#reblogging for all the good shit in the tags

[bluismie]

“Even the sinners dream”

[tiredyke]

every time queer discourse surges on this site everyone is so quick to jump to “it was actually the evil lesbians who divided us” because y’all heard the term “political lesbian” and never bothered to figure out what that meant

[kindred-spirit-93]

when life wants to fuck me over i get a paper cut in the most inconvenient place ever and a mosquito that simply wont die.

i will have that mosquitos blood if it kills me. its probably mine anyway. give it back you fucker

[fourswords]

to be quite honest shadow's characterization in the fsa manga was always something that raised more questions than answers for me because it's like. he's got a mile-wide inferiority complex about being link's shadow we all know this but when did he have the time to develop that inferiority complex in the first place. how long was he lurking around after ganon created him before the events of the manga actually started. what did he witness or hear or both to make him so fucking angry

[the-kipsabian]

[letmesleeponyourtummyordie]

I fucking LOVE redbook

For the culutural exchange.

you see, for years now, china has been propagated as this.. this bad place far away. Chinay that's where all the cheap trash comes from. "China, that's where the evil communism does evil communism! China, they're stealing your data! China, they're gonna overpower our econmy! China, they're evil and they're weird and they pay low wages and theycre here to take YOUR good life and your western way od life away from you!"

And now the Teens (tm) are going onto rebook and it's

people

like us

Who occassionally share the same dumb memes. I've seen someone joking about missing her chinese spy, and some kid replying with a picture of swimming captioned "i am coming, wife, ameria is not far!" and it's so beautiful to see these people so humanised. To see them as, just like us. Making dumb memes, watching their little vidoes, playing wirh jpgs like they were dolls.

It's wonderful- i wish i had a chinese friend. Globalisation can be so lovely

[spinecurlingmice]

everytime i see another borderline call themself a "yandere irl" im like :(( noooooo don't try to appeal to the losers who wanna romanticize your worst.......... nooo they dont have ur best interests in mind.

[bugtoast]

Guys caliborn and calliope make me so fucking sad if they got along they would've been such a good duo,,,, they would've been unstoppable,,,, mabel and dipper but on steroids,,,, :[

[ndostairlyrium]

I updated the controversial thing after the last mega playthrough + veilguard + fandom making me realize stuff <<

The tier list

The way Loghain and Merril sprinted to the friendship tier after only one year lmao this is totally fandom's doing, I went back to the games thinking "let me look real close" and fell in love

-

Again, this list is subjective, I feel people when they go "this character deserves more love" trust me, I like #1 fandom favorite punching bag. But I can't be forced into liking stuff only because it's another person's favorite 🤷

[kyliafanfiction]

I sometimes feel like characters who do truly monstrous things while also having been victims of some pretty insane shit themselves are sort of an exercise in empathy. Or at least, should be seen as such.

Like, in real life, if a person who has been horribly broken by their experiences and failed by society than proceeds to rape someone - it's hard to feel the justifiable sympathy/empathy for that person (without excusing their rape, never do that) because well, you can look at this actual human person they hurt, or worse, and it feels gross and disrespectful to the rape victim.

And this is understandable. (And applies to more than just rapists/rape victims of course, that's just the most visceral one and thus picked for that reason)

But a fictional rape victim is... fictional. You can't 'disrespect' their trauma, and while obviously rape/whatever else is real, and people may related to the rape victim and thus see your comments about the rapist also being a victim as somehow being about their experience...

Well, it's not.

Because the rapist here, didn't actually hurt a real person. Fictional characters are objects. They're objects that often grab us by the throat and refuse to leave our fucking heads, yes, but they're objects. They are tools used by writers to tell a story, and readers to tell a story.

And one of the things fictional characters are good for is allowing us to consider experiences we never had, and imagine ourselves in other circumstances and lives. (Also just fun and fascinating and interesting to watch their stories).

It's very easy to feel for the rape victim in fiction, and rightly so. That's Level 1 Empathy there. Granted, some people IRL fail that, but that's not really what we're talking about here.

Advanced Empathy, hard Empathy is feeling for the rapist. Not for the rape, of course, even if they feel guilt about it, but if someone really was failed on multiple levels and was broken and damaged and went through the sort of psychological wringer that would leave most of us here on tumblr catatonic - they do deserve the same Empathy any human (any person) who went through all that.

Even after they also do the bad thing, critically they still deserve Empathy. And that is fucking hard. I very often have a hard time feeling bad for truly awful people who also deserve empathy and sympathy, real and even fictional (despite all this, yeah, I'm not perfect on this) for what they (separately) went through.

It also becomes even harder when what they went through is utterly bound up with what they did. How what they went through and experiences is in part responsible for what they did - because they still made a choice. The circumstances may have left them not in their right mind, may have left them feeling without choice, may have driven them to things they normally might not think of or do, but they still chose to do that bad thing. And that's not okay. They still hurt someone.

And yet - one cannot remove the action from the circumstances. So you can still feel empathy, and elucidate all the factors and circumstances as to what led up to their choices and why, and it doesn't change that they did the horrible thing. The rape, or the murders, or whatever.

But circling back - with a fictional character... they didn't hurt a real person. There's no one who is real that suffered. The things the character did IRL are bad because they hurt real people.

So you're not being disrespectful to the victim by feeling that empathy, or sympathy. By exploring the things that they were a victim for. Even by wanting to focus on those things - fictional characters should be compelling in all their aspects, if they're written well.

And yet, of course, if you do that empathy and do talk about what the bad person went through and all that context, people come at you. They call you evil, just as bad as the (again, fictional) character, or they say that you're treading dangerously close to the arguments people use to defend the real people who do these things in real life. Or you're disrespecting all the victims of these crimes IRL. Especially of course, if the person coming at you has a reason this comes close to home.

But again - fictional.

In an ideal world, we'd all feel sympathy and empathy when it's called for, regardless of what the person did. Even the worst most monstrous people deserve human treatment in prison. And if you don't have empathy, that's hard. Even if you do have empathy, that's hard.

So if you look at a fictional character (who doesn't hurt a real person by virtue of being fictional) that does horrible, vile things, but went through so much, and you still can't empathize or sympathize with them... I mean, it doesn't make you a bad person, not even close, this is still fiction, and there's people I should empathize with in fiction that I don't, but...

It's still a failure of your ability to be empathetic. And we're all humans. We're all failing at that, among other things, all the time. But... it's good to be aware of that. at least?

At the very least, bear that in mind when other people are talking about that context, and that victimization. And please, for the love of god, don't fucking pretend that the victimization didn't happen, that this person who did do terrible things (in fiction) suddenly didn't also (in fiction) experience awful shit, as if doing a bad thing erases all the bad things done to you.

Again - it doesn't necessarily make you a bad person, but like... the horrible state of prisons in our society is a real, actual problem. The way we as a society dehumanize people who do bad things is a real actual problem for a lot of reasons (not least because it creates an incentive for authority that wants to dehumanize a person or a group to expand the definition of 'did bad things' to make their dehumanization now acceptable, among other things).

So yeah. Fictional character who suffers but than also makes others suffer - that's a useful exercise in Empathy. And doing that doesn't make you or anyone else a bad person, or actually defending the sorts of crimes, IRL or Fictional, that this character did. Contextualizing is not whitewashing, empathy is not erasing, and humanizing is not disrespecting the victim(s).

So yeah, they fictional character did bad things. But there's more to them than that. And you can say but and talk about what comes after but without disrespecting the fictional victim. Because the fictional victim... is just as fictional. Just as not real.

Is it possible for this to end up being taken too far? Yes. But that's a reason to be mindful of yourself when it comes to real people, not to never do it. And when it comes to fictional people - again, fictional. Nobody was actually, really hurt.

(I really do want to make clear, before people read the tags, that this applies to all crimes these sorts of characters do, rape was just picked as the one to use as the example.)

[scoliosisgoblin]

Eddie and Peter doodles feat. Benny from @bennydunbar

[civilization-illstayrighthere]

Johnny: wow kerry thought he was living in my shadow? shit. I had no idea. wow. this is news to me.

Also Johnny:

[mildfevermystery]

Chika SSR #1197 and SR #2242 [Transparent, Edited/Extended] ※ Credit is appreciated but not required.

[the-kipsabian]

an endless list of nights blorbos 💖 4/X ↪ orange cassidy

[cosmicredcadet]

never assume any of my posts are about Haz/bin hotel. I refuse to have anything of mine associated with that shit show. The ship discourse has been around way before it was even a thought and aroace and aroace coded characters have existed before it and will exist after it. This isn't new. this isn't a haz/bin exclusive problem. Do not assume that everyone who is in this conversation is talking about that show.

[wellzofyouth]

Iwtv is such a complex and beautiful show but its been wrapped up in shipping and fandom culture to the point where anything or any theme that isn't centered around who's fucking who (race, gender, class, memory, fatherhood, ABUSE etc etc) gets ignored or downplayed.

It's so sad that you can't even engage or analyze those topics without being dragged into discourse because somebody perceived you to be attacking their "canceled wives" or not understanding Gothic romance or whatever.

It's so sad that some people in this fandom make light of real world problems/tragedies just so they can feel better for liking flawed characters. It's downright infuriating how infuriating how some of yall treat others who call out bigotry in this fandom.

Idk it makes me so sad because this is like the first show Ive seen that engages with things like being a gay black male during that time period as well as being a father mourning the loss of your daughter, religion, and family and all that. So when it gets boiled down to just discourse of whatever because you want to actually engage with text instead of seeing it as simply source material for ao3 fic its like whatever man.

And I'm not saying this to be pretentious or get on my tumblr soapbox to preach about media literacy or anything. It just upsets me.