#probably. not problematic

[beheadable]

Recent realization that yes i’ve always thought of Mark (the Kid) as a younger brother type figure, though technicallyyyyyy to my Doom insert who is 45 years old, Mark is more like a son .

[inkskinned]

one of the things that i think we should pay attention to, socially, about the disney v. desantis thing is that it is really highlighting the importance of remembering nuance.

in a purely neutral sense, if you engage in something problematic, that does not mean you are necessarily agreeing with what makes it problematic. and i am worried that we have become... so afraid of any form of nuance.

disney isn't my friend, they're a corporate monopoly that bastardized copyright laws for their own benefit, ruin the environment, and abuse their workers (... and many other things). this isn't a hypothetical for me - i grew up in florida. i also worked for the actual Walt Disney World; like, in the parks. i am keenly aware of the ways they hurt people, because they hurt me. i fully believe that part of the reason florida is so conservative is because it's been an "open secret" for years now that disney lobbies the government to keep minimum wage down, and i know they worked hard to keep the parks unmasked and open during the worst parts of Covid. they purposefully keep their employees in poverty. they are in part responsible for the way the floridian government works.

desantis is still, by a margin that is frankly daunting, way worse. the alternative here isn't just "republicans win", it's actual fascism.

in a case like this, where the alternative is to allow actual fascism into united states legislation - where, if desantis wins, there are huge and legal ramifications - it's tempting to minimize the harm disney is also doing, because... well, it's not fascism. but disney isn't the good guy, either, which means republicans are having a field day asking activists oh, so you think their treatment of their employees is okay?

we have been trained there is a right answer. you're right! you're in the good group, and you're winning at having an opinion.

except i have the Internet Prophecy that in 2-3 months, even left-wing people will be ripping apart activists for having "taken disney's side". aren't i an anti-capitalist? aren't i pro-union? aren't i one of the good ones? removed from context and nuance (that in this particular situation i am forced to side with disney, until an other option reveals itself), my act of being like "i hope they have goofy rip his throat out onstage, shaking his lifeless body like a dog toy" - how quickly does that seem like i actually do support disney?

and what about you! at home, reading this. are you experiencing the Thought Crime of... actually liking some of the things disney has made? your memories of days at the parks, or of good movies, or of your favorite show growing up. maybe you are also evil, if you ever enjoyed anything, ever, at all.

to some degree, the binary idealization/vilification of individual motive and meaning already exists in the desantis case. i have seen people saying not to go to the disney pride events because they're cash grabs (they are). i've seen people saying you have to go because they're a way to protest. there isn't a lot of internet understanding of nuance. instead it's just "good show of support" or "evil bootlicking."

this binary understanding is how you can become radicalized. when we fear nuance and disorder, we're allowing ourselves the safety of assuming that the world must exist in binary - good or bad, problematic or "not" problematic. and unfortunately, bigots want you to see the world in this binary ideal. they want you to get mad at me because "disney is taking a risk for our community but you won't sing their praises" and they want me to get mad at you for not respecting the legit personal trauma that disney forced me through.

in a grander scheme outside of disney: what happens is a horrific splintering within activist groups. we bicker with each other about minimal-harm minimal-impact ideologies, like which depiction of bisexuality is the most-true. we gratuitously analyze the personal lives of activists for any sign they might be "problematic". we get spooked because someone was in a dog collar at pride. we wring our hands about setting an empty shopping mall on fire. we tell each other what words we may identify ourselves by. we get fuckin steven universe disk horse when in reality it is a waste of our collective time.

the bigots want you to spend all your time focusing on how pristine and pretty you and your interests are. they want us at each other's throats instead of hand in hand. they want to say see? nothing is ever fucking good enough for these people.

and they want their followers to think in binary as well - a binary that's much easier to follow. see, in our spaces, we attack each other over "proper" behavior. but in bigoted groups? they attack outwards. they have someone they hate, and it is us. they hate you, specifically, and you are why they have problems - not the other people in their group. and that's a part of how they fucking keep winning.

some of the things that are beloved to you have a backbone in something terrible. the music industry is a wasteland. the publishing industry is a bastion of white supremacy. video games run off of unpaid labor and abuse.

the point of activism was always to bring to light that abuse and try to stop it from happening, not to condemn those who engage in the content that comes from those industries. "there is no ethical consumption under late capitalism" also applies to media. your childhood (and maybe current!) love of the little mermaid isn't something you should now flinch from, worried you'll be a "disney adult". wanting the music industry to change for the better does not require that you reject all popular music until that change occurs. you can acknowledge the harm something might cause - and celebrate the love that it has brought into your life.

we must detach an acknowledgment of nuance from a sense of shame and disgust. we must. punishing individual people for their harmless passions is not doing good work. encouraging more thoughtful, empathetic consumption does not mean people should feel ashamed of their basic human capacities and desires. it should never have even been about the individual when the corporation is so obviously the actual evil. this sense that we must live in shame and dread of our personal nuances - it just makes people bitter and hopeless. do you have any idea how scared i am to post this? to just acknowledge the idea of nuance? that i might like something nuanced, and engage in it joyfully? and, at the same time, that i'm brutally aware of the harm that they're doing?

"so what do i do?" ... well, often there isn't a right answer. i mean in this case, i hope mickey chops off ron's head and then does a little giggle. but truth be told, often our opinions on nuanced subjects will differ. you might be able to engage in things that i can't because the nuance doesn't sit right with me. i might think taylor swift is a great performer and a lot of fun, and you might be like "raquel, the jet fuel emissions". we are both correct; neither of us have any actual sway in this. and i think it's important to remember that - the actual scope of individual responsibility. like, i also love going to the parks. Thunder Mountain is so fun. you (just a person) are not responsible for the harm that Disney (the billion dollar corporation) caused me. i don't know. i think it's possible to both enjoy your memories and interrogate the current state of their employment policies.

there is no right way to interrogate or engage with nuance - i just hope you embrace it readily.

[inadvisablebutinevitable]

Last thought before I disappear off the face of the earth (go back to work)

HC that the biggest jerejean shipper out of all the foxes isn’t Neil, or Kevin, or even Renee

it’s Nicky Hemmick.

He’s flirting with Jeremy bc ofc he is and Jer doesn’t realize that he’s joking. Turns him down politely and tells him that he’s flattered but he has someone else in mind right now.

And Jeremy’s not trying to be obvious but Nicky has spent a year with Andrew and Neil’s subtle-as-fuck flirting and he sees the way Jeremy just hovers around Jean the whole night, the way Jean gravitates to Jeremy when he feels uncomfortable and the victory on Jeremy’s face everytime jean smiles. It’s not hard to draw conclusions, not even for someone as outwardly oblivious as Nicky.

and because Nicky has never ever given a single fuck about subtlety he straight up corners Jean and asks “hey, you know that Jeremy has been trying to get in your pants the whole night right?” Jean cannot get over how crude that was and curses him out in French and English but Nicky knows a crush when he sees one so he just stares back triumphantly as Jean tells him to jump in the ocean with a thousand pound weight.

(Nicky doesn’t know how much the comment fucked with Jean’s sense of security tho and Jean spends the rest of the night convincing himself that Jeremy was being normal and Nicky’s a bitch)

anyway somehow Nicky ends up being one of the only foxes to know abt jerejean’s not so unreciprocated pining and every time he sees them on tv or watching game tape he’ll shout “JUST FUCK ALREADY” at the screen at risk of getting yelled at for hours by Kevin

[linka-from-captain-planet]

Favoritism

(Dark Justiciar!Shadowheart still being the worst Sharran ever despite being Mother Superior and Shar’s Chosen and going on a 10 minute long, basically unprompted, gushing, unbecoming-of-her-status rant about how amazing Nocturne is and how she’s her favorite and the others can die mad about it… impeccably consistent character writing)

[ecoterrorist-katara]

Ka/taang: friends-to-lovers or the Friend Zone?

It’s almost axiomatic, in any ATLA shipping discussion, that Ka/taang is the friends-to-lovers ship while Zutara is the enemies-to-lovers ship, and that differences in shipping tastes can be boiled down to whether you prefer FTL or ETL.

My first ship was Percabeth. My biggest ship was Klaine. It took me until Mockingjay to let go of my Gale-and-Katniss-are-childhood-friends rose-tinted goggles and start liking Everlark. I started dabbling in ETL because of Zutara, but I’m incredibly picky about it (do not ask me how many Dramione fanfics made me irrationally, disproportionately mad).

All this to say: as a longtime friends-to-lovers enthusiast, I should theoretically love Ka/taang. But…

My difficulty with Ka/taang as a friends-to-lovers ship boils down to this: Aang and Katara’s friendship was always narratively framed as insufficient, because Aang liked her from the start and always wanted a romantic relationship. And imo that dynamic really colours their entire friendship.

I like to think Aang would’ve been a ride-or-die friend — the type to give up the Avatar State to rescue her, the type to commit ecoterrorism and help her get arrested, the type to make her a flower necklace to cheer her up — even if he didn’t have a crush on her, but I will never know that. We never got to see the pure friendship part of friends-to-lovers, because the spectre of the romantic relationship was always there. Before the last five minutes of the show, Katara’s feelings for Aang range from “plausibly interested” (The Headband, Cave of Two Lovers) to “doesn’t hate it” (Day of the Black Sun, The Fortuneteller) to “no” (Ember Island Players). Yet Katara’s eventual capitulation to reciprocation of Aang’s feelings was always depicted as inevitable, starting from s1 when the prisoners during Avatar Day reassured him that she’d “come around” because he’s a catch. It’s as if friendship, even one full of devotion and mutual love like the one they share, is not enough.

And that’s just totally antithetical to what I love about a friends-to-lovers dynamic. I love romances where characters value each other outside of attraction, when they see each other for who they are (this goes double for pretty characters like Katara, whose complexity and imperfections are just as important as her beauty and her care for others). I love the idiots in love sub-trope, where they’re obviously into each other, yet do a bunch of mental gymnastics to remain in comfortable denial (we got a little bit of this earlier in the series, but by s3 we were firmly in Aang-pines-and-Katara-deflects territory). In every friends-to-lovers story I’m simply obsessed with the confess-and-kiss scene, but the version we got in ATLA was ruined by the lack of reciprocation, twice.

Over time, because Aang was written as so insistent about his affections, Ka/taang went from a friends-to-lovers story to a Nice Guy Friend Zone “why doesn’t she like me” story. I mentioned Everlark earlier: I got the same ick for Gale in Mockingjay as I did for Aang in s3, where the woman is not interested yet he still badgers her about it. (And considering Gale is canonically hot, I don’t think the relative attractiveness of Aang is the issue here). But Gale’s insistence was presented as his problem, his lack of empathy, his self-righteousness; Aang’s insistence was just a part of his quest to get the girl.

A lot of people say Zutara is a female fantasy, whether they mean it in a positive or pejorative way. Nobody says the same about Ka/taang, even though women definitely have friends-to-lovers fantasies too. A good friends-to-lovers story reminds me of all the times when I was an idiot before getting together with a friend I was actually head-over-heels for. Ka/taang reminds me of all the times when I was not interested in a friend and they didn’t respect my preference. Friends-to-lovers is a delicate balance, maintained only by unerring mutual respect and unconditional care for each other, and it can veer into Nice Guyism if the writers aren’t thoughtful about why this dynamic is so appealing. Which is exactly what happened with Ka/taang.

[chyarui]

I can’t stop- I love these two so much they make me so mad

another quinobi work in progress. starting to see a trend yet?

Im not 100% happy w their faces yet, and obv quinlan is missing his whole lower half, but hey that’s a problem for future me

[834k]

I'm so glad they have social media in the tsbt world because I know there's so much online discourse about how problematic Auristela is because of that mlm sponsorship

[purpurussy]

Talking about family stuff just reminds me of last christmas when dan was home and he tweeted this https://x.com/danielhowell/status/1739403759363481716?s=46 and replied to some people in the replies and god do I relate to being queer at home and your family still not taking the hint and watching transphobic or homophobic garbage, to me at least it looked that way, I don’t think he was willingly watching it.

the tweet in question oop!

yeah very real. i think a lot of queer people can relate to having to pick your battles with your family. i was on holiday with my parents a few weeks ago and we stopped somewhere with a non-gendered bathroom and my mum went on a rant about how she felt "unsafe" because fucking. gas station toilets should be "women's-only spaces" or whatever and i was just like 🤐 because i had to sit in a car with her for another 4 hours 😭

he is so strong for enduring this shit no wonder he hates going home 😔

[theloveinc]

I always think it's a little surprising, irritating, endearing, something when big, tough men find solace in being gentle with their daughters.

There's reason to do tough things with them, too, to make sure they grow up strong and independent, but I think of a man like Simon "Ghost" Riley, who spent a huge percentage of his life being beaten down consistently by almost all the men who were around him.

And sure, he trusts the men in his task force with his life now, no question about it, but... I think the sudden calm he experiences when he starts to raise a daughter is beyond strange for him, but also weirdly... healing, too. Enjoyable.

That's not to say he doesn't, and hasn't, enjoyed the boyish things in life, the watching sports, the playing in the dirt, the pretending to hold guns part of growing up... but he finds himself sitting through your daughter's ballet class, overwhelmed by the calm that surrounds him, actually able to focus on the intensity of her pliers, her releves, the way her pink skirt ripples when she leaps into a sauter.

It's a new realization, a new kind of war (between him and learning how to be a parent), but it's one that doesn't revolve around the consistent anxiety that warps his stomach when he watches boys, little or not, teeter the line between roughhousing and fighting, picking on one another for shedding accidental tears that, really, cause no harm.

With your daughter, he's set in charge of watching her play with her friends and finds there is no lump in his stomach when she giggles with them, no dark possibility drifting in the back of his mind that she'll reach out and get her arm broken by someone she trusts--the fights she fights with her peers all between the characters they play and not between their fists, their games of laughter and drama and screaming but not of raging violence.

There's people who ask him, people who joke, wouldn't a man like him prefer a son? He must've been so disappointed... Yet, Simon still has yet to think of the best way to tell them that he honestly enjoys having a daughter a little bit more, that she runs to him and not for a second is he afraid she's hiding a snake up her sleeve, because she's only ever greeted him with flowers.

[friendamedes]

text (from the interview tamsyn did with tumblr):

I find all ships intriguing. I’ve spent too long in these mines. No ship is too problematic or cracky for me. My only hope is to out-fandom fandom by presenting them with ships more problematic and crack-filled than they do (I will not; fandom always wins). In these tiresome days where ship wars have been taking on airs, as is my understanding, of virtue versus sin (I don’t even know what Bakudeku is and yet I feel sorry for anyone who ships it; I didn’t ship Reylo because it wasn’t messed-up enough and feel the same), I hope the Locked Tomb fandom is just accepting that all shipping is batshit and every ship is just as bad as the next. Gideon x Harrow is just as bad as Teacher x Crux is as bad as Hot Sauce x Cytherea the First is as bad as Camilla x Juno Zeta is as bad as Silas x Every Asht Brother (actually, I wrote the Asht brothers in an unrelated piece that’ll never see the light of day and imo they’ve suffered enough, but). 

some of you should hear this again.

edit: i'm a campal, good lord, please be nice & polite abt campals on THIS post too. thank you very much.

[oscargender]

Heartbreaking: “problematic” danmei everyone told you to avoid is actually pretty decent and has mildly interesting things to say about poverty and class

[deadmothsketches]

Don't feed the plants.

[an-eldritch-peredhel]

You are the daughter of an angelic faerie and an elven king. You have grown up inside the only magical safe-haven of an increasingly apocalyptic land outside. You have wanted for nothing, essentially leading the perfect life, suffering and death playing little role beyond the abstract. Your father will never die, and your mother will never leave, but for tradition you are still crown princess and are educated as such. You love to dance and to sing.

You meet some kind of monster inside your mother's borders, a monster not of her or your making. It stumbled across you, dancing in the forest, bloody and travel-worn and weary and wide-eyed as it stares. You are stronger than it, but you run rather than lunge for the kill. You feel pity, more than fear. And something about him makes the part of you that you inherited from your mother sing.

He tries to follow you, for a year and a day. You are stronger, and faster, and stealthier, and you let him see you sometimes anyways. You are not convinced that he is not a monster, but nor are you convinced that he is.

Spring blooms again to the tune of your song, and you let him get closer than before until you run.

But you hear him speak for the first time. He is a speaker, and perhaps to him you are the monster. You do not run, and you do not kill.

He calls you "Tinuviel"

He calls you nightingale- a little songbird, plain and brown, with a lovely voice. They are your mother's creation, but he does not know this.

He calls you daughter of twilight- perhaps for your skin and eyes and hair, but perhaps because that is when he has seen you most.

He calls you singer- creator of the very fabric of the universe, skilled enough to deserve the title.

You are the most beautiful creature the world will ever see, the daughter of an angel and a king. He does not call you beautiful, or angelic, or princess. He calls you a singer, plain and brown, dark and distant as the approaching night.

He is bloody and travel-worn and weary and wide-eyed as you dare to step closer.

He called you nightingale.

You don't know what to call him, but you hope to find out.

[heroesspirit]

Be honest, are you a bad person in any kind of way? I've been finding out about gross stuff that a bunch of blogs I really liked did and I feel icky :(

[anistarrose]

there's a type of tumblr funnyperson who's never posted explicit hate/exclusionism towards asexuals and other a-specs... and yet, they like to make up a guy. where the type of guy they always make up undermines any trust a-specs might've otherwise had for them. for example, a common post format is making up a hypothetical tumblr user's bio that's obviously just so cringe, according to the sensibilities of everyone reading — wherein the implied joke is how we've all seen someone in the wild who's cringe like this, right?

these posts always feel the need to slide some a-spec microlabel in there. a lot of the time, it's specifically an ace-spec microlabel plus "heteroromantic," especially if they think that the guy they're making up is trying to be a real special snowflake. to round out the "cringe," they usually pepper in at least one element from the set of: neopronouns, a namedropped mental illness, and a piece of media that's targeted at children/popular for tumblr to hate at the time.

then a zillion people reblog that post, all agreeing haha that's so cringe, and a million a-spec people (and nonbinary and autistic people) shudder — because are they the butt of the joke, to the people reblogging it? or are the people reblogging just laughing about a different element, like a comically long DNI or something, which has distracted them from noticing the fact that OP clearly associates a-spec identities with "cringe"?

if any a-spec people point this out about OP, or ask a reblogger if they support ace people, they are inevitably accused of overreacting — which is great for the aphobes, because they get a new "cringe" a-spec person to point and laugh at. it's just such a nasty cycle, and even people who wouldn't consider themselves aphobes aren't great at noticing and interrogating it.

[francy-sketches]

I ❤️ thinking about joffreymargaery failmarriage but it’s almost always w the show version *crowd boos* bc it’s more fun to imagine adults in a toxic relationship like book version is just