#looking back at it as much of a cultural phenomenon it was that shit did not need to exist

[chilewithcarnage]

god if i could go back in time and stop the sw new trilogy from happening i would cause why is the world still facing the ramifications of the reylo subculture through the advent of bad romance fanfic turned published work literature giving racist white women pedestals they definitely don't need. lowkey wouldn'tve have made much of a difference every subsequent star wars media thats come out in the past 3-4 years p much treats that shit as non canon anyways and is more concerned with turning everything cool and inventive about the sw animated series into hollow live actions products.

[genderisafuck]

Honestly like as someone who used to like Harry Potter and had like 98% of my taste for it ruined by JKR's bullshit (all the stuff I still have any attachment to is fanon) I get...so weirded out by the way people insist that even still TALKING about it among friends is somehow LITERALLY KILLING TRANS KIDS-

But also, on a weird, irrational, emotional level, I get it - or at least, I can sympathize with...what I know is one of the less fair motivations for it. Because I also have that feeling of, well, this series was important to me. It was a gateway to fandom for me. I did so much cringey shit with it when I was younger lmao - those are some really important memories. And now I can't look back on them without remembering how that money went to someone who wants me dead and is willing to spend the money I spent on those books to make it happen. Disgusting.

It's easy, emotionally, to look at someone who manages to still enjoy it and be angry. A little jealous, a little erased - how lucky one must be, to be so unaffected by it all, I find myself tempted to say, voice dripping with scorn.

Similarly, I understand and sympathize with the emotion of where a lot of people who were never fans are coming from, in a way that makes me resent the actions even more - "HA! Vindication! You mocked me for being the weirdo who never like the cultural phenomenon, but I was right all along, I have the moral high ground!" Sure can be an enticing feeling.

I hate it all that much more because I understand it. It's certainly not the only motivation that exists, of course, but it really does come off as...this isn't actually about our lives and rights on the line. It's fandom drama with a righteous sounding excuse. It's a game to so many of you - not all, but far too many.

tl;dr ALL emotions are morally neutral - yes, including liking things - but the way some people act on them sure as hell aren't and that's NOT just on the "still liking the wizard books" side and thank you for acknowledging it <3

I was never all that invested in harry potter. I watched every movie with my first girlfriend a few years ago and back then i still considered them pretty average. Definitely not worth rewatching or buying the books over.

But yea there is a certain kind of puritanism as in "if you still like the books/movies now, youre a bad person". I agree you shouldnt be spending money on any of that stuff anymore, obviously, but its fine to like it. Harry potter is a big part of a lot of peoples lives and childhoods and just because JKR decided to come out as an idiot doesnt mean that those feelings arent still there, i totally get that.

In that way, if you can access the media without helping JKR in any way, then you should be morally allowed to do that. Its not like the books or movies are evil (there are problematic themes in them, but i trust in peoples ability to critically engage with media).

The question is just how to do that best. Piracy obviously. Not engaging in the fandom as to not draw more attention to JKR, to not give her any new fans? Its not like i have the answer to that

[olderthannetfic]

I went down a rabbit hole on penis subincision, which lead to an edu article on sexual behavior in indigenous Hawaiian populations. (By Milton Diamond if you feel an urge to google). The article talked about how it was normal and even encouraged in a lot of these cultures for young people to engage in homosexual acts for the purpose exploring each other and simply having fun. This, in turn, reminded me of an assertion that Mark Thompson made in his book, Gay Spirit: Myth and Meaning...

--

....I’m not sure if you’ve read Thompson’s work but you posted passages from his book a while back. He compares the rejection a fixed gender identity and the phenomenon of "changing" to the archetypal definition of being a shaman, which is kind of fine. But then he goes on to claim that Diné (Navajo) people had a cross-dressing shamanic priesthood of gay people (the nadle) until white colonialism destroyed the tradition. Which, frankly, was a claim that I initially dismissed as...

…a gay white dude making things up until this whole subincision thing made me go look into it more closely. There are in fact many detailed articles on this. (They’re called Nádleehi, not nadle in these papers). So what I want to ask is if anyone knows exactly how common it was for LGBT+ to be accepted in non-colonial populations. Because I was under the impression that the consistent natural reaction to queerness in almost every human culture is to eradicate it.

Nonnie... WHUT?

YES, oh my god, a ton of cultures were okay with some form of something we would today see as queer.

YES, colonialism routinely wiped this out or at least tried to, and many of the places doing the colonizing also stamped out their own ancient traditions.

I don't recall that particular book or quoting it, but I post a lot.

It's not as clear-cut as total acceptance or acceptance of all forms of queerness. A common format is some kind of third gender role for nonconforming or trans or intersex people, often a combination of what we'd see today in the West as femme gay men and heterosexual trans women. Sometimes, this third gender had a specific social role, like shaman or entertainer. The modern split between gender identity and sexual orientation is not really how people saw it in a lot of past cultures (or, hell, in plenty of modern ones outside of the mainstream Western world).

When I was 14, I was fucking obsessed with this academic book of compiled journal articles called Third Sex, Third Gender: Beyond Sexual Dimorphism in Culture and History.

In terms of binary m/m interactions... uh... Ancient Greece is right there. Did you... miss that?

Historically, Japan was all about it being manly to fuck dudes because they didn't have girl cooties until the Meiji Restoration. Similarly to Ancient Greece, it was unmanly to take it up the ass as a grown man, but that's different from m/m sex in general being a problem. As with many societies outside of the mainstream West post... like... mid 19thC, m/m sex was seen as something you did, not something you were.

Medieval Europe would have kicked your ass for "sodomy", including oral with your spouse, which also falls under that term in that period, but they still wouldn't have thought a man was "gay" for fucking men. They'd have thought he was falling prey to a common sin that any man could potentially be tempted into. Sexual orientation is pretty much not a thing until after we get psychology as a science.

China got more homophobic over the dynasties. There was a time that the emperor's boyfriends were in the fucking history books along with his baby mamas. That's where we get the term "cut sleeve" from.

We don't tend to know what f/f stuff was going on in most times and places because most of the written record is men writing about their dicks.

Modern Thailand has all kinds of interesting things going on, and that whole region of SE Asia has had at points, though the more colonialism, the more local shit got suppressed. I can't speak to the total accuracy, but here's a wikipedia article on gender identities in Thailand.

Tibetan monasteries had abbots openly promoting their boyfriends. As long as you were doing it between the thighs and not touching icky girls, it was fine.

American Indian cultures are well known to have had fucktons of priesthoods/shamans of that type. It wasn't every group. Some were more prone to punishing gender nonconformity. AFAIK, a specific variant role for AMABs is more common than just letting people do whatever. In some, you could become a shaman, but they also tended to scapegoat the shamans in times of crisis. I'm no expert. I'd look up what modern two-spirit people have to say about their cultural traditions along with journal articles. The historical record is fragmentary and full of missionaries' unhelpful opinions.

Humans do often punish difference, but tons of cultures didn't see m/m sex or some specific form of third gender as anomalous. A ton probably didn't care about f/f sex, though it's harder to tell.

Gender conformity is often enforced... but why on earth would you assume most cultures only have 2 and that they map exactly onto our modern ideas of gender?

Seriously, nonnie, where have you been?

[chaos0pikachu]

Your post reminds me of the early 2000s when people were speculating on which Disney Channel and Nickelodeon actors were actually together IRL (which is weird enough to speculate on the romantic lives of children) and how crazy the tabloids were in general back then when it came to actors personal/romantic lives.

I think people in Western culture tend to downplay the prevalence of that behavior nowadays because it’s not as front and center as it used to be but it does still happen and a lot of the time it’s still used by studios to promote their shows. Definitely not a phenomenon unique to Asia.

Omg you just made me remember the Lindsey Lohan, Hilary Duff, Aaron Carter 'love' triangle that existed back then lmaoooo what a time

I do think western fans, particularly ones in BL/GL fandoms, are so hyper focused on those fandoms/sub-fandoms they either don't pay attention to what's happening outside of those fandoms or don't know general media history. I don't blame~~ ppl for this fandom is ultimately a hobbyist space first and foremost, but I do think it can lead to damaging assumptions about non-American/British cultures and a prevalent belief that these types of occurrences only happen in BL/GL fandoms which can - and has in my observations - lead to some xenophobic beliefs about East Asian cultures in general.

This is a bigger problem in general of xenophobia when it comes to consuming and/or engaging with non-white/non-american media like this belief that Korean media isn't horny in general isn't just something I see BL fans saying but also ppl who watch romance kdramas b/c that's their main focus, romance kdramas not Korean media in general. Which is vast and varied, and exists beyond Crash Landing Into You, Guardian, Squid Game and Parasite

(sidenote, everyone knows Bong Joon-ho for Parasite but his filmography is varied and amazing, The Host is such a clever subversive of a B monster movie and Snowpiercer is probably one of my fave films of all time and Chris Evans best on screen performance to date)

Like, I see folks saying "shipping" a lot when it comes to fans believing idk Mew and Gulf were irl dating when in my fandom experience that shit was called "tin hatting" b/c it was a conspiracy. There was a fine line difference between ppl who like just enjoyed and liked Dom and Elijah's friendship and wrote silly (even if it was sexy) fanfic about them and the ppl who literally stalked Elijah to a gay bar once b/c they legitimately believed Dom and Elijah were in a secret romance. Like way to much fandom shit, Jared and Jensen also popularized tin hatting or rather their fandom did. J2 crawled so Larries could fucking RUN. Back in the days of LiveJournal there were anon communities that had threads with 1000s of comments about how Jared and Jensen were secretly in a relationship b/c omg look at the way they act at cons! They're so touch-feely! They make innuendo jokes!

We'd call this "fan service" with a Thai acting pair and I would argue that's what Jared and Jensen were doing, fan service just in the early 00s. Idk if they still do this at cons I don't follow SPN anymore but you saw the same comments about like the 1D members. In my experience I would argue western tin hatters of western celebs are worse than what I see from BL fans even with the "fan service" or whatever b/c there's a sense of heightened conspiracy think involved. And again, it's not just for same-sex couples the actors for Outlander have been harassed by tinhats for almost as long as the show has been on (so like 8-ish years). At the height of the popularity for Scandal tin hats were saying Kerry Washington's baby was gonna come out light skinned "proving" it was her white costars (for those who don't know Kerry is a Black woman and her husband is a Black man, her former costar is a white man).

idk where I was going with all this but like, this isn't something specific to Thailand or Korea etc it's not even something specific to same sex pairings. I would argue Thailand's just learned how to monetize off people's already pre-existing lack of boundaries towards public figures.

[renardtrickster]

My take on the Wizard Game Discourse is that the Harry Potter Video Game Scene hasn't been good since Prisoner of Azkaban on the PS2 (and also the LEGO games), but furthermore the left dropped the ball on Hog Legacy by A LOT, and on SO MANY LEVELS.

The first thing that should be discussed is the streaming scene, in particular the fact that a lot of streamers got sent hate for playing or wanting to play the game, or outright harassed for it (I don't know how widespread this was but I'm moving forward with the assumption that it was a Notable Phenomenon). In particular, this doesn't do anything useful and actively hurts us. If you're a neutral "apolitical" streamer who just wants to play a mediocre wizard game, then you're more likely than not going to block, ignore, and continue on (while also drawing attention to it on social media), because spite and the Streisand Effect is a very potent motivator, and this goes double if you're an especially big streamer. If you're a leftist streamer, see the next paragraph. And if you're a reactionary streamer, you're just going to spin it as a culture war "the left attacked me for liking Harry Potter" thing. And on this point, leftists already have to struggle with a reputation for being no-fun-allowed wokescolds. If we had said "don't play the game it's shit and so is JKR" and responded to it coming out by clowning on it 24/7 (and also not making it trend on twitter every day leading up to it releasing) then we still would have gotten that, but at that point is becomes Dialogue and you can just tell them that their mom sucks you good and hard through your jorts. The circle of online political discourse turns gently. The imagery of leftists actually actively jumping on people's backs because For God's Sake I Just Wanna Game, however, is much harder to shake off though. That shit scares normies off and gives reactionaries more ammo.

Going from the above, I mentioned there's one group of people who will fold when given backlash for playing Wizard Game, and it's: other leftist streamer! I've seen quite a couple of lefty streamers say something to the effect of "might play it, prolly not buying it though Yar Har Har, and make fun of it/donate the money to a trans charity to stick it to JKR", and they get blowback from it, even from their own audience. One notable instance was Hasan Piker planning to do Exactly This, only for his fanbase to slag on him and not do it, because doing otherwise would be "supporting JKR". I have more to say about "supporting JKR", but let's look at the impact here. Before, JKR was going to make a shitload of money, but also a couple of prominent leftist streamers would have streamed the game, made fun of it, showcased to their audience all the shortcomings of the game's mechanics and writing, potentially done the Really Smart Thing of using a normie opener ("Harry Potter am I right?") to inject leftist commentary in a way that's easily consumable, even by liberals and apoliticals, and then tossed whatever money they made (likely the hundreds of thousands, if not millions in Hasan's case) into a trans charity. Instead, what we get is just JKR making a shitload of money and also we get headlines about how the most prominent leftist streamer got bullied by his own audience for playing bideo james, and also the charity streams don't happen. What is our outcome? What did we accomplish? Was it moral purity? Do we care about moral purity? Will moral purity prevent the rapidly approaching trans genocide from happening? I dunno, but at least I feel slightly better for it.

The final point is my address of a counterargument I've often seen in relation to "just pirate the wizard game" or "play the wizard game to slag on it and make money for charity" or similar, and I imagine it's a point that someone reading this was about to shoot at me. It was a tweet by JK Rowling, where she states that she counts any support of her works, including Harry Potter, as indirect support of her and her ideology. Now, financially speaking this is true, any money you throw at JKR goes to JKR (which is why you should either Not Give Her Money For The Game or at the very least do it and then throw x200 that much towards groups harmed by her), but a lot of people seem to take this further, in that even if you don't financially buffer her, playing/reading her stuff is like an unconscious and/or spiritual "good job on the transphobia, love the way you're the public face of a hate movement!" handshake, and that publicly doing so is just a roundabout means of sending support and fans (and recruits) her way. And to this, I would like to say THAT'S NOT HOW ANY OF THIS WORKS. ARE YOU FUCKING STUPID?

Not only is this argument as incoherent as Tom Cruise saying that watching his movies is like an indirect vindication of Scientology, and also insincere because even if Harry Potter and Cormorant Strike or whatever became unpopular and unprofitable overnight she would keep on doing what she's doing, but the real baffling part is the fact that lefties just accepted and agreed with this, letting JKR define the framework and the endgoals. By accepting this, we immediately concede that the only proper response to a 10+ years old sitting on the bookshelf at home is to burn it (please think carefully before commenting "yes I am okay with identifying with the imagery of leftists being book-burners but politically reflected). By accepting this, we concede that someone watching the films or reading the book to MST3K it or negatively review it or critically point out all the things wrong with the writing or JKR's worldview is the same thing as uncritically watching and supporting it and loving JKR. By accepting this, we make a bet with JKR that if her new game sells well, then that means she's right, and the public is on her side when it comes to transphobia. It's not, by the way, people liking Harry Potter doesn't mean people liking transphobia, much less JKR herself, in much the same way that H.P. Lovecraft being a household name doesn't mean that everyone who's ever read Shadow Over Innsmouth actually really secretly supports racism not to mention the fact that the public majority is on the side of trans people, transphobes just so happen to be loud, fucking annoying, and also in positions of power because our power structures really favor the reactionary voice for No Reason In Particular. But the game was destined to make bank, because of reactionary support, and also apoliticals/liberals/normies not being too assed about it, but mainly because JKR is a household name bigger than Lovecraft at this point. It was a bet we didn't need to make, because we let her control the narrative when we didn't need to, and in attempting to "win" the unnecessary bet, we gave her free advertising, embarrassed ourselves, prevented ourselves from doing charity streams for some reason, and accomplished nothing where just saying "game a shit" and clowning on it on twitter would have done infinitely more at none of the cost.

My final note before you go is that this post is a criticism of the online left, but it is from a leftist perspective. This is no place for people whose takeaway is "well the real issue you guys don't realize how BASED JKR is and how trans people are bad" and you will be beaten senseless by every able-bodied patron in the bar bar for such audacious behavior.

[duhragonball]

Hey, it's been awhile. I was originally watching EVA along, but I got bored and had to take a break for a little while, so let me first praise you for your persistence and no doubt bravery (such as sitting through GT like how did you get so brave?) I did finish it and as an adult can't help but feel the appeal is really boobs and shock value, with abstract noise making it seem profound and cheap. I think if I watched it back then I would have a different opinion, I wonder if you feel the same?

(Sorry ran out of space and have to make 2 asks) Anyway We left off last time with how you let popular culture and memes guide you with anime, what do you think the meme for evangelion would be? Get in the robot Shinji? Having watched the show I am not sure about that, well it's nothing like the "Nah, I'd win" of today. That said, do you have any interest in newer anime such as Jujitsu Kaisen from which that meme came from? I heard Oshi no Ko is hot as well, but it could end up like NGE for me..

Well, the thought has crossed my mind that part of my difficulty with NGE is that I'm not watching it as a teen or a twenty-something. The impression I get is that it was a formative anime for a lot of fans, and that may only be because of when they watched it, rather than the text of the anime itself. I'm 47, and this stuff may not "click" for me the way it has for others.

I think there is a case to be made for NGE just being... not very good. A lot of the creative decisions may only be pretend-deep, and there's places where it's so-called subversion of the mech genre seems to be indistinguishable from the things its trying to satirize.

For example, there's two different versions of the ending, and fans and commentators are still wrestling with the implications of that. Is one ending better than the other? Do they compliment one another? Is one intended to "punish" the audience? Is it all just a big puzzle crafted to spark all of this discussion? And you know, it's tempting to just look at this and think: "Maybe it just sucks. Maybe the only reason there's two endings because they genuinely couldn't get their shit together."

I'm not making that case, mind you. All I know is that I'm having a blast re-reading JoJolion, and part of the reason for that is because the story is told in a much more clear and linear way. There are plot danglers and confusing flashbacks, but the story goes out of its way to make sure I'm familiar with the basic plotline. JoJolion tells me what a Locacaca fruit is and what it does and why it matters. Evangelion never explains what the Lance of Longinus is or where it came from or how anyone knows what to do with it. It doesn't even explain how many of them there are. You have to read the wiki to find all of that out, and not even the wikis are in agreement about everything.

So it may just be a thing where it helps to see a show like NGE at a certain age. I still think G1 Transformers holds up, but most of that show is a trainwreck of animation gaffes and implausible plots. It only holds up for me because I watched it when I was eight, and it captured my imagination. And I knew it was kind of stupid even back in 1985, but it was a good kind of stupid. So I could imagine someone in their late teens or early 20s watching Eva and it might be their first "serious" anime with blood and drama and so forth. And it captured their imagination and became a phenomenon in spite of its flaws.

On the other hand, I think that kind of experience is possible at other ages. I got into JoJo when I was 40. I'm sure something out there will blow my mind when I'm 58. I hope so, or there won't be much to look forward to.

For what it's worth, I think I'm more invested in Evangelion for the enigma of the show, rather than the text of the show itself. There's an iceberg there, and it seems like the real fun of the whole thing is to dive down to see how far down it goes. If you can enjoy it on a more superficial level to start with, then you're in for a treat, because you can keep coming back to it and find deeper and deeper lore to enjoy.

[welcometomyweird]

Something in the Sky

On the subject of cryptids, I have always been and remain agnostic. My attitude is that stories are great and they're fun to hear, but until I see the thing... in the wild... with my own eyes, all these creatures are are stories. Until they walk right up to me from the woods, Bigfoot, Mothman, the chupacabra and all the haints and boogers that go bump in the night are just urban legends. (Wow! I need to take a break from Old Gods of Appalachia.)

Well, my dear strangelings, as fate and Charles Fort would have it, it turns out that I have actually seen a cryptid... or cryptoid? I'll get into the debate in a bit, but there doesn't seem to be any agreement on what category this critter falls into. Due to the uncertainty, there isn't much in the way of good and well researched information. Even the photographic evidence (as you can see above) doesn't give us a whole lot to go on.

So, what is this squiggle in the sky? I was asking myself the same question when I came across it back in the twenty-teens. The name given to it is "sky serpent". Now, while I saw a total of twelve of these things almost a decade ago, I just learned that they're a thing last week.

"Twelve?" Yes, twelve... four groups of three over a period of about twenty minutes. My guess is it was possibly a migration. They were moving in a southern direction over the city of Boston in late summer or early fall. I only saw them because I looked up while stretching a kink out of my neck. Were it not for that... knot... I would have missed them entirely. City people don't look up, especially in Boston. We keep our eyes down and mind our business.

I wasn't the only one who saw them. The one friend who always seems to be with me when weird shit happens was there. Because we were both looking up and watching these things, a few other people looked to see what had us mesmerized, then a few more. Pretty soon, there were a couple dozen people just watching this sky parade.

The photos aren't mine, but they illustrate the problem of getting photos of aerial phenomena. Unless you have professional equipment and you KNOW it's going to be there, photos will always be crappy. Don't believe me? Take a picture of the moon with your phone. Even the "good" ones I have are mostly lens flare.

Having said that, I mentioned the words... THE words at the root of the debate. Are sky serpents creatures or crafts? Ufologists say they're the former and crypto zoologists say they're the latter. (Of course, I would find the critter that defies classification.) Yes, they move through the sky, but they seem to be organic. They move like snakes or eels. I may not know much about UAP, but I haven't seen anything in the historical record describing extraterrestrials getting out of or off of one of these. (Perhaps Mr. Hanks will find something and correct me.)

What I have seen in the scant literature on the topic of "sky serpents" appears to draw comparisons with the traditional depiction of dragons in Chinese and Japanese art. No, I am not saying dragons are real, but if ancient cultures had seen these sky serpents, I can see how that would give rise to myths about dragons. Had my mother been with me, that is precisely what her conclusion would have been.

Biological entity or extraterrestrial craft, my big questions are: Where are they coming from? Where do they go? Why have we not seen one on the ground?

Obviously, I have no answers. No one does because the people who typically study this kind of thing aren't interested. I've only seen them myself the one time. I did see a video in a Facebook group I belong to. One of the members got footage at about 30,000 feet while on a flight... assuming it's not doctored. That's how I became aware that those weird flying whatevers I saw were a known phenomenon.

Has my position on cryptids changed? Nope! Bigfoot is still gonna have to sit down next to me and ask for a cigarette. Mothman is going to have to read my tarot cards. That said, if the pros don't want to invest the time and energy into getting something close to answers about these "sky serpents" then maybe I finally a cryptid to hunt.

[sinnoman]

Letting Diavolo Go To The Human World Is The Same As Letting The Pigeon Drive The Bus… Do Not Do It!

tw: cursing. also, minus luke.

The Demon Prince’s fascination of the human world wasn’t a new thing to you. However, it did surprise you how much he did not know of the customs and cultures humans had. He’s centuries older than you can imagine and he’s never impulsively gone up there before?

When you asked him about it, he gave you wide grin. “I’ve only gone up there for conferences and meetings. I’ve never gone up there simply to have fun. I have so much work and it takes up too much time.”

You frowned a little disheartened that Diavolo hasn’t been able to experience or enjoy a trip to the human world without it being work related. You were about to suggest a proposition as Barbatos added on, “Speaking of conferences, your four o’clock meeting is about to start in ten minutes, Young Master.”

The bright smile on Diavolo’s face fell a little. “I’m sorry, MC, our weekly tea has to be cut a little short.” You reassured him it was no problem as he got up from his seat and walked you to the door. He told Barbatos to escort you to the House of Lamentation. The minute Diavolo was out of earshot, Barbatos leaned towards your ear with a strained smile on his face.

“The Young Master is able to do what he wants. However, no matter what he does, do not let him go to the Human World by himself and with no motive.”

You didn’t understand why Diavolo wasn’t allowed to go up there without being supervised. He was a grown man and the literal Future King of Hell. Surely, he could take care of himself. So a few days later you asked him if the two of you could to the Human World together and he agreed. What could possibly go wrong?

Oh, you were wrong. You were so wrong!

It’s been less than twenty-four hours and now the both of you are sitting in a jail cell. Your left hand was sticky, your clothes were damp with rainwater and you were sure the guard kept eyeing you up and down as if you were insane. Diavolo sat next to you with a guilty look on his face. He mouthed a “sorry” at you, making you giggle while tearing up at the predicament you both were in. He could only laugh with you as you laugh and cry at the same time.

When the guard had told you were allowed one phone call (courtesy to Diavolo for compelling him to do so) you immediately headed towards the jail phone and punched in the number. You were a little surprised that the Devildom phone numbers worked but you didn’t really dwell on the thought.

You just hoped the person you called would bail the both of you out.

LUCIFER

Sigh…

Someone get him five shots.

When you called Lucifer to tell him that you and Diavolo went to the Human World for a day trip, he was hoping you were going to ask him if he wanted anything before the both of you came back.

What he wasn’t expecting was (in less than 24 hours) for you to tell him not only have the both of you created an unnatural phenomenon, you managed to commit three felons, crashed a car that neither of you have a license to drive and managed to get caught of all things.

When you told him that you got arrested he was debating on letting you go to prison so you could learn your lesson. Then he heard Diavolo’s voice in the back and started choking on his wine.

How in the three realms did Diavolo managed to get arrested? And how did you (the one he thought was as responsible as him) allow this to happen? What do you mean you let Diavolo drive the car? He has a butler for a reason, MC, obviously hE DOESN’T KNOW HOW TO DRIVE—

Was about to lecture you about the danger you put yourself (Diavolo) in and what the consequences when he heard Diavolo’s, “I don’t want to go back.”

Immediately gathers everyone to go and pick you both up. Has the bail money ready to go, makes sure he thinks of everything that can go wrong and gives it a solution and prepares to drag Diavolo out that jail cell himself.

When he gets there he gives you a glare that could soil cheese in 2.5 seconds.

When he goes to bail you both and the guard tells him you both can’t be released tonight, he snaps. Immediately threatens the guards with the unholiest torture threats you’ve ever heard. The guard ends up caring a little less about his job and a little more about his life and let’s you both go.

Diavolo doesn’t leave the cell. Father help him, his patience is running thin.

The next two hours is just him, Barbatos and Diavolo arguing.

“Young Master, for the last time. Get out the cell.” “NO!” “Can we just leave him—” “Quiet, Belphegor! We cannot leave him. Lord Diavolo GET OUT THE CELL!”

MAMMON

Impressed but at the same time mostly concerned.

When you told him what happened, his face started to get paler with each word. How did the two of you manage to do all this in less than a day? And here he thought he was a troublemaker…

Then the words finally process in his head. “Ya got in a car crash?! Human what we’re ya thinkin’? What if ya died? I don’t care who was drivin’ I’m never letting ya near a car again!”

Looking and thinking for someway to profit off of this. Then realizes, as the appointed human watcher, if Lucifer found out that he let you get arrested ON TOP of Diavolo being there with you while he made money off of it, his head would be ripped off.

In a state of fear in panic for both his life and yours, he goes to pick you both up alone.

It’s not his first time encountering the police. He’s been arrested before for illegal gambles, dealing, fights and such its not hard to guess what for. He will tell you though that he’s actually not the first brother to get arrested.

When he gets there the first thing he does is rush to you and make sure you’re okay. He doesn’t really care that Diavolo is there too. He just has to make sure that you are okay. All human parts are intact? Okay. Good. Let’s go.

Then the guard tells him that he can’t let you both leave yet because you need to be trialed.

Uh oh. Frustrated Mammon is here.

Immediately starts arguing with the guard. He gets so angry he’s about to start throwing punches. That’s until the guards throws a handcuff on him and shoves him in the cell with you.

He gets a phone call too, though.

You tell him to call Lucifer or Barbatos and then Diavolo tells him not to call either of them because he really doesn’t want to go back. Suddenly, Diavolo and him are best friends.

You command him to call Lucifer though and he bites his lip. The ringing of the jail phone has his heart pounding. When the phone connects, the words spill and he mentally cursing at you.

Long story short, Lucifer is the one that gets you both out and leaves Mammon there.

LEVIATHAN

Immediately asks you why you called him of all people. Doesn’t hesitate to try and refer you to someone else.

Then immediately remembers it’s like that this is exactly like that one anime where the—

When you told him why you got arrested he got extremely nervous, ESPECIALLY when he heard Diavolo’s voice in the back correcting you when you left a detail or two out. Not because he’s of the intensity of the crimes but, because he knew Lucifer would absolutely strangle you.

Is already panicking and looking for a solution. Is trying to remember what his brothers had done when he got arrested. (Spoiler Alert! He was the first brother out of all of them to get arrested. He punched a child in the face at an anime convention. The kid snitched and told his mom, cough cough, little shit, cough cough. Does he regret it? Nope! In his opinion, the kid deserved it.)

He voices his anger when he realizes that he has to use manga money to bail you both out. How could you do this to him? He thought you were his Henry. Turns out you’re just a fish…

He blogs and video records the minute he gets up there. It’s going to go viral, he just knows it. Then he gets a message from Lucifer with a smiley face and a link to his blog and he’s panicking. He has to get you two out of there. NOW!

Simply just throws money at the guard, not really caring if you two can’t leave just yet. He’s getting you two out of there one way or another before Lucifer gets here. Listen MC he doesn’t care that he’s making things worse, he refuses to die without having his 93849281849th Ruri-Chan marathon.

Then the dilemma of Diavolo not wanting to leave hits him and his patience is running thin. Why of all people did you have to get arrested with the person needed most in the Devildom?

It becomes too late when he finally manages to start convincing Diavolo to come back home. Lucifer walks through the door.

And Levi summons Lotan.

SATAN

Mr. Agent of Chaos #1 is so proud and impressed with you.

Don’t get him wrong, he was worried about you. Getting arrested and caught for your crimes is a big deal. Yet, you managed to commit three felonies before you got caught? Love, he’s invested.

He has so many questions for you. What felonies did you commit? What was your favorite felony? How’d you get caught? What do you think was the first mistake you made that got you behind bars? If you could do this all over again do you think you would get caught? Here, let him get a pen and paper so you can tell him every little detail of what happened so he can make it fool proof for you.

Then, he here’s Diavolo say he’d be glad to provide the details of what happened and now he realizes what the big issue is.

Oh he can’t wait to hold this against Lucifer’s head. Wait, let him go tell Belphie!

He has everything prepared and is ready to bail you out. You knew he was reliable.

If you see him take a picture of the two of you curled up together in the cell. It’s for research purposes. Totally not for Belphie and him to hold against Lucifer. You can’t tell him to delete it, his printer is already making hundreds of copies.

Turns out Satan isn’t as reliable as you thought. This is because five minutes and a broken desk later, he’s thrown in cell too.

He knows he should get a call too but the guard doesn’t tell him he gets one. Starts cursing so quickly you can’t even make out the words he’s saying.

When Diavolo tells him it might be better that he doesn’t get a phone call, it clicks in his head. Who needs to be bailed out when you can just escape, duh.

He doesn’t even get to the good part when he sees his brothers, Simeon, Solomon, and Barbatos walk through the door. Turns out Belphie’s sleep talking doesn’t have a filter.

He gets a little upset after this whole ordeal. He didn’t even get to try his escape plan…

ASMODEUS

Honey, he can’t relate. It sucks to suck.

Like Lucifer, he has never been arrested. He’s been close to but whenever that happens he just distracts the police from doing it… wink wink.

He knows and seen how stingy police can be with arresting people so he immediately feels for you. And when you’re telling him why you’re in a jail cell, he immediately starts getting ready to come charm you out of that cell. Then he hears Diavolo’s voice.

On second thought…

He immediately has thoughts on how Lucifer would react if he found out he were some how involved in this. Yeah… no, he rather have skin blemishes for the rest of his life.

No matter how nervous he is, he marches his perky butt up there and goes to get you both.

When he gets there he immediately goes to baby you. Checking for any injuries and makes comments on how you’re wet and such. Then he takes in his surroundings.

You’ve been here for how many hours? Oh no. Honey, look. There’s rust everywhere, unidentifiable liquids on the ground. Ew, is that a dead roach caught in a spiderweb? Why were you sitting on the small bench they had? Do you know how many gross people sit on it too? Don’t even get him started on the smell of this cell. Once the both of you go home, straight to the bath.

He goes to pay the bail but then the guard tells them they can’t leave just yet. He knows it’s time to work his magic.

You owe him. The guard is grimy and smells like he hasn’t showered in months. Not only that they’re very persistent at about their job. Charming them is taking longer than he originally had planned.

And then he realizes that Lord Diavolo does not want to leave. Oh boy.

Explains that Lord Diavolo can go anywhere he wants after this, he doesn’t care. That was until you interrupted him saying neither of you can leave without him. He really starts to stress. Why did this have to happen to him?

Somehow and in someway, the both of you manage to convince the redhead to go home. When you get to the House of Lamentation, he’s pulling you straight to his bathroom.

BEELZEBUB

You made him drop his macaroons… his macaroons. He just got them… :(

He is so confused on how you managed to do all of this in a short amount of time? Then he realizes what you just said and he starts stress eating. Poor baby, you kinda regret calling him because it really stresses him out.

“What do you mean you got into a car crash? Are you okay? Are you sure? Don’t worry I’m coming to get you.”

Then he hears Diavolo’s “take your time” and now he’s really stress eating. Not only does he have to bail you out, he has to bail out Lord Diavolo too? Oh boy, the amount of stress you’ve given him is making him have stomach tremors.

He was thinking about getting the both of you alone. Then he started having thoughts of all the human world food and realizes he wouldn’t be able to go alone without getting distracted. So, he brings Belphie to keep him on track.

His frown grows deeper when he sees the two of you curled into each other in the corner of the cell. He ignores how Belphie’s laughing and taking pictures of you both before walking over to you two.

He didn’t bring any bail money. Like Levi, ignores how the guard is saying that they can’t let the both of you leave. Simply pushes the guard off of him when they try to stop him. He also rips the bars from the ground and throws them aside. C’mon, we’re leaving.

Then Diavolo doesn’t want to leave and that’s where Beel gets upset. He’s hungry, Lord Diavolo. He doesn’t have time to be fooling around. His stomach his about to make earthquakes.

In less than three seconds, he’s now playing tug-a-war with Diavolo. Trying to ignore the empty promises of royal dinners the Prince is throwing at him.

“Lord Diavolo, we’re leaving!” “I will let you have anything you want to eat from the Palace is you let me stay!” “WE ARE LEAVING!”

BELPHEGOR

He knew he should have slept through the phone call.

He was actually wondering where you were. You missed their daily nap session. If he wasn’t too tired, he would have gone looking for you earlier.

When you explain to him what happened there’s two opposing sides to his thought. On one hand he’s like “What do you mean you committed three felonies?” in an amusing way. Lowkey is kinda proud. The most he’s been arrested for is fight with some mom who told him he couldn’t sleep at some park with his pillow.

On the second hand he’s like “WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU COMMITTED THREE FELONIES?” He’s stuck on the part on how you could have died in less than 24 hours. He’s more angry at the fact you’re making him worried about you then at the fact he has to go pick you up.

When he went to go get Beel so they could go pick you up, Mammon overheard and started making a whole commotion. You can only guess what happened next when eight demons, a sorcerer, and an angel showed up at the police station.

When he sees not only you behind bars, but Diavolo too, he’s really wishing he slept through your call.

He snaps when the guard tells him he can’t go home with you just yet. Starts picking a fight the guard. It’s a screaming match before it turns into fist fight. He’s not leaving here until he makes a point Lucifer. He’s winning this fight one way or another! You can’t stop him!!

When he hears that Diavolo doesn’t want to leave, he doesn’t care. He drags you out the cell and leaves the Prince there. Lucifer can deal with him. He just wants to go home.

When you guys do finally get to go home, he’s covered in scratches and a couple of bruises. He’s using you as a body pillow tonight whether you like it or not.

DIAVOLO

He’s so happy.

He doesn’t care that he’s committed serious crimes and is now sitting in this jail cell. He also doesn’t really care that it could potentially hurt his reputation as a ruler. He’s so happy he’s got come up here and do things he’s never done before. And he’s most happy that he got to do this with you!

And although it’s mostly his fault, he pretends as if none of it matters and keeps reliving the moments in head. (He’s sorry, truly. But when he gets so excited he just simply forgets about everything else and focuses on what he wants to do. Laws and regulations; out the window. It’s Diavolo time!)

At first you were more than a little upset with him. But then he couldn’t contain himself and started telling you about what happened today as if you weren’t there. The words are coming out his mouth so fast it gets to a point where he gets all tongue tied and he’s barely saying words.

He tells you every single detail all over again and every emotion he felt within that moment and thought he had too. And the more and more he speaks, that anger you felt diminishes. You’re happy that he’s happy and enjoyed himself although this day hadn’t particularly gone to plan.

Even when Barbatos and Lucifer come to pick you both up, he’s smiling through it. Especially when they both are lecturing you, it goes through one ear and out the other. He’s glad he was able to experience this.

Oh and don’t think it’ll stop here. He basically tries to convince you to go with him again.

BARBATOS

Longer sigh…

He warned you.

He told you not to do it and look what happened. He hopes you learned your lesson.

He also knew this was going to happen regardless of his warning. He tried preventing it, really. But no matter what alterations he made to the timeline, you both still ended in a jail cell.

When you told him what chaos the both of you have caused in less than a day, his anxiety spikes. You let Lord Diavolo drive a car? Of course he’s going to tell you he knows how to drive. Just because he tells you doesn’t mean he actually knows MC—

He’s upset with you but at the same time he feels for you too. He knows how his Young Master gets when he’s too excited. There’s nothing stopping him, he’s really the definition of one-track minded.

He tells you to give him a few seconds to gather a few things before hanging up. You thought it was going to take a half hour at most but then Barbatos is walking through the station door three seconds later.

The guard lets the both of you go willingly and with no money. You suspect it’s Barbatos doing and when you ask him about it, he acts as if he knows nothing.

Actually, he covers the entire mess completely by altering time. He can’t have people finding out Lord Diavolo had gotten arrested by human authorities, can he now? Nothing pops up when you search for news reports on the web.

He lets Lucifer deal with your punishment as he deals with Lord Diavolo’s. However, he does lecture you about it the next time he sees you. Oh, and the two of you alone together? Never happening again.

SOLOMON

You don’t get to finish your explanation before he’s laughing in your face.

Mr. Agent of Chaos #2 is so amused by this, he wants to hear exactly how you got yourself in this mess. He’s even more surprised that you allowed yourself to get caught. You have pacts with seven demon lords and you thought to not use any of them?? This is more entertaining than Asmo at a frat house.

WAIT DID HE JUST HEAR LORD DIAVOLO’S VOICE TOO?

He starts laughing even harder. The Demon Prince got arrested too? This is comedy gold. Wait a little while longer, he needs to document it for future references. Quick question: what type of unnatural phenomenon did the two of you create? Describe it to him.

He knows what the police are like but never has had to deal with them himself. He can’t be shady if he hasn’t avoided the police for a decade or so. What? He got tired of paying taxes…

He goes alone. When he sees you and the large demon smiling at you he starts to laugh again. It’s to the point where he’s wheezing and bending over. He wipes tears from his eyes afterwards. This is priceless. Please let him take a selfie with the both of you in the back.

He goes over to magically open the cell until the guard tells him he can’t do that and you guys can’t leave. He looks over at the guard and mumbles a few words in latin. Now the guard’s a duck, great. Nice going, Solomon.

When Diavolo tells him he particularly doesn’t want to go back the Devildom, Solomon doesn’t care. He can do what he wants as long as he can take you back with him. But when you tell him to help you convince the Prince to go back home, he sighs.

He threatens Diavolo about calling Simeon to come get him and the redhead is glaring at him but still walks out the cell. Great! Now everyone can go home!

So about that the phenomenon….

SIMEON

Three words: What the fuck?

How did any of this happen? When did any of this happened? What do you mean it happened today? The day’s barely ended! You got into a car crash? Are you okay?

Voices his concerns, deeply. Makes you feel so guilty about what happened today you start crying while the jail phone is pressed against your ear. Diavolo can only rub your back as he listens to Simeon thoroughly explain to you on why what you did was wrong and that you’re lucky he isn’t Lucifer.

He then hears Diavolo’s “Maybe calling Simeon was a bad idea.” Oh. Now he’s really upset. Doesn’t understand how Lord Diavolo allowed this to happen. You could have died, he’s not ready to see you in the Celestial Realm just yet! He tells you to pass the phone to the Demon Lord and you can’t imagine what Simeon is telling Diavolo that’s making him so pale. It’s your turn to rub his back.

When you get the phone back, Simeon tells you to sit tight and he’s coming to get you.

When he does get there, the frown on his face makes you feel even more guilty than on the phone. You could even Diavolo go stiff beside you.

When the guards tells him that the both of you aren’t allowed to leave, he’s super close on letting the both of you suffer the consequences. Yet, he tries to make the guard more lenient by guilt tripping him too.

When he hears that Diavolo doesn’t want to go back, it doesn’t take much for him to convince the Prince to go back home. All he does is glare at him and the redhead is walking out the cell with nervous chuckles.

When the three of you go back to the Devildom, he makes the both of you explain to Lucifer and Barbatos as to what happened within the last hour and why he had to go and pick you up.

TAGS: (sorry this is really long.. also don’t mind the grammatical errors I wrote this on my phone and actually less than 24 hours)

@beels-burger-babe

@mammonsemptycreditcard

@obeythebutler

@minteyeddevil

[ninjaduckpirategoose]

This is a really interesting phenomenon to me, because my parents, especially my dad, really went the other way. To be clear, they never tried to put me in the way of anything inappropriate. But if there was something I wanted to watch, or read, or listen to, my dad not only let me, he would help me find it. If teachers or librarians at school wouldn't let me read something, he went into bat for me every time. If he saw or heard something he thought was cool, his attitude was often, hey my kid is also cool, maybe they would like this too.

The upshot of all this was threefold. First of all, I definitely consumed a lot of media that a lot of adults would have considered inappropriate. I was fine. I continue to be fine.

Second, I had a much broader experience of art, music, literature, etc, than my cohort. I had the opportunity to be able to hear a piece of music in the 90s and hear its lineage in music I'd heard from the 70s or 40s. I was better positioned to recognise when something that looked like a new insight was actually a weak knockoff or misinterpretation of an older idea.

Last and most important, because I was interacting with a lot of art, which I often didn't understand, my dad and I talked about it. A lot. What things meant, where they came from, what the cultural, historical, geographical, political, racial, etc contexts were for the creators and their audiences. We talked about who makes art, and why. Who writes, and who is published. Who speaks, and whose voice is heard. We talked a lot. He explained a lot. Sometimes, he found himself having to explain things to his child that made him uncomfortable. He did it anyway. I loved those conversations, and I know he loved them too.

I have almost no experience of having my interaction with art and with diverse perspectives censored by my parents, so I can't speak with authority on why exactly people do that to their kids. I just can't help thinking about all those great conversations I had with my dad. I could ask any question, I could call him out on inconsistencies, with the innocence of youth I could pinpoint his own biases and ask him why they didn't make sense.

My dad was not a perfect dad. He made mistakes, and he had moments of selfishness, or arrogance, or bad judgement. Sometimes all three at once. We talked a lot and we argued a lot. We didn't agree on everything. If I thought he was full of shit I would tell him so, and he right back to me. But I really feel like I was so so SO lucky. I got to have such an open and really joyous experience of art all through my childhood. I still have so much joy in art, every day of my life. I also got to have all those conversations and questions and debates with someone who truly loved me and cared about my safety as well as my education. When he did protect me from things, which I'm sure he did, he never made me feel like he thought I was immature or stupid. And by engaging with me so conscientiously, he showed me not just how much he loved me as a child, but how much he respected the adult I would become.

I'm so fucking tired of listening to people carve exemptions for parental privilege out of every single principle they express. "sure it's reasonable for parents to want a say in what books their kids check out of the library, but they shouldn't be able to control what others—" NO! FUCKING NO!! THAT IS NOT REASONABLE ACTUALLY! and the kids whose parents are most invested in having that control are exactly the kids who most need to be able to access those books

[olderthannetfic]

I'm a Chinese, nationally and racially. Racial projection seems to be a common practice in western fandom, doesn't it? I find it a bit... weird to witness the drama ignited upon shipping individuals with different races, or the tendency to separate characters into different "colors" even though the world setting doesn't divide races like that. Such practice isn't a thing here. Mind explaining a bit on this phenomenon?

--

Sure, I can try. But of course, fish aren’t very good at explaining the water they swim in.

Americans aren’t good at detecting our own Americanness, and a lot of what you’re seeing is very much culturally American rather than Western in general. (In much of Europe, “race” is a concept used by racists, or so I’m told, unlike in the US where it’s seen more neutrally.) Majority group members (i.e. me, a white girl) aren’t usually the savviest about minority issues, but I’ll give it a shot.

The big picture is that most US race stuff boils down to our attempts to justify and maintain slavery and that dynamic being applied, awkwardly, to everyone else too, even years after we abolished slavery.

There’s a concept called the “one drop rule” where a person is “black” if they have even one drop of black blood.

We used to outlaw “interracial” marriage until quite recently. (That meant marriage between black people and white people with Asians and Hispanic people and others wedged in awkwardly.) Here’s the Wikipedia article on this, which contains the following map showing when we legalized interracial marriage. The red states are 1967.

That’s within living memory for a ton of people! Yellow is 1948 to 1967. This is just not very long ago at all. (Hell, we only fully banned slavery in 1865, which is also just not that long ago when it comes to human culture.)

Why did we have this bananas-crazy set of laws and this idiotic notion that one remote ancestor defines who you are? It boils down to slavery requiring a constant reaffirming that black people are all the same (and subhuman) while white people are all this completely separate category. The minute you start intermarrying, all of that breaks down. This was particularly important in our history because our system of slavery involved the kids of slaves being slaves and nobody really buying their way out. Globally, historically, there are other systems of slavery where there was more mobility or where enslaved people were debtors with a similar background to owners, and thus the people in power were less threatened by ambiguity in identity.

Post-slavery, this shit hung around because it was in the interests of the people in power to maintain a similar status quo where black people are fundamentally Other.

A lot of our obsession with who counts as what is simply a legacy of our racist past that produced our racist present.

--

The other big factor in American concepts of identity is that we see ourselves as a nation of immigrants (ignoring our indigenous peoples, as usual). A lot of people’s families arrived here relatively recently, and we often don’t have good records of exactly where they were from, even aside from enslaved people who obviously wouldn’t have those records. Plenty of people still identify with a general nationality (”Italian-American” and such), but the nuance the family might once have had (specific region of Italy, specific hometown) is often lost. Yeah, I know every place has immigrants, and lots of people don’t have good records, but the US is one of those countries where families have on average moved around a lot more and a lot more recently than some, and it affects our concepts of identity. I think some of the willingness to buy into the idea of “races” rather than “ethnicities” has to do with this flattening of identity.

New immigrant groups were often seen as Other and lesser, but over time, the ones who could manage it got added to our concept of “whiteness”, which gave them access to those same social and economic privileges.

Skin color is a big part of this. In a system that is founded on there being two categories, white owners and black slaves, skin color is obviously going to be about that rather than being more of a class marker like it is in a lot of the world.

But it’s not all about skin color since we have plenty of Europeans with somewhat darker skin who are seen as generically white here, while very pale Asians are not. I’m not super familiar with all of the history of anti-Asian racism in the US, but I think this persistent Otherness probably boils down to Western powers trying to justify colonial activities in Asia plus a bunch of religious bullshit about predominantly Christian nations vs. ones that are predominantly Buddhist or some other religion.

In fact, a lot of racist archetypes in English can be traced back to England’s earliest colonial efforts in Ireland. Justifying colonizing Those People because they’re subhuman and/or ignorant and in need of paternalistic rulers or religious conversion is at the bottom of a lot of racist notions. Ironic that we now see Irish people as clearly “white”.

--

There are a lot of racist porn tropes and racist cultural baggage here around the idea of black people being animalistic. Racist white people think black men want to rape/steal white women from white men. Black women get seen as hypersexual and aggressive. If this sounds like white people projecting in order to justify murder and rape... well, it is.

Similar tropes get applied to a lot of groups, often including Hispanic and Middle Eastern people, though East Asians come in more for creepy fantasies about endlessly submissive and promiscuous women. This nonsense already existed, but it was certainly not helped by WWII servicemen from here and their experiences in Asia. Again, it’s a projection to justify shitty behavior as what the party with less power was “asking for”.

In porn and even romance novels, this tends to turn up as a white character the audience is supposed to identify with paired with an exotic, mysterious Other or an animalistic sexy rapist Other.

A lot of fandoms are based on US media, so all of our racist bullshit does apply to the casting and writing of those, whether or not the fic is by Americans or replicating our racist porn tropes.

(Obviously, things get pretty hilarious and infuriating once Americans get into c-dramas and try to apply the exact same ideas unchanged to mainstream media about the majority group made by a huge and powerful country.)

--

Politically, within the US, white people have had most of the power most of the time. We also make up a big chunk of the population. (This is starting to change in some areas, which has assholes scared shitless.) This means that other groups tend to band together to accomplish shared political goals. They’re minorities here, so they get lumped together.

A lot of Americans become used to seeing the world in terms of “white people” who are powerful oppressors and “people of color” who are oppressed minorities. They’re trying to be progressive and help people with less power, and that’s good, but it obviously becomes awkward when it’s over-applied to looking at, say, China.

--

Now... fandom...

I find that fandom, in general, has a bad habit of holding things to double standards: queer things must be Good Representation™ even when they’re not being produced for that purpose. Same for ethnic minorities or any other minority. US-influenced parts of fandom (which includes a lot of English-speaking fandom) tend to not be very good at accepting that things are just fantasy. This has gotten worse in recent years.

As fandom has gotten more mainstream here, general media criticism about better representation (both in terms of number of characters and in terms of how they’re portrayed) has turned into fanfic criticism (not enough fics about ship X, too many about ship Y, problematic tropes that should not be applied to ship X, etc.). I find this extremely misguided considering the smaller reach of fandom but, more importantly, the lack of barriers to entry. If you think my AO3 fic sucks, you can make an account and post other fic that will be just as findable. You don’t need money or industry connections or to pass any particular hurdle to get your work out there too.

People also (understandably) tend to be hypersensitive to anything that looks like a racist porn trope. My feeling is that many of these are general porn tropes and people are reaching. There are specific tropes where black guys are given a huge dick as part of showing that they’re animalistic and hypersexual, but big dicks are really common in porn in general. The latter doesn’t automatically mean you’re doing the former unless there are other elements present. A/B/O or dubcon doesn’t mean it’s this racist trope either, not unless certain cliched elements are present. OTOH, it’s not hard for a/b/o tropes to feel close to “animalistic guy is rapey”, so I can see why it often bothers people.

A huge, huge, huge proportion of wank is “all rape fantasies are bad” crap too, which muddies the waters. I think a lot of people use “it’s racist” as an easy way to force others to agree with their incorrect claims that dubcon, noncon, a/b/o, etc. are fundamentally bad. Many fans, especially white fans, feel like they don’t know enough to refute claims of racism, so they cave to such arguments even when they’re transparently disingenuous.

--

Not everyone here thinks this way. I know plenty of people offline, particularly a lot of nonwhite people, who think fandom discourse is idiotic and that the people “protecting” people or characters of color are far more racist than the people writing “bad” fic or shipping the wrong thing.

But in general, I’d say that the stuff above is why a lot of us see the world as white people in power vs. everyone else as oppressed victims, interracial relationships as fraught, and porn about them as suspect. Basically, it’s people trying to be more progressive and aware but sometimes causing more harm than good when those attempts go awry.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

It really bothers me that tumblr will shit on Christianity all day long but all other religions, especially Judism and Islam, are off limits. I'm from the middle east and literally no-one will listen to me when I try to tell them Islam isn't cute or kind. *sigh* I know the West is becoming less religious in general and that's encouraging, but I don't see many signs that they're learning more about the reality of Islam, let alone dealing with it. :( Anyway, thank you for running this blog.

It's a really weird phenomenon.

Did you ever watch the American talk show "The Late Show with David Letterman"? (Go with me here, I promise I'll make a point.) In particular, the opening. As the opening titles began, the announcer would say: "from New York, the greatest city in the world, it's The Late Show with David Letterman!" This is what American patriotism often looked like, sometimes acting like America invented freedom, and occasionally even claiming it being due to Xianity. This obnoxiousness is called exceptionalism. Essentially, "we are uniquely the best."

Just as narcissism consists of grandiose narcissism and vulnerable narcissism, so too does exceptionalism live at two extremes. And it’s just as obnoxious.

Countries like the US, UK, Canada, Germany, France, Australia, New Zealand, etc that have some form of secular liberal foundation have progressed far enough to be aware of and ashamed of much of their own history. However, history is to be remembered and learned from so that it's not repeated, not lived in. But there's a manifestation of exceptionalism that basically ignores all the strides that have been made, the battles fought and won, and behave like nothing has changed in 50, 100 or even 400 years. That theirs is the worst country. The most racist, the most sexist, the most dangerous, the most etc, etc, etc. Even though it's not. Not even close.

This is actually the same thing, but in a self-flagellating way; call it "vulnerable exceptionalism." A form of superiority complex of self-declaring ones own inferiority. Sort of like Xianity itself. "I'm nothing without god," for example, attesting to how wretched and sinful they are. You often see this through their accusation that non-believers are "arrogant" for not debasing themselves at the feet of this imaginary deity. It's performative arrogant humility.

The truth is, they're probably unlikely to be the best person or the worst person in the world. They're probably exceedingly average, but there’s nothing exceptional about that. Attesting to one's broken nature wins the approval of the Xian flock, and in the same way, attesting to the supposed depravity of a first world country wins approval in certain ideological circles. But it's similarly a form of humble brag. A race to the bottom, rather than to the top.

Mix into this a little Postcolonial Theory (which I won't deep dive into), and you've got yourself a nice big serving of cultural relativism. Basically, the notion that secular, liberal western countries have no real claim to being "better" than a theocratic dictatorship, because look at what they did 1000 years ago.

Except that they are better. In every measurable metric of human wellbeing: lifespan, access to health, freedom, education, accountability of the government, and so on. But you're not supposed to say this, because it would be imposing western values onto a different culture. (But I did say it, and I'm not walking it back.)

In her book, "Unveiled," Yasmine Mohammed talks about how her country threw her back to her abusive fundamentalist Islamic family. Because hanging her upside down and beating the soles of her feet for not memorizing and reciting the quran is just the way the culture works. This happened in Canada, by the way, in the name of "cultural sensitivity." As she points out, and rightfully remains angry about, this would never have happened to a blonde, white girl in a Xian household.

This relativism encourages people who live in free, liberal, secular countries, whose rights and responsibilities, their government's obligations and limitations, are enshrined in their constitutions and laws, to see themselves as sharing a common fate with those in closed, totalitarian, theistic countries, such as those under Islamic rule. it's supposedly cultural humility to think that maybe Sharia is just as valid a social approach as French secularism, for example.

So you end up with the navel-gazing of people living in free, democratic, secular societies preoccupied with imagining air conditioning, hiking, knitting, cycling or other trivialities are somehow racist or sexist, because these are just as important as whether women are arrested for removing their hijabs in Iran, or blasphemers sentenced to death in Pakistan, or Islam as a religion/political doctrine seeks to subjugate the entire world under it.

Except they're not. People in countries like Somalia, Syria, Pakistan, Iran and many others dream of either escaping to such free, western countries, or transforming their own into one of them, where secular, liberal values allow one the freedom to pursue one's own happiness.

They want to be able to tell their stories about what life is like in strongly Islamic countries - and to be heard. Because the plain truth of Islam needs to be spoken, or nothing will ever get better. This isn't even isolated to apostates either. Plenty of devout Muslims want to see islam undergo a Reformation similar to what Xianity went through hundreds of years ago, but silencing criticism to protect “religious sentiments” takes higher priority among the ideological elite.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/muslim-woman-activist-to_b_11761630

https://warsclerotic.com/2016/09/02/muslim-reformist-to-sally-kohn-stop-working-against-us/

No, free western countries might not be perfect paradises, but even where they fall down, they have the social machinery to be able to identify, address and resolve those problems. The Civil Rights Movement, Gay Pride among others, have been successful because of this machinery, not in spite of it. Liberalism isn't just a set of ethics, it's a way of resolving conflicts, not dissimilar to the scientific method. where current ideas are replaced with better ideas by making a reasoned case for change, by appealing fairness and to those Liberal ethics. And critics of Islam just want to have the same privilege of access to the Liberal machinery.

You’ll also notice there's usually some low-key racism or "noble savage" fetishization at play by Islam's non-Muslim defenders. To regard criticism of Islam as "racist" is itself racist, and invent language to shield it from valid scrutiny, in the name of signalling how virtuous and “inclusive” one is  - that’s sophistry and narcissism. This language has of course been adopted by Islamic zealots; they know the magic word that's supposed to make you feel fearful of being seen as a bigot (the same people have no fear of being called a “homophobe”). In effect, to hold up Muslim people as a human shield to protect Islam the idea.

And really, if you haven't been called an "Islamophobe" by a Defender of Islam - whether follower or mere apologist - within two posts of interaction, have you even been online lately?

I realize I've talked primarily about Islam here, mostly because I think it's most deserved, but also that I don't think Judaism is that "off limits." For reasons of Intersectionality - "white passing", which is deeply ironic considering Hitler's Aryan objectives; success in America; and the bizarre binary mathematics of Intersectionality - categorizing Jews as an "oppressor" class. There's a more thorough dive into that here. What this Critical Theory/Intersectionality mindset has done is embolden more antisemitism of late - and particularly in the current Middle East conflict - just as it has anti-Asian hate.

Which is not to say that you shouldn’t criticize Judaism, since you absolutely should, but I don’t think it’s as untouchable.

In closing, you may also be interested in the views of Sarah Haider, who founded Ex-Muslims of North America and has been frustrated by the same phenomenon. There are several interviews I can recommend: here, here, here, here and here. An excerpt from one:

“It feels like a betrayal,” she replies. “I’m still shocked and appalled by it. It’s difficult to move on. The betrayal of the left has really hurt us, because in principle these people should be on our side, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with us in our efforts to reform Islam and bring human and women’s rights to Islamic countries. But they’re barring the gate, telling us we’re ‘Islamophobic’ or spurring hatred toward Muslims or contributing to a hostile atmosphere for them. They even say we’re contributing to Western imperialism. This is nonsense and is appalling to us.”

[ngalu]

~On this episode of Ngalu rants~

I LOVE how a lot of put-downs for shit people like are always "tHe MajOrITy oF faNS arE (Insert further description) gUrlS".

Like- no. I FUCKING hate this copy-paste argument that's used in every fucking fandom I go to like it's a be-all-end-all statement when it doesn't mean shit.

First of all, there is nothing wrong with girls liking things. LET GIRLS LIKE THINGS. So, what if a certain piece of media has a fan base of mostly girls? Does a fan base with a majority of girls somehow make it invalid? Stupid? Not worth while? NO!

This put down is so fucking misogynistic with the implication that because something is mostly an interest of girls, it's somehow less valuable and worthwhile to interact with and enjoy, so anyone that is also interested is therefore stupid/obssessed for liking the same thing. (I see this SO often, and the people that say it are always so proud of themselves for their little 'gotcha moment' like they did something)

Second of all, straight people including straight girls are free to enjoy queer media and ships too. I know, ✨SHOCKING✨.

What also ticked me off about this redditor though is that, on top of their bullshit misogynistic argument, they called everyone else that might enjoy this ship outliers because every other demographic, that isn't a straight girl, enjoying queer stories and romances is impossible to comprehend. I would LOVE to see how they worked that out. I wanna see their PowerPoint presentation outlining every other demographic, that is not a straight girl, as an exception proving the rule SO bad.

Thirdly, gen z girls? That's so specific of a demographic that now I NEED to see that PowerPoint presentation (I'm assuming it has a pie chart, I love pie charts).

In all seriousness though, referring to gen z as teenagers at this point is ridiculous - the oldest of us is almost 30. The label cannot practically be used interchangeably in that way, when the oldest is (at time of writing) 27 and the youngest is 12 - that's way too big of an age gap to refer to an entire generation as "teenagers".

Furthermore, the targeted ridicule of teenage girls is SO FUCKING GROSS AND OLD. You can circle back to the first point for this one, but it's such a common cultural phenomenon to automatically hate anything young girls show interest in (whether that's music, movies, food, make up, and ships of fictional characters!) that you can base a whole discussion of its on it. And in fact, people HAVE - the number of articles that are out there describing this topic in detail is baffling and sad.

Fourthly, there's one more thing about the comment that I wanna talk about: "straight gen z girls who just want Will to get who he wants".

With how specific this comment is (and spoken with such confidence too) I want to assume that there is a specific person they had in mind when they wrote that. It's the only explanation I can think of.

Even if a Byler shipper did just want Byler to happen because they like Will and they want him to be happy with the boy he likes in the show, that's fine. Like- it doesn't hurt anyone, it doesn't really affect anyone except for one or two people that will get annoyed with that opinion, because that's just another way of enjoying a ship (it's really not that serious). But to project that on to an entire fandom is a bit much, I'm looking at you ClemandLee- dick for brains- fanatic.

Anyway, thanks for coming to my Ted talk *wiggle dances off stage*

......

Bonus rant:

Where the fuck in their asshole did they pull that statistic out of?? How the fuck did they collect the data to definitively say with full confidence that a majority of Byler shippers are "straight gen z girls who just want Will to get who he wants"? That is SO fucking specific like- how long did it take them to research that???

Did they have a survey? Questionnaires? Interviews? Did they set up a website or something so they could collect all this data? How the fuck are Byler shippers supposed to obssessed if that's somehow the case???

went to check out the st reddit 😭😭😭

umm WHAT?????

hey guys, are all of us bylers straight gen z girls???? AM I a straight gen z girl????? are most of us bylers little kids who are overly obsessed weirdos????

BREAKING NEWS: stranger things redditors can't fathom the fact that queer people like queer ships as well as representation and bylers can come in different ages and sexualities!!! 😱😱😱

[ashdumpsterpile]

I know you talk abou st*cky in the interracial ships stuff, but can we talk about st*ny? Iron husbands is literally right there, but I also always sees Rhodey as Tonys moral support only. And ik Tony is very shippable with most characters, but the fact his ship is Rhodey is one of the lowest ships in ao3 (ironstrange, winteriron and god forbid stark*r all had more fics in ao3).. It's pretty telling this side also has racism problems...

I'll go ahead and answer this here, but letting y'all know that I do have a marvel sideblog if you want to hit me up there (@themarvelarchives).

Hey, I'm going to ramble for a good minute.

So after I posted my very incoherent, controversial take on St*cky vs SamBucky, there were a ton of ppl who came onto anon saying that St*cky shippers were racist. I think I only answered a few, but y'all were pretty insistent on it. I personally have not observed that St*cky shippers are so I'm not calling anyone out on that side of the fandom for that.

I also did not call out anyone on this side of the fandom bc that's not what my meta was about. I think I mentioned maybe once or twice in the whole post that there was underlying racist in the fandom, but since you asked, we can talk about it here.

Covert Bigotry In Fandom Spaces.

To understand what's going on in the MCU, we have to first look at what I call "woke-queer" fandom.

So "Woke-Queer" Spaces is the phenomenon where certain fandom members like to call ppl out on their bigotry, while covertly harboring their own queerphobia/racism/etc. An example of this that we're all familiar with is TERFS and how they like to claim that they are progressive and woke, while also claiming that trans women are fake and trans men are sexist.

How this translates to fandom, however, is the hypocrisy that is cancellation and callout culture.

For example, Supernatural in particular is a fandom that likes to call out the writers on their homophobia and racism, and yet, somehow, the fandom is chalk full of homophobia and racism. If you want to read more about this, here is a truly excellent article from the perspective of a queer woman of color.

Moving on, I've also talked in a previous meta post, on the internalized acephobia that exploded in 2019 after Good Omens was released. Rather than reiterate everything I said in that post, I'll just leave it at this: the controversy in the Good Omens fandom can be summed up by the fact that queer audiences are claiming that Ineffable Husbands is the wrong kind of queer. The hypocrisy oozes off the screen, doesn't it?

A final way this viably translates to fandom, is in how the Doctor Who fandom evolved over time.

So Steven Moffat takes over as head writer and showrunner in 2010. It's a new series, a new Doctor, a new Tardis, and new branding. He steps up the action, changes the color grating, and raises the stakes. Women are sexier, the Doctor is smarter (and more of an asshole, but that's another meta post), and every companion comes with their own impossible mystery that makes them Special™.

Series 5-10 got tons of woke points for having lesbian characters, an episode where the Doctor is homoerotic with James Corden, and an underlying trans narrative with the Master's reincarnation. What a lot of people forget, however, is that his series was incredibly sexiest, incredibly lesbian/biphobic, and basically turned the Doctor into everyone's fantasy sex-object.

This, unfortunately, brought out the worst of the fandom. There was RTD Era vs Moffat Era wars exploding in certain corners, TenxRose shippers vs ElevenxRiver shippers.

What does this have to do with covert racism in fandom cultures though?

Hnnngng ok, so back in RTD era's we get Martha Jones, the Actual Best Companion On The Entire Show. Except for the fact, of course, that she is written to be in love with the doctor. She's a brilliant character--smart, sassy, flawed, funny, flirtatious--and her entire plotline is reduced down to a school-girl crush on a white man.

She doesn't do well with fans, they scrap her after one season.

We move on to Donna Noble (The Other Actual Best Companion On The Entire Show) and RTD's era ends with them scraping her too and regenerating David Tennant's Doctor.

It will be five more series (not seasons, SERIES) until Doctor Who will have another black companion--who gets extra points for being gay--only to fall victim to "bury your gays" at the end of the season (but not really bc no one stays dead on Doctor Who).

The fandom's reception of Martha Jones was historically bad. The comparisons to her predecessor, Rose Tyler, were rampant and everyone was finding a reason to hate her.

The fandom's reception to Bill Potts was also historically bad, as everyone was screaming that she was being written for more "woke points" and that they wanted Clara back.

Fandom has a historically bad reputation of being problematic and, I would argue, the majority of it has to do with these toxic undertones of bigotry that slip under the radar. "Woke-queer" spaces, as I call them, are these instances above where spaces that claim to be inclusive of gender/orientation/race are covertly bigoted.

Marvel and Cancelling

Now is an excellent time to talk about the MCU.

Anthony Mackie (Sam Wilson) has recently come under a lot of criticism from fandom members for shutting down shipper speculation.

"The idea of two guys being friends and loving each other in 2021 is a problem because of the exploitation of homosexuality. [...] something as pure and beautiful as homosexuality has been exploited by people who are trying to rationalize themselves."

I can't find the rest of the quote, but Mackie goes on further to say that it was important to him to portray "a sensitive, masculine figure" without insinuating that there was romance involved.

Woke culture lost it's shit. Everyone was suddenly claiming that Mackie was calling them exploitative for shipping a gay ship as a queer audience, which could not have been further from the case.

Mackie actually makes some very excellent points in that sensitivity is not gay/queer. Woke culture loves to rag on Toxic Masculinity, but the minute someone plays a character who is loving and sensitive with no queer narrative in mind, they are immediately canceled.

What Am I On About

Okay, let's actually address what your ask was about, Nonnie. You pointed out--rather truthfully--that it is unfair to call-out racism on one side of the fandom, while ignoring it on the other side.

Well, I've gone back through my St*cky vs. SamBucky analysis (which is incoherent at best, I apologize for that) and I see maybe once instance where I called out fandom members for being racist. Here's what I had to say about racism:

"[...] Iron Husbands is a rarepair, probably because it’s an interracial ship."

"[there is] nothing wrong with shipping two white men, but it does become a problem when you ignore/bash POC/interracial ships to the determinant of your own white ship."

And then there was the post you brought up where I addressed interracial ships in the fandom. That one is probably more relevant to this topic, to be honest, as I actually addressed fandom racism there. I assume that your reason for bringing up Stony is because it's a ship that is more relevant to my side of the fandom, HOWEVER, the reason I highlighted Stucky instead was because I was comparing the fact that they've both been around the same amount of time and are relationships that feature the protagonist and their best friend.

You brought up St*ny in the ask, however, so I'm going to talk about St*ny for a minute.

As someone who never has nor will ship St*ny, it never even occurred to me that some of the problem behind the Iron Husbands tag being so small is because everyone ships the white, boring ship. You brought up a very valid point, but because I was never in that part of the fandom, I can't really speak to any possible underlying racism there, besides what I've already said above.

I would be interested in hearing a St*ony shipper or ex-St*ony shippers thought on this, but sadly I don't know any. If you have any more thoughts regarding this, Nonnie, pls drop back into my inbox.

You do make some excellent points in this ask though, and I would like to talk about racism on my side of the fandom.

So back to Mackie and his Twitter cancellation. Notice that Disney made him address the rumors and not his co-star, Sebastian Stan. Anthony Mackie is put on blast and made to answer fan demands and receives backlash, while Sebastian Stan gets to fly under the rader. This is not, by the way, a criticism of Stan, but instead of the blatant racism Disney has been displaying over the past few years.

How this ties in with the rest of my post has to do with my "woke-queer" spaces bit. The outcry across the MCU fandom over Mackie was swift and unforgiving. He was cancelled on charges of homophobia and bigotry--all the while these same fans turn a blind eye to any queer interpretation of other interracial ships and discourse in their own fandom.

The racism that I'm speaking about, of course, is an almost passive racism. Of course if you don't ship a specific ship for reasons other than their race, it's perfectly fine. It's okay not to ship Iron Husbands or SamBucky or any other interracial fandom ships. However, the distinct lack of shippers in the fandom IS telling because there are people who would ship that exact ship if not for the fact that one of men is black.

I don't have much more to say about this except to thank you for bringing it up and for listening to my long rambling post.

(Feel free to bug me about Tony Stark, MCU ships, MCU Meta and anything you want to talk me about on this blog and @themarvelarchives.)

[sage-nebula]

So, the good news: Ghetsis was not redeemed, he isn’t going to have a relationship with N moving forward, and although N was shown to wish things could be different between them, ultimately the whole situation was treated with the seriousness and gravitas that it deserved and N never once forgot the abuse that Ghetsis put him through, nor was he at any point willing to just brush it aside. In that regard, I’m very glad for how Masters handled the situation. 

With that said, though, the writing in Masters made me realize something else about how child abuse stories are handled in Pokémon, and that something else is . . . not good. Namely, I’ve realized there is a significant difference between how child abuse stories in Pokémon are handled depending on whether the abusive parent is blood related to the child or not.

First and foremost, let’s get this out of the way: There is a social stigma in Japan against adoption. This isn’t to say that children never get adopted, but that culturally adoption is looked down upon in comparison to having biological children, and as a result there are only a few hundred adoptions each year in comparison to the thousands of kids living in orphanages. (Although this isn’t purely stigma, since in Japan the biological parents can still retain legal guardianship over their children in the orphanages and can therefore prevent them from being adopted by families as well. They don’t do this maliciously, but instead might think, “I will be able to care for my child later” even if that never comes to pass.) Additionally, I’ve read before that the stigma is why adopted children often don’t refer to their adopted parents as “mother” or “father” but I can’t find that source now, so take that with a grain of salt.

Anyway, the point of me saying all of that is: Japan has a stigma against adoption and Pokémon is a video game series created by Japanese people. Therefore, it stands to reason that Japanese cultural beliefs (such as the importance of blood family over adopted family) can make its way into the series, even if the series itself is a worldwide phenomenon that they know will absolutely stretch beyond Japan’s borders . . . and I think that’s what has happened here, intentionally or otherwise. Basically, whether an abusive parent in Pokémon is redeemed or not seems to have very little to do with the severity of the abuse (including that which is shown to the audience), but instead everything to do with whether their children are biologically related to them or not.

First, let’s take a look at the abusive parent that was redeemed, Lusamine. In Sun & Moon specifically Lusamine is not once shown being anything but abusive to her children. Lillie tells a story of how Lusamine was kind to her a couple times in the past (dancing in the rain, co-sleeping when Lillie was sick), but that falls in line for abusive parents. Abusive parents generally aren’t abusive 24/7; there’s a well-known cycle of abuse which contains a “honeymoon period” stage in which, typically after an apology and a promise to do better, the abuser treats the victim kindly, which usually results in the victim believing that the abuser really does love them and that whatever abuse comes later (and it always does come later) is in fact the victim’s fault on some level, for failing to keep things stable. Regardless, we know that not only did Lusamine abuse both Gladion and Lillie terribly in the past (to the point where Lillie has trauma surrounding even the clothes she wears and has trouble getting new ones), but we also see her verbally and emotionally abuse them on-screen, and then we see her attempt to murder Lillie during the climax. While Lusamine was retooled into being a well-intentioned extremist in Ultra Sun & Ultra Moon, we again see her verbally abuse her children on-screen, to the point where when Hau says that Lusamine really isn’t a bad person after all, we see Gladion grimacing in the background. All told, we see Lusamine emotionally, verbally, and (with her attempted murder in SM) physically abuse her children on-screen, and yet she is still forgiven by them pretty much immediately, redeemed, and treated as if they’re a happy family with just a few unfortunate bumps in their history. I’ll note here, for anyone who isn’t already aware, that Lusamine is Gladion and Lillie’s biological mother, and this is obvious by how similar they all look even if you weren’t told repeatedly.

Now let’s look at the abusive parent that is not redeemed, Ghetsis. In the first set of Unova games, Black & White, most of Ghetsis’ abuse of N happens off-screen and isn’t revealed until the climax. Ghetsis had N raised in a castle underground where he was cut off from society. He was brought pokémon that had been abused so that he could be manipulated into thinking that all humans abused pokémon and that pokémon needed to be liberated therefore. Because Ghetsis needed N to act as King of Team Plasma and control the legendary dragon, Ghetsis didn’t directly abuse N during this time. Instead, he neglected him (N was primarily raised by his sisters, Concordia and Anthea), and psychologically abused him via manipulative lies about what the rest of the world was like. It isn’t until the climax when N has decided to disband Team Plasma and listen to what the player has to say that Ghetsis brings out the verbal abuse, calling N “a freak without a human heart” and revealing that he was only ever using N all along. In the sequel games, Ghetsis is similarly openly hostile to N again, showing that he has no intentions whatsoever of being a good father to him. He’s pretty terrible to him, even if we didn’t see very much of it (particularly in comparison to what we saw with the Aether family, whose abuse was also much more realistic than N’s situation), and pretty much no one would want him to be redeemed. But also it’s important to note that N and Ghetsis, despite having the same hair color, are for whatever reason NOT biologically related. 

And this is hammered home time . . . and time . . . and time again, particularly in this Masters event.

Now, I think most of us would agree that it would be hard to find a woman who would want to procreate with Ghetsis. Granted, Ghetsis isn’t the type of person who would care about consent, but I do think it’s reasonable to assume that Game Freak probably wanted to avoid those thoughts, even though it could have been very easily solved by having a female Sage who was also Ghetsis’ baby mama / wife (similar to how Ariana, one of Giovanni’s executives, is very obviously Silver’s mother). So I mean, from a taste standpoint, I can see why they wanted to go the adoption route with Ghetsis, even though they still made him and N have green hair despite not being biologically related for some reason.

But.

I still think it’s noticeable that they have the irredeemable abusive parent be the one who both had the least amount of on-screen abuse (and also the least realistic abuse) and also be the adopted parent, versus the one they bent themselves into pretzel shapes to redeem be the one with the most on-screen abuse (and most realistic abuse) who also happened to be the biological parent. The message that sends, to me, is that it doesn’t matter how badly you abuse your children in this world so long as you are their biological parent. In the end, you will be forgiven and they are beholden to you as family. Versus if you’re an adoptive parent . . . well, you were never as important anyway, so. I mean, why else would Lillie leave her loving adoptive parents of Kukui and Burnet to go back to her abusive mother in Sun & Moon? Clearly the blood ties were just that much more important. (Granted, Kukui and Burnet hadn’t officially adopted her, but they as good as. I’ll never stop being infuriated by that ending.)

 This is, to a lesser extent, even shown with Giovanni and Silver’s situation. Giovanni was, to our knowledge, never actually abusive toward Silver; in the one conversation we see them have in HeartGold & SoulSilver, Silver’s main issue is that he doesn’t understand why Giovanni is disbanding Team Rocket after losing to Red, and also he doesn’t get why Giovanni needs so many underlings to begin with. He thinks Giovanni is weak, and Giovanni just tells him that he’s wrong without really bothering to explain things. At most, Giovanni is aloof and distant with Silver, which makes Silver angry, but Silver’s bigger issue is with Team Rocket as a whole. Giovanni’s definitely not a good father, but he’s not an abusive parent on par with Lusamine or Ghetsis from what we’ve been shown, and the implication is there that they could potentially repair their relationship in the future. Even in this event, the tension between them wasn’t bad, just complicated.

But . . . they’re also biologically related. Silver is Giovanni’s son, we’ve been told this a million times, and it’s very obvious that Ariana is his mother. They’re biologically related. And so, even though Giovanni is routinely touted as one of Pokémon’s most fearsome villains, Silver will never actually cut him off completely / be able to do that because Giovanni is his biological father. The fact that Team Rocket is based on yakuza probably complicates things even further there, but all the same. If Silver had been adopted by Giovanni, I’m pretty positive that Giovanni wouldn’t care / Silver would cut him off entirely. It wouldn’t be seen as a “real” family.

And this all bothers me, because not only was my biological mother abusive, but my stepmother was the only one who treated me as a mother should treat her child. Similarly, my biological sister was complicit and even participated in the abuse I suffered as a child, but my stepbrother whom I’ve known practically my whole life is the sibling I’d ride or die with. To me, biological ties mean jack shit. Family doesn’t begin or end with blood; to treat non-blood relations as lesser is something that will never fail to raise my hackles. So to see it handled this way in one of my favorite franchises of all time . . . yeah, it’s more than a little upsetting. I understand why it’s happening, I’m fully aware of the cultural context that this series is being written in, but that doesn’t mean that I have to like it, because I don’t.

And before anyone gets it twisted:

Both Lusamine and Ghetsis can rot in hell, NEITHER should have been redeemed. This is NOT me complaining about Ghetsis being treated as the piece of shit he is, but rather my anger at the fact that Lusamine got a pass because she birthed the children she abused, and Masters making that abundantly clear by having N and Ghetsis state in every single chapter of this event that they weren’t blood related. 

But anyway, it’s nearly 4am, and I need sleep. I can continue being angry about Pokémon’s handling of abusive parents at a later date.

[impossiblelibrary]

Today's rant brought to you by: Queer Eye Japan, can we all just try to be as kind as they try to be?

After watching the Queer Eye Japan super short season, I wanted to google to see the overall reaction to the show, make sure that my western eyes were correct in seeing the care that was given to the culture. Were cultural taboos, other than being outwardly gay, crossed? So I find this article in the top results and other than the perspective, why tho? Tokyoesque.com had an article with a higher reading level, with surface level appreciation but at least better written.

I can't get over this hate article though. Unfounded, dumb, wrong and incorrect. Do not go forward unless you like that blistering kind of anger from me.

But the reasons just get weaker as the article extends: "Hurts the country it set out to save?" Looking for white savior much? They did not go to save Japan, they gave some free shit to like 4-5 people, think smaller.

Their culture guide wasn't gay enough.

You want to suggest any lgbt insta models or celebrities, use your platform to raises some up?

"There is a growing sexless culture in Japan for married and unmarried people, and it is perilous watching Queer Eye present this without any context behind what is driving this behavior."

Sexiness is what the fab 5 embrace, unfortunately and it was probably discussed behind the scenes of how much talking about sex was allowed or polite and the conversation of not having sex is closer to the tip of the tongue rather than the feeling of sexiness. The West is not the ones blasting that information. It is across multiple Japanese printed newspapers and online stories by now and the "context" is still being discussed and debated amongst Japanese. So I don't think any outsiders should be weighing in or "explaining" this phenomenon. We can repeat what we have been told but guessing at the reasons is not our place. The reasons illustrated by the author of the article seem lacking, a take but not the only one, but who am I to speak on that being in a sexual relationship with someone who pulls from that culture?

Kiko begins to lecture Yoko-san on how she “threw away her womanhood” (referring to a Japanese idiom, onna wo suteru) by going makeup-free and wearing drab, shapeless clothes.

The mistranslation by the subtitles fixed by this author was necessary information. But Kiko didn't lecture her on it, it was brought up by Yoko before any of them arrived, that was her theme, that was what she had decided to focus on. Meanwhile, if you watched Jonathan, he understood there was no time to spend on makeup and skincare so provided her a one instrument, 3 points of color on the skin to feel prettier. That and the entire episode being the 5 treating her like a woman on a date, not trying to hook her up, which is what they did in American eps.

"In teaching a Japanese woman, who already struggles to find time for herself, how to make an English recipe, Antoni is making great TV and nothing more."

So Antoni shouldn't have taught her apple pie because it's too exotic for a Japanese woman. (Can you smell the sexism?)

He didn't make an apple pie, altho Yoko did mention her mother made that for her when she was a kid. He made an apple tartine after going to a Japanese bakery who makes that all the time. Then highlighted the apples came from Fuji in true Japanese media fashion. Honey, American television doesn't usually highlight where the ingredients come from. A Japanese producer told him to do that. So all worries handled within the same ep. She got Japanese ingredients, had the recipe shown to her and then made it for her friends in her own house. Did the author actually watch this show or nah?

"beaten over the head with his western self-help logic. “You have to live for yourself,” he says."

The style of build up the 5 went for was confrontational but in a "I'm fighting for you" way. It's hard to describe, but the best I can say is, a person has multiple voices in their head, from parents, siblings, society, and maybe themselves. By being loud and obnoxious, American staples right there, they are adding one more voice. You deserve this, you are amazing, you are worth it. I know this is against most Japanese cultural modesty, but maybe it shouldn't be.

Sarcasm lies ahead:

Apparently: mispronunciation is microaggressions, not just someone who had a sucky school system. Yea okay, They're laughing at the language not at how stumbling these monolinguals are with visiting another country. Mmhm. Japanese don't say I love you and don't touch and that should stay that way instead of maybe, once in awhile, feeling like they can hug. Yeah, let's just ignore Yoko's break down that she had never hugged her lifelong friend after hugging strangers multiple times. Maid cafes are never sexualized in Japan ever, just don't go down that one street in Akihabara where the men are led off by the hand sheepishly blushing. Gag me. And Japanese men love to cry in front of their wives and would never break down once the wife leaves. I have never seen a Japanese movie showcase that move. Grr.

"I identify as many cultures."

So you're a Japanese man when it's convenient for you to get an article published? Are you nationally Japanese or just ethnically or culturally?

Homeland is an inherently racist word?

"After the Bush administration created the Department of Homeland Security after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, a Republican consultant and speechwriter Peggy Noonan urged, “the name Homeland Security grates on a lot of people, understandably. Homeland isn’t really an American word, it’s not something we used to say or say now.”

Yes, let's use a Washington Post article rather than a etymology professor. Yes, the google search results increased after 2001 Homeland Security was used but the word has been around since the 1660s and I've read multiple turn of the century lit on white people returning to their homeland, i.e. the town off the coast they were born in.

"But" is not disagreeing. I think the repeated offender for the author is the not acknowledging the makeover-ees feelings. But, that is how LGBT have decided to deal with the inner voices that invade from society. They are just that, not our own, they are the influence of society, and we can choose, we have to choose, to be influenced by someone, anyone else.

Karamo can't speak about being black when an Asian is speaking about being Asian, even though the Asian gay man was feeling alone. It's called relating bitches, and I'm done with people saying that is redirecting the conversation, it's extending the conversation. That's how we talk, the spotlight is shared, especially when someone's about to cry and doesn't want to be seen as crying, time to turn the spotlight.

The gay monk wasn't good enough, you should have invited the gay politician.

Yeah, causes I'm sure a politician has all the time in the world for a quick stint and cry. They picked a Japanese monk who travels to NY because they had a guest who travels to the West too. Did you want him to stop traveling back and forth? Did you want a pure, ethnic and cultural Japanese gay man who has no ties to the west to talk to this Western educated young man? Seriously?

This is just not how it works in Japan.

Being in a multi-cultural marriage between two rebels, discussions on facets of culture are plenty in my household. Culture should be respected enough to be considered but not held on a pedestal like we should never adjust or throw some things out. LGBT being quiet and private for instance. "Being seen" was Jonathan's advice, and a good one especially for a Japanese gay man that was called feminine since he was a kid. Some gay men can hide, but as Jonathan said, he couldn't hide what he was, he couldn't hide this. So fuck it. Don't hide. It's actually more dangerous for a feminine man to come off as anxious rather than gay and proud. It makes you more of a target if they think you won't fight back. Proud means, Imma throw hands too, bitch.

This is also from the civil rights playbook going back to Black America: never hold a protest or a fight without the cameras, without being seen. LGBT have found the more seen they are, in media, in the streets, the better off we are. When LGBT Americans were being "private" about our lifestyles, we died, a la 1980s. They won't care if you start dying off if they never saw you to begin with.

And hence why I think the author's real anger is from these 5 being seen dancing flamboyantly in Shibuya, in Harajuku, afforded the privilege of doing this safely because of their tourist status, cameras and very low violence rate in Tokyo, loud and obnoxiously. Honestly, they wouldn't have been invited or nominated if they didn't want that brash American-ness coming into their home, just for a taste, at least.

Here's my real anger, my own jealousy: Japan's queer community currently does not have marriage or adoption rights. US does, so we have progressed further. But we are also not that many years from being tied to cow fences with barbed wire, beaten with baseball bats and left for dead overnight. If things are so bad over there, maybe take a few pages from the civil right playbook we took so much time to perfect and produced by the Black Americans who fought first. But so far, I only hear loss of jobs and marriages, which we still have here too. Stop trying to divide us, we are one community, LGBT around the world and we are here to try to help. Take it or leave it, it's not like we're going to go organize your own Pride parade for you.

Rant over? I guess. Is this important enough to be put in the google results along with his. Hell no, anyone with half a mind can see he's reaching more than half the time. And any argument about: this wasn't covered! There are a shit ton of conversations that are not covered in the 45 min they have. They are not a civil rights show, it's a makeover show, doing their best in that direction anyway. Know what it is.

Next blog post, what research I would guess was happening behind the scenes for each of the 5? I'm pretty sure I saw Jonathan doing Japanese style makeup there...

[grison-in-space]

This is a nice idea and aligns neatly with Tumblr's pop-left notion that everything crappy in the world is down to capitalism, but if you understand the history of autism as a pop culture phenomenon as well as a diagnosis the problems quickly become apparent.

You have to keep in mind, in the 1990s and 2000s when the public started becoming aware of what was then called high functioning autism or Asperger's, it starts thinking about autistic people as people who might be in their communities and what those people look like. You repeatedly see autism discussed (in men) as associated with some very specific interests, almost without exception. And the first of this stereotyped range of weird fixations? It's math, especially but not exclusively applied math.

I was a pediatric diagnosis. I spent huge swathes of the years between twelve and fourteen happily reading about the boundaries of the categories that contained me: ADHD, as I rather vaguely knew, but also this new Asperger's Syndrome thing that was being championed as both the pathologization and veneration of the new "geek chic" of the day.

Kid, back in MY day, everyone was uncertain and tentative about what the boundaries of stuff you could call a stereotyped interest were, and how much math you had to incorporate for it to count anyway. Back when I was diagnosed, almost no one would formally admit that autistics could fixate on complex systems that applied mathematics any further than accounting or physics.

This happened along with, fun fact, an increase in esteem for expertise in mathematics, because these decades were the rise of the personal computer. Autism was seen as the "dark side" of increased status and salaries for computer programmers, a potentially necessary evil of this increasingly precious, valuable piece of society that had always been shoved into a corner and jeered at.

Fuck I feel old tonight. Tell me y'all at least know about Jim Sinclair, one of the great heroes of my life? Probably yours, too, if you're reading this. Or has anyone written a solid autism community history I can direct folks to?

I bounced off Neurotribes in 2025 because, well, I was 25 and talking about it meant listening to people spout out about stuff I had personally learned at 15 and felt vaguely uncomfortable acknowledging in polite conversation, and what was worse is that they often had... dubious understandings of the thing. Or thought vaccines were involved (for fuck's sake!). It was just easier never ever to go there.

Did someone get farther, does it get into that at all? Or has anyone else written a good primer on the history of autistic community? What about Eric Garcia, I was impressed by his book a few years back... ah, shit, I'm going to need to get up to date again.

I am an animal researcher, dammit! I have to figure out what I think is happening with leptin!

honestly so much of the way we conceptualize autistic special interests is predicated on there not being anyone who shares them with us? and like. have you met humans. have you talked to any autistics. because lots of them are pretty interesting actually! and autistic people are often pretty good at infecting you with their interests so that you share them too even if you're not as motivated to fixate happily on them for their own sakes!

huge whorls of autistic-generated human communities exist, and people who aren't used to autistic people never seem to realize that Yes Those Are Also Autistics, often because people are used to autistic special interests occupying some very limited contexts like Computers because Computers were a big new societal innovation and community spinning up right when people also started thinking about autism as a Distinction Among Humans. Also Pokemon. And the Internet. Nineties kids know what I mean, eh?

anyway here are some heavily autistic communities that allistic people never seem to realize tend to concentrate autistics and be driven by them:

every non-commercial domestic animal fancy ever, including dog, cat, pigeon, chicken, and horse people; also includes a fair chunk of the commercial kinds but there are slightly less of these

fandom of any kind (for some reason--it's misogyny--no one seems to realize that this also applies to female-slanted forms of fandom focused on storytelling and modification as well as male-slanted ones that involve information curation)

religion. especially any kind that involves any kind of organization--less the charismatic ones that involve manipulating other people, more the kind that draw people interested in the way that religion works. less/more is not all/none.

kink and sexuality generally and also gender. we think a lot. it's a problem. and we get snagged on stuff. plus sensory shit ties into everything. just saying. e v e r y t h i n g.

academia. look we get. we get interested in things. if you get interested enough in things people call you an expert and sometimes they give you money. money is nice. it lets you buy more objects of special interest.

acting. we wear masks all the fucking time and we get caught up in it. which makes you think about structure, eh?

comedy. ditto.

building shit. admittedly the allistics have largely noticed that engineers concentrate us by now but it has taken a surprisingly long time to realize that this also applies to other, older crafts.

fibercrafts and textiles. what about "we like textures and also figuring out how things work" is a surprise to you. also math. again the answer to how the allistics keep failing to notice this one is "there's lots of ladies in there."

I bet I'm missing plenty that I'm just not thinking of but my god, man, look at how many of these things touch us! look at how they shape our understanding of one another and ourselves! how cool is that