#not in an ableist way but in a can’t imagine why your brain would do that way. which is fair

[foxmulderautism]

autism is so funny today i briefly had a messy break up with my wham hyperfixation because i saw a small out of context thing that upset me after intentionally going out of my way to look for something that could upset me only to decide after hours of deliberation that it did not actually upset me and didn’t even matter because i was just being silly looking to dramatise something to bother me 👍 as part of my unmasking goal of 2024 i am going to be open about the weird and nonsensical autism symptoms that i cycle through on the daily 👍 anyway now we’re back together and im streaming wham rap enjoy what you do 👍

[headspace-hotel]

Medication stigma absolutely was and is a real and harmful thing. “Take your meds!” is such a ubiquitous message because of the ableist messages so many people have internalized about how they “shouldn’t need” medication, that they just have to be Strong Enough or do the right thing to overcome their mental health issues. And medication genuinely does create a significant reduction in the suffering of many people.

More and more people do not realize this, and recently “anti-capitalist” people are writing articles and blogs about how psychiatry is fundamentally capitalist and how doctors are just throwing prozac at people left and right to stop them from realizing that their problems have systemic origins, and they are genuinely reading messages in the mental health community about medication and mental illness as “chemical imbalance” as capitalist bootlicking.

If you don’t know the context, I suppose “it’s a chemical imbalance in your brain!” must seem like total ignorance of how society harms people and causes much of the suffering that leads to mental illness.

But these ideas in the mental health community are so pervasive partly because even just 10-15 years ago, taking medication for mental health problems was overwhelmingly seen as “weakness” and needing medication was a character problem. It comes from the overwhelmingly prevalent ableist idea that needing “help” of any kind is bad, and that the only acceptable disabled or sick people are those who Overcome through sheer willpower and gumption or gain some sort of special gift. That’s the context people are missing.

That’s the problem. That’s what you need to be attacking. Not the people themselves who are trying to survive. That’s how capitalism harms and devalues people.

Like, I’ve had multiple close friends who have suffered from SEVERE anxiety whose parents straight up refused to get them any kind of medication because they “didn’t believe in it.” Fight for a world where everyone has healthcare and minors have a say over their own health care instead of bitching about how much you think people “need” mental health care.

Imagining a post-capitalist ideal world as one where people largely don’t need medication is ableist. Why? Because focusing on minimizing the accommodations people will need instead of meeting their needs is ableist. It’s discomfort with the idea of genuinely differing needs and abilities, with the idea of people that can’t be Fixed by putting them in the environment they’re “supposed to” be in.

An ideal society is not one where people don’t need “help.” An ideal society is one where people are helped.

I do think some (some, not all) anti-capitalists are very uncomfortable with the basic fact that there is no society that will naturally accommodate everyone. People have bought into this rosy idea of neurodivergence in particular where ADHD and autism are “adaptive” and make us more successful in The Wild where we are Supposed To live. First of all, that’s bullshit. There is no “state of nature,” and evolution doesn’t work that way.

Second, some illnesses, disabilities and traits are not adaptive. Period. Neurodivergence may not have helped early man to survive. It may have been a liability for us in The Wild. We still have value. That is the POINT.

Also, frankly, even if no one would need Prozac without capitalism, something that makes people suffer less is still an okay and good thing. If you have a problem understanding this, why do you even care about creating a better world?

[primaverabutitalreadyexists]

“I really don’t care being « called out » on something that isn’t true, but I have the right to defend myself. I will keep drawing him as I see fit and using his cane/crutch, and brace when the setting call for it. Have a nice day!”

It was when you said this that did it for me. Only willing you include a disabled characters disability aids when it fits your aesthetic? I know you have quite a few followers and for some reason that makes you think you’re above taking criticism but my god that was a shitty way to respond. I know someone else said that we are more than our disabilities which is true, but it’s also something we can’t just turn off whenever we feel like it. That’s why when an artist decides that it just doesn’t ‘fit the piece’ they’re drawing it kind of sucks.

Having « few followers » does not make me above anything or anyone else, I would say it’s quite the opposite actually. And I gladly take any criticism, as long as it is constructive, and done with the desire to help people improve in a field they lack experience/knowledge. That person was straight up agressive in the first place, already assuming things and straight up went for a confrontation that could have been easily avoided. And let me tell you, I’m at fault as well, I shouldn’t have matched the same tone, and that’s why it escalated this way, I’ve been super dumb in my phrasing. Maybe it was a clumsily written criticism, maybe they didn’t meant to make it looks like an assumption, idk and most likely will never know.

Including a character disability has nothing to do with aesthetics, a disability ISN’T an aesthetic to begin with. You can’t just say « oh no it’ll ruin my piece, go away crutch » and if you ever find a tweet or anything from me saying this, please send it to me, because it just never ever scratched my brain, not even once. Like a lot of artists out there, sometimes I draw things in a way that makes me feel good, that I think look okay. And if they offend some people, it isn’t in my intentions, I would never willingly do something as mean and stupid as that. I use Viktor for a lot of male body studies, like that shirtless one, that was just a primary version of an other with one with the merged brace and robot parts that isn’t even finished. That person picked 3 fanarts I’ve made of Viktor without his crutch or his brace. Does that make me a fucking ableist?? I would love to post all my fanarts, sketches of him featuring them, because I have a lot of these, and future projects, unfinished pieces that now I’m just too fucking self conscious to even finish. I love drawing him and now I feel like I do not deserve it. It was a bad way to answer them, and I totally agree with that, but I won’t stay here, being called a disgusting term and say nothing.

When I said when the setting calls for it, I was talking about wether it’s a portrait, a certain pose, if he’s seen entirely, or not, or if it’s Act 1, 2/3, machine herald or even the post shimmer augments design non canon thing a lot of artists are imagining. We still don’t know how he will turn out in s2, and a lot of people are making fan design (amazing I must say, I’m so happy to see a fandom coming with such wonderful and original ideas). I’m not saying I draw things like « oh what if I included his crutch this time? Would be so cute and cool 🥰 » It’s all about the way I’m making the piece and the setting he’s on. Currently I’m working on a piece where he’s using his crutch to get up from his bed, for exemple. Idk if it makes sense, it’s frustrating.

Anyway, I’m glad you’ve reached to me to talk about it, and to speak your mind on the matter.

[a-queer-seminarian]

So sorry if this is breaking news to anyone, but: the Bible is ableist. Its pages hold some really shitty stuff about disabled persons.

...AND it’s also affirming of the goodness and wholeness of disabled persons, just as we are!

it turns out that among the many authors of the many texts collected into the Bible, there were differing views around what we now call disability!

so whenever disability comes up in a given passage, i can’t keep my brain from immediately trying to sort it: is it a Good Text for disabled persons, or a Bad Text?

i try to resist that easy binary, because the answer is usually somewhere in between. that certainly seems to be the case for this week’s lectionary reading from Mark 9.

there’s so much wild stuff in Jesus’s little monologue in this lectionary passage, but let’s start with verses 43-47 (my rough translation incoming):

If your hand causes you to stumble, cut it all the way off; it is better for you to enter into The Life impaired than, while having two hands, to go away into the gehenna, into the unquenchable fire.

And if your foot causes you to stumble, cut it all the way off! It is better for you to enter into The Life limping than, while having two feet, be cast into the gehenna.

And if your eye should cause you to stumble, cast it out; it is better for you to enter into the Kingdom of God one-eyed than, while having two eyes, be cast into the gehenna, where their worm does not die, and the fire is not quenched. For everyone will be salted with fire.

oh lord, not the hell talk!! anything but hell talk!! this whole passage bristles with a million ways to misuse it. (homophobia cw: anyone else ever get told “if your sexuality causes you to sin, cut it off — this passage is proof gay people should be celibate!” just me?)

now, my focus is on what Jesus says here about disability, but as we talk about that, better ways of reading the text will come up. for instance, that last verse about how everyone will be salted with fire? to me, that suggests Jesus’ vision of this “gehenna” place does NOT = the standard Christian idea of hell. first off, it’s a place not of punishment, but purification — which is a word heavy with baggage these days...what if I say “reformation” instead? And if that’s the case, i imagine one’s stay there isn’t eternal — why bother reform people who are gonna be shut off in a fire-filled jail forever?

once those fires “purify” you, i imagine your stay is through and off you go into “The Life,” because you’ll finally be ready for it. so that’s one option for getting ready for The Life / The Kingdom of God — or, Jesus says, you can opt instead to get rid of the things that “cause you to stumble” in advance by......cutting off a limb or gouging out an eye??

now. i could be wrong but. if we start by taking this text as literally as possible, with physical stumbling and a physical limb-removal taking place......wouldn’t it be easier to avoid tripping if you’ve got two eyes to see obstacles with, two feet to step over potholes with?? even today when prosthetics are sometimes an option, there’s an adjustment period where you have to relearn walking.

so it seems that Jesus is making one of his trademark statements meant to subvert expectations -- the last will be first, the foolish are proven wise, and those with two feet are more likely to stumble. chances are, he’s not speaking literally. it’s not your literal foot or hand you should be chopping off -- it’s a metaphor for something else.

but before we consider what exactly it’s a metaphor for...where does this ironic little twist leave actually disabled persons? is it shitty of Jesus to be using disability in this way? is this like his “blind leading the blind” & “spiritually blind” comments elsewhere in the Gospels, where he stamps a disability with a moral judgement?

yeah, i do think it’s kinda crappy to use real disabilities for an object lesson, for hyperbolic effect, for shock value. “better to be impaired” (even tho, the subtext seems to be, It Sucks To Be Impaired) “than end up in Gehenna. Trade one terrible thing for a still bad but not as bad thing!” My impulse is thus to throw this passage right into the Bad Text box —except!

Except, i feel like this text holds some positive implications about how Jesus viewed disability, too. 

First off, there’s the implication that one can enter into “The Life” — abundant life, “the world to come,” God’s Kingdom — while disabled. (i wish that were just a given, but it’s not; it’s actually exciting to hear confirmed!)

In the Hebrew Bible (the “Old Testament,” the scriptures we share with our Jewish neighbors, the texts that Jesus would have read and known), the most common assumption about disability is unfortunately that disability = imperfection, and imperfection is something that should be kept out of contact with God.

Now, there are authors & stories within the Hebrew Bible that offer a counter-narrative to that assumption! Two quick examples: Exodus 4 establishes Moses as having a speech impediment, yet he has many close encounters with the Divine. Meanwhile, in Isaiah 56:1-8, God not only welcomes in eunuchs — whom Deuteronomy 23:1 forbade from entering God’s Assembly — but even gives them a place of honor there!

So Jesus’s perspective is not brand new; he simply continues the counter-narrative that other Jewish rabbis and prophets established before him. Still, it is significant that he takes the status-quo-subverting perspective that actually, disability and wholeness are not at odds!

While Jesus’s primary aim with this little passage is not about disability, his weird self-disabling metaphor does imply an attitude of welcome for disabled persons, in that he seems to take it for granted that disabled persons are not barred from The Life of wholeness and abundance he’s talking about.

It’s obvious to him that they don’t even need to be made not-disabled to get there! (Plus, there is no suggestion that once there, one regrows one’s lopped-off limbs or eye / becomes abled again.) This isn’t the only time Jesus expresses this idea of disabilities present in God’s Kingdom, either — my fave is the parable of the banquet in Luke 14 (i have a whooole video about that passage, if you’re interested).

Moreover, Jesus’s closing remarks about salt — which at first glance seem to be something of a non sequitur — can be linked to the Gehenna fire stuff when it comes to the theme of im/purity. Let’s look at that last verse of the lectionary reading, which follows right after Jesus’s claim that “everyone will be salted with fire”:

“Salt is good; but if salt becomes unsalty, with what will you season it? Hold salt in yourselves, and keep peace with one another.”

Another weird little riddle from our favorite riddle-master. unsalty salt? instructions to stay salty?

One way to read this is to focus on the purifying and preserving uses of salt — the way it can keep food from going bad, which was particularly important in a time before refrigerators. in the previous verses, Jesus told his disciples what to cut off — anything that impedes them on the way into abundant Life. Now, he tells them what to hold on to — the stuff that, like salt, clean out harmful things and preserve helpful things, thus enabling abundant Life.

So yeah. In naming something culturally considered an imperfection — disability — as something that can easily enter The Life, no problem, Jesus is making an argument for what is truly impure, what truly impedes wholeness. And it’s not disability! ...So what is it? What are these stumbling blocks that Jesus likens to feet, hands, and eyes?

To find out, we have to rewind to the start of the lectionary reading, a comment from the disciple John that actually kicks off Jesus’s whole spiel:

John informed him, “Teacher, we saw someone throwing out demons in your name, and we stopped him, because he wasn’t following our way.”

But Jesus said, “Do not ever prevent him! For there is no one who will do a powerful work in my name, and will be quickly able to speak evil of me. For whoever is not against us, is for us. Whoever might give you a cup of water to drink because you are in Christ’s name, amen I say to you, that one will not utterly lose his reward.”

The disciples have a certain way of seeing the world, and their actions against someone who is not one of them, but still using Jesus’s name to cast out demons, show us what that way is. They see the world in terms of us vs. them, in vs. out, one right way and many wrong ways. It’s this perspective that impedes them from supporting other people’s kin(g)dom-building work when it differs from their own.

But Jesus tells them they need to stop thinking this way, and start recognizing that there isn’t just one road to the Kin(g)dom, but many — and to quote Jesus’s words from other parts of scripture, you’ll know that someone’s work is good when it produces good fruit. This dude might be doing things differently from how they do it, but the fruits of his efforts are good — the casting out of demons, which frees people up for new life. So don’t stop him — support him! Be glad for his work!

To sum up the entire passage now that I’ve laid it all out and shown how the seemingly-disjointed parts of Jesus’s speech connect, I see his argument as something like this: “That dude you tried to stop is not against us; we can see that by the consequences of his actions, which are positive! His goals are the same as ours, so don’t hinder him just because his path is different from yours! Now, here’s an example of people/behaviors that ARE against us: people who cause little ones to stumble. And you know what you should do with such stumble-makers (or else the stumble-causing behaviors/attitudes)? Cut them off. Let go of anyone or anything that keeps you from abundant life, from the liberation God intends for all. Meanwhile, hold on to the things which purify you like salt — the things that liberate you to enter wholeness. Do it now of your own accord, or accept that it’ll happen later, and it won’t be very fun.”

To reiterate what all of that has to do with disability theology, I’ll share what my friend Laura said when I brought all these ideas to them. (Laura is the host of the Autistic Liberation Theology podcast, which i highly recommend for anyone who wants to hear more Bible stories told through a disability lens!)

Laura noted how common perspectives around dis/ability lead people wrong today, impeding our liberation. Our society teaches us that in order to function as whole persons, we need to be able-bodied (and neurotypical), and that the kinds of accommodations that disabled persons require limit their quality of life. When those ableist assumptions are the lens through which we view the world, that can “cause us to stumble” in the metaphorical sense — can impede us from loving ourselves and one another fully, and from fully participating in the diverse Kin(g)dom of God.

They offered two examples:

When a person with a mobility impairment that could be improved with a wheelchair avoids using that wheelchair because of internalized ableism, preferring the increased suffering that walking more than their body can healthily do over being “wheelchair bound,” that internalized ableism is a stumbling block keeping them from abundant life. Learning to let go of those beliefs, to use a wheelchair when they need to, will — contrary to that “wheelchair bound” language — bring liberation. 

Their next example imagined a parent who puts their autistic child through ABA therapy in order to get them to talk, make eye contact, and otherwise behave like a non-autistic person, due to the belief that autistic persons are missing elements of a full personhood, or that they can only live a happy life if they learn how to mask their autistic traits. However, in reality, ABA therapy brings the child pain and trauma — it impedes rather than enables their quality of life. Letting go of that need for your child to communicate through spoken language and otherwise behave like an allistic will make room for celebration of who they really are!

As Jesus’s comments in this passage imply, a disabled person can enter into “The Life” of wholeness and kinship that is the Kin(g)dom of God just as they are. To try to sever their disability from them would be the hindrance to that liberation. To deny that there are many ways to participate in the Body of Christ  impedes the incoming Kin(g)dom.

So let’s take this message to heart. Let’s consider what points of view, what assumptions about what is necessary for wholeness, are currently keeping us from abundant life, or causing us to stop others from their abundance-bringing work. It’s time to learn how to let those harmful assumptions go — and hold tight to the things that bring true wholeness.

For more on this text, check out my translation notes, which include a lot of commentary from D. Mark Davis’s own exegetical work.

For more on disability theology, you might enjoy my #disability theology tag on tumblr or my Disabled AND Blessed YouTube series. This video exploring the many different perspectives on disability found within the Bible is particularly pertinent.

Finally, what do you think? What good news do you hear in this Mark 9 text? What parts of it feel like a stumbling block for you, dredging up hurt or confusion?

[foilfreak]

BEAUTY AND HER BEAST: Chapter 9 (temporary 1-2 week hiatus being taken from his fic, click ao3 link and read end notes to find out why. I WILL BE COMING BACK!!!)

WARNING PLZ READ BEFORE CONTINUING: This fic is rated NSFW and contains graphic depictions of things some people may find disturbing or alarming, including, but not limited to: violence, gore, unhealthy family relationships, Oedipus complexes, gratuitous amount of pornographic literature, ableist language, physical, mental, and emotional abuse, etc. If you are someone who does not enjoy fiction with these elements in them, then I suggest you refrain from reading this, because this fic will have all that, and probably a lot more. So, this is your first and final warning to turn around and go somewhere else if stuff like this just isn't your vibe, because from this point forward, your emotional wellbeing is in your own hands, and I will not be accepting blame if you disregarded my warnings and ended up reading something you didn't like. Idk why I feel compelled to write one of these despite this being Resident Evil fanfic, but I figured I'd cover my ass just in case.

(AO3 link below)

Despite the shrill echo of Nadine’s terrified voice being something Salvatore has prepared himself for since before the young woman even arrived in the reservoir, the real thing was still somehow 100 times worse than he could have ever imagined it being.

Chaos followed as Salvatore frantically left his hiding spot, crawling across the floor as quickly as his mangled body would allow, as a loud crashing sound vibrates the whole room once Nadine’s body finally lands, quite uncomfortably I might add, on the hardwood of the floor. The sudden frantic and terrified swinging of her arms following Salvatore’s verbal slip knocked the poor woman off balance, sending her right back down to the floor for a second time.

Staring at the writhing figure of Nadine from the other corner across the room, Salvatore sniffles pitifully to himself as tears cascade down his face. Oh how appropriately cruel, that the universe wouldn’t even give Salvatore the decency of a proper meeting with Nadine, much less a chance at friendship and even less at anything past that. It makes perfect sense that this would be the way Nadine found out how disgusting and pathetic he is. Sitting alone in a dark and dingy room, watching old romance films because he has no one of his own to hold and love like the men in the movies do, and eating entire blocks of cheese all on his own, because nothing pairs with unending loneliness like the tang of sharp cheddar and the horrible stomach ache that follows it.

Putting his hands up to cover his face, a final effort to hide himself away from the beautiful woman’s gaze, Salvatore merely sat in his new corner, his shoulders shaking with sobs of agony and his body trembling in fear as Nadine’s gaze finally locked on to him, and him alone this time, in the dark silence of the room.

“H-Hey… are you alright? I’m sorry I yelled like that, I didn’t mean to startle you like that, but you suddenly spoke up out of nowhere and it scared me half to death” The soft voice from across the room asks, causing Salvatore to pause in his moment of self-loathing. Did… did she just ask him if he was alright? Wasn’t he the one who was supposed to ask her that?

“W-what…?” Salvatore chokes out, peering out slightly from behind the cover of his hood in confusion. The sight he’s met with is one that steals his breath away, much like the first time he laid eyes upon the stunning beauty this tiny woman held. However, unlike their “first” meeting, that took place back in Mother Miranda’s lab, this time there was no metal pod separating the two, Salvatore realized, as the sight of Nadine, slouched tiredly on the ground barely a few feet away from where he cowered in the corner, registered in the mutant man’s mind.

Next, of course, came her actual appearance. Black strands tousled messily across her forehead framed her round face and golden eyes perfectly. Her long white dress bunched up around her upper thighs, revealing the curves of her large, but muscular legs, that had previously been obscured by the material of her dress. Slouched shoulders and heavy breathing caused the material of Nadine’s nightgown to slowly inched its way down the front of her chest, not exposing her necessarily, but definitely revealing more and more of her lusciously plump breasts with every harsh up and down of her shoulders.

Tears continued to fall from Salvatore’s eyes even as saliva began to fill his mouth and his fear and self-loathing slowly gave way to the growing fire beginning to kindle in the pit of his stomach. The sound of his muffled sobs of anguish and arousal escaping from behind his hands causes Nadine’s face to immediately fall, agony replacing the previously wild look her face held.

“N… N-no. No no, please don’t cry. It’s alright. I-I-I’m not going to hurt you… I mean it… see… I don’t have any weapons on me” Nadine says hurriedly, standing up and doing a spin to show that nothing that could pose potential harm to Salvatore was hiding between the folds or frills of the thin garment. “See! Nothing to hide.”

Salvatore merely closed his tear soaked eyes and shook his head, the motion moving his whole body along with it. “Nooooooooooo… y-you d-don’t… under-s-stand…”

“What do you mean? What don’t I understand?” Nadine asked, kneeling back down to the ground, moving slightly closer to Salvatore than she was before, a terrifyingly genuine look of concern and worry etched into her beautiful features.

The mutant man fought back a wave of nausea and choked on a sob at the angelic sight. Hoards of hormones equating to despair and arousal battle within the hellish confines of Salvatore’s brain. The mutant man was filled with so many mixed emotions that he genuinely couldn’t tell if he wanted to tear himself apart until not a scrap of evidence of his existence remained, or if he wanted to just spring forward and consume the delectably dangerous morsel that sat so prettily before him, like an octopus latching itself upon the almighty great white shark as it just passes above their home, pulling the now helpless and unsuspecting predator down into the depths of a true monster’s domain.

“Hey, come on now. It sounds like you’re having a hard time breathing. Why don’t you come out of the corner where the air’s a little fresher, ya?” The young woman coaxes gently, moving ever so slightly closer to Salvatore as she speaks. The movement does not go unnoticed by the hooded man, nor does the way it pushes her dress even further up her already decently exposed thighs, but with little ability to stop Nadine’s incremental advances, Salvatore merely buries his face into his hands, blocking as much of his disgustingly bloated maw as he possibly could, even as the young woman attempted to change her angle to get a better look at him.

“P-p-please… jus-just stop!” Salvatore commands, suddenly filled with a wave of confidence that abandons him just as quickly as it arrived. “j-j-j… j-just… g-go… please…”

A light mist has become visible in the light reflecting off of Nadine’s eyes, the young woman looking truly saddened by the strange man’s utter rejection of her. Whether it was out of pity for Salvatore’s sake, or fear of her own impending isolation should the likes of Salvatore even reject her company, the hooded man could neither tell, nor did he really want to know.

“Well that’s not a very nice thing to say to someone trying to be your friend now is it? I might not look as normal as I used to but I’m not here to cause any trouble” Nadine scolds lightly, her voice strong, though even Salvatore can detect a slight wobble. “But… if you can give me a valid reason why I should leave, then… then I’ll do it, no questions asked.”

A valid reason? What other reason did she need than to get away from him?

Salvatore takes a moment to wipe away some of the tears that coated his face, slightly peeking out to look at the younger woman once again before speaking. “Y-you… you can’t… s-stay here… th-this place… it i-isn’t… isn’t g-good enough f-for you… it’s… i-its not w-worthy… I-i… I’m… n-not worthy… of you…”

Nadine shifts slightly closer once again, a pained look cut into her face like a raging storm cuts through large waves out in the open ocean. Her whole body was a sea of turbulent waters as she gingerly reached her hand forward, slowly but surely inching her way closer to Salvatore, until her wine dark fingers just barely brushed against the thick, rugged fabric of his overcoat.

Silence befell the two mutants, permeating the room with tension so thick and heavy Salvatore thought he might suffocate.

The cornered man could not bring himself to look up as Nadine’s delicate fingers gently latched on to the article of clothing covering his wretched and disgusting form. Salvatore shuddered as he prepared himself for what was inevitably to come once Nadine removed his overcoat: the biting cold of the surrounding area pinching and nipping at his thick, but sensitive flesh; another shrill shriek of fear and terror that would pierce him to his very core; the sound of Nadine, beautiful, gorgeous, perfect, immaculate Nadine, fleeing not just the underground tunnels that had lead her to discover this place, but also the reservoir, never to be seen again.

Salvatore wouldn’t blame her for this choice, of course. After all, it’s what he would do if he found himself trapped with a wretched creature as grotesque and pitiful as he himself was. Death wasn’t an option Salvatore had the luxury of entertaining, but he never blamed others if they chose it over him.

He would too, if he could.

Despite his earlier expectations, the hand on his coat never moves to take the garment off the trembling man, instead, moving to gently run along the side of Salvatore’s head, down his shoulders, before resting itself softly, but firmly, along the area of growths that covered the small of his back. After taking a moment to allow the violent trembling of Salvatore’s body, in response to the young woman’s gentle caresses, to calm down to something more manageable, Nadine slowly lifts her left hand and rests it on the opposite side of the hunched-over man’s head, yet she makes no move to try and take his cloak off or remove his face from his hands.

Stillness and silence return for a brief moment, almost as though Nadine were waiting for Salvatore to raise objection to her advances and stop her, as if he had the power or control to do anything but cower in the corner and cover his growing excitement in shame. With no explicit objections voiced, the hands resting gently around Salvatore began to slowly pull him toward Nadine’s body.

“Come here” Nadine’s soft, heavenly voice commands lightly, as Salvatore’s body does as instructed with no resistance whatsoever. A broken sob of humiliating arousal escapes the hooded man when he gently falls forward into Nadine’s lap, her arms quickly moving to wrap around and hold the hooded man against her soft, warm, and strong body.

“Shhhh, it’s alright. There’s no need to be so worked up. You have nothing to be afraid of, here” Nadine coos soothingly, as her hand gently caresses his thin, leather covered arm.

Salvatore cries pitifully as the painfully comforting words and actions make him want to vomit from overjoy. “Y-you… you d-dont unders-s-stand…” the hunched man weeps, his voice slightly muffled by his knees as he continues trying to hide his face by shoving it as far between his legs as he’s physically capable.

“What don’t I understand? Could you explain it to me?” Nadine asks, patiently holding the sobbing mess of a man firmly against herself as he collects himself enough to answer.

“I-it isn’t… you… th-that I f-fear…” Salvatore begins, trailing off as another wave of cold dread and fiery desire collide violently somewhere deep inside the hooded man’s chest.

“What is it that you’re afraid of then? If not... me?” The young woman’s angelic voice questioned, the slightly fearful and worried tone of her voice toward the end of her question, as if what Salvatore thought of her was even worth her precious time to worry about, made the mutant man’s stomach wretch sickeningly.

“I-I… I f-fear… oh god-” Salvatore began, before promptly shutting up and shoving Nadine as far away from him as he could from that angle, throwing himself to the floor, on his hands and knees, in the opposite direction just as a wave of acidic bile forces its way from the confines of the man’s mouth and out onto the floor in front of him. His own hideous reflection stares back at him in the growing puddle of stomach acid once he’s done.

A spiteful reminder from the universe of what he was and why he lived the way that he did.

Drunkenly reaching his hand forward to smear the vomit puddle around so he at least didn’t have to look at himself AND sit in his own filth while he gathered the energy to get up and wash off in the lake, Salvatore missed the way Nadine’s eyes narrowed in confusion at the man’s clumsy movements, before suddenly widening as she realized what the hooded man was doing.

“No, wait! Don’t touch that, it’ll only make you feel worse if you fiddle around with that nasty stuff” Nadine says hurriedly, as she rushes forward to take Salvatore’s moving hand in her own and presses it firmly against her bosom to prevent the man from playing around in his own throw up. She gasps in shock and her grip tightens around Salvatore’s hand, as though she’d suddenly remembered something important she’d forgotten about and Salvatore’s hand had brought it back to her conscious mind, before shaking her head and pulling herself from her thoughts.

“Oh, you poor thing! Here, let me wipe your face for you, and try to take deeper, slower breaths while you’re at it. You’ve managed to work yourself into such a panic that it's no wonder you’re throwing up all over yourself.”

The room is spinning far too fast and in far too many different directions for Salvatore to really be sure what’s going on, however the feeling of Nadine’s skin pressed against his own as she tenderly raised the edge of her pristine white dress to wipe away the lines of green acidic bile that had been left on Salvatore’s lip, was a sensation of euphoria unlike anything the hooded man has ever felt before in his entire life.

Not even Mother Miranda’s own embrace felt quite as… ‘brutal’ wasn’t the appropriate word to use based on its true definition, but in that instance it's the only word that Salvatore can think of to describe how intense everything around him, Nadine especially, feels at the present moment. Her touch, her scent, her warmth, her weight, her firm grip around him, the constant rhythmic thrum of her heart beat against his cold, bony hand, all of it was so intensely brutal that it was a wonder how the combined effect didn’t beat him into the floor. It was too much for Salvatore to handle all at once, and yet he knew that if the kind angel sitting next to him retracted so much as a single one of those sensations, he’d lose himself to insanity like careless swimmers lose themselves to sudden rapid currents.

Salvatore threw up 3 more times before his stomach finally allowed him the relief the hooded man had desperately been craving. The floor was an absolute mess by this point, but thanks to Nadine, who’d managed to keep his upper body upright the whole time, Salvatore hadn’t made nearly as much of a mess of himself as he normally did, though that still didn’t fix the primary problem that had resulted in all that vomiting.

“There we go. That must feel a lot better, huh?” Nadine asks calmly, pulling Salvatore in to rest against her chest once again, his face still turned downward and away in avoidance.

Although Salvatore does not grace her question with a response, the hooded man has long since given up trying to get away from the young woman, at this point just allowing her to move him however she pleased, taking in as much of her kindness and affection as he possibly could, before she inevitably hightails it out of here, of course. It was only a matter of time, at this rate.

“You know… you’re a lot bigger than I expected you to be” comes a sudden declaration from Nadine, breaking the silence that had permeated throughout the room and immediately pulling Salvatore from his dejected whimpering.

“I mean… I suppose I should have expected that, especially since most middle schoolers are taller than me, nowadays” the young woman continues with a lighthearted chuckle, “but you looked so small and stump-like from all the way up in that stupid pod that I couldn’t help but be a little surprised when I felt you had arms and legs. You could have very well had a snake for a body for all I knew and I still don’t think I’d have been as surprised, though this huge coat you're wearing certainly doesn’t make getting a good look at you very easy.”

“Th… that’s th-the point…” Salvatore mumbles, though seemingly more to himself than anyone else.

“Really? And why is that?” Nadine asks curiously, clearly having heard the older man’s muttering.

“I-if… if you k-knew me… you’d know… th-the answer to that q-question” Salvatore replies sadly, fresh tears beginning to prickle along his lower lid, threatening to spill over as the depressing reality of his meaningless existence makes itself more than obvious.

He was a filthy monster who deserved to spend the rest of his life alone and miserable, because why would something as unholy as him ever be worthy of anything else?

“Oh, now I don’t think that’s true at all. After all, I’d like to think I know you pretty well, and I still want to see what you look like” Nadine counters, her words shocking Salvatore beyond belief.

She… knew him? How? When? In what ways? What?

The only other time they’ve ever interacted was back in Mother Miranda’s laboratory. While the hooded man supposed his gifts could be aiding in Nadine’s surprisingly positive impression of him, he hesitated to call receiving a dress and a necklace from a random stranger “knowing” someone. How on earth could she say she knew him when, for all intents and purposes, they’ve only just met?

“B-b-but… h-how… how d-do you k-know… m-me? Y-you have… t-trouble… seeing… d-dont you? D-did… did y-you see me… b-back in the l-lab?” Salvatore asks, tears belonging to an unspecified emotion once again beginning to fall as a hand moves to gently grasp at the bones lining the top of his hood.

“Unfortunately no, I wasn’t able to get a good look at you before, hence why I was trying so hard to catch a glimpse of you earlier. You are, however, right in the assumption about my eyesight. I have severely impaired vision, yes, but it's manageable with a strong enough prescription; not that I see myself getting to an eye doctor anytime soon for a new pair of contacts. But even without my contact lenses, I can still make out general movements, as well as general shapes and colors, pretty easily from far away, it's just fine details from a distance and darkness that give me the most trouble. My vision is actually perfectly normal so long as whatever I’m looking at is within a few feet of me. If I looked down right now, I’d probably be able to see your face normally. Do you hide your face away from everyone around here?” the young woman asks curiously, gently pulling the dark fabric of the hood back, slowly revealing Salvatore’s face to the dim light of the room, even as her gaze remained locked on the wall behind them.

“N-not… e-everyone… th-there’s a f-few… who… who I sh-show my f-face to… regularly” Salvatore chokes.

Really?” Nadine asks, “like who?”

“M-my… siblings.”

“Oh, so you’re not the only one around here then? Are your siblings here in the reservoir?”

“N-no… th-they live… in o-other places… of th-their own… a-around the v-village.”

“Wow, so there is more of this place to explore, then!” Nadine states excitedly. “I’d love to get out and see more of the area for myself at some point, though I doubt that’s very wise given the amount of howling I’ve heard the past few nights and the fact I don’t know my way around this area... though, even if I did, that memory is probably long gone along with the fucking rest of them… not that I would have wanted to hold onto them anyways, I don’t think.”

Salvatore’s attention is caught by the last bit of Nadine’s statement, confusion filling him over what the younger woman could possibly mean by what she’d just said. “‘G-gone along w-with the rest o-of them?’... W-what… d-does that… what d-do you m-mean?”

Nadine remains silent for a moment as she continues to absentmindedly stroke the side of Salvatore’s head, the hooded man unable to tell what she could possibly be feeling right now without risking exposing his face to her.

Thankfully, Nadine resumes speaking before Salvatore loses patience and gets too risky. “My memory of the life I had before waking up in that damn pod is foggy at absolute best, but I don’t need my memories to know that I wasn’t very happy with my previous life and that I was actively trying to get away from it somehow. What exactly was I even running from and where was I going? Who knows, and frankly I don’t care to relearn it either. I do think it's quite funny that you were talking about me needing to go somewhere else because this place isn’t good enough for me though, because honestly, even if I could somehow get the hell out of here, it's not like I’d have anywhere else to go. Getting away from the shitty life I had before is probably how I ended up here to begin with, though if I’d known this was how things would end up I might have reconsidered throwing it all away so suddenly.”

Had it not been for Mother Miranda being there for him throughout the years, Salvatore would probably think much the same way as Nadine about the whole situation, but having Mother meant he always had a purpose and a goal to work towards, so it didn’t matter that Salvatore couldn’t return to his old life. What shocked the deformed man the most however, was the fact that Nadine appeared to not only already accept the fact that she couldn’t go back to her former life, but seemed to actively be searching for something, anything new to try and fill the void that had been left behind by the life she’d, more or less, willingly gave away to come up here.

Could… could this mean…?

“Thankfully my ability to make new memories doesn’t seem to have been fucked up at all, which I’m quite happy about since I'll be needing to make a lot to fill in the empty spaces in my brain. We met for the first time in the underground laboratory I was being kept in, though I suppose it was less ‘meeting’ and more ‘seeing’ for the first time, but… still. I don’t know why you were there, or who was with you at the time, but I remember waking up just before you were about to leave. There were a couple others who’d come, before you, to look at me and a couple others for some reason, but you were the one who stuck out the most, to me. You were… special!”

Shock and dumbfounded awe nearly choke the life right out of Salvatore. He could barely comprehend a single word the young woman was saying to him, yet he clung to every heavenly syllable she uttered like they were the foundations of the word of god itself. The pain and agony he normally felt due to his cadou mutations momentarily paused, slowly weaning from its usual constant thrum to a dull numbness that felt surprisingly euphoric in all it’s nothingness.

“S-special? Me?” Salvatore breathed, almost unable to believe the words, even as Nadine hummed in affirmation of their truth. “B-but… how…?”

The giddy chuckle Salvatore’s mundane question pulled from Nadine shook the deformed man to his very core. Her girlish laughter rattles violently around inside the deformed man’s head, playing the sweet, holy tune over and over again, like a broken record that Salvatore would happily go insane listening to for the rest of eternity if he could.

“Isn’t it obvious? I’d have assumed you knew exactly what you were doing with how sweetly you talked back there, why it's almost criminal how suavely you stroked and tugged at the strings of my delicate heart. All the others were so rude, boring, and/or annoying that I thought I might die if I ended up stuck with one of them, but then you came in and swept me right off my feet. It was like nothing else I’ve ever felt before and immediately told me that you weren’t like all the others, you were a kind man and if I ever ran into you I could tell I’d be able to trust you…” Nadine trails off for a moment. “When I learned that we were being moved out of containment and onto our “permanent homes”, I hoped and prayed that I’d be lucky enough to end up wherever you were, but I didn’t want to get too excited until I found out for certain.”

“Th-then how did y-you know… it-it was me?”

“How could I possibly not? You set yourself apart from all the others right out of the gate. I'm honestly shocked you don’t remember it yourself. But there's not a single doubt in my mind that I know exactly who you are… er- well, I suppose a more appropriate way of putting that would be “I know exactly who you are to me”, not that what other people say or think has ever really been something I’ve taken with more than a grain of salt” Nadine giggle beautifully, smiling kindly as she cradled Salvatore’s hoodless, tear soaked face against her, like he were the most precious thing she’d ever laid eyes upon and wanted to hold and protect him until the end of time.

Unable to look away any longer, Salvatore allows his head to rise from his knees until it settles upon the face of the woman currently cradling him in her arms. Her gaze remained turned away from Salvatore for a moment, though for some reason the hooded man had a feeling that it was more out of respect for him and his boundaries than a lack of desire to see his face.

What a strange thing, to be treated with more kindness, love, and respect from a complete stranger than from the majority of people you interact with.

Salvatore wanted to cry when Nadine’s golden eyes finally lowered to him, her face slowly shifting downwards until their noses were little more than an inch apart from one another, though whether his tears were from agony or ecstasy, even he couldn’t properly tell at the present moment. Only one question was on his mind and the deformed man would stop at nothing until he got an answer for it.

“W-who… who am I-I… t-to y-you?” Salvatore asks, his voice barely above a whisper as he forces himself to stare directly into the endless pool of honey yellow swirling around in her irises, wanting-no… needing to know, to see with his own two eyes, what exactly he was to this woman, and whether that answer would spell endless disaster for him and his deep seeded desires, or be the key that unlocks a world of possibilities almost as endless as the spheres of gold that Salvatore finds himself unable, or rather unwilling, to tear his gaze from, lest this be the first, and last time he ever be blessed enough to see them from this close.

A long moment of silence passes as Nadine returns Salvatores gaze, the fondness of her expression only growing as she lowers her forehead to rest against his, a soft, almost breathlessly enamored expression that he’d only seen on black and white screens cast toward men eons more pleasant to look at than he was, slowly spread across her perfect face as she finally answers Salvatore’s question.

“You’re the lovely man who held my hand!”

[inflammatoryfandomblog]

pre-note: i’m going to tag @darkchocolatekitkat here, but at the same time this isn’t really a response per say, in that i don’t really want to be argumentative or whatever (this is literally just my style of typing/speaking generally, i realize i can come off as hostile) or clog up their mentions. so i figure mentioning them is a compromise between acknowledging their post without coming off as rude. this is basically a post prompted by some of their previous posts but with an entirely different point, so it sits in a fairly gray area. anyways!

listen man, i loved volume 7 james ironwood. i think up until volume 8, james ironwood slowly had more facets of his character revealed, and i was almost excited for where his character could go from there.

because ironwood was a decent person in a position of corrupt power (an unelected position with two seats on the council lmao, that’s fishy as hell), and you can’t really stick to being a decent person in that institutional position for long. he tries his best. he also had a tragic flaw, and that was being self-sacrificing in a way that was almost insistent on him being a hero. the whole “i love you, and that’s why i must do THIS for you, and i know THIS is good because it requires me sacrificing something, so you should be grateful.” thing

kind of like that dad who keeps toiling away at giving you that baked casserole that you don’t really want, because you are his child, and so he puts in that work out of parental love, yes, but also out of a need to be your provider. when you don’t want the casserole, a resentment builds up. this sort of thing is subtle, but it’s believable, it happens in real life, and it’s actually a really complex sort of flaw. kind of like a sense of paternalism that’s also tied to ironwood’s good qualities.

but instead of understanding... any of that, crwby literally goes for the lazy “oh NO IRONWOOD is LOSING his HUMANITY!!!! look!!!! he has a prosthetic arm and that means he is less human!!! look at our visual metaphors! aren’t we clever! and, uh, yeah, i’m not gonna touch that with a 10-foot pole because yikes, i don’t really bring up representation often but maybe don’t do that. 

(if you want to know why this is not great, for the uninitiated, saying that prosthetic limbs make you less human is... hmm. not all media that has the “robo parts replacing human parts” has this aspect--for example, if a character chooses to have their body parts replaced because robot parts are better, that’s not about disabled people, that’s about transhumanism--here the robot parts are pretty clearly prosthetics, so! don’t use symbolism without context, kids!)

 but also, it doesn’t work as a metaphor for his paternalism, ableist elements aside. what ironwood actually wrongly sacrificed was the safety of his people (the “few city blocks”), not that he sacrificed his arm to stop watts... then... stupidly allowed him to live... instead of... killing him... because... uhhhhhhhhhhh... i guess he lost a few brain cells along with that arm! GOTTEM! (was taiyang... right? do people in the rwbyverse have some amount of brain-cells-that-do-the-thinking-thing in their arms? is that why cinder is so dumb?)

“ohhh look the humans are acting like robots and the robots are acting like humans!!! ooooh!!!” which... might be fine elsewhere, but it doesn’t work here! emotions have nothing to do with it!

and like, the worst thing is, even if they didn’t fuck it up, ironwood having this depth of character simply doesn’t matter. the main plot of the show isn’t about the state of Humanity (TM), it’s about some woman who fell into black goo and is really angery and wants to destroy the world. and once you ratchet up the stakes to “the world is going to be destroyed because of some stupid reason that isn’t even the fault of anybody! it’s just an evil wizard!” then like, it’s all for nothing. for ironwood’s flaws to matter, the overall plot has to give it a reason to be nuanced without having him be an idiot (eg letting watts survive lmao) or letting him fall to the wayside because his villainy would otherwise have nothing to do with the main conflict.

like fuck dude, imagine if salem had this depth instead of a backstory and motivation that mean nothing and go nowhere! she’d actually be a good character!

[yellowocaballero]

Bonus story that I regret already

A friend requested a HLVRAI/Freeman’s Mind/HL crossover. Specifically, them getting drinks, in a pub. 

I really hate to spill that I’ve seen all of HLVRAI and Freeman’s Mind, but I figure the cat’s out of the bag. It’s three pages. It’s crack. There will be no continuation. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but tw for ableist language, suggested animal abuse, and suggested slavery. So...that’s how you know Freeman Freeman’s Mind shows up. 

God, does anybody remember FM? Am I the only person who remembers FM? Am I having a stroke? Imagine if Freeman’s Mind came out in 2020. There’d be call-out posts. 

Enjoy...I think? Rest under the cut. 

********************************************

“When you think about it, dog breeding just doesn’t make any sense.”

Thank god. Gordon exhaled in relief. The guy sitting across from him in the dim, crowded pub had finally moved on from his extensive...very extensive...opinions on the IRS. Gordon had desperately tried redirecting the conversation to something more normal, like theoretical physics, or his opinion on multi-dimensional crossovers, but instead the guy just seemed very desperate that everybody know that taxation was theft.

“Right!” Gordon said enthusiastically, just trying to get word in edgewise. He knew he liked to talk, but this guy was ridiculous. “Pugs can’t give birth by themselves. It’s inhumane.”

“Oh, forget about that shit.” The guy waved a hand, burping slightly as he slammed back more of his beer. “What I’m saying is that it’s ridiculous not to train dogs to attack your enemies.”

“I don’t actually have that many -” 

But the guy was already ranting, completely talking over Gordon. Pleadingly, Gordon looked at the other guy they were sitting with for help, but he just sat there drinking his beer with eyes distantly fixed on the tacky retro diner signs hung on the wall. Traitor. 

“When you think about the entire thing’s stupid. The breed standards are just ridiculous, first off. Breeding dogs so they can’t bite, can’t bark, can’t hunt their own food? It’s stupid. What else is the point of a dog! Anybody around here remember why we breed dogs in the first place? It’s so they can help protect us, protect the pack. Dogs used to pull their own. And now they’re just shitty little lap dogs that rich old ladies use to wealth signal. It’s fucking stupid. Dogs are just freeloaders. And I don’t have any freeloaders in my house.”

“Wow,” Gordon muttered rebelliously, “did you read about that on Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit?”

“So that’s why I’m proposing my new idea for dogs. A better dog. Dog 2, the sequel to dogs, if you will,” the guy continued, completely steamrolling him. “These dogs are huge, first of all. But not too huge, since you don’t want them to be a drain on your resources. I’d say definitely the size of a St. Bernard, maybe a little bit bigger. I don’t give a shit if it’s friendly to children or whatever. I don’t give a shit about children. If they can’t survive my dog attacking them, they were never going to make it to adulthood anyway. Survival of the fittest. Anyway, my dog’s going to be big. Short hair, because we live in a hot climate and I don’t want a dog that’s shedding everywhere. It’s not exactly going to be a polar rescue dog here, I need a dog that can survive the Arizona desert. But this dog has to be two things, and these two things are completely vital. Without these two things, it might as well be a Pomeranian.” The man held up two fingers. “One: the dog must be completely loyal to me. Intelligent, but not too intelligent that it doesn’t accept me as the alpha. I’m the alpha to the dog, as I’m also the alpha to the human race. Its loyalty must be complete. Like, I say jump, the dog says how high. That’s how intelligent it is too.” He pushed down the finger, keeping one up. “Second, the dog must be a cold blooded attack machine. I ain’t owning no pussy dog here. This dog is vicious. It can kill anything, and it will do it with pleasure. This dog feels no regret, pain, anguish, PTSD, hesitance, and it never fucking misses. Its teeth are huge and it’s an unrestrained attack machine. With this dog at my side, ain’t nobody’s fucking with me. Walking down the street with this dog next to me, nobody’s looking at me sideways. The chicks dig me. Everybody thinks I’m great. That’s why this is the ideal dog, above all other dogs.”

“Wow,” Gordon said desperately, really hoping that this was the end of the fucking dog conversation, “that’s great. My friend, uh, Tommy, he has a great Golden. Says it’s a perfect dog. That’s really possible actually, it survived like six turrets -”

“Idiot. That’s not what I fucking mean.” The guy scoffed at Gordon. “This perfect dog doesn’t exist. No dog is that immaculate. And if you try breeding for all those traits, you end up with some shitty inbred dog. No way. You gotta get more creative. Just wanting the perfect dog is for chumps who don’t understand genetics, evolution, dog breeding, dog training, warfare both physical and psychology, psychology itself, sociology, philosophy, or xenobiology. No. What I’m saying now is that in order to get the perfect dog, you have to breed aliens. I’m thinking headcrabs.”

Gordon distantly felt his jaw dropping. “Head - headcrabs?”

“Or those fucked up things with garbage disposal mouths,” the guy said thoughtfully. “Whatever they’re called. I don’t respect any of those shitty aliens enough to give them names. If you want me to remember your name, you have to earn it. My brain’s filled with much more important things, like theoretical physics and being better than you.”

“Garbage disposal - do you mean peeper puppies?!”

“Yeah, whatever. What I’m saying is that I’ve really cornered the market on xenobiology. I’m the world fuckin’ expert in dealing with aliens.” He looked thoughtful for a second as he chugged his beer again, which was a first. “Well. Dimensional expert. Point is, I can say with eighty seven percent confidence that, given enough time and unlimited access to a shock collar, I can train one of those shitty alien species crawling all over Black Mesa to obey my every command and slay my enemies. I could probably even turn it against its kinsmen. Get the aliens to wipe out the aliens, and humanity comes out on top. Then I turn my alien slaves against humanity, and Gordon Freeman is at top. So what do you think? Good idea or good idea?”

Gordon stared at him, slightly horrified, slightly incredulous, somehow amused. God, he had spent too much time around Benrey. This guy would love Benrey. He could never introduce them. “Terrible idea. I can’t believe we’re the same person.”

“You’re a loser. What about you, huh?” Freeman gestured with his cup at the third Gordon Freeman, who still seemed thoroughly checked out of the conversation. “What do you think? Want to invest some money into my plan? You’ll get a three hundred return on your investment, and dominion of the country of your choice.”

Gordon Freeman stared at Freeman blankly. He seemed really checked out. 

Freeman looked back at Gordon. “Is this guy retarded or something? That or he’s high off his ass, but I know how I get when I’m high and I’m never that out of it.”

“I’m not sure you aren’t on coke right now,” Gordon groused, sipping his own margarita. Which Freeman had called a ‘girl drink’. Asshole. “Why don’t you just -”

“Hey, Doc!”

Suddenly, with no more advanced warning than the overly friendly cry, Benrey - sorry, Barney - popped up at their table. Freeman groaned, ignoring him completely for favor of his drink, and Gordon waved weakly at him. He seemed - well, nice. Much nicer than Benrey. Not that it was hard. 

“You guys having fun or what?” Barney said, leaning against the table and winking at Freeman, who made a face. “We’re having a really good time at the Barney table, let me tell you. Maybe we can do Trivia Pursuit? That’ll be fun!”

“Don’t tell me you’re actually making friends with Benrey,” Gordon said, sighing. “Dude’s insufferable.”

“Blunt as ever, Doc,” Barney laughed. “Benrey’s not that bad! Just kind of a freak, you know?”

“Yeah,” Gordon said, impossibly depressed. “I know.”

“Anyway, I actually wanted to ask the Doc if he had my keys. Hold on a hot second.” Barney turned to the aforementioned zoned out Gordon Freeman, and abruptly started waving his hands around. Wait - was that sign language? When he glanced at Freeman, he seemed interested too. 

Even more amazingly, Gordon Freeman responded, rolling his eyes and tilting his fist before digging in his pocket and pulling out his keys, pressing them into Barney’s hands. Barney winked, signed out what Gordon recognized as a thank you, and fucked off back to the Barney table. If Gordon craned his head, he could see Freeman’s Barney (whose name Freeman didn’t even seem to know) trying to drink his beer as he was thoroughly terrorized by Benrey. Gordon couldn’t fight the crush of fondness that bloomed in his chest. Benrey was fun to watch when he was terrorizing someone else - but you could say that about all of his friends, really. 

Then the implications of that exchange hit Gordon over the head. He turned to Gordon Freeman, who seemed to have gone back to checking out of the conversation. “Wait, are you freaking deaf?”

Gordon blinked at him sleepily. Gordon cursed, rummaging around on the table until he found a napkin, and Freeman passed him a pen as he wrote down in large, blocky letters ‘ARE YOU DEAF???’ and slid it to Gordon Freeman. 

Gordon Freeman stared at it. He looked up at the two of them and - oh, god, he was definitely smirking. Like the cat that caught the fucking canary. He tilted his fist in what even Gordon recognized as a yes. 

“You fucking asshole!” Gordon exploded. “You left me to suffer with this guy alone? How could you? That’s not team behavior!”

“You got pranked, bro!” Benrey called, from across the room. “Bro, you got mad pranked! El oh el, bro!”

“Shut up, asshole!”

“Hey, what do you mean?” Freeman asked, offended. “My ideas are genius. This is a unique business opportunity, here. You’ll never get another chance to make three hundred percent back on your investment again -”

“Epic fail, bro!” Benry called. 

Gordon groaned and started chugging his margarita. He would need to be a lot drunker if he was going to get through this stupid extradimensional mistake. 

[blindbeta]

Hello. Your blog made me think about a book I read when I was in middle school. It’s about a group of special education students in a school for kids with superpowers trying to prove they are capable of participating in a competition the other students were allowed to be in. The main character is blind and at some point is given the ability to see through a kid with telepathy sending images to his mind. It’s not the same as a seeing person and is described as more like a slideshow, plus he goes back to not seeing when the telepathic kid isn’t there, but I was still wondering if you would consider it a problem that he was given the ability to see in the first place. I was already upset as an autistic person that the only developmentally disabled character is constantly patronized or ignored by the physically disabled characters, including the main character, and no one is ever challenged on how they treat him. Said developmentally character dies in the end by sacrificing himself, which is what leads to the main character basically going ‘Wow, I guess he was able to understand what’s going on this whole time.’ (That’s not a direct quote but it might as well be.)

Also the characters are only given the right to compete because the blind character is given the ability to see.

Book Talk: A book that brushes against the cure trope and problems with inter-disability ableism. A.K.A. This book should have been written by a blind person.

Oh thank you for sharing this with me, nonnie!

The first thing that comes to mind is, could the blind character see before? Because if he cannot remember seeing before, planting images in his mind probably wouldn’t look like actual sight, and it probably wouldn’t make sense to the blind person’s mind. It is true that directly putting images in a person’s mind would be different from making it so their eyes could see, in which their brain definitely (italicized) wouldn’t know what to do with information randomly coming in from eyes that hadn’t worked previously. So I can’t imagine putting images in someone’s mind could mimic sight and actually make sense to that person. Even if it is described as a slideshow. It is still images.

It might work if that person could see before. Or if the telepathic kid was giving the blind person commentary on what was going on, such as, “There is a large, round table just ahead of you. You can reach out to touch the edge and walk it. There are no chairs.”

That said, I would consider it a problem, yes. Mostly because the blind person has to rely on a sighted person to give him vision instead of just describing things to him, and the group was not able to compete until the blind person was able to see. Which is ableism. This may be seem as an overreaction by some people, but think of it this way: the blind person is only deemed capable when he is able to see the way an able-bodied person can. Rather than giving the blind person accommodations and equal opportunity, they waited for him to just . . . see?

I think this would have been a much better situation if it was written by a blind person, who could avoid most of the negative stuff or play them in a way that showed why they were bad. For example, showing the ableism of the people not letting the disabled people complete until they were told the blind person could see via telepathy. This could have been portrayed as a bad thing and perhaps the higher-ups could have been tricked or something, and the blind person couldn’t actually magically see.

Again, if the person went blind at a later age, it might be okay, but I would still prefer the blind person not be able to see images when he feels like it. Because some blind people can’t do that. I might also feel okay with a telepathic person feeding close-up/larger images to a person with low vision, as long as they didn’t become dependent or use the telepathic approach when assistive technology would be readily available.

To add, when I said blind people can’t do things such as see on a whim, I didn’t mean to imply blind people shouldn’t have powers like flying for the same reason. I meant that if you’re going to write a blind person, wherever they are on the blind spectrum, they should still be blind. Being given the ability to see, especially with no consequences for the blind person, is not something that usually happens. And if it does, there is usually surgery or something unpleasant involved. Giving a blind person temporary sight or temporarily better sight is brushing up against the cure narrative and can have some unfortunate implications if people aren’t careful. A blind writer would know this.

As for the part about the developmentally disabled character being mistreated by the narrative, I’m sorry you had to read that. I will say that sometimes physically disabled people don’t understand developmental disabilities or mental illnesses, but I genuinely feel like that is ignorance and internalized ableism and could even be a function of white supremacy encouraging ableism. Disabled people should at least make an effort to understand other disabilities and treat other disabled people fairly and with respect. Disabled people should not be ignored and certainly not patronized by other disabled people and it also bothers me that this likely portrayed by a non-disabled author. It either seems like the author felt like this was normal or they wanted to show disabled people treating each other badly with no real exploration of the topic.

As for this character dying, I think it sounds ableist given what you told me about the rest of the story. I don’t think killing a disabled character is bad on its own, but it is bad the majority of the time, because writers usually have ons or two disabled characters in the whole story. I also think, in this case, the type of disability matters as we, because not only was this developmentally disabled character mistreated, he was the only developmentally disabled character. And then he died.

This book doesn’t sound so good. I’m glad my blog is helping people question things they may not usually question.

-BlindBeta

[geraltcirilla]

Your latest daisy/sousa gifset ? Gorgeous, is the quote you used from a showrunner chloe or is it like from someone in the fandom also ie agent carter, everyone was white like the two main female characters were right and so was everyone else, and I don't think it had anything to do with the time period there are shows set way before that are 1000% more inclusive like anne with an e or black sails also no lgbtq characters although that's an issue aos had as well

Thank you!! :’) The quote I used is from Maurissa Tancharoen from this interview with Hypable. I’ll go ahead and give you the entire Daisy portion of that interview because it’s filled with gold.

On the romantic side of things, Chloe Bennet (and several of her co-stars) couldn’t be happier with Daisy’s choice of Daniel Sousa as her partner.

“He’s so stable, and so supportive, and so willing, and so understanding of who she is,” Bennet says. “[Daisy needs] that kind of stability in her life, and that support. And I think it doesn’t hurt that he’s a strapping young man!”

“She has become such a kind of a power house, physically,” Bennet continues. “I love that he kind of brings her down to Earth a little bit.”

For Enver Gjokaj, Sousa’s relationship to Daisy’s power was a crucial factor in their developing bond.

“They don’t seem to have a lot of [things] in common,” he notes, “But the fact that he’s attracted to strong women, and that he’s worked with strong women in his past, and that’s who he is — I think that becomes the foundation for a relationship. The fact [that Daisy’s power is] not threatening to him at all, that that’s actually a positive, that… made total sense to me.”

“And [Gjokaj] played it with such a quiet confidence, and just you’re so grounded,” Bennet continues. “Sousa is so grounded in himself, and he’s not threatened by her as an entity and by Quake, and it actually finds it slightly amusing. which I think is really sweet, actually.”

Clark Gregg also expressed a certain relief at Daisy’s choice, which he feels reflects maturity on the part of friend and castmate Bennet.

“One of the things that happens, especially when you do play a character for 200 years as I have… is that the life and art blend together,” he says, noting that it was challenging to repeatedly “watch Chloe/Daisy go through these various things and get her heart broken, and have people die.”

So “to have Enver show up and create — recreate — the new version [of Sousa], dealing with different kinds of stuff, was just cool!” Gregg says. The character’s new incarnation on Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. was “tough. Not calling attention to himself. It felt so real, and I love so much what he did, and the way that [he and Chloe] just kind of quietly backed into this thing that everybody has been rooting for. [It’s] such a testament to their work in the chaotic final season, and how lucky we were to get Enver. It’s just facts!”

For their part, showrunners Jeff Bell, Maurissa Tancharoen, and Jed Whedon felt it was critical that their cast of female characters be seen as much more than partners in relationships, regardless of how matters concluded.

“They’ve had relationships [but] we never defined them by that,” says Bell. “But Daisy hasn’t had great luck in the past, bad things that happened or it hasn’t worked out. And so when Enver showed up, it was more than we could have imagined. We’d hoped that they would have chemistry, and the fact that it worked so well was great.”

Bell also observes that even more significant than the romantic developments was Daisy’s re-formation of a new kind of family for herself.

It was important, he says to let Daisy’s sister “Kora come over at the end and [give] Daisy family to continue. So it wasn’t just ‘Now I have a boyfriend!’ It was like she had a new unit. I think that was something that happened organically through the force of the storytelling that was a nice thing that we hadn’t foreseen.”

“The whole drive of Daisy’s character arc was, she was in search for her identity. She was in search for her family and where she came from,” agrees Tancharon. “And what she stumbled upon was new one, and so at the end, it’s very clear that she is actually starting her own little family in space, with the man she loves and her actual sister.”

I really love this interview and I’ve loved EVERY interview the cast has done post-series. I don’t think I’ve ever shipped a couple quite so beloved by every single cast member, even people totally uninvolved like Clarke Gregg and Elizabeth Henstridge. This interview was especially sweet because Maurissa confirmed that Sousa and Daisy are in love, which we all though but it’s nice to get the showrunners backing that.

//

Re: Agent Carter, even when it comes to the female characters Peggy Carter was the only one listed as main cast. Peggy, Jarvis, Jack, Sousa, and Dooley are main cast, Angie, Dottie, and Ana are credited as reoccurring. And Angie was only in s1 (she made a brief cameo in s2 in a dream sequence), and Ana was only in s2. Only Dottie was in both seasons 1 and 2 and she was a villain. So I don’t think I can even give Agent Carter credit for having white women in the show. It’s really bad if you can’t even have white women in your main cast.

Agent Carter had an issue with lack of women, lack of BIPOC cast, and lack of LGBT characters (like you said AOS also has that last issue). The writers of the show actually claimed at the time (because even back then people were calling them out for this) that they were just being “truthful to the time period”, which we all know is a crock of shit. As you said BIPOC and LGBT didn’t suddenly spring into existence in the 2000s and lots of other period piece shows include them as characters. 

Also as I said in my previous post, the writers have this unsettling need to woobify and coddle bigots because “they’re a product of their time” and the writers are constantly justifying their behavior and actions and trying to make them seem sympathetic. 

But not only that, the feminism felt incredibly shallow and performative.

For example, one of the famous “feminist” lines of the show was “I know my worth. Anyone else’s opinion doesn’t really matter.” Peggy said this after Jack Thompson took all the credit for her work and effort in s1. I remember at the time people were livid because that was a terrible message to be sending women and girls. It’s okay if a man steals your work so long as you believe in yourself...? No. Hell no. That’s not how society progresses forward. Peggy should NOT have accepted that outcome and should have FOUGHT Jack to demand he give her her proper credit. But she didn’t. She rolled over and took it, and we as an audience were supposed to applaud her for it.

Another “feminist moment” is when Sousa catches Peggy helping Howard Stark and the SSR think that she’s a terrorist. So after they arrest her they all take turns interviewing her and she calls them out, saying: “I conducted my own investigation because no one listens to me. I got away with it because no one looks at me, because unless I have your reports, your coffee, or your lunch, I’m invisible.” Except this isn’t exactly true. She wasn’t invisible to Sousa and she didn’t get away with it because he literally caught her. Since episode one Sousa was investigating a strange blonde-haired woman with a scar on her right shoulder who he believed was helping Howard Stark. That woman was Peggy. And he actually figured that out in episode 1x05 and tried to arrest in her 1x06. Given that this is only an 8 episode season Sousa knew about Peggy for almost half the season, but was hunting her for technically the whole season. How is that you being invisible? How is that you getting away with it? How?? 

Peggy continues and says: “You think you know me, but I've never been more than what each of you has created. [At Dooley] To you, I'm the stray kitten, left on your doorstep to be protected. [At Jack] The secretary turned damsel in distress. [At Sousa] The girl on the pedestal, transformed into some daft whore." This statement was also weird as fuck to me because Sousa never thought she was a whore, never called her a whore, and never accused her of being a whore, etc. When the SSR found out Peggy was helping Howard Stark they were trying to figure out why she would do it. A working theory was she was in love with him (a fair theory given Howard’s a bit of a womanizer and actually has hit on Peggy in the past). So Sousa (along with literally everyone else interviewing her) accused her of having an affair with Howard. But somehow only Sousa received that scalding drag, when technically it was true of everyone. Also how was he viewing her on a pedestal when he called her out all the time (during their “quirky banter”) and once again, investigated her for terrorism. Some pedestal huh. (This quote actually bugs me a lot because some people to this day will reference it as a reason to hate Sousa - “He was obsessed with her and then when he thought she was with Howard he called her a whore!” That never happened, that’s Peggy’s false version of events. I have eyes and a working brain and I watched the season myself and it’s simply untrue.)

Peggy will just say stuff that sound Cool and Empowering but if you break it down and analyze it, make no sense and mean absolutely nothing. It’s just cringey.

And let’s not even get in to the ableist implications of Peggy fantasizing about Sousa suddenly having two legs and being able to walk perfectly. That was her romantic vision of him. A version that could not only walk, but dance. Who throws aside his cane like it was just an accessory. Okay.

I really did not like Agent Carter at all (problematic stuff aside the actual plot sucked) but I watched the whole thing because I was a fan of Peggy Carter and Jarvis and I really wanted to make it work. When it was cancelled I didn’t cry about it, I was actually relieved I wouldn’t have to watch a third season. That show was just such a cringey, embarrassing mess.

Sorry for the long rant about it. It’s been a long time since I talked about this show and it still bothers me to this day because people reflect on the show so fondly and are still making petitions to bring it back as if it’s wasn’t a heaping mess.

Thank God Sousa was saved from that show. lol

Disclaimer to anyone reading this: Me hating the Agenter Carter show is not me hating Peggy Carter. Obviously I love my mans Sousa, and I also love Jarvis and Angie. I loved a lot of the characters and my issues with the show has to do with the showrunners and the writing.

[azuremist]

So, this post will dip its toes into some of The Discourse™, because today, I will be talking about something I found in the Professor Layton fandom that made me want a Burger King pissy meal. This may not be entirely coherent, as I am a very emotional person, but then again, neither are any of my posts, really. In case any of you are wondering, this is 100% okay to reblog, but if you aren’t an abuse survivor or have PTSD, don’t clown around on this fucking post. This is under a ‘read more’ because, believe me, you do not want this to be clogging up your dash. As many of you know, I’m autistic, so when I’m passionate about something, I tend to infodump, so this may be quite long.

 This post will also be covering possibly triggering topics, so please read at your own risk.

 Now, this post will be about a blog entirely irrelevant to this, except for the fact that it is where this whole thing is happening. I will not be tagging that blog, because I do not think the moderator of the blog is at fault or anything, they just happen to be a confession blog where people put their opinions on; opinions which I will be talking about today. But for anyone interested in seeing the posts, they’re @/professorlaytonconfessions. Obviously, don’t witchhunt, but I’d hope you all would know that by now.

 So lately, as anyone following that blog may know, the hot topic of discussion is how Luke’s parents are portrayed as abusive in the Professor Layton fandom so that Luke can be portrayed as having PTSD/being adopted by Hershel, and how that is apparently a bad thing. Which, allow me to clarify: if you do not portray Clark and Brenda that way, that is totally fine. What is not fine is the way that these people react to an abuse survivor saying that they portray Luke’s parents that way to cope.

So, here is the original post in question:

 (“Luke’s parents are not abusive. Clark and Brenda Triton ARE NOT ABUSIVE. You can say Luke was adopted by Hershel or whatever but the Tritons aren’t and never were abusive.”)

 This, from what I can tell, appears to be the first post on this matter. And, while it isn’t as bad as some of the stuff we’ll be seeing later, there is some stuff to unpack. Mainly, their language in saying that people can do one thing (say Luke was adopted by Hershel), but can’t do another (portray them as abusive). Can it be frustrating if a fandom misrepresents your favorite characters consistently? Of course it is!! I’m not saying it’s not! But what I am saying is that you can’t tell people how they can and cannot portray characters. It’s their choice. If you do not like it, then look for content of the Tritons elsewhere. Or, make it yourself! Everyone has the power to make the exact kind of content they want to see, if they just make it themselves. And if you don’t think of yourself as talented, commission somebody to write or draw it! Freelance artists need the money, you want the content… It’s a win-win.

 However, a different anon replies with this confession:

“You guys can say that Clark wasn’t abusive in canon, and I guess I’ll agree. But fictional characters can be whatever we want, and some people want to project onto Luke and his relationship with his parents. Don’t make abuse victims feel bad for projecting themselves onto fictional characters.”

 And this? This is a perfectly reasonable statement. It is true that abuse survivors can project onto Luke’s relationship with his parents, and it is understandable that, as such, they may get upset when seeing a post that (as we just covered) tells people what they can and cannot do with these characters. People, especially people with trauma, project onto characters so much that it has become practically a meme, of sorts, especially in the artist/writing community. I would know, as I do this a lot, as well. So, while the tone of this post reads to me as slightly more frustrated than I initially was upon reading the original post, it’s honestly not a good feeling when somebody criticisms your healthy coping mechanisms just because they don’t like how you portray a character; especially if, like me, you struggled for a long time with unhealthy coping mechanisms before finding this one.

 And while I wish this was the end, and this could just be a nice post about how traumatized people cope, someone decided to send in the coldest, most brain-dead take here today, in my opinion:

“my good dude, a fictional character may be a fictional character but they are still a… character. that’s literally the meaning of the word. they’re not blank slates. as someone who really adores luke’s parents, this is just really awful and pretty dismissive, please just move your projections elsewhere.”

 Now, this is so much to unpack that I feel tempted to throw away the whole damn suitcase. But okay, sure, let’s take a crack at it. Someone replied, to an abuse survivor, saying that projecting onto these fictional characters to cope with their literal trauma, by saying that their healthy coping mechanism is ‘just really awful’. Why? Because they really adore the characters, of course! That’s more important than an abuse survivor learning to heal from what horrible thing traumatized them! Of course! Yes, perfectly reasonable. (For those of you who have trouble reading it, that was sarcasm.) And then, immediately followed that insensitive remark with an almost doubly insensitive remark: ‘Just move your projections elsewhere.’ This truly shows how much this particular person cares about how two characters are portrayed over how a trauma survivor feels. The utter lack of respect to say, ‘Just move your projections elsewhere,’ to a real person with PTSD trying to cope, just because they dislike seeing fictional people get portrayed as bad people, is lacking empathy in every sense.

 For those who do not understand, allow me to make a comparison. Imagine a soldier with PTSD, who has a service dog to stop them from having a panic attack in public. Their service dog helps them cope with their trauma, and makes them feel safe. Now imagine that they took their service dog to their favorite public place. Perhaps a diner they went to when they were younger, someplace that comforts them… And someone in the restaurant came up to them and said, ‘As someone who hates dogs, this is awful and pretty dismissive. Please just take your canine elsewhere.’

 Now this may seem like an extreme comparison, but let me tell you, as someone who has both PTSD and a service dog: it’s not, really. Either way, you’re calling the way someone copes with their trauma awful for wanting to exist in a place (the diner, the Professor Layton fandom) where they can feel safe.

 Now, let’s just move on from that bordering-on-ableist post, because there are still more things to go. Here is the next post:

“This isn’t aimed at abuse survivors… it’s more that there are so many artists in the fandom (a lot of popular ones) who push for this headcanon that the Tritons were horrible parents and Luke should stay with Layton instead. (Some artists outright refuse to draw the Tritons??? What?) As a fan of the Triton family, it makes me feel bad… no one ever projects these kind of headcanons onto a character who deserves it, like Descole (the one who ACTUALLY tried to hurt Luke) or Randall ect.”

 Okay, so first. ‘This isn’t aimed at abuse survivors, it’s more… so artists’. Implying that artists can’t be abuse survivors? Yes, this even includes ‘a lot of the popular ones’. Just because someone doesn’t say they have PTSD does not mean that they do not have it. You are not, and never will be, entitled to personal information, and that includes diagnosis. The exact artists you are making this vent about may very well be an abuse survivor, but you just don’t know. You shouldn’t have to know to decide whether or not someone is ‘valid enough’ to portray a certain character a certain way. Same goes for people who refuse to draw the Tritons all together. I’m going to say it again: you are not entitled to personal information, and that includes why someone may not want to draw a certain character.

 And, you feel bad? How bad do you think the traumatized people who are drawing this stuff feel? This is just like the autism moms who say stuff like, “But their autism is so hard on me!”

And, as for why they don’t project these headcanons onto Descole and Randall… Maybe it’s because they were abused by their parents specifically, and want to make Luke go through the exact same thing they did. Maybe they just like Descole and Randall more than the Tritons. But then again, as I’ve said: you are NOT! Entitled! To personal! Information!!

“people’s headcanons, preferences and interpretations are not a personal attack. people like and dislike the same things and that’s okay. don’t take someone disliking something you like personally bc I can guarantee it’s not personal.”

 This one is easily the most tolerable of everything we’ve seen, but there are still certain things I’d like to point out. Particularly, ‘Don’t take someone disliking something you like personally.’ Because, for abuse survivors, it isn’t as simple as a matter as ‘liking’ or ‘disliking’. It’s how you cope. It’s how you feel safe. Fictional characters mean so much to people with mental illnesses and/or disabilities, so of course we may take it personally if you decide to tell us how we can enjoy them. And calling coping mechanisms ‘liking something’ seems to be infantilizing the issue quite a bit. But with that being said, again, this isn’t too terribly bad. Unlike this next one, which is, yet again, just a god-awful, brain-dead take.

“i feel like an issue in this fandom is that often artists who get popular have these awful headcanons (like luke’s parents being abusive.) and because those artists are popular it feels like their hcs are EVERYWHERE and people copy them just to get in their good books. when in truth they’re probably just a vocal minority’

 And here we have, again, the return of the assumption that artists (even these ‘popular artists’ that you are trying so desperately to blame) do not have PTSD. Just, assumptions everywhere. We also see the return of the descriptor ‘awful’ to describe how abuse victims cope, which is just… Well, you know. And this particular post leaves me with so many questions! Most of them of the ‘how do you know who and who isn’t traumatized’ variety. “How do you know that artists, even popular artists, aren’t abuse victims?” “So, is what you’re proposing that abuse victims just don’t ever make vent art involving these characters? Or, at least, not post them anywhere?” “How do you know that the people presumably ‘copying the popular artists’ aren’t abuse survivors, either?” There are quite a large amount of assumptions being made here, and it’s just frustrating to see. Anybody can be traumatized, anybody can be trauma victims trying to cope. But, also, say it with me now: YOU ARE NOT ENTITLED TO PERSONAL INFORMATION, TO SEE WHO AND WHO ISN’T ‘VALID ENOUGH’ TO PORTRAY A CHARACTER A CERTAIN WAY.

 And, with that final post, we are up to date with all of the current posts on the matter. Now, allow me to remind you that ALL OF THOSE POSTS WERE IN RESPONSE TO AN ABUSE SURVIVOR SAYING THAT THEY USED LUKE AND THE TRITONS TO COPE WITH THEIR TRAUMA. Every time someone insinuated that no artists had trauma, called the headcanon ‘awful’, all of that, was in response to a literal, real-life traumatized person. Because… What? They portrayed a character in a bad way? So they should just find a whole new coping mechanism, and ditch this one that works, just because you, a stranger on the internet, told them to?

 So you may be asking yourself, “Azure, I have read 2,000 words of your ragetyping. What is the point of all of this?’ Well, my friend, besides just getting all of this out of my system, I think the point of this can be summarized quite concisely by a post made by @/your-fave-has-ptsd: “It is far more important for us (people with trauma) to see ourselves in the media than it is for us to stay true to canon.”

 So, if you put how a fictional character is portrayed over abuse survivors’ feelings (and, again, I must reiterate: you don’t know who does and doesn’t have PTSD), then maybe you should really reevaluate your priorities. If you don’t like how someone portrays Luke’s relationship with his parents, maybe just make the content that you want to see yourself, and block those who make the content you do not want to see. Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

[sockknitterporg]

Make sure your self care advice about healthy versus toxic friendships is not ableist!

Almost every chronically ill person I know has lost multiple friends and loved ones due to people:

becoming impatient with them for being sick

being unwilling to accept the realities of their illness (which often involves cancelling plans or not hanging out as often as able-bodied friends)

getting convinced that some fad they read about on Facebook will cure their incurable disease and refusing to take no for an answer

expecting them to make the greater effort to keep the friendship alive without taking into account just how much effort it takes just to survive a chronic illness

and similar reasons.

Yet I constantly see advice tagged "self care" or "end toxic friendships" that leaves disabled people in the dust. Some advice is so harmful to us that you may as well add "and don't be friends with cripples, they're not ever good friends!"

I know these suggestions are well intentioned. But good intentions don't matter if you hurt someone in the process. I'm going to go through the suggestions that hurt us the most and explain why they're harmful, and what you can do to ensure a chronically ill person is being a good friend to you.

Next time you see a post advising these things, speak up for us! And don't just assume people will know not to hold us to the same standards as abled people. Younger teens may not know what they should and shouldn't expect in friendships. Older teens and adults might not know what's reasonable to expect of a chronically ill person.

At the absolute worst, you may simply not be in a position to sustain a friendship with someone with a chronic illness. If it comes to that, that's a real shame, but which would you rather hear? "Hey, I have an issue that conflicts with your needs, I don't think we can be friends," or "You jerk, you're a toxic friend! I can't believe you don't even care about me!" Especially when the second option usually comes with public humiliation and the offended party driving away many of your friends by fracturing your entire friend group into two 'sides'. This hits us especially hard because due to the isolation of being chronically ill, we don't have that many friends to begin with.

So, on to the list!

“A true friend will make time for you when you need it, day or night.”

Most chronic illnesses come with a chronic fatigue component. And chronic fatigue is not "like that one time you stayed up super late". It's not "like that but kinda worse". Chronic fatigue is when you go to bed at a reasonable or even early hour, get your full eight hours of uninterrupted sleep, and wake up just as tired as when you went to bed; and this has happened every night for literal years. It's honestly beyond explanation how it feels, how every waking moment is like some kind of creative torture and nothing in the world can relieve it.

Now try to imagine what little poor quality sleep you get is interrupted. This isn't a question of "oh no, my beauty sleep!" When I am woken up by the telephone, I have extreme cognitive difficulties for some time. Again, this is above and beyond "not had my coffee yet," I mean a clinical condition that has led to clothes in the dishwasher, the phone in the freezer, and sometimes outright dangerous mistakes like pouring a cup of drain cleaner instead of mouthwash (fortunately the smell got my attention before I put it in my mouth).

But even during the day, we may not be as 'available' as we seem. Many people think that disabled people live a life of leisure, lounging around and never doing anything. This only makes sense if you refuse to count the hours and days spent on the singular task known as "trying to stay alive". Abled people tend to not realise just how hard that is for those of us with disabled bodies.

Unlike other commitments like jobs or outings, we cannot reschedule the times when our bodies require extra care and attention. If I am having a flare, then I am having a flare until my body decides it's done having a flare.

Specialist appointments are often made several months in advance, and depending on an individual's situation missing them could be catastrophic. Just from my own experience, certain appointments were literally so important that missing one could have left me without access to any further medical care, without my income, and without my home!

I love to help and support my friends, but I also have to be realistic about when and how fast I'm able to respond to them. Depending on the severity of the situation, I might even be willing to sacrifice some of my health to respond faster, but that is a choice I have to make for myself based on my own knowledge of my body, not something you can demand.

A disabled true friend will make time for you as soon as they are reasonably able to. They will be eager to support you when you need them, but you need to understand their limitations. Being asked to postpone spending time with a chronically ill person isn't a sign that they care less about you, just a sign that their health isn't the greatest.

“A true friend will respect you and respect your schedule by never cancelling plans.”

Sometimes this suggestion will be made a little more gentle by adding "without good reason". And I know few chronically ill people cancel plans without good reason.

But many abled people get angry with us after the third or fourth cancellation. Accusations begin to fly that we're not cancelling for good reason, but whenever we simply don't feel like it or even because we secretly don't want to be friends at all.

The thing is, the keystone of all the various chronic illnesses is a thread of uncertainty weaving through our lives. Any time I make plans, I'm gambling against my disease, hoping I don't get a flare at a crucial moment. There is no way to know ahead of time how I'm going to feel on a given day. This is true of many, if not most chronic illnesses.

I make plans with my friends because I want to see them. I want to spend time with them! Unfortunately, I have a disease that does not care about my social life. You think it's inconvenient for you, think about how it must feel to actually be the one who's lost their health to this thing.

The alternative is not planning to do anything together at all, and that is a fast track to social isolation.

A disabled true friend looks forward to spending time with you, even if their illness makes them miss some of the things they planned to do with you or have to reschedule them sometimes.

“A true friend will remember details like your birthday and favourite colour, and never has to be reminded of things.”

I...don't know my phone number. I'm serious, my actual phone number. I have to open up my phone and check, every single time I need it. I don’t know my National Insurance Number (for Americans - it’s like a SSN), I have to keep that written down. I can barely remember my debit card PIN, and that’s just four numbers. Four numbers that I use nearly every single time I leave the house, and I still can’t remember them.

But you’re going to judge how much I care about you by expecting me to do well on a trivia memory test?

I don’t think abled people understand just how hard it can be to remember details when you’re battling a chronic illness. I literally have to write down and track every little thing like whether or not I’ve taken my meds, even whether or not I’ve eaten on a given day. It’s inevitable that I’m going to forget other things, too.

Judging whether or not I care about my friends on my ability to remember things is unfair, and frankly a little cruel. That’s not to say that I don’t give a damn about my friends, but the expectation that you should ‘never need to be reminded’ is unrealistic for someone with a disability. I ask my friends questions like “Is your birthday on the eighth or the twelfth?” or “Your favourite colour, was it purple or blue?” when I need information on the fly. When I’m at home at my desk, I actually have a little notebook that lists my friends’ basic information because my brain cannot retain information like a healthy person’s.

A disabled true friend will care about you and the little details about you that are important to you. But they may have to be reminded, or use reminders and notes to be able to keep a hold of that information!

“A true friend will never need to ‘take a break’ from your friendship. That’s a sure sign that you’re not really friends at all!”

Sometimes my health is worse than other times. Sometimes, as long as I take my meds and use my assistive devices, I’m basically fine. Sometimes I’m completely bedbound and barely able to speak. Sometimes my mental health is doing fine, even if my body isn’t great. Sometimes the existential horror of knowing my health will gradually get worse is enough to destroy me, even if my body is currently as close to fine as it ever gets.

Sometimes, when the stress of dealing with being chronically ill is eating me alive, I don’t want to burden other people with that--even my friends. Sometimes, my fatigue level is so high that all I can manage to add to a conversation is a few emoji and maybe an ‘ooh’ or an ‘ick’ here and there.

Sometimes, I just need some time to myself to deal with and process the whole mess that is trying to navigate life with a disability in a disability-hostile world.

These are not unreasonable things to ask for, and it doesn’t mean that I’m less interested in a friendship just because I need some space to deal with things on my own in my own time. The idea that someone should never need time on their own is toxic in and of itself, so let’s banish the idea that you need to be glued to your friends 24/7 in order to be ‘supportive’ or whatever else.

A disabled true friend will show you their friendship by spending time with you on the regular when they’re able to! But everyone needs a little bit of alone time now and again, and it doesn’t mean they’re uninterested in remaining friends if they need to be by themselves for a while.

“A true friend will always take your advice, and would never disagree with you.”

This is how you get an echo chamber. Even worse, for disabled people, this can actually lead to your disabled friend dying. And no, I’m not being overdramatic when I say that. I have had my friends--well intentioned and wholly meaning well--send me advice that could have literally killed me if I’d taken it. From herbal remedies (that would cause a fatal interaction with my medications) to diet changes (that my actual professional doctor said would give me malnutrition) to exercise routines (that my actual professional doctor, who did multiple years of medical school and graduated and has a license and everything, said would definitely cause lasting physical damage to my body)....

I get that you want to help your disabled friend feel better, but if you have a suggestion and they tell you it isn’t going to work, you have to respect them, respect their boundaries, and respect that they know their bodies and their limits--usually better than you do! Besides, wouldn’t a true friend respect their friends’ boundaries? Which is more important to you, your friend’s health and safety, or being right?

A disabled true friend will respect your opinion, but may need to reject suggestions or ideas that they know would be harmful to their health. And if you’re a true friend to them, you’ll respect their boundaries in return.

These are just a few of the toxic ‘suggestions’ that wind up causing disabled people serious amounts of harm.

This post is already massively long, so I shall clip it here, but next time you share a #SelfCare post about toxic friends, think about whether or not the suggestions are actually feasible for disabled people to live up to.

Many disabled people, myself included, are really fucking tired of losing our friend groups because people expect more than we’re capable of giving and then screech at us for being bad friends when we can’t keep up with people’s expectations.

If you’re at a place in your life where you’re not capable of accommodating a disabled person’s needs in your friend group, that’s honestly fine, but don’t destroy their reputation (and possibly their lives--many of us do not get out very much, and our ‘online friends’ are our only friends) by screaming about how they’re ‘toxic’ just because they slept through you messaging them or because they didn’t immediately jump on whatever ‘one weird trick’ you googled for their disease.

If you’re going to pass around info to try and end toxic friendships, make sure you’re not throwing disabled people under the bus along with it!

[thenixkat]

Animorphs notes 50

Book 50

In the final count down

We start with a fucking Cassie book.

Who is scraping their slave’s blades together in the middle of a fight?

Who decided to start haveing hork bodies make a weird pretty much impossible noise given the fucking placement of their blades. 

Also still no distinction b/w enslaved people and the people controlling them

… Cassie’s skin… is already brown… ya know what? I don’t care, I’ve already revoked her Black card for a while now

So this was an exercise. One that Cassie failed.

Also since when was Toby’s speech ‘guttural’?

Also just doubling down on this staying put for siege warfare nonsense from 47 huh?

Imagine if yall decided to break this shit to yer families b4 u were forced to do so

Well at least they have a new camp and didn’t inside on staying in the old one. It’s a start

Hell yeah hork-bajir construction and engineering prowess

If Jake really gave a damn about the saftey of his parents he’d have fucking made a second attempt to rescue his brother

He should blame himself

I mean I’ve mostly ignored Tobias but this whole wild hawk thing reads like an extended suicide attempt that the universe just won’t take him up on

hammers i get axes and saws? Why? horks... are axes and saws

Cassie's mom needs to not be specist

also of course the parents aren't allowed to have any competence. they are damseles who can't fight and need to be babysat by horks. also! the animorphs never consider giving their parents morphing just incase to protect themselves. Except for Loren but there’s lot to unpack there and I’d rather just throw out the suitcase

also why the fuck would Cassie's mom, a fucking veterinarian not understand that people could die? Vets have to deal with death and injury and unpleasant shit. Ya know the realities of nature and chance and the horrible things that happen to animals and what people can do to animals

but that would mean actually making the parents characters and not just devices to show how much the Animorphs have 'grown' and how people who'bve never been to war can't possibly understand it

I’ve not forgotten Marco deliberately leaving his stepmom to be enslaved b/c he likes his first mom better

Also the Animorphs are def falling apart

i wish the parents were allowed to act like actual people

When I say the ableist shit in Animorphs I don’t just mean the shit with the physically disabled characters

Rachel didn’t touch them? At no point in that segment did she touch her mom. This is book 34 all over again when the writer changing events a paragraph apart. My kingdom for a fucking editor

Ah it just seemed like she was talking to Rachel and not the horks. I will not delete my previous point

and the series had been trying to make a point of painting Rachel as needlessly violient and dangerous for a good while now it just felt like something the writers would do

*Note: I don’t actually put my full conversations with Ach in these

Cassie yer the last person who can be calling people cowards

A functional team leader would know the second in command just incase anything happened

Tobias seems to be hanging out in human shape more

The hork-bajir are getting on just fine Cassie and would be great without yall

… I’m just gonna assume that Toomin took all the parents brains b/c them being functional would get in the way of his plans

I’m just gonna start skipping shit b/c thsi is very poorly written

Is this implying that Toby has an underbite?

Just assuming that the yeerk resistance has been crushed or can’t help

All the animorphs are speciest as fuck and deserve to fucking lose this fight

“So it has to be people” I hate these kids i hate these kids i hate these kids

Writers: Purposely makes the adults behave with no sense or realism at all

Writers: Are to uncreative to use the hork-bajir Writers: Guess the only solution is to throw more kids at the meat grinder and let's sprinkle in some ableism

The yeerks have very advanced prosthetics/medical technology and a body is a body you ableist hacks

...The yeerks would know that morphing heals people you cunts VISSER 3 FUCKING EXISTS\

Pointing out yer inconsistencies doesn’t make it better

I don’t  give a shit about yer romo worries

You’d think these fuckers would wear a different face than their own but that ould imply they can think

Part of me just loves the ‘fuck off’ energy that girls have for Marco. 

More ableism. There was no rudeness on the part of the stuttering boy or the girls expecting the Animorphs to fucking stick around and wait for what he had to say

I like James

James and friends are a good.

Like it feels like an entirely different actually competent writer showed up for a few scenes

Annnnd now we’re back to shit. Collette you and yours did nothing wrong or dude

Kelly has exactly the right attitude. And Timmy’s probably the only asian person outside of Allison Kim in this whole fucking series.

hell yeah James kick his ass!

I wanna see Kelly kick their asses too! Cassie is racist against romani people

honestly I would have prefered it if James didn't give a shit about Jake turning into a tiger. something like, "That ain't gonna help you beat me jackass"

listen take it to the ultimate level, mount some dracon beams to his chair and just have him fucking go at the yeerk forces and kick their asses

Call their asses out James

Not everyone is willing or able to put their lives on the line and that’s fine. Not everyone is a warrior or willing to throw away their lives. There’s more roles in a war than just fighting

Oh who coulda guessed that the important one would be healed by morphing

i am not well versed enough in disability issues to rip that apart but i know enough that it should be shredded

You had several fucking choices that you decided not to go with b/c the writers are hacks

Huh neat the yeerks predicted them and attacked

Nice. I love some competence. The unnammed yeerk leads the capture of the majority of teh Animorphs

Kelly's battle morph is a fucking walrus! that's awsome

Everyone’s competence has flushed into the void

booo Kelly has a perfictly good walrus

Tobias isn’t morphed oh forget it

One of the yeerk resistence actually did something!

Thanks Cassie! You’ve fucked over yer side and will have much more blood on yer hands. 

Also Jake continues to not give a singular shit about rescuing his brother

And that ends the book

[checanty]

so two questions (love your work for the record. you've become one of my primary inspirations over the years! thank you for exposing us to your talent :D ) with the issues surrounding social media at the moment - cancel culture, censorship, algorithm issues etc. How do you feel this is currently affecting current and upcoming talent? Do you think it will get better or worse and why? for my second question - how can one have a relatively humble career in freelance without the social media fame?

Thank youuu!!

Okay, okay, question one: First up regarding the censorship I can’t really say very much since I’m not doing any photography with nudity or any pornographic artwork. I know non sexual artistic nudety does sometimes get flagged, but usually those decisions get gevised if you ask. It’s annoying, but nothing career deciding. I also started sharing my artwork on a website where pornographic (and gore) content was always inaccessible to minors, so this whole thing doesn’t seem particularly outlandish to me. You’ll find your audience, but have to sell ‘under the counter’, you know? Cancel culture on the other hand … it doesn’t really affect me because I’m not usually spreading my opinions far and wide on the internet and my artwork isn’t exactly divisive. Now back in my youth on Animexx (that German website with the adult filter. Where every artwork you uploaded had to be approved by a human being by the way.) I did write and post some questionable things. Hell, I did a whole comic based on a super cringeworthy premise which was rather ableist and contained at least one rape joke. There’s a reason you won’t find it on the internet anymore. I didn’t see it as problematic when I was 15, despite people gently trying to explain to me why it was (In hindsight I understand and am grateful for those folks. But they were patient. they were adults talking to a child. You know.) There’s a lot of stuff I thought was cool and edgy at 15 or even 18 that would make me take a serious double take nowadays. I’d like to think I’ve grown since then. I’d like to think I’m still growing and I’m very aware that a lot of what I think now might have to be seriously re-evaluated a few years from now. Heck, sometimes I catch myself saying stuff and realize it’s messed up a second later.So I’m a bit afraid for young artists out there getting torn apart over stupid (and also harmful) things they say and create. Or artists getting torn apart other stuff they said or created years ago. Like, call them out, yes. but. People can grow. Especially teenagers are not exactly the product of an environment of their choice. It took some depression and alienation (it was horrible, but also, ah, character building?) from my friends to realize some of their jokes were not actually funny and being a sadist is not a cool thing to call yourself. Like the human brain isn’t done rewiring until your mid to late twenties. Let people evolve.  On the other people growing up more involved in social media and ‘cancel culture’ might be used to being smarter about what they say and maybe also a tiny bit less ignorent because they have reason and all the options to educate themselves? There are a lot of pretty amazing teens around. Maybe I was just super slow. (Sometimes I try to imagine being on Tumblr earlier in life and it’s usually a mix of ‘I would have been a better person and all those mental health resources would have helped me so much’ and ‘Nah, I was a brat and would have been eaten alive.’ It’s kind of like people are complicated.)Algorithm issues are horrible, they’re even making a difference for established artists who rely on social media to sell their stuff. BUT. If people do great work and share it, it usually still ends up getting seen.Also, it’s all already different from when I started out. If I was 18 years old today I might look at this ancient 25 year old lady and tell her to stop whining because she can’t deal with all that modern stuff. I don’t want to underestimate the young folks. They’re often underestimated. (Yes, I think teenage me was often horrible and stupid and arrogant, but in other matters pretty smart and actually funny and capable. It’s like you can be a lot of things. Like I’m still all those things and others.)I have no idea what is going to happen. I guess it can always get worse. But if it does get worse we don’t really need to bother with the social media for promotion any more and can go back to blogging on our websites again.It’s doubtful Zuckerberg is going to make Facebook or Instagram ‘better’ again. If anything there’s probably be something new. I mean Patreon and Twitch are already kind of new developments and they work great for some folks! That’s lot of income they wouldn’t have had otherwise! There’s always some good, some bad happening. You get what you get and then figure out to make it work for yourself :/I’m going to let this stand as an answer to your first question because I can already feel myself contemplating in the back of my mind if I actually agree with myself on everything said so far. It seemed right at the time! I’m not doing this ‘opinions on the internet’ game very much for a reason :DQuestion number 2: THIS IS EASY!First up, you can have a great career in freelance without social media fame. Not speaking from experience, but it’s possible. (’fame’ I consider something like 100k plus Instagram/FB or anything followers)Social media fame is important in two cases: When you make most of your money selling small products (say prints, books, but also membership stuff like Patreon) and need to reach a huge audience to sell enough to live on. (because maybe 5% of your audience actually buys things.) And when you actually want to make money being an influencer. There are times where clients hire you as an illustrator AND some sort of influencer because they want to make use of your fan base, but that’s like back in the old days when a famous artist gets hires because they’re already well known to the fans/bring their own fans to the product. That would be a nice position to be in, but it’s not exactly standard procedure.When you’re a freelance illustrator you’re not selling small things to a huge audience. You want a few hopefully high paying jobs. Most clients hire you because you’re good and reliable and fit their budget. They need the art. Not your fans. They don’t care about your fans.And you know, most social media followers will not want or be able to hire you for a 300,00-10.000,00 USD (or more. I guess if you go into advertising you can get more.) job. You need to be more selective. Do the networking thing. Be seen by the right people. How? Well, do your research! Look at who might need your work and send them nice e-mails, postcards, whatever. Have a nice portfolio website. If they’re part of a community, become part of that. Now, social media are still useful for let’s say art directors to find you. But having a small artists all working in the same genre as you do the chances that if they share your work an AD also working in the same genre might be following *them* and see your artwork like this is much higher than if folks not in the ‘business’ share your work even if there is a higher number of them. It’s quality vs quantity thing. One reason I like Twitter is because a lot of writers hang out there. Writers might not be responsible for chosing cover artists (most of the time), but self publishers are. And do like doing cover artworks for self publishers. And writers are friends with other writers and other artists and editors and publishing people and so on and so on. So no, no social media fame needed to succeed, BUT try to be known in the right circles. And be nice and reliable so people hire you again and tell their friends. It happens.  Also, yes I’m definitely procrastinating right now. I should be working on the table of contents for my mermaid book.

[almaasi]

reaction post typed while watching SPN 13x23 “Let The Good Times Roll”

idk what you guys thought but I LIKED IT and here’s why!!!! (EXCEPT THAT THING WITH THE KNIFE??? WHAT THE HELL???)

04:02pm

so it only took 45 minutes to an hour to find somewhere to watch this, my thanks to @trisscar368 for helping me out!!!

eventually found it streaming rather than downloading, would not recommend but HEY IT WORKS (for now) [http://gorillavid.in/zbtu97hfei65]

this feels like it’s 2008 all over again, trying to watch doctor who after school

OKAY LET’S GO

i’ve seen a bunch of major spoilers but i know cas doesn’t die so i’m good. apparently it’s A Boring Episode but also MICHEAL and LUCIFER so

idk idk let’s just watch the thing and find out what happens

-

04:04

rowena: is there, i dunno, music? CARRY ON MYY WAYWAR---

fuck

-

04:09pm

feels good having bobby there

-

BOBBY’S REACTION TO TRUMP IS THE BEST EVER

“and you call where WE come from ‘apocalypse world’?”

-

04:11

cas: “they’re talking about whether kylie jenner would make a good mother. consensus is no”

hey give her a chance

i mean i know nothing about her but she seems... teachable?

-

dean: “yeah well, that’s why i’m a chloe man”

WHOOOOOP dean loves his girly trash tv i see

-

brown werewolf: “now that is why i’m a chloe man”

dead brown person alert :|

how naive i was to think he might be left alive because he got a speaking line and made himself a dean parallel with that single line

-

04:16

mary: “do you really like the rain?”

bobby: “when it’s this beautiful, i do”

lest anyone forget bobby is a gentle down to earth sweetheart

soft papa bear

-

“rowena and charlie are road-tripping it through the south-west”

WOULD WATCH THAT SPINOFF

but #savewaywardsisters first

-

04:19

dean: “can you imagine? you, me, cas, toes in the sand, couple of those little umbrella drinks, matching hawaiian shirts, obviously”

PLEASE

“....some hula girls“

mmmm *squints at how that part was said after a....... pause, off-screen with the camera on sam*

-

04:24

dean to jack: “it’s not about being strong....... i don’t know what you went through over there... but i know you came out the other side. because you ARE strong”

good papa dean words

much love for him and his emotional avaliability

-

04:26

dean: “whatever you’re dealing with, whatever comes at us, we’ll figure out a way to deal with it. together. we’re family, kid”

sam said it to dean, dean said it to jack

i guess the next step is ...jack saying it to cas?? SOMEONE’s gotta say it to cas

but also WOOOO DEAN’S CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT REGARDING JACK SINCE THE START OF THE SEASON

-

04:32

um

is it just me or is this a seriously unfortunate racist-looking coincidence

desperately hoping this wasn’t the guy who killed maggie

(i don’t think it is, which means maybe this is a “don’t jump to conclusions” kind of storyline which has a race-relations subtext??? i wish it meant nothing besides jack’s need to protect others, but given the lack of living characters of colour on this show, the minute a person of colour shows up, it BECOMES about the fact they’re not white, bECAUSE they always die, invariably)

anyway, my point is: this is problematic

also the red shirt. as in “red shirts always die” ??

edit: thank goodness....... RED HERRING

-

“3 sheeps” poster in the background

i remember this symbolism from something earlier but can’t remember exactly what

i’m thinking lambs to the slaughter, or being part of a flock, or being herded into something they’re wrong about, being naive, following each other one by one into the unknown

wow reading tarot has improved my “make a list of all the obvious symbolism” skills

-

04:39

the fact cas is suffering with the angel language whistle is interesting?? i thought it hurts dean because he can’t understand it

which means.......cas isn’t understanding this noise?

or maybe he is understanding, it’s just real loud

-

04:42

enjoying sam being protective of cas

-

lucifer: ........”the three amigos.... sam, dean, and the other one”

that’s probably how a lot of people see team free will tbh

how sad

-

lucifer: “you want a lightsaber?”

jack:

vroom

we mAY HAVE LONG SAID HE’S TOO PRECIOUS FOR THIS WORLD BUT WE NEVER MEANT FOR HIM TO LEAVE

-

04:50

that awkward moment when you’re trying to solve a murder and your adorable magic grandson comes home with the devil

:o

-

the face you make when the devil makes an ableist joke about your son and then says “no offence”

(the ”i would murder you but there’s enough dead bodies in here right now” face)

-

04:56

maggie: “kinda seems like you have... you know, bigger.... satan-y... problems”

bless this girl

-

05:00

dean: “as shakespeare once said: eat me, dick-bag”

tbh shakespeare probably did say that at one point or another

add shakespeare to the list of dean’s bisexual heroes

(follow up thought: what if when cas could time-travel, he and dean and sam went to go explore shakespeare’s town and dean made.... Friends)

-

05:04

lucifer’s talking to jack about their future space travels

i mean i think it’s fairly obvious, lucifer was the one who killed maggie, so he could bring her back and impress jack

maggie said “i didn’t see their face but i saw their eyes” and that means it was either lucifer or michael with the glowing eyes, and micheal said to dean “you’ll be the first life i take in this world” which leaves lucifer

stinking nasty manipulative trash angel

-

05;07

micheal, while strangling dean: “could’ve done this quick, but i wanted to enjoy it, that moment when the soul leaves the body”

yeeeah okay sure, speak aloud your reasons you’re stalling for time while jack figures out how to get back

-

05:10

jack to lucifer: “you’re not my father. you monster”

HUZZAH

-

for the record i’m... reaLLY ENJOYING THIS episode so far

it’s all big and mighty and magical but the core of the story is a boy trying to find his family and figure out the truth behind his manipulative father

i’m so glad it led to this because i am HERE for this kind of story

the world hangs in the balance, but it’s not dean, cas and sam trying to save everyone, it’s jack trying to find his place among loved ones, and by following his desire to help people he’s learning what he needs to know

i fucking love this okay

-

05:14

lucifer: i just need your power--

OH NO I SPOKE TOO SOON

OH NO

-

05:17

michael: “this is the end. of everything”

I SEE DEAN’S COGS WHIRRING AND I WORRY

nine years of not saying yes to micheal and now it’s happening isn’t it

-

05:20

jack’s pained little whimper :c :c :c

-

05:21

dean: “i am your sword”

CHILLS

-

05:22

dean: “CAS I DON’T HAVE A CHOICE”

cas: D:

PERFECT MOMENT FOR AN AGGRESSIVE KISS but nope that would be too much like goodbye

-

05:24

third option rather than sam or jack trying to kill each other: they pick up lucifer’s blade and kill lucifer with it

-

05:26

WHAT 

NO

??????

BAD IDEA????

JUST STAB LUCIFER????

-

jack:  i love you

NOO ;;A;A;A;A;A;A;A;;A;A

DJSGJD

I’M NOT ENJOYING THIS 0/10 WOULD NOT RECOMMEND 

PLEASE STOP

-

05:27

WELL FUCK

hi there

WHHHOOOOOOO

meanwhile back at the bunker: cas has the weirdest traumatic boner

-

05:29

THE WINGS KEEP GETTING BIGGER

-

05:31

interesting angel flying physics here

dean flails while sailing slowly backwards

i mean i know he’s on a suspension wire but technically waving his arms about ought to affect his position

-

05:33

LITERALLY SAM COULD’VE DONE THAT TO BEGIN WITH

WHAT EVEN WAS THE POINT OF THIS

HE COULD’VE ACTED LIKE HE WAS ABOUT TO STAB JACK AND THEN GO WHOOSH AND STAB LUCIFER

SAM HAS FUCKING NOODLE ARMS HE COULD’VE DONE IT WITH HIS EYES CLOSED

JEEZ

-

05:35

okay but i’m laughing right now

are you telling me this is what happens if lucifer accidentally trips and falls on his knife

where did that golden blade come from anyway

has lucifer just been carrying it around this whole time?

COULD ANYONE HAVE PICKPOCKETED THAT KNIFE AND STABBY STABBY >>> EXPLODING FLYING FLAME DEVIL ??

WHAT BRAIN CELLS WAS LUCIFER MISSING TO HAND THAT BLADE TO SAM WINCHESTER IN THE FIRST PLACE

OR GO INTO BATTLE WITH MICHAEL WITHOUT THE KNIFE

OR TO HAVE THAT BLADE ON HAND IN THE FIRST PLACE ??????????

I’m sorry i just find this hilarious

i mean good fucking riddance to this trash angel but wow what a way to get there

all of this was so easily avoidable ?? i seriously don’t understand what possessed sam to think “aw yeah let’s pick up this magic devil blade to KILL MY OWN SON and/or HAND IT TO HIM SO HE CAN KILL ME” instead of “umMMM the devil just gave me a magic knife and is trying to tell us to kill each other maybe we should kill him with it”

I HOPE SOMEONE IN THE WRITER’S ROOM HAS A REALLY GOOD EXPLANATION FOR THIS

-

05:45

HAPPY RELIEVED SAMMY

why do i feel like everything’s about to go terribly terribly wrong, worse than before

-

05:48

i mean micheal!dean looks good though

despite everything i think dean would approve of the outfit

-

like he actually looks a little bit TOO attractive

definitely not to be trusted

you know when people just look TOO handsome and shiny and perfect and they’re TOO charming and you know something’s up

this guy’s got danger written all over him in sleek & elegant calligraphy

-

05:50pm

mmmmmmmmm okay, it’s over

i liked it ?

felt old-school, kinda like a buffy episode or an x-files episode

things i’m happy about: everyone lived and lucifer died!! this is a pretty cool progression of events and i’m interested to see where it goes (not EXCITED, i’m not EAGER, but i am interested). that black dude was not the one who killed maggie. maggie survived!!!

things i’m not thrilled about: the fact sam didn’t just stab lucifer in the face when he was right next to him holding the magic knife?????? i don’t get it and i don’t think any kind of meta is actually gonna be able to explain how ~UM EXCUSE ME JUST ONE SECOND~esque that moment was

no bechdel test pass

jack’s personal arc this season was great and i love him

as always, this show is riveting to me only because i care so much about the characters, and i cannot tELL YOu how fucking pleased i am that this show’s universe is now a universe where bobby, charlie, mary, rowena, dean, cas, sam, jack, jody, donna, claire, the other wayward girls, and billie ALL EXIST AND ARE ALIVE

seriously could’ve done with some kevin too, i’m still bummed that he’s died TWICE now and isn’t back permanently yet

but HOLY SHIT THE REST OF THEM ARE ALL ALIVE 

GIVE ME A TEAM-FREE-WILL-MAJOR SEASON WITH ALL THE SQUAD ALIVE AND KICKING ASS AS A GROUP

like... save dean as a group, then one by one discover that dean and cas have been locked in a room without clothes for three days, then save the world and retire forever as a happy, healthy hunter squad with their gay dads

FUCK YEAH

overall, this episode is maybe a 9/10 just because that FUCKING KNIFE man. i dunno what to think about that.

like .........why

i also want cas to have a season arc!!! a positive one!!! where he actually accepts love and expresses affection and receives AUDIBLE AND VISIBLE AND TANGIBLE affection from others!!!

and for fuck’s sakes stop killing people of colour, give us more women of colour who are good and don’t die, pass the bechdel test more often

AND ABOVE ALL GIVE US WAYWARD SISTERS I WANT THAT SHOW SO BADLY AND EVERYTHING IT REPRESENTS

IT WOULD FILL IN ALL THE GAPS THAT ARE MISSING FROM THIS SHOW

PLEASE

[almond-assistant]

A very long rant and my opinions on neofeminism

Keep in mind that these are very opinionated, and I really don’t wanna fight with you. I’m only posting this so people know where I stand with this stuff, and so they know what kind of person I am.

Inequality: (the fake scenario here is metaphorical and also taken from a youtube video) Imagine there was a short person and a tall person, and there's a wall. In order to see over it, both people are given a stool of equal height to stand on. The tall person is still taller, and can see farther. Instead of giving the taller person a shorter stool, or a short person a taller stool, how about we give nobody a stool. Instead, give them equal materials to build their stool. Equal opportunity does not mean an equal outcome.

Wage Gap: That thing? It's non-existent; women are actually 'out-earning' men, according to literally every governmental source. And if the wage gap existed, it'd be illegal, considering women recieved equal rights in America in 1972.

Transphobia: Trans people are propped up and given all sorts of support in society! I remember at one point I considered myself transgender (I'm still queer-identifying fyi), and I was treated just as well, if not better, than most kids at my high school. And you know how you guys are so "supportive" of trans-men? Well, guess what. By not grouping him in with the cis men, you are therefore being transphobic by invalidating his identity, implying he is not like the cis man, as he would like to be seen as. Do you call a trans guy a rapist, like a cis man? No. Do you consider him sexist, like the cis man? Of course not! Even if he is, you wouldn't DARE accuse him of that! Right? Because he's an owo smol trans flower boy. By rubbing it in everybody's faces that you/someone you know is trans, you are therefore negating the fact that they'd like to be treated like a cisgendered person in the first place. Same goes for trans-women. FYI, I completely support real trans people!

Transtrenders: Super transphobic! If you want to be babied and called uwu smol then go join the adult baby community. You want to be queer? Just don't label yourself trans! Want attention? Go join a fucking talent show or something idk. Don't have dysphoria? What's the point in calling yourself the opposite gender? I don't get that. Wanna be a futa catgirl? I... I don't even know. Please stop that. Sexualizing trans/intersex people is transphobic. Trying to fit in? I get that. I did that. But please, please. don't rub it in everyone's faces. I actually DO have a bit of social dysphoria, but I used to make it a bigger deal than it should've been.

Patriarchy: I agree that patriarchy doesn't work. But, patriarchy is also basically gone, so I don't agree that it's this really big deal you guys make it out to be. On the other hand, matriarchy doesn't work well either. It takes both genders for lots of things to run smoothly. There are highly positioned women and men. That's what makes systems work, including reproduction and all that jazz. So basically, men are in fact needed. Stop treating them like shit. If you got rid of men, we'd go extinct. I know there's this thing with women's bone marrow or whatever, but that's not really relevant, and it isn't even guaranteed to work. By separating women from men, you are therefore being sexist, because equality doesn't have anything to do with gender. It's like if x=y, then y=x, y=y, and x=x. If x and y was female and male, or literally any gender, this would be the goal of feminism by definition. Without the belief that women are currently in a lesser position in society, neo-feminism falls flat. Speaking of which, you always focus on women, why aren't you including all of the other "genders"? Isn't that a bit sexist of you? Society is giving women everything they don't deserve. That's not equality. And yet you still think women are opressed.

Rape Culture: And before you rush to the comments with "You don't know what it's like to be sexually harassed!", I do, and that's why this topic ticks me off so much. Anyway, by labeling all men as rapists, you are therefore being sexist. And, even though you guys say men/boys can't be raped, they have been, and can be. Males are actually sexually exploited more than women. Furthermore, women can be rapists. Consent doesn't apply to just the woman. If a woman wants to have sex with a guy and he says no, yet she forces him to, it's still rape. Legal sexual interactions require both parties involved to give consent. I read a post on here that said something to the effect of, "If you don't have sex with a fat woman, you're raping her". That... boggles my mind.

Ableism: I have mental illnesses too, so this also pisses me off. I mean, I get that some people are wheelchair-bound or don't have the same mental abilities as a neurotypical person. I think it's great that we're helping to accomodate these people! But when you call everything that could even possibly leave out someone other than the neurotypicals ableist, it's frustrating. Literally anything could be ableist or classist. Eating pizza? No, this is ableist because some people have diabetes and can't eat certain things. Running gear? Ableist. Some people have to use wheelchairs, either because they were born paralyzed in the legs, or because they're too obese to move. Brain exercises? No, get that out of here. That's offensive to people with autism or the like, because their brains don't work like that, and it implies they're not good enough. therapy? Kill it with fire. You're saying we neurodivergents are not ok? It's like you don't care about people that want to get better. There's such thing as a target audience, so now let's see.. Pizza? Oh! That's for people who want a quick, cheap, and easy meal! Running gear? That's meant to interst people who enjoy being fit and maintaining their cardiovascular health. Wheelchair-bound folks have specialized exercises for keeping their muscles healthy. Running would not be as effective of a way for them to do that. Brain exercises? For people who want to keep their brain sharp and improve certain areas where they might have weaknesses. Again, people such as my brother (who has medium-high functioning autism) can have special exercises provided to them. But when companies manufacture products that leave out the neurotypical person, nobody thinks twice. So much for equality.

Fatphobia: I do agree that this one exists, although I've never experienced it myself, since I myself have problems gaining weight and keeping it on. I'm actually guilty of fatphobia, but hear me out. I don't mind if you're overweight, as long as others don't have to make special accomodations at no cost to the one being accomodated. If you're 500+ pounds and/or you need a wheelchair and two seats on a plane, I'm calling you out. There's no way you could be that fat without doing it to yourself or having a disability. I don't mind these things if you do have a disability, I understand you couldn't control it then. But if you're just sitting in your bed all day stuffing your face with cheese curls, you have no right to whine about fatphobia, as you could've easily prevented it. Mental disorders such as depression or anxiety that may lower your motivation so low that you don't care, I also get, since I've been in that situation plenty of times. Regardless though, I will not say you are beautiful. This is my personal opinion, and I know others may find obesity attractive, or even erotic (which is in itself fatphobic), but I do not. There are people who don't actually find it pretty, but still say it is. Please stop that. Speak your mind, yo. It's kinda sad that others shape your views, and if you don't agree entirely with the flock, you're not one of them, yknow? That's like... a cult or something.

Classism: I'm soft on this one, since I've been in and out of financial stability throughout my childhood and it sorta fucked me up. But again, calling everything classist is just not right. Songs about fancy cars and diamonds are praising the lush life, not making lower classes feel bad. If anything, those songs help them work harder to achieve their own dreams and have their own great life. But again, it's all about the target audience.

Racism: Racism was originally based off of fear and confusion. Other races had never seen a different skin color than their people's, and thought they were a different breed or species. The reason europeans and americans viewed africans as animals, is because they didn't know what else they could be. African society wasn't as developed, and the African people exhibited very primitive behaviors, as opposed to the educated caucasian. After a while, the african people taken to other lands as slaves, started to dislike that life and form their own opinions and values. The white people learned that the Africans were just humans of a different color, and eventually softened up a bit. But they couldn't abandon their ways of life, so the slaves slaved on, and the rich got richer. These values passed through generations, and eventually someone said, "Stop, these are people too, let's set em' free.". Though, yes, some families still teach their children to be racist, they don't imprison them anymore. Schools do a very good job of describing the treacheries of racism and slavery so it doesn't happen again. Most of my friends (and my boyfriend who I love so so much) are of color, in one way or another. Shit, I'm like, an eighth native american. I do consider myself white though, I'm Norwegian and Irish, for the most part. But I'll still honor my roots. Anyway, even modern racism is still based on fear. Islamophobia stems from terrorism, Black violence comes from stories of gangs and police shootings, and lots of other xenophobia stems from stereotypes. I'm completely against racism, trust me. But when you separate white from black and call white people scum, and call people of color 'strong, independent', and discard white people, it's kinda confusing. Racism applies to race, and caucasian is a race. Get it together.

Cisphobia: That exists. Cisgenderism/Heterosexuality are still identities, whether you want them to be or not.

Sexualities: Cool, You like people (Or you don't, if you're ace/aro). I know these sexualities were shunned before but most people are really accepting now! Just not the weird demonsexual things. Some people don't understand that too much. I sure don't.

Genders: Same as sexualities, don't get too crazy and people are cool w/ it.

Mogai and Neopronouns: Shit, get them out of here. You're making actual LGBT+ people look like a joke.

Anything I didn't mention that you'd like to hear my opinion on? Leave an ask! All interaction is welcome, though not all is wanted. Regardless, I'll try to be kind to you. I really have no reason to be rude to you if I don't know too much about you.

-Kevyn (almondassistant)

[argotmagazine-blog]

Hating On Audiobooks Is Pretty Ableist

I'm a very slow reader. At most, I read around two books per season, and half of these books come in audio form. I love reading paperbacks, but it takes a large amount of time. For busy people like me, or for disabled people who can't see the written page, or can't physically hold up a book, audio books are vital. Yet despite this simple concept, there is a nasty attitude about listening versus reading floating around the reading community. Rather than viewing audiobooks as a different way to enjoy books, listening to audiobooks is “cheating,” and they don't count as “real reading.”

It's such a prevalent issue in the reading community that makes audiobook readers constantly defend themselves. BookTubers such as AclockworkReader, Chelseadolling, and BooksWithEmilyFox have all uttered some variation of the words “I know people consider audiobooks cheating but...” and go on to defend their love of audiobooks. There's nothing wrong with defending yourself of course, but its such a shame BookTubers have to constantly mention the unjustified stigma.

Forums are also packed with judgmental commentary that shames audiobook listeners for merely existing: 

The problem with calling audiobooks “cheating,” is that you're passively accusing disabled people of relying on a “lesser” form of reading, therefore implying they're lazy.

Why Does Reading Come With A Superiority Complex?

Those who prefer physical reading may defend their anti-audiobook perspective by saying something like “But hey, when we're calling people cheaters, we're not referring to blind people, we're talking about perfectly abled people who just can't be bothered to pick up a real book!” Okay, but where do you draw the line? Who counts as “disabled enough” to deserve respect for listening to audio recordings?

Dyslexic folk, people who get migraines or joint pain; these are the people society tends to forget about when they throw around the word “lazy.” Tons of Dyslexic folk read from huge books every day, but there-in lies the issue of preference. Just because you technically can read physical text, doesn't mean you should be forced to if you want to enjoy a story.

With all of this in mind, I took to various community Facebook groups to talk to disabled and fellow neurodivergant folk about their thoughts on audiobooks. I asked them about the audiobook stigma, and how the haters make them feel. Lefa Singleton Norton, arts worker from Melbourne Australia, talked me through the importance of audiobooks. She writes

“Audiobooks are ideal for days I am stuck in bed, unable to handle the cognitive load of interacting with the world.” she said, “It’s easier for my system to take in a single input - sound - than to manage the multi-input of reading myself, where my brain has to work harder to interpret the visual language. I have definitely been subjected to people telling me it’s not really ‘reading’ which smacks of a total lack of understanding not just about disabilities, but language and communication.”

This is harmful for many reasons, not just because it puts people off using audiobooks, but because it shines a light on society's hated of learning disabilities. The more we stigmatize technology made to help disabled and neurodivergant folk, the less likely society is to create more of it. Go to any tech video or article on a cool new invention and you'll get a handful of comments bemoaning about how the inventors are promoting laziness or wasting money. When critique like this is loud enough, it overshadows the support for funding or creating new versions of the device.

Clearly, a lack of understanding is definitely partially at fault for the stigma, particularly when it comes to deciding what does and doesn't count as “real” effort.

Science has busted the 'cheating' myth already

Scientifically, it's actually been proven that listening to audiobooks uses the same mental processes as physically reading does. That's not to say there aren't subtle differences here and there, but research has shown that people can be just as involved in the listening process as the reading process. It's actually been proven for decades that the brain comprehends auditory and written words with the same level of understanding. Researchers Kintsch and Kozminsky conducted a study in which 48 individuals were asked to summarize three 2000 word tape-recorded and written stories. Equal comprehension of each story was found regardless of whether or not the participant listened, or physically read the story.

And for those who are audio learners as opposed to visual, listening to audiobooks can be more beneficial for their learning preferences.

I understand people need science as proof, but ultimately it's exhausting and depressing to be required to prove something so innocent and simple. Preference should be enough, the stories of disabled people having a medium that suits them, should be enough. There should be no stigma attached to something as inoffensive as listening to a novel.

Simply having a preference isn't a problem. It's okay to dislike something, even hate engaging with it. The issue stems from going to the extreme of mocking people for liking it. Audiobooks simply aren't for everyone, and for some (particularly visual learners) they may find it difficult to concentrate on the story as much as they would if it were on paper. Deaf folks also have no use for the concept, or people who have sensory issues, like freelance writer and editor Shannon L. She writes:

“I get sensory overload and thus can't comfortably listen to audiobooks. One of my auditory difficulties is listening to one voice speak with no real break in dialogue. It's hard for people to understand, and I feel like I'm being dismissive of their suggestions to listen to audiobooks, when of course that's not the issue.

This stigma is so pernicious, that for people like Shannon who mean no disrespect to those who enjoy audiobooks, folks who do mean disrespect have given her a reason to add a disclaimer to her preference. It's so exhausting to have to defend your love of audiobooks, or your justified dislike of them, all because a group of people like to think they're superior for picking up a wad of paper.

Physical reading is viewed as some sort of achievement that only the most dedicated readers excel at. While physical readers can spend a month reading the whopping 1,138 pages of Stephen King's 'IT', their friend is finishing the audiobook of the same novel in under a week. All due to the fact they got to listen to the recording at one and a half speed, while they showered, cooked, and washed their car. This ease of access, to the those who prefer physical reading, perhaps comes across as “not listening hard enough.” They probably didn't concentrate on every word, the book snob may think, they probably got distracted for most of the recording. They'd appreciate it more if they just slowed down and held the text in their own hands.

Though challenging yourself with a very long and difficult paperback book interests (and impresses) a lot of people, the idea that everyone has to do this to be a “real bibliophile” is straight up elitist. Turning reading into a contest to see who “reads better” restricts reading access to people who otherwise would be intimidated by such attitudes.

It's actually not that different to the video game hard-mode conceitedness that exists in the gaming community. There are actually people out there that believe a game isn't worth playing on easy-mode, or that gamers aren't skillful if they play on anything less than hard-mode. Audiobooks, in the eyes of book snobs, are the so called easy-mode of reading, e-books are medium-mode, and reading off of real paper is hard-mode. With that logic, hardcore survival-mode must be reading from stone tablets, in Latin.

Single player gaming and reading are both solo activities. The idea someone else is shocked by your choice of “difficulty” is such a bizarre concept to me. It's no one's business but your own how you read your chosen book in your own home. This obsession with demanding other people challenge themselves is very reminiscent of society's fear of unintelligence. Society is terrified of producing more children with learning difficulties, low IQ's, or any kind of special needs that make the parents “look bad.” And since reading has always been associated with intelligence, we fear that if we stray away from the written word, we will get less and less intelligent over time

What Reading Snobbery is Rooted In

Books are one of the few learning apparatuses that are still used from the 20th century. So in a way it makes sense that people are afraid of losing them. But no one ever said that physical books were going to die out as a result of audiobook and e-book popularity. They're not a replacement, they're an addition.

Part of this reading affectation possibly comes from anti-technology sentiments. It's the fear that technology is moving too quickly, and that society's youth will become obsessed with the latest gadgets. Not being able to relate to modern technology because you grew up with analogue devices is understandable. I can imagine it's pretty frightening in certain contexts. But to use that fear to attack individuals who need that new technology makes no sense, and doesn't help anyone.

We fear these “unintelligent” folk will be burdens, so we turn our fear into manipulative mockery. 60 percent of disabled children will be bullied in their lifetime, versus 25 percent of non-disabled children. These statistics show society's pure hatred of developmentally challenged folk, and micro-aggressions such as mocking them for listening to audiobooks is only the beginning of a lifetime of stigma.

This is obvious elitism at play, but it also shows a fundamental misunderstanding of how our minds learn and develop. Just because the written word was all we had for centuries, doesn't mean it's the only way we can learn. In fact, if we were to go back millennia, we'd see that we were all auditory learners once. We told stories out loud, we sang songs, we were always listening to audiobooks; but back then the speakers were our mouths rather than apple headphones. And as technology progresses further, we'll find new ways to learn, to read, and to adapt. This fear of change is not only unfounded, but also very possessive. And it goes way back.

Printed books were once reserved for the elite aristocracy because of how expensive they were to produce and manufacture before the advent of the printing press in the 15th century. Access to education was limited as well, so many children went without learning how to read. However, once the industrial revolution hit, the cost and difficulty of printing decreased dramatically. This caused elites to fear that their once exclusive hobby would be tarnished by the lower classes. They feared what would happen when they got hold of the information only the rich could previously afford to digest. This caused a massive possessive culture around printed books, and it seems that it still hasn't faded since. This is something Norton also touched upon during our interview:

“Let’s not forget books are technology too!” she continued, “When the masses learned to read, wealthy and privileged people bemoaned that it would be the death of Literature. Then they said it about radio. And then about ebooks. To valorise reading a paper book as the only pure and real reading is to roll up ableism, snobbery and classism in one ugly package. Whatever method you use to input a book into your brain, you’re engaging with the text, taking it in as part of yourself. The mechanics don’t matter.”

The obsession that difficulty and effort are interchangable, and that intelligence equals superiority will hopefully decrease as technology advances. If we can build devices that everyone can use, rather than just able bodied neurotypical folk, then we can all experience the same joys, and the same activities.

Ultimately, we know audiobooks aren't cheating, science and common sense proves that. But until we stop thinking about reading as a stressful challenge that makes us better than others, we can never truly click with the book community, or even reading itself.

Stephanie Watson is a feminist writer, editor, and zinester, who specializes in pop culture, and psychology. She is the EIC of Fembot Magazine, and a contributor to YourTango, New Normative, HelloGiggles, and many more.