#r slur use

[bixels]

The Ryoko Kui interview's reception is such a disaster over a pretty normal (yet still flawed) interview between a non-Japanese fan and Japanese artistic. This is discourse for discourse's sake, and it's no surprise that almost every Twitter user I've looked at who's using this interview to parade Kui around as a goated mangaka standing strong against Western ideology is anti-trans.

Like, I do think the interview was kinda wonky with its focus on fandom culture, which Kui clearly didn't have much interest in. But sometimes that happens. Sometimes interactions between two people, especially a fan and a creator, two people who view and interact with a piece of media in completely opposite perspectives, don't click. Does this really need to get blown up into a "West vs. East culture war" issue.

Anyways, Kui saying "I don't consider my audience's interpretations when writing. I leave it to their imaginations, but I have my own read on things too" is the healthiest, most normal thing an artist/writer who wants a non-parasocial audience could say. Artists and writers use this line all the time. If Kui didn't enjoy autistic Laius or Farcille headcanons, she would have probably voiced/signalled her discomfort, like she did on the topic of Senshi fanservice. Overall, Kui handled the interview really well. Props to her to sticking to her guns and keeping a healthy disconnect from the fandom. While I think the interviewer could've/should've been more tactful and restrained, the flaws in their questions is not a symptom of the woke mind virus trying to wriggle its way into the pure Japanese psyche. It's the sign of an over-eager fan who sees a piece of fiction differently than its creator.

[alexei-home-fromthewar-at-last]

I think a fair number of (able-bodied) people don’t understand that cripple is a slur. It’s a slur. It’s offensive. Physically disabled people can reclaim it *if they want to*, but they don’t have to. They can be offended by it if they want to as well. Both are valid.

Also, you can reclaim it FOR YOURSELF! You don’t just get to call other people cripples because you decided to reclaim it. That’s personal. Saying “oh, I can say that because I’m physically disabled” only applies if you’re referring to YOURSELF that way. You do not get to tell other people in your community what they should and shouldn’t be comfortable with.

[conanssummerchild]

LOLLLL

[bunnieswithknives]

The moment you start throwing around a slur as a genuine insult you are no longer reclaiming it. Reclaiming a word involves referring to yourself with it in a positive manner, using it to spread community and trying to remove the feelings of shame around it. If you are using it as an insult you are not fucking reclaiming it, you are just using a slur.

[fischiee]

rvb: when characters go through severe enough trauma sometimes they can fragment into different elements of themselves in order to protect their mental stability and the alters fragments have their own quirks and aspects that relate to the trauma that was inflicted in order to best protect the sanity of the character but still all belong to the same personality

rvb: what’s a system

[hazeofalterhumans]

Anyone know of a vriska only (kin fictive etc) discord server that doesn't allow radfems? Because. Uh. That was an issue I didn't expect to have.

Edit: The original post used the phrase Baeddel as that's what the users called themselves and is the radfem ideology they followed (Baeddelism). This post has been editted for both clarity and sensitivity, as, while Baeddel is the term for someone who follows Baeddelism, it has also been used as an insult or even as an intersexist and/or transphobic slur in some contexts and is thus both unclear as a label and unintentionally inflammatory.

[honeycrispjamz]

If me and my bestie were on that plane this is where we would of landed instead of the Canadian wilderness

[spot-the-ableism]

https://www.tumblr.com/homochadensistm/762029424206020608/do-not-open-this-persons-archive-and-go-to-october

just was made very uncomfortable with the use of the r-slur (especially as an autistic person)

“The R-word, also known as the R-slur, is a hurtful term that remains prevalent throughout social media, according to a Kantar Social Listening study. The research shows that when social media users are posting about people with intellectual disabilities, 7 in every 10 of those posts are negative, and 6 in 10 contain a slur.  The R-word is a form of hate speech that stands for “retard,” “retarded,” or other offensive words ending in “-tard.” While “mental retardation” was originally introduced as a medical term in 1961 for people with intellectual disabilities, in the decades since, the R-word has become an insult used all too commonly in everyday language. Those who use the R-word often do so with little regard for the pain it causes people with intellectual disabilities—and the exclusion it perpetuates in our society.” -source

there’s not exactly any perfect resource I can point to that explains everything correctly so I will explain, since I will be @‘ing homo with this information I genuinely do think it’s that because their first language is not English they probably don’t know about the reason why people are upset, so I am using the benefit of the doubt.

“Retard”, “retarded”, “retardation” and “retardant” are all words that mean to slow or delay something. It’s originally a French-ish word.

there are many different contexts that the word is used, not all times is it a slur.

But the reason it is, is due to almost a hundred plus years of systemic abuses to intellectually disabled people, epileptics, people with learning disabilities and people with autism and schizophrenia.

for almost a 100 plus years people were sent to institutions or asylums to live out the rest of their lives abused or dying, many many people died in those institutions.

they were diagnosed with “mental retardation” which is actually an umbrella term for all sorts of mental and neurological disabilities, many people with Down’s syndrome, facial deformities and differences, people without the use of their vocal cords and more were also treated in these asylums and institutions and were among the many effected by the rampant systemic ableism and eugenics of the time.

there is this idea that asylums and institutions are not bad, when in reality it’s been almost 200-300 years of them and you can have families and friends and people who wrote books about it and they’ll tell you what it is. Hell.

so why did I give you that context?

well the reason “retarded” or “retard” is a slur is because of those institutions and asylums treatment of people they called the R slur.

their autonomy was taken away, they had no rights, anyone calling out the abuses of institutions were for a long time also penalised, and the eugenics of the time had swayed way too many peoples opinions of the rights of the neurodevlopmentally disabled.

over time things got better and the eugenics of it all started to be penalised, but the fact remains that the r slur is incredibly hurtful and harmful to people still to this day.

there is generational trauma that comes with being neurodevlopmentally disabled or having intellectual disability.

so a lot of people are very insulted and upset at the usage of the word as a slur to insult or belittle others.

I hope that makes sense to you @homochadensistm

[antiradqueer-karkat]

errrr lolz radqueer beiing ableist !!

[adhd-culture--is]

adhd culture is being super eloquent in your head (even though you have like four other thought trains chugging along in the background) and then trying to speak and it all comes out into a jumbled mess

.

[full-of-malice]

i haven't seen the new deadpool and wolverine movie yet, i've heard a lot of good things about it and i was actually kinda excited? most of the mcu has sucked so bad for a while now and deadpool is cool i love both characters. i love the art that was made by the fandom and the creativity i've seen from the fandom from the new movie

and then i learned that they for some reason put an r slur joke in the movie for no good reason at all. like wow. we just can't have nice things.

i was genuinely looking forward to this movie and that just. basically ruined the entire thing for me. it leaves a gross taste in my mouth now. really disappointing honestly

like i genuinely think the fandom is lovely, the ships are goofy, the art is wonderful, the movie seemed to have wonderful potential but like. come on. and i've seen like a total of one person talk about it

[aroaceleovaldez]

i hope this doesn't sound like a silly or weird thing to send you, but i'm autistic and have long thought of nico and a handful of other riordanverse characters as autistic and i love your posts about why nico in particular seems intentionally autistic-coded. but i've been thinking, if rick did intend for any of his characters to be autistic, why wouldn't he say so outside of the text at least? i can't think of a good reason why not, when he goes out of his way to be explicit about so many other characters' various marginalized identities and has confirmed things like reyna being asexual outside of the original text. so it gives me this nagging sort of doubt that maybe rick just made nico come off as so extremely autistic coded by accident, somehow. if it wasn't an accident i do kind of wish he'd say so because there's next to zero explicitly stated autistic representation in, like, any media so it'd be nice to have here even if not strictly necessary. either way though, like i said, i love your posts and i agree with you 100% about autistic nico! some others i like to think are autistic are annabeth and leo.

(Most of this is gonna be kind of a tangential ramble to your point and i apologize in advance just bear with me)

This actually touches upon something I've been meaning to do a write-up on recently, which is: depending on the coding, that is our explicit statement. In most coding, actually, that's kind of the point. (Also something something Death of the Author.)

You may have noticed a recent trend across media of characters saying things directly rather than expressing them in a natural way, and often this includes incredibly stilted dialogue of characters explaining things in very politically correct, wikipedia-esque descriptions and terminology that make absolutely no sense for the characters' personalities or mannerisms. This is born out of the idea that if something is not stated in explicit terms, no amount of evidence below an outright direct exact statement will ever count - if two characters of the same gender have an explicit kiss and wedding on-screen, it doesn't matter because they never said the word "gay," etc etc.

In PJO, prior to more recent books, we get plenty of examples of characters explaining parts of their identities without direct statements. Percy never needs to say in outright terms that he has PTSD from Gabe - and it doesn't make sense that he would! He's 12! He's never been diagnosed for that. He probably doesn't even know what PTSD is really. But we, the audience, know without a doubt he has PTSD, because it is clearly expressed to us. That is coding. Tyson is coded as having down syndrome. Nico is coded as being autistic. It doesn't make sense for Nico to turn to the camera and explain that he's autistic and what that means, because he definitely never got diagnosed for it and probably doesn't know what that means cause the diagnosis literally did not exist when he was growing up - and heck, autism terminology was still kind of getting sorted out back in 2007 when TTC was published, so it's unlikely we could have feasibly gotten any exact terminology wink-wink-nudge-nudges short of something like how Percy outright mentions other students called Tyson the r-slur in Sea of Monsters. And in fact we see that same exact style of coding with Nico later on in the series. Nico never turns to the camera and says word-for-word "I am gay, I am mlm, here's me wearing my exact pride flags" (until TOA/TSATS, which... did the exact thing i mentioned about characters speaking like theyre trying to get a good grade in therapy, or giving a powerpoint presentation). But it is never unclear that HoO is telling us outright that Nico is gay. It's not just hinted at. It's there, in your face. But entirely because no one ever outright says "gay" specifically it's technically still only coding. We know he's gay, we know the characters have trauma/ptsd, etc etc. We don't need it spelled out - that's just kind of condescending. It's like if you said describing a character with "eyes like moss" means they were "green-eye coded."

Nico being autistic-coded isn't hidden. It's not a secret. It's very overt. If you know what autism looks like, well, yeah, there he is. Even if you only know very vague 2007 media presentation of autism, Nico in TTC is easily recognizable enough as autistic because that's the point. Tyson is easily recognizable as being coded as having down syndrome and it's very clearly very intentional! It's just never spoon-fed in exact terms to the reader because it's not necessary! You've already been told the information necessary to tell you what is up with this character, so just plainly going "oh they're [x] in exact terms" is very much telling-not-showing and feels redundant. And while there are places for that kind of thing, most of the time it's very unnecessary. Sometimes coding is subtle, sometimes it's obvious, and yeah there are times where writers code characters unintentionally, but the textual evidence is there, and that's the whole point.

And that's what Death of the Author is about - it doesn't matter what the author intended at the end of the day, because if it's in the text it's in the text. You can look at author intent to try and figure out what that text means, but the text is the text. A Separate Peace is a very classic example - author John Knowles denies there being homosexual subtext, and meanwhile one of the protagonists living in 1942 puts on a pink shirt while saying he doesn't mind of people think of him as gay. What the author says after the fact doesn't matter - if it's there, it's there. So Rick saying anything outside of the books is completely irrelevant. And Rick talks about this a lot - he actively tells people that his statements outside of the books are just his own thoughts, but what's in the books is what's in the books, and if the text supports it then that's all the evidence you need.

Nico specifically is a case where yeah, he's clearly autistic-coded. It's very obvious and very obviously intentional when he's younger, and as the books progress it remains a background trait of his but is still notable (except for when it gets forgotten in TOA/TSATS like everything else, including the adhd/dyslexia, but i digress). It's a clear pattern within the first few books that Rick is intentionally including. It doesn't make sense, especially for the year the book was published, for the reader to be directly told in explicit terminology that Nico is autistic, because the reader is already being told that Nico is autistic.

And yeah, Rick doesn't mention Nico being autistic-coded outside of the text, but he also doesn't mention Tyson being coded as having down syndrome. He also said one time that Percy doesn't have PTSD at all, which is very incorrect starting from book 1. Again, Death of the Author. Whatever Rick says outside of the books does not matter, because he already said it in the books. And there's plenty of other stuff in the books that Rick doesn't touch upon, particularly relating to character identity - did you know Leo is Native? Sammy mentions that the Valdez family is Native in Son of Neptune but we don't get any specifics and then it's like never brought up again anywhere. That happens all the time in the series - and outside of the series - Rick can't possibly address every single point to confirm/deny everything from the books. That's what analysis is for! And that's why my blog exists 👍

[confused-canid]

Made another f2u blinkie!

Credit's appreciated but not required

[stripe-conlon]

While researching slang for a pjo fic* I realized how lucky Nico got with his generally accepted birth year even if he hadn’t been casino’d through most of the 1900’s. Too young to be drafted in WWII, too old to be drafted into Vietnam and Korea didn’t have a draft.

[proteusolm]

Watching 2000s TV shows keeps you on your toes. You'll forget it's a 2000 TV show until throws out an out-of-nowhere r slur, or a jab at queer people or racial minorities, or cringy complaining about "political correctness/PC culture" (has been replaced by the cringy complaining about "cancel culture" of today). It is amazing how precisely it dates things to the mid-2000s.

[bluepandadraws-log]

RAGHH I HAVE COME TO INFECT YOU WITH MY HOMESTUCK BRAINROT

just kidding, unless yu like it then thats skib, but here's john

also I hope yer havin a good day!! ><

Eg...egbear..!!