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automatismoateo · 2 years ago

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I'm tired of staying quiet via /r/atheism

I'm tired of staying quiet

Throaway account--

Tl;dr: We need to stop being passive, and start calling religious people out on being horrible human beings.

So, for many different reasons, I am a member of the US Military. Mostly, it's due to personal reasons. Now, I definitely don't live and die military. Or white and blue, for that matter.

If you are not aware of it, the military tries to accept and protect all religions or lack thereof, but it is inherently Christian. Most chaplains you meet are Christians or were raised Christians. A lot of upper leadership, you guessed it, are Christians, because they're old and that's how they grew up.

This isn't inherently an issue, but it can be, especially if left uncontrolled.

Now, this post isn't just about the military aspect of it. In fact, I am making this post to hopefully help you build some courage to stand up for others, even at the cost of your own comfort. Keep it in mind, however, that there are many layers to this post, so I understand you may disagree with some of my points.

Now, to the story:

My immediate shop "leader" is a Christian, with a big C. He loves and dies Jesus, and goes to Church every Sunday. To no one's surprise, he is also extremely conservative. Loves guns, loves big T, big DeS, loves his submissive wife, loves low corporate taxes, loves poor people, loves the uneducated, loves people without melanin on their skin, hates homeless veterans, the whole thing.

In the past, he has gotten in trouble for saying the big no-nos out loud: Being openly racist, homophobic, antisemitic, etc.. He shut his mouth for a little while, but like any other true Christian, he felt like he can't be silenced and his true colors just NEED to show. He's now back to saying anything that's on his mind, as long as he feels like he's with his safe group. Sometimes he lets it slip, though.

Being in the Military, we are obviously known to curse a lot. We curse, we say stupid shit, we talk about controversial topics, etc.. It's all obviously unprofessional, but they can't fire us, so who cares, right? On the flip side, since they can't fire you, some people think they can just openly be the same shitty fucking person they are at home, at work.

If that happens, there are one of two things we usually do when this comes from those above us. 1) Shut up and pretend to be on their side so we don't get fucked over or 2) Report the actions to the inspector general (not to management, because they'll likely just slap them on the wrist and tell them to not do it again). The problem is, the IG isn't as helpful as you'd think, because mission takes precedence a lot of times.

So you're essentially left with option #1, since you don't want to be any more miserable at work than you already are.

Except that, you know, this shit has been going too far for far too long.

Not just in the Military, but outside even. For too long, these Christians have been allowed to roam the country and spout the most racist and homophobic shit with no consequences because they know no one will do anything. They'll take your freedom because it doesn't align with their vision of what freedom is. They'll take away your books because it makes them look bad. They'll take your children from you, because you are in love with the wrong person.

For too long, they have been allowed in positions of power, making the lives of anyone with opposing views miserable.

So, for my own mental health, I have decided I need to speak up, even if it'll get me in trouble. At work, I have started calling my superior out on his bullshit Christian values in front of others. Any comment he makes that is out of line, I'll tell him how "that's not very Christian of you." Hates homeless veterans? "Wow, what would God say about helping others?" "Loves that Mexicans are being shipped to Brandon's house?" Yep, what good morals you have!

Once in a while, he'll feign ignorance and ask me what I mean. I grew up Catholic, so I'll tell him that I don't remember being taught to be so ignorant, so selfish, and just overall a bad person.

Overall, I am just trying to make people realize how fucking disgusting he is. For a long time, I used to think that "whatever bad values you have, just leave them at home." I have come to realize that is wrong, too. No, don't leave that shit at home. Don't go home to beat your wife because she didn't make dinner, or your kids because they talked back. That is exactly what this country has done for the last few decades, and it has all come to bite us in the ass.

For too long we have kept quiet. We have let people pass on these horrible traits to their children. Their children grew up thinking that diversity is bad, that God is the only thing that matters and any opposition is inherently wrong. They grew up being told that a woman's place is in the kitchen, that black people are inferior, that poor people don't deserve to be helped. They grew up knowing only Christian hatred, and they're becoming loud once again.

Here is how I see it: the people who are supposed to be there to help you, guide you, bring you the "love of God," are the most judgemental, pieces of shit human beings I have ever met. They'd rather let you rot in misery before helping you. I'm not talking about giving you money in the time of need, or a bed during a cold night out. I'm talking about helping society become better for everyone, not just the people they deem worthy.

They will tell you in your face that rape is justified, that only their definition of love is what matters, that kids deserve to die of cancer because "God works in mysterious ways." They'll spit you in the face and tell you it's your fault. They'll do this with no remorse, because they know that on Sunday someone will tell them that they did God's work.

These people have roamed free of consequences for far too long, and they've gotten too comfortable. They deserve to know when they're out of line, and we clearly we need to remind them of it.

Please, do your neighbor, your friend, your family member, and do society a favor: don't stay quiet anymore. Don't expect to change these people minds, but let's aim to influence those arounds us.

Let's be the change that needs to be made, one voice at a time.

Submitted March 05, 2023 at 06:25PM by religionequashatred (From Reddit https://ift.tt/K7UAnos)

#reddit

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tiffanytoms · 3 years ago

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Okay, so I was gonna let this review just rot where it was, but — as “Rebecca” intended — obviously I can’t stop thinking about it. And while I’m an adult who can’t get insulted out of a fandom and shamed from creating the art I wanna share, maybe the next person they try to come for will be silenced bc of this one person’s warped point of view and their insistence on spreading the superiority of their personal beliefs and boundaries. And that’s dumb — especially since they seem incapable of reading a warning.

Drama ahead. 🌶

Big sigh. Biiiiiiiiiig fucking sigh.

First of all, I want to say how frigging stupid this is, because I know me and this girl are on the same side even if she’s too holier-than-thou to see it. We’re both attracted to Jily for a reason, and one of those reasons is we’re not all those things she just superficially accused me of.

Second, this review is just so pretentious and condescending that… dude. I mean, I guess it’s no surprise that she read something that upset her on this forum, but instead of addressing it here, she anonymously wrote a review on FF and not AO3, because one allows for responses and one doesn’t. I can infer that she didn’t want an actual dialogue or nuanced discussion about the topics she brought up, but instead just wanted to lecture someone and feel better about herself. That much is obvious, but here we go anyway.

I acknowledge that anytime you have to start an argument by saying “I’m not racist or antisemitic like you just implied” you’ve already lost — something I’m sure she was well aware of, because this seems like an accusation she is well versed with leveling to try to win the moral high ground — but I’ll start with that bc, ffs, obviously I’m not, and I don’t condone any form of racist or antisemitic behavior. We just don’t live in the same reality where a fanfiction written of two characters from Harry Potter fucking each other all over the castle (which is literally the entire premise and point of the story…) mean such a thing. Like, wtf man. What type of twisted, trigger-happy universe does she live in? Stories can exist for purely hedonistic purposes and don’t need to have a moral. This isn’t a children’s book — it’s an adult fiction that was labeled and tagged as such.

And I don’t normally talk for other people (but I don’t think they’ll mind in this case), but I don’t think that either my readers or I are friggin nazi sympathizers for enjoying a story where a good girl fucks a bad guy (a premise as old as time). Again. For fuck’s sake. Saying such a thing is super insulting to people who actually have to deal with issues like fucking nazis. (Have your minds all melted from the stupidity of this all? Bc mine has.)

She asked me to consider what I’m writing, but I’d ask her to consider the slander she’s slinging. Because these insults aren’t just directed at me, but everyone who might have enjoyed a bout of escapism — perhaps from some of the very same shit she’s pretending she cares about and wanted to virtue signal every chance she got. (We get it. You think you’re a “very good person” and people who enjoy kinky sex are not.) But she forgot: it’s a flipping story. No one is getting hurt, it is meant for pure, unadulterated enjoyment. She knew she wouldn’t like it, but she read it anyway. She even acknowledged this fact in the first line of her review when she said that to her, Jily was inherently good. Great! Then don’t read a fic where one of them isn’t!! I think she came in wanting something to be mad about (and again, make herself feel superior) and then was glad that she found it so she could flaunt that feeling. So, at the very least, I hope writing that review gave her whatever she wanted out of the confrontation. No really — I do. Because that she’s trying to stifle someone from making art means she’s probably dealing with some shit, and I really do hope whatever she’s going through gets better. Because she said she didn’t understand why I wrote this fic, but girl, you’re just like the main character: you knew something was going to be bad for you… and you did it anyway. That is the entire premise of EW. So… maybe reading it helped her come to terms with herself a little bit? 🤷🏼‍♀️ One can hope.

More on the original point, I can’t believe I have to explain such a thing as perspective, but here it goes: how people interpret themes and characters, and whole fucking dramas that they’ve made up in their heads, is not how other people do. I’m glad she cares about such things as social justice — I really am, and more people should care in the real world — but trying to shame people out of what turns them on is not the way to achieve those goals. It’s a waste of her energy and mine defending myself when, AGAIN, I know we’re on the same fucking side. She isn’t making the world a less shitty place by making people feel ashamed of being turned on by the two people they want to see fucking, fucking. She’s just not. If she needs me to elaborate that further, she’s probably a child that shouldn’t be reading this kind of story (condescending remarks that make false assumptions about you aren’t fun, are they?) or an adult that knows that kink-shaming is no longer socially acceptable, but is still having a really hard time putting that principle into practice — opting instead to be a performative ally and merely say she’s cool with kink.

“This is just two people with extremely questionable morals fucking.”

Yes!

Yes!!!! Exactly as I said it would be in the warning!!!!

Exactly what some people wanted to read and enjoyed reading and shouldn’t feel ashamed for having done so!

“How is this any better than, say, Snily, Jegulus, or Drarry? Everyone claims to bash those ships while … writing a version of that?”

This is such a bad faith argument, but I’ll bite. For the first part, I spent 200k words describing how it’s different (your prejudices and superiority complex are really showing with your phrasing there…), so if you want to comprehend that, feel free to hate read it again. For the second claim… you make a lot of assumptions about others, but no I don’t bash other ships, I let people live their lives free of judgement. It’s not that hard.

“What I do not understand is why the same smut couldn’t have been with, like, good Jily?”

………. Because the whole premise is she wants to hook up with someone that she shouldn’t want to. Like. “Okay, why can’t you just have your story without the plot?” What kind of question is this 🤯 I already wrote canon Jily. If morally dubious content is not your jam, don’t read it, but don’t shame people for wanting to read something different than everything else out there with their Jily. How I write Jily doesn’t threaten you.

Also, just… the audacity to read an entire fic you claim to hate, and then complain about something that was in the prelude the whole time. I mean… I just?? 🤨 I warned it was not a romance, I warned it was an unhealthy relationship, and seriously? Lily turns out to be a bad guy that rules them all, so I dunno man…

Take your puritanical pearls and go clutch them somewhere else.

👋

#trolls be trolling #virtue signaling #awkward turtle #don't like don't read #live and let live #fandom etiquette

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liquidstar · 4 years ago

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I feel as if many people, myself included, have been having problems with the way “critical thinking” is conducted in fandom circles more and more. Which I’d say is a good thing, because it means we’re thinking critically. But still the issues with the faux-critical mentality and with the way we consume media through that fandom group mentality are incredibly widespread at this point, despite being very flawed, and there are still plenty of people who follow it blindly, ironically.

I sort of felt like I had to examine my personal feelings on it and I ended up writing a whole novel, which I’ll put under the cut, and I do welcome other people’s voices in the matter, because while I’m being as nuanced as I can here I obviously am still writing from personal experience and may overlook some things from my limited perspective. But by and large I think I’ve dissected the phenomena as best I can from what I’ve been seeing going on in fandom circles from a safe but observable distance.

Right off the bat I want to say, I think it's incredibly good and necessary to be critical of media and understand when you should stop consuming it, but that line can be a bit circumstantial sometimes for different people. There are a lot of anime that I used to watch as a teenager that I can’t enjoy anymore, because I got more and more uncomfortable overtime with the sexualization of young characters, partly because as I was getting older I was really starting to realize how big of an issue it was, and I certainly think more critically now than I did when I was 14. Of course I don’t assume everyone who still watches certain series is a pedophile, and I do think there are plenty of fans that understand this. However I still stay away from those circles and that’s a personal choice.

I don’t think a person is morally superior based on where they draw the line and their own boundaries with this type of stuff, what’s more important is your understanding of the problem and response to it. There are series I watch that have a lot of the same issues around sexualization of the young characters in the cast, but they’re relatively toned down and I can still enjoy the aspects of the series I actually like without it feeling as uncomfortable and extreme. Others will not be able to, and their issues with it are legitimate and ones that I still ultimately agree with, but they’re still free to dislike the series for it, after all our stance on the issue itself is the same so why would I resent them for it?

Different people are bound to have different lines they draw for how far certain things can go in media before they’re uncomfortable watching it and it doesn’t make it a moral failing of the person who can put up with more if they’re still capable of understanding why it’s bad to begin with and able to not let it effect them. But I don’t think that sentiment necessarily contradicts the idea that some things really are too far gone for this to apply, the above examples aren’t the same thing as a series centered solely around lolicon ecchi and it doesn’t take a lot of deep analysis to understand why. It’s not about a personal line anymore when it comes to things that are outright propaganda or predatory with harmful ideals woven into the message of the story itself. Critical thinking means knowing the difference between these, and no one can hold your hand through it. And simply slapping “I’m critical of my interests” on your bio isn’t a get out of jail free card, it’s always evident when someone isn’t truly thinking about the impact of the media they consume through the way they consume it.

I think the issue is that when people apply “Critical thinking” they don’t actually analyze the story and its intent, messages, themes, morals, and all that. Instead they approach it completely diegetically, it’s basically the thermian argument, the issue stems from thinking about the story and characters as if they’re real people and judging their actions through that perspective, rather than something from a writer trying to deliver a narrative by using the story and characters as tools. Like how people get upset about characters behaving “problematically” without realizing that it’s an intentional aspect of the story, that the character needs to cause problems for there to be conflict. What they should be looking at instead is what their behavior represents in the real world.

You do not need to apply real-world morals to fictional characters, you need to apply them to the narrative. The story exists in the real world, the characters and events within it do not. Fictional murderers themselves do not hurt anyone, no one is actually dying at their hands, but their actions hold weight in the narrative which itself can harm real people. If the character only murders gay people then it reflects on whatever the themes and messages of the story are, and it’s a major issue if it's framed as if they’re morally justified, or as if this is a noble action. And it’s a huge red flag if people stan this character, even if the story itself actually presents their actions as reprehensible. Or cases where the murderers themselves are some kind of awful stereotype, like Buffalo Bill who presents a violent and dangerous stereotype of trans women, making the character a transmisogynistic caricature (Intentional or otherwise) that has caused a lot of harm to the perception of trans women. When people say “Fiction affects reality” this is what they mean. They do not mean “People will see a pretend bad guy and become bad” they mean “Ideals represented in fiction will be pulled from the real world and reflected back onto it.”

However, stories shouldn’t have to spoon-feed you the lesson as if you’re watching a children’s cartoon, stories often have nuances and you have to actively analyze the themes of it all to understand it’s core messages. Oftentimes it can be intentionally murky and hard to parse especially if the subject matter itself is complicated. But you can’t simply read things on the surface and think you understand everything about them, without understanding the symbolism or subtext you can leave a series like Revolutionary Girl Utena thinking the titular Utena is heterosexual and was only ever in love with her prince. Things won’t always be face-value or clear-cut and you will be forced to come to your own conclusions sometimes too.

That’s why the whole fandom-based groupthink mentality about “critical thinking” doesn’t work, because it’s not critical. It’s simply looking into the crowd, seeing people say a show is problematic, and then dropping it without truly understanding why. It’s performative, consuming the best media isn’t activism and it doesn’t make you a better person. Listening to the voices of people whom the issues directly concerns will help you form an opinion, and to understand the issues from a more knowledgeable perspective beyond your own. All that means nothing if you just sweep it under the rug because you want to look infallible in your morality. That’s not being critical, it’s just being scared to analyze yourself, as well as what you engage with. You just don’t want to think about those things and you’re afraid of being less than perfect so you pretend it never happened.

And though I’m making this post, it’s not mine or anyone else’s job to hold your hand through all this and tell you “Oh this show is okay, but this show isn't, and this book is bad etc etc etc”. Because you actually have to think for yourself, you know, critically. Examples I’ve listed aren’t rules of thumb, they’re just examples and things will vary depending on the story and circumstance. You have to look at shit on a case-by-case basis instead of relying on spotting tropes without thinking about how they’re implemented and what they mean. That’s why it’s analysis, you have to use it to understand what the narrative is communicating to its audience, explicitly or implicitly, intentionally or incidentally, and understand how this reflects the real world and what kind of impact it can have on it.

A big problem with fandom is it has made interests synonymous with personality traits, as if every series we consume is a core part of our being, and everything we see in it reflects our viewpoints as well. So when people are told that a show they watched is problematic, they react very extremely, because they see it as basically the same thing as saying they themselves are problematic (It’s not). Everyone sees themselves as good people, they don’t want to be bad people, so this scares them and they either start hiding any evidence that they ever liked it, or they double down and start defending it despite all its flaws, often providing those aforementioned thermian arguments (“She dresses that way because of her powers!”).

That’s how you get people who call children’s cartoons “irredeemable media” and people who plaster “fiction=/= reality!” all over their blogs, both are basically trying to save face either by denying that they could ever consume anything problematic or denying that the problematic aspects exist all together. And absolutely no one is actually addressing the core issues anymore, save for those affected by them who pointed them out to begin with, only for their original point to become muffled in the discourse. No one is thinking critically because they’re more concerned with us-vs-them group mentality, both sides try to out-perform the other while the actual issue gets ignored or is used as nothing more than a gacha with no true understanding or sympathy behind it.

One of the other issues that comes from this is the fact that pretty much everyone thinks they’re the only person capable of being critical of their interests. That’s how you get those interactions where one person goes “OK [Media] fan” and another person replies “Bro you literally like [Other Media]”, because both parties think they’re the only ones capable of consuming a problematic piece of media and not becoming problematic themselves, anyone else who enjoys it is clearly incapable of being as big brained as them. It’s understandable because we know ourselves and trust ourselves more than strangers, and I’m not saying there can’t be certain fandoms who’s fans you don’t wanna interact with, but when we presume that we know better than everyone else we stop listening to other people all together. It’s good to trust your own judgement, it’s bad to assume no one else has the capacity to think for themselves either though.

The insistence that all media that you personally like is without moral failing and completely pure comes with the belief that all media that you personally dislike has to be morally bad in some way. As if you can’t just dislike a series because you find it annoying or it just doesn’t appeal to you, it has to be problematic, and you have to justify your dislike of it through that perspective. You have to believe that your view on whatever media it is is the objectively correct one, so you’ll likely pick apart all it’s flaws to prove you’re on the right side, but there’s no analysis of context or intent. Keep in mind this doesn’t necessarily mean those critiques are unfounded or invalid, but in cases like this they’re often skewed in one direction based on personal opinion. It’s just as flawed as ignoring all the faults in the stuff you like, it’s biased and subjective analysis that misses a lot of context in both cases, it’s not a good mindset to have about consuming media. It’s just another result of tying media consumption with identity and personal morals. The faux-critical mentality is an attempt to separate the two in a way that implies they’re a packaged deal to begin with, making it sort of impossible to truly do so in any meaningful way.

As far as I know this whole phenomena started with “Steven Universe Critical” in, like, 2016, and that’s where this mentality around “critical thinking” originated. It started out with just a few people correctly pointing out very legitimate issues with the series, but over time it grew into just a trend where people would make cutesy kin blogs with urls like critical-[character] or [character]crit to go with the fad as it divulged into Nostalgia Critic level critique. Of course there was backlash to this and criticism of the criticism, but no actual conversation to be had. Just people trying to out-do each other by acting as the most virtuous one in the room, and soon enough the fad became a huge echo-chamber that encouraged more and more outrageous takes for every little thing. The series itself was a children’s cartoon so it stands to reason that a lot of the fans were young teens, so this behavior isn’t too surprising and I do believe a lot of them did think they were doing the right thing, especially since it was encouraged. But that doesn’t erase the fact that there were actual real issues and concerns brought up about the series that got treated with very little sympathy and were instead drowning out people’s voices. Though those from a few years back may have grown up since and know better (Hopefully), the mentality stuck around and influenced the norm for how fandoms and fandom people conduct any sort of critique on media.

That’s a shame to me, because the pedestal people place fandom onto has completely disrupted our perception on how to engage with media in a normal way. Not everything should be consumed with fandom in mind, not everything is a coffee-shop au with no conflict, not everything is a children’s cartoon with the morals spoon-fed to you. Fandom has grown past the years of uncritical praise of a series, it’s much more mainstream now with a lot more voices in it beyond your small community on some forum, and people are allowed to use those voices. Just because it may not be as pleasant for you now because you don’t get to just turn your brain off and ignore all the flaws doesn’t mean you can put on your rose-tinted nostalgia goggles and pretend that fandom is actually all that is good in the world, to the point where you place it above the comfort and safety of others (Oftentimes children). Being uncritical of fandom itself is just as bad as being uncritical of what you consume to begin with.

At the end of the day it all just boils down to the ability to truly think for yourself but with sympathy and compassion for other people in mind, while also understanding that not everyone will come to the same conclusion as you and people are allowed to resent your interests. That doesn’t necessarily mean they hate you personally, you should be acknowledging the same issues after all. You can’t ignore aspects of it that aren’t convenient to your conclusion, you have to actually be critical and understand the issues to be able to form it.

I think that all we need is to not rely on fandom to tell us what to do, but still listen to the voices of others, take them into account to form our opinion too, boost their voices instead of drowning them out in the minutiae of internet discourse about which character is too much of an asshole to like. Think about what the characters and story represent non-diegetically instead of treating them like real people and events, rather a story with an intent and message to share through its story and characters, and whatever those reflect from the real world. That’s how fiction affects reality, because it exists in reality and reflects reality through its own lens. The story itself is real, with a real impact on you and many others, so think about the impact and why it all matters. Just… Think. Listen to others but think for yourself, that’s all.

#see i told you guys id find that essay and post it for real. i wasnt kidding.#good luck inbox of mine :praying:

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fakeikemen · 4 years ago

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Katara's Grief

(This is my first attempt at a meta post and I know that this has probably been already done but I just needed to get it off my chest and go on a little rant and it kinda got long so bear with me.)

A lot of the hate on Katara stems from the fact that she keeps on mentioning her mother's death at every chance she gets and invalidates other people's pain to assert that her suffering is the worst of the lot.

And even though everybody is entitled to their own opinions, I'm gonna point out why I think the aforesaid claims are not exactly correct.

First we'll take a look at; Katara's Backstory:

We know that Kya is killed in a fire nation raid and that Katara had been the last person to see her alive before she leaves the tent on her mother's insistence. Only to come back a few moments later and find her dead body. This, in itself is a traumatising event.

So yes, her mother died. Other people in the story go through far worse. You're not wrong when you say that.

But what is more important in Katara's story is the aftermath of her mother's death.

As Sokka says while talking to Toph in "The Runaway" in B3 Ep7:

Sokka: When our mom died, that was the hardest time in my life. Our family was a mess, but Katara? She had so much strength. She stepped up and took on so much responsibility. She helped fill the void that was left by our mom.

As an eight year old, she had to force herself to grow up to step into her mother's shoes and raise herself and her elder brother and simultaneously look after the entire village after her father left to fight in the war. She had to do all of it by herself.

In face of all her responsibilities, she never really had the chance to simply be a grieving child lamenting the loss of her mother. She habituated herself to caring more about others than herself (We see this trait in the entire series as she acts as the stand-in mom friend for the entire Gaang with an exception of Suki and Zuko). She ended up bottling her feelings of grief, resentment, guilt and rage deep within herself.

She had to give up an extensive part of her childhood where most children focus on figuring themselves out, to become a mature and responsible person who was working as the immovable pillar holding up the family and even the whole village not much later.

She put up a strong front to help others and pretended to be fine even though she was hurting inside the whole time.

She could never find any closure from the situation. She never got over it.

Moving on to the criticisms:

1. Katara keeps on mentioning her mother like a broken record:

Here are the number of times Katara mentions her mother's death (not sure if that's all of it, lmk if there are any others):

1. In her first scene with Sokka

Katara: Ever since mom died, I've been doing all the work around camp while you've been off playing soldier!

2. A short while after she meets Aang

Katara: Well, I just want you to be prepared for what you might see. The Fire Nation is ruthless. They killed my mother, and they could have done the same to your people.

3. A short while after she meets Haru

Katara: I lost my mother in a Fire Nation raid. This necklace is all I have left of her.

4. A short while after she meets Jet

Katara: Sokka and I lost our mother to the Fire Nation.

5. In the swamp after she sees a vision of her mother

Katara: I thought I saw Mom.

6. In the Crystal Catacombs with Zuko

Katara: I don't? How dare you! You have no idea what this war has put me through! Me personally! The Fire Nation took my mother away from me.

7. A short while after she meets Hama

Katara: We completely understand. We lost our mother in a raid.

8. Repeated mentions in The Southern Raiders episode

(Most of the episode basically)

The first mention with Sokka is in the middle of a siblings' spat where she tells off Sokka for trying to act as if he were superior when it was obvious that in the face of the gaping hole that was left by Kya's sudden death, Katara had shouldered much more responsibility.

When she tells it to Aang, she uses it as a proof that the Fire Nation is capable of immense cruelty and destruction.

The Gaang travel all around the world and meet different people affected by the war in different ways. So when Haru, Jet and Hama narrate their own stories, Katara sympathises with them and talks about Kya's death in lieu of "I understand, the Fire Nation hurt me too."

After they got separated, Aang, Sokka and Katara each had their visions and after they get back together, they all mention their visions and so does Katara.

When left alone in catacombs with Zuko, whom she considered as the face of the Fire Nation— the same Fire Nation that had her mother killed and forced her father to leave to fight in the war, she has a meltdown where she rightfully accuses him of all the bad things he's done and then breaks down while talking about how the war has cost her i.e., by causing her mother's death.

The Southern Raiders is the episode where Katara hunts down the man responsible for her mother's death. If you think mentioning Kya repeatedly in this episode is uncalled for, then I don't know what to tell you.

In all the incidents mentioned above, Katara mentioning her mother's death is a very natural occurrence is the respective conversations. She mostly talks about Kya's death to either extend her sympathy or to use it as an example of the ruthlessness of the Fire Nation.

Another fact to be noted is that 70% of the Gaang's storyline is followed via Katara from a narrative point of view. Plus, being the mom-friend, she acts as the spokesperson. Considering that Kya's death is a major event that played a huge role in shaping Katara's life and is also the source of her severe, unresolved trauma, which acts as the driving force of her story, it is only natural that she brings up this topic whenever she is engaging in a deeper conversation.

It is us as the viewers who have seen her from the start and already know about her mother's death and we see her talking to multiple people about it. Which is why it might come across as repetitive to some people.

While, Kya's death is not necessary information that everyone needs to know, Katara talking about it never comes across as a forced or unnatural.

2. Katara invalidates others' pain because she thinks she has suffered the most:

First of all, if anything, Katara is the most empathetic person of them all. As the mom-friend of the group, not only is she their constant moral support, she also helps them untangle and sort out their own feelings. She is also able to tap into issues that aren't said out loud.

Instances of Katara helping and supporting Aang, emotionally are uncountable.

She is the first one to notice Sokka's sour mood in B3 Ep4 "Sokka's Master". And even though his insecurities seem baseless, she validates him (by saying "I'm sorry you're feeling so down" instead of something like "That's a dumb thing to say") and knows exactly what to do to cheer him up.

In B3 Ep7 "The Runaway" she has the insight to understand that Toph's unruly behaviour is caused by the mixed feelings she has about her parents even though Toph's herself never talked about it.

She even reaches out to Zuko in B2 Ep19 "Crossroads of Destiny" even though she used to think of him as the face of the enemy.

But then there's The Southern Raiders.

Ah yes, that episode where Katara is extremely OOC and a total b*tch.

Agreed that she said some things that she definitely shouldn't have said. But like, she's just 14?? And has been hurting on the inside since she was 8?? And pretended to be fine just for the sake of other people?? Like, there's a limit to how much she can have her shit under control?? And she did a real good job of Sokka's upbringing and taking care of the village and taking care of Gaang on her own?? Some people out there are really willing to forget everything she has ever done just because she was mean for 5 minutes?? A traumatised 14 yo shouldn't be villianised and called toxic because she got mad and lashed out at people that one time??

But here's my take on the scene anyway:

When Aang gets to know that she's going to go face her mother's killer:

Aang: Um ... and what exactly do you think this will accomplish?

Katara: I knew you wouldn't understand.

Aang is a non-confrontational person who prefers running away from difficult situations as opposed to Katara who firmly stands her ground and is never afraid of confrontations. Katara had approached Aang only hoping that he would understand. But going by his dismissal, he obviously doesn't understand the burning need that she has to confront the man who had single-handedly destroyed her childhood. (Most people infer that what Katara means is that she thinks that Aang doesn't understand the pain of losing people. And so does Aang, I guess)

But things start getting even more tricky when:

Aang: Katara, you sound like Jet.

In all honesty, this is probably the most insensitive thing that she could've heard from anyone right then, let alone one of her closest friends. Hearing herself being compared to a homicidal maniac just because she wants to avenge her mother's killer. (No, I'm not justifying murder but there's a clear difference between homicide and avenging someone's death. And Aang may not be my favourite character but I do love him but this wasn't really a good thing to say either. And he wasn't even mentally distressed in the very least to be completely lacking tact or a filter.)

And then the situation escalates:

Sokka: Katara, she was my mother, too, but I think Aang might be right.

Katara: Then you didn't love her the way I did!

After 6 long years of Katara bottling in her dark feelings and letting them fester inside herself, she is finally letting them out and the first things she faces in a span of few minutes are outright rejection, invalidation of her feelings, comparison to a homicidal maniac and nothing akin to the unconditional support that she has provided to everybody. Her own brother tells her that he is siding with the boy who just compared her to a homicidal maniac.

Yes, accusing your own brother of not loving your mother enough is a very cruel thing to do. But both Sokka and Katara know that she doesn't entirely mean it.

But also, there is one very important factor in here:

In B3 Ep7 "The Runaway", Sokka says to Toph:

Sokka: I'm gonna tell you something crazy. I never told anyone this before, but honestly? I'm not sure I can remember what my mother looked like. It really seems like my whole life, Katara's been the one looking out for me. She's always been the one that's there. And now, when I try to remember my mom, Katara's is the only face I can picture.

Katara overhears this conversation just as Sokka had meant her to.

This dialogue lets us know that Sokka's coping mechanism has made him suppress all memories of Kya and replace them with memories of Katara in order to attain a semblance of normalcy.

Both Katara and Sokka had very different ways of coping with Kya's death. Katara pressed down her feelings and tried her best to pretend to ignore them while Sokka partially succeeded in forgetting her.

When Katara first hears these words she is shown to be crying. But if she were to remember these very words while she was justifying herself infront of her own brother and a close friend for wanting to avenge her mother, it would've had a negative impact on her.

In her rage, she would've thought: "Of course he doesn't want to avenge mom. Because he doesn't think it's worth it and that's because he doesn't even remember enough of her to be mad about her death."

And for someone who has spent each day of the last 6 years trying to fill in the shoes of her mother and experiencing her absence everyday, the idea of forgetting her mother is a ridiculous concept to her.

Her thoughts would have quickly derailed to: "He didn't love her enough to remember her."

In light of these thoughts, saying "Then you didn't love her the way I did" doesn't feel out of the blue.

No, I am definitely not justifying what she said, I'm just laying out a possible explanation to why she said what she said.

Yes, she should've apologized to Sokka for this and I think that they definitely should've had a long conversation about their mother's death and how it affected them. Between Katara supressing her feelings and Sokka supressing his memories, i don't think they ever had this conversation.

But sadly we are given neither of these scenes.

Tl;dr: Everytime Katara mentions her mother, it's with good reason and I don't think it's fair to call a character toxic when they lack a mind to mouth filter for 5 minutes and say some mean things. And considering all that Katara has done for everybody, it isn't fair at all.

Peace out!

#antis really be out there ignoring everything she does to hate on her because of two lines she said #nvm katara is one strong badass girl stan her for good grades and clear skin #katara #atla #atla meta #meta analysis #avatar the last airbender #water tribe #kya #sokka #hakoda #gaang #atla gaang #avatar gaang #zuko #aang #toph #ira's posts

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a-m-e-t-h-y-s-t-r-o-s-e · 3 years ago

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Forgive me father but I need to rant about Chick-Fil-A. The “resident non-beanie” in the discord group chat posted a meme comparing people that eat at Chick-Fil-A to people that allow antisemitism, and I just have to talk about it.

I’ve been to Chick-Fil-A maybe twice in my whole life, and not once by my own accord. I have NO issue never eating there again if that’s what it takes to support gay rights! ZERO skin off my nose if I never eat Chick-Fil-A ever again!!

But apparently, to allllll the people who pretend to give a shit on social media, Chick-Fil-A is just SO GOOD they can’t stop eating it, despite it being against their stated beliefs.

At this point I think we oughta just give up and let the homophobes win. Nobody that pretends to care actually does care enough to eat at one of the 5000 other chicken fast food places out there, rather than support their ideological enemies.

It’s not even a hard thing to do!

When I was ~12 I was obsessed with MJ and personally boycotted Pepsi products because they burned his head. THAT was hard; I didn’t have control over when/where my family ate, or what we bought for groceries, and Pepsi owns so much stuff. They own Taco Bell, KFC, Pizza Hut, Gatorade, Doritos, Starbucks, Tostitos, QUAKER FOODS, you name it! Pepsi is SO BIG it’s almost impossible to stop supporting them, and I was still TRYING. I cared that much about Michael Jackson I was willing to nearly starve to death over something that was already settled eleven years before I was born.

And yet, adults with their own money, who get to decide what they’re going to eat, who make such a huge fuss online about how important it is to boycott Chick-Fil-A, continue to go there anyway because “it’s just that good.”

Nobody even cares about boycotting Chick-Fil-A. They say they do, to look good, to look “woke,” to look like they care about gay rights, but in actuality if someone brought home Chick-Fil-A they’d all eat in a heartbeat regardless of their personal beliefs.

This whole “boycott” has been going on for ten years and it hasn’t even started. I’m starting to think this is some weird kind of ad for Chick-Fil-A, like “Our chicken is so good, you’ll turn your back on your beliefs just to get a bite of our sandwiches! Yum yum!”

So at this point, I’m gonna say it, I don’t care. I’m still not particularly into fast food chicken, I’m still probably gonna avoid Chick-Fil-A, but I don’t wanna hear anymore goddamn grandstanding on how “evil” Chick-Fil-A is. I don’t even know what the owner supposedly did! Did he kick out his gay son? Does he support conversion therapy? Did he say the word “faggot” once 40 years ago and we just can’t forgive him? Did he sneeze wrong and the Internet decided he was a bad person? WHO KNOWS??? Who cares??? Apparently nobody! They just want to be able to police what people eat because they want to feel morally superior!

Who gives a shit!!! If you people who say you care don’t actually care, why should I!! CHICKEN SANDWICHES AND PEACH MILKSHAKES FOR EVERYONE! Shut the fuck up!!!

#sj shit #venting #personal potatoes #long post

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pip-n-flinx · 4 years ago

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Among Us

So this is going to get long, this is going to get personal, this is going to be about prejudice and race and self-serving bad-faith arguments and flawed rhetoric. And for all of these reasons I’m going to leave the rest of this under the cut.

As a few of my friends will know, earlier this week I was delivered an ultimatum from my landlord/roommate. He disguised it well, telling me he was ‘concerned for my mental health’ that my ‘negativity was dragging the whole house down’ and that I was simply too filthy to live with. I won’t pretend I’m a neat freak, and I can honestly say that I have taken some pains to clean more since, to his surprise and delight, though its particularly hard to take coming from him.

“You’re always so down. It’s making you lazy and thin skinned” You know its funny you should say that, now specifically, because I’ve actually been on the up and up this last week and you didn’t mention this at all in January when I was actually at my worst, or February when I was afraid I was going to have to quit my job, or back during the holiday season when retail work was breaking my back... Only now do you think to check in on me?

“You left a pair of gloves, a letter, and a small wooden trinket on the table!” Indeed I have, as you have left your pair of gloves, well over 21 letters, and regularly set your packages on this same table, including today two packages to be returned to amazon. I didn’t realize I didn’t get to use the table the same way you do.

“You don’t do dishes! except that you did this week, which is cool I guess but still!” You do realize that I actually hand-wash every dish I use within 24 hours of using it, right? And that often the dishes you come to me bitching that I never cleaned are in fact your fiances, yes? Ok good, next question.

“You’re always complaining about work. I don’t mind that you vent, but its all you talk about anymore!” I have either lost or walked away from 4 jobs in this last year, and that has not been easy, or fun. I have worked essential retail jobs the entire pandemic thus far. Additionally, in the months leading up to you storming out of your 75k a year salaried sales job, I had told you to leave it because I could see that it was killing you. You got so fed up with the job that for 4-5 months before you left your grandma-paid-off-my-second-mortgage capitalism-knows-best-pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps-ass spent more time playing valorant and league of legends on the clock than doing actual work. Need I remind you that every time I stepped into your office, or simply stepped upstairs to get ready for work, you would complain about how awful your managers were, or how shitty someone had been to you over the phone? DID I EVER BELITTLE YOU FOR ANY OF THESE THINGS????

The real kicker was that the spark, the moment that started this (at least for him) was me trying to explain why racism and ‘cultural supremecy’ was bad. I had brought to him something I thought we could both agree on, that we could both laugh at. I brought him a series of tweets about how problematic Van Gogh was for studying and imitating traditional japanese painting techniques. He took this, and immediately turned into a piece of the culture wars. Now, I agree, this is an egregious example of trying to ‘cancel’ someone. How cancelling a long dead artist who couldn’t sell his art while he was alive is important is beyond my comprehension, its not as though the market value of these comes up very often, and almost no-one will ever have a chance to buy or reject a Van Gogh. But to him this was emblematic of ‘liberals’ cancelling Seuss and Rowling.

He even went so far as to say that Van Gogh probably ‘did it better’ than the artists he was studying/imitating. Now, this is a huge red-flag to me because this is straight out of the Nazi playbook. This is William Shenker, proposing a theory of music to proof ‘German cultural superiority.’ This, if you will pardon my language, is the real culture war: trying to supplant other cultures art and history with western figures and events.

Now, for those of you who don’t know who I’m talking about, this man is sexist. He doesn’t believe women are equal, complains about women’s sports, and rejects a woman’s right to choose. This man is a transphobe, questioning the logic of ‘safe-spaces’ and allowing people to change their pronouns. This man is a Trump supporter, and voted for him twice. And all of these things I found out years after we became friends. I have in the past contemplated what it would take to cut him out of my life wholesale. Despite our wealth of shared experience and our shared interests, we’ve been drifting apart as he drifts further and further to the right. And he has been drifting. He’s parroted more bad-faith arguments from Ben Shapiro and Tucker Carlson in the last 6 months then he ever did when I first moved in with him.

I have been trying to push back, especially when he says the quiet parts out loud. I try to let him know that it is not acceptable to say he would rather an unarmed black man die that risk that a police officer might be injured. When he compares the people in control of Seuss’ intellectual property and works choose to stop printing less than 6% of his published works to the book burnings in Mao’s china. When he says that its more important to protect teacher from students trolling them by changing their pronouns than it is to protect trans or NB kids. When he espouses his belief that trans and NB kids are ‘just mentally ill.’ Whenever he says any of this shit, I have pushed back. I have tried to halt, or at least slow, his descent towards eugenics and white supremacy and fascism.

It has been to no avail.

And to be honest its exhausting. I wanted to believe that he would trust me, not just to be a moral and thoughtful person, but to be educated and informed on these issues. We went to school together, spent countless hours solving homework and trying to crack games together. If I don’t know the answer to his questions immediately, he often jokes ‘C’mon, you’re supposed to know everything!” and has frequently told me that I’m selling myself short.

But apparently all that trust and all that respect goes out the window when I challenge him. Suddenly I’m ‘overly negative’ or ‘too sensitive’ or he’ll ‘need to look into that, but...’

And the thing is, he is capable of great acts of kindness. He offered to rent me a room in his completely paid-off house, no mortgage at all, simply because he could see living at home was killing my mental health. He offered me 50-75% off of market rate. He buys gifts all the time, has landed tenants job interviews, set people back on their feet, and refused to press charges for several major financial loses he’s taken on the determination that it would do more harm to the defendant than he could ever recoup from it.

But he does not extend this kindness, this generous soul, to everyone. And lately, his circle grows smaller, and his kindess has waned, and it’s been so devastating to see him slip further and further towards his own worst impulses.

I know there will be people who think I should have cut him out of my life years ago, who can’t believe we never talked enough to know that he voted for Trump in 2016. I think back then he was genuinely ashamed, or at least guilty, about that vote. Now? It’s almost a matter of pride for him. I can’t tell you the number of times in the last 4 months that he’s told me that Biden “couldn’t possibly” be as “great” a President as Trump.

And he hides behind this “praise them when they do good, cuff them when they do bad” line and I used to take comfort in it but now... Now it’s clear that it was just a front or excuse for liking these abhorrent people.

I’ve had a couple of hard conversations with some of our mutual friends about what this means for me, and how I interract with the whole group of friends as a whole, in the last 3 days. None of our mutual friends seem to take any of these things as seriously as I do, with my oldest friend even telling me that he ‘can’t imagine’ breaking a friendship off over politics.... I know I know, the caucasity of it all, yes ha ha. And it does make me genuinely worried that I’ll wind up losing the 5-6 close friends that I actually rely on these days over this horrible sonuvabitch. But all this personal venting aside, there’s something bigger here I want to address:

I sat down this evening to watch Last Week Tonight and I was struck by this piece about Tucker Carlson, because while I knew some of what was said on his show, he is remarkably confident for a man who spouts the quiet parts of racism/sexism/homophobia on TV. I have a hard time imaging a more blatantly racist thing to do then declare that a woman who suggested ‘dismantling systems of oppression wherever they are found’ wants to dismantle the American system...

And I have to say, we should go back to punching Nazis. I want these fuckers afraid. I want them to crawl back to the furthest reaches of the internet, relegated to be laughed at for their bigotry by pundits of every political ideology. I want their vile vitriol hidden away where it doesn’t embolden others. I want them to know that they are out of line, out of touch, out of time. I want them to feel ashamed, like the relics of a bygone and worse era that they are, and for them to quietly fade to an ignominious death. I’m tired of seeing them on National News. I’m tired of Pewdiepie’s channel and influence refusing to die despite all the horrible things he’s said and done. I’m tired of Ben Shapiro spouting off about a woman’s place and rights, as if he has any fucking authority on the matter. I just want these people to lose their platforms and their followers. And for me the fact that they haven’t yet is so incredibly discouraging.

I know I didn’t offer any answers here I’m just tired of being alone with this defeated attitude and I guess I needed to get this off my chest as I try to disentangle myself from the losing battle of trying to save a friend from alt-right radicalization.

#tw/ white supremecy #tw/ sexism #tw/ racism #tw/ transphobia #wooow this got longer than I expected #meta: alt right radicalization #and how they're reaching people my age #plus a lot of personal venting

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blarfkey · 5 years ago

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director’s cut, director’s choice of ⭐️Dear Fen’Harel⭐️? (Though generally speaking, I’m intensely curious as to how you develop characters because everyone you write is so brilliantly layered)

So um, this exploded. And I apologize. I am very much a character-driven writer versus a plot-driver writer. Also, how I develop characters is not a process I think about, it just happens, so this is also me finding out for myself how my own brain works, haha. If you want the full fucking three page essay this turned into, there’s more under the cut.

If not, and I don’t blame you, TLDR: I break a canon character down to their parts based on what I see in-game, I look at how their personal quest affects them, and I try to find a modern day equivalent to that. Each character has an issue they need to get past and I create situations to challenge those issues. And Ellana was created to be a foil for Solas and I dumped all my negative traits into her because neither she nor I can afford therapy so this is our best bet.

First of all, developing characters in fanfic is different than OC characters because I have a pre-set personality to work with rather than making someone from scratch. So for this, Ellana’s development is different from the rest of the cast.

For fanfic characters, obviously I look at the source material and see how they’ve reacted to certain situations and what they have canonically expressed about themselves in both deed and word. Honestly, I pay more attention to what they have DONE versus what they have SAID because a lot of characters tend to fool themselves into thinking they’re one way when they’re not (here’s looking at you, Solas).

Because DF is a modern AU, I take what I have seen in Canon (which is a lot because Bioware is very good at giving so much material to work with having all those different dialogue trees) and I apply it to the Modern Day. Some characters fit very easily – Dorian was made for Academia. Krem seems a more modern character anyway with how he constantly roasts Iron Bull. Josephine’s prowess in DA:I translates very easily to political science. Varric kind of has a modern writer’s career anyway.

Some are not easy – Solas is actually super hard for me to write in DF than he is in Thick as Thieves because so much of his characterization, his world views, his prejudices, are rooted in the fact that he is an ancient being out of time – which is impossible to have in this AU. I have crafted a sort of back story for him that might explain some things later, but it’s flimsy at best, haha.

So I’ve had to really look at what Solas is like in Inquisition when he’s pretending to be a “normal” hedge mage hermit from nowhere and how he behaves in his romance and extract from that. Solas is a nerd, he’s socially awkward from self-imposed isolation, he constantly struggles with what he wants and what is the morally correct thing to do and the temptation to be loved usually wins out over his convictions until the last second when he gets his common sense back and ruins everything.

It helps that in both DA and DF Solas is keeping a massive, massive secret from the Inquisitor about his identity that will shift the power balance between the two, so I’ve used that to guide me when I’m unsure. He still feels off to me, but it’s whatever at this point, lol. I did my best.

Once I’ve boiled a character down to their usual traits, I figure out how I’m going to have them grow throughout the fic and use their growth to help Ellana’s growth. I try to pull from their personal quests as much as I can, when I can get it to fit.

Some people, like Iron Bull, are static because they’ve already gone through their journey and have reached acceptance. I didn’t really know how to work his Leaving the Qun story line in the modern day, since it is tied so closely with war and potentially killing the Chargers, so by the time Ellana meets him, he has already left the Qun and made his peace with it. I use his static nature to help guide Ellana when she’s conflicted about her identity.

Some people, like Josephine, have personal quests that don’t fit with a modern era but I want to show them grow anyway, so I create something else for them. Right now, Josephine is mired in family drama and trying to figure out how to balance shouldering the weight of her responsibilities to her family with being her own person. That I drew from my own personal experience with being the only sane person in my family with their shit together, haha.

Or Cassandra, who is definitely NOT going to be Divine here, lol. So instead she gets to struggle with her art and how she can express herself in a way that leaves her vulnerable to scrutiny and yet can be so freeing.

Some people, like Krem, get a character arc that I think should have been explored but never was. Krem being trans is something that’s mentioned and talked about a little and never explored. I mean, he’s not a main character, so I get it. And I liked that Being Trans wasn’t his entire character. But there was no way to put him in the modern AU without his trans identity impacting some of his story and growth, even if he had already made his peace with it.

Now, I will say this upfront: I am not trans, and I haven’t had the opportunity to be close friends with a trans person, but I have done a lot of research on what trans people have said about their own experiences, and combined this with other research I’ve done over the years with other minorities and tried to put together what could be lingering insecurities for him and how he could overcome them.

I’m definitely not saying that I’ve done this perfectly and I’m always open to any trans reader who would give me correction, but being trans was not an aspect of Krem’s character that I wanted to ignore just because I wasn’t familiar with it.

I will say that his romance with Josephine was Not Planned. It just kinda happened and I happily ran with it, haha.

Varric’s arc with Bianca is just wishful thinking because I hate her so so much and Bioware just dropped that bomb in Varric’s lap and then just lets him keep holding on to it and it’s bullshit.

The other character journeys are just ways to explore vulnerability in them that I didn’t think got enough attention in the game or I think they could realistically have even if it wasn’t in canon. Like Dorian dealing with his father. Now, in the game, Halward doesn’t have a disease and he dies unexpectedly. But I wanted Dorian to have a realistic reason why he would reach other to his estranged father in this AU and a ticking countdown to an inevitable death seemed right.

Now we get to see Dorian really struggle with this new-found connection with his father that he always wanted to have and now it’s temporary and heartbreak is inevitable and is it still worth it to him? I think Dorian has similar feelings in Trespasser when he found out his father was murdered because he still invested himself to rebuild a lost connection, only to lose it so soon after.

Zevran’s past with the Crows is also something that I really wanted to explore because in the game he is sad for a hot second and then moves on with the Warden and his newfound goal of destroying the entire Crow organization. So I wanted to see Zevran struggle with his inner worth, the fact that he can’t hide forever and his past puts his loved ones in danger, the fact that he can even HAVE loved ones and how it scares the shit out of him. I wanted to have a character who puts on such a good front about not giving a shit about anything to hide how very deeply afraid he is. We are going to see more of this also before the story is over, lol.

Now, Ellana. Like all original characters, Ellana has a lot my personal experiences tied in her. But I originally created Ellana to fill a need for a type of character that I wanted to see with Solas and don’t really get to. I mean, I have not scourged the corners of the internet to find it so I’m sure there are other characters like her, but I haven’t found very many.

I see a lot of very beautiful, very delicate and feminine, very kind and gentle Disney Princess kind of Lavellans. I see a LOT of them. And I don’t hate that necessarily. I mean, Josephine is all of those things and more and I adore her and I sort of crack ship her with Solas anyway, in the secret recesses of my heart. And I love seeing a female character who is the epitome of a “weak” female use those “weak” traits to succeed.

But I am also not very beautiful, I am NOT delicate at all, I’m not gentle. I am not anywhere close to a Disney Princess or a Josephine. And it was disheartening to see Solas romance all these Ocs that were nothing like me after a while because it kind of gave me the message that someone like Solas, a character that I admire and def have a fictional crush on, would never want someone who looks like me or acts like me. That even with unlimited freedom in creating a romantic counterpart for him, I saw so much of what society already reinforces as an ideal that I will never match up to. It doesn’t help that Bioware’s body diversity for elves ranges is nonexistent.

So I made Ellana for me. Not because I want to hate on other Ocs or prove that mine is superior, but so that I would have something that I connected to. And I wanted to explore a dynamic with Solas that I didn’t get to see very often.

So when I first imagined Ellana, I wanted her to be strong and tall and muscular and powerful in a way that makes a lot of unenlightened men uncomfortable. I wanted somebody used to manual labor and dirt and the outdoors and solving problems with their fists and just totally unrefined because I wanted her to be the complete opposite of Solas. (So like Cassandra but in elf form, haha).

I did not want her to be soft or conventionally attractive at all. Ellana doesn’t shun femininity, because I don’t think femininity is inherently wrong, but she is uncomfortable with it and she doesn’t indulge in it.

(Just FYI I am NOT built like Ellana at all either, haha. This is the wish fulfillment part of the OC. I greatly resemble the dwarves, which is why I love them so much.)

But I also needed her to have a reason to leave home, and to have some points of commonality with Solas, so I made her a nerd. A jocky nerd who is insatiably curious and stubbornly independent. And then because I wanted Ellana to feel like a real person instead just a wish fulfillment fantasy, I needed her to grow. So I gave her all my complicated anger issues, my bluntness, my struggles with homesickness, the way I compartmentalize negative events in my life so I don’t have to deal with them just so they can bite me in the ass later, my experiences of going from a lifestyle where all my needs were met and I was oblivious to how great I had it to living with serious poverty for the first time.

And then I devised situations with her life and the other characters where Ellana has to confront these issues and learn to accept them and either move past them or learn to control them. Sometime she gains wisdom and imparts it to people like Sera or Dorian when their struggles come up. And her biggest challenge has yet to arrive, so she’s still cooking, so to speak. Ellana still has a long way to go before she really reaches maturity.

As far as her relationship with Solas goes, I wanted her to challenge him and give him a total upheaval everything he thought he knew about his own culture and his own self. And I wanted him to do the same for her. And then when all the pieces are done falling, they have grown into two people who can handle being together.

So that’s basically it. If there is any character in particular you want to know more about or why I made certain decisions, always feel free to ask!

#asks #dear fenharel #my fic

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theleagueof13 · 5 years ago

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Hottest Take: Tophie Isn’t That Bad

okay so hear me out. it sounds hideous right now, I know. just read to the end. it gets better. I promise.

I want to preface this by saying Sophie is my favorite character and I would never want her to get hurt (sir that’s my emotional support SGE character). Which is why I was so frustrated when she fell for all these toxic guys. The end result was inevitable: she would spiral into destruction. Eventually Sophie would go running to Agatha, who cleans up her mess, and they promise to stick together forever — that is, until there’s a new boy in town.

She’s so fucking inconsistent; sometimes she’s boy-crazy, other times she’s all about “girl power”, she can’t even choose between being a princess or a witch. Obviously those things can overlap, but DAMN this girl needs to chill with the identity crisis parkour. As the stakes are raised higher and higher every book, Sophie can’t afford to pull this shit.

I think we BEEN KNEW Sophie is in desperate need for validation. She’s been chasing her fairytale visions of grandeur ever since childhood, and who better to represent that than Tedros, the heir of Camelot?

Never mind the fact that Tedros has hardcore daddy issues and is one mental breakdown away from the hellhole of moral ambiguity. Never mind the MESSY as fuck Trial by Tale. Just pretend that Sophie got her true love’s kiss. It means that the sisters will “go home” but as always, Sophie will stay for Tedros and Agatha will stay for Sophie.

I know that Tophie’s failure was the whole catalyst for the climax, but ignore that. Let’s hope that Agatha gains her self-esteem somewhere along the way. (I personally thought that her character arc could have been extended to the 2nd book).

The only thing that is holding Tophie together is:

their mutual surface-level attraction

bare minimum toleration of the other’s personality

the overcompensated belief that their love would unite Good and Evil

Sophie would cling on to Tedros for as long as possible. In a few years, she could be the next Queen of Camelot. She’s so dangerously close to everything she’s ever wanted. But it’s only so long before they both realize that their relationship is a puppet of their vices.

It’s different for everyone, but I feel like some time alone is healthy post-break-up. It’s better long-term than to immediately start shopping around for a rebound.

Anyways, Tedros was the only piece of Good that Sophie could claim for herself and love had failed her. The quickest (and ugliest) solution to Sophie’s problems is straight up destroying any hope that she can be Good. I like that message better: sometimes you have to accept that you are not who you thought you were.

This is where Witch Sophie comes in, aka Sophie in her superior form. This part is super fucking messy but anything is better than her lineup of psychopath boyfriends that we NEVER asked for. If she went one full book without dating anyone, she could actually develop as a character. What a concept.

By the time Sophie matures, Tagatha would probably have a friends to lovers slow-burn (it’s what I’ve always wanted!!) since we never saw their “talking stage”.

Wasn’t the whole point of Book 1 friendship is magic or some shit? Wouldn’t it have made more sense for Tagatha to hate each other in AWWP if they had unresolved, pining but also resentful tensions? And Telip, god I love Telip but it could have been a more scandalous betrayal if Sophie was motivated by manipulation rather than “Do I have feelings for him again?”. Same with Rafal in TLEA, he could easily seduce her with power. It’s like if she was given a second chance… but eventually she’d realize Rafal was not setting her free, but holding her back.

When QFG completely crushes us, thank god that Sophie was an “INDEPENDENT WOMAN” who balanced out her internal shit, because guess what that leaves room for? Nicphie!!!

I would prefer Nicphie to be SUPER slow burn since Hicola happened in literally two chapters. It would eradicate any hints about Hophie FOR GOOD, and dumb gay romance is the funniest genre don’t question me. After all this time of chasing twisted versions of perfection and learning from her mistakes, there’s Nicola. Nothing about her is airbrushed or regal or charming. She’s already attached to Hort, which was an obstacle so unlikely that the thought of competing against Weasel Boy is just embarrassing. The whole situation is confusing and awkward, and that’s a feeling Sophie has never reckoned with. Like, tell me that wouldn’t be fun to read. You can’t.

Moral of the story:

Sophie should learn her lesson with Tedros so that she can be a better girlfriend for Nicola.

#nicphie #The School for Good and Evil

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thatyanderecritic · 5 years ago

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Hi! So I saw a post of you talking about how blank MCs/inserts in yandere written stories typical have no personality because of the nature of being inserts. What would you suggest could be done if someone wanted to write a second-person POV story that is from a semi reader insert perspective. To give the narrating character an actual personality?

To write an MC: Writing Tips with Kai

Hey there anon. Kai here to answer your question.

If you want the simple answer, it’s pretty obvious: Just give them a personality, duh. It ain’t rocket science. Even if the MC is meant to be a self-insert or relatable to reader, just give them a personality and not make them blank with generic personality traits. Even if the character is so wildly different from how a person may act, most people do a thing called “roleplay”. In that story, they aren’t the “[Y/N]” from IRL but the “[Y/N]”, the baddass assassin (or something like that).

Now that’s the simple answer. For those who want a more in depth answer, read below the cut.

As stated before, the best way to write a an MC with a second person POV is to actually give them a personality. The only way you could actually pull off a blank MC is if you’re writing for a game. But games fall under a different set of rules. For now, we’re strictly talking about stories/books/ect. (basically a medium that doesn’t allow for the reader to directly influence).

Authors shouldn’t be try to achieve in making an MC that everyone can self insert in. It is an impossible endeavor and with blank MCs, you’re going to end up appealing to the lowest denominator. And when you think about it, it sounds like you’re a wishy-washy person if you try to make everyone happy by making such an MC (note: I’m not implying that authors who do blank MCs are wishy-washy, I’m just stating that it could come across in such a manner). You’re simply better off appealing to no one and concentrate on telling a good story. And to make a good story, you need to have solid characters. A blank MC isn’t a solid character.

Personally, I don’t think an author should worry too much of the audience being able to relate or “be” the MC. It’s really not that big of a deal. A majority of people are capable of doing a thing called “roleplaying”. You know, inserting themselves as the character and pretending to be that character. It’s easier to pretend to be a defined person than an empty puppet. In fact, authors should be more concern in making a good roleplaying experience and not “is this MC vague enough?” You may think having a blank MC helps the roleplaying experience, but it isn’t. Here are the reason why:

Blank MCs are typically stupid and make dumb decisions. If I was the reader, I would be wondering, “Is the author insinuating that I’m a stupid person?” There’s also the fact that people would get upset and go, “I would never do such a thing” hence making a disconnect.

Blank MCs are overly passive and inactive. Due to the fact that authors want to have the MC be everyone, the author can’t predict what everyone would do in a certain scenario. In the end, the “safest” option would be to do nothing. But then that leads to upset readers since practically everyone would at least do something instead of nothing.

Blank MCs usually only have two traits: nice and clumsy. That’s it. Those are the only two traits. Obviously this is a bland person and really, not everyone is that clumsy… or that naively nice. Some people can be given the illusion that they are this MC with just these factors, but with the combination of just the two, there can be a disconnect and people go, “What’s wrong with this person?”

As you can see, the main issue with blank MCs are the fact that there’s a disconnect. People aren’t puppets. If you simply give a person a body but give them permission to move it, then are you not making that person an unmoving puppet? You’re basically telling people they’re just a wall or a piece of furniture… not a person… especially a person that they know quite intimately: themselves. Having an MC with an actual personality that people can establish, people will have a better attitude. You might be surprised but people can relate to other who aren’t “themselves”. As long as a person can understand the other, then they can put themselves in the other person’s shoes. Instead of pushing “This MC is literally you” try pushing “This MC is you’re role, Mx. Actor”. Even if the character is so completely different from the reader, readers would just be happy if they can just insert their own name. To summarize the audience’s reaction would be this meme:

But if you’re really insistent for a blank MC, the only place that it could work would be video games or interactive fiction (visual novels, chose your own adventure, ect.). The reason why this option works so well with blank MCs is that the reader actually have a say in what the MC does… basically, the reader is filling in the blanks as they move in the story. At this point, the blank MC is given life. But the probably most of the time with this particular case is that author’s miss the point.

The biggest control freaks of out of all creators would be authors since most options are usually limited or would punish the player if they don’t act how the author wanted them to act. What’s the point in giving options if you’re just going to tell the reader that they think wrong? For example: a reader would get his negative points if they refuse to do something superficial with a love interest; like going out drinking or if they like muffins or not. Why do they get punished if they don’t like muffins??? Doesn’t make any sense.

The same go for options. Most of the time… the option sucks. It’s either be the “UwU” soft type, the unnecessarily bitchy one (for some reason), or the quite one who’s only dialogue options are “…”. But I guess that how people view others: either the Virgin Mary, Lilith, or a blow up doll. Fuck me, ay?

Just give more reasonable options and don’t punish players/readers over the smallest superficial details. Let a person like a brownie, god damn it.

Now that we establish the fact of: “Yes, authors should give an MC a personality even if they’re a self insert”, here’s some tips if you want to have a unique personality for your MC-

Don’t let the MC make stupid choices. Kinda obvious but, using the MC’s stupidity as a plot device is over done. I mentioned this before: There’s other sort of conflicts BESIDES the MC’s stupidity. Like MC vs. nature or MC vs. fate. Sometimes, even if you did your best, life doesn’t always work out perfectly.

Don’t make the MC an overly emotional mess that cries over the smallest thing. Similar to the stupid choices point, it’s an over done trope.

Let the MC be sensible and have common sense. If a door is locked, then it obviously needs a key. You don’t need the MC to go through a mental gymnastics to figure this simple shit.

Let your MC be morally grey. People aren’t black and white. Why do authors always try to make the MC an angel? There’s a thing in between you guys.

Let your MC be evil. While I personally would like more morally grey MCs, evil MCs are probably the next rarest type of MC. It’s good to have variety.

Try to let your MC be more of a T (Thinking) from the MBTI personality types instead of F (Feeling). Personality types that have a T in it are one of the more rarer types of protagonist in stories. They’re normally either the villains or side characters. Rarely the protagonist. It’s a bit more common to expect a T male MC while T female MCs are downright mythical. Probably because it’s womanly to be an F… oops.

Don’t make your MC be overly naive. Like seriously, why are all these MCs act like they lived under a rock for the past five years. “What is this… strange heartbeat when I’m next to my love interest? Must be a heart attack.” Biiiiitch. Not everyone is so emotionally stunted. And before anyone think that the T type of personality are like this… no, they aren’t. Just because they use their brain doesn’t mean they don’t understand how they feel. If anything, they’ll take these feeling and formulate a plan on how to successfully woo their partner… anyways, point is: Don’t make your MC an emotional virgin.

In yandere stories in particular, let your MC be the yandere’s equal… if possible, their superior. Actually, just give a unique character dynamic instead of “UwU, the yandere is overbearing and stronger than me.”

Anyways, I hope this was helpful to you anon!

Here’s a bonus picture of all the T type personalities that you could use for unique MCs:

(Bonus: I’m an INTJ while Julie is an INTP, in case anyone was wondering)

#Anonymous #anon #yandere #male yandere #female yandere #writing tip

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noeulneo · 5 years ago

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hello wow i’m so very late but très excited to be here with my boi noeul! for a quick rundown he is: 25, atlas, a cop but undercover rn so unless we plot it out, no one should know this fact! he’s actually what you might consider morally upright for the most part (in comparison to probably most of elysium), but boy has an aggressive streak that might change your mind about that. the duality of man. who knows, idk he just has a lot of issues, which you can find below the cut!

but yeah if you’re up for plotting with him and all, please shmash that like button and lets just jump into it 🤪

QUICK CURRENT FACTS

yall know the atlas personality thing? yeah that’s him

in adjectives he is: reserved, resilient, determined, selfless to a fault but also prideful, competitive, unforgiving, anxious, possessive

as mentioned above he does have an aggressive streak, read more on how that developed in his history, which he thought he managed to temper, but now being undercover and in the thick of everything, it's kinda hard to keep down

his undercover task is really just to bring dirt to his superiors, so they can use that info to blackmail or sell or of course give to the powers that be

so he's now usually found around the afterlife and ambrosia, pretending to be but a mere delivery boi

he's so very conflicted and confused internally and morally and everything in between, so he's kinda a hot mess kinda jumpy and defensive

but pls love him thanks xoxo

THE ABRIDGED HISTORY

( tw: child neglect / abandonment, death / implied murder )

like most of elysium, his family was dirt poor when he was born

so his dad, also a cop, turned dirty, accepting bribes and such for the $$$

long story short, his dad hates it, feels gross abt it but what can he do, becomes an angry alcoholic to cope w it, blames noeul for it directly to his face

mind you noeul's a small kid at this point, and he just takes it all quietly and takes care of his dad when he comes home blackout drunk at 3am

meanwhile, his mom just keeps withering away, so he's basically raising himself and his parents

and then some years later somehow his parents popped out another baby on accident?? so yea he got a little sister, and surprise surprise, she's not well cared for at all by their parents

so he ends up essentially being her parental figure, tryin to protect her from all the arguments and bs going on in the house, etc. etc.

eventually, his mom just ups and leaves, and then a few years after that, his dad dies during a "robbery gone wrong"

their aunt moves in with them to take care of them, but she's also pretty shit at being a parent soo noeul basically does everything again, finding odd jobs and etc.

so he didn't properly get to grieve about any of those big life changing events at all, and that all came to a boil a few years down the line

enter: his aggressive streak during his later teen years where he picked fights with ppl he had no right getting in fights with just to get all his anger out and to Feel

got really badly injured one time and when his sister ended up having to take care of him, he reminded himself of his dad and so he vowed to stop and clean up his act

which he did, and ended up getting into the police force, and blah blah, that's essentially where we are now

ETC.

regarding the whole revolution stuff: technically he is working against it right now, considering he is feeding back all his intel to his superiors, which then gets in the hands of the govt and whatever

buuut tbh he hates the state of elysium and what it did to his parents and his ideals really kind of align with the revolution more, so my hope is as he learns more about the cause and stuff, he'll likely turn

that's my original arc idea for him anyway, but at the moment he is just a beat cop just doing the work he's been given

so what i'm sayin is please help break him eheheh

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inbarfink · 5 years ago

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You know, Aziraphale's insistence here is........ really inaccurate (Yeah, shock, Aziraphale's preconceived notions about Angels and Demons are inaccurate? WHO WOULD HAVE THOUGHT??????). If any one of this pair of Ineffable Husbands here is more likely to lie, it's not Crowley. It’s Aziraphale.

Crowley and Aziraphale both lie to *some* degree. They lie to their superiors... Like, basically All the Time. They lie to the humans around them, that's literally their job description! You can't live in secret among the humans if are 100% honest, you’ll reveal youself as an Angel\Demon eventually! But Aziraphale is the one who actually ended up lying TO CROWLEY, while Crowley himself has been pretty much 100% honest with him all the time (and what made Aziraphale's guilt even worse is that Crowley obviously didn't even CONSIDER that Aziraphale WOULD lie to him like that. And you know he didn’t think that because Aziraphale is an Angel. It’s because he’s Aziraphale and Crowley TRUST him.)

And his dishonesty issues doesn't end there, he lied to Shadwell about Adam being a Witch with ‘oodles of nipples’ (When all Crowley said about Adam is that he’s ‘possibly’ a Witch. Aziraphale went a bit more extreme than that), and he...... omitted the part about Adam being a CHILD to Shadwell and Madame Tracy. Which is... kinda dishonest, considering it's KIND OF A VERY IMPORTANT DETAIL SINCE BOTH OF THEM ARE NOT INTO KILLING CHILDREN!

Fuck! Aziraphale lied to fucking GOD! My sweet dear lying Angel What Are You Doing you lied to God

Now, let’s go to Crowley. You WOULD expect Crowley to lie more often, wouldn't you? After all, he’s not just any ol’ Demon, he's a tempter-by-trade. He is literally THE Tempter, the original Serpent of Eden who did THE Temptation.

But, Well, 'Temptation' and 'Lying' are not the same thing. Honestly, Crowley is the best demonstration of that

The Serpent\Crowley? Didn't lie to Eve. Not a single word he says here is false. He didn't say "You should eat it, God doesn’t care that much I’m sure he’ll forgive you lol", he didn't say "it’ll give you amazing superpowers and shit", the only things he said were the truth. The only one who lied in this story was God! The Serpent\Crowley called them out on it!

Some Demons might tempt people with Happy Lies, but not Crowley. That has never been his style. Crowley tempts people with the Uncomfortable Truth. "God lied to you, this Fruit will make you wise like God", “Our bosses don’t actually care how the work gets done so we might as well work together”, "Deep down, what these people wanted was real guns", "There is no good wine in Heaven so you should help me stop Armageddon"

Again, SOME Demons might be into it, but the place where you find the biggest amount of Happy Lies? HEAVEN. Of course Aziraphale is the one more likely to lie.!He's been mired in the Heavenly culture of lies and hypocrisy for so long! The same culture Crowley questioned until he Fell and didn't stop questioning after. Again, Uncomfortable Truths. “Why did God make the Tree of Knowledge so tempting in the first place?” “Why does God allow Children to die in the flood?”, “Why does the world HAVE to end?”

Aziraphale is better than any other Angel we’ve seen cause at least he tries to AVOID dishonesty and knows it’s bad, cause at least he doesn’t like it when he lies, at least he feels guilty about it. Gabriel and Co. barely give a crap about their own lies about there being “No Back Channels” and so on. And as much as he wants to just be a good little Angel who obeys and doesn’t have to think about it too hard.... he does engage with Crowley’s Uncomfortable Truths, a lot. He can’t help but debate them and try to reason them out. Aziraphale might be bothered with Uncomfortable Truths, but Happy Lies bother him morally a lot more.

When analyzing the acting in the body-swap scenes, some people pointed out that Aziraphale-as-Crowley has less obvious tells than Crowley-as-Aziraphale (Disregarding the Tartan). And maybe it should be obvious that Aziraphale would be better at pretending and lying like that. I mean, well, obviously.

He’s an Angel.

That’s what they do.

#Good Omens #Crowley #aziraphale #good omens (2019)#crowley good omens #aziraphale good omens

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onetenthoddity · 6 years ago

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A Big Personal Post

So word of warning, this is gonna be a very long tl;dr post about my struggles with my sexuality and I’m gonna get into some real TMI stuff. Also, while it is Pride Month (Happy Pride Month to any LGBT people reading this by the way!!), this is completely unrelated to that and has nothing to do with my sexual orientation or gender identity or anything similar. I’m just a boring cis straight guy. Sorry men, you just don’t do it for me.

This might seem like a weird and unexpected post coming from me, but I constantly keep all this locked away tight and it’s been eating at me for years and years and years and it’s gotten really bad recently, to the point of real emotional distress and depression, so I think I need to just let it out already. So that’s what I’m gonna do.

I’m just gonna jump right into it; I have a very high sex drive. I like sexual stuff; fanservice, big titty anime girls, lots of nsfw art and artists, the dreaded sexualized depictions of women, you know. The usual suspects. And it’s not like any of that is bad. Humans are sexual creatures, it’s biologically wired into us to have a sex drive and experience sexual attraction and desire. Pretending that’s not the case/telling people it’s wrong to feel that way is honestly absurd and really harmful. The real problem is I feel really bad about all of it; I have a huge amount of shame and guilt and embarrassment towards my sexuality. I never really talk about sex or sexual things with anyone, and I get uncomfortable whenever it gets brought up. Like I said, I bottle it all up, and that only makes me feel worse about it all. I’m not even religious at all by the way, I’ve been to church for religious purposes a grand total of once in my entire existence. But unfortunately the US is still a sexually repressive society whether you’re religious or not thanks to those good ol’ puritan roots that still fuck everyone over to this very day, so it was still hammered into me that sex is bad and something to be ashamed of. It’s so ridiculous; I live in an extremely liberal town right outside Boston, my family is full of accepting people, I actually got a good sexual education from school, and yet here we are. Even though I logically know it’s a load of shit, I just can’t seem to get rid of the idea that sex and sexual desire is inherently harmful or wrong.

But that’s not the only reason I feel so negative about my sexuality; as one of my exes once put it, I perhaps drank TOO much respect women juice. And while I lean very left/am a very progressive person in general, it’s not like I’m one of those male feminists that seem like they’re just trying to get brownie points or moral superiority, nor am I a “nice guy”. No; for most of my life I’ve just been around women. When I was little me and my older sister spent all our time together; she’s even the one taught me how to read. From middle school and beyond basically all of my closest friends were all girls. And since I was an art boy, I took a lot of art classes and went to art club, which were demographically mostly female. Hell, I was the only boy in my AP Portfolio class, and like one of three total in art club. And after that I went to an art college with a 30/70 male to female ratio. No exaggeration, for the past decade I have not had any close male friends, and for the past four or five years I haven’t had any at all. I feel much more comfortable around women than men; I actually have trouble talking to guys, especially guys who are more stereotypically masculine (which I am not at all nor care to ever be). I don’t just like girls from an attraction standpoint, I genuinely like and care about women as people. But because I have such a high sex drive and I like women in a sexual manner too, it kinda makes me feel like a hypocrite; like I’m betraying that fact. There’s always so much talk about how sexualizing women is wrong and harmful, and women face so much sexual abuse from men, that I feel like I’m a bad person for liking things like fanservice or porn or whatever. It makes me feel like I’m contributing to the problem. But of course, this too is absurd; sexualization and sexual objectification aren’t the same thing. You can both depict and view someone in a sexual manner without dehumanizing them, and to think just by making someone sexual you also objectify them is honestly kinda crazy. Once again, a lot of this thinking also stems from repressive religious ideologies. Men being shitty to women is much more a problem of gender and cultural norms. But even more importantly; I am absolutely not a bad person. I don’t harass women and I’ve never sexually mistreated anyone, and I have no desire to in the first place. I don’t try and make friends or relationships or do favors just for sex. I’m not a “nice guy;” I’m a genuinely good person. And I know I’m a good person because I can never admit to myself that I’m a good person despite literally overwhelming evidence.

The final problem is that I have built up an extreme amount of sexual frustration. I am a super introverted person with a lot of social anxiety and self esteem issues, or, as a therapist might put it, a very lonely person. I don’t have a huge desire to be social and I spend most of my time at home, and my anxiety tends to prevent me from being social when I actually want to. So, shockingly, I’ve never had sex. I’ve had a grand total of two relationships, both recent. One lasted four years and another four months, and while both had a sexual component to them neither went all the way. The four year one was especially frustrating, and in the last year of that relationship we basically stopped doing anything sexual, which really piled on the stress/guilt/shame for me (it turns out she was actually a lesbian; we had an amicable break and we’re still friends to this day). I’m also not interested in casual sex at all; I’m one of those truly disgusting people that needs an emotional connection and genuine feeling and such, which really doesn’t help matters. It feels like my sexual frustration is completely out of my control, and a lot of the time I feel like I’ll just never have sex. Like it’s something for me to admire from afar and never get to participate in myself, no matter how much I want to. I also feel like I’m just not very sexually attractive; the idea that someone would want to have sex with me doesn’t seem believable to me (if you knew what I looked like you would probably smack me upside the head for saying that, by the way). I do my best to try and manage my frustration on my own, but in the end I can only do so much. All of this frustration just ends up making me resent my sexuality, which just makes me feel more shame. It also makes me feel lonelier than I already am, especially in a romantic sense.

I made a deviantArt where I post NSFW art (along with my usual stuff) as an attempt to channel my frustrations and to try and accept and express my sexuality, but I don’t know if it’s helped that much, and honestly I’m terrified of someone close to me finding out. The link was on my tumblr before, but I tried to not draw attention to it because, you know, the shame and embarrassment and stuff. You can find it here: https://www.deviantart.com/asaragi

I think that’s everything I wanted to get off my chest. As I said my negativity towards my sexuality has been growing and gnawing at me from inside for a very long time, and combined with my sexual frustration it has really impacted my mental health recently. I’ve made a lot of positive changes in my life recently, and by all accounts I should be feeling a lot better yet I keep falling back in a depressive low, and I keep having trouble sleeping. I knew this was a problem but I was hoping I could just ignore it, that I could work on the other areas of my life that were causing stress and that would fix my depression. I was really hoping that the other stressors were just exaggerating my sex issues. I didn’t wanna face my shame or talk about it with anyone; I can’t even talk about it to my therapist. But no more; it’s time that I accept myself. I’m never gonna get past this if I don’t, and besides, it’s not healthy to hate yourself. If there’s one thing I’ve really come to understand recently, it’s to be kind to yourself and embrace yourself. My sexuality is an important part of who I am. It’s not something for me to be ashamed of, and it doesn’t make me a bad person. It’s simply part of being human.

This was really hard for me to write, so if you read it all, thank you. I hope you have a wonderful day, and remember to be kind to yourself <3

#personal #tl;dr #tmi #text post

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pass-the-bechdel · 6 years ago

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Marvel Cinematic Universe: Captain America: The First Avenger (2011)

Does it pass the Bechdel Test?

No.

How many female characters (with names and lines) are there?

One (7.69% of cast).

How many male characters (with names and lines) are there?

Twelve.

Positive Content Rating:

Three.

General Film Quality:

Excellent! Full of as much heart as action, the film takes on the complicated task of delivering a Captain America for the modern world, avoiding jingoism while also acknowledging the origins which brought the comic-book hero into being. Against the odds (and my personal expectations), it is a sound success, and I consider it easily the best of the Marvel franchise’s early films.

MORE INFO (and potential spoilers) UNDER THE CUT:

Passing the Bechdel:

Obviously, that didn’t happen.

Female characters:

Peggy Carter.

Male characters:

Johann Schmidt.

Steve Rogers.

James ‘Bucky’ Barnes.

Howard Stark.

Abraham Erskine.

Arnim Zola.

Gilmore Hodge.

Chester Phillips.

Brandt.

Fred Clemson.

Timothy Dugan.

Nick Fury.

OTHER NOTES:

I’m mad about the Hydra symbol being the coolest insignia in this franchise. I would wear the heck outta some Hydra merchandise, if it weren’t for the, y’know, evil Nazi fascism stuff.

I love little Steve. They pulled that off so well.

I don’t love that Peggy’s introduction revolves around her being disrespected by a guy and then knocking him on his ass. It feels far too prescribed, too Strong Woman Cliche, so expected as to be rendered essentially meaningless. It implies that these are the most important things about the character - she’s a woman and she’s tough - and it panders to the sexist perspective by requiring Peggy to ‘prove herself’ upon arrival in a traditionally-masculinised way. They could have handled this introduction much better.

Man. This movie has such a good cast. The goodness of this cast has no chill.

“So many people forget that the first country that the Nazis invaded was their own.” This the good shit.

“Go get him! I can swim.” Snort.

Sometimes, when I can’t sleep, ‘Star Spangled Man’ plays over and over again in my head. That’s probably why I can’t sleep.

“Do you...fondue?”

The thing where someone gets hit and they fly off-screen in an exaggerated fashion is never not funny to me.

Characters surviving explosions without a scratch, however, is never not rubbish to me.

A super-soldier is never late, Peggy Carter, nor is he early; he arrives precisely when he means to.

Steve really isn’t very precious about choosing his team: they’re all just Bucky’s friends. He basically just went “ok, show of hands, who loves Bucky Barnes? Good, you guys are with me”. I mean, it’s solid reasoning - he trusts Bucky, and these guys have Bucky’s endorsement, and that’s good enough for Steve. I note that only one of the other guys on the team besides Steve and Bucky is a white American - the other guys are a black American and an Asian-American (and I see you there, recognition of racism against Japanese-Americans which led to their incarceration during the war, etc.), and then there’s a French dude and a Brit. That’s Captain America’s elite team: not all-American, and racially inclusive. I DIG that subtext.

*hisses* why is this whole Natalie-Dormer-mackin’-on-Steve thing even here? It’s a useless contrivance, plus I am extremely displeased at having Peggy being so petty in her jealousy that she actually fires a loaded gun straight at Steve. I sure hope she heard Howard’s explanation about the properties of the vibranium shield, or that she already knew them, because otherwise this is completely outrageous, but even then: what if the shield hadn’t performed as advertised? What if a bullet ricocheted and hit someone else? This is such a dangerous thing to do, and did I mention it is in service of a useless contrivance anyway? Peggy deserves better writing.

Lemme tell ya straight up: I thought I was gonna hate this movie. I mean...it’s Captain America. I expected cloying patriotism, a blandly self-righteous hero, probably some good ol’ war glorification as well. What we got instead was a film that barely even mentioned the good ol’ USA outside of the (explicitly recognised as) propaganda rigmarole that Captain America slogs through - a tool used to excellent effect to acknowledge the character’s history (the comic was created as propaganda during WWII in real life) while also carrying through the idea that what Captain America stands for is something far grander than nationalist fervour - and Steve himself is imbued with unassuming charm, fueled by the strength of his personal convictions but never forcing those convictions upon others in a show of moral grand-standing: an essential facet of the character is that he’ll pursue what he believes to be right regardless of whether anyone else follows him, and he accepts that there are consequences to his actions; he never props himself up with holier-than-thou declarations, he never shames anyone for disagreeing with him, and he never claims any kind of superiority over others (an important distinction when you’re juxtaposed with a Nazi Ubermensch villain). Other characters are inspired by Steve, but the film wisely never positions them as if they were weak or wavering without the symbol of Captain America to unite them: the war is a grindhouse, and they know the only way out is through. No one is fighting because they perceive battle as a great and noble cause, nor because they are righteously empowered; they fight because their enemy is too terrible to let pass, and there is no room for glory in that.

I can (and will) still quibble about the representation of war in the film: while the fact that it is sparingly shown does help to avoid the glorification of violence and death in battle, it also undersells the horror of war, which runs the risk of looping back around to glorification by making it all into fun skirmishes with faceless goons and glow-weapons. Additionally, Captain America clashes exclusively with Hydra and its operatives; while Red Skull severs his ties with Hitler early on through the welcome disintegration of a few Nazi representatives, the film cannot entirely distance itself from Hitler’s legacy (which Red Skull actively takes on for himself), and I take long-standing issue with anything which uses Nazis as an evil catch-all but fails to acknowledge and respect the victims of their reign. After Steve’s heroic nose-dive in the Valkyrie ends Hydra’s campaign, the film cuts to celebrations of the end of the war; they don’t actually state that it was Captain America who just defeated the Nazis by taking down Red Skull (despite the fact that Hydra’s soldiers with their fancy tech and also, um, actual-Hitler and his armies, are all still out there), but the implication is there, and it feels a mite bit insensitive, to say the least. I do think it is better that Steve has his own corner of the war to fight, rather than taking on the whole thing and battling actual-Hitler in the end (now THAT would be insensitive), but I do wish that the destruction and evil of the war at large were the backdrop of the film, rather than the comparatively sanitised Hydra operation that we see.

In this context, the weight of the war and the toll that it takes on the psyche of those suffering through it is carried almost exclusively by Bucky Barnes, who emerges from the unseen tortures of a Hydra work camp changed, his buoyant enthusiasm from the beginning of the film subdued, locked up behind the shattered look in his eyes and the fragile way he carries himself, determined to see this thing through to the end so that he can fall apart later, if he makes it that far (he doesn’t). Fandom has made much of Sebastian Stan’s understated performance, and with good reason: despite a minimal number of scenes there is a richness of detail in Bucky’s character, and as the emotional sinking ground for tragedy - both as the personification of the war’s devastation, and as a personal loss for Steve Rogers - Bucky’s narrative importance belies the amount of time dedicated to him in-text. Fandom has also made a strong point - with which I agree entirely and for which I will not pretend to take unique credit for noticing - that despite expectation, Bucky’s archetypal function in the film is not as the Hero’s Sidekick; he is, in actuality, fulfilling the cliche of the Love Interest, not in competition with Peggy Carter but instead of; Peggy, likewise, is not an archetypal Love Interest at all, because she’s the Hero’s Sidekick.

I am entirely of the opinion that this is an essential part of what makes Peggy - the sole named female character in town - work out so well, against the odds. As Steve’s sidekick, Peggy’s primary functions are to support him and give him advice; the sidekick is traditionally a rational role, someone who keeps the hero grounded and helps them to make the right choices, especially when they are emotionally conflicted. The Love Interest compels the hero’s emotions, sometimes (often) framed as driving them to acts of recklessness, to joyous heights, and depressive lows. Bucky is Steve’s damsel in distress; Steve is compelled to act when he learns that Bucky has been captured by the enemy, action which is tempered and assisted by Peggy’s influence and which ultimately brings Captain America out of propaganda mode to practice what he has preached, and be the soldier Steve always hoped to be. When Bucky falls, Peggy is there to talk to Steve, as a friend, and help him stop wallowing and concentrate his grief into the resolve which carries him through the climactic confrontations of the film’s final act. I’m not going to argue that Steve wanted to join the army just to be with Bucky (presumably that was a factor to some extent, but to call it the primary motivator would be to ignore the value set which made Steve into Captain America in the first place), nor that he was willing to sacrifice himself in the end because Bucky was gone (Steve’s mourning for Bucky certainly played a role in his mental state at the time, but ultimately, bringing down the Valkyrie was a practical choice, not an emotional one), but undeniably, Bucky was either integrally or tangentially attached to all of Steve’s major decisions across the film, as is common for a Love Interest, whereas Peggy consistently filled a support-and-guidance role, as any good sidekick should.

This is not to imply, by any measure, that Peggy can’t or shouldn’t be seen as a viable (lower case) love interest (or that Bucky’s time as a hero’s sidekick somehow doesn’t count as what it is); actually, I think that both character’s relationships with Steve benefit from being framed in this switched fashion. Bucky’s lifelong friendship with Steve comes across stronger and more meaningful due to the emotional pitch, allowing it to resonate as something deeply significant to Steve despite the limited exposure we have to it in action - extra important considering that Bucky is also fulfilling that sacrificial-character role. For Peggy, the fact that she is presented as a love interest but coded as a Hero’s Sidekick is even more important in its effect: since she is the only woman around, we have been taught by approximately All Media Ever to perceive her as the Love Interest from the second she steps on screen, and with that perception we are also encouraged to devalue her character as essentially existing for no other purpose than to be an attractive female prize for the Manly Male Hero to win by story’s end. By reinforcing Peggy as a friend to Steve, we subvert the expectation that she has no real function and/or that her personality is irrelevant, because narrative coding has taught us that sidekicks (almost exclusively male) matter, they have things to say and their influence on the hero is meaningful. Whether they are stalwart sidekicks, or bumbling fools, comedic, or secretly-insidious, a sidekick should be noted, because they’re a lot more likely to have something plot-relevant going on than a boring old Love Interest. Being presented as a helpful, sympathetic presence in Steve’s life who also Has Her Own Shit Going On allows Peggy to meet Steve on more even ground, and her interactions with him are not built around being romantically or sexually available: by having a working relationship built on a foundation of understanding friendship rather than attractive chemistry, the development of feelings between the characters comes across more as extraneous and organic, rather than a prescribed cliche. It still is a prescribed cliche, but it’s not one that compels Steve to do dumb stuff or that undermines Peggy’s relevance as a person in her own right, and that makes it a much more palatable romance than what we usually get.

This is also why that idiotic ~jealousy~ contrivance I flagged earlier is so out of place - I mean, it’s out of place because it’s idiotic, it has no impact on the story in any way and its an insult to the characters and I don’t know why it exists or why they kept it in the final cut of the film because it’s asinine rubbish, but it’s also out of place because it approaches Peggy as a Love Interest, scorned and emotionally lashing out, an attempt to generate Love Interest drama where it has no place in the movie, for the characters as the people that they are, with the established dynamic that they have, or in the context of their situation. Throwing a misunderstanding and some hurt feelings on top of a relationship which has worked refreshingly well thus far because of the honest and open conversations the characters have shared is utterly tone-deaf, and it’s one black mark on what is otherwise a shockingly strong and tonally-consistent film. She may be all alone in the movie, but I will happily argue that Peggy is the best, most-rounded female character in the MCU at this early stage, and she’s playing across from an eminently worthy leading man in Chris Evans’ charmingly-sincere Steve Rogers. The supporting cast is there - Seb Stan, of course, but also Stanley Tucci! Tommy Lee Jones! HUGO WEAVING! - being wonderful and engaging across the board, and there are no weak links (except Natalie Dormer, but that’s not her fault, and at least the misstep is brief and POINTLESS so that it doesn’t taint the rest of the film). Captain America: The First Avenger may not be absolutely perfect - nothing is - but it is a great ride, sometimes surprisingly nuanced, sometimes intriguingly subversive even while it plays straight with the expectations of its genre. I went into my first viewing of the film just hoping it wouldn’t make me mad, and I gotta tell ya: I ain’t mad at all. As far as I’m concerned, this is the platonic ideal of superhero films.

#Captain America: The First Avenger #MCU #Marvel Cinematic Universe #Bechdel Test #female representation

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citrus-feline · 6 years ago

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ppl really are just like “lol ur just sad bcuz ur not allowed to be lazy” when mentally ill & disabled people complain about capitalism making them actually want to commit suicide because it makes us all seem like burdens.

how can you have such a lack of empathy?? for a fucking Second just imagine what it would be like from that persons perspective before telling them that they should suck it up and just do it (somehow?? despite their situations making that near impossible, if not outright).

idk what to tell you if you think that this is a thing that is okay to let happen. it is not uncommon to any degree for people in this type of situation to feel like a burden and to consider things as drastic as suicide. that isn’t uncommon. that happens, a lot. but you’d rather believe that we are all in some kind of evil group of dumb kids who pretend just because they want to be lazy??? there are kids who do that, yeah, but the majority of people who complain about this kind of thing aren’t like that.

you can continue to tell us that we are awful people for thinking this way, and i want you to know that it isn’t helping. you saying that shit is upright making it worse. even if it WAS true, what is the point of saying it? you are implying that people who go through this Deserve to feel like burdens and Deserve to want to commit suicide, even if that wasn’t your intention. that is what we see when you type that out.

you all act like we never have tried and we are just sitting with our unknowing perceptions of how things work, but let me tell you that almost all of us have tried, multiple times at that. finding a job with these circumstances in the first place is incredibly difficult. i can sometimes do an okay job at getting people to believe that i’m normal because my appearance isn’t really affected by what i go through, while other people don’t have that grace. and even then, even when i was hired after months and months of searching and being turned down over and over and over because my personality wasn’t what they wanted..... my employer would eventually learn that i am not normal. it’s Really hard to hide that type of thing when it affects you every single day of your life, turns out.

even taking the horrible process of getting hired into account, people will act like when you are hired that you are good and it’s all easy from there. it isn’t. it really isn’t. i worked as long as i did for my past jobs because i went in thinking that everything wrong with me would go away when i finally got to that point. because that’s what people act like. unfortunately, that isn’t how it works. i would find myself dreading work after a month or two. by the third month i would consider suicide nearly every minute on the job, to the point of me getting so scared that my employer would notice and i would get fired or i would end up quitting because i don’t want to die just yet.

you can go on and on about how young adults these days are just too sensitive and don’t understand anything, but like... im starting to think that everyone from older generations that felt this way just... died? killed themselves? or couldn’t find a job and ended up on the streets? you know that tons of homeless people are mentally ill or disabled to some extent, right? you know that, right??? and even with all of that you still continue to say how entitled we all are when we literally just want to survive.

my dream for what i want my future to be isn’t crazy or over the top. i just want to live with my boyfriend, get married in a few years, and maybe try to go to school when i feel ready. my goal in life is to just be happy. it isn’t to be rich or famous like you all seem to think it is. i just want to survive with the person i love. i want to be happy. why is that such an awful thing to want? how am i a bad person for wanting to be happy?

im quiet and always do as im told. i dont go out of my way to make things hard for other people. yes, doing things can be really hard for me, and they normally are. but ill end up doing it, it just might take a while. the problem with how things work is the expectation of happening fast and without issue. i’ve always done things slowly because of how much thought i put into everything. it has always, even since i was very young, difficult for me to work myself towards doing something.

this isn’t something that developed during high school like so many people seem to assume. i’ve been depressed and anxious for as long as i can remember. i remember being REALLY weird when i was very young, and that’s because i didn’t understand what was wrong with me. i was miserable most of the time, even as early as elementary school. i feel like i didn’t ever have the happy, lazy experience that everyone assumes i’m trying to keep in my life. i can’t keep that if i never had it. and even if i could somehow make it happen, it hasn’t. i’m in a pretty understanding situation with my boyfriend, and i’m given time to do things. he understands how hard things are for me, and doesn’t automatically just call me lazy like everyone else seems to. it makes me feel like i have some kind of worth.

isn’t it depressing to think about the fact that i will often find myself thinking that i am worthless because of the lack of what i do? i will find myself looking at me at the core and think “yeah this is worthless, and it should be thrown away”. even when i do well i think this way. nothing is ever enough, and no matter how hard i work to ignore it, my issues won’t magically vanish. i WISH they did. and i’ve tried so hard to make that happen. but it doesn’t. this isn’t something that is simply just a made up problem that i’ve convinced myself to believe. i was suffering from this before i even knew you COULD be like this. i just always thought that i was weird and broken and unlovable and... worthless. even as a kid. i tried the same tactic of making myself do tons of things in order to try to make it go away, but it didn’t work. being the smart kid never worked. being the kid who really wanted to have fun and play but assumed i couldn’t because i needed to work harder to be ‘normal’ like all the other kids Never Worked. i never had more than 5 friends at a time for the large majority of my school life. that got a little better in high school when i started to accept whats wrong with me, but even then it was still pretty bleak.

i just. i don’t get how people can come on here, look at a post written by someone struggling for other people struggling, and then tell everyone who agrees with it that they are all just lazy and awful people. does that make you feel good about yourself? you know that we all already know that we are far from normal, right? i know only one or two people who have gone through this all without mental illness or disability contributing, but so many more who experience it with those things being the core.

if you hate disabled and mentally ill people, just say it. because you acting like you are morally superior because you are lucky enough to be able to tolerate the work environment of today is obviously how you feel. we know that people hate us. we do. i’ve been verbally abused plenty over this exact thing, from lots of different people acting like they “know the best” for me.

please just. stop talking to us if you are so unwilling to listen. we listen to you constantly. its a rare case to come across other people being loud about this type of thing without outright looking for it. if you look for it, you can find it, but i wouldn’t have ever thought to do that for most of my life. the only reason i learned what was wrong with me was because a school counselor in middle school got so concerned for me that she made me see her once a week to talk about how i see the world. and turns out, most people DONT see it the way i do! wow! sounds stupid but i actually had NO idea that i saw things so differently than other people. what a shocker, right? well, it sure was for me when i was just learning then that some people have things like depression or anxiety.

im done with this post. im tired and im going to think about something else.

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