#make them indefensible yknow

[hedonicghost]

were going to crash obm until you all understand how writing characters works again

[obstinaterixatrix]

I’m quarantining this separately because I want to keep personal feelings and reactions separate from the info posts I’m rb’ing, and I’m not looking for input, but man. the destruction of palestine is indefensible (has always been) and it’s so frustrating to see people just fall for (or just perpetuate) propaganda for genocide. and in general, like, iraq? vietnam? warmongering is basically the same cycle of the same bullshit driven by the same motives, profit/power/paranoia. the second you stop engaging in hypotheticals and engage in the facts of the situation, there are no ambiguities or grey areas in mass death.

it’s also frustrating to see people outside of the conflict engage with it by making it about their own feelings to an overwhelming degree. I think grief is natural and compassion needs to be centered, anger is understandable, but folks on the outside come across as self-centered when their anger is based on their own grudges. it’s like making a situation personal that’s not yours to take, yknow. It dilutes the conflict.

Personal feelings aside, I don’t think trying to shame or attack other people is productive, it’s a distraction from productive work or conversation. it’s a matter of stonewalling people who won’t change their minds and making your own stance clear. it’s a matter of providing information and resources to people who have the capacity for understanding. it’s a matter of donating to trustworthy organizations when relevant and participating in collective action where possible. it’s a matter of having a stance that cannot be diluted. it’s just so pointless to argue in good faith with people who aren’t willing to engage in a good faith conversation. like I’m not saying the people who aren’t taking a solid stance in support of palestine don’t matter, but the individuals don’t matter to me, they’re operating in their own capacity and that’s largely irrelevant. (and in some cases, it’s understandable why some people might not have the capacity to engage.) what’s relevant is putting as much pressure on the people in power as possible. and pathos is important in terms of the pathos that needs to be felt for palestine, but pathos is useless rhetoric against an oppressive power. pathos is for connecting allies, when it comes to oppressive powers it’s about cornering them. anyone else’s feelings are their own to deal with. outside of those personal feelings, engage with reality or get out of the way. anyway, that’s all the feelings I want to quarantine.

[selchwife]

this is maybe not the blog to have this little bitchfest on but here we go. because i love bitching and am a hater.

i do get angry pretty often that nuanced conversations about things like abuse in fiction as a reflection of and dialogue with the society in which said fiction is created and how certain common narratives can genuinely influence people's thinking and how they interact with other people in subtle ways and how to create art as ethically as possible given all that have been like. kind of subsumed under this really simplistic shipcourse debate where i think both "sides" have, to a degree, kind of lost the plot (in that i think vocally profiction people are generally really noxious and horrible and morally indefensible, and antishippers who identify strongly with that label and who get really invested in Doing Discourse frequently stoop to the level proshippers often dwell at and fail to make actual cogent points, NOT in that i'm neutral or something obvs).

because the reality is that there is a deep and wide and vast can of worms opened when the base discussion is like, "what is and isn't okay to write and what should the consequences be for people who do write something that isn't okay?" because i think the reality is there are a myriad of positions to take in relation to those questions between the two extremes of "being offensive is COOL, actually," and "no one should ever write anything." like, an entire world of nuance that gets lost there. especially because the whole hashtag Debate is confined to the sphere of people's fucking dumb ass fanfiction. i don't think fic has no literary merit or something but it's so deeply entrenched in the realm of arguing over shit that largely is like. i don't know. i don't want to be insulting to fic but having read so much of it it astounds me that so many people argue on the side of like "but the ARTISTIC MERIT!!!! of these depictions!" and then you read some piece of Problematique Erotica with about as much Artistic Merit as the back of a box of cereal and you just have to stare out your window and wonder about the general state of intellectual discourse

anyway of course you guys already know this but i think in evaluating whether or not a depiction of a taboo subject like abuse is valuable one has to figure out what it is that the narrative is ultimately communicating first and how that message, like, idk gels with social discourses that already exist about the subject. this is why i tend to be more sharply critical of these elements in fanfiction; typically i feel like the only message is like "what if there was an excuse for this behavior/what if it was desirable" because it's, you know, erotica, or it's poorly-done Dark Romance, or whatever, and then there's a whole further debate to be had about like "well if it's just kink etc and clearly labelled as such does that actually feed into the dominant social narratives you're complaining about" but generally i think like, just the sheer volume of this stuff portrayed in a positive light is kind of concerning and there needs to be some kind of wider analysis of like, how that potentially perpetuates and is certainly perpetuated by external elements like rape culture or a society that largely has a lot of discomfort with actually criticizing behaviors it outwardly condemns when those with power and social capital are the ones doing the abusing.

but like i said, yknow, that's all complicated shit and i think your average like ~problematique darkfic~ writer has not really attempted to wrestle with any of those points in relation to their own work. or even cares about them or finds them valuable questions. it's really readily apparent too when people from this general "camp" are like "but what about when people like hannibal from tv show? he ate people???" like, as if there's the same sort of cultural defense of cannibalism as there is of fucking rape that makes idealized depictions of rape dangerous. like, get real.

also ive bitched about this on my personal but 90% of people who are not incest survivors like just in general have not even the barest understanding of what is actually objectionable about incest, so i don't tolerate its incursion into fandom shit basically at all. not to mention that debates about it tend to be massively offensive toward actual survivors on both sides (protip: try not to rely on arguments about how it's 'gross,' it's really fucking stigmatizing to hear repeatedly that abuse you have endured is primarily objectionable because other people think it's yucky rather than because it causes extreme harm physically and emotionally).

anyway tl;dr i am just really tired of people being dumb and knee-jerk in their endless quest to find justifications for being just as utterly offensive and vocally reprehensible as possible without any criticism or repercussions and how said desperation has really watered down any useful dialogues that could be had about fiction and its impacts on survivors of abuse in favor of, like, having to anticipate utterly inane bad-faith arguments from people who do not give a shit about anything but their own sense of being pleasurably naughty and transgressive. like the majority of proship arguments have all the intellectual honesty and depth of "but i WANT to stick my hand in the cookie jar!" to me.

[themostrandomfandom]

hello! I don't know if you're still on the blog or will be in some time, but I still have to at least try. I just had my rewatch of glee for the first time in 4 years, and it woke some buried feelings up again lmao. One of the things i most strongly feel for is Britt's class president run. I know she would've done more things during it, yknow? Like she prepared for the position and had a solid plan for it. I really feel like they wasted her potential in s3. Do you think you would rewrite it?

Hey, @randomizepersonality!

Sorry it’s taken me so long to reply to you. Limited internet these days.

I, too, am one who is completely disappointed by Brittany’s S3 storyline and how the writers absolutely dropped the ball when it came to her class presidency. 

Negativity about Glee writing under the cut.

______

In episode 3x02, the writers clearly establish that Brittany’s interest in the class presidency isn’t a lark or something she is doing just for the hell of it. The platform she pushes for Kurt is anti-bullying, pro-inclusion—and she has a dog in the fight, because she wants herself, Santana, Kurt, and all the other LGBTQ kids at the school(plus anyone else who qualifies as “different”) to feel safe being themselves. 

Baby Girl has a clear, focused goal, and she feels it is important for her to achieve that goal. As she tells Kurt, “What’s wrong with [being gay]? Look: Ninety-nine percent of the kids at this school are either freaks or closet freaks. The captain of the football squad? He gets the job, but he doesn’t represent the people. That’s why we need a unicorn.” She isn’t just talking out of her ass or viewing the presidency as a way to boost Kurt’s (or her own) popularity. She actually wants to accomplish something.

That’s why when Kurt declines to run on her “Project Unicorn” platform, she picks up the banner herself, proudly declaring, “I’m also a unicorn.” The values she’s supporting are ones that are near and dear to her heart, as she knows from personal experience (particularly in regards to her relationship with Santana and Santana’s fears about coming out) how vital it is for kids to feel comfortable in their own skin and how damaging it is when they don’t.

Honestly, what she’s talking about is an extension of the things she both learned for herself and taught to Santana during the Back Six of S2. She’s talking about “embracing all the awesomeness” that one is, promoting acceptance, and spreading love because love makes everything possible. It’s all big time stuff, and even though she’s couching it in unicorn metaphors and glitter, she is serious about what she wants to do.

—which is why it’s so fucking unbelievable that she would completely slack off from that position the second she won the election.

I mean, seriously, the Glee writers, you’re telling me that at the exact time when she and her girlfriend are facing the reprecussions of a vicious public outing, being bullied in the hallways for showing any sort of affection to each other, having to deal with pressure not only coming from their fellow students but even from members of the faculty and administration—I’m looking at you, Will and Figgins—facing up to the Finn Hudsons and Josh Colemans of the world, Brittany would just fuck right off and fail to enact any of the policies or programs she had clearly thought about before? You’re saying that she wouldn’t try to use her power and popularity to try to improve the situation?

Bullshit.

—and especially “bullshit” to then try to make a joke out of her failure, as they do later in the season, when she tells Figgins, “Okay. I now realize I wasted an entire year belaboring the nuances of my fluid teen sexuality, and getting caught up in Lord Tubbington’s Ponzi schemes, and then for a while, I stopped talking, but I don’t want my presidency to be the last one at McKinley! I don’t want that to be my legacy.”

There’s no excuse for them wasting this storyline.

Ideally, they should have allowed her to succeed in what she was trying to do. She could have hosted an anti-bullying rally and brought in Holly Holliday to sing to the student body about how it’s okay to be gay. She could have used her own coolness to shift paradigms, because, after all, she is both the senior class president and most popular girl in school AND a fabulous, bisexual unicorn. She could have organized a “kiss-in” in protest against Figgins’s homophobic PDA policies. 

I mean, really, with her creativity and zany genius, the writers could have absolutely gone wild and had her do any number of things to make her world a better place.

Even if they were dead set on having her fail, then they at least could have actually showed her failing—giving her a storyline where balancing academics, extracurriculars, and dealing with the fallout of being outed becomes too much for her to handle, and her ambitions for the class presidency fall by the wayside; letting Kurt confront her about wasting the opportunity she won over him; having her break down and admit that maybe the problem she took on was too big for her to tackle herself and that the world is a worse place than she initially thought; allowing her to display the same kind of depth and humanity that she was afforded in S2.

But instead they muted her for half a season and pushed her into the background at a time when she should have been getting foreground attention, and then they tried to pass off their act of forgetting about Brittany as Brittany forgetting to do anything herself.

That Brittany wasn’t allowed to speak throughout Santana’s outing arc was an indefensible narrative choice. That the writers waited until the very end of the season to come out of nowhere and say, “Guess what? Brittany failed at everything, and y’all should just laugh about it!” was meanspirited and unfunny. Her whole S3 storyline was an exercise in bad writing. TPTB laid narrative threads for her at the beginning of the season but then didn’t weave them into anything. They wasted all of her potential. 

So, yeah, all of this going-on is to say that I would absolutely rewrite Brittany’s S3 storyline if given the chance. 

I mean, in the Mouseverse, S3 is where I diverge from canon, and there’s a reason for that.

Anyway, thanks for the question! I’m right there with you.

[godzillas]

I feel bad for liking D:BH. First because David Cage is a piece of walkong crap and the fact that I feel that it could have been better. I love the characters, and the way the game works but I feel bad for liking it as much as I do. Is that normal?

this is guy of a big boy question and i’ve been sitting on it for a hot minute, mulling over it, and i have a few things to say

this ask is either one of two things. 1) you’re someone who is probably young and/or white who is still trying to figure things out and is, yknow learning and trying to seek some sort of direction on this issue and learn from it or 2) you’re still probably someone who is young and/or white and you want my validation, approval, and comfort for something you enjoy despite all thats wrong with it. and like, i’m just straight up not gonna do that. i won’t hold your hand and tell you it’s ok to like the racist game fgjkfkjgfd

either way, i’m just some fucko on the internet. depending on my opinion for direction on this is ill advised. but i’ll tell you what i think. i think at this point the game is indefensible. even if you love these characters, there’s no ignoring everything harmful about them. i’m a pretty big supporter of the idea that you can enjoy something critically if it’s not the best thing in the world, but this game just. the bad outweigh the good in every single regard.

so here’s what i’ll say to you. the best thing you can do about something you really love despite knowing its flaws is try to separate the characters from its source material the best you can. this is a game where its particularly hard to do that, but i think it’s literally way you can enjoy it. take this shitty man’s writing and make it your own, make it better. i think That’s normal. comic fans do it all the time because theres some really, really shitty writers in both dc and marvel.

but again. that’s just my opinion. especially as someone who has 0 attachment to the game to begin with. in the end, you do you, who am i to dictate how you should think, but like. there are a lot better games in this format that you could be interested in, like oxenfree or even fucking. life is strange (which i dont particularly enjoy but its Better Than This)