#nice strawman

[thisdiscontentedwinter]

Random unrelated post. 

“Dogpile” has more than one dictionary meaning. 

Here’s one I found: 

a number of people throwing themselves on top of one another, as in a brawl or a celebration of victory

Three is a number. 

Meanwhile, if anyone wants to message me about how the friendship died when they were no longer in a position to send money and gifts, I know. Been there, done that, might even get a T-shirt made. 

In the meantime, please do remember that it’s not a fault of character to be kind, just because someone with an awful lot of practice at it manipulated you. 

[ratbastarddotfuck]

have to wonder why to some people on this website, being multigender and having a complex identity is "fine" but calling myself a fagdyke is considered "slur collecting". like, no, I am a gay man and a gay woman. if I were either of these identities in a vacuum, it would be fine for me to use these terms for myself. but because I'm multigender, and experience these identities in tandem, suddenly putting them together for the convenience of describing my identity means I'm acting in bad faith? why is my multigender identity only okay if it's palateable to you?

just call me a fucking trender next time you want to act like people are taking on identity for clout, and wear your transphobia on your chest.

[philyuri]

gotta say it is fascinating to me that the phandom is so largely built on archives and memories and retrospective and yet i'm seeing so many people be SHOCKED to learn of dan's (in particular) past racist remarks/actions. we have the deleted videos. there are links to them. they are found in the same place as the 2009 timeline. people (mostly poc!!! wonder why!!!) have been discussing it. so why is it that there is broad phandom memory for tweets from 15 years ago but a more recent history of racist actions is seemingly only remembered by fans of colour? interesting. lol.

[armed-saphire]

world is healing i saw a youtube comment of the regular ashley door discourse hate and someone fucking cooked them in the replies

[reactionimagesdaily]

quick update

Hola everyone!

Just writing a thing to say I SEE all the messages that've been sent to my inbox and I'll promise I'll get round to them soon! I've been doing National Novel-Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) this year (as well as some job-huntng lolol) and it's taken up a lot of my spare mental energy. Low-key it feels like all I can do to make sure that the queue doesn't run out of submissions xD

Next month I'll get to everyone's image requests - promise! - and also to those 10K celebrations I mentioned a little while ago! (I've been cooking some stuff up behind the scenes for that milestone, don't y'all worry)

And. Yeah that's about it from me. Stay tuned, thank you for your patience, love y'all, adios <3

[diamondnokouzai]

oh i like zaheer

[lwoorl]

I'll say it: "Oh all AI artists do is write a stupid description and immediately get an image with no effort, there's no art in that" is the new "Digital painting doesn't count as art because it takes no effort"

[agentgreenbean]

just saw such an annoying take that i blocked everyone who reblogged the post. on both this blog and my biggest sideblog. get out of my house

[butch-bakugo]

Remember, youre fighting on the side tht think furries are zoophiles, guros are cannibals and bakugou enjoyers r abusers. Ur gonna be torn apart some day 2

Piss. Cope. Seethe piss baby lmao

[synthetic-sonata]

really awesome day to think everythings going alright and then you wake up and get hit in the face twice in a row

[kragehund-est]

hey there popular social justice poster, i see you're asking people to reflect on their biases against a marginalized group. nice! quick question. why did you make it into a jab about women? yeah, i was actually right there with you until you decided to finish your post up with a strawman of a woman prioritizing her own safety and calling her a bad person for it. good talk 👍

[tatterdemallionsails]

Thank you @amarriageoftrueminds! AND the mansplaining, AND the Marvin Gaye, and quite frankly this guy makes my teeth itch. Dude has the balls to say it wasn't personal, but compare his reading of the HYDRA code words with Karpov's. Zemo's was pure malice while Karpov might just as well have been reading his grocery list.

Every so often I see… interesting takes about Zemo that leave me questioning if we… all saw the same stuff.

Like, you know he commanded a death squad before his fam even died, right? This man is not a good dude. Sure, maybe it was in the name of his country but also… his country was a shit show and he said as much.

So I am absolutely perplexed by the number of “he wouldn’t do x” and “why does everyone make him so toxic” kinds of things. He actively waterboarded Vasily Karpov like one of the first times we saw him. He was put in the RAFT because he is a fucking terrorist.

This feels like another one of those things I guess that reminds me of Hannibal. Him being polite doesn’t make him any less of a cannibal. You can be both polite and a bad person.

[marzipanandminutiae]

Guys I just found the most hateful Interior Desecration of a Victorian house in Eastern MA

Brace yourselves

Exterior:

Oooh! Pretty! Two-family! Nice molding! Little side porch!

Interior:

I should be legally allowed to kill people who do things like this, I think

(And before anyone starts in with their strawman nonsense, no, this is not a case of “but it’s all someone could afford!!! They were tragically forced to buy a gorgeous Victorian house when they wanted a modern prisonscape, because the market in their area works that way!!! Even though they somehow could find enough money to do an entire interior renovation!!!” it’s a rental property)

[gamblegun]

"transandrophobia truthers" has become such a nice little strawman for people to take out all their transphobia towards transmascs out on, while also painting themselves as in the right. Ohhh those stupid whiny bitch children who hate women and are a threat to the community and never suffer and deserve to die, I am going to talk about their genitals: the illusive "transandrophobia truther." I don't have any transphobia to unpack, since it's okay to talk about THOSE trans men that way. Yes, they are definitely a cohesive group who's conversations I totally have at least skimmed through.

[specialagentartemis]

speaking of Rowland, what changed your mind on grimdark stories? You used to post about how much you hated them lol

Hopepunk started to annoy me more lol.

It's been several things. Partially, it's just been years; I've gotten older, read more books, found authors I really really loved writing really bleak really sad really upsetting and really fascinating books.

Partially it's that I don't really believe in the definitions people use about grimdark anymore; the more I read, the more I feel it's a strawman stereotype that barely exists moreso than it's an actual social force in literature.

Partially I do stand by my irritation with a lot of dark and gritty remakes/reboots of mostly A/V media; Star Trek does not need to be a dark and gritty war story, LOTR doesn't need to be sexy, etc. They feel lazy and trend-chasing more than they feel like a genuine creative endeavor. Too often, they can feel like they're jettisoning the aspects that made me like them in an attempt to be more Mature by adding Violence and Swearing and Sex. I stand by that Star Trek Discovery wasn't good, and the fact that it felt like it was embarrassed that it had to be Star Trek when it really wanted to be Game of Thrones in Space was a big part of why.

But honestly that seems to primarily be happening in TV/movies, and it's stopped being nearly the inescapable social force it was 6-10 years ago. The zeitgeist moves on and new trends annoy me. In sci-fi/fantasy books, the movement seems to be in the other direction: hopepunk and cozy. And they have just. been bad books. So many of them have been bad in new and frustrating ways. In the same time period that hopepunk and cozy were on the rise in the sff zeitgeist, I also read books like The Fortunate Fall by Cameron Reed, Ninefox Gambit by Yoon Ha Lee, and The Vanished Birds by Simon Jimenez... heavy and sad and serious and unhappy and with brilliant artistry that feels like it actually has something to say and isn't ignoring how humans actually act by saying "well it wouldn't be a problem if everyone was just nice :)" I read the bleakest, most upsetting, most depressing sci-fi book I've ever encountered, Harmony by Project Itoh, which he wrote while he was in and out of hospitals dying of cancer and it shows. It's unsettling and unnerving and upsetting and different, and you can tell it comes from the heart. Is it grimdark? Maybe, yeah. And it has value as literature, and I got a lot more out of it than I did from a lot of things touting how important they are for being Hopeful and Cozy and Conflict-Free.

Honestly, part of it is my natural plain contrarianism. When making fun, hopeful, funny, campy, or adventure-y things Dark and Gritty and Violent was held up as better and more inherently mature writing, it annoyed me and made me dislike it; now that violence and selfishness and cruelty and pain in stories seems to be considered immature and unnecessary, and rather hope, softness, gentleness, happiness, cheerfulness, conflict-aversion, and harmony are the Morally Correct and Mature ways to write stories, I resent that too. It ends up feeling trend-chasing and reductive, and when bland nothing books are held up as The Most Ethically Correct And Best Writing Because They Are Hopeful, it makes me just as annoyed as when dark and gritty TV is held up as The Most Mature And Serious Prestige Television.

Also, honestly, the world kept getting worse and sometimes I want media that acknowledges that I feel afraid and hurt and angry, and that things aren't all sweet and good and nice actually. It often makes me feel better, more seen, more understood, than media that goes actually everyone is nice and and problems are easy to solve and the world is basically just and people can be trusted to all be mature and good and reasonable. (And if you're ever impatient, or selfish, or snappish, or mean, or insufficiently hopeful... then you don't belong in our utopia. As someone who *gestures above* can be impatient, snappish, and mean... that doesn't make me feel all that hopeful.)

[olderthannetfic]

that anon's post about how different posting fic used to be got me thinking about my own experiences in old fandom, and man... i hate to say it, but sometimes i kinda miss writing before third wave feminism got big online. i say that as a feminist myself. i feel like some of the Anti stuff we see today comes partly from misunderstandings and strawmanning of legitimate theory and observation, especially when it comes to the topic of sexuality. the thing that especially stands out to me is online horror. when i was younger, it seemed like you could get away with pretty much whatever horrible thing you wanted, and everyone kind of understood that EVERYTHING was on the table and if you're uncomfortable with some of it you just need to move on. and one thing that's brought me a lot of comfort as an SA victim was the over-the-top, stupidly horrible SA in creepypasta and darkfic. but now even the places with the most messed up content, where that's the entire appeal, has tons of people saying "oh yes all of the murder and gore was great but did it really NEED the SA elements? that could make it so unapproachable for victims" yeah so could literally everything else in this game, joseph, it's not supposed to be for everybody. it's hard to get all my thoughts in one place but when i look back on my time online, i see a through-line from "we should be more thoughtful about how we write women" to "why is the trauma always SA" to "yknow what don't EVER write SA unless that HAS to be what happened", which... again, that's my comfort zone. it's nice, being in a place where we don't pretend like death and torture are the only threats that could be hunting you. and more and more i find myself losing that ground! every time i find a new fandom that should be cool because it's right there in the media, i'm again hit with "mmm did we really NEED that though?" to be clear i do think you should warn for that, just like you should warn for psyche horror and gore and all that. but idk, when i can't even write mild dubcon without people screaming "think of the victims!!", i feel like nobody actually cares about us. because if they did, wouldn't we be allowed to write about the experiences...? apply them to the characters we related to, even? but nah, clearly we're just romanticizing shit and stereotyping women. fucking hell, man!

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