#miss me with that self hating fatphobic bullshit

[terrainofheartfelt]

I just glimpsed the lockscreen of a girl on the train and it literally just says “NOTHING TASTES AS GOOD AS SKINNY FEELS” and I am suddenly reminded that I live in a very different dimension of thought than other people

[hareofhrair]

While I'm yelling about House MD--

I see in the notes of my House posts sometimes people being like "ooh, maybe I should watch that" and I always kind of wince and want to grab them like, yeah, please do, but also watch out. There's a reason we call it hate crimes md, and it's not just because of the queerbaiting.

So the thing about House is... It began airing in 2004. The 2000's were, for those of you who missed them, an... interesting time for what was then still called "political correctness." And these times were heralded by a certain Type of Guy, with a certain type of Edgy Humor. In pushing back against the admittedly very white liberal language policing of the PC movement, his goal was to be as offensive as possible, to every demographic possible. For those that had thought it through enough to justify this behavior, the claim was an intent to shake things up and force people to confront their unspoken biases and have hard conversations. The catch phrase was "I'm not racist, I hate everybody equally." These were your Jeff Dunhams, your Dane Cooks...

(For my part, I think it was, at it's heart, white guys attempting to parrot the marginalized groups demanding radical acceptance? A gay person saying "yeah I'm a faggot, what's it to you?" A disabled person saying "yeah I'm crippled, fight me about it. Call me a person with special needs again and I'll break your kneecaps with my cane." They picked up on the "we'd rather be called a slur than this avoidant, self righteous, language policing bullshit" and came away with "so I should call everyone slurs, got it.")

Enter House MD.

The tagline of the show is "Everybody Lies," and it's a very consistent theme throughout. The thesis of the show is that our society, with its shame and repression and bias, is incapable of real honesty. And approaching problems with soft, non confrontational language that talks around the issue instead of dealing with it only makes this worse.

So naturally, House is one of Those Guys.

I doubt there is a single episode in which he does not at some point, say a slur. When Foreman (the only black character and, until Kutner and Park, the only non white major character) is in the same scene with House, you can be absolutely certain he is going to say something racist, while staring at Foreman with a shit eating grin, daring him to make a fuss about it so he can monologue about how Affirmative Action is actually condescending to black people.

It would be one thing if this were strictly a character choice, something that was specifically wrong with House the person. Unfortunately, even when House is not involved the show itself is still, just, blindingly racist, all the time. Any time the patient isn't white, it's a horror show. Racist caricatures as far as the eye can see. It's also intermittently sexist, intersexist, nauseatingly fatphobic, and while it generally does better with disability than most any other show of the time, it is still shockingly ableist at times given the main character is, himself, physically disabled, and implied to be autistic as well.

What makes it worse is that they set House up as someone who wants to deflate people's egos and make them confront their biases ect, and then almost never puts him in a position where he's punching up. There's even a specific episode where he's treating a conservative campaign manager who released an insanely racist anti-migrant political ad, and his racism just doesn't get brought up. The ugly truth about himself he's forced to confront is that he's gay, and the man he's in love with and the people he surrounds himself with are, well. Conservatives.

All of this is not to say you shouldn't watch House or that House is a bad show. It's just very much a show from a very specific and unfortunate moment in the recent history of the ongoing battle for equality. The worst part is, its heart is in the right place, it is just doing a real bad job. It wants to be progressive. It just thinks being polite and respectful is weak and lame.

On that note! The show also features a canonically bisexual woman who actually says the word bisexual-- fucking wild for the time, where the best you generally got was vague allusions to "swinging both ways."-- And it shows her in relationships with both women and men. Including, very notably, Foreman. And if I need to tell you how revolutionary it was for them to show a romantic relationship between a black man and a white woman in the 2010's, take a minute and think about how many relationships like that you've seen in TV or movies since then. Or ever.

It centers on a nuanced and compassionate portrayal of an addict, and tackles the realities of that in an incredibly honest way I don't think I've seen anywhere else. Just the simple, consistent reminders that both House and the other addicts featured on the show are using for a reason, and it's often because they have medical needs that have been neglected by bigoted doctors. There's a whole arc where they try to restrict House's use of painkillers by reducing his prescribed dose to basically a handful of ibuprofen, claiming he only thinks he needs such a high dose because he's addicted and he'll "adjust" to a lower dose in time-- IE, get used to just living with the extreme pain. Unsurprisingly, the increased pain makes him awful to be around, worse at his job, and eventually drives him further into addiction. The way the show deals with this is honestly fantastic, especially given, again, this was the 2000's and 2010's. For a somewhat contemporary comparison, take a look at how addicts are portrayed in Breaking Bad, which came out four years after House in 2008. The general attitude towards addicts was not great.

This show has a lot going for it. The relationships and the stories it tells are honestly incredible. But it is also very flawed, and people should be aware of that going in.

If you want to start watching House, awesome! But maybe look up trigger warnings first.

(Also, completely aside from All That^ there's also the genre typical medical gore and body horror, so, you know, also be prepared for that!)

[hottakehoulihan]

This is a rant/musing/meandering about Worm fans WRT Wildbow. I think it's time I at least once made myself an unsubtly dissenting voice, since silence indicates agreement to so many. Move on if you like. This is probably mostly for me.

I'm white, from the USA, grew up with thrift store clothes and scavenged pencils but got to visit the dentist when needed, and was raised in the same ethnocentric, homophobic, fatphobic, ableist, Puritan-influenced culture that most of us were. I try to routinely examine and correct my biases and blind spots. I am trying to see what I might be missing, with as open a mind as I can manage.

I reread Worm (fourth readthrough, but my retention is meh) these last few months actually looking for any evidence at all I could find of the various phobias (all of them, it seems, and also the vaunted hates-drug-users) that some folk like to assert Wildbow has. I didn't find much that didn't--IMHO--more closely fit an accurate description of how the characters (including Taylor, who is literally a child that grew up in an even less-enlightened environment than most of us) are biased. This, coupled with an unfortunate shortsightedness of methodology (do NOT use dice when you write your story. It seems like a good idea to naive youth, but We Do Not Live in a world where you can just let RNG dictate that your [insert bad thing] is committed by [insert group that is already stereotyped as doing that bad thing]. (Though sometimes that's gonna happen in real life too, and art depicting things that happen in real life is Not Always Bad you just have to be careful about context and tone.) Also, try not to accidentally/subconsciously follow Hayes code-influenced patterns. ...though that's hard to do when you're making almost EVERY character a morally grey one) is all the support I see.

Whew, that was a weird parenthetical juxtaposition. Should I rewrite? Nah; it's already taking too much time.

Seriously, how many actually 100% goodguy fleshed characters does Worm have? Arguably zero. Even Yamada and Legend, by dint of having to work within the confines of their structures, made concessions to evils. Dinah made her ruthless calculus decisions just as Cauldron did. Taylor's famously grey self-justifications were agonized over no more or less than Parian's. A perfect character would be a blemish, arguably. (I'll just take Amy as my woobie; after more than a dozen years of emotional abuse and neglect by her kidnappers, she deserves a bit of consideration and rehabilitation.)

And just like I'm willing to assume that Gregor's somehow flawed, like he offscreen asserted that there are acceptable civilian losses when you're doing crimes or assaulting Cauldrons, and that's clearly bullshit because there's no actual evidence Gregor is anything less than perfect but it's easier to assume evils (and more fun to talk shit) than not, I figure a bunch of folk are trying to fit in by agreeing and priming their confirmation biases accordingly.

And this is without, even, considering the millions of other words in non-Worm stuff. You're gonna read Pale and tell me this same junk?

...though, well, perhaps my cutie Biscuit, and a thing Louise said about addicts essentially vanishing from the lives of their loved ones, might count as being against habitual recreational narcotic use. I'll think about that over my next bottle of wine.

I like reading light novels, and fluffy fanfics, and similar, even though usually the characters involved seldom have what you might call facets. When the retired orc warrior who started a gnomish coffeeshop moves on to her next volume, I'm there, and I don't care if I never find out that she once had to choose between leaving baby goblins to die in a fire or saving a teammate from a spike trap.

I've read so many stories where there's no such thing as an 'ism', or rather there's just no example of representation, because every character is two steps away from being an AFGNCAAP (Ageless, Faceless, Gender-Neutral, Culturally-Ambiguous Adventure Person)

I think Wildbow is serious about trying to always be a better writer in the approaching-MFA sense. I see efforts to portray believable behavior of real "human" (whether human or not) characters from multiple backgrounds, in a world that scans as plausibly diverged from the same sort of ugly we live in today.

I do not see any more latent phobias of any sort than I see in pretty much anything else available to read, from fanfic to bestseller lists to "new favorites" lists at the local library. In fact, I see markedly less, to include some (fuck 'em) commenters complaining about shoehorned-in wokeness.

It's weird to me that, given the body of work and the literal black-and-white facts about who and what exist within, and the extra time and effort the author made and makes (too much, IMO) generously engaging with the fans, the default is to diss the author for not doing even more. In their first work. Of which half the concept and much of the worldbuilding dated from grade-school practice. And it's still great.

And I'm saying this about a story where a significant number of the villains are literally white male nazis, torturemurderers, and literally inhuman terrorists. You wouldn't expect people to be demanding a lot of nuance if you were an outsider to this story. But Worm delivers, IMO.

This is not in response to anything recent; I've been chewing on this for years prior to even joining tumblr or creating this username.

tl;dr: Are you sure you're not talking shit about Wildbow just to fit in with the other cool snarksters and feel cool and cynical and superior? Instead of sincere? Because I went looking, and, respectfully, I think you're wrong. And it's a bit ugly and sad.

[plounce]

do u have any reccomendations for how to read only comics involving rictor and shatterstar?? i used to be into marvel comics so i am immune to the usual comic shenanigans but i would like to learn more about these boys

here is a guide to reading xmen comics for rictor and shatterstar, my favorite canon comics couple! they were the first on-panel gay kiss in a marvel comic! they’re very special to me!

OKAY SO... ok. for anyone else using this, here’s a standard disclaimer that obviously there’s gonna be a lot in these that just absolutely sucks because 1. the 90s, 2. comics are an extremely cishet white male dominated industry. i do not vouch for everything written in these comics, but i think the gaycoding that eventually gets canonized is worth wading through a lot of stupid bullshit and very ugly art.

quick backstory on these two: rictor is a mexican teenager who was kidnapped by an anti-mutant terrorist group and was rescued by x-factor (the original 5). he hung around their auxiliary teen group the x-terminators for most of x-factor, being a delightful little punk (wearing a sleeveless leather vest a lot of the time!) and hanging out with boom-boom (who i love) and then got put into the new mutants for a very short time (where he had a thing with rahne/wolfsbane), before it was dissolved and transformed into x-force when rob liefeld took over the title. rictor hates team leader 90sdude cable because he thinks cable killed his dad in front of him. he tends to be the snarky asshole on the team.

the first part of this article has a lot of little rictor moments i’m not covering here. if you want the full rictor experience, check out x-factor (1986) and !x-terminators! x-factor starts very slowly but it picks up and improves when the simonsons take the helm.

rictor left the team. shatterstar was introduced by liefeld - he’s an Emotionless Warrior Guy Who Loves To Fight from mojoworld (a planet run by a despot who produces tv. it’s Commentary), where he was forced to be a gladiator from birth and doesn’t know a lot of earth customs and doesn’t have emotions (or rather, he represses them). 

x-force (1991) feel free to read through all of it, but in case you just want to skip to these two, all of these issues have one or two good little Moments - just do some skimming. i tend to focus more on rictor than star in this era because star is made more interesting than Emotionless Warrior Guy by butting up against rictor:

13-16 (rictor rejoins his old new mutants friends)

19, 21-26 (the first phase of their relationship where they don’t really get along. in one of these issues rictor stares at star’s ass. big moment of star being autism-coded in here too)

29-30 (rictor drives shatterstar around and they seem to get along better, you get to learn a bit about star’s past, adam-x the x-treme is there)

32-33 (just some little moments of them hanging out, a couple good rictor lines)

34 (VERY IMPORTANT - rictor backstory issue! AND this has the first big Subtext moment: shatterstar reveals he learned spanish from tv so he and rictor can have “conversations of a highly -- personal nature” HELLO?)

35 (some little moments where you can see star and rictor are now Friends and star is affected by that friendship)

39-40 (more good friendship - rictor asks if star has been watching dating shows and they just seem close. rictor also has gotten a haircut! we learn shatterstar’s mojoworld designation! they ride some motorcycles!)

43 (VERY IMPORTANT - the two go to a club. rictor tells star he’s a virgin then asks him if he has a dick. i am not kidding this literally happens. star learns what sexual attraction feels like and says ‘i don’t know what emotions im supposed to attach to that’, and rictor tells him he’ll help him learn.)

44 (VERY IMPORTANT - rictor leaves the team because he doesn’t want to have the team communicate telepathically (VERY interesting for a character who is eventually revealed to have been a closeted gay man). shatterstar begs him not to leave - “you’re my best and only friend.” rictor tells him that if he ever needs him, he’ll come back.)

cable (1993) #22 (follows up directly on rictor leaving the team - star accompanies rictor to the airport and has a lot of Feelings and has great hair. “julio. one last time. please, change your mind. what am i going to do without you?” oh so you’re dependent on your best friend who you’re in love with? oh?)

45, 47-48 (star’s weird biology, star brings up rictor as his emotional touchstone in a situation where he isn’t relevant at all. also, a plotline where tabby gets treated terribly by her friends and the narrative!)

49 (VERY IMPORTANT - star wanders around at night wondering why rictor hasn’t contacted him yet. he goes to the club he and rictor went to in #43 and turns down a girl who hits on him. he thinks “i miss julio...” (in an earlier issue, rictor tells cable not to call him by his first name - “only my mom calls me that”), then beats up some homophobes in an alley. I AM NOT KIDDING.)

51-52 (51 has more weird star biology. 52 has two pages of star and james talking that is a nice look at star’s developing emotional state - the rest of 52 is a fight with one of marvel’s extremely fatphobic villains, just a warning to skip the rest of it. although the letter page of 52 has someone go HEY ARE RICTOR AND SHATTERSTAR IN LOVE? thank you roeland looman from the netherlands)

54-56 (the start of shatterstar’s weird bad benjamin russell backstory that is quickly forgotten, disregarded, and uncared about by everybody. BUT in 54, there is some extremely loud subtext where star’s feelings for rictor are explicitly compared to a het romance subplot!)

58 (star is very chill and flamboyant for like two pages, it’s great)

59-61 (VERY IMPORTANT - rictor returns because star Needs him in the midst of his identity crisis!! it’s so joyful and sweet for them both, and the subtext is so LOUD here - there’s just. so much going on, i won’t describe it all, but it’s very good content and their emotionally intimate relationship is very apparent - really excellent gaycoding. the weird shatterstar backstory wraps up circuitously and to no great effect, but the art in the last issue is very nice, and rictor’s plain and uncomplicated concern for star is great.)

63-65 (some little moments - shatterstar and rictor time travel and beat up some nazis, star has a lovely conversation with siryn,)

x-force/cable ‘97 (the team goes to asgard! the important thing is that star says some goofy “ah... warriors...” things, and then rictor teases star for liking delivery pizza. it’s very charming)

67 (they hang out with tabby in a van. shatterstar has pigtails!)

70 (VERY IMPORTANT - rictor and shatterstar exit the team together to go take down rictor’s crime family in mexico! they seem very devoted to each other. shatterstar’s hair is all the way down!)

post leaving x-force:

76 (VERY IMPORTANT - ricstar return for one issue - rictor gets held captive to force shatterstar to fight domino!)

x-force annual 1999 (VERY IMPORTANT - ricstar get their own story about what they’re doing in mexico! shatterstar has an ugly little goatee, but rictor looks great! they choose to share a room rather than sleep separately and then it kind of feels like they shared a bed! rictor has learned star’s alien language! they genuinely just seem so close and comfortable with each other, it’s incredible.) (if you’re using RTO, it’s within the rest of xforce’s issues)

they’re both in comics limbo for the first half of the 00s besides a couple random flavorless appearances. shatterstar at some point goes back to mojoworld to help with the war against mojo. then we hit peter david’s x-factor run in 2006, known as x-factor investigations (xfi). this directly follows the “house of m” event - what matters is that the vast majority of mutants have been depowered by the scarlet witch. rictor is one of them.

rictor is a main character of the team from the first issue (the series opens with him about to attempt suicide), so if you wanna read the run you can start from the beginning. x-factor is... well, there are worse-written comics. it’s an okay read, but i find PAD’s writing insufferable a lot of the time (he writes multiple man as a pretty blatant self insert, and literally every girl on the team wants to fuck him at some point or another). i read the whole thing and it’s decent comics, but you might want to skip to the ricstar.

PAD canonizes ricstar, which is great! but unfortunately: 1. he writes star as  “slutty bisexual just can’t stop wanting to fuck people besides his partner who is uncomfortable with that!”, which is biphobic and sucks hugely, especially since it feels so different from xforce original shatterstar (see this post). rictor also just seems so annoyed with him all the time, which also sucks - they’re best friends!! let rictor like his boyfriend!!

anyway. if you choose not to read all of xfi, here are the ricstar highlights:

first issue of xfi for rictor's horrible mental state after m-day

14 (jamie implies that star would be jealous of rictor hanging out with quicksilver)

43, 45, 49 (star reappears!! he’s mindcontrolled, but it gets fixed, and he and rictor have the first ever on panel gay kiss at marvel!! yaaaay!! then they talk about their relationship a little)

after issue #50 it changes the numbering, so if you’re using RCO youll have to go to xfactor (1986) #200 to continue

200 (SHATTERSTAR FIGHTS THE THING!)

continue to read between here for star apparently being unable to stop kissing people. sigh. star sleeps with adult layla, which... sigh. whatever

207-208 (rictor and shatterstar semi-resolve the stupid biphobic plotline, resolve to work on their relationship, rahne discovers them (she and rictor had been sleeping together earlier in xfi), rahne is pregnant and homophobic, rahne and star fight, star is a delightful bitch)

209 (shatterstar on a pirate ship. that's it)

210 (rictor confirms that he is gay and it wasn’t legit when he’s been with women. there’s a moment where it's like "oh star makes rictor laugh" which is epic)

211-212 (star is said to be frustrated about rictor and rahne, rahne’s baby’s actual dad is revealed)

213 (rictor and rahne mostly resolve their shit)

216 (star and monet hang out, star thinks monet tells him to pee on rictor, spiderman is there)

217 (there’s a joke about the longstanding theory that longshot and star are related, monet is revealed as muslim in a very dumb way)

220 (star and rahne have a pretty nice conversation about their relationships to rictor and rahne’s faith. rictor does an offscreen internalized homophobia)

221 (star and rahne continue to hang out but it’s not as good as the previous issue.)

222 (oh my god, rictor cares about shatterstar being hurt! rahne owns up to how she kind of treated rictor like shit!)

pop over to avengers: the children’s crusade (a young avengers miniseries with good ol’ billy/teddy and i like it! but if you don’t want to read the whole thing - rictor and shatterstar appear in #6, and rictor is the first mutant to be repowered! they’re more tender with each other over their five page appearance than they are in xfi, so it’s a balm)

225-226 (PAD decides the first thing rictor does with his powers is be a scab [DEEP SIGH], rictor and shatterstar discuss rictor getting his powers back, the biphobic plotline is resolved again kind of in a very PAD-y way)

235-236 (shatterstar gets to be the main character of a mini arc. fights a mojo guy)

238 (ricstar go with rahne to help her find her son)

242 (they find her son. not as important imo)

248 (oh my god... they joke together :) they like being around each other :) also shatterstar goodboy moment. then in 249 rictor’s life is spared bc of shatterstar’s goodboy moment)

259 (SHATTERSTAR’S CRAZY CONVOLUTED BACKSTORY THAT ACTUALLY MATTERS TO HIS CHARACTER! YAHOO! and star has a cute little bob)

after xfi wraps up, there’s a couple years of limbo before they appear in secret warriors (2017) #2-3 (end of #2 and most of #3), which is a big crossover event or something. i don’t know, it’s an inhumans comic, and as an xmen person i am contractually obligated to roll my eyes at the inhumans. ricstar both have mustaches, star doesn’t speak, and rictor has the ugliest costume ever (green tracksuit with no socks??) (tabby also has a terrible costume). it’s just more inhumans trying to be a match to the xmen and utterly failing to not look & act like total jackasses (except, of course, for kamala and moon girl). rictor’s jokes that daisy johnson should get more original powers (she also has seismic powers - rictor predates her!), and then daisy blows up the xmen’s jet. while it’s in the air. this is a very neat summary of most mutant-inhuman relations.

now we enter the current era of “on again off again” relationship limbo.

rictor appears next in iceman (2017). in #9 he states that he and star have apparently broken up offscreen! and then he hits on bobby! sina grace is a cool person but this writing decision is so... aghhh. the next issue he and bobby go out on a date and he’s immediately like “yeah i only have my eyes on star”, so it seems to be more “it’s complicated” than “we’re broken up for good.” he sticks around to help out with a mission in #10-11.

they’re on again in new mutants: dead souls, where rictor is a part of the team and he’s hilarious and has so many great lines! shatterstar also makes a couple cameos throughout and they’re all super sweet! they seem very domestic and comfortable and happy, i love their dynamic in this. my favorite shatterstar panel ever is in #6, where he is making rictor pancakes and is only wearing an apron. please ignore all the big plot things that happen at the end of this, especially everything with karma. they are stupid, dumb, and do not matter.

related to nm:ds, rictor appears in multiple man #1 as part of that team and looks very very cute. and he isn’t whitewashed like in nm:ds!

off again in the shatterstar (2018) miniseries. i have a lot of mixed feelings about this because i LOVE all the rictor stuff, the first issue codes shatterstar as autistic in a very characterful way, it doesn’t whitewash rictor for once, and the covers are GORGEOUS! but it also attempts to retcon a ton of star’s emotional backstory AND arc set out in xforce, casting a black woman as his emotionally manipulative ex. also star is a landlord (ew). my advice with this one is to treat all the flashbacks as not-really-canon since they suck.

star appears in extermination (2018) #3-4 and gets mind-controlled into trying to kill the time-displaced teen o5 (timetraveling baby cable is trying to put them back where they came from), and the art looks great and i feel really bad for him. rictor makes a follow-up cameo in uncanny x-men (2019) #9-10, where you can see that he’s at the school in order to visit shatterstar since he’s with cecelia reyes. he then goes to fight nate grey/x-man, where he gets sucked into the age of x-man pocket universe/event.

around half the xmen get trapped and brainwashed in that pocket universe where there is no love or family, merely friendship and comradery (it’s an attempt by nate grey to ‘fix’ the xmen by getting rid of all the soap opera stuff - it’s a bit meta wrt how xmen are the soap opera superheroes). there are a couple different titles for this event: rictor appears in age of x-man: x-tremists #4-5. people have mixed feelings about this title due to the gay characters (northstar and iceman) enforcing no-romance laws that very intentionally parallel anti-gay laws from real life, but rictor is just chilling and running an illegal romance movies theatre, and then he gets drunk and then starts a riot and he’s just delightful in this.

everyone outside of the pocket universe thinks everyone who disappeared was killed. shatterstar is part of the team in x-force (2019) (there are two 2019 x-forces: this is vol 5, written by ed brisson) who are trying to track down young cable (baby cable, or “bable”), who killed older cable, who formed good old 90s xforce. boom-boom is the best part of this entire run, hands down. the art is expressive and interesting but i Hate how they draw warpath (the one time he’s free from comic book limbo!). shatterstar is in full “i only like fighting please let me fight i am a difficult asshole” mode, and talks about grieving rictor in #7 and #10. this is never really resolved since age of x-man is thrown over for hoxpox (BIG status quo changes & current era of xmen comics), but aside from my little ricstar heart i can’t really mind.

rictor is currently appearing as part of the team in excalibur (2019), and has been very... cozy... with apocalypse. at the time of writing (halloween 2020), it’s very heavily ambiguous what exactly their relationship is besides “intense” and i still have no clue what to think about it. he and star have been stated by the writer to be exes, but i also know tini howard is a ricstar fan so im holding out for good things! and it’s cool that rictor is getting a ton of focus and a lot of powering up. i remember reading xfi #1 and being amazed at how rictor described how soul-deep his earth powers were and wanting more of that, and excalibur has that for him in spades. (i am still withholding a lot of judgment wrt rictor’s writing in excalibur until i see how things pan out)

after reading to excalibur #12, switch over to x-factor (2020). read the first three issues because i love northstar and prodigy and rachel. please ignore a couple cringe comments towards poor daken. shatterstar appears in #3, trapped on mojoworld, getting traumatized, and breaking my heart as i write this. that last data page... free my boy!!!!

after x-factor #3, read x of swords: creation. more rictor and apocalypse being Close. after that, read x-factor #4 for apocalypse being very Attached to rictor, and then rictor looking very good and freshly resurrected. then continue reading excalibur. in may, x-factor is going back to mojoworld!!

that’s all there is so far! i think within the next year there will be even more content for us, and im very eager to get to that content. i will update this post as things come out.

[mama-mercyyyy]

Hello, hi, yes I’m alive.

Yes I know this was posted before the game was even out I’m pretty sure, and I hope they have changed their viewpoint on this now, but I’m still going to rant about this.

tl;dr at the end. This is quite the rant I have.

First of all, “doing women better?” Most of their games are targeted at male players, of course they’re going to make their female characters sexy af. I, a female, don’t want to look at “ugly” or “normal” females. I want them to look very nice as well. And, as for the male characters, none of them are fat. They are short, tall, a literal gorilla, etc. but none of them are fat, except Roadhog, but there’s also a chubby female, Mei, so it balances out. All of the males, almost, are pretty sexy and muscular as well, but I don’t hear anyone complaining about that. I want to look at good looking characters. Not just average normal people.

Oh boo-hoo 5 out of 12. That is perfectly fine, and I don’t know for sure, but I think Blizzard has kept the male:female ratio pretty close to half and half so this point gets thrown out the window.

And I also want to make this clear. ALL FEMALES HAVE BOOBS. AND GUYS LIKE THEM. VIDEO GAMES HAVE BEEN TARGETED AT MALES FOR A VERY LONG TIME NOW. I didn’t know if some people realized this.

The fact that this author just assumed that the female characters are uninteresting is pretty sexist in of its self, don’t you think? But seriously, I doubt that they even looked into any of their backstories if they didn’t even bother looking up their names. I don’t have anything to say. Anyone who knows the game know they all have some pretty sick backstories, or hopefully will get just even a backstory at all *cough* Zen *cough cough* Mercy *cough*

I think it’s so dumb to complain how all the women are so slim when they are basically in the military. Mercy is a combat medic, Tracer is in the field all the time, Widow is an agile sniper, and Pharah is a literal soldier. They cannot be overweight. They will not be able to keep up. I know I’m going to get called “fatphobic” for this but it’s the truth. I can understand putting more muscle on some of them, but not making them chubby or fat.

Again complaining about boobs and thighs being shown to a male dominated market. Sorry but that just what guys have always liked. All the way back to the very beginning of the human race.

Let’s skip all the way to where they redesign the characters to be “better.” They have no idea about anything in this game so I’m going to skip over the fact that McCree is as American as anyone can get and that Torb is as Swedish as anyone can get, and that they want to make Winston a female, and get right into the juicy stuff. Is Mercy’s waist impossibly small? Yes. Do I care? No. It’s art. Oh also, “Mercy is an angel character with blonde hair. Which. NO. We’ve been over this. Always having angels be blond is some creepy white supremacy bullshit, okay?” Okay, what? How? Why? Should I read the article they linked about this? I think yes. I will do that now.

It explained nothing to me. How surprising. Anyway, fat Widowmaker. Just no. It makes no sense. She is a sniper. She cannot be overweight. She needs to be agile and quick. Like all of the other women in military like roles. Quick explanation for that one, let’s move on. The author is so upset about Sym not wearing pants. MAYBE SHE DOESN’T WANT TO WEAR PANTS. WHO EVER WANTS TO WEAR PANTS? ONLY PSYCHOPATHS I’M PRETTY SURE. Ahem, moving on.

Lastly, the author liked mostly everything about Tracer EXCEPT the fact that on her statue Blizzard sells you can see her butt. Oh no. Scary I know.

tl;dr This article is pretty pathetic. The author is obviously grabbing at straws to get mad at Blizzard, as it seems they have a vendetta against them. All of her points fall apart with a tiny bit of research, to which the author basically admits to not caring enough to do, and common sense. Blizzard is not sexist and has done nothing wrong in the sense of their female characters in Overwatch. Gameplay is another topic though.

No hate toward the author, though I hope they changed their mindset towards some things by now, 3 years later. I know it might seem like I got heated in this rant, I did a bit, but it’s not toward the author or anyone who feels the same. I disagree with you, but that doesn’t mean we need to yell or get angry at each other. We can have a calm discussion if you’d like, as long as we can both talk like mature human beings. Feel free to tell me why I’m wrong!

Thank you for making it this far and watching me get frustrated about characters in a video game. I hope I didn’t hurt anyone’s feelings too bad, but it’s all in good fun, I don’t mean anything that would have hurt your feelings, it’s nothing personal towards anyone but the words on the page. :)

More art hopefully coming soon!

[fatphobiabusters]

Submission: Thoughts on EDs and Fatphobia

TW: Eating disorder, diet mention, thinspo/meanspo mention

Y'all: “Hey, it’d be super if everyone could just treat fat people with basic respect and decency”

Everyone: “Oh. My. God. I can’t believe you are ENCOURAGING people to kill themselves with unhealthy eating habits wow you have a special place in hell. Also a body positive blogger once beat up my cousin’s boyfriend’s sister and-”

Thinspo/Pro Ana/ED blog:

-Posts cruel and graphic meanspo and often actually sends it to others as ‘inspiration’ (even if the person asked for it it’s still fucked up to do to someone who’s clearly very sick and needs real help)

-Reblogs pictures of people who are so thin that they likely either A) are photoshopped images, or B) have an ED (of course in the absence of any extraneous circumstances that may cause this body type) and are emaciated to the point of being in serious danger from the laundry list of fatal complications that chronic malnourishment ACTUALLY HAS (and that being fat does not have) and then captions them things like “wow, can’t wait till this is me 😍”

-This bullshit: “Hey everyone! I’m starting a new diet tomorrow they say is super effective basically you only consume Diet Coke for three months. Message me if you want to join and we can make a group chat to ENCOURAGE each other!”

Everyone: “………………….”

Ugh I’m annoyed now but yeah just a few observations of mine as someone recovering from anorexia. I s2g 99% of ED Tumblr is a steaming garbage pile of toxicity where people spend all day deliberately triggering themselves and others so yeah all these people who get on your case about “encouragement” (encouraging what exactly btw?? encouraging fat people to love themselves?? encouraging thin people not to be assholes?? like these seem like good things to encourage???) have a wayyyyy better place they could be focusing their undying concern about other people’s eating habits, but I guess it was never really about that, was it? 🤔

P.S. Every thin person with an ED who acts like they should get a pass for hating/making fun of/being cruel to fat people or saying shit like “I’m so fat and disgusting” and acting like they’re somehow also victimized by fatphobia the same as a fat person because they’re “mentally ill and see themselves as fat so it’s really just self loathing” need to cut it the fuck out right now since this logic at its core is extremely fatphobic (and also just doesn’t make any fucking sense), not to mention it completely ignores the fact that there are PLENTY of fat people out there who have all kinds of ED’s (no, not just BED) and therefore get to live with the delightful combo of a brain that tells you the only way to be happy is to starve yourself to death (thanks brain) AND societal fatphobia which, in addition to everything else you bring attention to on this blog, would almost certainly cause any symptoms of their ED to be at best overlooked by doctors and loved ones and at worst praised and hailed as success stories. I was never even close to underweight even when my ED was at its worst, but that didn’t make me any less sick.

Ugh sorry this is a long vent, but it just gets to me sometimes. Yeah ED’s majorly suck, but lots of people are mentally ill and that is NEVER an excuse for the kind of cruelty that I’ve seen and experienced coming from people in the ED community, so yeah its ridiculous that anyone thinks you are the people who desperately need to be called out.

Lastly if you’re fat and you see ED symptoms in yourself, please please take them seriously and remember that there is NO SUCH THING AS BEING TOO FAT TO HAVE AN EATING DISORDER (yes, including anorexia). It’s almost impossible to even start recovering if you think there’s no way you can possibly be sick. Everyone on this earth deserves to live and enjoy their lives without EDs poisoning their minds. The idea that you have to be nearly skeletal and close to death in order to deserve help is so dangerous and I can’t even imagine the harm it’s caused. You truly deserve so much better.

Also I just want to say I really love this blog and I think what y'all do is so wonderful and important! You and other fat/body positive blogs have been as healing to me in my recovery as I once allowed thinspo blogs to be destructive. Thank you lovely people for everything you do! ❤️

*end*

(I’m really sorry if I missed any triggers at the beginning! I wasn’t sure if “eating disorder” was enough of a blanket warning for everything I discussed or not. Also, if you do end up posting this, I’d like to stay anonymous if possible. Some people I know irl follow me and not all of them know about my ED. Thanks and I hope all of you have a great rest of your day!!)

Thank you for this submission. You are exactly right about all of this. I just wish more people understood this.

-Mod Bella

[richmeganews]

'Shrill' Is the Mona Lisa of Body Positive Television

Within the first five minutes of Shrill, Annie Easton (Aidy Bryant) pauses while getting dressed and kneels down to stretch out her sweater over her knees. I immediately yelped. My tall, thin best friend didn’t understand what she was doing, at first. “Is it a self-esteem thing?” she asked. “Is she… gathering herself?” See, when you’re wearing plus-size clothing, a lot of it isn’t cut quite right for your body, so if you have a bigger tum, sometimes shirts that run too narrow need to get hit with what I like to call “the Ol’ Knee Stretcher.” I’d never seen my experience on screen portrayed sans explanation. Shrill is what every piece of Body Positive Media should be: made by us, for us, but accessible for everyone who wants to come along on the ride too.

The series' six-episode first season, streaming on Hulu, is based on Lindy West’s New York Times bestselling essay collection of the same name. West, Aidy Bryant, and showrunner Alexandra Rushfield, serve as co-creators. The writers room has more than one plus sized creator and it shows. Obviously, there’s West, who is also known for her biting essays and face-forward feminism on Jezebel and The New York Times among other publications, as well as Samantha Irby, author of the hilarious essay collections Meaty and We Are Never Meeting In Real Life. Bryant, now a seven-year running cast member on SNL, is a pitch perfect choice to play Annie, a fat woman in her 20s navigating life and trying to find herself within the alt-weekly she works for, her friendships, and her relationships with her parents and the kind of terrible dude she's seeing. In short, she’s a city-dwelling straight white woman in her twenties. She’s just also fat.

There’s been a wave of body-positivity-lite media recently, like the shallow and unsatisfying I Feel Pretty, which conflated insecurity with marginalization. Not long after, Netflix released the inherently fatphobic Insatiable, which included a scene where a fat girl fights a homeless man for a sandwich and starred a straight-sized actress in a fat suit. (Just hire fat actors. Please.) These shows completely miss the point. At its core, body positivity is a feminist political movement that centers some of the most marginalized—fat people, very fat people, people of color, people marginalized by gender, disabled people—and works for social and political change to make the world a safer place for bodies of all kinds to live in.

One of the show’s greatest successes as a comedy is its understanding of Actually Good Fat Jokes—jokes for fat people rather than at our expense. The show expertly satirizes the communal experience of living in a body that others treat like shit. It’s a long needed reclamation, because prejudice against fat people has so long taken away actually good fat jokes.

I spoke to Irby, over the phone, about this. When it comes to the diet food, branded “Thin Menu,” that Annie eats at the behest and purchase of her mom, she says, “That was my love letter to all my sisters in the struggle. I see you eat that one Lean Cuisine enchilada that looks like dog vomit; I’ve eaten it a million times. It’s disgusting.” Indeed, this “thin menu” is all too familiar to any fat person who has been trapped in a terrible prepared-food-diet program. “We have all eaten that food whether we wanted to or not...that to me was, like, the wink, I see you,” Irby said. “This is for our people. Those of you who get it will really fucking get it.”

Body positivity isn’t about feeling pretty or learning that “it’s what’s inside that counts.” It’s about systemic prejudice. It’s about dismantling the kind of ugly, deep set cultural biases that lead fat women to face a wage ceiling because people don’t want to hire or promote us, that leaves fat people without proper medical care or attention, and that abandons us without any kind of legal protection against discrimination based on our size and appearance. It’s not about learning to love our own personality and the content of our character instead of bemoaning our flesh; it’s about surviving and ferociously, defiantly thriving in a world that refuses to see us as anything but a “before picture.”

This is why we say the word “fat;” to underscore that we are striving for a world where it’s simply a descriptor, not something to be demeaned or embarrassed about. I’m fat, you’re short, they’ve got bangs—these are all simple physical descriptions. It’s also why many activists prefer the terms “fat positivity” or “fat liberation,” instead of the watered-down “body positivity.” Yes, all bodies are good bodies, but let’s be real about which bodies society really hates.

Luckily, the recent profitability of surface-level body positivity and corresponding content boom has allowed a few true gems to shine among the costume jewelry. The joyful Dumplin’ on Netflix, based on Julie Murphy’s book, shows the kind of rebellious, chubby teenage girl I never saw on screen as a protagonist. Dietland on AMC forced the hateful, tiny moments of despair that come from denigration and ridicule in your face over and over. While I found it not quite uplifting, it was still more honest and raw about the fat experience. These shows walked so Shrill could run. Shrill is the chubby Mona Lisa of the "Fatnaissance." Bryant’s portrayal of Annie is fully-rounded and realized. She’s not your fat best friend or a one-note punchline—instead she’s afforded space to learn her lessons repeatedly, to have the kind of growth trajectory that a protagonist deserves but fat characters are so often denied.

And this kind of perspective, where fat viewers finally get to be part of the in-group, explains why the rest of the show is so good. In the fourth episode of the show, “Pool,” Annie, wearing jeans and a shirt buttoned up to her neck, walks into a Fat Babe Pool Party with Fran, who’s confidently wearing her bathing suit. Annie is there to write about the party for the alt-weekly, but it’s really just an excuse for her to nervously walk through the door. Her entrance is unlike any moment I’ve seen of a fat girl insecure at a pool party on screen before: instead of feeling nervous around all the thin girls, Annie feels nervous because she’s not in the same place in her journey as other fat women walking by in string bikinis.

“We all are at different places on the path,” Irby said. “There’s a universe in which Annie would never even consider going to a party like that because she’s a little buttoned-up, repressed, listening to her mom’s diet talk her whole life. Just to see all the different shades of where you could be in your journey with yourself was really important, too, and I feel like we captured what a lot of people feel in just those few minutes.”

Photo by Hulu

By the end, Annie finally jumps in the pool and swims through the clear blue water, kicking her jiggling legs and twisting joyfully around the thighs and stomachs and flesh of other fat women.

Irby, who wrote the episode, felt the same way when she flew to Portland to watch it be shot. “Lindy and I walked into the ballroom to see the extras and there are like 16 women in there who were really just all sizes," she said. "Like for real all sizes, and there were like so many swimsuit options, they had a makeup team and a hair team, there were women in wheelchairs and a woman who had just undergone chemo. And there were women of all ages, which is another thing. Like can I see a 50-year-old woman? Can I see a 60-year-old woman in a bikini on television in 2019? I would really love to. We both started to cry because I was like, they’re really doing it. This is like a fucking dream come true.”

Shrill tackles the bullshit “wellness and diet culture” head-on, from the very first episode. I, too, have been aggressively courted for an exercise class—once a woman in a Kohl’s handed me a card wordlessly, put her hand on my stomach, and walked away. I walked around feeling light-headed for an hour, reeling from the one-two punch of having a stranger touch me and seeing the card read “Yoga And Fitness For Expecting Mothers.” I was not pregnant. The woman in the pilot episode, who calls Annie a “fat bitch” for not accepting her patronizing help has a similar sneering vibe. “If you ask a thin person, they’d be like, 'no, that doesn’t ever happen,'” Irby explained. If you ask a fat person, they’ll say, 'oh a few times this morning people have asked me if I’ve thought about going paleo.'”

The show also dives into the kinds of abuse that fat people face in the workplace. In the second episode, Annie confronts a troll (played with incredible smarminess by SNL’s Beck Bennett), who has been leaving nasty comments on her articles felt all too real to me. Some of these comments are taken directly from West’s conversation with one of her real-life trolls, on a breath-taking episode of This American Life. On screen and in real life, the man who hurled terrible, disturbing insults admits to hating her because he’s resentful that she seems so confident, and so sure of her words, while also being fat.

But the show nails details even more personal and small and subliminal than that—like the tension between physical enjoyment and painful self-awareness. These moments are ultimately the most important. After Annie has a positive sexual experience with a guy she likes, she goes to the kitchen to eat the dinner she missed. Alone, she finally enjoys her spaghetti freely and messily. That comfort found in privacy felt so familiar—eating when nobody can watch you or enjoying a hotel pool late at night when nobody is around to judge. The moment when Annie sees a fashionable, plus-size woman dressed in a red show-stopper of an outfit brought to mind the feelings I had discovering body positivity for the first time. And—just like Annie—I had to re-learn how to hold on to that body positivity. “The first time I saw a fat girl in a crop top I was like oh, you can do that huh?” Irby said. “I don’t think for the majority of us it’s just one thing that solves everything and you’re like ‘Okay! I’m totally okay with my body!’”

This is the kind of success that comes from letting fat people write fat characters. Working with another fat person on a creative project where all aspects of your identity can be shown comfortably is life-changing. Both Irby and West enthusiastically underscore the magic that comes from working with someone who just gets you. “I don't know how I would've written that show without other fat people in the room...when you're writing with people who have that shared experience, you're just, you know, you're a mile ahead already,” West said. She and Irby were roommates for their summer while writing Shrill and they spent their time off watching Catfish. Irby agrees. “As women, we often have this thing where like, I’m not the only person this has happened to but I’m the only person I know who’s talking about it so it makes me feel like I’m the only person this has happened to.”

And this is also not to say this is the universal experience—Annie is a small-fat, white, cis woman living in the Pacific Northwest, and that’s a different experience than many fat people have. "It's really important to me to not present the sort of small-fat, white woman as the fat experience,” West reiterated. “Because obviously, black women have a different experience in fat bodies, and queer women have a different experience in fat bodies...The more fat people in the room, the better because what you want is all of this perspective brought to the table.” But this on-screen reflection is simply a first step for fat liberation. There’s space and need for many fat narratives on TV, and I can only hope the success of Shrill will convince execs to put more on the table.

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[kanaruaizawa16]

I understood that day.

TW: Emotional abuse, anxiety issues, toxic relationships, emotional repression, school bullying, low self-steem, interiorized mysoginia, admired people-related trauma, real life management problems, blaming on mentally ill people, several ways of social oppression and supporting on oppresors

There is a part of me I regret deeply, of my past and I learned how harmful it was with the crazy circunstances of this year.

Way before of joining Tumblr, I was a coldhearted antifangirls. I was young and lost, I suffered deeply before due all my other issues (school bullying, the “idolizer” accusation shit, blablabla), and I found on the stoicism and pretended coolness of another human being, a very troubled one, the approving and learning I thought I needed. Self-control, coolness, “maturity” and “perfection”.

That human being was in the end nothing like that.

I commited a severe mistake in 2007, one year after of meeting her. To join her cause, in another fandom, as result of a personal quarrell with an obsessive fangirl who apart of needing urgently a good treatment for learn to accept reality (her favourite fictional character will never look at her because it doesn’t exist on first place), she was a human trash, a treacherous, plagiarizer and a person who bullied and blamed mentally ill people. But that woman I met, who was my friend, the one who wanted to exterminate the fangirls, was not any better. Toxic, rigid, pretentious, and sadly very violently normative and puritan regarding sexuality and faith. Have you known these people who are so proud of the rejection to body and feelings? She was that kind of person. Have you known these kind of women who think that if they are so “rational” like the masculine they will be respected and that’s why they reject things who are associated with women because “being a woman is bad”? Something like that.

I learned she was another anti-emotions, repulsive and sad person. I understood it years after of meeting her. But by then, I had already interiorized so much shit.

I left her seven years ago, I couldn’t deal with her anymore, her shit was too much, she needed and still needs urgently to mature. I don’t regret any single second of it. But the damage was done. I admired her, she looked so strong, so cool when I was so young. I wanted to be like her. But I realized after of leaving her, I was wrong.

One of the reasons I opened Tumblr, was for learning slowly to manage the emotions I had “forbidden”, but I still would see certain feelings as wrong.

I learned to accept it more or less with fictional characters (after of all it’s a joke, I always take it as joke, for keep my sanity), and partially with sportspeople. I say partially because... I know very well the reason I fell on the hands of a toxic person like that woman. I know how lost and desperated I was of being accepted and recognized by others as intelligent and cool. I know rejection and despise. I know the hatred I developed against myself, all because some people just found funny to use my appreciation to Ayrton Senna just for bully me and destroy me. And the people who was cruel with me, pointing out my “religious incoherence”, and afterwards how “stupid” I am. I was so desperated of being recognized as cool because of it. That woman never knew my disgrace nor my burden, but still she tried to make this young teenager at her stinky image. I was... so weak... I was doing so partially well on tumblr and learning slowly. But later the fuckin’ abusive guy named Antonio. That manipulative Senna-hater. The relapse and all that shit. The anger I developed against everything in 2014 when I realized Antonio’s sexism and his “Kanaru should hate Senna because I am a fuckin’ know-it-all” hidden agenda... and the internal battle I have because the weird mix of my unconditional affects towards Ayrton and the hatred I developed to his “perfect” image because it turned out to be a lie.

I struggle a lot on show emotions. I struggle on show affection or admiration, in general. But apart of my issue with Ayrton, there is another area who is affected with this and my 2007 times...

...Admiring musicians.

If you wanna know how much of troubled and fucked up is my historial on emotional repression, is my (damaged) relationship with visual kei fandom. I entered there in 2008, but I was still on that cause anti-fangirls, so I could never could get along with people and I was also prone to pretentious idiots. I know why I never could fit in and why I could never relate well with the people of there. I hated most of the women who were in the fandom, because of being fangirls, mostly. Because of obsessed and deluded and it did not help at all to know shit of the bad side of visual kei as musical industry, and in general of Japanese music industry. And there are also people I hate for valid reasons, like most of the people of Colombian Street Team of Versailles, because of pampering a racist, fatphobic bully.

It did not help to be overly conscious of the delusion and distance dynamics with Japanese rock bands. I remember how much I put effort on being “good” and avoid to show overloaded emotions in the meet&greet of the live in Colombia of Versailles in November 9th. Or how awkward and clumsy I was in May 29th 2015 on the solo live of Kamijo when I took the two-shot cheki photo with him. I look akward because of my problems, despite of my smile. All because of being emotionally blocked. All because I wanted to prove I am not a deluded fangirl. I wanted to prove to myself and to others, even to people who hated me, even to my “normal-not-fans-of-nobody-too-busy” parents, despite they did not really care much and actually they did never actually forbide me of being more emotional. 

I was... maybe... unable of enjoy at full because of my fear.

I regret of it.

I realized it this year.

The damage due my desperation on avoiding to fangirling, and understimating my criteria and sense of intelligence so desperately became very visible to me recently.

I don’t know if it was surviving and getting rid of two major abusive and toxic “friendships”, despite I developed certain degree of anxiety issues and insecurity, apart of the long-term damage I have of other issues... or realizing I have a chance of after of so many years of my life of showing affection without fearing.

Life gave me a chance. And honestly a big one.

When the bassist of my favourite Spanish-speaking band sent me that voice message thanks to a friend in June 24th, I understood it. I already had a intuition of that being so cold was not good idea, since before, when I realized I have a crush on him and he’s my platonic lover. But that day I understood.

I understood I’ve lost ten years of my life and I damaged greatly the posibility of having a proper emotional development because of a mistake due of my desperation of acceptation.

I had to endure this bullshit of my past. I had to experience a deep grudge and feel a great rage of what happened. But also I found the loving support of people. My long-term friends and the people of Kraken fanclub. I can feel such respect and love. I’m glad of having such amazing people at my side, and bit to bit for me to recover. And gather courage of a lot of things.

Like for example to accept the offer of meet my crush on a casual, calm situation. I would never miss that chance now. My heart was given a chance, of course I would accept it.

I am not the person of that time of years ago. I probably I would’ve been wary and cold and reject it in 2011. But now, I am glad of having accepted the chance life gave me.

And for me, thanks to this, I realized the person I was had gone for good.

I am happy I can let it go this part. I still have a lot of battles, but this one, I think I’ve won it. It’s thanks to the courage and positive feelings I can do this. Maybe, while drown on my hatred and sadness I would never be able of see the problem.

I am thankful of life due this.

I understood what I truly needed now.