#my idea of time/existence as a circle is mostly just based on my understanding of probability

[cheesey-rice]

I feel like in theory time has got to be a circle.

Like if you put aside relativity to us as humans the idea of before the big bang there was always nothing forever and after the heat death of the universe there will be always nothing forever kind of seems unlikely and is partially assumed based on our own need as humans to categorize distinct boundaries/intervals in order to easily process information. It would kind of make more sense if existence occurs in alternating waves with pre-bigbang/post-heatdeath nothingness. Theoretically if these waves of existence/nonexistence occur on an alternating schedule then the various existence points could cycle through a bunch of different variables of relationships between the various types of matter that compose existence.

With the assumption of infinite time, the alternating combinations of these existences mean that theoretically the pattern of exact existences could repeat in a manner copied such that essentially time is 'repeating' itself. Unless we have like a π situation actually? But then again π could like eventually repeat and we just don't know because it isn't really relevant to us to calculate out past the trillions. It might be a cool scifi premise to figure out how many permutations it takes for pi to repeat and then extrapolate that to this 'existence is a circle' mentality in the sense that how long does it take for something with 'infinite possibilities' to repeat an exact order and then that would be how far you would have to go to reach the existence generated to be exactly like your current one monkeys with a typewriter style, lol. But idk my point being that irl I think the default assumption that existence stops/starts at some point is a bit silly and it's more likely that existence past points of 'nothingness' loses meaning to us the same way calculating out all the digits of pi loses Relevancy to telling your math teacher what the area of a circle is. In that sense you can kinda just define existence by personal relevance the same way scientists do.

[nekropsii]

ALPHA TROLLS RANKED BY HOW WRONG THE FANDOM AT LARGE IS ABOUT THEM:

This is a personal challenge, based entirely on my own experience and perspective, and also ranked from Most to Least Correct. I was bored, and thought this might be fun.

Putting this under a cut, because it's long as hell.

MEULIN LEIJON

People get her mostly correct, from what I’ve seen… Most of the time, fan content of Meulin is absolutely recognizable as Meulin, but her pride in her deafness + joy of learning new ways to interact with the world through/due to her disability is always removed, and I do not often see people tackle the Toxic Positivity aspect of her character. That seems less like character assassination, though, and more like a combination of people not actually playing through the Openbounds, people not being able to fathom disabled people (especially those who gained a disability later in life rather than being born disabled) being happy, and general fandom distaste for the idea of touching anything uncomfortable, especially when that uncomfortable topic is highly mundane, normalized, and potentially applicable to them or their loved ones. Meulin’s toxic positivity was, of course, commentary on Tumblr’s ecosystem at the time, so… It was much harder to touch back then.

ARANEA SERKET

People tend to get her general, broad strokes personality right, but unfortunately she gets treated pretty roughly for the crime of Being A Serket. People refuse to understand her motivations, and she often gets demonized for what she was doing around/during [S] Game Over, even though that was something she’d gotten pushed to and also was cool as fuck to watch. God forbid a woman do anything.

DAMARA MEGIDO

People are right about the racism, 100%. It is completely despicable, hard to look at, and extremely blatant. She does, however, have character outside of that. No, it isn’t “whore”, it’s more like “angry, dysfunctional abuse victim”, and she’s genuinely a very interesting and tragic character. But, again, people are right about the racism, so she gets to be placed way up here.

MEENAH PEIXES

She is such a chaotic little bastard. I love her. I really do. Please understand that she genuinely does not understand the concept of consequences. This girl didn’t have a Lusus, she didn’t have parents, it was functionally illegal to tell her “No, you can’t do that.” That would fuck up literally anyone’s moral compass. That’s not me hand waving away all the fucked up and bad shit she’s done, we all know what she did, but people tend to forget this aspect of her character and it pains me deeply, because it is a very genuinely interesting concept that I want to see more of. She’s capable of regret, we’ve seen her feel it, I just don’t think foresight is her forte. No one raised her to consider consequences, or help her experience them in a healthy way, because nobody raised her period.

Also, her ass is not butch, she is the girliest girl in the entire comic. She is about hot pink and glitter and kiss marks and unicorns and cute little puns and you will respect that. She is not masculine. Her ass is not masculine nor is she butch. Let her be her hyper-feminine self.

LATULA PYROPE

Please for the love of god there is more to her character than “Gamer Girl” and “Mituna’s Girlfriend”. You are falling for her fucking ruse. Please. Please. Please recognize that her entire character is about internalized misogyny, and being forced to overcompensate for misogyny in gaming circles as a gamer who happens to be a woman. Please. I’m begging.

KURLOZ MAKARA

His character is not that deep, it’s mostly just a string of events he is mysteriously, inexplicably involved with. The Makaras are extremely Function Over Form- their characters practically do not exist, they're mostly just plot devices that exist to push the story along. I'm sorry to Makara fans. You just invented a guy in your mind and decided he was real. He is also not that soft, though, and his relationships with both Meulin AND Mituna are not healthy. Hard to stop people from ascribing cutesy squishy lovey dynamics to random men who happened to have looked at each other once, though. Some people truly haven't graduated from 2012.

HORUSS ZAHHAK

I am begging people to consider that maybe the biggest issue here is not that he is “Bad Otherkin/Therian Representation” and is in fact maybe the fact that Hussie was actually making fun of Systems when he was writing Horuss. Because Horuss is canonically a system. He uses the word system. He uses the word switching. He uses the word host. He literally talks about his Plurality at length in extremely upfront, plain terms. I don’t know how him being “Bad Otherkin Representation” was and still is the main discourse about him. It makes me insane. That is a commentary that truly writes itself. Talk about having your priorities out of wack, honestly...

PORRIM MARYAM

No, she is not a MRA, she’s just a regular feminist who happens to live on a different planet with different politics and social hierarchies from Our Real World Earth’s USA. Whatever argument you’re about to pull out of your ass to say that she sucks is bad. She already explained what she meant by that, in more detail, very clearly, and she was right. Half the time she’s literally just giving you factual information about what Beforus was like, and literal plot synopses. She isn’t saying anything insane. She’s literally normal. I don’t know why people cannot handle or process this. Porrim has not ever said anything controversial. If you disagree with this you’re either misconstruing her on purpose or you fell for Kankri’s bait, and that’s just fucking sad at that point.

Also, she’s more than a sex object, and her tits are not huge. Honestly, half the shit she was saying was just “I am more than my sex life”, and so many people took that and made her main character trait her sex life. Just pathetic.

RUFIOH NITRAM

This man is a fucking war criminal and I will stop at nothing until he is behind bars for his crimes against Damara. Raging misogynist. Total fucking cunt. Just the worst. If I talk any more about this, this part will be 1,000 paragraphs long. But also, I’m begging people to recognize his relationship with disability, too. He was similar to Meulin in the sense that he didn’t mind his disability, and his biggest gripe with it was the way that Horuss tried to “fix” it… Which is an interesting way to expand upon how Beforus’s culling system is not only very explicitly ableist, but mimicking real world systemic ableism. I also want people to recognize that Hussie is actively having a conversation about the reclamation of slurs with Rufioh’s character, and how not letting people reclaim such language is doing nothing but giving the word power against them while stripping away their own personal agency. Rufioh’s a complicated guy, and he’s interesting and also the worst, and I am really tired of how he gets watered down to nothing but “Pretty Boy Victim Of His Inexplicably Psycho Ex”.

MITUNA CAPTOR

Holy Fucking Shit, You Guys Are Ableist.

KANKRI VANTAS

To this day I see people saying he was just Hussie making fun of SJWs. To this day. To this day people think Hussie was trying to make Every Tumblr Leftist look bad, and that he hates them Because They Are Leftists. When will people recognize him as a bootlicker to the oppressive class and the violently bigoted. When will people recognize that. When will people recognize that this is more of a commentary on the legitimate real flaws of Tumblr’s politics at the time. When. When.

When will people stop portraying him as a lovey-dovey Catholic Whore. I’m going to stab my fucking eyes out and then kill everyone in this building. Me when it's based and cool to ship an aroace character with a sexual predator. I GUESS.

CRONUS AMPORA

I say this with every ounce of sincerity I can possibly muster as a person: What the literal actual fuck.

[misscammiedawn]

Legitimacy vs Selection Bias in Hypnosis

This has been on our mind a lot recently. It's mostly been sparked by the recent Mindless Banter podcast run by @theleeallure @enscenic and @hypno-sandwich where the three hosts spoke about how they dislike academic models of hypnosis and a recent post by @h-sleepingirl discussing why they herald hypnotic education.

One thing that is always going to be true about the advocates of our kink who have been involved with the community for a long time is that we are going to be experienced and capable hypnotists and/or hypnotees.

Likewise those who join and find themselves brought in to the fold tend to self-select; if a person is not able to find any success or joy in hypnosis because it's not working or they do not gel with the styles taught and practiced then they will not hang around.

This means that we have a functioning ecosystem of people who know the lingo, who are primed to react as they should and tend to have things work for them.

Which is great! It makes it so much easier to work out when everyone is on the same page.

But it also creates an insular community.

I've written before on why the insular nature of our community worries me.

One of the lines I wrote in that post was this

One of the big differences between the online erotic hypnosis community and the NGH (National Guild of Hypnotists) who rue our existence is that we do not require legitimacy to function when they themselves exist in a half-truth state where when receiving both of my certifications it was impressed that we needed to perform an uneasy dance of providing services without practicing medicine because hypnotherapy is not licensed psychology in the same was that chiropractors are not performing medicine.

Legitimacy is the idea of taking what we do, what we are, what we believe and what we practice and trying to make it valid to those outside of the community. It's performing studies, it's building a framework of hard rules, it's about pretending that we understand how the brain works beyond the anecdotal evidence that we witness it every day within our corners and communities.

Fact is, hypnosis is a malleable and belief-based practice that rests right in the middle between faith and science. As mentioned in the above linked post, trance can be detected on an EEG:

Source

Our last post on this topic just spoke about accepting that we exist in a soft science where what we believe, how we approach our beliefs and what ideas we allow to take root in our minds will have a firm impact on how the minds of the hypnotists and hypnotees we interact with.

Today I want to talk about why keeping the education and the science involved in the conversation is important.

Because, like the Mindless Banter crew, I have reached the point of my career in hypnoplay where should Dawn wish to induce a trance she need only find a partner, lay out what will happen and perform. The rest of it just happens.

Once you reach a level of confidence and community, it pretty much takes care of itself. The interaction between a hypnotist and a person who has never experienced trance before and the interaction between a hypnotist and an enthusiast will play out differently.

What I mean by this is if Dawn is approached in DM by someone who wants a session she will be able to pick up a number of tells without even noticing it on their confidence and experience. Someone shy, unsure and untrained will not dive straight in. Which makes the encounter less likely and even if it does happen it comes from the power dynamic of a teacher and student rather than two enthusiasts going to town.

This is normal and it's not a bad thing. It just means that the typical educator in the hypnokink community is typically aware of the "weight class" of their hypnotees which paints their expectations of how things will go and allows for a line between the way hypnosis is taught in 101 and how it is practiced in enthusiast circles.

It's why Progressive Muscle Relaxation is something which gets scoffed at a lot in our circles. The typical enthusiast does not need to spend 20 minutes on an induction when their typical partner is someone they can hold the shoulders of, stare at with intent and give permission for the hypnotee to drop.

That isn't to say that experienced hypnotists only play with experienced hypnotees. It just means that the majority of the play from those who educate does not match the material that we teach to beginners. Not a bad thing.

But it does breed this divide I mentioned. Between the experience of those who do this all the time and what is "academic".

So, besides helping new people into the community or playing in pure theoretical space, why must we keep the academic approach involved?

Well, first... the science does inform what we do. Yes, a lot of this is based on belief but there is a large amount of the science which is just fact no matter what we do. The neuroplasticity of traumatized brains is a topic we type about a lot given our dissociative disorder. I mentioned in my Dissociative Disorders and Hypnosis post that there are multiple studies that there's a higher hypnotic suggestibility in those with conditions that include dissociation as a symptom. The fact that this was being taught in a 101 class was why I made that post to begin with.

From my Mind Makes It Real post I mentioned that we need to be aware of the truths to keep ourselves in check. We should always be wondering "am I wrong?" about everything and the moment one lets go of the academic framework and commits to the loose ethos of "it just works" you lose a little bit of that footing and external perspective. We're an insular community and there's an element of "the popular ideas win out", not to stress a point too much but the whole hatred of the progressive muscle relaxation induction is a good example of this. I know a few community leaders who reflexively rant any time they hear it. These people have the ability to control the con schedule. They teach classes and part of their lesson is their personal disdain for that approach. This goes into the minds of those who were taught by that person and becomes part of the internal dogma. Suddenly you have a situation where a minority of people in the community need to defend the PMR.

I do not actually care too much about PMR but it really is one of the most accessible entry level trances and the disdain for it is a little gatekeepy, if I am being honest. I don't think any individual means for it to be something they keep out of the community but enough individuals following a trend creates a community concept, a widely held belief.

And hypnosis is entirely about widely held beliefs. Thus it is now a fact that PMR is boring and ineffective and there's more fun ways to do trance. That is an example, hopefully one that is understandable to an audience who are also into hypnokink (apologies to my non-hypnosis Tumblr followers, I hope if you're reading this you enjoy this peak into a little internet sub-culture).

Which brings me to legitimacy.

Do we really need it?

Hypnosis is both science and fantasy. A person attending a hypnokink convention could treat hypnosis with the technical skill and care that one would approach as ropeplay, learning all of the different terms and all of the safety procedures and treating it as a psychological version of what can be physically observed.

But you may also have someone who treats hypnosis as roleplay and improv with a framework not too dissimilar from a tabletop sourcebook for D/s shenanigans that they can learn and play within much the same as a D&D player can switch to World of Darkness. I guarantee there are a large number of people in the hypnosis community who do this and they're not wrong for doing it.

But as I mentioned above. Hypnosis is a scientifically observable phenomenon and it is dangerous if abused. Heaven knows I know that more than most. One must not believe in the dangers for them to be real. An immature hypnotist is a danger to a hypnotee regardless of if they think they are roleplaying or performing edgeplay. And the same is true for a hypnotee, too. If one believes it's all roleplay then their limits and safety will be at a different level than someone who is aware of the risks.

One need only look to the dark corners of our community where covert hypnosis is practiced eagerly, recruitment is a game and personality erasure is an aesthetic to know that there are uncomfortably large swaths who are practicing hypnosis from the perspective of fantasy. I do not want to pull out the news articles about how Disney Deer brainwashing ruined people's lives again.

The good news is that within the educator/convention going portion of the community we do teach this stuff. We do make everything clear. We're not currently in a community where academic approaches are shrugged off.

But it makes me uncomfortable when experienced educators in the community forget how far their words reach and dismiss the academic for the sake of "what works".

We do not need to seek legitimacy for the eyes of those outside of the community. We do not Demand To Be Taken Seriously. We have a community where people are welcome to join or not join. We do not need external legitimacy.

But we need internal legitimacy.

We need the people who practice within our care to know that they're practicing with dangerous tools that can and will mess a person up if treated without proper care.

Safety and education require we keep room for the academic and seek to legitimize what we do or those who look at hypnosis as pure fantasy will not be able to recognize the risk.

At least, that's my opinion.

-

For more of our ramblings on hypnosis and the hypnosis community, please check out our Hypnokink Writing tag for other bits of education and commentary like this <3

[unrvlybutch]

I believe this to be especially true for TIFs, but I think a large part of thinking transitioning would save my life was due to a deep misunderstanding of what the trans community actually is.

The media portrayal is dissonant to the reality of how rife with depravity and sex-cultism it actually is. The preconceived idea going in is different than what you're going to see once you step foot into trans spaces..Mostly of course due to the TiM autogynophillic side of the equation, but also due to the high concentration of comorbid mental conditions that are frequently displayed and discussed within these circles.

There is a strong emotional aspect that many young women can connect to, that feeling of "you mean I can escape this?" And not having to face sex based oppression is something that resonated with me, the new unwanted male attention, the standards of what it means to become a woman, the performance we're expected not only to conform to but to enjoy. Seeing your friends who were boys change and become distant to you, like strangers. The change is isolating, jarring, and introduces prospects that children weren't made to comprehend. Add a crazy new mix of hormones and preteen angst into the equation and it's a perfect storm.

Trans ideology is such a dangerous thing to discover and the community will never be a safe place for children. It is harmful and self destructive by nature, it inhibits the path of true personal growth in development and masquerades as exactly what it is destructive towards.

I wish I had never learned about the vague concept of "transness." I believe dysphoria is real, I still experience it -- but it does not mean I am male, I am not trapped in my body, I do not have a male soul. I don't feel like a woman because there's no feeling associated with being your biological sex. You just are, it just is.

What I don't understand is how Dysphoria moved away from being a mental illness when it requires destructive, experimental surgeries, hormones, etc. to just get to the baseline of feeling contented in oneself.

But I understand also from firsthand that it is a beast that is never satisfied, I felt but a moment of peace when I got on testosterone and then all the worries about a mastectomy came into mind, but even if I got that...My body would still be so noticeably female...moving onto the next worry, body masculinization surgery -- is that even a thing? I hoped it was..and phalloplasty, and furthermore...but even then, it stands only as a barely passable approximation of what I wanted for myself. And the cost? Impossible.

The dream of transition is not, on a biological scientific and social scale, enough to satisfy dysphoria

I see my dysphoria now as something that exists parasitically alongside myself, it lives in the same space in my mind as my anorexia did -- both of those two things are something I fear I will never be free from in thought, but I strive everyday to put them away in order to live a healthy life. The difference in my treatment between those two mental illnesses was drastic. One landed me several times inpatient against my will, one was coddled and affirmed by every therapist I've ever had. I do not have to make the discernment of which one that was. They did not give me appetite suppressants for my anorexia, they did not give me weight loss surgery, they did not say that being emaciated and ill was really just who I was always meant to be. But, both impact my quality of life equally. Both have lead me to self destruct, self hate, ruminate on my insecurities and become obsessive over the parts of myself that I really could not change.

I don't know. These are just some thoughts I've been having.

[sapphire-weapon]

yeah not denying that, but one of the basest aspects of being on the aspec spectrum is the lack of attraction not lack of expression

aromantics still get married despite the cultural belief marriage is romantic same applies to many other western culturally believed romantic things because to them they lack romantic attraction aromantic within aspec community means lack of romantic attraction. terf definition is lack of any intimacy its a negative statement meant to push exclus bs

believing someone cant be aspec because they enjoy physical contact is terf rhetoric, its exclusionist rhetoric that 'real' aspecs should be completely cold stone touch averted people which is just a negative stereotype which is mostly spread by terfs it all goes full circle into 'not something i understand thus it cant be real or valid' rather than the fact that people understand and feel stuff differently, terfs say for lesbians to be attracted to transwomen they cant be real lesbians, because they arent, vice versa same is used for aspec people sorry if this isnt articulated correctly its also late where I live

comparing this to terf rhetoric is so absurd to me because terf rhetoric is based on the idea that gender doesn't exist/is intrinsically tied to a person's genitals. no one is saying that romance doesn't exist -- or that aromantic people don't exist. it's a false dichotomy.

a more accurate comparison would be me telling you that your line of logic would dictate that you think that CBT doesn't work, because that's actually what it's sounding like to me. the argument that i keep getting put back on me is that behavior and cognition have absolutely no relationship to one another -- or that a person's environment doesn't influence them.

this is why i said:

i was also speaking in generalities. are there tiny little micro cultures throughout the west where this is a thing? where those expressions of intimacy are completely removed from any romantic intent? sure. but in general, 99 times out of 100, if you find yourself yearning for someone’s physical intimacy, you’re experiencing a romantic longing for them in a western context. this is how you were raised culturally, and it takes A BIG EFFORT over MANY YEARS to unlearn that and decouple those two concepts.

what i'm talking about is how culture influences people's thoughts, desires, and behavior.

what you're talking about is... i don't know, assuming that i think aromanticism is a complete lie 100% of the time all the time. but i say right there in that quote that it is a thing. people have these experiences, and they're real.

however, i acknowledge that i then went on to say:

very often, i see people use “aromantic” as a stand-in for “i don’t want a relationship” – but that’s not what it is. but to experience that longing, to experience that yearning – that is a romantic feeling. even if you don’t want to be committed to that person. even if you have no desire to devote yourself to them at all. it’s still romantic in nature, because culturally, those things are romantic. and i have a really hard time believing that random 20 year olds on the internet have managed to completely decouple themselves from their cultural upbringing and totally decontextualize these actions to such an extent that they exist in their own micro culture. more often than not, these are young people who are intimidated by intimacy and sexuality and don’t really feel comfortable with who they are yet, so they slap the word “aromantic” on themselves because they don’t want to be bothered with romantic pursuits – but that doesn’t mean that they’re wholly disinterested in romance. there’s been a pushback in recent years against anything surrounding the words “romance” and “romantic” and that is really what my initial statement was about. “romance” has become almost a dirty word in some fandom spaces, because of people’s own personal discomfort with vulnerability and flaws in themselves and others. if it’s not romantic, then it’s less vulnerable, and so people strive to be as invulnerable as possible.

so let me explain.

people who are so staunchly against the concept of "romance" in fandom spaces who are very young and likely have a poor self-image and little life experience -- which are the very specific people i'm talking about; i'm not talking about aromantics in general, i'm talking about this very specific subset of people -- need to be careful that they're not co-opting a very real term for a very real thing that exists and using it as a band-aid over their own damage.

that's why i continuously use the words "yearning" and "longing."

and if they do that soulsearching and come to the honest conclusion "no this is really me, i'm really decontextualized from my cultural upbringing" -- then that's great, and i support them. but i'm willing to bet that, for a lot of these younger people, they find themselves yearning for romance while not wanting it to happen to them in a practical sense because some other xyz reason -- and then lashing out against romance in response.

like let me tell you a story. i have been celibate for about 15 years due to a very traumatic experience i had at 18. i could very easily make the argument that i'm aroace based on my lack of desire for sex or a relationship. one of my go-to lines when people ask why i don't have a boyfriend is: "if i wanted to be that responsible for another living creature's emotional state, i'd get a dog." in fact, a coworker of mine was convinced that i was aroace based on what i told her about myself, and she tried to convince me of it. and eventually, i just had to get firm with her and say: "it is just. TRAUMA." and walk away from the conversation.

but how many people -- especially young people -- don't have that insight about themselves -- or don't want to accept that part of themselves? it's easier and more appealing to accept the thought that you could be aroace because, if you are, then there's nothing "wrong" with you. the damage isn't there.

aromanticism is real.

asexuality is real.

these are real things that people experience in life.

but so are trauma and emotional damage and negative self-image. and they're ugly, awful, terrible things that no one wants to be burdened with. some people don't recover from them. and i don't blame a single person for grasping for a perceived "out" that's offered to them. if i was younger, rawer, closer to my own damage -- maybe i would've let my coworker convince me i was aroace, too.

and so i posed the question of where this backlash against romance was coming from, since people in fandom want to see expressions of romance in media so badly (but without the romance part)? because, culturally, in the west, what they're asking for are expressions of romance. and that comes from somewhere.

this is not a black-and-white issue. there's layers to this. it's nuanced. the conversation keeps getting boiled down to "is or isn't" and "inclusion or exclusion" but i feel like that's just not helpful. to blindly accept what people say on its face doesn't help anybody. this is why people are fucking fighting all the goddamn time.

i wanted to know where the backlash against romance was coming from, so i looked at it from a macrocosmic perspective. i took into account culture and psychology and stigma against mental illness, because i don't think it's productive to just broad-brush say "IT'S ALL JUST AROMANTICS!!1"

we need to be able to talk about these things, man. it's important.

[burned-lariat]

I love my trend of watching two movies on select home flights. The last time I did it, I watched Lady Bird and Love, Simon. I enjoyed both.

This time, I watched The Whale and Bodies Bodies Bodies and...hmm.

The Whale

I'll get this out of the way: Brendan Fraser EARNED that damn award. EARNED IT. His performance was fantastic. Close second to Hong Chau (Liz the nurse). Otherwise, there wasn't much to engage with. The plot was fairly non-existent (I think we were watching this man just kill himself, and thus, it was the "plot"). I was constantly gaslit to think Ellie was worth investment, especially by Charlie, though it's debatable on whether or not he's meant to be listened to (considering how he was never shown to be a liar, seems like his take was meant to be correct). You could've done without Thomas - he was unneeded. I get it's based on a play, but you mean to tell me that the script writer and Aronofsky couldn't toy with certain elements more?

I also think the movie was too short to do what the staff wanted it to do. I saw I was about 80 minutes in, and almost nothing had happened. Nothing progressed the "plot" beyond Charlie's eating disorder as he marched further and further, and this "reconnection" with Ellie was on an infinite loop that was very unearned at the end of the film. I think there could've been something there with having characters like Ellie and Thomas craft deeper empathy upon seeing Charlie's plight, where Ellie understands that her father's decisions are not on a black-and-white binary and Thomas steps out of the fanaticism circle (plus it gives the character more relevance). Liz worked just fine in her role, and she was a high point story-wise. Same with the ex-wife, though her only being in one sequence and having their past all dumped in a lone monologue really is a bummer. Fraser and Chau were great, but the rest couldn't get there.

6/10.

Bodies Bodies Bodies

About 20 mins in, when someone described the BBB game, I realized I'm just basically watching an IRL game of Among Us go wrong and had to hunker down. I actually did find myself quite bored down the stretch, mostly between deaths, because there was just a bunch of walking around and dead air during the hurricane. Each of the characters had the depth of a puddle, even for the characters that were meant to have more than that (like Bee and Sophie). The acting was hit or miss - I think Stenberg was the best of the bunch, Davidson was fine for his limited time, Sennott swung between great and flat, and everyone else was just kind of dull. I didn't care about them. There was nothing to engage with. I don't need to like you, I need to engage with you, and if I can't get that, then it's a wash because I stop caring.

I also think this film suffered from being too short, and I'd actually argue that Bee isn't needed. You could still have the plot work without the end twist (it was dumb!!) and having Sophie as the sole lead, where her return after rehab and the subsequent playing of the game outs all the drama. Speaking of drama, much of these characters' histories were told to me. I want to see it, not be told it. Why not have people mention a memory or flinch on a trigger over behavior instead of dialogue dumps of content (which I'll get to) and constantly saying "oh we're longtime besties!!" every other sentence?

Speaking of, good God did this movie just spill the details of the group's qualms practically unprovoked. We didn't get to see it in nuanced performances or context clues via presence and scenery and dialogue: we got EXPOSITION DUMPS. Jordan's beef about Sophie? Teased for a scene or two in the very beginning, left out to dry for a while, and then dumped en masse when she squared off with Bee and Sophie. Max and David beefing over Emma? Two mini conversations about it with no clues teasing such (like if the idea is that they wanna dangle Max as the red herring, they could leave inside jokes or teases that point in his direction like making David's injuries around the black eye). Max doesn't show up at all until the very last scene, so what was the point of him even being brought up or included? What is the point of everyone dying if the plot unravels to not be a campy murder mystery after all? That's not fun!

If this was meant to lampoon Gen Z/Tik Tok culture and how people like the group bastardize mental health language & AAVE, it did not come across that way to me. It came off as those stereotypes playing Among Us But You Actually Die (and even then it's a stretch considering the ending).

4/10.

[calculatesguilt]

6, 13, 14, and 21. :)

6. Favorite female bot(s)

Ohhh this is a hard one there's so many that are good. Tbh it's probably Windblade, though Nautica is pretty up there :)

13. Least favorite Decepticon(s)

This is a hard one because tbh I don't care for Most Decepticons? I'm not a Villain guy so it's hard for me to find any interest in them especially when I feel a lot of the time the Decepticons get Fumbled and often fall into the trap of "revolutionary is now genocidal so we can't talk about their Points" in a lot of conts. BUT... If I had to pick I... don't really care much for Starscream.

I often feel he's overhyped and his position in a lot of conts. often feels like he's wresting the narrative away from other characters that don't really have any screentime (or pagetime depending on the continuity.) And I often don't like how fandom portrays him but that's another beast I don't wanna tackle.

14. Least favorite Autobot(s)

21. A pairing you love that no one else seems to

did you know there are only 10 works in the rodimus/perceptor tag on ao3. did you know there is only 5 pieces of art for them.

I GRIP YOUR SHOULDERS SO TIGHTLY

DID YOU KNOW THIS...

Okay this is actually a pretty niche one and mostly it's based off the fact that Rodimus and Perceptor are Just Like my fiance and I. They've a special place in my heart and I wish their dynamic was explored a little more in mtmte given Percy was chief scientific officer (which... one would think he'd have a bigger impact on the Higher Up positions... but whatever.)

This one and drift/percy though from what I understand before mtmte came around that was the fairly popular one for those two. HOWEVER..... I will talk about them because i care about them . so much.

Okay this got long so rest under the cut.

I think every day of my life about how drift saving percy is intrinsically tied to him becoming an autobot. and i think so much about how people do their dynamic WRONG. you see i don't think they'd be A Thing at all DURING the events of canon but i could see them tentatively stepping towards it once Perceptor is able to come to grips and let go of the whole idea that he Owes Drift for saving him.

There's some very interesting dynamics there (that i'm currently exploring with Expunge/Override) that I wish was mentioned even in passing in MTMTE and it really pisses me off that so many off the characters aren't allowed near their pre-existing relationships.

Perceptor and Drift do not have a single shared line in MTMTE. they have ONE panel where they're talking Off Screen in the TB's spotlight

my hot take that would get me ending up like this ^ is that it would've been so much better if it was percy who went after drift. not ratchet. he'd have more reason to (a. he has more ties to the overlord incident than . fucking ratchet. b. do you know how dangerous the whole "patient falls in love w the doctor that saved him" trope is? c. it'd be coming full circle paralleling when drift went back to rescue him on turmoil's ship. it'd be poetic.) and his Continued Existence is in of itself a rebuttal to Drift's struggle with "i only bring death to the universe"

(also drift deserves a REAL man that doesn't constantly belittle him. Like Me.)

[leam1983]

Money-to-Mouth Syndrome

In the wake of what's transpired considering Tumblr's turbulent future, I've decided to chip in with an Ad-Free subscription, being someone who used to run primarily off of adblockers.

Mastodon isn't growing as well as I'd hoped, and most of its users are people who would've subscribed to it out of ethical concerns. It's not the popular platform, as it were. I don't like the idea of the server that was pitched as being the "best match" for me being an exclusively IT-focused one, and I don't like the sense that Mastodon is fast becoming an island unto itself - basically what Linux was before Ubuntu broke into the mainstream and helped to usher in today's distro-filled world. People talk about the Fediverse without really understanding the concept of federating communities, and it feels like the terminology is calcifying before my eyes.

Threads is a waste of time for me. It's so focused on being "friendly" that it offers less features than Twitter and seems to be geared towards base visibility. I never used Twitter to step forward, I used it as a second glorified RSS feed.

Bluesky is a non-entity as of now, as it's tiptoeing towards a public release. As for Facebook, it's mostly where my parents share old one-panel Bizarro strips. I have zero interest in it.

That leaves me with Tumblr - and only Tumblr.

I like the people I know from here. I enjoy reading my mutuals or picking stuff out of the dashboard. The closest analogue is Facebook, but it's actually far more sanitized. Not every post comes with thousands of comments spewing hate and misinfo. Yes, there's a few and I'm sure I'd find a ton if I bothered to check out the Alt-Right or Radfem circles around Tumblr - but I don't.

If you give me a choice between voting with my wallet or watching while Mullenweg et al. divest Tumblr of its purpose for the sake of base profitability, I'm whipping out the ol' VISA without so much as a second's worth of hesitation.

As for Twitter - it's irrelevant now, and it's been that way long before Musk got involved. Twitter's death knell sang the moment you heard about Right-wing firebrands launching their own little echo chambers. The dream of the Online Public Space is dead, we've instead formed cliques and fostered an increasingly divisive climate that's had catastrophic consequences for the world, the environment and our sociopolitical development. Things went south at Twitter the exact moment Jack Dorsey stopped being the public face of the company. The place used to champion clarity of expression and base fucking decency, now it twists democracy out of shape because you're supposedly expected to let the howler monkeys flinging poo have their own shot at "self-expression".

Sure, the artists on the Bird Site cling to it because it's where their communuties developed, but communities are like flocks. If you're worth it as a creator, you'll be followed elsewhere.

As for NSFW content... Shit, find an oligarch with an unlimited firehose of seed money, settle your server architecture in the Bahamas and take the occasional errant payment in crypto, and chances are you could survive a few years as a platform that allows smut, by virtue of being wholly unknown of standard credit issuers. Eventually, though, the same secrecy that enables the existence of smut on your platform could be abused by bad actors for all sorts of things, too. Considering, I just don't see porn ever featuring on a platform in a permanent and visible capacity.

[lesbiansforboromir]

Alright, if any amount of my frustration comes through too harshly in this reply then I apologise for that but I cannot deny that I am frustrated. This is definitely mostly on me for allowing vent posts to be reblogged and I understand that the context to this post is temporally divorced from itself. I actually do not remember the original catalyst for it because some version of the same event occurs so often on my blog that they have all melded together in my memory.

But I do remember the reason I most recently reblogged it, when I posted a Guardian article discussing how the white supremacist italian government is currently using Lord of the Rings to further it's agenda. And the response to that post, from multiple Tolkien fans, was some combination of 'oh those silly white supremacists, havent they read Tolkien's Nazi publisher letter and therefore know that his work is ideologically counter to what they stand for?'

I get this kind of response all the time, pretty much everytime I post anything about the eugenicist/racial superiority logic that makes up a great deal of LotR's foundational worldbuilding. It is apparently not obvious that the letter doesn't innoculate it's author against other forms of racism because that is exactly how it is used, over and over again, to attempt to shut down any discussion about it. It's as if this one letter makes Faramir's entire diatribe about how tragic it is that Gondor's populace is becoming 'less high' and 'more like those warlike middle men' vanish from existence. Or just wipes the modern day fandom of what I will optimistically call the large minority of neo-nazis that inhabit it and openly declare that their views are based upon the book's content.

This is a problem I have come up against from casual fans, from hardcore fans, from literal Tolkien academics themselves, I cannot understate how often I have said something along the lines of 'the fact that the narrative casually mentions the rohirrim killed the Druedain for sport before Ghan-buri-ghan helped them is pretty uncomfortable', only for 'but the nazi letter!' to be thrown at it. And I am by no means the only person within any of those circles who has this issue.

And absolutely this post is thoughtless and throwaway and worded poorly. I made it too much like a personal attack for one, I actually have no interest whatsoever in determining Tolkien's personal views on racism one way or the other. And you are completely right, the letter has much more impact and uniqueness to it's message than I allowed it, I was too dismissive and I even misattributed it's date. I am genuinely glad to hear that it gave someone comfort and I hope it does the same for many others.

The problem and frustration that I have is that the dominant Tolkien fandom dialogue has all the energy in the world to defend a dead man against accusations of racism (real and imagined), but absolutely no interest in acknowledging how many living racists today love his work for (they believe) it's alliegance to their ideas of social order. And how long that has been the case. They especially do not want to think about why that reality exists. And this letter, which I presume he wrote over the course of a few afternoons, isn't just used to exonerate Tolkien himself from holding any racist views, it is used to deny the possibility of racism existing in LotR entirely. Which, at the very least, is the piece of his writing that has had the most impact on the world between the two of them. I hope that all explains my less than positive relationship with it.

I never want to hear about the goddamn nazi publishing letter ever again, you all know that hating nazis in the 1950's in England doesn't automatically make you immune to racism right? Please examine what the phrase 'corrupting the most noble northern spirit' actually means in Tolkien's context, we can't keep doing this. Read Charles Mills "The Wretched of Middle Earth" please please please

[nothorses]

Interview With An Ex-Radfem

exradfem is an anonymous Tumblr user who identifies as transmasculine, and previously spent time in radical feminist communities. They have offered their insight into those communities using their own experiences and memories as a firsthand resource.

Background

I was raised in an incredibly fundamentalist religion, and so was predisposed to falling for cult rhetoric. Naturally, I was kicked out for being a lesbian. I was taken in by the queer community, particularly the trans community, and I got back on my feet- somehow. I had a large group of queer friends, and loved it. I fully went in on being the Best Trans Ally Possible, and constantly tried to be a part of activism and discourse.

Unfortunately, I was undersocialized, undereducated, and overenthusiastic. I didn't fully understand queer or gender theory. In my world, when my parents told me my sexuality was a choice and I wasn't born that way, they were absolutely being homophobic. I understood that no one should care if it's a choice or not, but it was still incredibly, vitally important to me that I was born that way.

On top of that, I already had an intense distrust of men bred by a lot of trauma. That distrust bred a lot of gender essentialism that I couldn't pull out of the gender binary. I felt like it was fundamentally true that men were the problem, and that women were inherently more trustworthy. And I really didn't know where nonbinary people fit in.

Then I got sucked down the ace exclusionist pipeline; the way the arguments were framed made sense to my really surface-level, liberal view of politics. This had me primed to exclude people –– to feel like only those that had been oppressed exactly like me were my community.

Then I realized I was attracted to my nonbinary friend. I immediately felt super guilty that I was seeing them as a woman. I started doing some googling (helped along by ace exclusionists on Tumblr) and found the lesfem community, which is basically radfem “lite”: lesbians who are "only same sex attracted". This made sense to me, and it made me feel so much less guilty for being attracted to my friend; it was packaged as "this is just our inherent, biological desire that is completely uncontrollable". It didn't challenge my status quo, it made me feel less guilty about being a lesbian, and it allowed me to have a "biological" reason for rejecting men.

I don't know how much dysphoria was playing into this, and it's something I will probably never know; all of this is just piecing together jumbled memories and trying to connect dots. I know at the time I couldn't connect to this trans narrative of "feeling like a woman". I couldn't understand what trans women were feeling. This briefly made me question whether I was nonbinary, but radfem ideas had already started seeping into my head and I'm sure I was using them to repress that dysphoria. That's all I can remember.

The lesfem community seeded gender critical ideas and larger radfem princples, including gender socialization, gender as completely meaningless, oppression as based on sex, and lesbian separatism. It made so much innate sense to me, and I didn't realize that was because I was conditioned by the far right from the moment of my birth. Of course women were just a biological class obligated to raise children: that is how I always saw myself, and I always wanted to escape it.

I tried to stay in the realms of TIRF (Trans-Inclusive Radical Feminist) and "gender critical" spaces, because I couldn't take the vitriol on so many TERF blogs. It took so long for me to get to the point where I began seeing open and unveiled transphobia, and I had already read so much and bought into so much of it that I thought that I could just ignore those parts.

In that sense, it was absolutely a pipeline for me. I thought I could find a "middle ground", where I could "center women" without being transphobic.

Slowly, I realized that the transphobia was just more and more disgustingly pervasive. Some of the trans men and butch women I looked up to left the groups, and it was mostly just a bunch of nasty people left. So I left.

After two years offline, I started to recognize I was never going to be a healthy person without dealing with my dysphoria, and I made my way back onto Tumblr over the pandemic. I have realized I'm trans, and so much of this makes so much more sense now. I now see how I was basically using gender essentialism to repress my identity and keep myself in the closet, how it was genuinely weaponized by TERFs to keep me there, and how the ace exclusionist movement primed me into accepting lesbian separatism- and, finally, radical feminism.

The Interview

You mentioned the lesfem community, gender criticals, and TIRFs, which I haven't heard about before- would you mind elaborating on what those are, and what kinds of beliefs they hold?

I think the lesfem community is recruitment for lesbians into the TERF community. Everything is very sanitized and "reasonable", and there's an effort not to say anything bad about trans women. The main focus was that lesbian = homosexual female, and you can't be attracted to gender, because you can't know someone's gender before knowing them; only their sex.

It seemed logical at the time, thinking about sex as something impermeable and gender as internal identity. The most talk about trans women I saw initially was just in reference to the cotton ceiling, how sexual orientation is a permanent and unchangeable reality. Otherwise, the focus was homophobia. This appealed to me, as I was really clinging to the "born this way" narrative.

This ended up being a gateway to two split camps - TIRFs and gender crits.

I definitely liked to read TIRF stuff, mostly because I didn't like the idea of radical feminism having to be transphobic. But TIRFs think that misogyny is all down to hatred of femininity, and they use that as a basis to be able to say trans women are "just as" oppressed.

Gender criticals really fought out against this, and pushed the idea that gender is fake, and misogyny is just sex-based oppression based on reproductive issues. They believe that the source of misogyny is the "male need to control the source of reproduction"- which is what finally made me think I had found the "source" of my confusion. That's why I ended up in gender critical circles instead of TIRF circles.

I'm glad, honestly, because the mask-off transphobia is what made me finally see the light. I wouldn't have seen that in TIRF communities.

I believed this in-between idea, that misogyny was "sex-based oppression" and that transphobia was also real and horrible, but only based on transition, and therefore a completely different thing. I felt that this was the "nuanced" position to take.

The lesfem community also used the fact that a lot of lesbians have partners who transition, still stay with their lesbian partners, and see themselves as lesbian- and that a lot of trans men still see themselves as lesbians. That idea is very taboo and talked down in liberal queer spaces, and I had some vague feelings about it that made me angry, too. I really appreciated the frank talk of what I felt were my own taboo experiences.

I think gender critical ideology also really exploited my own dysphoria. There was a lot of talk about how "almost all butches have dysphoria and just don't talk about it", and that made me feel so much less alone and was, genuinely, a big relief to me that I "didn't have to be trans".

Lesfeminism is essentially lesbian separatism dressed up as sex education. Lesfems believe that genitals exist in two separate categories, and that not being attracted to penises is what defines lesbians. This is used to tell cis lesbians, "dont feel bad as a lesbian if you're attracted to trans men", and that they shouldn’t feel "guilty" for not being attracted to trans women. They believe that lesbianism is not defined as being attracted to women, it is defined as not being attracted to men; which is a root idea in lesbian separatism as well.

Lesfems also believe that attraction to anything other than explicit genitals is a fetish: if you're attracted to flat chests, facial hair, low voices, etc., but don't care if that person has a penis or not, you're bisexual with a fetish for masculine attributes. Essentially, they believe the “-sexual” suffix refers to the “sex” that you are assigned at birth, rather than your attraction: “homosexual” refers to two people of the same sex, etc. This was part of their pushback to the ace community, too.

I think they exploited the issues of trans men and actively ignored trans women intentionally, as a way of avoiding the “TERF” label. Pronouns were respected, and they espoused a constant stream of "trans women are women, trans men are men (but biology still exists and dictates sexual orientation)" to maintain face.

They would only be openly transmisogynistic in more private, radfem-only spaces.

For a while, I didn’t think that TERFs were real. I had read and agreed with the ideology of these "reasonable" people who others labeled as TERFs, so I felt like maybe it really was a strawman that didn't exist. I think that really helped suck me in.

It sounds from what you said like radical feminism works as a kind of funnel system, with "lesfem" being one gateway leading in, and "TIRF" and "gender crit" being branches that lesfem specifically funnels into- with TERFs at the end of the funnel. Does that sound accurate?

I think that's a great description actually!

When I was growing up, I had to go to meetings to learn how to "best spread the word of god". It was brainwashing 101: start off by building a relationship, find a common ground. Do not tell them what you really believe. Use confusing language and cute innuendos to "draw them in". Prey on their emotions by having long exhausting sermons, using music and peer pressure to manipulate them into making a commitment to the church, then BAM- hit them with the weird shit.

Obviously I am paraphrasing, but this was framed as a necessary evil to not "freak out" the outsiders.

I started to see that same talk in gender critical circles: I remember seeing something to the effect of, "lesfem and gender crit spaces exist to cleanse you of the gender ideology so you can later understand the 'real' danger of it", which really freaked me out; I realized I was in a cult again.

I definitely think it's intentional. I think they got these ideas from evangelical Christianity, and they actively use it to spread it online and target young lesbians and transmascs. And I think gender critical butch spaces are there to draw in young transmascs who hate everything about femininity and womanhood, and lesfem spaces are there to spread the idea that trans women exist as a threat to lesbianism.

Do you know if they view TIRFs a similar way- as essentially prepping people for TERF indoctrination?

Yes and no.

I've seen lots of in-fighting about TIRFs; most TERFs see them as a detriment, worse than the "TRAs" themselves. I've also definitely seen it posed as "baby's first radfeminism". A lot of TIRFs are trans women, at least from what I've seen on Tumblr, and therefore are not accepted or liked by radfems. To be completely honest, I don't think they're liked by anyone. They just hate men.

TIRFs are almost another breed altogether; I don't know if they have ties to lesfems at all, but I do think they might've spearheaded the online ace exclusionist discourse. I think a lot of them also swallowed radfem ideology without knowing what it was, and parrot it without thinking too hard about how it contradicts with other ideas they have.

The difference is TIRFs exist. They're real people with a bizarre, contradictory ideology. The lesfem community, on the other hand, is a completely manufactured "community" of crypto-terfs designed specifically to indoctrinate people into TERF ideology.

Part of my interest in TIRFs here is that they seem to have a heavy hand in the way transmascs are treated by the trans community, and if you're right that they were a big part of ace exclusionism too they've had a huge impact on queer discourse as a whole for some time. It seems likely that Baeddels came out of that movement too.

Yes, there’s a lot of overlap. The more digging I did, the more I found that it's a smaller circle running the show than it seems. TIRFs really do a lot of legwork in peddling the ideology to outer queer community, who tend to see it as generic feminism.

TERFs joke a lot about how non-radfems will repost or reblog from TERFs, adding "op is a TERF”. They're very gleeful when people accept their ideology with the mask on. They think it means these people are close to fully learning the "truth", and they see it as further evidence they have the truth the world is hiding. I think it's important to speak out against radical feminism in general, because they’re right; their ideology does seep out into the queer community.

Do you think there's any "good" radical feminism?

No. It sees women as the ultimate victim, rather than seeing gender as a tool to oppress different people differently. Radical feminism will always see men as the problem, and it is always going to do harm to men of color, gay men, trans men, disabled men, etc.

Women aren't a coherent class, and radfems are very panicked about that fact; they think it's going to be the end of us all. But what's wrong with that? That's like freaking out that white isn't a coherent group. It reveals more about you.

It's kind of the root of all exclusionism, the more I think about it, isn't it? Just freaking out that some group isn't going to be exclusive anymore.

Radical feminists believe that women are inherently better than men.

For TIRFs, it's gender essentialism. For TERFs, its bio essentialism. Both systems are fundamentally broken, and will always hurt the groups most at risk. Centering women and misogyny above all else erases the root causes of bigotry and oppression, and it erases the intersections of race and class. The idea that women are always fundamentally less threatening is very white and privileged.

It also ignores how cis women benefit from gender norms just as cis men do, and how cis men suffer from gender roles as well. It’s a system of control where gender non-conformity is a punishable offense.

[moontrinemars]

A Proposal for Studying Tropical and Sidereal Placements in Tandem

These are my own ideas based on individual research. Credit if you reference. Refer to my blog bio for more.

We have been born into an early time in creation. We may feel as though the world is old, because of how short our own lives seem by comparison, but we are still living in what is projected to be the early childhood, if not infancy, of the universe.

I have a working theory that, without putting the onus on any force in particular, the patterns of the universe work out such that they align with the capacity of its inhabitants to interpret them. Thus, I suspect it is less than incidental that the breach between Tropical and Sidereal placements began when it did.

The existence of this breach does not necessarily imply that one school of astrology is wrong and the other is right: I suspect that instead, it signifies a need for astrologers to analyze the difference in the way that either methodology's calculations are expressed in reality, to come to a more nuanced understanding of how the patterns we glean from astrology interact in reality.

I believe that the tropical zodiac and the sidereal zodiac are both legitimate systems with their own respective meaning and significance, ideally studied in tandem.

While the difference between sidereal and tropical placements are relatively minimal at the moment. It will only grow as time goes on. As such, the distinction between how each placement is expressed may seem minimal now, but it will become more obvious as time goes on, because the difference will grow.

For example, when tropical and sidereal placements were in sync, people may have been born tropical Gemini and sidereal Gemini Ascendants. Now, people like myself might be tropical Cancer-sidereal Gemini Ascendants. In some time, people will be born tropical Leo-sidereal Gemini Ascendants, then tropical Virgo-sidereal Gemini Ascendants, and so on until, eventually it comes full circle to double Gemini again.

So back when Tropical and Sidereal placements were aligned, and thus they impacted the native toward the same thing, there was no real need to distinguish between the two zodiac systems. But now with nearly a sign's difference between the two, astrologers often subscribe to one system over the other based on what aligns with their personal interpretation of events and individuals.

I suspect, as this gap grows greater, particularly once the systems are squaring one another and thus enter new rounds, the truth that either correlates with respective aspects of reality will become more obvious, and the legitimacy of referring to both not just on their own but also in tandem will gain traction among astrologers.

If this sounds like a potentially viable theory to you, and you want to be ahead of the curve, there is value in figuring out the impact of either system on the individual. Personally, I have my own working hypothesis - keeping in mind that I'm young and I have plenty more experience to gain and research to conduct:

Tropical placements are best referenced for key insight into lived circumstances. Sidereal placements are best referenced for insight into purpose and fate.

The tropical zodiac is best for circumstances. It reflects the impact of reality in this life on the native. The sun is valued more because of its significance to choices, which define our circumstances.

It is also why western astrologers, who mostly use the tropical, zodiac, treat the north node as benefic but regard both nodes as less important. The nodes are illusory, so they may drive natives to pursue change for the betterment of their circumstances, but they do not exist in physical reality, which makes their effects less tangible or obvious.

The sidereal zodiac is best for fate. It reflects the purpose shaping the current reincarnation of the native's soul. The moon is valued more because of its significance to foundations - which ultimately construct or lay the path to our fate.

This is also why vedic astrologers, who mostly rely on the sidereal zodiac, consider Rahu malefic but place more value on the nodes altogether. The nodes are illusory, representing visions of the life path with disconnection to reality, which may disrupt karma. However, because they represent illusion and higher powers, together the nodes are seen as pretty significant.

You may ask, then what about the draconic zodiac?

Here's how I see it. The draconic zodiac is determined by aligning the north node in the chart with a placement of 0º Aries. So? Well, the north node is the illusory unfamiliar. It is a mathematical object that represents newness and potential. Aligning it with Aries, the sign of inception, instigation, and beginnings exposes who we are when we passionately pursue a brighter future, and when we strive to embody an unfamiliar, and more powerful version of ourselves.

This is why I think using the whole house system with Aries ruling first is necessary in draconic charts - it places the North Node at the cusp between the self of the 1st house and the unknown of the 12th house.

These are my thoughts on the subject - for now. Hopefully further research and experimentation will lead to more insight, but in the meantime, I hope this was interesting, and thanks for reading ♡♡♡♡

[whumptober]

Whumptober 2020 - Updated

Welcome to Whumptober 2020! We’re doing things a little differently this year so please make sure to read the Event Info carefully. We are also excited to announce the addition of an AO3 Collection, which can be found here.

We hope you’re as excited as us to watch the Whump Community come together once again for a month of bone-crunching creativity and collaboration!

(All 31 Themes + Prompts, Event Information, and FAQs are posted below the cut!)

No 1. LET'S HANG OUT SOMETIME Waking Up Restrained | Shackled | Hanging

No 2. IN THE HANDS OF THE ENEMY  "Pick Who Dies" | Collars | Kidnapped

No 3. MY WAY OR THE HIGHWAY Manhandled | Forced to their Knees | Held at Gunpoint

No 4. RUNNING OUT OF TIME Caged | Buried Alive | Collapsed Building

No 5. WHERE DO YOU THINK YOU'RE GOING? On the Run | Failed Escape | Rescue

No 6. PLEASE.... "Get it Out" | No More | "Stop, please"

No 7. I'VE GOT YOU Support | Carrying | Enemy to Caretaker

No 8. WHERE DID EVERYBODY GO? "Don't Say Goodbye" | Abandoned | Isolation

No 9. FOR THE GREATER GOOD "Take Me Instead" | "Run!” | Ritual Sacrifice

No 10. THEY LOOK SO PRETTY WHEN THEY BLEED Blood Loss | Internal Bleeding | Trail of Blood

No 11. PSYCH 101 Defiance | Struggling | Crying

No 12. I THINK I'VE BROKEN SOMETHING Broken Down | Broken Bones | Broken Trust

No 13. BREATHE IN BREATHE OUT Delayed Drowning | Chemical Pneumonia | Oxygen Mask

No 14. IS SOMETHING BURNING? Branding | Heat Exhaustion | Fire

No 15. INTO THE UNKNOWN Possession | Magical Healing | Science Gone Wrong

No 16. A TERRIBLE, HORRIBLE, NO GOOD, VERY BAD DAY Forced to Beg | Hallucinations | Shoot the Hostage

No 17. I DID NOT SEE THAT COMING Blackmail | Dirty Secret | Wrongfully Accused

No 18. PANIC! AT THE DISCO Panic Attacks | Phobias | Paranoia

No 19. BROKEN HEARTS Grief | Mourning Loved One | Survivor's Guilt

No 20. TOTO, I HAVE A FEELING WE'RE NOT IN KANSAS ANYMORE Lost | Field Medicine | Medieval

No 21. I DON'T FEEL SO WELL Chronic Pain | Hypothermia | Infection

No 22. DO THESE TACOS TASTE FUNNY TO YOU? Poisoned | Drugged | Withdrawal

No 23. WHAT’S A WHUMPEE GOTTA DO TO GET SOME SLEEP AROUND HERE? Exhaustion | Narcolepsy | Sleep Deprivation

No 24. YOU’RE NOT MAKING ANY SENSE Forced Mutism | Blindfolded | Sensory Deprivation

No 25. I THINK I’LL JUST COLLAPSE RIGHT HERE, THANKS Disorientation | Blurred Vision | Ringing Ears

No 26. IF YOU THOUGHT THE HEAD TRAUMA WAS BAD... Migraine | Concussion | Blindness

No 27. OK, WHO HAD NATURAL DISASTERS ON THEIR 2020 BINGO CARD? Earthquake | Extreme Weather | Power Outage

No 28. SUCH WOW. MANY NORMAL. VERY OOPS. Accidents | Hunting Season | Mugged

No 29. I THINK I NEED A DOCTOR Intubation | Emergency Room | Reluctant Bedrest

No 30. NOW WHERE DID THAT COME FROM? Wound Reveal | Ignoring an Injury | Internal Organ Injury

No 31. TODAY’S SPECIAL: TORTURE Experiment | Whipped | Left for Dead

Alternate Prompt List

Alt 1. Punctured

Alt 2. Falling

Alt 3. Comfort

Alt 4. Stitches

Alt 5. Stoic Whumpees

Alt 6. Altered States

Alt 7. Found Family

Alt 8. Adverse Reactions

Alt 9. Memory Loss

Alt 10. Nightmares

Alt 11. Presumed Dead

Alt. 12. Water

Alt. 13 Accidents

Alt. 14 Shot

Alt. 15 Carry/Support

Event Info

WHUMPTOBER is a month-long, prompt-based creation challenge (think: Inktober, but whumpier). There are 31 Official themes this year - one for each day of the month - which can be used, skipped, or combined in any way you’d like. They are meant to serve as inspiration without being taken literally (e.g. you don't have to include the exact wording into your work). Additionally, there are 3 prompts for each theme.  These are optional suggestions and can be used in conjunction with the theme, or as options/alternatives.  We want to give everyone as much creative freedom as possible, as well as increase event accessibility for folks with triggers and squicks.

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Of course! We’ve created an AO3 Collection to archive any fics posted there. The archive can be accessed here. The blog is the official archive, so please respect the boundaries of any closeted whumpers in your social circle :)

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Q. An existing fic I am currently writing contains many of the Whumptober prompts, can I use it?

If you are actively writing this fic at the moment with the whumptober prompts in mind, yes. If it just conveniently checks the boxes, then please don’t. You can, however, add new chapters answering one or more of the prompts.

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Yes, absolutely, and it would count towards being a completionist for both/all of you :)

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See this post

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See this post

Q. My interpretation of the prompt isn't whumpy at all, does that count?

No, sorry, but keep in mind that whump [see definition] is something very nuanced and different for everyone and emotional whump/angst is just as much part of it, as is physical whump and torture. So before you dismiss your idea, think about this.

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tw at the end of the word, ex. emeto tw

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Here on Discord

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Note: This is a creation challenge, please don’t repost your old work under our tags (unless it’s been changed or edited for the event).

[ladymisteria]

@kittenfangirl20 Exactly what I think too! As a "blinker-free" (pardon the term) fan of the Erik/Christine paring, I fully realize that Erik is the kind of individual who skates merrily across a lake of red flags - but at the same time we are presented with a wealth of strong motivations that, at the very least, attempt to say to the reader: "Yes, he is dangerous and damaged, but something, at base, strongly contributed to making him that way." Does it justify the shit he's done? Of course not! But it gives you a way to understand that it's probably the only way he knew how to relate to other people.

These motivations are completely lacking in Raoul. He is rich, he has a solid family behind him that supports him (his sisters and brother), he has known only the positive aspects of life (Poverty? Degradation? Having to actually sweat to earn a living? What are these unfamiliar and absurd concepts?) and he is also presented to us as aesthetically attractive. His being a total jealous and possessive asshole, therefore, has no reason to exist.

It's clear that Erik doesn't represent a completely healthy choice either (psychologists and psychiatrists would have a field day, with him! 😂), but at least he showed that he understood the bullshit he did and - in his twisted way - he "apologized" to Christine, accepting her decision to leave with Raoul without tormenting her anymore - an "act of renunciation" that the Viscount, throughout the novel, proves that he is unable (and unwilling) to perform at all.

Also, honestly, I don't remember ever reading about Raoul apologizing for the bestial way he treated Christine the whole time, not even at the end of everything. This (more than other things) has always led me to accept without too much effort (in fanfiction or even in the ALW sequel) the idea of a drunken or violent Raoul and a "healthier" Erik.

In fact, I don't struggle to believe that with a little work (okay, a lot 😂) Erik can overcome (or at least greatly improve) his flaws until he becomes an acceptable (if not even decent) human being.

But Raoul… In the novel all his "unmotivated unhealthiness" (hatred, possessiveness and jealousy) is based exclusively on mostly unfounded suspicions (a half-conversation - without context - overheard from behind a door, a name made using a certain tone by Christine…) - and he doesn't apologize even when he discovers the truth. It just goes from: "Christine is a whore" to: "I have to free Christine from the man she's attached to in some way, though I don't know which one because I've never listened to her".

Is there really anyone who believes that it would never happen again, once they get married? Given his temper, isn't it more likely that he would view a casual conversation between a man and Christine as yet another proof of a betrayal from her, perhaps by getting drunk or even taking his anger out on her (and we know he's violent too, 'cause - as you rightly pointed up - he threatened of kill a person without even knowing her, and was further capable of shooting, without a second thought, at something/someone he believed was Erik)?

Do we really want to believe that he would be able (as Erik did) to accept Christine's hypothetical decision to leave him - without again thinking that she is incapable of making her own choices?

And the worst thing, in my opinion, is that it is clearly shown (by the way he treats her) that for Raoul Christine she is easily "replaceable".

Terrible to say, but if he really had lost Christine, in the end nothing would have changed for him: in all probability, indeed, he would have found "a replacement" (even if a woman interested only in the comforts he can offer) in the circle of a month. Erik doesn't.

Christine may have been important (personally I don't think so, but still…) to Raoul, but she was the world to Erik.

Yesterday, wandering around here on Tumblr, I found another post about how Eristine fans (like me) prove to have absolutely no understanding of Gaston Leroux's original work.

Because we do not see how wonderfully perfect - and more importantly how absolutely healthy as a choice, for Christine - is Raoul de Chagny.

The post then concluded with a clear victorious note establishing how - given the canonicity of Raoul/Christine - this paring was obviously right.

Well, if you will allow me, I would like to respond to that post - by saying that yes, it is quite true.

In fact, everyone knows that:

sneaking - uninvited! - into a person’s dressing room and expecting everyone to leave to be left alone with an unconscious young woman is healthy;

waiting, once - rightly so! - being dismissed from the dressing room by said young woman, in a dark recess, for her to be alone in order to “get back at it” with an unsolicited courtship is healthy;

getting jealous when you hear her talking to a man, to the point - literally! - to becoming enraged and beginning to regard her as a prostitute is healthy;

entering her dressing room in her absence to see who she was daring (!) to talk to is healthy;

following her when she leaves Paris, raging when she apparently rejects your affections and - again! - practically calling her a prostitute when she tries to explain about the Angel of Music is healthy;

escaping through a window so that the innkeeper doesn't see you stalking the young woman in the middle of the night - again without her knowledge - to find out if it is true that she is going to pay her respects at her father’s grave, or if it is just an excuse to meet another man, is healthy;

questioning anyone who knows anything about her and her private life - even though she has clearly expressed her intention to break off your relationship (of friendship, let’s clarify! There is no engagement, secret or otherwise) - and even going so far as to show up at her home - again, uninvited! - to “put the screws” on his elderly and ailing foster mother, suggesting to her that the said young woman is (guess what? Bravo!) almost a prostitute just because she has not yet fallen at your feet, smitten in love with a spoiled child, is healthy;

“ambushing” the carriage in which the young woman travels, so that you can confront face to face the man with whom she dared to cheat on you (?!?), ending up for the umpteenth time considering her a prostitute “who led you on” (again, what?!?) is healthy;

considering her a saint or a whore depending on the time of day is healthy;

offending and humiliating her (accusing her, as is now ritual, of being the worst of whores) when she tries to explain to you, at the masquerade ball, what has happened to her and is still happening to her is healthy;

slipping - once again! - uninvited into her dressing room, spying on her as she writes a private letter, and even managing to rage when she seems to show pity for someone who is not you is healthy;

showing up - uninvited of course - at the young woman’s home, accusing her of not being herself, of being naive and a person completely incapable of judging the people around her, trying to get her to promise that she will never go out without you again, even managing to become enraged when she refuses to reveal the name of the “man who had the audacity to put a gold ring on her finger,” and her response to the proposal that certainly came with the ring is healthy;

taking seriously a fake engagement (which has very little secret about it, since the “third wheel in the triangle” himself urges the young woman to engage in it), and firmly claiming to turn it into a marriage - despite the fact that over and over and over again the young woman has told you that she has no intention of marrying you, and that yours is a game - is healthy…

Just tell me: should I continue? Because I don’t know how you feel about it, but it never seemed to me that Raoul was so much “the best choice” at the end of the day…

(To be clear: Erik has not a few problems and flaws, but at least he was honest and never claimed to be a "healthy choice'... and no honest Eristine fan would ever say that).

As for the "canonical = perfect" argument... I would like to remind you that Hades/Persephone is also canonical, yet everything is but a happy couple riding off into the sunset, so...

(P.S. I can no longer find the original post, so I would like to apologize to @textsfromthefifthbasement for using her screenshot).

(P.S. part 2: Thanks to @brendadaaedestler for pointing out how I needed to... "express out loud" this analysis of mine of the real 'healthiness' of Raoul de Chagny's character.)

[gendercensus]

On fae/faer pronouns and cultural appropriation

HOW IT STARTED

I had a handful, a very small handful but more than two, responses in the Gender Census feedback box telling me that fae/faer pronouns are appropriative. The reasons didn’t always agree, and the culture that was being appropriated wasn’t always the same, but here’s a selection of quotes:

“Fae pronouns are cultural appropriation and are harmful to use“ - UK, age 11-15

“I’m not a person who practices pagan holidays but, my understanding is that pronouns like fae/faeself are harmful because the fae are real to pagans and is like using Jesus/jesuself as pronouns“ - UK, age 11-15

“I know you've probably heard this a million times, so has everyone on the internet, but the ''mere existence''of the fae pronoun feels really uncomfortable for some of us. I'm personally not against neopronouns like xe/xim, er/em and the like, I am a pagan but apart from the, imo most important, reasoning of that pronoun being immensely disrespectful, I worry as an nb about people who banalize the usage of pronouns ''for fun'', and I'm quoting what some people have told me.“ - Spain, 16-20

“I don't agree with fae/deity pronouns just from a pagan perspective it's very disrespectful to the cultures they come from. Like Fae are a legit thing in many cultures and they hate with a fiery passion mortal humans calling themselves Fae to the point of harming/cursing the people who do it“ - USA, age 16-20

“only celtic people can use far/ faers otherwise it’s cultural appropriation, many celts have said this and told me this“ - USA, age 16-20

So that’s:

❓ Someone who doesn’t say whether they’re pagan or Celtic.

❌ Someone who definitely isn’t pagan.

✅ Someone who is pagan.

❓ Someone who doesn’t say whether they’re pagan or Celtic.

❓ Someone who doesn’t say whether they’re pagan or Celtic.

So, just to disclose some bias up-front, I am English so I’m not Celtic, but I do live in Wales so I am surrounded by Celts. The bit of Wales that I live in is so beautiful in such a way that when my French friend came to visit me she described it as féerique - like an enchanting, magical land, literally “fairylike” or thereabouts. Coincidentally I have also considered myself mostly pagan for over half of my life, and I can’t definitively claim whether or not the Fae are “part of paganism” because paganism is so diverse and pick’n’mix that it just doesn’t work that way.

To me the idea that fae/faer pronouns would be offensive or culturally appropriative sounds absurd. But also, I am powered by curiosity, and have been wrong enough times in my life that I wanted to approach this in a neutral way with an open mind. Perhaps what I find out can be helpful to some people.

So since we only have information from one person who is definitely directly affected by any cultural appropriation that may be happening, the first thing I wanted to do was get some information from ideally a large number of people who are in the cultures being appropriated, and see what they think.

~

WHAT I DID

First of all I put some polls up on Twitter and Mastodon. [Edit: Note that this post has been updated with results from closed polls.]

I specified that I wanted to hear from nonbinary Celts and pagans, just so that the voters would be familiar with fae/faer pronouns. I asked the questions in a neutral way, i.e. “How do you feel about...” with “good/neutral/bad” answer options, instead of something more leading like “Is this a load of rubbish?” or “are you super offended?” with “yes/no” options. I provided a “see results” option, so that the poll results wouldn’t be skewed as much by random people clicking any old answer to see the results. And I invited voters to express their opinions in replies.

Question #1: Nonbinary people of Celtic descent (Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Cornwall, the Isle of Man, and Brittany), how do you feel about non-Celtic people using the neopronoun set fae/faer? [ It's good / No strong feelings/other / It's bad ]

Question #2: Nonbinary pagans, how do you feel about non-pagans using the neopronoun set fae/faer? [ It's good / No strong feelings/other / It's bad ]

The Twitter polls got over 1,100 responses each, and the Mastodon polls got over 140 responses each. With a little bit of spreadsheetery I removed the “N/A” responses to reverse engineer the number of people voting for each option, combined those numbers, and recalculated percentages.

Obviously this approach is not in the least scientific, but thankfully the results were unambiguous enough and the samples were big enough that I feel comfortable drawing conclusions.

Celts on fae/faer pronouns being used by non-Celts (561 voters):

It's good - 42.5%

No strong feelings/other - 44.0%

It's bad - 13.5%

Pagans on fae/faer pronouns being used by non-pagans (468 voters):

It's good - 47.2%

No strong feelings/other - 39.5%

It's bad - 13.3%

Here’s how that looks as a graph:

The limitations of polls on these platforms means that we have no way to distinguish between people who have more complicated views (”other”) and people who have “no strong feelings”, so we can’t really draw conclusions there. If we stick to just the pure positive and pure negative:

Celts were over three times as likely to feel positive about non-Celts using fae/faer pronouns than they were to feel negative.

Pagans were over three and a half times as likely to feel positive about non-pagans using fae/faer pronouns than they were to feel negative.

So Celts and pagans are way more likely to feel actively good about someone’s fae/faer pronouns, even when that person is not a Celt/pagan. That’s some strong evidence against the idea that fae/faer pronouns are appropriative, right there.

~

CORRECTIONS

To be clear, I haven’t done any research about the roots of fae/faer or the origins of the Fae and related beings, but my goal here was to get a sense of what Celts and pagans think and feel, rather than what an historian or anthropologist would say.

On the anti side, here were the replies that suggested fae/faer either is or might be inappropriate:

“I only worry that not everyone understands the origin of the word outside of modernized ideas of fairies.“ - pagan

“As a vaguely spiritual Whatever (Ireland), I think a mortal using "fae" as a pronoun/to refer to themselves is asking for a malicious and inventive fairy curse (on them, their families and possibly anyone in their vicinity, going by the traditions). I have not heard of this term before, so this is an immediate reaction from no background bar my cultural knowledge of sidhe/fae/term as culturally appropriate. My general approach is people can identify themselves as they want.“ - Celtic

So we’ve got a pagan who’s wary that people who use fae/faer (and people in general) might not have a fully fleshed out idea of the Fae. And we’ve got a Celt who doesn’t mind people using fae/faer personally, but based on what they know of the Fae they wouldn’t be surprised if the Fae got mad about it. No outright opposition, but a little concern.

There were not a lot of replies on the pro side, but not because people weren’t into it, judging by the votes. There were a lot of “it’s more complicated than that” replies, many of which repeated others, so quotes won’t really work. Here’s a summary of the Celtic bits:

“Fae” is not a Celtic word, and Celts don’t use it. It is French, or Anglo-French.

“Fae” can refer to any number of stories/legends from a wide variety of cultures in Europe, not one cohesive concept.

There are many legends about fairy-like beings in Celtic mythologies, and there are many, many different names for them.

The Celts are not a monolith, they’re a broad selection of cultures with various languages and various mythologies.

And the pagan bits:

Paganism is not closed or exclusive in any way. It might actually be more open than anything else, as “pagan” is a sort of umbrella term for non-mainstream religions in some contexts. A closed culture would be a prerequisite for something to be considered “appropriated” from paganism.

From my own experience, pagans may or may not believe in the Fae, and within that group believers may or may not consider the Fae to be sacred and/or worthy of great respect. (I’ve certainly never met a pagan who worshipped the Fae, though I don’t doubt that some do.)

And then we get into the accusations. 🍿

“this issue wasn’t started by Celtic groups or by people who know much about Celtic fae. It was started primarily by anti-neopronoun exclusionist pagans on TikTok.“

“[I’m] literally Scottish [...] and it’s not appropriative in the least and honestly to suggest as such is massively invalidating towards actual acts of cultural appropriation and is therefore racist. Feel like if this was actually brought up it was either by some people who seriously got their wires crossed or people who are just concern trolling and trying to make fun of both neo-pronouns and of the concept of cultural appropriation and stir the pot in the process.“

“It wouldn't be the first time bigots falsly claim “it's appropriative from X marginalized group" to harass people they don't like, like they did with aspec people when they claimed "aspec" was stolen from autistic language (which was false, as many autistics said)“

“It's been a discussion in pagan circles recently ... People were very quick to use the discussion as an excuse to shit on nonbinary people.“

“I think it would be apropos to note that the word "faerie/fairy" has been a synonym for various queer identities for decades, too. The Radical Faeries are a good example.“ (So if anyone has the right to [re]claim it...)

A little healthy skepticism is often wise in online LGBTQ+ “discourse”, and some of these people are making some very strong claims, for which I’d love to see some evidence/sources/context. Some of it certainly sounds plausible.

~

HOW DID IT START?

I had a look on Twitter and the earliest claim I can find that fae/faer pronouns are cultural appropriation is from 18th February 2020, almost exactly one year ago today. Again, tweets are not the best medium for this, there was very little in the way of nuance or context. If anyone can find an older claim from Twitter or Tumblr or anywhere else online, please do send it my way.

I have no idea how to navigate TikTok because I’m a nonbinosaur. (I’m 34.) I did find some videos of teens and young adults apparently earnestly asserting that they were Celtic or pagan and the use of fae/faer pronouns was offensive, but the videos were very brief and provided nothing in the way of nuance or context. For example:

This one from October 2020 with 29k ❤️s, by someone who I assume is USian based on the word “mom”?

This one from December 2020, that says “I am pagan and i find it rather disrespectful. It’s like using god/godr or jesus/jesusr.” That’s probably what inspired the feedback box comment above that refers to hypothetical jesus/jesusr pronouns.

If anyone is able to find a particularly old or influential TikTok video about fae/faer pronouns being appropriative I’d really appreciate it, especially if it’s from a different age group or from not-the-USA, to give us a feel for how universal this is.

For context, fae pronouns were mentioned in the very first Gender Census back in May 2013, though you’ll have to take my word for it as the individual responses are not currently public. The word “fae” was mentioned in the pronoun question’s “other” textbox, and no other forms in the set were entered so we have no way of knowing for sure what that person’s full pronoun set actually is. This means the set may have been around for longer. The Nonbinary Wiki says that the pronoun set was created in October 2013, as “fae/vaer”, later than the first entry in the Gender Census, so I’ll be editing that wiki page later! If anyone has any examples of fae/faer pronouns in use before 2013 I would also be very interested to see that.

~

IN SUMMARY

Obviously I can’t speak for everyone, as the Twitter polls are not super scientific and they only surveyed a selection of Celts and pagans within a few degrees of separation of the Gender Census Twitter and Mastodon accounts, but I can certainly report on what I found.

For a more conclusive result, we’d need to take into account various demographics such as age, culture, location, religion, race/heritage, etc.

As far as I can tell based on fairly small samples of over 400 people per group, a minority of about 13% of Celtic and/or pagan people felt that use of fae/faer pronouns is appropriative.

A much higher number of people per group felt positive about people who are not Celts or pagans using fae/faer pronouns. The predominant view was:

It can’t be cultural appropriation from Celtic cultures because fairy-like beings are not unique to Celtic cultures and Celtic cultures don’t call them Fae.

It can’t be cultural appropriation from pagan cultures because paganism is not “closed” or exclusive in any way, it’s too broad and open.

~

If your experience of your gender(s) or lack thereof isn’t described or encompassed by the gender binary of “male OR female”, please do click here to take the Gender Census 2021 - it’s international and it closes no earlier than 10th March 2021!

[mittensmorgul]

For anyone interested in long-term residence in the supernatural fandom, please have some observations I’ve made over the decade I’ve been here. Take it or leave it as you will, but I’ve found all of this info useful over the years I’ve been here.

I wrote this yesterday, and it achieved its mission of identifying the sort of folks who would react negatively to it (i.e. a lot of block lists have been updated), so now that it’s been edited for content, it’s going under a cut (because that is how we do things on tumblr in general, unless we have a deliberate purpose for annoying readers with excessively long text posts) for the sake of people who actually do care about the fandom and its history. If that’s not you or your reason for being here, then keep on keeping on with your own thing, I guess. For those who are interested, there’s a lot of fandom resources some of us have been building for years that you might enjoy knowing about.

First off, I’ve been informed by a few friends who’ve read through this for coherency’s sake that it sort of reads like a *shakes cane from porch* fandom grandma complaint, but honestly... I earned this rocking chair and goshdangit imma rock now. So apologies for any “back in my day” vibes or faint aroma of tiger balm this post might give off. Then again, it’s loosely based on a similar post from 2012 so like... time is a flat circle anyway I guess.

1. There is no such thing as “tumblr famous,” unless you’re referring to the hilarious and delightful fic of the same name (please go read it, you will cackle). Posting Hot Takes for imaginary Clout™ on this site is kind of pointless in the long run. Sure you can post solely for the sake of stirring shit and getting notes, but the majority of the folks who do aren’t long term residents of the fandom. They’re just tourists moving through our little beach town for spring break. If you’re actually intent on moving to this corner of the fandom for an extended stay, please bother to really feel out the permanent residents and understand the culture and general mood of the neighborhood. It bears no resemblance to whatever’s going on across town where all the bars and beach parities are happening, and those loud, drunken revelers are, again, gonna disappear back to their regular lives or on to the next party eventually. That doesn’t mean the fandom is dying, it’s just evolving.

(funny how I had several comments implying that I’m just trying to keep the fandom from evolving with this post, because I sincerely do want the fandom to continue on for years to come, and that is impossible without evolution. We can evolve without self-immolating, though. mostly i included point 1 for an excuse to push ancient but hilarious fanfic on you.)

2. Once you post something here, it’s been unleashed to the fandom winds. You never know where it will end up, or who will comment on it or add to it. Remember that time Misha tweeted the link to the Epic Cockles Love Story post? No? It was wild. That was 2012. They all know we’re here, and how to find us if they want to. Please don’t take it to their doorsteps.

Obviously if someone is being a dick on your posts, please feel free to block them, but the whole entire point of this site is to engage people with your posts. Being big mad that someone reblogged your post with comments or supporting evidence, or happy headcanons or “HECK THIS IS GREAT BECAUSE (insert personal story about their experience or whatever else made them Feel Things about your post)” is frankly ridiculous. If your goal is to avoid any sort of engagement with your posts, then maybe try instagram instead. From what I understand, there is a SPN fandom presence there, and nobody can tarnish your original posts with unwanted commentary. But the ability to reblog with additional commentary is a FEATURE of tumblr that builds community through conversation. Otherwise we’re all just talking to ourselves in a vacuum, and that’s what actually kills fandoms.

(and for the folks who just want to blog how they want to blog and don’t want people to engage on their posts at all, please feel free to block anyone you want, as well... nobody wants to step on your toes, but most of us also don’t want to walk on eggshells wondering if this post is one of the “do not add comments for any reason” sorts of posts, either. This is a huge fandom and most people can’t even begin to keep track of every creator and their url du jour, and what their personal rules might be regarding interaction with their content. Including a “please don’t add comments” note at the bottom of your posts-- and not in your tags that won’t even show up on reblogs, but in the actual body of the post-- would sincerely help avoid any awkward or unwanted interactions, too. At the end of the day, you are in control of your own fandom experience and the block button exists.

For the record, I block zero fandom blogs (which is why I posted this, I wanted it to reach a wide scope... refer to the opening paragraphs as to why).

3. Since this post was partly inspired by a tag I left on that post going around about how “previous tags” mean fuckall on this site (which you can read here), just a reminder that if you like someone’s tags or feel they add value to the post, part of the Peer Review structure of tumblr encourages you to PASTE THEM INTO A REBLOG. If you do this, then at least credit the person who actually wrote the tags! Don’t just copy someone else’s tags into your tags on your reblog of the post without credit either. They were not YOUR tags. (I have had this happen to tag rambles I wrote and someone else got credited with them on a subsequent reblog and it is FRUSTRATING). Just... don’t even bother to write “previous tags” because WHAT PREVIOUS TAGS?! Nobody is gonna bother to chase back the chain of reblogs trying to find where the mystery tags came from, friendos. That way lies madness.

(for the record, since some folks seemed to focus on this point solely, writing “previous tags” on a post isn’t inherently a BAD thing, but for anyone who actually is here for more than one-off shitposting, then it’s sort of a pointless thing in the long run. This wasn’t intended to suggest people who ARE here for one-off shitposting are bad or “doing it wrong,” but for people who might actually want to preserve that hilarious joke or insightful comment. People delete posts and entire blogs all the time around here. Links break. I get that the upcoming generation just shrugs at that and moves on with their lives, but heck... you don’t have to accept that all entertainment is disposable if you don’t want to. There’s a bizarre sort of nihilism plaguing us all about the impermanence of pretty much everything that feels like something we should be fighting against rather than buying into wholesale, even in our escapist entertainment. I’m just exhausted by the complete loss of joy in community.

*shouts from the peanut gallery* IT AIN’T THAT DEEP, JUST GET SOME FRESH AIR AND LOOK AT A PUPPY OR SOMETHING

Yes... yes it isn’t really that deep, but bigger picture in the state of reality we’re all entirely disillusioned with, are we supposed to just give up on everything, including the things we cling to because they bring us a tiny spark of hope that we’re not all just trapped in this dystopian nightmare and things might actually be worth living for?

*peanut gallery clinging to burnt husks of peanuts in a barren peanut field* but this is how we have chosen to cope

Okay... you do you... I feel bad for you but if that’s the case then this post is NOT FOR YOU. AND THAT’S FINE. I honestly do not care if you don’t care! I mean, I’m sorry anyone has to live in a world that drives them to that mindset, but I understand. This post is for anyone who might look at their lives and their choices and think “no wait, I unironically enjoy this and want more from the experience of that enjoyment than I’m currently feeling.” Everyone else can continue with their lives as usual.)

4. CONTENT THEFT IS NEVER OKAY. PERIOD. Things like “credit to the artist” or tagging gifs or images you found on pinterest as “not mine” isn’t actually credit. If you can’t source an image or gif set, DO NOT POST IT! We don’t REPOST (i.e. save an image and then create a new post with it as if it was our own creation). We REBLOG (click the little square arrows and reblog from the actual creator). That goes for gif sets, fanvids, screencaps, meta, fic... everything.

(hopefully everyone here already understands this one, but I felt compelled to include some “these are stupidly obvious” reminders anyway, since this is ostensibly some sort of advice column. This is the equivalent of the warning label on your toaster reminding you not to use it in the bath. Like... duh...)

5. Close kin of item 4 is SOURCE YOUR SHIT. 

(for 100% disclosure purposes, I specifically discussed this one in this specific way because of an influx of anon ask messages I received in the wake of the finale. Literally the inciting incident for creating this entire post was what I can only assume was a joking ask about a comment Misha made at a con years ago. Someone actually bothered to take the time to type out those sentences to me. I have no idea what they were expecting in reply, or what could possibly motivate them to send this comment about something so entirely random from, again, several years ago. Just a joke? No idea, but whatever... it got me thinking that there might actually be people who are new to the fandom who MIGHT actually care about the fandom history, and maybe they just don’t know where to go for that info, or how to even begin searching through 16 years of history for things they might actually find enjoyment in, rather than just hauling random out of context garbage out on main and pointing and laughing about it now. People are actually allowed to care about things. It’s not cringeworthy to actually care about things, and you are not alone in actually caring, and there’s this whole big room over here full of people who are thrilled to share in that with you. This post is intended FOR THOSE PEOPLE SPECIFICALLY, so if that is not you, please just continue walking by.)

Yes, I know lots of y’all are new around here right now, but dredging up stuff from years ago that fandom has completely debunked and presenting it as TRU FAX again is just exhausting. We’re not trying to be party poopers, but seriously, we have seen it all and are mostly done with extinguishing bags of flaming dog poop on our front porches for the umpteenth year in a row. I’ve seen a lot of posts that have the same tone as “I saw Goody Proctor dancing with the devil” or “I heard kylo ren has an eight pack” and just... the information is there for anyone who cares enough to find it.

This goes double for “why is nobody talking about this thing I just discovered while watching the show for the first time?!” And, oh hon, we have talked it all into the ground over the last fifteen years. We’re happy you’re discovering it again, but I promise we talked about it plenty when the episodes originally aired. We have such a rich meta history that lots of us have worked really hard to preserve. I encourage you to seek it out, if nothing else than as historical artifacts. The way we have discussed the show has been a 16-year evolution. People have written literal doctoral dissertations on this show. Your shitposts are fun! We love reliving our own experience through fresh eyes, and seeing your wonder at experiencing it all again for the first time! But y’all didn’t invent this fandom in the last six months, either.

Meta Sources and Minerals provided by our friendly neighborhood fandom archivist, @lets-steal-an-archive

Academic books and articles about SPN 

A collection of Meta Essays going back to s1 and organized by topic (all of this has happened before, all of it will happen again)

SPN Heavy Meta Archive (s1-3)

Mel’s Dreamwidth archive of meta (s1-12)

Oranges8hands Dreamwidth archive of meta (s1-15, with many similar entries to Mel’s... though ymmv on viewpoint in a lot of these too)

Anyone remember Fandom Wank? Not the concept but the actual LJ... No? Okay have a link to SPN topics that ended up there. Through 2013. We have seen so much... including several fandom containment breaches.

for all your art sourcing needs, please see @theroadsofararchive, the repository for so much fandom art.

need to find a gif of something? canonspngifs is a vast repository of gifsets of the entire series. If the gif you want to use in your post happens to be the first gif in the gifset, in the tumblr gif finder thingy just paste the permalink to that post from canonspngifs (which is easily searchable by episode, character, location, situation, quotes, and sometimes even color and clothing items the actors are wearing... it’s really well organized, especially for tumblr >.>) and the first gif will be automatically linked with credit to the gif creator attached. It makes life easy that way. It’s also convenient when trying to remember something specific but can’t remember what episode it’s from. I’ve used the site to jog my memory before going to the superwiki armed with more specific search results to find episode quotes and references. Or sometimes I just scroll through all the nice gifs for fun, too.

Need a screencap of something and know exactly which episode it’s from? Try Home of the Nutty. You might not find the exact screencap you’re looking for, but they have a complete set of caps of every episode, and it’s an incredibly useful resource for quick reference checks and the like. Just give pages a chance to fully load before clicking on the next one. The site is easily overloaded, but it’s still free to use (and again, with credit... Pretty much every screencap on my entire blog is from HotN unless otherwise credited).

As you can see, this is a fandom built on preserving our history. You absolutely are not required to engage with any of this if that’s not of interest to you, but I can only assume that there are people who would be interested in it if only they knew it existed and how to find it. Well, now they do.

6. A few more notes on tags, and how they work on tumblr. The first 20 tags on your ORIGINAL posts are searchable sitewide, so if you want to be able to find something again, tag that thing first before going on general tag rambles. The only place tags on reblogs are searchable is on your own blog. So you don’t have to put 50 tags trying to get a post seen if it’s a reblog. You’re just spitting into the wind at that point. If you have a filing system for finding things again, then by all means add those tags (again, in the first 20, so they’re searchable), but you don’t need to tag a reblog “destiel” and “deancas” and “dean” and “cas” and “dean x cas” or whatever. Pick one for your personal blog’s filing system, that’s all you need.

(this was only added because tagging and searching on this site is so very broken... I get that a lot of folks don’t care about ever searching their own blogs again for anything, so this one only really applies if you do often find yourself trying to find old posts. If not, then it’s not really relevant.  It took me years to work out a decent tagging system, and at the beginning of my time here I never thought I’d end up camping out here for a decade and falling this deep into the fandom, and I regretted my lack of consistent tags only years later when I realized I actually wanted to be able to go back and find specific old posts again. So... for anyone who wants to err on the side of caution, working out a sensible tagging system really helps if you’re here for the long term. I personally tag content by episode, because some of my other general tags are so large as to be practically useless as a search term. But whatever system you choose to file stuff on your own blog, it really only has to make sense to you. And again, if this is pointless advice for someone who has no intention of settling here for the long term. Please feel free to ignore it. I just wish someone had explained it this way to me ten years ago and saved me the hassle of retroactively tagging something like 30k posts... especially now that using the mass tag replacer is the fastest way to get your entire blog deleted... oops? so yeah, don’t use the mass tag replacer either >.>)

7. Tags on Tumblr DO NOT WORK LIKE TAGS ON TWITTER. If you @ someone in the body of the post, it will show up in their notifications (if they’re the sort of person who even checks their notifications... not all of us do. For the record, I generally don’t...), but putting actor or ship names in the tags on a tumblr post does absolutely nothing. It’s not the same as tagging the actor’s twitter account in a tweet. Nobody’s getting notifications about you tagging a post about Jensen here as “Jensen Ackles.” There is a difference. Please learn it. (and don’t take headcanons and ESPECIALLY RPF or otherwise explicit art or fic from tumblr to twitter and tag the actors in it. That’s just... not okay.)

(I have seen the pearl clutchers getting all in a huff about the mere existence of RPF or even explicit content of fictional characters if it doesn’t meet their purity standards, but tagging those things allows people who don’t want to see it to actively avoid that content here. Nobody has a right to tell people their fictional content shouldn’t exist at all, or that creators of that fictional content somehow deserve harassment or threats for having dared to create such “immoral” content, won’t somebody PLEASE think of the children... and no... you do not do that here. Don’t be the problematic behavior you wish to ban from the world. Learn to use tags to protect yourself from, as i have attempted to emphasize here, fictional content you are personally upset by. That’s a you problem, not a problem for the creators of potentially upsetting content that they tag appropriately for.)

8. General formatting stuff: If you’re writing long text posts, visually break them up so people aren’t faced with one long wall of text. The enter key is your friend. Also, if you put long text posts under a Read More break and send people to your blog to finish reading, please ensure that your blog is actually visually accessible (tiny text, or light grey text on a dark grey background, or a visually busy background might be aesthetically pleasing to you but nobody can actually read it. Loads of folks won’t even try. Which is great if you don’t actually care whether people are able to appreciate your content or not, but something to at least consider if you *do* actively want to encourage engagement with your work. Confirm how your blog looks on both mobile and desktop and make sure it’s actually functional in both, too).

And since I mentioned that most of my experience on fandom tumblr has been in the SPN fandom, here’s a bit of a reminder for folks who are new around here. With the reminder that I have been here more than a decade and still feel like a newbie myself sometimes...

This is an OLD FANDOM. There are many, many people who have been at this longer than some of you have been alive. The average age for creators in this fandom is older than you think (I think of my friends in their 30′s as young’ins okay? okay). With that understood, you are responsible for the content you consume and are exposed to. Curate your experience. Ship and let ship. YKINMKATOK. Don’t deliberately expose yourself to content you find upsetting for whatever reason. Tags and warnings are your friends, not targets for you to attack in some sort of purity war. People will ship things you do not like (or in specific ways you do not like), will say things you do not agree with, and will find their happiness in things you abhor. That is not your concern. Find what you do like, and support and engage with it, and ignore (or block, or unfollow) the rest. Tumblr has a feature that lets you blacklist tags so the content you’re trying to avoid won’t appear on your dash.

Remember the paradox of tolerance.

It is not your job in fandom to police how other people enjoy the fandom. It’s not *my* job to police how *you* enjoy the fandom, UNLESS your enjoyment is in actively harming other real human beings in the fandom. If you don’t like their take on the character or the show or the plotlines or their ships or anything else, you don’t need to engage with their posts at all! The necessary corollary to this is that clarifying misunderstandings or correcting factual misinformation is not “policing.” 

(this is where the peanut gallery reminds me it ain’t that deep, and I plead with them to put down the social media and find just one (1) thing to actually believe in in this godforsaken life, find something other than disdain and cynicism and spite to live for. If those things motivate you to find a larger cause for yourself, then great, use them to your advantage, but use them to find something that makes you a better person or brings you a modicum of joy and connection to your fellow human beings despite living in a dystopian hellscape of a world)

I have seen a lot of posts lately that are founded on the sort of authority that comes with “I watched through tumblr for a few months and then watched the last three episodes of the series” and as such are just... missing the larger context of the entire show, and are unfounded entirely in canon. I 100% appreciate the new enthusiasm for the fandom that we’ve been living in here for years, and it’s wonderful to see new people enjoying the thing we love. Your headcanons are valid, you are valid, but recognize that your headcanons aren’t canon. All of us finale denialists have accepted this in some measure, so we feel you. We truly, truly feel you. But regarding actual canon, we have a resource for that: the Superwiki. Learn it, live it, love it, as Metatron would say.

(which you could discover he said in 10.17 Inside Man, thanks to the superwiki! accept no substitutes!)

(and again, there have been people who have been involved in fandom for years who haven’t engaged with canon in years, either! You can play in this universe however you choose, BUT FOR PEOPLE WHO ACTUALLY CARE ABOUT CANON AT ALL, WHICH I AM AGAIN POINTEDLY SAYING MIGHT NOT BE YOU, READER, AND I’M NOT SUGGESTING YOU ARE WRONG FOR NOT WANTING TO ACTUALLY ENGAGE WITH CANON, but if you DO want to engage with canon, please have some useful resources. Why do people feel personally attacked by being presented a list of helpful resources? Absolutely baffling.)

(also: words have definitions. “Canon” is a specific thing, meaning in this case “the finished media product that aired on television.” Anything beyond those limits is secondary canon (think: john’s journal, which is not canon but canon adjacent at best...), word of god (i.e stuff said by the writers and showrunners), or headcanon (which includes actor commentary-- they may have helped create the show with their acting choices and whatever, but they are not in control of the story overall). If there’s something you dislike about actual canon, you can reject it and supplement it with your own theories or preferred outcomes-- that’s basically what fanfic is-- but that doesn’t make your theories canon (much to all our dismay, that’s just not how any of this works. This is not to invalidate how anyone engages with the show or the fandom, just trying to clarify what seems to have been a source of unintentional misunderstandings. Your theories do not have to be “canon” to be legitimate interpretations.)

***I am setting this section apart, and did make a separate post of just this following information, because this is where we go from being relatively chill about different parts of fandom choosing to interact in different ways and you do you and blog however you want, to “hey can everybody please understand that the way you are interacting with this specific material might be harmful for specific legal reasons, and stating that you do not care about the consequences of your actions does actively make you the asshole here...” Okay, now that we have that understood:

The spnscripthunt collective has been steadily acquiring new scripts (which are posted in full on the superwiki for everyone to enjoy, for free). The language around how some folks are talking about these scripts is... concerning. For very real legal reasons, actually, and not because we’re feeling precious about the collection and don’t wike it when meanies use them in shitposts.

-First off, these scripts are not “leaks.” They are all verified and legally purchased (or gifted, in some cases, but still acquired entirely above board. we didn’t whack anyone over the head in a back alley for these scripts, or swipe them out of someone’s trailer on set).

(in case anyone was unaware, these scripts are the copywritten protected property of Warner Brothers. So yes, how we use them and share them with the fandom could have legal repercussions. We present them as a collected resource of fandom history which SHOULD fall under Fair Use doctrine, but this is untested legal water. Insinuating that the scripts are somehow not entirely legally obtained, or that posting them for public access involved less than 100% transparent and entirely legal transactions is incredibly concerning.

Once again for the peanut gallery, if you don’t care about any of that and are just having a good time with it, at least be mindful of the work and expense a large group of people have gone through to acquire and present the content you’re all too eager to exploit for cheap thrills. Some of us do actually care and are not exactly comfortable with the fact that others don’t seem to care about burning it all to the ground. We can’t force you to listen or behave as we’d hope you might, but at least be aware of the potential consequences of your actions. All we’re asking is for you to not be the douchebag who sets the whole neighborhood on fire with your illegal fireworks display. Is that too much to ask for? more on that in a second, first... a psa)

-If you see a script for sale and are unsure if it’s legit (or believe it might already be freely available in our collection), please feel free to ask us for advice. Our goal is to make as much of our fandom history available to the entire fandom, and we absolutely do not want anyone shelling out money for stuff you can already find for free.

(seriously, we’ve seen a bunch of resellers cropping up selling printed versions of the scripts we bought and uploaded for everyone to enjoy free of charge, or scripts that are otherwise of dubious origin. We’ve been at this for years now and know what’s actually out there. We don’t want anyone to fall for a scam if we can help it)

-Also, the usual reminder that the scripts we acquire ARE NOT NECESSARILY THE FINAL SHOOTING DRAFTS. In fact, the majority of scripts in our collection are NOT. Changes are made daily to scripts, even during filming. Comparing a Production Draft (white pages, effectively the first “final draft” of what usually becomes a series of drafts before filming wraps) to a much later revision (say... green or goldenrod revisions, several of which we DO have in our collection for comparison) and how those earlier drafts often differ wildly from the aired version versus how similar a much later green draft is to the aired version, for example, can teach you a lot about the television writing process. The link above to the superwiki scripts page has a nice little explainer about how this process works.

Differences between our posted scripts (many of which are white drafts, aka FIRST complete drafts, which will likely go through multiple rounds of revisions before filming even begins) and the aired version of the show are not all “acting choices” or a director or editor just cutting whole scenes on a whim. It’s insulting to everyone involved in production to suggest that’s the case.

(and yeah, fine... whatever, make any sort of posts you like regarding how those changes came about, but at the very least understand that it’s not actually the truth about how any of this works. Don’t care that that’s not the truth and want to make the posts anyway because shitposting is fun and that’s the extent of your sense of humor? FINE! You’re entitled to do that! But at least you DO know the truth now, and hopefully so do the people who engage with your posts. Deliberate ignorance isn’t cute, smooth lions notwithstanding)

There’s probably a whole other post to be made on fandom tagging etiquette, but again I don’t really use the tags enough to know what’s going on with that whole situation. I’ve also probably left a lot of stuff out, so please feel free to add things I’ve overlooked.

Thanks also to @trisscar368 and @thayerkerbasy for help compiling this, too. They were kind enough to escort me through the park to feed these pigeons. Now I need to take them out for ice cream. :’D

So I guess welcome to the neighborhood. Make yourself at home, but like... try not to trash the place while you’re here. Some of us live here by choice, lol.

[ganymedesclock]

These are questions I've had for some while and it's hard to find someone who'll answer with grace. This mostly relates to disabilities (mental or physical) in fiction.

1) What makes a portrayal of a disability that's harming the character in question ableist?

2) Is there a way to write a disabled villain in a way that isn't ableist?

In the circles I've been in, the common conceptions are you can't use a character's disability as a plot point or showcase it being a hindrance in some manner. heaven forbid you make your villain disabled in some capacity, that's a freaking death sentence to a creative's image. I understand historically villains were the only characters given disabilities, but (and this is my personal experience) I've not seen as many disabled villains nowadays, heck, I see more disabled heroes in media nowadays.

Sorry if this comes off as abrasive, I'd really like to be informed for future media consumption and my own creative endeavors.

Okay so the first thing I'm going to say is that while it IS a good idea to talk to disabled people and get their feedback, disabled people are not a monolith and they aren't going to all have the same take on how this goes.

My personal take is biased in favor that I'm a neurodivergent person (ADHD and autism) who has no real experience with physical disabilities, so I won't speak for physically disabled people- heck, I won't even speak for every neurotype. Like I say, people aren't a monolith.

For myself and my own writing of disabled characters, here's a couple of concepts I stick by:

Research is your friend

Think about broad conventions of ableism

Be mindful of cast composition

1. Research is your friend

Yeah this is the thing everybody says, so here's the main bases I try to cover:

What's the story on this character's disability?

Less in terms of 'tragic angst' and more, what kind of condition this is- because a congenital amputee (that is to say, someone who was born without a limb) will have a different relationship to said limb absence than someone who lost their limb years ago to someone who lost their limb yesterday. How did people in their life respond to it, and how did they respond to it? These responses are not "natural" and will not be the same to every person with every worldview. This can also be a great environment to do worldbuilding in! Think about the movie (and the tv series) How To Train Your Dragon. The vikings in that setting don't have access to modern medicine, and they're, well, literally fighting dragons and other vikings. The instance of disability is high, and the medical terminology to talk about said disabilities is fairly lackluster- but in a context where you need every man you possibly can to avoid the winter, the mindset is going to be not necessarily very correct, but egalitarian. You live in a village of twenty people and know a guy who took a nasty blow to the head and hasn't quite been the same ever since? "Traumatic Brain Injury" is probably not going to be on your lips, but you're also probably going to just make whatever peace you need to and figure out how to accommodate Old Byron for his occasional inability to find the right word, stammers and trembles. In this example, there are several relevant pieces of information- what the character's disability is (aphasia), how they got it (brain injury), and the culture and climate around it (every man has to work, and we can't make more men or throw them away very easily, so, how can we make sure this person can work even if we don't know what's wrong with them)

And that dovetails into:

What's the real history, and modern understandings, of this?

This is where "knowing the story" helps a lot. To keep positing our hypothetical viking with a brain injury, I can look into brain injuries, what affects their extent and prognosis, and maybe even beliefs about this from the time period and setting I'm thinking of (because people have had brains, and brain injuries, the entire time!) Sure, if the setting is fantastical, I have wiggle room, but looking at inspirations might give me a guide post.

Having a name for your disorder also lets you look for posts made by specific people who live with the condition talking about their lives. This is super, super important for conditions stereotyped as really scary, like schizophrenia or narcissistic personality disorder. Even if you already know "schizophrenic people are real and normal" it's still a good thing to wake yourself up and connect with others.

2. Think about broad conventions of ableism

It CAN seem very daunting or intimidating to stay ahead of every single possible condition that could affect someone's body and mind and the specific stereotypes to avoid- there's a lot under the vast umbrella of human experience and we're learning more all the time! A good hallmark is, ableism has a few broad tendencies, and when you see those tendencies rear their head, in your own thinking or in accounts you read by others, it's good to put your skeptical glasses on and look closer. Here's a few that I tend to watch out for:

Failing the “heartwarming dog” test

This was a piece of sage wisdom that passed my eyeballs, became accepted as sage wisdom, and my brain magnificently failed to recall where I saw it. Basically, if you could replace your disabled character with a lovable pet who might need a procedure to save them, and it wouldn’t change the plot, that’s something to look into.

Disability activists speak often about infantilization, and this is a big thing of what they mean- a lot of casual ableism considers disabled people as basically belonging to, or being a burden onto, the able-bodied and neurotypical. This doesn’t necessarily even need to have an able neurotypical in the picture- a personal experience I had that was extremely hurtful was at a point in high school, I decided to do some research on autism for a school project. As an autistic teenager looking up resources online, I was very upset to realize that every single resource I accessed at the time presumed it was talking to a neurotypical parent about their helpless autistic child. I was looking for resources to myself, yet made to feel like I was the subject in a conversation.

Likewise, many wheelchair users have relayed the experience of, when they, in their chair, are in an environment accompanied by someone else who isn’t using a chair, strangers would speak to the standing person exclusively, avoiding addressing the chair user. 

It’s important to always remind yourself that at no point do disabled people stop being people. Yes, even people who have facial deformities; yes, even people who need help using the bathroom; yes, even people who drool; yes, even people whose conditions impact their ability to communicate, yes, even people with cognitive disabilities. They are people, they deserve dignity, and they are not “a child trapped in a 27-year-old body”- a disabled adult is still an adult. All of the “trying to learn the right rules” in the world won’t save you if you keep an underlying fear of non-normative bodies and minds.

This also has a modest overlap between disability and sexuality in particular. I am an autistic grayromantic ace. Absolutely none of my choices or inclinations about sex are because I’m too naive or innocent or childlike to comprehend the notion- disabled people have as diverse a relationship with sexuality as any other. That underlying fear- as mentioned before- can prevent many people from imagining that, say, a wheelchair user might enjoy sex and have experience with it. Make sure all of your disabled characters have full internal worlds.

Poor sickly little Tiffany and the Red Right Hand

A big part of fictional ableism is that it separates the disabled into two categories. Anybody who’s used TVTropes would recognize the latter term I used here. But to keep it brief:

Poor, sickly little Tiffany is cute. Vulnerable. How her disability affects her life is that it constantly creates a pall of suffering that she lives beneath. After all, having a non-normative mind or body must be an endless cavalcade of suffering and tragedy, right? People who are disabled clearly spend their every waking moment affected by, and upset, that they aren’t normal!

The answer is... No, actually. Cut the sad violin; even people who have chronic pain who are literally experiencing pain a lot more than the rest of us are still fully capable of living complex lives and being happy. If nothing else, it would be literally boring to feel nothing but awful, and people with major depression or other problems still, also, have complicated experiences. And yes, some of it’s not great. You don’t have to present every disability as disingenuously a joy to have. But make a point that they own these things. It is a very different feeling to have a concerned father looking through the window at his angel-faced daughter rocking sadly in her wheelchair while she stares longingly out the window, compared to a character waking up at midnight because they have to go do something and frustratedly hauling their body out of their bed into their chair to get going.

Poor Sickly Little Tiffany (PSLT, if you will) virtually always are young, and they virtually always are bound to the problems listed under ‘failing the heartwarming dog’ test. Yes, disabled kids exist, but the point I’m making here is that in the duality of the most widely accepted disabled characters, PSLT embodies the nadir of the Victim, who is so pure, so saintly, so gracious, that it can only be a cruel quirk of fate that she’s suffering. After all, it’s not as if disabled people have the same dignity that any neurotypical and able-bodied person has, where they can be an asshole and still expect other people to not seriously attack their quality of life- it’s a “service” for the neurotypical and able-bodied to “humor” them.

(this is a bad way to think. Either human lives matter or they don’t. There is no “wretched half-experience” here- if you wouldn’t bodily grab and yank around a person standing on their own feet, you have no business grabbing another person’s wheelchair)

On the opposite end- and relevant to your question- is the Red Right Hand. The Red Right Hand does not have PSLT’s innocence or “purity”- is the opposite extreme. The Red Right Hand is virtually always visually deformed, and framed as threatening for their visual deformity. To pick on a movie I like a fair amount, think about how in Captain America: The Winter Soldier, the title character is described- “Strong. Fast. Had a metal arm.” That’s a subtle example, but, think about how that metal arm is menacing. Sure, it’s a high tech weapon in a superhero genre- but who has the metal arm? The Winter Soldier, who is, while a tormented figure that ultimately becomes more heroic- scary. Aggressive. Out for blood.

The man who walks at midnight with a Red Right Hand is a signal to us that his character is foul because of the twisting of his body. A good person, we are led to believe, would not be so- or a good person would be ashamed of their deformity and work to hide it. The Red Right Hand is not merely “an evil disabled person”- they are a disabled person whose disability is depicted as symptomatic of their evil, twisted nature, and when you pair this trope with PSLT, it sends a message: “stay in your place, disabled people. Be sad, be consumable, and let us push you around and decide what to do with you. If you get uppity, if you have ideas, if you stand up to us, then the thing that made you a helpless little victim will suddenly make you a horrible monster, and justify us handling you with inhumanity.”

As someone who is a BIG fan of eldritch horror and many forms of unsettling “wrongness” it is extremely important to watch out for the Red Right Hand. Be careful how you talk about Villainous Disability- there is no connection between disability and morality. People will be good, bad, or simply just people entirely separate from their status of ability or disability. It’s just as ableist to depict every disabled person as an innocent good soul as it is to exclusively deal in grim and ghastly monsters.

Don’t justify disabilities and don’t destroy them.

Superpowers are cool. Characters can and IMO should have superpowers, as long as you’re writing a genre when they’re there.

BUT.

It’s important to remember that there is no justification for disabilities, because they don’t need one. Disability is simply a feature characters have. You do not need to go “they’re blind, BUT they can see the future”

This is admittedly shaky, and people can argue either way; the Blind Seer is a very pronounced mythological figure and an interesting philosophical point about what truly matters in the world. There’s a reason it exists as a conceit. But if every blind character is blind in a way that completely negates that disability or makes it meaningless- this sucks. People have been blind since the dawn of time. And people will always accommodate their disabilities in different ways. Even if the technology exists to fix some forms of blindness, there are people who will have “fixable” blindness and refuse to treat it. There will be individuals born blind who have no meaningful desire to modify this. And there are some people whose condition will be inoperable even if it “shouldn’t” be.

You don’t need to make your disabled characters excessively cool, or give them a means by which the audience can totally forget they’re disabled. Again, this is a place where strong worldbuilding is your buddy- a handwave of “x technology fixed all disabilities”, in my opinion, will never come off good. If, instead, however, you throw out a careless detail that the cool girl the main character is chatting up in a cyberpunk bar has an obvious spinal modification, and feature other characters with prosthetics and without- I will like your work a lot, actually. Even if you’re handing out a fictional “cure”- show the seams. Make it have drawbacks and pros and cons. A great example of this is in the series Full Metal Alchemist- the main character has two prosthetic limbs, and not only do these limbs come with problems, some mundane (he has phantom limb pains, and has to deal with outgrowing his prostheses or damaging them in combat) some more fantastical (these artificial limbs are connected to his nerves to function fluidly- which means that they get surgically installed with no anesthesia and hurt like fuck plugging in- and they require master engineering to stay in shape). We explicitly see a scene of the experts responsible for said limbs talking to a man who uses an ordinary prosthetic leg, despite the advantages of an automail limb, because these drawbacks are daunting to him and he is happier with a simple prosthetic leg.

Even in mundane accommodations you didn’t make up- no two wheelchair users use their chair the exact same way, and there’s a huge diversity of chairs. Someone might be legally blind but still navigate confidently on their own; they might use a guide dog, or they might use a cane. They might even change their needs from situation to situation!

Disability accommodations are part of life

This ties in heavily to the previous point, but seriously! Don’t just look up one model of cane and superimpose it with no modifications onto your character- think about what their lifestyle is, and what kind of person they are!

Also medication is not the devil. Yes, medical abuse is real and tragic and the medication is not magic fairy dust that solves all problems either. But also, it’s straight ableism to act like anybody needing pills for any reason is a scary edgy plot twist. 

(and addiction is a disease. Please be careful, and moreover be compassionate, if you’re writing a character who’s an addict)

3. Be mindful of cast composition

This, to me, is a big tip about disability writing and it’s also super easy to implement!

Just make sure your cast has a lot of meaningful disabled characters in it!

Have you done all the work you can to try and dodge the Red Right Hand but you’re still worried your disabled villain is a bad look? They sure won’t look like a commentary on disability if three other people in the cast are disabled and don’t have the same outlook or role! Worried that you’re PSLT-ing your main character’s disabled child? Maybe the disability is hereditary and they got it from the main character!

The more disabled characters you have, the more it will challenge you to think about what their individual relationship is with the world and the less you’ll rely on hackneyed tropes. At least, ideally.

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Ultimately, there’s no perfect silver bullet of diversity writing that will prevent a work from EVER being ableist, but I hope this helped, at least!