#its literally all recycled racism.

[bli-o]

i fucking hate transphobes because they love to make up “actual reasons” trans people are trans like “they have a fetish for being (x) gender” or “they want to prey on kids” and it allows them to completely dodge actually interacting with arguments for the existence of gender and the non-existence of gender or sex binaries. It sets the discussion MILES upon MILES back because it’s not even a discussion of whether trans people are real, it’s a discussion of whether we’re xyz stereotype.

and that’s the express purpose! It’s the oldest trick in the book; if they make a strawman to argue with, they dont have to put in the effort to argue with you at all! Conservatives have done this for hundreds of years.

misogynists stereotyped women as emotional to have an excuse for not confronting whether women are inherently less capable or smart than men Racists stereotyped black men as predators to have an excuse for not confronting whether your skin tone was a valid reason to dehumanize and hate someone

homophobes stereotyped gay people as predators(rings a bell) to have an excuse for not confronting whether being gay is natural or not immoral.

Just as they stereotype trans people now as predatory(rings a bell) “autogynephiles” or as “TRAs indoctrinating kids.”

[tired-hellowl]

here' a comprehensive list as to every problem I have with the current *unecessary characters known as 'Glitz and Glam'

Do they expand the story/worldbuilding in any meaningful way? Do they explore a new hidden dynamic/past conjunction with a differing character and is that explored meaningfully? What was the point of having them animated when Mammon can portray the same level of humiliation/degrading/on stage lack of positive reinforcements. 😐

I'm so sorry but I view these characters as necessary garbage that caused some animators arthritis via too many patterns, not enough screen time to have meat and potatoes worth of dialogue, or really any pretense within the story whatsoever and yes this extends towards every female character on screen but let's not worry about that !!! Even if they are IMPLIED to be from the ring of envy-a color or ring we haven't seen nor meaningfully conveyed to the audience that it even is possible to go in/exists- it isn't conveyed to the audience well enough besides the visual implication of colors???? Instead of having shitty b-plots that go nowhere via Stolas and Blitz goofing off in seeing stars, Moxxie and Millie getting C-plots for no reason, or loona getting a rabies shot- all of that time could have been exploring hell, going to different rings, focusing on other characters besides the main 5, literally I would prefer a quiet episode like BoJack Horsemans 'Fish out of Water'where we can actually see the personalities of the main characters be appreciated and shown to us but that's never gonna happen :/

What I've been worried about is not even the on screen racism/out of touch 'rap/hip-hop parody' leaves a terrible taste in my mouth, if that isn't enough then the sexualization/implication of an incest type dynamic and nothing else besides fetish bait with these characters constantly grabbing one another and not really acting like siblings moreso someone who has never had siblings attempting to write sibling banter and failing terribly :/

Why do you have a problem with 'Klown Bitch' it's so catchy! Uhm, no??? I feel bad for anyone who attempts to defend helluva/hazbin as good modern musicals let me grit my teeth in silence as to the glorification over white people dominating black culture

HERES A HISTORY OF FEMALE HIPHOP ARTISTS: X

Pictured above is very old concept art about twin characters and its the same hairshape viv kept to transfer over to glitz/glam- despite clearly being over designed and way too much going on Alá vivzie style. It just goes to show she recycles even from herself and not every design is always new hot and fresh :/ AND SPEAKING OF CONCEPT ART-

Also also don't forget salems' concept designs thst got passed even though they loon toony, loony, clown enough, and definitely majorly way easier to have animated besides the mess that is the current design meta ???

Love how you can clearly see the silhouettes being so easily identifiable comparably towards the actual amalgamated mess that is their current limbs attempting to hold onto their toothpick body for their head.

All this screams to me is viv using the artists thst try to come onto helluva and they try their best with what their given, viv only picks the best bits SHE thinks is worth her time rather then thinking about the audience or animating anything else besides overglorified white people rap 🤔

Also the episode literally presents its full internalized misogyny/racism within this episode because vivzie herself literally admitted to typing into script with a full chest that

'Women just ain't funny'

. . .

why present misogyny within the series if you as a creator aren't willing to tackle the subject matter? Why write about it or present it as if you're smart over including the joke in your script when it isn't even funny because it just further pushes women out of the entertainment/comedy business which mind you IS ALREADY VERY WELL MALE DOMINATED SO PUTTING OTHER WOMEN DOWN TO PUT YOURSELF UP ISNT HELPING YOUR CASE VIV???

So then what was the point of adding female clowns if all you were going to do with them was make fun of them out of their expense and then profit off of the fact that they are incest coded????????????

?????????Are we watching the same fucking series????????

[lovecolibri]

SaL anon here again my friend with a quick 🫂 for you. And now let's dive in.

So the great and unexpected: Madney!!! I didn't think we'd be getting much from them this episode, and it was starting to feel weird that we hadn't heard from them after Mara left, so I was so, so happy to see them finally get some dedicated screen time!!! And I loved how they handled their talk about kids and really brought home how solid and loving their relationship is (of course Chim already knew, that's her husband!!!). And while the well call-back being about their story was a surprise, it wasn't unpleasant, it worked and Kenny killed that scene, they never said it outright but you could feel Chimney thinking about his own brother when he was talking to the kid. And yeah, Maddie making a rule that she not be treated with kid gloves was so good to see, it needed to be said. Perfect subplot for them, no notes.

The incredible and only partly expected: Eddddddie!!! We are finally, actually dealing with the root of Eddie's problems and yeah it feels mean to say (but Tim kinda earned it after last season's mess) they are actually handling it well. The hot gay priest is a lovely bonus, but him being the one to push Eddie made sense for where Eddie is at now. And the Risky Business dance after shaving??!! TV at its finest. And as a last point actually putting "Oh, I'm straight." in the script?? That man is getting out and I can't wait, we are going to feats my friend.

Now not great but I get why but also I'm tired: The break up. So before I get salty let me just emphasize BONES 🥂🥂🥂🥂🎉🎉🎉🎉!!! Oh god it feels like we lived the literal seasons of BT 1.0 in these 10 or so episodes of BT 2.0 and I'm so glad its done for and we are free. That being said let's talk about the way they handled this. So is it just me or is Tim literally recycling his lonestar secret wife plotline for Tommy but with slightly less plotholes?? Because Josh's whole speech minus the Glee nonsense sounded a lot like his facebook post from that time. That man seriously needs to let his bad ideas die. Also whether your trying to face-value justify Tommy seriously hurting Abby during a rough time in her life (and I'm no fan of Abby) or trying to imply that we should let go of the racism and misogyny of the past in the subtext, "you don't know what's it was like to be scared and gay and closeted" isn't an excuse!!!! You don't get to magically wave away people being harmed by a character's actions OR someone close to those people passing judgement on those actions with a "pre-Glee" argument, its absurd. And yeah, maybe they had to have a good excuse for Buck to overcompensate and jump into "let's move in together!" but is this really the best they could do?? Speaking of Buck overcompensating, I repeat from last week, the hamster wheel is not fun!!! I mean at least they didn't actually move in together, but to try and pull off a last minute "I won't because I care too much" from the guy who just brought Buck tickets to watch a game he hates for an anniversary present is just 🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄. Also unless its part of his post-breakup spiraling we are once again not going to discuss the condescending attitude, the digs at Buck being mature enough, or telling Buck who he is all the way up until the final scene. I'm tired. Why did we go through all of this nonsense for months to end with Buck getting nothing from this relationship aside from realizing he's bi, we could've done that in 2 or 3 episodes last seasons and spared everyone the pain of trying to buy into's Lou's attempts at acting. Just ugh.

At least we ended with Buddie on the couch, which definitely feels like the start of something. Thoughts (salty or otherwise)??

Hello my friend, and thanks for the hugs, they are appreciated 🫂

Okay, let's get to it! I am SO very excited about a new Madney baby! They deserve to have a lovely, healing experience after the last time! Their discussions about joy were sweet and I loved their rules! They have to communicate, but with trust! He has to trust that when she says she's okay and doing well, she is, and she has to trust that if she is NOT doing well, she can speak up and he (and everyone) will be there to support her. I love this for them, and also for us! And also for Uncle Buck and the good stuff we can get there too.

The Eddie stuff was so good! We see him STILL hiding the actual truth of what happened in his storytelling and putting all the weight on himself! And even without the full story, Hot Priest Brian still knew exactly what was up and what to say to help kick-start Eddie's journey. As much as I hate this Chris plot dragging out like it has been, this episode gives some reasoning by telling us Eddie is keeping himself from joy to punish himself, and Chris has always been a joy for him. Hopefully we will see him taking steps soon to go get his son back.

As for the break-up, at the very least we can celebrate it being over! 🍾🥂🎉🍾🥂🎉🍾🥂🎉 I wasn't expecting it to be super satisfying but damn this show still manages to let me down 😒 I am *cackling* at the LS comparison because it's just like, same premise, different font 🙄. And if it didn't work the first time and actually got a LOT of criticism, why pull the same shit again? Except that BT 2.0 is called that for a reason because it's the same as BT 1.0 down to the stank face about an ILY, and a panicked "move in with me so I can prove I'm good enough" from Buck. How tired and boring.

I'm glad Bryan gave a speech that resonated with him. I'm glad it can be looked at with an Eddie lense. I'm NOT glad that we are excusing racism, and misogyny in the name of "protecting closet space". Eli was a white man who worked in the same house under the same people, and we NEVER see him engaging in that kind of shit! So it's not like T couldn't have hung out with him instead, he actively CHOSE to be part of the problem. And at the end of the day, we STILL see the misogyny from T, in the way he talked about Abby!

Literally, WHAT did Buck learn here? BT 1.0 didn't really teach him anything either because he left not because he was miserable and unhappy, but because she once again put people he loved in danger for her own personal gain. And even THEN they didn't actually talk about that or let anyone on the firefam make any comments about her behavior, or the way she treated him, or how unhappy he had looked. And here we are again, with Buck trying to shrink himself down to be what someone wants, while the show refuses to address it, even through other characters talking amongst themselves about their concern for Buck. NGL I snorted SO hard at Buck saying he didn't think T could be that cruel because that's the ONLY thing we knew about him as a person until they brought him back in s7. We literally could have avoided ALL of this and gotten rid of him in 7x05 and let Buck have an actual plot about exploring this side of himself, and reflecting on what he actually wants.

*deep sigh*

On the bright side!! Couch theory is fucking BACK! We got Buck having the same couch his mom got for him(???), we got T laying on it looking the most uncomfortable a human has ever looked on a couch (his head isn't even on the pillow??) while Buck is across the room starting an allergic reaction to the medicine T gave him, we got Eddie dancing around and jumping on the couch, and we got Buck showing up and them sitting in silence on Eddie's couch (the first time the two of them alone have shared a couch) with pictures of their missing son framed between them! What a way to end the episode! And next week is lightning strike trauma??? It feels good to be this excited about the show again, even if it still could use some work to get back to the level of the good ol days. We're on the right path!

Thanks for giving me something else to think about today 💙

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

Be it body hair, women’s lack of pockets, or films that are too long – there’s no shortage of things to pick up and beat men over the head with.

Brexit, climate change, COVID 19 deaths, the financial crisis, racism, homophobia, or even ‘the weaponisation of women’s hair’; the patriarchy and its little brother, ‘toxic masculinity’ are up to no good, yet again.

And it’s everywhere.

It’s in the cities. It’s in the streets. It’s in oceans, down the valleys and in trees above.

It’s in your breakfast cereal. It’s hiding under your bed. It’s making you late for work and leaving the milk out.

God damn patriarchy.

It’s fucking things up, for everyone, everywhere and quite literally, for all of time.

But whilst angry social justice warriors shake their fists at the sky and shout at clouds, the rest of us look puzzled as to what the hell they’re all yelling about.

Beards? Patriarchy. Bacon sandwiches? Patriarchy. Not recycling your plastic bottle? Patriarchy. The absurdity and fragility knows no bounds.

Luckily, some things are just too stupid to be offensive, and thankfully many of these things are exactly that.

And whilst I take no offence from the silliness of these articles, I must admit I may have lost braincells reading them, whilst the full body cringe has left me pretzel like and exhausted.

So, tell me, what has the patriarchy done to you?

==

Don't forget skyscrapers.

When you've run out of real things to complain about.

[rainbowgod666]

Which makes me (an italian) just... annoyed

All those thinks about them taking metals and all I got was "they are better at recycling raw resources than actual companies"

Adam Something has an ENTIRE ASS VIDEO about them

Literally i cannot come up with any reason for them being hated which honestly speaks VOLUMES about how the Roma (called "rom" here in italy) suffer for NO REASON (even Hitlers entire idiocy can be """explained""" with him being a racist child who really hated this one teacher that just so happened to be jewish HMM I WONDER HOW THAT WENT.)

Yeah were better in termini of racism but its not like europeans arent racist. After all, the current americans DID come from europe, and the first thing they did was SLEDGEHAMMERING THE NATIVES BECAUSE GOOD FUCKING GRIEF THEY WOULD HAVE LOST SO MANY TESTS OF CHARACHTER.

Like. My people have no issues joking about nationalites and whatever (we have stereotypes for cities and soccer teams ffs) but here i am, wondering who is the idiot that keeps stuffing immigrants into Lampedusa because there is NO WAY its more complex than "let those who wanna stay in italy stay in italy and allow anyone else to keep traveling" like this is the kind of things that make my lines of questioning go from "child that doesnt know any better" to "guy that is THIS CLOSE from shooting your banana off" and all because most of these things stop making sense when you realize Its Not That Complex At All (like, say, THE ENTIRETY OF THE GAZA GENOCIDE)

And i despise it.

Some of y’all really think racism in America looks like this:

When it really looks like this

[perenlop]

mlp season 9 is so weird tbh. literally feels like a lot of it is just recycled and like a lot of noodles got thrown at the wall to see if theyd stick

[fallout-lou-begas]

A lot of people have accused yjj of being racist, particarily in regards to one of their comics involving Joshua graham, and in general saying that they glorify colonization. I mainly understand the other things they’ve done, but the racism seems inexusable. A lot of people have also been saying that yjj and their followers have harassed people. I want to get both sides of the story on this, so basically I’m asking what the deal with all this is?

Hi, anon. I'll provide my thoughts since you asked politely.

This post is quite long and can be considered an extension of my previous post on the matter.

Besides the infamous and self-admittedly ill-informed chancla comic, for which they've apologized, essentially all of the claims that Yesjejunus is racist stem from their depiction of the Dead Horses and Sorrows relative to their depiction of Joshua Graham and their original character Joan in their fanfic No Light (and to a lesser extent Learnin’ the Blues), which is heavily grounded in the setting of Honest Hearts. I think it's unambiguous that the depiction of vaguely defined "tribals" in Honest Hearts, assembled through a mishmash of disparate signifiers and recycled stereotypes and named like Warrior Cats and completely helpless without Joshua Graham's guidance, is indeed thoroughly racist, even if it was intended to be more nuanced and came from a place of self-admitted ignorance on the part of the developers. What I struggle to understand is that the developers and writers of Honest Hearts—and of Fallout: New Vegas as a whole since the entire game is rife with such mishandled, insufficient depictions of "tribals" with no explicit inclusion at all of any specific Indigenous people or presence—are given miles and miles more sympathy and leeway for their poor handling of these characters in the source material than a fanfic writer is for using the tools and setting that they were given by that source material, including the "lore" and naming conventions of the Dead Horses and Sorrows, to tell a story that means a lot to them personally, inspired by their own deepest fears and experiences with abuse, and ignited by their charismatic yet deeply and blatantly monstrous interpretation of Joshua Graham. Given that it uses the setting of Honest Hearts as a backdrop, there aren't any living characters in Honest Hearts who aren't "tribals" besides Joshua Graham and Daniel, and post-canon, Daniel wouldn’t be there. When Yesjejunus is accused of sidelining the Native characters or relegating them to the background, it's because they're just not writing a fanfic about Follows-Chalk or Waking Cloud as main characters: they're writing a specifically intentioned story about the Courier and Joshua Graham, a story that for better or worse remains faithful to the source material’s depiction of Joshua Graham’s unilateral authority over the tribes in Zion, a baked-in element of Honest Hearts and a critical narrative component of No Light. To accuse Yesjejunus of being racist on this principle in and of itself would be like accusing me of being lesbophobic if I wrote a Dead Money-set fanfic with Father Elijah as the main character instead of Christine. If you want something that centers these other characters then you'd just have to read a different story, or write it yourself.

As a final note, I do think that Yesjejunus is a skilled writer. This thought exists simultaneously with the acknowledgement that like everyone else in fandom, they're writing as a hobby and do not have the oversight of an editor on the work that they produce personally and for free. It's not lost on them that there's things about their story that they could have handled differently or more sensitively, such as the oft-cited example of the death of the pregnant Dead Horse character in No Light, with more forethought or planning at the time—even if they were bound by the constraints of Honest Heart's own setting (such as the dearth of non-tribal characters who could have possibly been in the scene instead) while writing the story. Everyone is free to critique this aspect of the story as much as they are to critique any other aspect, or to be discomforted by the whole thing (given it's a very intentionally uncomfortable story throughout), but the suggestion of so many of these "callouts" that Yesjejunus must have been cackling maniacally about the plight of poor access to medical care among real Indigenous people is a suggestion made entirely in bad faith, and one that I simply don't care to entertain.

As for the point about harassing people: if anyone's only evidence of being "harassed" by a single, specific person is anonymous messages on tumblr dot com, then I don't believe the evidence. If people are accusing Yesjejunus' "supporters" or "associates" of harassing people, then if the accusation is that this harassment is occurring either on Yesjejunus’ behalf or otherwise with their approval, then it is also going to require more evidence than the mere existence of the mean anonymous messages themselves. This goes for the rumor that they have "spies" in fandom Discord servers or whatever, too, which is a rumor that I think has only manifested among its spreaders by either self-appointed individuals speaking on no one's behalf but their own, and by the metaphorical snake eating its own tail in paranoia. Yesjejunus, and I, and all of our mutual friends have been nothing but annoyed at best and horrified at worst by the efforts of some self-appointed individuals to "defend" them with such excess vitriol. Speaking plainly, we generally avoid literally any kind of anonymous or public interaction with anyone who's vocally opposed to us as a rule, specifically to avoid this kind of debacle, and when I say "we" and "us" I'm not referring to some sort of shadowy cabal of conspirators scheming to advance the nefarious YJJ agenda, but to a group of friends. I don't know how to explain to some people who question why we praise their work or share their art sometimes how normal friendships work online.

I also take severe umbrage with the validity of the breadth of these anonymous harassment accusations because of how patently fraudulent several other claims are. Yesjejunus has recently been accused of "grooming,” for example, an accusation only even worth considering if one temporarily forgets what grooming actually is and pretends that grooming is when someone older interacts in literally any capacity with someone younger. Some will say that they’re not accusing them of grooming per se, or not of grooming by that name, but in any case, the meaning is that Yesjejunus has interacted with minors and this on its own is intended to scare and upset you. I have seen only two users actually named as "victims" of these “interactions,’ however, sas-afras and comrade-shrimp, but both users have publicly refuted this accusation because neither of them were minors when they first interacted with Yesjejunus. Frustratingly, though, these literal refutations from the literal so-called "victims" are either dismissed out of hand or muddied by hand-wringing mutterings of "well, I could have sworn they were actually minors, though" and "well they claim that they weren't actually groomed, but who really knows." The spreading and trust in completely anonymous accusations, combined with the total rejection of statements from the only people named in these accusations when their statements contradict the accusations, suggests to me that the existence of these actual interactions (and assuming these interactions occurred both intentionally and with Yesjejunus’ being fully aware of the other person being a minor) is not nearly as important as pushing the narrative that "Yesjejunus is a groomer" or “preying on minors” onto the fandom, and ensuring that anyone who doesn't take this claim completely at face value appears complicit in something horrible. As for anyone who still feels "uncomfortable" at how sas-afras or comrade-shrimp or me or anyone who is very much an adult but just so happens to be younger than Yesjejunus could ever become endeared to them, I reiterate that sometimes I don't know how to explain to people how normal friendships work online.

I want to conclude by saying something that I've said many times before: you don't have to like Yesjejunus (or me, or everybody, or literally anyone else) and no one is holding a gun to your head to befriend them or read their work or look at their art. The block and filter and unfollow buttons are very conveniently located on your dashboard and are totally free to use. Everything I've written here is not intended as some argument as to why everyone on the planet needs to be following their blog and leaving kudos on Learnin' the Blues. Still, while I think everybody has the right to curate their own dashboard and remove the content that they don't want to see, I also think it's reasonable for me to not want my friend to get their name dragged through the mud by the exaggerated and misinformed claims of petty, grudge-bearing brigadiers and self-aggrandizing fandom security guards when they'd like to just dump funny shitposts about the Burned Man's chode in peace.

[comrade-meow]

Spell-caster's notebook, 2nd half of the 19th century - 1st quarter of the 20th century, Haute-Saône. Photo credit: Musées départementaux de la Haute-Saône

“When total war is being waged with words, one must make up one’s mind to engage in another kind of ethnography.”

—Jeanne Favret-Saada, Deadly Words: Witchcraft in the Bocage (1977)

One of the best studies of the power of language and its relationship to violence is Jeanne Favret-Saada’s Deadly Words: Witchcraft in the Bocage (1977). In this groundbreaking ethnography, Favret-Saada discusses how witchcraft employs language to gain power and catch the subject within a web of words. For Favret-Saada, the ethnographer is the unwitcher who lets herself become entangled within a network of power in which words create spells. She calls this being “caught.” For “those who haven't been caught” spells simply “don’t exist” (15).

Similar to Favret-Saada’s work on witchcraft in France, today’s cultural-political economy is immersed in another politicisation of language. This time the catching of subjects, government and institutions is happening in the public sphere under the guise of linguistically codifying identity. All this necessarily relies upon a previous “bewitching” of subjects who are willing to recycle the language of the magical spells despite the absence of evidence.

In witchcraft, language becomes the contested space that Favret-Saada rightfully notes as having taken hostage the very premise of communication, writing, “[I]t is no longer truth or error that is in question, but the possibility of communicating.” Addressing those who have been caught within the spell of language—the bewitched and the suffering—Favret-Saada asks:

In what way are the bewitched right when they say they are suffering? And the unwitchers, when they say they “take it all” on themselves? (And what of the alleged witches, who remain obstinately silent, or claim they do not believe in spells?) What, then, is at stake when such a discourse is being used? These questions led to other, more fundamental ones, about the effect of spoken words and the very rationale of this discourse: why is talking in this way so like the most effective kind of act? How do words kill as surely as a bullet? Why do people talk rather than fight or die, why do they use precisely these terms? And why this kind of language rather than another? If one talks in terms of witchcraft, it must be that the same things cannot be said any other way. (13)

Although Favret-Saada asks these questions about rural Normandy of the 1970s and the role of the ethnographer in studying her own culture, we can easily expand upon Favret-Saada’s premise here. For as she posits in the Bocage that one need not believe in sorcery, there is an accounting that takes place by virtue of the group’s symbolic code where “you have to be caught to believe” and where those who haven’t been “caught” have no place speaking about spells. Favret-Saada poses this question to herself: “What ultimate authority could I invoke, in talking about spells to a bewitched person or an unwitcher?” Does being an insider lend to the currency of language and belief such that any interaction with an outsider necessarily invokes a turf war over space, bodies and language?

For Favret-Saada, words do not merely represent or communicate beliefs—they have noticeable effects on the vitality and well-being of both the bewitched and the dewitcher. Where her work examines how words “kill” and “heal,” today we are in the throes of a culture war where the claim—contrary to fact—of words causing death, of words being “literal violence” are now thrust to the fore. Indeed, words are laden with such potential for “violence” today that many think twice before speaking or writing. The mere accusation of violence has become the negative reinforcement of a movement that has been allowed to make up facts, statistics and now even the very non-reality of violence.

If we are to move forward through the current debates over gender, race, and various other orbiting identities whose moral framework rests almost uniquely upon claims of victimhood, often in direct opposition to material fact, we must return to some of the primal tenets of reason posed during the Enlightenment. We are in the throes of a society caught within a hall of mirrors��many of which are firmly and uniquely fixed within the virtual world of social media—where the narcissistic output is unparalleled even by a three-year-old having a strop on the playground. Where words are “violence” and opinions akin to “murder,” we are witnessing the conflicts created when a direct antagonism between perceived identity and material reality is met on the social stage.

In order to understand what is driving this culture of identifying with oppression—often feigning oppression—our task must be to address those who claim to be suffering. While the subjects caught in the spell of words have been at the centre of media and political attention in recent years, these communities rely upon the language “witchcraft” to divorce themselves even further from ontological and empirical reality while surrendering themselves to a language that holds no resemblance to the material world. There is something to be said for the punishing efforts of these lobbies which seek to project phobias and other -isms into any thoughtful debate or prose on issues of “race” and gender.

Favret-Saada noted that those who resist the language of sorcery will be made to suffer. Today, we must ask ourselves if those fighting for the recognition of their identities even if the older remedies of psychiatry or religion have failed:

The priest and the doctor have faded out long ago when the unwitcher is called. The unwitcher’s task is first to authenticate his patient’s sufferings and his feeling of being threatened in the flesh; second, it is to locate, by close examination, the patient’s vulnerable spots. It is as if his own body and those of his family, his land and all his possessions make up a single surface full of holes, through which the witch’s violence might break in at any moment. (8)

This study considers how the aporia left by the fading grip of religion and medicine has been filled by outside forces coming to confirm the subject: the suffering subject. Having worked with those who were caught up in a spell, the dewitchers and the wives and families affected by witchcraft, Favret-Saada notes how suffering forms the core of how witchcraft is exercised in this community and she explores the reasons for this suffering.

Today, suffering is undergoing a cultural redefinition in the west through the recycling of historical tropes of violence and oppression injected throughout identity politics. Unlike the distant witchcraft of Favret-Saada's fieldwork, historical atrocities cannot simply be cut and paste into a present-day reality in order to rejuvenate a fresh violent act of suffering through which the subject identifies. Where Favret-Saada shows how working with the bewitched and their unwitchers implicates the constant manoeuvring of “good and evil," she claims that all unwitching "is impossible to cure without switching to a position of indirect violence.” Violence is a discursive marker for Favret-Saada where "he who does not attack automatically becomes the victim."

To understand the political forces that revive discourses of racism and sexism today by those claiming victimhood, we must ask those suffering why they suffer. Then, we must also ask why the spell involves converting others to their ideology so that the subject might suffer less. The symptom of suffering that we see by those claiming to have a gender identity, for instance, is inextricably linked to their need for others to mirror their self-image through language. This is similar to what Favret-Saada claims about dewitching, “a technique that neutralizes and exteriorizes venomous self-doubt." There are clear ideological manoeuvres meant to inscribe healing through fiat.

We need to understand how people weaponise emotionally-laden discourse today. The public shaming of those who do not confirm the suffering or pronouns of another seems to be part of a larger network of “sorcery” where the current structural functioning of our society rewards those individuals who engage in the aforementioned language games while punishing those who refuse.

Favret-Saada’s identification of power as the primary element in the effectiveness of ritual forms is a crucial contribution to our understanding of such rituals. Still, we can see the pitfalls of reducing the language of witchcraft to a tidy binary of the subject who suffers and the dewitcher who does violence. Where “the sufferer can choose to interpret his ills in the language of witchcraft,” it is also the case that those who do not claim to suffer are deemed de facto oppressors.

Where oppression is a historical and current-day fact, the truly oppressed subject is mostly not heard. What time has the underpaid or economically destitute worker to chime in on Twitter or to write her local politician? We are captured within a political field where segments of the population use words like “literal violence” to refer to another group whose push back on their notion of oppression. Those who use the stage of oppression in order to be heard are as numerous as is their narcissism expansive. When the media prints that something is “oppression” or “murder” today, we can pretty much bet that what is being communicated is invariably the opposite. In a world where narratives of oppression have taken hold of democratic processes with fury and where the mere claim to victimhood is tantamount to fact, we must concede that we are living in a post-truth era.

Emotions are given enormous weight over facts in media today and all it takes for one to be considered oppressed is to use the “magical spell” of language. The only way out of this chasm between truth and narcissism is to revert to the institutions of science, philosophy, journalism and law. Let us not forget that long before smartphones it was possible—even pleasant—to have heated discussions over a meal with friends and strangers, everyone chiming in with their thoughts and disagreement.

We must reject illogical, illiberal hokum being fed us as the "new progressive" language of the day and instead we should return to the table of dinnertime debate where facts outweigh feelings and where individuals are held accountable for good-faith debate. I have often wondered if the current popular authoritarianism would have ever taken hold without the cloaked anonymity that social media affords. Still, I am quite certain that the current stifling of free speech, academic debate and the media's drive of anti-science narratives are all directly linked to the fact that politicians are not held to account for their performances that have zero political vaue. From AOC's sporting her "tax the rich" dress at the Met Gala for which attendees paid £25789 to attend to David Lammy who claims that males have cervixes, the left is in dire straits with a political class of professional liars who use words to bewitch us all.

I suspect that were the online debate moved to the salon or dining room, we would all be able to see the ruffian sulking silently in the corner, angrily seething because his arguments were unconvincing. His fist banging on the table evidence his every iteration as less rational and credible than the one before. As he struggles to bully all those in disagreement around him, his turbulent behaviour reveals him to be fundamentally an irritable prig who harbours deep-seated misogyny and homophobia.

Real-life interactions are part of the remedy to the addiction-addled cycles of social media use. We cannot replace the vacuum left by religion's demise with political or ideological orthodoxy any more than we can unwitch the possessed who identify with their fictional oppressions.

One of the options we have at our disposal is to unplug and go outside. I’m heading there now. Come join me.

[breelandwalker]

WORD. And conservatives and evangelicals literally just recycle the same basic (and baseless) claims every five or ten years and aim them at a different group. Literally all the Q rhetoric is just reworded Satanic Panic stuff with different window dressing.

Slight tangent - Don't think this hasn't made its' way into witchcraft and pagan circles either, because it has. And I'm not just talking about the community issues with racism, antisemitism, and historical misinformation. When you see moral puritanism in discussions about witchcraft, when you see witches claiming there's a "good" and a "bad" way to display a pentacle or telling other practitioners they shouldn't practice certain types of magic bc Bastardized Incorrect Version of Karma, that's a product of the Satanic Panic.

It grew out of a concerted effort by the modern witchcraft community to prove to the general public that oh we're not cultists, we're not associated with THOSE witches, we're the GOOD ones. That's why there's so much emphasis on the Threefold Law in 1980s-1990s witchcraft literature. That's why late 90s shows like Charmed and Buffy portrayed witchcraft the way they did.

I could go on, but I don't want to derail OP's post too much.

What's up with the Satanic Panic, in a nutshell.

Around the 1970's, conservative Evangelicals began weaponizing a number of conspiracy theories against anyone who wasn't a conservative Evangelical. These conspiracy theories were essentially repackaged witch hysteria (IE, the conspiracies pushed by early modern witch hunters) and antisemitism (especially blood libel).

The core conspiracy theory was that a global satanic cult was working behind the scenes to manipulate politics and lead people away from Jesus. The exact practices of the cult depended on who you asked, but common allegations were practicing human sacrifice (including plenty of child sacrifice), drinking human blood, engaging in sex slavery, producing CSE and snuff films, doing drugs, and having orgies.

Numerous people stepped forward claiming to have been either former cult members, or cult survivors. Pretty much all of their accounts are full of blatant absurdities, and anytime someone was actually investigated, pretty much all of their claims fell apart. For example, Mike Warnke, one of the earliest self-proclaimed ex-satanists, was found to have made up his entire story. One woman, Lauren Stratford, was not only revealed to be a fraud, but afterward claimed she was a Holocaust survivor to collect benefits.

Some examples of claims made by people who claimed to be ex-members/survivors include:

Neopaganism was created by the global satanic cult, and Aleister Crowley was their main agent in this.

All neopaganism and modern witchcraft is a slippery slope to human sacrifice and "hardcore satanism."

All media that depicts magic or the supernatural in any way is part of the satanic agenda. Yes, literally all of it. Yes, even that.

Homosexuality is part of the global satanic agenda.

Rock and heavy metal music are part of the global satanic agenda.

Fluoride, artificial sweeteners, and various food additives are actually mind control drugs.

Electromagnetic waves are used to control people's thoughts.

Marxism was created by the global satanic agenda.

If you know anything about QAnon conspiracy theories, you might notice that some of these look awfully familiar. This is because QAnon was another manifestation of Satanic Panic. They updated "electromagnetic waves" to 5G, and largely replaced homosexuality with transgender, but it's the same thing.

The conspiracy theory about cultists creating mind controlled slaves by inducing dissociative identity disorder through torture (all that Project Monarch stuff) is purely a product of the Satanic Panic. People's supposed "memories" of this abuse were generally produced via recovered memory therapy, which is now known to be more effective at implanting memories rather than recovering them. No serious investigations ever produced any evidence of the supposedly widespread and incredibly elaborate torture of tens of thousands of children.

Now, there have been actual isolated cases of what might be considered satanic ritual abuse. But they do not constitute evidence of a global satanic conspiracy. Rather, they constitute evidence that the perpetrators were inspired by the conspiracy theory.

Additionally, they had a very pseudoscientific view of DID, and the horrible practices allegedly used to induce it and create mind controlled alters were pure pseudoscience, as were the alleged symptoms that someone might be a victim of satanic ritual abuse and just didn't remember it. Everything from autism to having conflicted feelings about your abuser to liking BDSM could be construed as a sign that you had been ritually abused. With a bunch of therapists fully convinced that thousands of people had been ritually abused and armed with hypnotic techniques that allowed them to implant memories of abuse, you can see where things could turn messy in a hurry.

Those who claimed to be former satanists/SRA victims were extremely clear in their assertions that this global satanic conspiracy really did exist, and that the only way to escape and stay safe from it was to accept Jesus. Tales of demonic attacks that could only be stopped by the power of Jesus were common, as were other claims of grandiose supernatural power.

In short, the Satanic Panic was - and still is - a means of demonizing anyone who isn't a fundagelical Christofascist, and scaring anyone who already is, into remaining such. Many of the conspiracy theories have made their way into supposedly progressive circles, so you'll occasionally come across the Project Monarch stuff in DID communities, or see pro-LGBTQ people subscribing to conspiracy theories about the wealthy elite drinking blood or adrenochrome.

But make no mistake, there is no "grain of truth" these allegations of a global satanic conspiracy. There was no "time before all of this was corrupted by evil agendas." It was all created by people with with hateful agendas, and continues to be perpetuated by people with hateful agendas. And that's all, folks.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Pandemics and peak indifference

When I think about our historical, profound shifts in attitude and discourse, the model I apply is "peak indifference."

Say you have real, existential problem. More often than not, these are systemic problems, and those are the hardest problems.

https://locusmag.com/2016/07/cory-doctorow-peak-indifference/

Not just because systemic problems involve collective action (you can't recycle your way out of climate change), but because the cause-and-effect relationships of systemic problems can't be easily known, so it's hard to know what you need to do to avert the problem.

Systemic problems pose a third difficulty: they enrich small minorities, and those minorities can exploit causal ambiguity to deliberately sow doubt.

To make that more concrete: think about cancer-tobacco denial.

Not everyone who smokes gets cancer. When it does give you cancer, the tumor comes years after the puff that damages your genes. There's lots of social pressure to smoke, and getting your friends to quit is even harder than quitting yourself.

And on top of all of it, the tobacco industry made tons of money from giving us cancer, and they could use some of that to fund doubt-merchants who deliberately worsened the difficulty in linking smoking and cancer.

https://timharford.com/2015/04/cigarettes-damn-cigarettes-and-statistics/

But denial doesn't make problems disappear - it just incurs policy debt, and the interest on that debt is human suffering. Climate inaction, tobacco inaction, and inequality inaction only delay the day of reckoning, and make it worse when it arrives.

That's where peak denial comes in. Over time, the mounting harms from policy debt make it harder and harder to deny the problem, At a certain point - long before we take action - the number of people who deny the problem starts to decline.

This happens naturally, without any need for activist urging. The problem is that the natural peak denial point is often several steps beyond the point of no return. And that's when denial slides into nihilism:

Here's what nihilism looks like:

"Well, I guess these things *did* give me stage 4 lung cancer after all. No point in quitting now."

or

"You were right, rhino populations are in danger! But since there's only one left, let's find out what he tastes like?"

That's why we can't wait for peak denial to arise on its own, why we must hasten its arrival - because we want people to engage with systemic problems *before* the point of no return.

That's where storytelling comes in.

Stories are a fuggly hack, an illusion played on our empathy, wherein we're fooled into caring about the literally inconsequential fate of made-up people (your breakfast yogurt's death was more tragic than Romeo and Juliet's, for it was once alive).

https://locusmag.com/2014/11/cory-doctorow-stories-are-a-fuggly-hack/

But still, made up stories that make vivid and visceral the consequences of inaction can spur us into action, can create a vocabulary for discussing the lived experience of people in a future that has not yet arrived.

Even better than stories, though, are *histories*, the real stories of real people who really suffered through real experiences comparable to those that we face on our horizon. Hence "those who forget history are doomed to repeat it."

We're very good at forgetting history. The arrival of the covid pandemic was filled with stories of the dimly remembered 1918 influenza pandemic. Our failure to heed those warnings triggered tales of its brutal second wave the following winter.

Herp derp.

Starting in 1968, successive US presidents began to dismantle Glass-Steigel, a corrective put in place after a horrendous finance sector collapse that triggered the Great Depression and WWII. Not one president heeded historians' warnings about the consequences.

Derp.

Dismantling the checks on finance led to successive, worsening crises followed by crushing austerity a deepening inequality. Historical warnings about how this cycle ends with guillotines and Reichstag fires were ignored.

Derp derp derp.

The ideology of finance is a subset of right-wing thought, defined by Corey Robin (in "The Reactionary Mind") as the belief that some people are born to rule, while the rest are born to be ruled over.

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-reactionary-mind-9780190692001

This belief has many guises (Dominionism, imperialism, racism, monarchism, fascism, libertarianism) but they all boil down to one thing: eugenics.

It's one thing to believe that markets are meritocratic during a moment of dynamism, when the low-born can rise to riches.

But when their offspring pull up the ladder and social mobility halts, "meritocracy" becomes hereditary: markets elevate the best people, and the best people are all descended from the wealthy, so the wealthy must be of better stock (cue Trump and his talk of "good blood").

Eugenics was once a mainstream American doctrine, and American eugenicists inspired Nazi "race science." But after the Holocaust, eugenics fell into disrepute and we dropped it down the same memory hole that the 1918 flu disappeared into.

But eugenics made a comeback under another guise: the "human capital theory," which holds that markets reward us in proportion to our value to society, and thus the CEO is paid 10,000x more than the janitor because the CEO provides 10,000x more value to the human project.

Eugenics isn't just repugnant, it's also wrong. To understand why, you have to understand how desirable traits are social, not isolated in individuals.

Blair Fix's essay on the link between eugenics and human capitol theory is a must-read:

https://economicsfromthetopdown.com/2021/01/14/the-rise-of-human-capital-theory/

By way of illustration, Fix describes geneticist William Muir's experiments with improving chicken egg-production through artificial selection, in which he only bred the best layers. The result? A disaster. Egg-laying plummeted.

It plummeted because laying isn't an isolated trait. Chickens that produced the most eggs did so by bullying other chickens out of *their* feed and resources. Selecting for laying selected for bullying and aggression and led to endless chicken-fights and no eggs.

When Muir bred another flock of chickens based on a *group*'s ability to lay, THEN he got his eggs. Egg-laying is a social process.

This story will be familiar to anyone who's worked in a stack-ranked software development shop.

Software managers have long noted that some coders can turn in 10X or even 100X more code than their median colleagues. But attempts to build "superstar" teams that fired all the median programmers end in chaos and destruction.

If your 100X programmer is such a dick that no one can work with them, then their aptitude is irrelevant - you'll never ship.

I assume there are analogies to this in the sporting world, but I am vastly unqualified to discuss sports of any kind.

Despite the bankruptcy of human capital theory, the systemic dangers it posed, and the obvious fact that it was just eugenics dressed up as economics, the theory festered for decades, poisoning our worlds.

The C-suites of every major company are filled with hens whose egg-laying prowess is the result of their suppression of their peers' efficacy - while others whose social integration make them far more productive are relegated to worse jobs or forced out altogether.

The lockdown provoked squeals of outrage from the world's wealthiest people, who insisted that the factories be re-opened. As the slogan of the day went, "If a billionaire needs you to go to work to maintain his fortune, then you are the source of that fortune - not him."

We can't afford to be indifferent to any of our systemic problems any more: not climate science, nor inequality, nor monopoly, nor the lurking eugenics that justifies it all.

[luidilovins]

You should turn your post on the Uncanny Valley into a book or something. I am not even kidding, it's brilliant and sorely needed information. Thank you for it.

Tbh its just speculative that the uncanny valley is an inherent biological trait and not cultural or a learned behavior at the moment. A good example would be the cultural phenomenon of colorophobia where in the US we have a longer history of using clowns in our horror pop culture genres than countries like Japan.

Clown entertainment has been around since the Egytian times and maybe some people have always been freaked out by them it honestly just takes one director or author to have an disproportionately irrational fear and good cinematography skills to convince people that they SHOULD hate clowns just as much, (I could say the same about the movie Jaws but thats a bit of a tangent,) or a memorable event that damages the public's trust in something that SHOULD be innocent or harmless. (A good examples being the John Wayne Gacy trials.)

Clowns are also thought to be in the uncanney valley so ita a fairly good argument on cultural phenomenon versus genetic traits. Up until aroud the 60s-70s clowns were actually fairly well liked by the US general public and a lot of older generation still find a fondness in it that would scare the living shit out of their grandchildren.

As far as evidence that I may be right about the "uncanney valley might be because of rabies" theory, there has been a small case study suggesting that the movements of a non-human robot that trigger the effect in us, is also present in people with parkinsons but the sample size is too small for me to be thoroughly convinced.

And don't be mistaken I also dislike this concept because saying that ableism is an inherent human trait is just as bad as saying racism is an inherent human trait. There is little to gain from distrust in the disabled and little historical evidence to suggest it was common or beneficial to discard disabled people. Disabled people's remains have been found time and time again to live to incredibly long livea and be cared for, and participate in their communities. I'm highly critical of this particular case study and I take it with a grain of salt because its on cosmo, but evidence of human disabilities and compassion can be sourced by actual bones and it's been placed on VERY credible sources. NPR, NBC, Discovery, Nat Geo, NY Times, literally the clostest you can get to creme of the crop news articles on DOZENS of accounts and if you have a goddam problem then pay for a tour to the Smithsonian, find an archeologist and coherse them into showing you the bones and then explain phorensics to you because you probably wouldn't understand unless you too were a phorensic archeologist yourself.

What I DO BELIEVE tho is that if the uncanny valley is a legitimate inherent trait, that like most evolutionary traits, it made it this far for this long because it somehow served us benificially. And the biggest benifit I can think of is identifying neuro-infectious diseases because they can spread agressivley, many of them lead to death or lasting effects and are fucking MISERABLE to catch. We're talking brain swelling, fevers, uncontrollable vomiting, tremors, hallucinations, motor and vocal tics, difficulty swallowing, seizures. This could all happen because they eat infected deer meat or because of one bad fox bite. It's miserable if you survive and horrifying if you dont. Rabies can survive in your muscle tissue for years before infecting your brain and once it does usually you only live for about 5-10 days in and out of concious knowledge that you're going to die painfully, and disease aggrivated psychosis. It would be hard to pinpoint the causation because the amout of time before full blown infection would vary too much to assosiate for a long time. So your only option is to hone in on telltale signs.

The disabled people who would suffer from herdeditary or developmental neurological disorders run the risk of prejudice from mistaken identity, but if a human is part of a community, and doesn't die within a week from having a wobbly head, it would sooner or later become apparent that they're not dangerous. I think nowadays culturally people don't press to learn more about disabled people due to social and political prejudice and never fucking grow up past that. Mistaken identity or not. You learn about people from the patterns of their behaviors so even ones that seem abnormal to you become a normal recognizable pattern for them. Fancy that.

We don't get grossed out by chimps or gorillas, who are even more distant cousins, and the proof that we don't have a search and destroy button for anything immediatly related to us is a bunch of bullshit can be found in almost every human's blood on earth. And not just neanderthals, but denisovans as well. And that's not even accounting for genetic backtracking the crossbreeding of other sapiens species before we were whittled down to just the three. What makes the tweet even stupider is that when neandertals still roamed the earth humans were shorter, hardier, and overall more rough looking so we looked even indistinguished then. We Also Chewed On Bones and neandertals handled cold climates better than us based on a study on chest cavity density and, skull nasal intake and heat circulation, providing genetic diversity and the upper hand in survival in the tundras or mountainous regions spanning over Eurasia. If it wasn't for humans fucking neandertals we might not have been able to spread over the contient or diversify the way we did.

So my full hypothesis is that if the uncanny valley is a genetic inherent human trait it was used to benifit people from catching agressive diseases in a time where the benifit of fearing a group member with rabies outweighed the cost of fearing a group member with a disability like parkinsons.

WHAT PISSED ME OFF was the idea that we are DESIGNED to be unwary of our evolutionary cousins could easily be used for white supremacist spaces to justify racism BECAUSE IT ALREADY HAS

So that one tweet that might seem like a quirky thinkpiece in my eyes is just fuel for eugenics trend round whatever number we're on. It's like we don't fucking learn. It would be REALLY easy to retool the concept that it's natural for people to be fearful of whatever the bullshit definition of sub-humans are. Claiming that black people were sub-human thus deserving of mistrust and submission to white ownership worked like a fucking charm.

Maybe if I go to college and major in psyche/socio/civics it'll be my college thesis. Right now I'm more of a hobbyist than anything, but what I DO know is that anyone can make an untested hypothesis to combat another untested hypothesis and it should hold just as much goddamn value. I combatted the idea that the idea that human othering was funneled into an unconfirmed effect that causes disgust and terror based on non-human sapiens is in fact racist and gave what is in my opinion a more evoluntionary practical approach to the uncanney valley.

The generalized links that I used APARENTLY weren't good enough for some people but aparently a single tweet that says "hur dur heedle dee uncanney valley exists because of human cousins" was taken at face value even tho it was probably tapped out in five seconds without regards to the reproccussions. I find a huge discomfort that less than studious links about the evolution of monkey social behaviors that I used as a guideline to explaining my concerns became the focal point for people to nitpick without even having the gall to "well actually" on the subject. That absolute ravaging NEED to rip apart at it and devolve into name calling because I MENTIONED racism is fucking suspicious and I don't trust it. I had to stop looking at the responses because some people were only reblogging and arguing with barely half of my argument and i was getting nowhere fast.

There were a few people that made actual points with cited sources that made their own rebuttle arguments. That I respect. It's just as valid an argument as mine and I'm ALWAYS willing to take on more credible sources to strengthen my stance or gain perspective.

But it's the utter dismissal of a concerning concept that just seeped into the subtext that gnawed at my gut. Some people on top of hating the linked sources I provided, admitted they didn't read it, refused to read between the lines to purposfully misinterpret or derail my main points, and detract that my claim that the tweet was a result of systemic white supremacy saturated into modern science was a bunch of bullshit because I claimed that 1500s anglos invented racism.

The thing is we did invent the racism that we fucking currently subscribe to.

We practice the science that we formulated based on our own social prejudice. Real people die from this.

We remain uncritical of our own theorums that we postulate then pat ourselves on the back like we're philosophical geniuses even though racism is a family heirloom with a new paint job.

We preach the eugenics ideals that we pulled out of our asses to benifit from fearmongering, promises of national security and unpaied labor.

White supremacists create subtext with the intention of it being consumed by accident or in ways that seem palatable.

Fuck.

That.

I don't hate the person who wrote the tweet. Chances are that they gave the tweet as much thought as they took the time to write it and went on their day as a fun little thinkpiece. Everyone on the internet does it. But its that kind of thinking error that needs to be adressed as a progression of historic and scientific prejudice that gets rehashed, recycled and untouched and continually damages and is weaponized against marginalized people. I am not wrong for taking it seriously especially when a bunch of people were sitting around nodding their heads just as effortlessly.

I don't owe the internet any more sources than the tweet. I don't owe anyone on the internet a full scientific ananysis. And the people's reaction to what I had to say was actually what further convinced me I might have hit the nail on the head.

[themoonsbeloved]

I find it interesting that you have never been in any fandoms before twst, just because twst doesn't look like a "first fandom" place, what made you get invested to twst more than other fandoms?

There's kind of a half truth in that. I did once try to get in a fandom prior to twst years back, like I literally made a fan blog and everything, I was dedicated. But it barely lasted long at all because I was bullied off due to the rampant racism and whitewashing of the only Black character, minor-adult shipping and CA apologism in relation to the anime I was really invested in. Other than that I've experienced fandom (and its isms and phobias) vicariously through mutuals who are/were part of large popular fandoms, so technically its not like I've absolutely never experienced what fandoms are like.

To answer your question, I got invested in twst mostly cause the nostalgia of classic disney movies (something I was already familar with and could grasp) and the really diverse character designs for each dorm intrigued me a lot (particularly looking at savanaclaw and scarabia). I was first exposed to it when I came across a recommended video on youtube introducing all the dorms and characters. In the beginning I was like wtf is this why would you make pretty anime boys out of disney villains, but what else do I expect from anime lol. Plus for me personally I had never seen this many characters of colour that were Arab and Black/Black African coded. At the same time its a given that my exposure to such media is really limited, but with that, from what I can see at least in terms of gacha games is that this seems to be the only game (if not one of the very, very few) with the most racial diversity... not saying they did it WELL though.

In short, my own (limited) consumption of anime in conjuction with childhood nostalgia and the fact that I am too used to seeing the same recycled, lone dark skinned character in a sea of white characters means I was susceptible to half-hearted crumbs from a gacha game.

[shifuaang]

Just wanted to say it’s nice to see someone agree Aangs parenting in LOK is grossly out of character. I keep seeing people contort the situation into pretzels to make it work. It comes close to ruining the franchise for me

I almost have to divorce LOK from ATLA in order to enjoy it, which is really kind of sad considering how it's so integrally connected to its source material and yet seems to mishandle said source material at every opportunity.

LOK recycles the same familial conflicts as ATLA. Both Aang and Toph are painted as bad parental figures, which seems like a complete character assassination of the two of them as well as of Katara who was married to Aang and seemingly allowed him to mistreat Kya and Bumi. I wrote a much more in-depth meta on this narrative choice and how it contradicts the character strengths and flaws that were given to Aang in ATLA here if you’re interested. 

Basically, I think it’s very unlike Aang to show favoritism to his airbending son when he sees firsthand how badly favoritism affects both Zuko and Azula. Aang is shown to be extremely excited about sharing his culture with Katara and Sokka and is more inclusive than anyone else in the Gaang. I love Aang because he is human and has many flaws, but to make him a bad father taints his legacy, is lazy writing, and almost ruins the series for me as well. Forgive me for going on a rant, but I’ve wanted to talk about my grievances with LOK for a while, and your ask inspired me to make a list soooo away we go:

I hate that the rules of bloodbending are retconned to create the conflict in season one - it diminishes the Avatar's ability to energybend and take away bending as a means of justice (specifically Aang who had to defy all of his friends and the rules of the world in order to defeat Ozai without compromising his culture and morals). Why can Noatak and Tarrlok bloodbend when it's not a full moon? Just because they will themselves into doing so? If this is true, surely Hama would have figured out how to utilize this technique as she was also abused and had just as much motivation as the two brothers to be a survivalist and hone her powers.

The Harmonic Convergence allows airbending to come back too quickly. It all feels too neat and tidy. While I absolutely adore the restoration of air nomad culture and watching that come to life, it's not enough of a slow burn for me. I feel that it lessened the extraordinary pain that Aang experienced being the last of his people. If they're going to go the route of the lion turtle being the one to bestow bending (which I don't like, but we'll get there), why not include a plot where the Air Acolytes go on a quest (led by the Avatar who is the bridge between the spirit and physical world) to find him and have him grant them airbending? That would have been far more interesting to me than the spirit world conveniently opening up and restoring balance.

The whole concept of the lion turtle being the bestower of all bending leans far too much into the Western-centric idea of some kind of monotheistic creator. I was happy to accept the existence of benders, non-benders, and the Avatar without there being any sort of long-winded explanation for why they came to be. Sometimes when shows try too hard to give mystical elements backstory and lore, it takes away from the intrigue and magic behind everything. LOK in general is far more Western-centric than ATLA. The spirits of Raava and Vaatu aren't necessarily a bad addition, but they are written as completely black and white. The dichotomy of good vs. evil doesn't exist in ATLA - even Ozai's life is given intrinsic value and careful consideration despite the fact that he is, by all accounts, an irredeemable dictator. Tui and La, push and pull, lend themselves to a far more complex and morally grey narrative. 

With LOK moving in a more Western direction comes a blatant lack of respect for Asian cultures, particularly Buddhist culture. Nothing is as well-researched or planned as ATLA's plot and cultural references. From fartbending to straying from Eastern themes and spirituality, it all just feels very juvenile, which is ironic considering LOK was meant to appeal to an older audience. 

While I almost loathe to say this because Zaheer is such a well-written character and intriguing in ways that even ATLA's villains aren't, his achieving enlightenment and learning to fly is a slap in the face to true morality, concentration, and wisdom, which are the main pillars of Buddhist thought and training. You're meaning to tell me that Aang had to struggle with opening seven chakras, letting go of earthly attachments, and literally dying and being resurrected in order to go into the Avatar State, but all Zaheer had to do to achieve what only one other airbender has achieved is watch P'li die? He got to unlock a previously insurmountable airbending technique after breaking every moral airbending code, including taking life with his bending? I'm not buying it. 

On a similar note, the way cultural appropriation is glossed over in LOK is also incredibly inappropriate. LOK has a real opportunity to explore racism, blackface/brownface, and the sexualization of ‘exotic’ characters in Old Hollywood when Bolin is cast as Nuktuk, but his role in the films just becomes a running gag. It shouldn't sit right with anyone that someone who is half Fire Nation is playing a waterbending hero only about 50 years after the hundred year war in which the Fire Nation almost eradicated waterbenders.

The relationships are not very well-written. Love triangles are a terrible plot device, and Bolin's abusive relationship with Eska is played for laughs. I don't like Korra being cut off from her past lives in what feels like some desperate sort of ploy to get the fans to break ties from the old characters and only care about the new ones. The copaganda is gross, and Toph becoming a cop makes very little sense to me. The plot can be messy and contrived, and the pacing isn't great.

So you're probably wondering, why do you even watch LOK? It sounds like you hate it. I truly don't. The animation is beautiful, the fight sequences are amazingly choreographed, and I really enjoy some of the new characters like Asami, Tenzin, and Jinora. I think LOK is a good, solid show on its own, but it's impossible to hold a candle to its near flawless predecessor. 

[rwdestuffs]

Y’know, I like Yang and all, she’s my favorite character, and I like a lot of her story, but I really don’t like how she kinda is now just the person Blake chases after.

Don’t get me wrong, Blake’s heartbreak and rage at Yang falling into the void is really well-done, but it just reminds us that the writers don’r know what to do with Blake.

I used to enjoy Blake’s story in the early volumes. She was a no-nonsense person who could call out both sides of an argument. She’d look to a member of the White Fang and say “No. You’re not fighting for justice. You’re fighting because you’re just angry and want to take it out on someone.” and then she’d take a look at a racist and say “You just think that you’re better than a faunus because you’re a bigoted moron with no sense of self-reflection.” Then she just kinda became a pity-party.

And literally, all I wanted out of the whole thing with Yang was that she left a note. Like… Nobody calls Yang out on her selfishness on wanting Blake by her for emotional support, but by contrast, nobody really calls Blake out on the amount of emotional distress she put on Yang. She went home to be with her parents, but her logic with Yang was “If I’m not near her, then she won’t get hurt.”

Okay, someone please inform me as to why Adam couldn’t just walk to Patch, cut off Yang’s head, and then mail it to Blake? Like… Blake was being an idiot there. She wasn’t going back to zoo to warn her parents, she went there for comfort. Which, credit where it’s due, is a reasonable reaction to the trauma she faced. But so is Yang’s. Neither gets comforted or called out on their actions, which ultimately means that Yang’s reaction is viewed as much more selfish because we don’t get a chance to have her be called out for it, and for her to point out how much she suffered as well.

This show has honestly exhausted itself with Blake and Yang and is now just using them as ship bait. They’re probably not going to get together or acknowledge their feelings until the end of the series because the writers think that that’s how representation works. You do it at the end, because a bunch of other shows did that too.

Except those other shows did it at the end because of executive meddling.

The entire reason for Blake’s existence was to drive the racism subplot, but because the writers were so horrible at writing it, they finished it up, and now Blake has pretty much nothing left for her character to do except be Yang’s love interest. There could be more potential for her as a character, but the writers don’t know what to do since they dropped the racism arc.

And as much as I want Blake to have story relevance again, she’s not going to, because the writers followed some white karen’s blog on how minorities “should” act instead of actually picking up a history book. And I’d rather they not butcher the racism arc any further just to give Blake relevance again.

The hard part is trying to figure out how Blake can have relevance again. If anything, I would have liked for her to have been Emerald’s new source of comfort. They both have left abusive relationships, and I think that it would be a good idea for Blake to be a source of comfort for Emerald. Blake could have been the source of comfort for a lot of victims, but the writers chose to not do that because they don’t realize it.

Which is another issue with having vomit boy fall to the void island instead of Emerald. We don’t get the Emerald and Blake interactions that could have helped flesh out each character a bit more.

And Yang’s character is pretty much going in the direction of her getting the Spring Maiden powers by way of Raven sacrificing herself to save Yang. This show can’t have its villains grow and learn because the main characters also haven’t really grown as characters either. And if the villains grow and learn but the main characters don’t, then that spells the end of the main characters. But the writers don’t know how to make their main characters grow and learn unless their name rhymes with yawn bark, and this creates massive problems.

It also says a lot when Blake’s character has been so mangled that she doesn’t even fight as well as she should be. It’s telling when a three minute long fight of her fighting Mikasa (Using recycled voice clips, I might add) has her more in-character and using more of her abilities than the actual show. Remember that pathetic display of her fighting that centipede thing? She was busy begging an unconscious and near-auraless Ruby to save her. She barely did anything to save herself, and the writers did all of that just to try to elevate Ruby as a character.

Ruby doesn’t need other characters to tell her how much she’s grown, she should just show it. Instead of Ruby one-shotting that thing, it should have been a team attack. Imagine how much hype there would have been if Blake was actually holding her own, only to get cornered, and having to prepare a clone, only for Ruby to then declare “LADYBUG!” And the two do that awesome slash maneuver from Volume 2 and takes it down that way. Not only would that have saved Blake’s character, but it would have also served as a way to showcase Ruby’s skills as a fighter and as a leader. She calls out the attack, and not only does Blake not hesitate in going into formation, but it then actually works. It would have shown growth on both characters.

Like… These writers don’t really get a whole lot of how these characters should be characters.

This all started as a rant about Blake and Yang’s characters, and then ended up being a rant about how the writing has caused them to be cared about.

[foodbytesback]

3 Fun, New Ways to Eat Human Flesh

In case you needed more proof that present-day Twitter is just circa-2013 Tumblr, the latest Twitter discourse is “well, it’s not... technically cannibalism.”  And I don’t mean a cheeky “haha, techbro food replacement Soylent was named after Soylent Green.” I mean there are companies out there trying to recreate human flesh for consumption, all while adamantly claiming (for legal reasons, presumably) that they don’t actually know what human flesh tastes like. Listen: I’m not going to act like I have anything deep to say about morbid curiosity or the taboo, I’m pretty much here to say “lol what a bunch of freaks.” At the end of the day, all I know is that my google search history has placed me on several watchlists.

First up, we have Hufu. For those of you that are portmenteu-challenged, that’s human tofu, because that’s pretty much what it was: a tofu product formulated to have the taste and texture of human flesh.   Also-to continue the theme of “Twitter is now just 2013 Tumblr-” much like how Tumblr users would scream “WHY IS NOBODY TALKING ABOUT THIS” on a news story that’s 5 years old, Hufu proper actually came out in 2005, and shut down their website in 2006.  And while there seemed to be plenty of media coverage- including a segment on Comedy Central’s The Daily Show- at the time, there doesn’t seem to be any accounts of anyone doing a taste test of it, causing many to speculate that it was never real to begin with.  Also, a lot of their branding seems to lean heavily on stereotyping Pacific Islanders as cannibals, so like… I can excuse the cannibalism but I draw the line at racism.

Along those same lines, we also have the much more contemporary Swedish company, Oumph. While the company normally specializes in Impossible-style meat substitutes, they decided to create a human burger patty, served out of a food truck this past Halloween, boasting it would look like beef but taste more like pork or veal.  They did, however, specifically mention that it was only for Halloween, “because otherwise it would be creepy.”  Good to know that’s where they draw the line.

Lastly, we have a very-not-plant-based alternative, the Ouroboros Steak.  If you thought a Swedish plant-based burger was too creepy, then buckle up, buttercup, this shit’s about to get weird.   This grow-it-yourself steak kit requires you to harvest a cell sample from inside your cheek, then incubate it in a petri dish over the course of 3 months, all while feeding it a serum derived from human blood!

Ok, so about that last part.  The serum is derived from expired blood donations (which is not something that I considered as having an expiration date, nor was I aware that anywhere in the world had such a surplus of donated blood that it ever got that chance to expire, but I digress), and behaves much like Fetal Bovine Serum.  FBS, being derived from the fetuses within recently-slaughtered pregnant cows, naturally tends to upset even the most casual of animal rights activists,  and even those not opposed to its use would still probably prefer to see the rare substance go towards stem cell research- or literally anything that could potentially help humanity in the long run- than have it be used to grow a fucked up steak just because it can.  So, it’s cheaper and more ethical than using FBS, recycling medical waste as opposed to baby murder… it’s just that it’s human blood.

While I’ve seen several sources mention this becoming a DIY kit, they also usually backpetal and say that such a thing is purely conceptual at this point, and that this whole thing was really a quasi-art piece to get people to think about the sacrifices we will have to make as a society if we want to continue to consume meat at the rate that we do.

That’s all any of these ended up being, really.  Publicity stunts of one sort or another, all leaning on the shock value of pseudo-cannibalism, just to pull the rug out from under us once they had our attention.  Will products like these ever truly hit the market in full force? Or has science gone too far?  Probably the latter lmao.

Anyways, I’m off to a dinner party at my friend Hannibal’s house.  I hope he likes the Piedmonte Barbera I picked out, he asked for Chianti but the store was all out.

[pinelife3]

What’s this Pizzagate in the heart of nature?

The big tech story in Australia last month was Facebook’s decision to restrict people and organisations in Australia from sharing or viewing news content on Facebook. This was in response to the Morrison government’s proposed Media Bargaining legislation which is basically a Murdoch-serving law to try to get tech companies to pay media organisations for news content hosted/linked/displayed on their sites and, most galling of all, share details of their algorithms with Australian media orgs. The idea that Facebook would have to notify NewsCorp every time they want to tweak their algorithm is patently insane. So I admire Facebook’s petty, dramatic manoeuvre: “if the way we share news on the site is such a problem then fine, no more news for you”. After all the fuss, the Australian government agreed to amend the Media Bargaining legislation - evidently with terms more agreeable to Facebook, meaning news has been restored to Facebook down under. 

One of the key responses I saw expressed in relation to Facebook’s initial news eradication was concern that disinformation would be able to spread more easily on the site - and that people wouldn’t be able to rebut disinformation with factual news articles.

So far as I can tell, the proliferation of disinformation online wouldn’t matter if people didn’t believe it. And most especially, if people didn’t want to believe it. After all, the web is full of persuasive writing and people who want to convince you of things - for whatever reason, conspiracy theories just seem to be very alluring. So rather than trying to protect people from their own stupidity by hiding disinformation... maybe we could look at why people are so credulous in the first place. Deep state? Jet fuel can’t melt steel beams? CIA Contra cocaine trafficking? The great replacement? Pizzagate? 

I’m going to class conspiracy theorists into three categories of my own making:

I believe: well meaning, uninformed people who have been fooled or duped. The fraudulent 1998 Lancet paper by Andrew Wakefield which started the vaccines cause autism conspiracy was actually written to support a class action lawsuit. Wakefield knew the results in his paper were not true: in addition to his conflicts of interest, he had falsified data. The paper was eventually debunked and retracted but the conspiracy had its roots and has continued to grow. I think a lot of the people who believe that vaccines are dangerous are parents who are just worried about their kids - and also want to protect other kids from a threat they believe to be real. Why is one debunked article more persuasive to people than a million proving the efficacy of vaccines? It is literally beyond reason.

It suits me to believe: people motivated by self-interest who adopt a conspiracy theory to support their larger world view. Their self-interest could be anything from their own ego to gun rights. The conspiracies around the Sandy Hook Primary School shooting are interesting because you can see a clear motivation for people to subscribe to that theory rather than the truth. If you’re a keen gun-owner, arguining that the shooting was a hoax to generate anti-gun sentiment and thereby allow the Democrats to pass harsher gun restrictions is neat and comforting. No one could argue that the events of Sandy Hook weren’t inhumanly terrible  - so the only option is to argue that they didn’t happen at all. Plus, in this worldview, no kids are getting hurt so you can sleep easy knowing you have seven semi-automatic weapons in the house.

I need to believe: the world is disorganised, scary, unknowable. Ocean deep, sky vast, dark impenetrable - and meanwhile our skin is so thin and delicate. So. Wouldn’t it be comforting to think that there’s a race of reptilian overlords that control the planet by whipping their tails against a complicated system of levers and pullies? That would explain a lot of the chaos in our world. Or maybe the problem is an elite coterie of Satan-worshipping cannibalistic pedophiles? If only we could defeat those accursed pedophiles then life would be peaceful. Luckily, Q and a septuagenarian reality TV host are here to save us. 

Across these categories, there are two unifying features: 

Rejection of widely accepted truth 

Investment in the conspiracy

As a comparison with the conspiracists above, here’s my take on a conspiracy: I think it’s quite probable that Epstein didn’t kill himself. I think that some powerful, shadowy entity took him out to protect itself. But I’m not obsessed by this idea. It would not surprise or upset me if this was officially confirmed - similarly crazy shit happens all the time. I haven’t devoted my life to revealing this truth. I guess I fit into the “I Believe” category: all official information says that Epstein took his own life but my scepticism of the unusual circumstances around his death and Epstein’s powerful connections leads me to doubt the official information. The difference is I don’t do anything about it. I don’t really care if I’m right or not - I’m not that invested in the conspiracy.

And that’s why it seems ludicrous to me that Facebook should be tasked with combatting the conspiracy theories spiralling across our culture. Simply being exposed to bad information does not radicalise you, does not conjure an investment in the conspiracy. If a normal person reads something creatively wrong or misleading they discard it from their mind. If it hits a chord with them, they may adopt that opinion themselves - see: astrology, Armie Hammer as cannibal, tarot cards, essential oils as serious medical treatment, etc. But the evolution from agreeing with a thought to militaristically insisting that the rest of society also agree with it is an abnormal progression. That strange impulse runs deeper in people than their Facebook timeline.

Most people have fears for the planet or believe there are major issues plaguing humanity - and we never do anything about it because it would be mildly inconvenient or because it’s too hard to care about every issue under late capitalism: 

"But sorting my recycling is boring”

“Yeah yeah fast fashion is problematic but H&M is just so affordable" 

"Of course I hate R.Kelly! But ‘Ignition (Remix)’ is my jam” 

“At least they have suicide nets in the Foxconn factories now”

“I only buy free range chicken thighs because I care about animal welfare”

“I retweeted that thing about anti-Black racism. Yay racism solved!”

There are probably lots of people who believe in conspiracy theories but are ultimately apathetic about doing anything: they can’t be bothered talking about vaccines and politics all the time, can’t be bothered going to a protest, can’t summon the interest to care much. So what’s interesting then is that across the three categories of conspiracy theory belief (I believe > It suits me to believe > I need to believe), what a person believes in, and perhaps even the reason for the belief, doesn’t create any impetus to enact real world change. On both the left and the right, the impulse to do something about an issue is rare. Do you think conspiracy theorists, like the left, have a problem with performative activism? 

Imagine that you agree that Sandy Hook was a false flag, that ‘they’ hired crisis actors to publicly grieve as if their pretend children had been murdered... do you then get in your car and drive overnight to Sandy Hook and start harassing those crisis actors at the pretend funerals? What do you call someone like that? The hero of their own story.

Just wait!

In their worldview, QAnon are unironically trying to save us from pedophile cannibals. Given what conspiracists believe to be true, they are acting in good faith and doing the right thing. If you believed this shit, you’d be upset too. The fact that they’re doing something about it is kind of admirable: they don’t want our babies to get autism from the measles vaccine, they don’t want a deep state to manipulate our democratic governments. It’s existential for all of us - we just don’t agree on the threat. 

Can you imagine how electric the riot at the Capitol Building must have felt for the people who led it. Brave, romantic, a grand gesture: it was like their Storming of Tuileries. Remember this day forever! 

Modern conspiracists are actually similar to the sans-culottes in terms of being avid consumers of propaganda and inflammatory reporting. Disinformation and stirring rhetoric are not new - but shouldn’t people today be less clueless than 18th century peasants?

Why are there are so many people who believe things which are untrue? They exist on this planet with us but interpret it so differently. These questions really are existential: an ancient, echoing maw pointing to the heart of human nature. The struggle for a more perfect world, whispers about where the danger comes from at night, arguments about how to protect ourselves. 

Has there ever been a society where people didn’t have differing views on how best to shape the world? It’s the central conflict of human existence: epic, older than language - and now we want Facebook to fix it?