence for "bad" actions- a religion, a political movement, or a hobby group- you should probably check in with yourself about the other things the group does, and see whether the amount of control they have over your life is okay. I know Steve Hassan's a shithead, but maybe run it past the BITE model. Do you feel like you're not allowed to think for yourself? Do you feel like the other members of your group are waiting for you to screw up? Are you being told not to have boundaries the other members of the group don't like? If the answers to any of these questions are "yes", you might be in a cult. It's easy to fall into a cult and hard to get out; I don't judge people for it. But you might be in a cult, and you might want to make the changes you need to make to get out.

this is your regular, cranky reminder that you are never going to get people to give up something that humans inherently do by guilting and shaming them.

no matter how strongly you feel that people ought to feel bad about doing something, and no matter how correct you are about whether or not they should feel bad.

shaming someone is an emotional attack. and the more vitriolic your attempt at shame is, the more vicious the attack is. most people, by the time they're adults, recognize this, and have built up various defenses against emotional attacks.

the only people that shame 'works' on the way you want it to work are not mentally well. they have moral OCD, or scrupulosity issues, or have been abused so badly that they do not feel like they have the right to have boundaries, or some combination of the three.

most people with healthy boundaries and healthy emotional responses will see your weaponized shame as an attack on them, and will react accordingly. and they are correct to do so. because part of having healthy boundaries is not letting random people emotionally attack you, regardless of how correct they are.

you can convince people that you are right and they are wrong. but the harder you try to make them feel ashamed, the less effective you're going to be. you're just gonna trigger a bunch of people who are mentally ill and make everyone else pissed at you.

[ablednt]

Is it ableist to think non-disordered systems don’t exist? The person I’m arguing with says it isn’t because they’re not disordered, but that doesn’t feel right

Yes that's extremely ableist for the following reasons:

Currently the only recognized plural-related disorders are dissociative even though historically even in the "disordered" part of the community dissociation was not an inherent factor. This was done to actively exclude people who would have fit an MPD diagnosis. (This isn't to say that I think that MPD was a good diagnosis either, but it's an objective fact stated by the people who created the DSM4 that they coined DID and OSDD because they don't believe systems exist at all and because they weren't allowed to remove the diagnosis completely they replaced it with criteria that would exclude a majority of the community.)

Many systems are formed due to something other than dissociation, such as schizophrenia symptoms/psychosis, BPD and also mood disorders, etc. All of these things can cause someone to have a split identity or consciousness, even just from a solely psychiatric perspective. It does psychotic and otherwise neurodivergent people who do not dissociate but whose experience with plurality is still in direct correlation with mental illness a huge disservice.

Speaking as a psychotic system, it's extremely fucking ableist to tell anyone that their reality is a delusion unprompted. Let's say, for the sake of discussion, that the person thinking this was right and nondisordered systems were somehow just misled into having a delusion that they're in a system when they're not. In the end, this changes literally nothing because psychotic people are allowed to be comforted by their delusions and in addition reality checking a psychotic person without permission is incredibly fucking harmful. Now, people might say, "well they aren't psychotic they're just faking" well no one fucking KNOWS THAT for sure. It's still harmful and it's still fucking ableist.

Many disordered systems are still affected by nonbelief in nondisordered systems due to mixed origins, a huge overlap in experiences deemed "fake" by discourse groups, and also just the fact that many people in this community have psychiatric trauma and while some systems may feel differently many of us do not want to define our systemhood by our diagnosis when said diagnosis is based in ableism and steeped in a history of violence against systems by psychiatry. I definitely fit the criteria for either DID or OSDD but it did not matter when I was being fakeclaimed and abused for my experiences.

Forcing a diagnostic label on people is traumatizing and ableist, there will always be people who fit the criteria for DID/OSDD who don't feel comfortable with those terms due to psychiatric trauma and forcing them to either use labels that make them feel unsafe or are triggering for them or be subjected to fake-claiming, harassment, threats etc. is incredibly ableist!

A LOT of the "faker red flags" that people bring up to decide who's REALLY a system or not heavily targets systems with comorbidities. Like the amount of absolute malice people who follow these thought patterns have against autistic systems is fucking uncanny. And yes before someone tries to make the argument they're also autistic whilst excluding systems, internalized ableism exists and is often weaponized at neurodivergent people who cannot hide their traits.

Lastly (though I can come up with more and more reasons all day and exhaust myself doing so and still have more as to why this is ableist) plurality in of itself is a neurodivergency. Neurodivergent refers to anyone whose brain functions differently from the norm and has thus been othered by neurotypical society, that is, the essence of it at least. There is nowhere I know of in society currently where plurality of any kind is supported readily by singlet society. In fact, very fucking rarely, do singlets ever specify DID or OSDD in their violence against systems. They don't believe that ANY of us are sentient, they don't fucking care whether or not we dissociate, at the end of the day the problem will always be that we present as more than one and society does not tolerate that existence. Punishing plural people for existing in any capacity is ableist because it is punishing them for not submitting to singlet societal norms, that is at the heart of all gatekeeping and intracommunity violence.

Tl:dr; So yeah, deciding that shit singlet psychiatrists cooked together to exclude the majority of the plural community and to deny thousands of disordered systems their autonomy is the word of god and anyone who doesn't submit to this is faking or delusional (making the assumption that a delusion like this is harmful in the first place) is ableist.

[None of this shit is up for debate, if you harass/fakeclaim anyone I do not want to hear it get away from me]

[thelunastusco]

Also like, so many sysmeds (or whatever) cry "DID/OSDD is more than alters!" okay... so they can acknowledge that the disorder is about more than just having parts, alters, sysmates, etc. That there's other criteria involved.

So it's almost like... you know... the plurality aspect, on it's own, isn't enough to qualify something as a disorder.

Almost like, it exists as a separate phenomena.

It's just such crap that here we are, over ten years since the worst of this nonsense started, and people are still just SO DETERMINED to either misunderstand, or purposefully misconstrue, what non-traumagenic systems are talking about and what the plural community is.

Literally no one is saying that a disorder can exist without the criterion for that disorder. They're saying that plurality, which is only ever sometimes PART of a disorder (not all with DID/OSDD/etc are plural or a system) is not inherently a disorder in and of itself.

And they're right. Plurality alone is not a disorder.

It is, in fact, ableism and harmful to suggest that plurality is inherently pathological.

It is, in fact, "discourse" (let's call it what it is: abusive) to tell people that their experiences-- which can't even be proven or disproven scientifically, NONE of our existences can, trauma-formed or not-- are false, misremembered, or faked, and harmful to others just be virtue of existing. "Your existence isn't discourse because you don't exist :)" fuck right on off, lmao.

Like, yeah, true. Sysmeds don't hate non-traumagenic systems for being systems, because they don't believe they're systems at all, and many are both THRILLED to announce that at every given opportunity and rip to shreds anyone who disagrees. But whoops, that is "discourse"! Fancy that.

The only statement in this entire thread of posts that's disingenuous is "nobody hates you for being a system, they want you to stop speaking over systems and stop spreading things that simply aren't true".

"Nobody hates you for being a system": nice misdirect attempt. Like not only is it a flat out lie, but combined with the next two lines...

"They want you to stop speaking over systems": nice reveal of what we mean by "because they don't think you're systems at all". Sure, they can't hate you for being a system! :) Because you're not one! :)) Unless you ACTUALLY are trauma-formed and disordered and just don't know, poor sweetie! :)))

"Stop spreading things that aren't true": and there we have it, the finishing touch. You aren't getting hate for being a system, because you're not one unless you exist the way we say you should exist, and any insistence otherwise is lying and ableist, and causing harm to ~REAL~ systems.

It's the DARVO of syscourse. 🙄 And here we are, a decade later, with people still acting like they're doing something to help systems by parroting it. They're not. They're just making it harder for all systems (especially since trauma-formed systems who AREN'T disordered exist) and attempting to ostracize an entire portion of the community for no good reason. A portion who are helping fight for the rights of all systems and have given the whole community a lot of tools, terms, and support that benefits trauma-formed systems too.

So, fine, it's not "discourse". Cool. Okay. In that case, let us be candid: it's vile and abusive, and we're sick of people pretending it's not.

i wish the existence of nontraumagenic plurals wasnt seen as "discourse"

i wish my want to feel safe in plural communites wasnt seen as "discourse"

i wish my want of the world to accept my lived experience wasnt seen as "discourse"

talk about nontraumagenic plurals and their place in communities isnt discourse. we are beings that just want to be accepted and feel safe. our existence isnt discourse.