#not adults with Controversial Opinions

[newfangledsoul]

I think the thing with Sokka’s early sexism being removed is less about his character arc (tho that’s important from a character standpoint), and more about the audience seeing that character arc.

Of course Sokka says iffy and sexist things, he’s acting like an entitled teenage boy. Many entitled teenage boys exist. I’m sure many of them watched Avatar growing up. The point is that these boys see Sokka doing what they do, and that they see Sokka is wrong to do so.

The purpose of an arc like Sokka’s isn’t to create a character who is sexist and who the audience shouldn’t like, who says iffy things and needs to be censored now that we’re in a more “civilized” age, it’s to be a teaching tool to the young target audience of the show. To show little boys that acting like this is wrong, and that girls can be just as strong as boys (this is where the Kyoshi warriors come in). Sokka is a great character because he goes through a genuinely hopeful sort of growth; his arc is something we hope teenage boys with his attitude go through in their own lives.

Taking away this arc deprives the story of one of its core ideals: teaching children what’s good and what’s bad. If they never see Sokka behaving badly, if they never see him being proven wrong, if they never see their hero who acts like them growing and changing for the better, you deprive them of a phenomenal role model who they might genuinely be inclined to base their behavior off of.

Shows like Avatar were so great because they showed growth. Sokka learns to overcome his biases, Zuko learns to overcome his pride and comes to understand what honor truly is, Katara learns to channel her temper into drive and not let anger overtake her, and Aang learns to uphold his principles even in the face of more convenient—if morally questionable—methods.

I think nowadays people (Hollywood) tend to forget that shows for children are often meant to be teaching tools, and not just entertainment. They forget that people—even kids—are flawed and so characters must be too if the audience is to learn anything from watching them on screen. It’s not enough to take an animated show and make it pretty and expensive, you have to translate the substance of the show, too. Otherwise you lose any purpose or power it might have had.

[siapom]

Okay, people. I need to soapbox for a hot minute.

My favorite fandom worlds are imploding on their own people, and it’s fucking ridiculous.

1) Lockwood and Co.

I hate to point this out, but I’m gonna anyway. There is no Locklyle WRITTEN ship in the books. There is an implied ship. The author confirmed that it was intentionally implied. But it wasn’t written. So you know what? There is NO canon ship.

You know what that means? People can ship whomever the fuck they want without “breaking canon”. If you write Locklyle, fine. But that makes you no better than people who are enjoying other ships. And even then, it’s a fandom. It’s imaginary shit. The way to keep the fandom alive and thrive is to NOT PUBLICALLY CASTIGATE AND PUT DOWN other shippers and their ideas, works, or conversations. If you do that, it’s YOU who is poisoning the fandom.

2) Stray Kids

Holy fuck, people! Can’t we all just be adults?

a) Do not attack people who interact with our boys in a professional capacity. It’s not helpful to the group to give them a reputation for having an out of control fanbase. It could cause their opportunities become limited just because others are scared that Stay may get offended by something.

b) If you don’t want to support the new song, don’t. Don’t buy it. Don’t stream it. Don’t get it off of a secondary site just because you can listen without supporting the collaboration.

DO keep your choices to yourself. Your choices are not supposed to apply to other Stay. We can make our own decisions. Other Stay are not lesser, wrong, unethical, Zionists, pro-genecide or any other thing you want to call them. They are simply supporting SKZ their own chosen way.

In closing, this is simple. Do what you want for yourself. Stop thinking your decision has any bearing on other people. Your ego is showing. You aren’t that fucking special. Check yourself.

Thank you.

*steps down*

[readingoals]

End of Year Book Tag

With the end of the year approaching, I've seen a few people on youtube doing this End of Year tag and I thought it'd be fun to do it too, as a kind of followup to the mid year freak out tag. I've adapted the questions a little based on a couple different versions I've seen but I believe the original tag was made by Ariel Bissett. Anyway, onto the questions!

I am definitely on track for my 2024 reading goal! This year I set a goal of 40 books and as of today (Nov 2) I am sitting at 38 read which I am obviously stoked with. I am a little behind on the Read Christie challenge this year but only by 4 books so I shouldn't have any trouble finishing the challenge.

What I am behind on is posting about what I've read (oopsie) so I defs want to try and get caught up before too long.

(Originally this prompt specified an autumnal/winter read but I live in Australia and we're entering summer so I changed the wording a little.)

I don't often pick books based on the season but this year I do actually have a couple of summery reads that I'd like to get to. The first is Every Time I Go On Vacation Someone Dies by Catherine Mack. The other is Everyone This Christmas Has A Secret by Benjamin Stevenson which it the third in his Australia set mystery series so I'm assuming it'll take place in the summer too lmao.

If you'd asked me last week I would have had a few titles on my list but currently there's only one. Ghosts: Brought To Life was released in October and I have ordered it so I'm just waiting for it to arrive.

Oh I have so many more than three lmao but the one's I'm focusing on most are the Agatha Christie's I have left to read - Hickory Dickory Dock (which I just started today), The Mirror Crack'd From Side to Side, Third Girl, and Passenger To Frankfurt. Aside from them I also have a few books I'd like to get to if possible just to tick off challenges I've been doing through the year (namely the Buzzword-a-thon and a bingo board I made in my reading journal). So that includes Artemis by Andy Weir, Not Now Not Ever by Julia Gillard, and There Should Have Been Eight by Nalini Singh, amongst others.

Absolutely. Most of my five stars this year were re-reads and, honestly, nothing stands out as my absolute fave at the moment, so there's defs a possibility. I think maybe the most likely would be Every Time I Go On Vacation if I get to it before the end of the year.

Nothing solid yet. I will be doing the Read Christie challenge again next year (although I'm getting close to having read all of them so I may have to stretch some prompts to get to everything lmao)

The other thing I've kind of had at the back of my mind is to move my Frankenstein thing I've been doing in October to a different month next year, maybe something around the april/may/june/july part of the year. This year October's reading did not go as planned, I spent 3/4 of the month reading and annotating Emma and then only got through one Frankenstein related book. October tends to be an especially busy time of the year for me with work and I usually have to read the book I'm annotating to exchange with Lauren around that time too. Plus the weather doesn't really give the right vibe. I don't celebrate Halloween so I didn't time it to coincide with that when I started doing it, it was just coincidence, so there's really no reason to keep in in October. But I am thinking of maybe making a lil mini bingo board or something for anyone who wants to join in on it. idk it's all very much just a vague idea in the back of my head right now.

[mad-raptorzzz]

controversial opinion below:

i dont like the movie Encanto. Let me explain…

i love the characters, the designs, the music (surface pressure is one of my favorite Disney songs), I like Mirabel and Bruno and Luisa a lot. I appreciate the cultural significance and love seeing the Columbian flare. And the generational trauma is always a topical point now.

But I do not, and I repeat do not, like how easily Abuela was forgiven. It honestly sours the whole movie for me. She was physically, emotionally, and mentally abusive to her granddaughter for something entirely out of Mirabel’s control. And you can see how badly this hits Mirabel. I know it’s due to Abuela’s past trauma, but that’s still not an excuse for how poorly she treats Mirabel. And then it’s all forgiven with a hug? like no, sweetie, get out of that toxic place it’s not good for you. AND they all do the same thing to Bruno. Poor guy.

sorry i was just watching a clip from it and got upset again, it truthfully ruins the whole movie for me.

Similar story beats happen in Turning Red, but we see more of the mom’s struggle and ‘punishment’ or retribution (?) for her actions. And we see how things actually do change after. Like Mei has agency over her life and we see her mother acknowledge this.

small rant this morning

[the-pea-and-the-sun]

Nineteen year olds are barely legal, much less true adults. They are naive and vulnerable with so many new responsibilities in their lives. They are more willing to do things they’ll regret in the future because they think it will make them ~real~ grown-ups. The human brain doesn’t fully mature till someone is in their late twenties.

Hi, so first of all the human brain "fully maturing" when a person becomes 25 (or their "late 20s"? I've actually never heard that one before) is a myth. Establishing a specific age of consent is necessary for legal purposes, but there is no actual magic number where a person suddenly becomes a "true adult". 18 is the only magic number you will get, because that is the exact age a person becomes an adult legally in the US and many other countries. You can define a legal adult and have an age where someone is a legal adult, but all the other things that we associate with maturity and adulthood, where someone becomes culturally an adult, are things that happen gradually, not suddenly. There are clear points where someone obviously is an established adult because they have more of the things we associate with adulthood, like someone who's in their mid 30's, is married with children, etc. And clear points where someone obviously isn't an adult and isn't close to being one, like a middle schooler who's dependent on their parents, and there's a lot of people who are in the middle, like 19 year old college students. It's necessary to draw a clear line between these two points in a person's life, but the actual line does not exist. A 17 year old emancipated minor with a full-time job who can support themselves might be seen as "more adult" and "more mature" than someone who's finishing up their GED at 19. It's still necessary for us to consider the former legally a child for the purposes of being able to consent even though the emancipation process has granted them many legal rights that only an adult should have, and it's still necessary for the latter to be considered an adult with adult rights that can't be taken away.

Sure, 19 year olds are "barely legal" and may do things that make them be perceived as "more grown up" than they actually are. This is because being a young person comes with a lot of stigma, and that stigma is exacerbated, not lessened, by saying a person can't truly consent until their in their late 20s. 19 year olds do often have less maturity than adults who are older than them, and there are people out there who will try and take advantage of that immaturity. A 19 year old deciding to have a one-time hook up is not an inherently worse or more immature decision than them deciding to take out a giant student loan. The solution to this is not to prevent 19 year olds from being able to legally handle their own money without the assistance of a "true" adult, it's to make sure 19 year olds are going into the world informed, and not in such vulnerable situations where they would need to take out a giant loan so early in their lives.

I'm 21 years old. When I was 20, (which really, is hardly different from being 19, isn't it?) I had a great experience with someone who was 27. I'm pretty confident that when I'm 25, there will be no switch-flip in my head that makes me realize what I did was wrong. When I was 18, I was in what I did not realize at the time was a really toxic and awful relationship with someone my own age. There was no switch-flip in my head to make me realize this either, just a gradual accumulation of life experiences and re-evaluations of what I wanted for myself and not for others and what I could do about it. There ARE people who specifically target vulnerable people in order to have relationships with them, often because they're young or because they're disabled or because they have a low sense of self worth or an insecurity about their age. There are also people who fetishize youth and equate it with beauty and innocence and because of this are unwilling to date people who society deems too old to be attractive. Young people and old people are both vulnerable groups that people often abuse and take advantage of. Vulnerable groups are more likely to be in abusive relationships and are more likely to allow others to make decisions for them that don't reflect their own interests. The solution is not to prevent these people from making their own decisions. Making the less-vulnerable groups who, by your own admission, already have more power than the vulnerable groups be the ones who get to say who is a legal consenting adult and who is not will not protect these groups. And you need to realize that for the purpose of arguing who has a right to be called a consenting adult who can have sex with any other consenting adults approximations aren't going to cut it. Are you arguing that 19 year olds can consent to have sex with each other, but not with "true adults"? Aren't two underdeveloped minds worse than one? Should it be more okay for a 19 year old to have sex with a minor than a 25 year old, since they aren't "true adults" anyway? Do we just prosecute whoever the "truest adult" is? If you don't like where the line is drawn, where do you propose we draw it? There is no "barely legal" status for 19 year olds, and there is no "brain probably fully developed" status for people in their mid to late 20s. The only actual logical conclusion a person can come to with this argument is for the age where someone is considered to be a "true adult" with true adult rights to be 25 instead of 18, because you're essentially arguing that 19 year olds can't consent (to sex specifically, I assume. I never hear people making the "brain not fully developed" argument for bank or housing loans).

It's important for adults, all adults, including and especially vulnerable groups, to be able to decide for themselves when and if they want to have sex and who they will have sex with. Arguing that "less mature" brains can't consent to sex or other "adult only" things, like having a bank account or owning a home, is the same logic people use to take rights away from people who are mentally or physically disabled. It harms the vulnerable group under the guise of protecting them.

[marauderingminnie]

So much of the current marauders fandom controversy wouldn’t even exist if people just tagged their posts right 😭😭

[lottieurl]

i'm curious about how you'd have jackie be a part of the cannibalism? because i find the concept absolutely fascinating (especially in the 21 timeline honestly because can you imagine the kind of person jackie would be if she survived all of That.) i just haven't given toooo much thought to the "how" of it myself

hm if you want like a specific scenario i feel like i'd have to write a fic lmao cause there's so much to cover (and honestly! maybe i will eventually. did ANYONE write cannibal jackie au or is it real boring on ao3 idk i haven't browsed the tag too much) but after s2 it's actually baffling to me that people are so insistent on how jackie Never Could?

everyone is SO focused on the creators saying her death represents the death of civilization they seem to actually forget she's also a character not a symbol (and i've seen the way people analyze some of her behavior in like the weirdest way just to keep everything as symbolic of civilization. like incomprehensible things being said just cause someone analyzes her only through the "she symbolizes civilization" lenses. i love her death and the way she haunts the narrative as much as any other shaunajackie enjoyer lmao but come on) like do we all understand that ben could die early on and also represent the death of civilization AND death of authority (from their life before crash)?

with that out of the way. here's the show we're all watching. natalie who was the other person horrified and enraged by what the girls did at doomcoming is A PART OF THEIR CANNIBALISTIC MURDER CULT. travis the guy they assaulted and tried to kill on shrooms is a devoted lottie follower now. travis the guy who was throwing up when he was trying to get the ring off his dead father's finger to give to his brother. that travis. is eating his brother's heart raw. taissa the sceptic who was one of the only people trying to get jackie to stay inside and who had to repress her first act of cannibalism and who threw up when she found out about it and who was the most vocally against what lottie was doing for a while (other than nat of course) is A PART OF ALL THIS NOW. van the girl who couldn’t handle seeing worms in a dead deer and nearly threw up is a shameless cannibal now and doesn’t flinch seeing all the blood. and we also have akilah who seems so kind and doesn't really want to take part in any of this but wants to survive and is scared of the rest so she does. there is lottie who doesn't want what is being done in her name but is scared and confused and lost and is being told this is all on her. and you're telling me you cannot imagine jackie taking part in any of this? on this show? like okay fine but i have a creative mind and see the kind of characters we now have in a cannibalistic cult and can tell none of those were characters who - before crash - Seemed Like People Who Would. literally none of them

but back to jackie! people ALWAYS mention the way she had trouble adapting, the way her death represents the death of civilization (which is like. literally pointless to mention if we are entertaining an idea where the death does not happen? like?) and that she wasn't eating much by doomcoming. YEAH CAUSE SHE WAS SO HEARTBROKEN AND SUICIDAL AFTER FINDING OUT ABOUT SHAUNA'S BETRAYAL. can you really just not imagine any other path for her character if she didn't die? cause i'm thinking of what liv said about van and about how it's "the corruption of the beautiful parts of her" and can see that with jackie too. all the other traits of hers like. yeah she was very depressed and lost after the crash. okay. imagine if she had a reason to stay alive (shauna lmao like. quite literally not a lot of other reasons for her she's so pathetic (affectionate) but yeah shauna or shauna related things everytime). the girl who - before crash - was so determined to be this person she was pretending to be and the image she was crafting that she was in a long-term relationship with a guy she didn't love and had sex (yeah she didn't consider it sex but like. it was. we are here in the 2020s and not ill with cishetnormativity so we can say that much) that made her miserable because she was such a determined person. how would those traits look like corrupted by the wilderness? because we somewhat saw it already at doomcoming when she just decided she's gonna sleep with travis and then made it happen. or those traits of her we see that help make people feel better? to me echoing van's storytelling and how it made others relax and how it entertained them? it feels like it comes down to jackie only ever being seen as A Bitch by jackie haters or a failgirl angel who has no flaws by her fans so the latter have an issue even like. trying to imagine a jackie corruption arc so to speak that would end in her participating in cannibalism

i just do not! get! why everyone is SO INSISTENT she never could. like how are you watching that show. i am not asking rudely just genuinely curious. because if you think Under No Circumstances Could She Ever then i suppose you think there are two types of people (well, characters) you can sort into two boxes. those who could engage in cannibalism and those who never would. which is.. i mean i disagree but fine. just tell me this then. do you literally think all the rest of them just happen to be in that Could Do Cannibalism box? like inherently? the plot luckily happens because those characters are just inherently people who CAN do this unlike those other people who never could? i'm sorry but that sounds like such a boring way to watch it. especially when canonically at least some of them are so openly distressed by having to do this and they very much do invent a religion to be able to both shift blame and excuse their actions in their minds

[gremlinsbooty]

What makes me love VOICE SYNTH Fandom, is that you have a total freedom in your headcanons. Also! Don't let the other people use the pretext of age of mascot (that nowadays doesn't make any sense, because fans can see them much older or younger) just to annoy your favourite headcanon or ship

[transingthoseformers]

Possibly controversial opinion ahead?

In contrast to IDW and TFP, I don't think TFA Cons came from the oppressed. So I don't think Megatron was ever a miner. Possibly a gladiator, but that was something he would've wanted to do. Just for fun, basically.

I like the idea of the transformers being created as a servant race, with the Autobots intended to fulfil non-war duties, and the Decepticons were made for war.

... I guess if I were to make a comparison, I'd compare it to modern humans and neanderthals? Can interbreed and create fertile offspring, but not the same species.

Okay I've got my own opinions about the definition of species because of the fertile offspring detail, but I'm gonna shut the fuck up about that because that's nitpicky nitpicky taxonomy politics because science is full of debate bullshit like that especially the world of evolutionary biology

Buuuut that's me going on a tangent, I'm legit gonna just say I don't think they're separate species: I think they're at most subspecies of C. cybertronii, but at least different frametypes. But that's me being petty and going biology brain. Considering how inherently morphologically dynamic cybertronians are in every continuity, it'd take a lot for me to outright say they're different species. Especially with the fact that they occupied the same place at the same time with no population separation we usually see happen in cases like this, and there's a wide enough middle ground that we see in canon with the divide possibly being mostly artificial and— okay I'm getting off track

What I was gonna say was because I haven't read much of the canon lore on TFA from the Allspark Almanac, because rn we're poor as hell and barely making groceries I can't afford a rare book online and Jesus fucking Christ that's. That there are some numbers. Goddamn. Goddamnnnnnn.

Anyway what I was gonna say is that I'm not educated on TFA lore enough but have there been indications that stuff was off before the war? I mean shit was definitely fucked by the time the end of the war followed, because I'm thinking quite a lot of the autobots in TFA in the present timeline are xenophobic. Not the majority, mind you, perhaps a loud minority, but from what I can see most of the autobots were apathetic to whether they were accepting of non-autobot entities because they just hadn't had any exposure to them so they had no reason to think about it. Sure maybe my example of Cybertron is tainted because when we see Isaac and Ratty go there shit was going belly up fast because of Sentinel Prime being in charge.

Basically: I don't have enough information to determine whether warframes were oppressed before the war or not, most of the tfa noncanon works tend more towards the oppressed angle but idk if that's them drawing off of canon or off of the other continuities to make up for the limited pre-war information we get in transformers animated

[oyasumire]

i legit don’t even care about bluey and don’t watch it and even after my last post im not gonna say i hate it bc it literally just means nothing to me, i do not think about it ever, but the way grown ass adults are getting so bent out of shape over a mild criticism of a preschool show is 😭

[rogue205]

Are Canada and America depicted as blond white boys in Hetalia because the countries as we know them were established by European colonizers?

Otherwise, I feel they should actually look Indigenous. Y’know, because those people were there WAY before Columbus “discovered” them.

[ange-is-a-liar]

.

[perikiro]

just wanted to tell you that the way you draw hokage naruto is literally chef’s kiss!!!! i’m obsessed; his hair looks so fluffy :D

AAaahh thank you so much 💛💛💛 actually I always have a surprising amount of trouble with naruto's hair, despite it looking like it should be so simple dsfjskjfs?? So I'm really happy to hear that 🥰

[partywithponies]

[jay-drinks-gasoline]

unfollow if you tell bigender/omnigender/genderfluid people "im still calling you she." or "im still calling you he.", if you hate on people for being "outside your norms", and if you support to either extreme of the wilbur soot controversy (claiming that wilbur is completely innocent and could never do something bad, or trying to dox wilbur to "show support to shelby)

spring cleaning!!! unfollow me if youre a terf, homophobic, biphobic, islamophobic, dont agree w the black lives matter movement 

[dredshirtroberts]

cake for breakfast was always a treat to me

growing up we didn't often have a lot of food in the house that i found palatable for breakfast. i still struggle to eat breakfast-type foods in general. cereal, eggs, toast, poptarts, bagels, oatmeal, unless i'm Hankerin' for them, i truly do not care for most anything you could count as a breakfast food. i'd eat them, when pressed, because there was nothing else available - we got Fun Cereals few and far between and i had to ration my portions because no one else rationed to share. My sister would have two bowls of cereal back to back but if i filled my bowl higher than the Serving Size dictated it should be, i'd get told i was eating all of the cereal and to save some for everyone else.

so even if we had food i enjoyed i wasn't allowed to eat it.

cake was different. We didn't have cake very often. Cake was for Special Occasions. (the food, not the band, the band Cake was for every day AND sundays, but i digress). You had cake in the house cause something Fun had just happened and so mom and dad were in a good mood and the goal was to get rid of the cake as fast as possible so it didn't go bad (and so we could get back on track with whatever diet mom and dad were following that month) so we were encouraged to eat more of it.

Cake for breakfast was special. Cake for breakfast meant that things were gonna be alright for a few days and i was allowed to actually eat more even if it *wasn't* cake I had that day. because calories were shared between us, so if everyone else was having Extra Fun Calories i was also allowed, even if it wasn't the same calories.

yes i know. this is probably fucked up. if this surprises you, that the way my family of origin worked is batshit insane, you've clearly never heard me talk about my family before lol.

I just learned last night that 4 out of the 4 other people currently in this house consider cake for breakfast meaning something is going wrong for them. and i can't comprehend that. in my head it's on the same tier as donuts (which were also a Special Occasion food) and danishes and breakfast pastries. how could it not mean that good things are happening because you have the ability to have cake in the house?