#or even people who are treating it like a genuine moral judgment ‘i was really scared mine was going to be worse but i’m okay’

[townhulls]

also re: that post, absolutely fascinated by the implication that having a low score means you have low standards. i’m one of the pickiest people i know when it comes to fic. even indented paragraphs are enough to get me to swear off an author forever. but i am also a person of Taste and, more importantly, not a prude

[cringefailvox]

my ultimate fantasy for hazbin s2 is a reveal of something in alastor's past that he can't explain away or justify, something genuinely morally reprehensible, and he and the other residents of the hotel have to navigate around each other with the renewed sense of "right, he's actually a bad guy."

i feel like the show and the fandom both sometimes forget that alastor is actually legitimately morally corrupt because he's superficially nice and abides by certain rules and social mores. but he like, does murder people. that's a real thing that he does.

i feel like he can get woobified a little and portrayed as like, a byronic hero who's always actually in the right but judged and misunderstood. there's an element of truth to that, but he's mostly a selfish and cruel person who does awful things because he doesn't care.

it would be personally EXTREMELY satisfying to see him face real consequences for the way he treats people, especially from the hotel that he seems to have grown to care about. fuck that deer UP!!!

REAL AND TRUE. it's always interesting to me the way murder is evaluated in fandom next to like, sexual assault, as being the more redeemable crime somehow, which i think is quite evident in the way people talk about alastor vs valentino -- neither of these characters is remorseful or even particularly in a hurry to justify the horrendous things they do, and yet i've noticed a general tendency towards letting alastor off the hook for the serial killing but not budging on the line that val is irredeemable. and like, ofc with the caveat that this is fiction and neither of them are real, but it's interesting sometimes how people measure crimes with a value system predicated on distance, where serial killers are so removed from the average person that it's nearly outlandish, definitely a spectacle, but sexual assault is real and immediate in a way that hits people harder. there's also the matter that alastor is part of the main cast and val is a secondary antagonist -- but anyway this is getting off topic from what you were asking

i absolutely agree that i'm excited to see the show really begin to grapple with the ethics of the main cast, esp alastor, because it's like. we know he's a terrible person. the gang knows he's a terrible person. but it really comes back to the bit in episode five, when lucifer (rightly, in this case, but unhelpfully) points out that alastor represents all the worst things about sinners, that he epitomizes everything lucifer loathes about hell, and charlie's response pivots neatly away from that ethical problem: "he's defending this hotel. it might be a bit more sadistic than i'd hoped, but he's doing it for me." alastor can be as morally bankrupt as he wants so long as it's in the service of a cause that charlie perceives as good

this actually makes perfect sense for charlie's character and it's sooo fascinating. she doesn't actually seem to care about how horrific everyone in hell behaves all the time -- what she cares about is those people dying en masse without any value judgment from heaven, she's affronted that it's all numbers to them, she really seems like she's only spearheading this redemption program because she thinks it'll bring down overpopulation and stop heaven, not because she was genuinely bothered by the rampant sin before. "happy day in hell" is all about how much she loves hell and keeps putting an optimistic spin on all the property damage and cannibalism and public bdsm. she doesn't care about alastor being evil because he's not her redemption poster child, but she DOES care about angel getting into turf wars and doing drugs in the hotel because it reflects badly on her. girl i need to see your personal ethics and values get cracked the fuck open so bad

[zukosdualdao]

i don’t begrudge people interesting aus, and i get why someone might be interested in exploring a plot where azulon didn’t really order ozai to kill zuko and that whole series of events went differently from what zuko was told and what the narrative says (and the comics, contentious as they are, further cement.)

that being said: when it comes to canon, i strongly dislike the argument that it can’t really be that azulon ordered ozai to kill zuko because it’s illogical when he just berated ozai for disrespecting iroh and lu ten after lu ten’s death…

because like… yes. it’s illogical, and unfair, and absurd, especially when he’s ostensibly doing it in the name of love for iroh and respect for the family line (which is not actually what it’s about, but more on that in a minute.)

it’s not logical or reasonable. that’s the point.

abusers don’t care about logic, not as it pertains to them. abusers will often give illogical orders or make unreasonable demands and then treat everyone else as the problem when they can’t live up to them or else point out the flawed nature of them.

(we also see how it affects zuko and azula, who have both been taught this behavior both by example (and, in zuko’s case, by being on the receiving end of it. the demand he endlessly search for a deity-like figure no one’s seen in a hundred years and most people believe to be forever-dead springs to mind.) in the storm, zuko unreasonably demands that they continue their search for the avatar and that the safety of the crew doesn’t matter, but the whole episode is about deconstructing that mindset and showing how he got there, and in the end, he chooses to do the right thing, saving a crew member and deciding to get the ship to safety instead of following aang. azula, by contrast, orders her own soldiers to pull in the ship despite the tides, and only doubles down (and violently threatens) when questioned, showing a lack of respect for the laws of nature itself. this is her first proper episode, and she never truly grows out of this mindset. see also: cherries accidentally left un-pitted being treated as evidence of high treason.)

there is a story about intergenerational trauma and the cycles of abuse being told here. azulon is contradicting himself. he’s a hypocrite! abusers often are! he doesn’t care, though, because why should he, when he defines what’s right and wrong—just as ozai does and as he teaches azula to—not through any consistent moral conviction or code but through what he decides to do and therefore what he perceives as his right to do? in his mind, the only ‘right’ is his final word, and the highest ‘wrong’ is going against it.

and while he couches his outrage at ozai’s attempt to usurp iroh’s place in the line of heirs in language that suggests it’s about loyalty to iroh and respect for the family line—it’s not really. it’s outrage that ozai, the son he clearly doesn’t care for, dares to question iroh’s place, and therefore azulon’s judgment and authority, as the rightful heir, the respected general, the golden child.

but it’s not even about genuinely respecting iroh or what he would want, whatever azulon may tell himself. iroh, who, even at the height of his imperialist indoctrination and military power, i very earnestly believe would have been horrified to learn azulon ordered zuko’s murder and that it was done, ostensibly, on “his behalf”—even though he never and never would have asked for it. and, especially coming just after lu ten’s death, i think he would hate for his grief at the loss of his son to be twisted and used in this horrendous way.

anyway. azulon’s order doesn’t match up with what he say he values and is trying to defend, but that’s because those things are not what he’s truly so angry about. it’s about control. he has it, and he will make any illogical, cruel, sadistic order he wants when someone challenges it, because he can.

which, by the way, is ozai’s whole MO as well.

[yinwaryuri]

Seeing a lot of upset posts about how the show ended with Boston and feeling like something really went over a few heads. Do I also believe Boston deserved better? Yes. But let's be realistic in the way Jojo and Ninew approached this.

Boston and his promiscuity have been the target of harsh judgements from episode one. And the writers have stated that he has a moral code, it's just very different from others. I was never expecting him to state it outright, that it would just be a thing worth paragraphs of speculative meta, but he does!

Boston stated his definition of boyfriend. If he wants to be exclusive, that's for all the emotional bonding that he desires with someone special, but does not deny him the ability to fulfill his physical desires with whomever he wishes. That's not just polyamory, it's a very specific kind!!! And it's entirely different from the traditional sort of relationship society has accepted. The thing is, he wouldn't have discovered that possibility without knowing Nick.

Boston did genuinely fall for Nick. But how could he have handled that properly when he has no experience being loved and has never learned how to love someone back? Moreover, how could he come to the conclusion that he likes being exclusive in one way but not another without absolutely fumbling the bag with someone who's on a different page? It's not exactly Nick's fault that he prefers physical affection to be exclusive as well, that's just how he is. There couldn't have been any discussion about this, it was a discovery in the making.

The truth is Boston would still have a hard time finding happiness in Thailand due to the political climate, especially with his father being a politician. He's gay and that alone makes achieving his dreams more difficult, but being as promiscuous as he is means even a majority of the queer community will shut him out. He's better off moving to the states where at least he has rights and better acceptance for who he is. And that's what happened.

Because having a sexual or romantic appetite outside of monogamy is still looked down on. I still see it in the BL fandom. I see it just in general. 3 Will Be Free is so often cited as a must-watch, but how many people stick to their comfort branded pairings?* How many people have made or heard jokes about the "Seattle polycule"? How many romantic aces and allosexual aros get othered and excluded and judged for their identity?

Jojo said there was no intended message, but that doesn't mean there isn't one to be found. Boston's arc is a prime example of how slutty queers get treated even by their own peers, even by people who care about them most. It's a cry from the cold and lonely dark that if we think these people deserve better, we need to change existing paradigms and find how we can give them that!

Nick wasn't prepared to do that because he is still hurting, and that's also okay. Not everyone has to change themselves to make the puzzle pieces fit. Boston and Nick's story centers around that so much. Nick being jealous and trying to copy Top, Boston trying to be what he thinks a boyfriend is - they only hurt each other because the parts that don't fit are digging in.

I hope we get a second season, but if not friends, remember Boston. He represents such a particular demographic that gets hated on and ignored constantly, and they deserve a chance. They're not easy, but that doesn't mean they're not worth it. Remember Nick too. We all have a Nick in some manner - someone that made us want to try, but no matter how much we cared for each other it just wasn't going to work. Family, friends, partners, whoever.

Instead of being outraged with the show, be outraged with society. Do something about it. Be kinder. Community is important, now more than ever. I cannot possibly overstate how much we need community, especially among minorities.

*this isn't meant to be judgmental toward fans who prefer branded pairings or aren't interested in that particular show. I know watching anything requires time and energy and scratching a certain itch at the right moment. It is, however, a concern that so many fans complained about numerous aspects of OF to the point where the creators went to the effort of explaining themselves on a weekly basis and editing certain parts to avoid backlash. I mentioned 3 Will Be Free because it's another example of Jojo's work. Many BL fans have heard of it, but only a small portion seem to have watched, and that can be an indicator of certain biases. This is not to imply anyone who hasn't seen it has said biases and is only intended to encourage reflection if needed.

[transmutationisms]

I would love to hear more of your thoughts on House & its relation to the detective genre ! I think that house (completely accidentally and very badly) stumbles into a good critique of how doctors & medical structures view addicts & disabled people, with house being a horrible hegemonic mr malpractice to his patients frequently yet half is series is unironically just about all the injustice/mistreatment he faces because his doctor colleagues can’t see him as a person but only as a problem to be solved/rehabbed/therapized/institutionalized/treated like a child with stolen candy/treated like a criminal. and then it also randomly takes an incredibly pro MAID stance. which isn’t really part of this but I just remembered how batshit insane that show was. and then chase killed a dictator and I feel like the show was squarely on his side for that one. Anyway. Do you have thoughts? I really like house.

ok here's my house md take. like a lot of medical dramas, the show essentially relies for its dramatic appeal on the construal of patients as gross, weird, and stupid—rubes who are too uneducated and self-serving in their petty lies to solve their own bodies, and thus need the intervention of house to fix them. this is standard for the genre, although slightly meaner on house than on some other examples (cf. grey's or even the older and soapier generation of these shows). i don't even think house committing malpractice is all that new; it's relatively common as a plot point that positions the noble rule-breaking doctor as someone who 'does what needs to be done' and skirts the bureaucratic red tape to follow their own superior judgment. what makes house more interesting is that from the get-go, house himself is both a doctor and an unwilling patient. in itself this isn't a tension that's new to the medical soap (injuring a major character is pretty par for the course) but house's particular interactions with the ruling biomedical epistemology are, as you point out, characterised by hostility and resistance, and the show frequently either sides with house, or at least leaves it somewhat up to the viewer to decide whether house is right to resist the pathologisation that cuddy and wilson try to impose on him.

this is kind of a tricky line to walk for 7 seasons or however long the show is. my recollection is there are episodes, for example, where it's very clear that house's pain is physical, and the writers use this to morally justify his vicodin use. this is obviously not a full-throated defence of opioid users, but it is at least pointing to a position on chronic pain that allows for the possibility that for some people, long-term use of drugs with a high addiction potential and side effects is legitimately the best thing. but, this messaging is also undercut by the fact that it's primetime television, they need to make drama, and there are definitely also episodes where house is framed as potentially lying about his pain, or at least mistaking a somatic problem for a physical one, which the writers often (not always, but often) present as evidence that actually, house shouldn't be trusted to make his own decisions about drug use, and ideally should be 'de-toxed' and probably sent to cbt or whatever. of course all of these considerations are also contextualised by the fact that house is, again, not just a patient but a doctor: his right and ability to make these types of calls for himself is, it's suggested, a result of his having attained medical education and credentials. the patients who come to be treated by him are seldom, if ever, given this same level of consideration or presumed to have sufficient self-awareness to make their own medical decisions. this isn't to say they're portrayed entirely unsympathetically, but ultimately the narrative engine of the show relies on house being the smartest guy in the room (though ofc, sometimes tragically 'held back by his addiction').

so, although there are moments on the show that genuinely transgress some of the norms of the med-drama genre, i have never agreed with people who thought that the show as a whole was presenting any sustained critique of the medical system, the treatment of chronic pain/disability, or the power-imbalanced doctor-patient relationship. ultimately all authority on house md is supposed to emanate from the physician, or the physician's superiors (cuddy as a 'check' on house, though sometimes a failed one! again because of the need to generate drama for like 140 episodes), and at its most radical the show is really only capable of presenting house himself as an out-of-control aberration whose existence strains the existing system rather than being produced by it.

this is where i think the comparison to the cop show genre becomes more clarifying. house md never made a secret of being an interpolation of the detective genre, specifically sherlock holmes. however, i'm not sure i've ever really seen writing on the show that analyses what effect this actually has on house. like police, doctors are tasked with maintaining certain social norms; the dichotomy between policing and medicine isn't even a solid line, as criminality is frequently rhetorically construed as a pathology in itself and medical authorities can and do have recourse to carceral systems in order to discipline and confine recalcitrant patients, the 'criminally insane', addicts, and so forth. (policing has historically also been understood in a more expansive sense than how we use the word today; our understanding of the medical/public health system as separate from police authority is arguably more to do with university credentialling than the actual exercise of social and political power).

so, if we want to be serious about the portrayal of medicine in popular culture (i am always serious about this) then we're necessarily talking about broader systems of power, social control, and discipline, and doubly so on a show like house that is explicitly inspired by detective fiction. this is where house md is most ideologically objectionable to me: as with the trope of the cop who breaks all the rules, house is basically positioned in one of two ways throughout the show. either he's a lone genius who alone is willing to achieve noble ends (cure) through distasteful means (breaking into patients' homes, berating them, performing risky interventions on them, &c), or—and this is rarer on house but does happen—he's portrayed as genuinely crossing an ethical line, in which case he's a kind of monstrous aberration from the normal, ethical functioning of the medical system, often represented metonymously by the objections that cuddy, wilson, or house's underlings raise. in both of these cases, as with copaganda, the function is ultimately to reinforce the idea that doctors, though occasionally capable of human error, are prima facie wiser than their patients, looking out for their patients' best interests, and performing noble social roles as healers. house, ofc, is very rarely willing to admit that he has any underlying ethical motivations, though much of the show is driven by the flashes where he is revealed to 'secretly' care about another person (often wilson) and anyway, the construction of an ethical society in which all individual actors are motivated solely by selfish interests is a very established rhetorical move for those interested in defending liberal capitalist societies (cf. charles darwin, thomas malthus, adam smith, &c).

because of television's need to generate profit via audience engagement, house md always relied on a certain level of shock or at least provocation in order to sustain itself. so, there are certain aberrations from the more overtly doctor-valorising medical dramas, like the suggestion (sometimes tongue-in-cheek) that house was better at his job when he was mildly high on opioids. this was, for the reasons outlined above, never a serious entry into political critique, but it was at least refreshing in a certain way as a departure from, eg, the portrayal of addiction and drug use that we see on grey's, which is completely limited to the medicalised AA narrative of 'recovery' as a battle against the malevolent intervention of an external chemical agent. which is to say that although house md is ultimately reactionary in the way we should expect from an american tv show, it did at least dabble in a certain level of caustic iconoclasm that allowed limited departures from the genre conventions. even with what was ultimately a pretty solid vindication of the anti-opioid narrative, the show does stand out in my mind as one of the few very popular presentations of any kind of alternative stance on chronic drug use. that it's usually put in house's own mouth means it is occasionally legitimated by his epistemological authority as a physician, though ofc ultimately this authority is challenged not through a critique of the medical system, but by presenting house as individually and aberrantly licentious, undisciplined, and insane—and his chronic pain/disability are both a justification for this, and a shorthand for conveying it.

[andros-paidophonoio]

My take on TSOA and Miller in general just to put it out there is that I like her writing and the way she describes a kind of idyllic, kind of proto paradisial love, it is very evocative and shows a very elegant and intimate presentation of affection in a way that I can see why ppl resonate with it. And the difference between her and some works attempting to imitate that style is....pretty stark lol. I think the stories are executed well in what they are going for, it's just that what is being executed--the approach to comfort and romance, the particular fantasy and desire being displayed is not something that suits my personal tastes or general approach to stuff at all. And this doesn't have to do necessarily even with historical or mythological "accuracy" but more how the stories themselves work for me, as works within their own universes.

(Some of my breakdown of my opinions under the cut. It's not "hate" bc I genuinely do not hate or even really dislike the works. I'm more trying to express my personal thoughts, and I'm happy when I do read things that make me have a lot of thoughts. Also I talk once again about Til We Have Faces)

I think what gets me about both books and the depiction of the ideal love vs cruel world etc is that they are stories that want to believe in the Inherent Internal Goodness of the characters despite their actions and seeks to kind of justify them morally by emphasizing their vulnerability and kindness in the society and world. Which is fine and all, but one thing that I personally find interesting is when one can be interested in and sympathize with characters but also you can see the way they hold and exercise and exploit power over others. Especially in historical settings. I get that especially for more romantic genres, there's a need for some handwaving of this so we can focus on happiness and arc of the focus characters, but it feels honest to me if they're appropriately terrible and unlikeable at times.

I get the fantasy that's kind of being presented is wanting to Be Good and Just and Beloved and have a blissful harmonious familial dynamic but that being in conflict with The Society...if I had to sum it up its very much that 2010s Tumblr "We Deserve a Soft Epilogue my Love" sentiment. Along with a desire and and love for men who are gentle and well-meaning and who have primarily *emotional* reciprocating expression... I get it ...but once again it doesn't really dig deeply into the discomfort of certain dynamics aside from the more acceptable "we must identify with the protagonist so they must be the Persecuted, and those outside are the Persecutors" aka the Homophobic/Toxic Masculinity/Rapist archetypes who are out there, Other.

Personally, after I read and was thinking about these books for a while I pulled out my copy of Til We Have Faces and revisited that. Now, I'm biased bc it's one of my favorite books, but it strikes me a lot as an interesting book to read parallel to Circe. Both retelling a classic myth from the perspective of an antagonistic figure, where a female character is regarded as ugly and abject (and a big source of the abjection coming from an abusive, powerful father) and because of that abjection, find and take comfort in other sources of power and influence. The stories are very different of course in both intention, but I felt like one thing I liked about TWHF is how it allowed its main character, Psyche's ugly stepsister Orual, to both be a rejected figure and one who suffers, but also show well, the way she also exercises privileges and power over people. She is treated terribly, rejected from being gendered as a desirable "woman" and a woman's role bc of her ugliness (while also being denigrated for being a woman), she desires love she has been denied violently, and it's not surprising that she acts in unsympathetic and judgmental ways. Throughout all this, She is also a princess, and later queen who believes she is descended from the gods, and in her society controls and sometimes takes the lives of her slaves, servants, and subjects. There is no contradiction; one can be a victim and also Lord power over others that you do not even realize. Her story and emotional journey is very interesting because it does not shy away from this complexity and discomfort, and it presents a world that is (in that novel, fictitious) but feels very ancient and alien in its practices and values.

In contrast, the worlds of Circe, Circe is not really given a chance to exercise power uncomfortably over anyone in the same way--she does do her cool Witch Behaviors but they are always Justified Actions, against once again The External Persecutors --violent rapist men, or Heartless gods. We don't need to face the discomfort of what it would mean for her to say, have attendants or servants or have a kind of hierarchy or what it means to. She basically Bootstraps herself into her power and is the Underdog the whole time.

Similarly in tsoa, we are presented with the kind and peace-loving Patroclus who is once again the Persecuted (by this time the External Homophobic Mom lol), and it goes out of its way to show his empathy with the womensuffering and the pain at The Society that causes the forbidden love to be forbidden. And maybe all this dancing around makes it easier for the average person to identify with the main characters bc whew who would want to identify with anyone who does anything BAD or in any way right???

But the thing is for me is that maybe we DONT "deserve" the Soft Epilogue, maybe, like Orual, we as people are a mix of shitty and exploitative in ways we refuse to acknowledge, even as we are tormented by our own Persecutors and traumas and lack of power in our lives and etc. but that doesn't mean u can't desire and seek happiness or be someone interesting and worth empathizing with... Idk I'm just not interested in the artistic tendency to want the character to be The Good Person, and the way we show someone is The Good Person is to show How Persecuted They Are, to be worth understanding and loving.

That's just my insta-thoughts, may expand later (I would like to write a more in depth analysis of TWHF bc I'm tired of the Very Christian analysis being the only one) but yeah. Idk in how this translates to my fanwork or whatever I'm not interested in justifying anything anyone does or "defending" or attacking faves. I'm interested in what I'm interested in, and it won't always line up with everything else. But that's ok, there's always room for different things, I'm carving out my spot of fun here like everyone else.

[beesmygod]

i know an anon suggested ocd to you the other day, and i didn't see the original message but i know it was a bit fraught. but i am a longtime follower who has ocd who also thinks you may have ocd. and with the reblog you just did i'm like well, maybe i can say a little bit.

i've been sitting on sending a message for a long time because (1) trying to diagnose someone on anon is so fucking weird, i am very aware and ashamed of this weirdness in sending this to you, don't worry, (2) it seemed so obvious to me and you've already talked about other mental health issues and such that i was like "no, surely she must already know she has ocd and is just choosing not to talk about it (completely understandable, i don't do it on main), and then i would also be weird for forcing her to out herself".

the thing with morality-adjacent ocd is that a lot of the base thoughts, in a vacuum, are fine. if you hurt somebody some level of shame is good so you can reflect and correct your behaviour. caring about doing the right thing and refusing to do things that violate your principles is good. it's the intensity and all-consumingness of the thoughts that is the problem.

i mean i say morality but it applies to other ocd too. you should wash your hands and keep your place clean as much as you can, but obsessively avoiding contamination by washing your hands for half an hour straight... etc. it's ultimately egodystonic - it takes the thing you hate the idea of the most and convinces you that is what you really are.

like you are genuinely an admirably principled person, more than many, and it's good that you do the right thing instead of the easy thing. but your anguish about like, not contributing enough good to the world as a comics artist and things like that screams morality ocd self-punishment to me... and repeatedly talking about it feels like a confession compulsion. which i also have, kind of! i feel the compulsion *to* confess, but i don't, because if anyone forgave me or told me it wasn't a big deal they obviously haven't formed a sound judgment because (1) they are morally depraved themselves, (2) i didn't explain myself properly and they didn't understand why it's bad, (3) they're my friend and being more permissive with me because they like me, so they're too biased.

this was long, sorry. but you're a good artist and i like your work and i hate seeing you suffer like this. and if you really don't have ocd, well, i'm just another weirdo armchair psychologist anon vanishing into the void.

i appreciate this and thank you for being kind+brave enough to send this while medication juggling is really making me insane new ways. i have not been diagnosed w/ocd and only started kicking the idea around not too long ago when cornered by the inescapable nature of my thoughts/feeling, the fact that no one understands what the hell i'm ever talking about, and seeing signs of it in someone else very close to me. and i guess incidentally learning more about how it develops/is treated.

lol your bit abt internally responding to how ppl try to comfort your "confessions" rings very true. i never thought of my posts as confessions but like im desperately trying to get a hold on a reality that makes sense to me because when reality doesnt make sense, it feels perilous and fleeting. like, doesnt anyone else feel like this? why am i the only one who sees this? how am i supposed to understand what i'm supposed to be doing to live a life that isnt equivalent to a sewage drain that empties out into people's houses if i cant even understand whats happening?

[cosmicjoke]

Killing is not always wrong, and the act of killing doesn't automatically make someone a bad person:

Yeahhhh, okay, so as usual, these same idiots are completely misconstruing my words and points.

Let's, for a moment, just accept the absurd premise that killing is always morally wrong, and can never, no matter the circumstances surrounding the act, be justified. Let's just accept that premise for a moment, no matter how absurd or childish or rooted in actually harmful naivety it is.

The argument being made is that Levi, because he's killed, is a bad person. That's the argument. That because he's committed a "bad act", that automatically makes him a "bad person", regardless of the reason or circumstances surrounding his so-called bad act. The argument, then, boils down to ones actions being the sum total of a person's character, and there is no room from there on for any other considerations or factors in judging that person's character. You've killed someone, so, no matter the reason, you're a bad person.

I really wish I didn't have to explain why this type of thinking is wrong, but given the amount of morons liking and reblogging this person's post, I guess I'm forced to.

Even supposing someone commits a "bad act", (again, accepting the premise that killing is always wrong) that in and of itself doesn't make the person who's killed a "bad person". A person's character shouldn't be judged on their actions alone, especially when those actions are viewed in isolation, without considering the mitigating circumstances surrounding them. What a person should be judged by is their actual character, who they are, how they regard and treat others, what they believe, what they feel, etc… Is someone who kills in self-defense automatically a bad person, even if they feel deep regret and sadness over having had to kill someone to save themselves? That's what this person is saying, and it's patently ridiculous and false.

Again, Levi killing, even if you accept the premise that all killing is wrong, doesn't make Levi a bad person. What would make Levi a bad person would be if he killed and enjoyed it (like Zeke) or if he didn't care about what happened to other people, if he felt no empathy or sympathy for anyone but himself, if he enjoyed watching others suffer, if he felt nothing at the loss of life, if he selfishly put his own well being and desires over everyone else's wants and needs. THAT would make Levi a bad person. Not the act of killing alone, but him having a lack of feeling or empathy, remorse or sadness over the act.

This person doesn't seem to get that good people can do bad things, which is one of the central themes of AoT. They don't seem to understand either that we're not saying Levi is good because he kills, or that his killing is good because he's good (why would anyone ever think that's what we're saying?). We're not saying killing is good at all, but that it can be right, depending on the circumstances surrounding the act, and we're saying Levi is good because he's a totally selfless individual who cares genuinely and deeply about others, who sacrifices his own well being, both physical and mental, to help others, no matter the consequences to himself, and that his acts of violence, whether you regard them as justifiable or not, are committed for selfless and understandable reasons, like saving his own life or the lives of others, because he cares about and wants to help people, and are never motivated by things like greed, lust, self-satisfaction, self-aggrandizement or for petty revenge. Regardless of whether you think his violence is right or wrong, justifiable or not, it's that quality of compassion, kindness, empathy and selflessness in Levi that marks him out as a good man and a hero. To deny him that is disgusting and shows a level of stupidly blunt judgmentalism that shouldn't ever be accepted in any substantive debate over this sort of thing.

Beyond that, this idea that killing is always wrong and that killing in self-defense will always and without fail lead to justifying outright murder is nothing but a childish fallacy. There's even a term for it, called the "Slippery Slope Fallacy":

Our justice system differentiates between murder and justifiable homicide for a reason. You can't judge every act of killing the same way, or from the same principle of it always being wrong, no matter what. The only thing that sort of thinking leads to is mass persecution, punishment and oppression, both of thought and action. To view anything through that sort of black and white lens of moral correctness is to deny reality itself and the complexity of both the world we live in and of human beings themselves.

There are countless examples I could give in which killing can be and is regarded as justifiable and correct, but there's really no point in me making this post any longer than it already is. Anyone with a functioning brain and that actually applies logic to their thinking should be able to figure out what scenarios and situations and circumstances would render killing the right and correct course of action.

And that's all I'm going to say on this subject. It shouldn't even need to be explained. But, you know, tumblr and its users woeful lack of critical thinking skills strikes again.

[halogenwarrior]

I feel like the large amount of capital-r Rationalist Worm fans has really negatively influenced some people’s interpretations of Taylor and her motivations. I sometimes see people treating her as this sort of platonic idea of utilitarianism or whatever moral philosophy you think she subscribes to, whose strengths and flaws are entirely the strengths and flaws of that philosophy in its ideal form. And having read the “rational fic writing advice of Eliezer “famous Harry Potter fic writer and comparer of Taylor to Hillary Clinton” Yudkowsky I can see where this idea comes from, because this is exactly how he says characters should ideally be written. He says he dislikes “gray and gray morality” where everyone is shown to have their flaws and hypocrisy, instead he likes conflicts where both sides are truly good rather than gray and the conflict is that they are completely true to different philosophies of what good is. To some extent, he has a point in this; there are works that use the existence of hypocrisy and self-serving as a “cheat” out of and easy answer to a conflict that really is supposed to be a clash between two pure “good” philosophical ideas (Pokemon Black and White my beloathed...). But in the end, characters who are just platonic ideas of philosophies are for philosophical essays and tracts; literature is for portraying humans in all of their psychological complexity, sometimes self-serving motives, and ways that, due to their individual humanity, they aren’t just walking philosophical mouthpieces and don’t match up completely with an ideology.

That being said, Taylor is actually quite human (and a human teenager at that, with all the expected immaturity) in this way and from author comments it seems that this is completely intentional. She doesn’t simply state her belief that Benevolent Warlordism is Better than the Corrupt Current Authority throughout the story and spend the whole time as the embodiment of that ideal. Instead, she starts out wanting to be a hero, and then she has a complete failure of her typically paranoid mindset with regards to Coil (taking him at face value of wanting to improve the city even though every politician says that and look how that usually turns out) because it’s what she WANTS to believe, so she can keep her new friends after feeling isolated while morally sanctioning her actions, and then does a surprise Pikachu face when it turns out Coil actually does bad things and her support is helping him do bad things, then spends the next few arcs running around trying to fix the one bad thing she feels particularly guilty of. It’s only after already setting herself up as a warlord to fix said guilt, solely caring about Dinah with the people she saves being incidental, that she justifies herself as the lesser of two evils compared to the corrupt status quo, a lot of the corruption of which she didn’t even KNOW ABOUT before already going ahead and deciding she was going to be a criminal. I’m saying this with genuine love for her character and acknowledgement that she isn’t a horrible monster and does some pretty admirable stuff, especially given her age and situation, and she certainly was always cynical, paranoid and judgmental with a determination for justice even if she didn’t know all the details of what was wrong with her world at the beginning, but it’s ridiculous and detracts from understanding of her character as a character and not a rationalist talking point to see her as some pure philosophical ideal from start to finish who is never making up her ideology as she goes along.

[its-not-a-pen]

Bastard Corner: Maffic Gabbro—the magma tycoon

from: Weekend at Omelas (quick, grab the kid and run!)

Gabbro is a greedy, corrupt, tyrant whose temper is as explosive as his lava mine. He doesn’t give a damn about his workers and treats his staff like objects. His character was loosely inspired by the “corrupt official”贪官 archetype from classic chinese dramas.

Favourite detail: Gabbro is the only one with dialogue in this scene which makes it sound like he’s talking to himself. This reflects his inflated ego, his word is the only one that matters around here, everyone else is literally a non-entity. 

God his POV is SO FUN to write. He’s so cruel and petty, which is very carthartic in it’s own way. Firstly, it holds a mirror up to ourselves. We’ve all said snide, hateful and judgmental things at some point. Sometimes it takes self-recognition in the other to realise “hang on…am I the asshole?” But most importantly, what he doesn’t say is just as important. Gabbro has this way of obfuscating and rationalizing his own misdeeds and it’s kind of fun to read between the lines to find out what he’s actually saying. 

Gabbro takes a genuine liking to undercover Qui-Gon Jinn which goes a long way to humanizing him. I really like this touch because it adds dimension to his character. Evil people don’t think they’re evil, from Gabbro’s perspective he’s just a ruthless businessman with exacting standards. Everyone’s looking out for themselves, afterall, why shouldn’t he try to get rich? 

Just like everyone else, he recognizes and appreciates positive qualities in people. Qui-Gon is humble, intelligent and curious. It makes sense that gabbro, who spends a lot of time surrounded by sycophants, opportunists and nepotism, would really like him.

well well well, if it isn't the consequences of his actions. Gabbro is in a hell of his own making. He holds himself above everyone and feels deeply isolated as a result. he demands total obedience and ruthlessness from his staff and hates them for it. He’s fabulously wealthy but has no friends and a string of failed marriages. Underneath it all he’s kind of just a sad, lonely old man.

(btw Gabbro is a vessel of the narrative, he’s not an analogue to any real person. Actual Billionaires 100% suck. they're not deep they're just greedy)

I really like this role reversal because Gabbro is actually the one who is emotionally honest while Qui-Gon is being manipulative and masking his intentions. It’s a nice little moral grey patch.

Did you notice Qui-Gon never says who he is or why he’s here? He never outright lies, Gabbro just made a bunch of assumptions. 

Lets take a moment to appreciate that this mf just threatened to sue the jedi order.

I try to give my characters a few positive traits to balance their negative ones. For all his faults, Gabbro is NOT a coward. Even when Qui-Gon has him on the ropes, he never backs down or comes close to confessing. 

Just when Gabbro thinks he’s gotten away with it… BAM! The safety inspection comes out of left field and wacks him over the head. I still laugh about it. It’s fucking Kafkaesque. This guy gets away with ILLEGAL ARMS DEALING and gets rekt by…fucking space OSHA. Its like al capone getting away with murder and jailed for tax evasion. Theres only one force more deadly and soulcrushing than the dark side and it is BUREAUCRACY.

[thiefking]

Re: your post about tone tags - I feel like people who don't have these kinds of communication issues can also get side tracked by them as a be-all end-all solution, even when tone isn't the cause.

One of my problems is not being able to read "courtesy sugarcoating", as an example, when someone says "this is maybe bothering me a tiny bit, but I don't know" when what they think is "this is bothering me a lot, and I would really like you to do something about it, but saying it like that feels too rough". Similarly they treat my words as the product of sugarcoating, and think I'm always angrier or more upset than I am.

A person might see and start to use tone tags to fix that, and think they should have worked, because they don't really understand the nuances of different kinds of missed social cues. I hope I'm making sense, sorry, I'm very tired.

all made sense to me boss! and you're completely right, the advent of /hj (half-joking) is a good example of how— and i do not mean to imply only neurotypicals/people with no issue reading tone use this tag and (i have to keep stressing this because tumblr is tumblr) this is not a moral judgment, but— the system can be used as just, like, a secondary way to not say what you mean while thinking or pretending that you ARE saying what you mean. the term half-joking means a million things depending on who you ask. i classify that very post as being one made in half-jest, but what does that mean to someone else? to me, that means i wrote it in a humorous tone and i was silly on purpose, in particular where i suggest that you tack on a whole bunch of parentheticals at once including (scary), but my thought behind it was genuine. but for someone else, they'd just call that a regular joke, and to them half-joking means something else entirely. even the definition i just gave for my interpretation isn't solid: that's just what it means to Me, in that specific example. but people who use /hj generally seem to assume the other person will know what THEIR version is, intuitively, even if they themselves have issues with reading tone!

speaking in general, people will always be facetious, hyperbolic, and sarcastic, and they will always sugarcoat, and they will always lie on purpose sometimes, and they will always lie accidentally, whether by omission or by misusing a word they didn't know the real definition of or any other number of ways. tone indicators, whether they be tone tags or parentheses, will not fix this, i'm definitely not gonna claim that either of them would, and i don't think doing any of that is inherently a bad thing. humans are just gonna do that kinda thing, even autistic people. however, i do wholeheartedly believe typing out entire words, rather than truncating them to 3 or less letters when there are only 26 letters and nearly 200k words in active use in the english language, is a better idea to get things across and have people actually understand each other, you know? and with any luck, typing it out entirely might encourage someone to be a little more forthcoming with what they mean because they can explain the reasons they're bothered by something. even if they're still sugarcoating, if you have a reason for it, that's something you can address and ask about, and with any luck resolve before it gets out of hand

[southshoretides]

Digging this one out of my drafts given the recent round of discourse about whether Scott Alexander is a 'right-wing writer' or not, and what that might imply about his judgment or character. From the link:

The silence stems partly, one senior leader in an organization said, from a fear of feeding right-wing trolls who are working to undermine the left. Adopting their language and framing feels like surrendering to malign forces, but ignoring it has only allowed the issues to fester. "The right has labeled it 'cancel culture' or 'callout culture'," he said, "so when we talk about our own movement, it's hard because we're using the frame of the right."

So you have what is basically a right-wing fantasy come true: zealous young activists destroying liberal advocacy orgs from the inside by turning everything into a social justice game and their superiors being too afraid of them to criticize them publicly, but they're damn sure they're not going to give conservatives an ounce of credit for accurately predicting it.

Personally I think conservatism is one of several lenses with which you can view the world, a series of claims and predictions about human and institutional behavior that are sometimes borne out by reality and sometimes not. Even when they aren't, I can usually get a feeling for why they feel that way.

I find this superior to the way lots of people here interact with the concept, which is to treat it as something both incurably evil and impossibly stupid, such that you really can approach objective truth and moral perfection by closely tracking anything that gets called conservative or too-close-to conservative or even not-actively-hostile-to conservative and just go whatever the opposite direction is. If that becomes untenable, just redefine your terms. It's a game, and the win condition is never admitting you're wrong. Everyone plays this game, which is why I've gotten so cynical about how farcical and pointless activism is, seeing it play out over and over and over again.

I'm not so dumb as to have to genuinely ask why people are hesitant to believe that people they hate might be right about some issue they disagree on. But if you're trying to rise above the level of base tribal conformity and your ape-brain telling you to divide the world into enemy and ally--and most people in this conversation are trying to do that, even if it's in an ironic, post-rationalist way--acting like a single word taints everything with which it's even mildly associated is not going to help.

And there's a lot of people who recognize that the Woke Wave is (conditionally, gradually) breaking apart, that lots of things were taboo'd in that 2014-2021 period for no good reason, and that they're not going to do that again, they're going to be truth-seeking rational analysts who aren't bound by cultural taboos or words-are-spells magical thinking, they still freak out at the idea that they might be defending a conservative notion, or mingling with conservatives. And I think that's kind of more pathetic than someone who's a partisan attack dog and knows it.

Because if 'conservative' as a concept is so devoid of truth and utility as to have a purely negative correlation with both, then articles like the above shouldn't exist in the first place, because the situation they describe should be impossible. Eager young progressives should help liberal advocacy orgs, not destroy them. Companies wouldn't be actively trying to filter out social justice advocates the way Argumate quotes up there.

So is Scott Alexander a right-winger? Who cares? He wrote about a lot of issues that caused him to break with the left, and stuck to his guns because he thought he was right about those issues, and there's a larger number of people willing to admit he was right now than five years ago. If he's wrong about the crime-driven hyperinflationary social collapse predictions, then he'll just be wrong about it. He doesn't self-ID as a conservative and were it not for the insistence on ideological purity that pushed left-skeptic libertarians, liberals, and centrists to break bread with the right in the first place, this conversation likely isn't even happening.

The Intercept had an article “Elephant in the Zoom” that would be right up your alley

Yeah. Glad I don't have anything riding on liberal advocacy these days

[cptsd-skywalker]

After reading through your blog, I have to conclude that you think that patients with CPTSD are all ticking time bombs who are always going to be violent and abusive and cannot ever change themselves for the better. And since you have CPTSD yourself, that means you think you will never be able to improve yourself, and the people in your life who have to live with you should just get used to how you are because you’re not changing. And that sounds very lonely to me; I too have CPTSD, but ever since I started to take an active role in my own healing instead of blaming everyone around me for my condition, I’ve been much happier. I hope someday you can reach the same conclusion.

This is a very cruel ask. I almost just deleted it without answering. However I think explaining myself might be worth something.

Mental health healing is not a linear journey and one must have resources to do this. I am assuming by “taking an active role” in healing you mean going to therapy and taking medication, both of which I am doing currently. Neither you or I are going to wake up tomorrow being “totally healed” you’re being mislead by your care team if you genuinely believe there is a cure for ptsd. You can be treated and it can be managed with the right resources, but it doesn’t just “go away” one day. It’s like to you mental health is an Olympics game to win and losers are just that, worthless losers. Honestly shocked that someone who claims to be so far along in the healing process would pass this kind of judgment.

For the record, if you had bothered to really read any of my posts you would know that I do not condone any of Anakin’s crimes towards others. An explanation is not an outright excuse. Understanding why he did something doesn’t mean you think what he did was the right thing to do. Furthermore, there are more factors in peoples choices in the world than just morality. People do not make their choices in a vacuum. Referring to your comment that all survivors must be “ticking time bombs” to me, I would like to add that under the right set of circumstances just about anyone can find their humanity tested to its limits. That doesn’t mean there is no right or wrong or that the choices we make don’t matter. After all, I’d Anakin choosing to overthrow the emperor matters than his choice to hunt jedi also matters. It’s not a one to one correlation. Diagnosing Anakin with CPTSD or BPD doesn’t sweep anything under the rug so much as it acknowledges contributing factors to the whole.

Also for the record, I don’t like your undertones of “people should just live with how you are” becuase you seem to be implying that I’m an abusive person when you don’t even know me. Again the judgement is very strong here. I honestly don’t think you read any of my posts in a meaningful or thoughtful way. Just because I don’t think of Anakin as you do or through the lenses that you do doesn’t mean that I am automatically going to champion abuse in real life. That’s just ridiculous.

Anyway? I hope you don’t hardline against people in the future without any backup. If you want to take issue with something specific I’ve said then please let’s have a real discussion with sources. I have many posts deep diving into why I believe Anakin fits the criteria for CPTSD. The morality of his actions is a totally separate thing.

[qqueenofhades]

Hi. I’m curious. What did you mean by “women who read fiction might get Bad Ideas!!!” has just reached its latest and stupidest form via tumblr purity culture.? I haven’t seen any of this but I’m new to tumblr.

Oh man. You really want to get me into trouble on, like, my first day back, don’t you?

Pretty much all of this has been explained elsewhere by people much smarter than me, so this isn’t necessarily going to say anything new, but I’ll do my best to synthesize and summarize it. As ever, it comes with the caveat that it is my personal interpretation, and is not intended as the be-all, end-all. You’ll definitely run across it if you spend any time on Tumblr (or social media in general, including Twitter, and any other fandom-related spaces). This will get long.

In short: in the nineteenth century, when Gothic/romantic literature became popular and women were increasingly able to read these kinds of novels for fun, there was an attendant moral panic over whether they, with their weak female brains, would be able to distinguish fiction from reality, and that they might start making immoral or inappropriate choices in their real life as a result. Obviously, there was a huge sexist and misogynistic component to this, and it would be nice to write it off entirely as just hysterical Victorian pearl-clutching, but that feeds into the “lol people in the past were all much stupider than we are today” kind of historical fallacy that I often and vigorously shut down. (Honestly, I’m not sure how anyone can ever write the “omg medieval people believed such weird things about medicine!” nonsense again after what we’ve gone through with COVID, but that is a whole other rant.) The thinking ran that women shouldn’t read novels for fear of corrupting their impressionable brains, or if they had to read novels at all, they should only be the Right Ones: i.e., those that came with a side of heavy-handed and explicit moralizing so that they wouldn’t be tempted to transgress. Of course, books trying to hammer their readers over the head with their Moral Point aren’t often much fun to read, and that’s not the point of fiction anyway. Or at least, it shouldn’t be.

Fast-forward to today, and the entire generation of young, otherwise well-meaning people who have come to believe that being a moral person involves only consuming the “right” kind of fictional content, and being outrageously mean to strangers on the internet who do not agree with that choice. There are a lot of factors contributing to this. First, the advent of social media and being subject to the judgment of people across the world at all times has made it imperative that you demonstrate the “right” opinions to fit in with your peer-group, and on fandom websites, that often falls into a twisted, hyper-critical, so-called “progressivism” that diligently knows all the social justice buzzwords, but has trouble applying them in nuance, context, and complicated real life. To some extent, this obviously is not a bad thing. People need to be critical of the media they engage with, to know what narratives the creator(s) are promoting, the tropes they are using, the conclusions that they are supporting, and to be able to recognize and push back against genuinely harmful content when it is produced – and this distinction is critical – by professional mainstream creators. Amateur, individual fan content is another kettle of fish. There is a difference between critiquing a professional creator (though social media has also made it incredibly easy to atrociously abuse them) and attacking your fellow fan and peer, who is on the exact same footing as you as a consumer of that content.

Obviously, again, this doesn’t mean that you can’t call out people who are engaging in actually toxic or abusive behavior, fans or otherwise. But certain segments of Tumblr culture have drained both those words (along with “gaslighting”) of almost all critical meaning, until they’re applied indiscriminately to “any fictional content that I don’t like, don’t agree with, or which doesn’t seem to model healthy behavior in real life” and “anyone who likes or engages with this content.” Somewhere along the line, a reactionary mindset has been formed in which the only fictional narratives or relationships are those which would be “acceptable” in real life, to which I say…. what? If I only wanted real life, I would watch the news and only read non-fiction. Once again, the underlying fear, even if it’s framed in different terms, is that the people (often women) enjoying this content can’t be trusted to tell the difference between fiction and reality, and if they like “problematic” fictional content, they will proceed to seek it out in their real life and personal relationships. And this is just… not true.

As I said above, critical media studies and thoughtful consumption of entertainment are both great things! There have been some great metas written on, say, the Marvel Cinematic Universe and how it is increasingly relying on villains who have outwardly admirable motives (see: the Flag Smashers in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier) who are then stigmatized by their anti-social, violent behavior and attacks on innocent people, which is bad even as the heroes also rely on violence to achieve their ends. This is a clever way to acknowledge social anxieties – to say that people who identify with the Flag Smashers are right, to an extent, but then the instant they cross the line into violence, they’re upsetting the status quo and need to be put down by the heroes. I watched TFATWS and obviously enjoyed it. I have gone on a Marvel re-watching binge recently as well. I like the MCU! I like the characters and the madcap sci-fi adventures! But I can also recognize it as a flawed piece of media that I don’t have to accept whole-cloth, and to be able to criticize some of the ancillary messages that come with it. It doesn’t have to be black and white.

When it comes to shipping, moreover, the toxic culture of “my ship is better than your ship because it’s Better in Real Life” ™ is both well-known and in my opinion, exhausting and pointless. As also noted, the whole point of fiction is that it allows us to create and experience realities that we don’t always want in real life. I certainly enjoy plenty of things in fiction that I would definitely not want in reality: apocalyptic space operas, violent adventures, and yes, garbage men. A large number of my ships over the years have been labeled “unhealthy” for one reason or another, presumably because they don’t adhere to the stereotype of the coffee-shop AU where there’s no tension and nobody ever makes mistakes or is allowed to have serious flaws. And I’m not even bagging on coffee-shop AUs! Some people want to remove characters from a violent situation and give them that fluff and release from the nonstop trauma that TV writers merrily inflict on them without ever thinking about the consequences. Fanfiction often focuses on the psychology and healing of characters who have been through too much, and since that’s something we can all relate to right now, it’s a very powerful exercise. As a transformative and interpretive tool, fanfic is pretty awesome.

The problem, again, comes when people think that fic/fandom can only be used in this way, and that going the other direction, and exploring darker or complicated or messy dynamics and relationships, is morally bad. As has been said before: shipping is not activism. You don’t get brownie points for only having “healthy” ships (and just my personal opinion as a queer person, these often tend to be heterosexual white ships engaging in notably heteronormative behavior) and only supporting behavior in fiction that you think is acceptable in real life. As we’ve said, there is a systematic problem in identifying what that is. Ironically, for people worried about Women Getting Ideas by confusing fiction and reality, they’re doing the same thing, and treating fiction like reality. Fiction is fiction. Nobody actually dies. Nobody actually gets hurt. These people are not real. We need to normalize the idea of characters as figments of a creator’s imagination, not actual people with their own agency. They exist as they are written, and by the choice of people whose motives can be scrutinized and questioned, but they themselves are not real. Nor do characters reflect the author’s personal views. Period.

This feeds into the fact that the internet, and fandom culture, is not intended as a “safe space” in the sense that no questionable or triggering content can ever be posted. Archive of Our Own, with its reams of scrupulous tagging and requests for you to explicitly click and confirm that you are of age to see M or E-rated content, is a constant target of the purity cultists for hosting fictional material that they see as “immoral.” But it repeatedly, unmistakably, directly asks you for your consent to see this material, and if you then act unfairly victimized, well… that’s on you. You agreed to look at this, and there are very few cases where you didn’t know what it entailed. Fandom involves adults creating contents for adults, and while teenagers and younger people can and do participate, they need to understand this fact, rather than expecting everything to be a PG Disney movie.

When I do write my “dark” ships with garbage men, moreover, they always involve a lot of the man being an idiot, being bluntly called out for an idiot, and learning healthier patterns of behavior, which is one of the fundamental patterns of romance novels. But they also involve an element of the woman realizing that societal standards are, in fact, bullshit, and she can go feral every so often, as a treat. But even if I wrote them another way, that would still be okay! There are plenty of ships and dynamics that I don’t care for and don’t express in my fic and fandom writing, but that doesn’t mean I seek out the people who do like them and reprimand them for it. I know plenty of people who use fiction, including dark fiction, in a cathartic way to process real-life trauma, and that’s exactly the role – one of them, at least – that fiction needs to be able to fulfill. It would be terribly boring and limited if we were only ever allowed to write about Real Life and nothing else. It needs to be complicated, dark, escapist, unreal, twisted, and whatever else. This means absolutely zilch about what the consumers of this fiction believe, act, or do in their real lives.

Once more, I do note the misogyny underlying this. Nobody, after all, seems to care what kind of books or fictional narratives men read, and there’s no reflection on whether this is teaching them unhealthy patterns of behavior, or whether it predicts how they’ll act in real life. (There was some of that with the “do video games cause mass shootings?”, but it was a straw man to distract from the actual issues of toxic masculinity and gun culture.) Certain kinds of fiction, especially historical fiction, romance novels, and fanfic, are intensely gendered and viewed as being “women’s fiction” and therefore hyper-criticized, while nobody’s asking if all the macho-man potboiler military-intrigue tough-guy stereotypical “men’s fiction” is teaching them bad things. So the panic about whether your average woman on the internet is reading dark fanfic with an Unhealthy Ship (zomgz) is, in my opinion, misguided at best, and actively destructive at worst.

[transmutationisms]

can you really chose to engage with a moralizing force without the values of that force having an effect on your decision? conversion therapy is an easier example to talk about because its more commonly understood as normative more than anything else (how could one choose conversion therapy without that normative pressure?). but honestly i think this is a feature of advice in general

totally fair question & for the record, this is a huge part of the reason i have more or less taken myself 'off the psychiatric grid' so to speak lol. there are basically two main reasons i'm still cautious about making a blanket judgment about the potential for therapy / other interventions to ever be useful as anything other than a normalising / moralising force.

first, it's just hard to sweep all of these things into one category with comparable consequences. even if we stick to 'drugs prescribed by a psychiatrist that you take on your own time at home', there's a world of difference between, say, stimulants and antipsychotics. both are prescribed because the psych is trying to make you 'normal' and 'functional' (able to work, compliant, &c) but stimulants are, like, fun, and for most people and usage patterns are relatively safe. i know lots of people who get them prescribed and then use them to various non-sanctioned ends; i have also done that extensively and have zero regrets. antipsychotics, on the other hand, come with a raft of incredibly harmful effects and long-term health damage, and don't even produce any kind of comparable pleasurable state. it's hard to imagine anyone actually freely choosing antipsychotics in a situation where they genuinely have no social or economic pressure to do so, and are given full knowledge of the risks they're taking on. like, it's hard to come up with literally any reason for these drugs to exist, or be prescribed or taken, besides violent efforts to make people 'act normal' and be employable and obedient. i think the analysis here always has to take into account these types of specificities—and again, all of this is still limited to the relatively optimistic case in which someone is prescribed a drug and is taking it at home, on their own time; a situation where someone is being eg forcibly injected in an institutional setting calls for a different analysis, and obviously psychiatry has lots of other methods of coercion and force at its disposal. when it comes to placing eg talk therapy into this sort of framework, it's also tricky because i do think this depends heavily on the individual practitioner. like, you raise a fair point that "person who gives you advice and guidance on your life and problems" is a position that inherently involves moralising elements—i think that's right. i guess my hesitation here is like, is there any possibility for a situation in which, in a radically transformed social context, certain talk therapy methods could be removed from the imbalanced doctor-patient relationship; used by choice of the suffering person; and aimed not at achieving a socially-defined state of 'normality' but as a way of giving both the person and their social support network the tools and communication base to live in whatever way the individual defines as best for them? it is possible that at this point i'm getting so speculative that this is not even a useful answer to the question!

second, and this is related to what i'm getting at in the last few sentences, i'm kind of working here off a comparison to any other medical speciality. medicine generally has immense power to do harm, & is frequently deployed explicitly as a way of defining, moralising, and enforcing 'biological normality' (canguilhem &c &c). yet, at the same time, it is true that people experience pain and disease and so forth, and that i firmly believe everyone should have free and full access to what health care exists to treat such problems. the challenge here is how we as communists ruthlessly critique the existing power structures and transform the provision of health care into a way of actually caring for people, prioritising their autonomy and their values for how they live their own lives, as opposed to enforcing a notion of 'good' bodies as a method of population management. i don't mean to suggest that there's no difference between psychiatry and other medical specialties; there is. yet it is also true that affective suffering is real, and although i think much of it is worsened or directly caused by living in a world that actively saps human life-activity for the sake of reproducing capital, i also think that in a full communist utopia people would still experience mental pain and distress sometimes. my position here is that we need to 1) ruthlessly criticise psychiatry and psychiatric care as it currently exists, 2) determine which—if any!—of its tools and methods can be radically transformed into ways of actually caring for one another, without force or coercion or the imposition of externally defined and moralised ideals, and 3) either way, find ways to ensure we are capable of providing care for one another when we are in need and want it. i am not sure whether something that looks like talk therapy will ever be part of this, and my sense is that, if it were, a lot of this work would become something that friends and social supports are capable of engaging in (it is a leetle fucked up imo that we currently offload this onto a provider–client relationship! like, that says a lot about the world). again, though, i don't think any such care is actually 'care' as long as it's aimed at enforcing an external standard of normalcy, functionality, profitability, &c. what i'm interested in is how we ensure that people are able to define their own happiness and flourishing, and how, given that human life is social and collaborative, those around them can be (when wanted) part of a person's effort to live their best possible and most preferred life.

sorry if this is just a really waffling answer lmao. i guess the tl;dr is: yeah i also worry about this and i don't know!

[stillness-in-green]

Why Deku's ultimatum to Overhaul is bad and he should feel bad

This is a bit outside my normal character wheelhouse, but I really need to get a rant about it off my chest, so here goes:

The Deku and Overhaul scene in Chapter 316 is terrible. It is fucking terrible.

I took a whirl around Overhaul's tag up through when the leaks first started dropping, but didn't immediately see anyone talking about why it's so fucking terrible, only concerns about letting Overhaul see Eri (understandable, but baseless, I think), some empathy towards Overhaul's current state (totally warranted!), some snark about Deku being So Done with Overhaul (haha because who cares about Deku's stated goal of trying to understand villains, right?), and, worst of all, some cooing about how Deku was being so compassionate and noble by offering Overhaul that olive branch.

Deku was not being compassionate and noble there. Deku was being arrogant, small-minded, and so shockingly cruel that it leaves me speechless that anyone could think his stunted and hard-hearted "offer" reflects well on him.

Deku's entire motivation in this arc has been wrestling with the realization that he might have been able to avoid some of the desperate battles of his past if he'd understood more about the villains he fought. He thought of three very specific people--Stain, Muscular, and Overhaul--as he reflected, "Maybe it wouldn't have had to go that way if I'd understood them better." He then thought of Gentle Criminal and La Brava, people who he’d come to some understanding of, who he’d been able to soften the conclusion of his battle with by going along with Gentle's fiction downplaying what had happened between them. The whole line of thought was intended to contextualize his newfound desire to save Shigaraki.

It soon became apparent that Stain, Muscular and Overhaul were, in fact, encounters that he would be revisiting, as a chance to see how he'd grown since he faced them, and as a dry-run on reaching out to villains that would give him a chance to practice ways he might reach out to Shigaraki when the time comes.

Well, based on his performance so far, the idea that Deku might be able to reach Shigaraki is laughable.

Firstly, his tentative questions to Muscular were ill-timed, all wrong for the middle of a battle. Muscular laughed him off, and I don’t think there’s any version of that scenario in which he would have done otherwise. Muscular was a huge threat, gleefully violent, disinterested in conversation about his history. Obviously, right in the middle of a fight was no kind of time to try to figure out what made the man tick! But Deku didn’t get the luxury of choosing the circumstances of that encounter, so yes, that battle probably was unavoidable, certainly if Deku wanted to stop him from doing further damage. But the idea that because Deku couldn't reach him right then and there, it's impossible for Deku--or, indeed, for anyone--to reach him at all is fallacious. Not every person has to be able to like or understand every other person. If Deku couldn't reach Muscular, so what? That doesn't mean it's impossible that someone might. And that means an obligation to treat Muscular like a human being, to afford him human rights, to not stop trying to find a way to rehabilitate him, even as you safeguard other people against him.

Deku's battle with Muscular being unavoidable was not some great triumph, for all that the narrative used it as an opportunity to let him show off how far he’d come in mastering One For All. In the way that matters, the way that Deku himself is currently trying to better, he hasn't advanced at all. Imasuji Goto represented his first test in the lead-up to saving Shigaraki, and Deku failed it.

His next trial was Overhaul.* Here, again, was someone who Deku was explicitly trying to understand. So what was the one thing that was most key to understanding Overhaul's current motivation? What was the one thing that Overhaul was ranting about out loud, incessantly? And what did Deku conspicuously fail to ask about? Overhaul's relationship with Pops.

This was so easy. So obvious. And Deku didn’t even try. All he could think about in the moment he was faced with that broken man was the little girl that man hurt--all thoughts of trying to understand where the man himself was coming from went right out the window, flown away in an instant. Instead of asking about why Overhaul feels the way he does, he demanded that Overhaul feel the way Deku wanted. He was essentially holding the only person Overhaul cared about hostage for the remorse he wanted Overhaul to feel.

I'm not going to try to armchair diagnose Overhaul with mental conditions. I don't have the educational background, and I'm positive Horikoshi doesn't. But it seems pretty clear that asking Overhaul to feel guilt about Eri was asking for something that he might not be capable of feeling, at least not without years of therapy that he was plainly not getting in Tartarus. And if Overhaul is not capable of feeling that guilt, then what does denying Overhaul his meeting actually solve? Who does it help? It doesn’t help Eri. Doesn’t help the old man. It certainly doesn’t help Overhaul himself. The only person who gets any satisfaction out of demanding remorse from Overhaul is Deku. And even Deku didn’t look like he found it very satisfying!

Another failure. A meaninglessly cruel, petty failure. A failure that served only to hurt a man who was already a live wire of agony, to sentence an old man to a coma he might never wake from without Overhaul's expertise, and to deprive Eri of the only actual family she had left.

And look, Pops might very well not be the ideal guardian for Eri, and I'm not saying he should get to "keep" her just because of the blood connection, but it's not like he cheerfully handed her over to Overhaul and walked out the door! He turned to Overhaul because he trusted Overhaul, because he wanted someone to help Eri and thought that maybe Overhaul could. And when Overhaul's thoughts about Eri took a very dark turn, Pops first denied his request about using her to further his research and then, when Overhaul kept pushing it, chose Eri over the kid he personally took in from the streets by telling Overhaul that he needed to leave the Shie Hassaikai if he couldn't muster any more respect for human life than that.

But, you know, Eri is so cute with Aizawa and stuff. And Pops was a criminal. Probably. Maybe? I mean, he was yakuza, anyway, so he obviously must have been a criminal even if the police never actually arrested him. Apparently, this means it's okay to just leave him in a coma forever! Even though Overhaul absolutely has enough medical expertise that letting him talk to a neurologist about what he did to Pops might enable them to figure out how to wake Pops up even without Overhaul being able to use his quirk to undo the damage. Hell, Overhaul is also the person alive who has the best handle on how Eri's quirk works. He might even know what her accumulation condition is. Maybe a better thing to ransom his access to Pops with would be Overhaul telling Aizawa everything he knows about Eri's quirk so Aizawa can use the knowledge to help her get a better handle on it.

But no. Obviously undoing some small part of the concrete harm Overhaul did was less important than how Deku felt about that harm.

And there's more! Oh, is there ever. I called Deku arrogant before; let me circle back to that.

Deku said that if Chisaki would feel the way Deku wanted him to feel, then Deku would uphold the promise to let Overhaul see Pops. But where in hell did Deku get off making that claim? Deku is a student. He's not a pro. He has no authority, medical, legal, carceral or otherwise. He has no say in where Overhaul goes or who he's allowed to see.

What the fuck? What the actual fuck? What kind of strings did Deku think he could pull that he could just casually make that claim without so much as going into a huddle with Hawks and Endeavor about it first? How inflated has this kid's sense of importance gotten that he made Overhaul that promise without even stopping to think about whether it was something he was in any position to ensure? It was such a bullshit ultimatum, not only because of how needlessly obstructive it was, but because it was so formless.

"If only you would feel a wish to apologize to Eri…" Okay, so what if Overhaul goes back to prison and, three days later, calls out to say, "Okay, I thought about it and I really feel like I want to apologize, now can I see Pops already?" Who gets to make that judgment call? Deku? Is he going to drop his faux-vigilante act and come visit Overhaul in prison just so he can squint at the man really hard to see if he's lying? Is Deku going to delegate the call to someone else? All Might? Hawks? A prison warden? A psychologist? Who? Who gets to be the one to say, "Okay, I think his remorse is genuine."

Then, once that call has been made, how many people have to arrange for Overhaul to be escorted out of prison and to whatever hospital Pops is in? Will Deku get to oversee that visit? Does he think he can overturn a warden declaring, "The scum doesn't deserve a visit, and the old man probably doesn't either," or a doctor protesting, "I'm not letting that man anywhere near my patient!"

The hell of it is, I think Deku could do all of that. He's got a close personal connection to All Might, who was basically a demi-god to this society for decades; he has the ear of the current top three heroes. Everyone is apparently convinced that the power to save this society rests solely in Deku's hands; I'm sure he could ask for anything he wanted. But the fact that that is the case suggests that this society is not even slightly turning away from its dependence on heroes dictating its morality. A hero having the sole right to dictate, out of hand, based on his personal feelings, the fate of people designated "villains" while the rest of society turns away is exactly what Shigaraki is angry about.

The only thing worse than Deku perpetuating the worst problems of hero society in an arc that's supposed to be about him finding a better way is that he didn’t even stop to think about it. It never even occurred to him that that was what he was doing. He thought that what he was asking of Chisaki was just and fair, and thus, he didn’t need to ask for any second opinions or permissions; he didn’t need to think about what would actually be feasible, about what was best for the people involved. He'd made his judgment call about a villain, and that's all there was to it. The villain could fall in line or--nothing. There isn't actually another choice. Hero's way or nothing

I hate it. I hate it. I don't care about whether Overhaul "deserves" to suffer; heroes making the cold decision that they will make him suffer is antithetical to everything a carceral system intended to rehabilitate prisoners stands for. And yes, Japan does at least claim on paper that the goal of incarceration in state hands is rehabilitation.

Restorative justice is superior to retributive justice. It's better for society and it's better for individuals. It is kinder, it is more compassionate. Retributive justice poisons people. It perpetuates suffering for no reason but moral grandstanding. Individuals are allowed to forgive or not forgive anyone they want, but a society should conduct itself with an eye to the long-term welfare of all of its people. That means that even the worst kinds of criminals still have human rights. It means not inflicting pain that serves no purpose.

I've gotten off-track here. Yes, I think that if Overhaul could feel regret about Eri, that would obviously be a positive development for his character. It'd hurt like hell, but it would be a hurt that indicated he was becoming a better person, a person who wanted to do more good, less ill, with his life and efforts. But you can't mandate that someone become a better person. No ultimatum handed down from on high is going to change Overhaul's heart. Telling someone, "I'll help you, but only if you only feel the way I want you to feel. Otherwise, you can just stay there and suffer," is not reaching out to help people who are suffering in the dark, which is, again, what Deku claimed he wanted to do, what he begged for Nagant's help in doing, the way he insisted to the vestiges that OFA should be used.

Deku writing people off because they don't conform to his expectations, because they can't be "good" the way he wants them to be, nor even "bad" in ways he can understand, is him failing to live up to his own expressed ideals. "I wish you'd feel bad about hurting people," wasn't enough to reach Muscular or Overhaul, and it damn well shouldn't be enough to reach Shigaraki.

Cruelty does not beget kindness. You cannot treat people with only callousness and severity, then condemn them for not taking the opportunity to grow. You have to give them opportunities to better themselves. For Overhaul, giving him an opportunity would be letting him help the man he wronged and then moving forward from there. Telling him to feel regret about Eri or else? That's doing nothing but sweeping his pain back under the rug.

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*I have more or less exhausted my outrage over Lady Nagant in chats with friends, so I'll spare the rant on how disjointed, contradictory and ludicrous her turn was; the gist is "very, on all counts."

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P.S. Anyone who says that Overhaul "has nothing left to live for" is being a level of ableist that defies description. Prosthetics exist. Assistive devices exist. Speech-to-text software exists. Overhaul is intelligent, driven and highly educated. Even if he never got prosthetics at all, there would still be things he could contribute to the world if he were motivated to do so. The better thing to do, though, would be to get the man some damn prosthetics, hook him up with the neurologist consulting on Pops' case, and let the two of them get on with the matter of waking up the old man.

P.P.S. Overhaul spent six months in solitary confinement. The United Nations considers solitary confinement exceeding 15 days to be a form of torture. Solitary confinement creates severe mental health issues and exacerbates existing ones. It frequently leads to a deadening of empathy, something Overhaul has in little enough amounts as it is. It is absurd to ask a man who's just come out of these conditions to "feel sorry for what you did to Eri," especially if you're planning to turn around and send him right back to solitary. Tartarus is inhuman, and the only reason more of the escapees aren't total wrecks like Overhaul is because Horikoshi clearly didn't bother to do the reading on the wide array of problems that those characters should be experiencing physically, mentally and socially.