#seeing us as the 'default' and/or inherently predators

[ruthlesslistener]

If ace and arophobes really are coming back to tumblr then I'm not apologizing for how nasty I'll be to them btw. I've got no plans to seek them or their rhetoric out but if it happens organically then I'mma tear them bitches a new one and I don't care if it leads to them hatebombing me with death and rape threats again like they did when I was 14 and 17 <3 theres 10 million problems out there in the world that need solving but theoretical cishet men 'infiltrating' the queer community ain't one of them

[wineanddineloseyourmind]

Hi this is my kinky hornyposting sideblog 😇 (main is @existentialsquid)

This is an 18+ only space. Minors DNI.

This is a pro-kink, pro-trans, anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist space. Bigots, transphobes, conservatives, and zionists DNI. Also, die!!!!

This is a place for me to explore all my kinks, including the dark ones. Continue with this in mind.

If you want to DM me, please read my whole pinned!

Anyway, about me:

Call me Di and use my pronouns (she/they/it) and you will be spared. You may also call me any feminine term of endearment if we’re mutuals 💖 (i love pet names so i will probably end up calling you “darling” and/or "babe" if i take a liking to you 😇)

I am a vers switch but my "default" is dom top, although that can change very quickly in the right situation :3

Other than kink, I enjoy TTRPGs, Fromsoftware games (Dark Souls, Bloodborne, Elden Ring, etc.), animated media and nerd shit like that. Also, if you have miniatures or models you built/painted, I want to see them!

I’m polyam and in an open relationship with my boyfriend @bearded-protagonist-enthusiast, but I’m not really looking for a new romantic relationship right now. I’m totally up for friendship and sexting with mutuals though! 🥰

i am here to make friends, explore kink, flirt with mutuals, and post about:

T4T

and

uneven power dynamics (sometimes involving primal predator/prey dynamics, praise, worship, playful degradation (as degrader), petplay, or dubcon (CNC, intox, etc.))

and

breeding/oviposition (also lactation)

and

monsterfucking (of nearly all kinds)

and

transformation/corruption (usually overlapping with monsterfucking stuff)

and

gore (blood, eroticised cannibalism, etc.)

(Note: there will be no real snuff, only occasional art and smut, as well as me just talking about gory fantasies)

and

unsanitary (musk and blood only)

Also, obligatory: I have a bit of an oral fixation so there will be talk of biting - if I ever mention “breaking the skin” with a bite, please know that it is purely in a fantasy sense! Drawing blood with your teeth is very dangerous IRL due to risk of infection. Buuuut it’s pretty sexy in fantasy though, so I will talk about it in that sense. Stay safe out there!

I also like unambiguously consensual stuff with human characters who stay the same, but the above are my kinks so they’ll show up frequently on this blog :)

If you don’t like any of those kinks, you have my blessing to never interact with me ever and live blissfully unaware of my existence. This is a pro-kink space.

On that note, there are some kinks I’m not into and would prefer not to be brought to this blog by replies or asks or what-have-you. No offence intended to anyone with these kinks, but these are my hard lines:

Being preyed on (I can get subby as hell but I draw the line at being treated like a prey animal 🙅‍♀️ I’m not a little rabbit or a deer or a puppy that gets hunted, the idea of me being that is not sexy to me)

Piss

Scat

Raceplay

My soft lines (i.e. things I might be comfortable with if done with someone I trust and can discuss them with) are:

Being degraded (generally I prefer being the one degrading, but in select situations I can be into being degraded)

Choking (I might find it sexy in fantasy on occasion, but I would never ever do it IRL because of the inherent health risks. For that reason, it can be a turn-off sometimes.)

Incest/fauxcest (I don’t always love all versions of this kink, but I’m open to discussing specific fantasies if I have a chance to say “actually, no thanks” before we start anything. You can call me mommy as a title if you’re one of my beloved mutuals 😇)

Detransition (I would never want this for myself but if someone wants to RP as their AGAB then I can be into that~)

The above is not a DNI list. You can still interact with this blog if you have any/all of the above kinks, just don’t bring anything on the hard lines list into my replies, reblogs, asks, or DMs. If you’re interested in something on the soft lines list please keep my boundaries in mind.

On the subject of interaction, i would love to see anon asks related to:

monsterfucking concepts

T4T flirting 🥰

True/False game (make an assumption about me and I’ll say if it’s true or false)

NSFW ask game

Kink Rating ask game

Fifty Shades of Blue ask game

NSFT Emoji ask game

Telling me you just masturbated to my blog/pics 😇

If you want to sext/RP with me, please:

Send me an ask or two first to break the ice

Chat with me for a bit

Pitch the scene you want to RP and/or ask if I’m in the mood first

ok thanks enjoy

ANON ASKS: OPEN

DMs: OPEN (MUTUALS ONLY)

My tags:

#me (whatever reminds me of myself)

#beloved volus (posts relating to my partner @bearded-protagonist-enthusiast)

#personal post (stuff that’s more about me than anything)

#my fiction (my short stories and smut)

#transition goals (what i’d want to look like in an ideal world)

#need (general horny thoughts)

#i can be trusted around cute boys (subby boy tag)

#i bite (this one is self-explanatory)

#i am looking (real people selfies and nudes)

#tf kink (content relating to fantasy transformation)

#monsterfucker (monster stuff)

#my asks + #my answers (self-explanatory)

mutal tags: #beloved volus (@bearded-protagonist-enthusiast) #kittendeer (@pupsferalkid) #misc (@miscling) #🐊 (@crocofsouls) #gothy kitten (@gothykitten16) #dommy demon (@serotoninswitch) #elf mutual (@mira-mira-0n-the-wall) #dungeon essie (@beansira) #baz (@hyenabrainedpup) and probably more when i get round to it lol

[paragonrobits]

on a whim i looked up the Templin Institute (a worldbuilding-focused youtube channel I dropped because I was horrified at a video they made where they claimed that the Men of Tolkien's Legendarium aren't REALLY human because they're not vicious enough, cruel enough, or obsessed with war) and I was miffed to see that apparently since I dropped them they made a video arguing that everyone in the MCU should be living in constant fear and that it would be better to live in the universe of The Boys (because the super serum is qunaitifable) and Warhammer 40k (since in that one, everyone is a zealot who believes that the God-Emperor protects them and thinks that all aliens are inherently evil)

and it sort of illustrates a thing that... I don't think sci fi fandom or writing IN GENERAL is like, but it is enough of a common element to bother me, and its when people treat cruelty, systemic brutality or man's capacity for evil as an inherently positive aspect.

This ties into the video that caused me to drop them; the channel made the claim that the Rohirrim would have been doing better if they had been genocidal and brutally attacked anything different enough from them (in the sense of "maybe if they had killed all orcs on sight for being nonhuman, Rohan would be doing better"). and its like... why?

I honestly can't fathom why anyone would consider that a good thing, or even think that it SHOULD be expected to hate and fear anything different from you, and to got to the extreme that NOT being xenophobic by default is some kind of failing, or imply that not wanting to kill all other forms of life makes you different from humans, or that being more bloodthirsty or willing to hurt others is an advantage.

What, I can't help but wonder, is the appeal in lionizing the worst parts of ourselves?

You see a lot of this in sci fi, and i think its because a lot of those look at the factions involved as characters in their own right, so they don't really feel much when stuff like 'by performign x social policy, the Human Dominion allowed 42 percent of its people to starve to death on purpose' is considered a fairly neutral detail.

Mindless fanaticism is often prized in these settings, to the point where the most common fandom memes is numbing stuff like 'FOR THE EMPEROR' and 'PURGE THE XENOS'. quite literally stuff all about turning your brain off and being happy about being a murderous garbage-animal that acts like a walking personification of the 'maybe the people who say all humans are inherently evil animals and that it will be a blessing when we all die and no longer poison the universe with our cancerous capacity for evil' idea.

i find it really, REALLY fucking creepy when this stuff gets popular, and more to the point, when the idea of 'humans are naturally warriors/soldiers' becomes so prevalent that you have people hating the idea of some universe where we don't automatically try to kill things for not being like us. its just exhausting, and tedious and...

I don't know, but it doesn't really sound right with archaelogical evidence for us.

I'm thinking about how ancient graves from our own ancestors and our neanderthal cousins both have many signs of caring for the ill, the elderly and infirm. the remains of children with severe Down's syndrome who survived until at least five years old, well cared for by others. Lots and lots of bodies with healed fractures and broken legs, which means someone took care of them; a running animal, and a hunter, with a broken leg is a dead animal. A healed leg is someone who was taken care of.

I think about how on the island of Cyprus, they found an truly ancient burial. In it, they found the body of a long-dead human, and beside them, the body of a cat, laid to rest with ceremony and by all signs, love.

The burial is around 9,500 years old; almost ten thousand years ago.

This predates the first confirmed use of writing by at least 3000 years or so. 3000 years before the epic of gilgamesh became one of our first stories (a story, I note, about a king who grieves the death of a friend and desperately tries to find the secret to immortality, and in time makes peace with the inevitability of death, and becoming a story we still know today).

War goes back a long way; there's no mistake about that. But I think about how friendships and love for animals that loved us too, and long-dead people still showing the signs that people cared enough about them to keep them alive as long as possible, is probably much more integral to the concept of being human, or perhaps what it means to be a thinking entity at all, more than our capacity to hurt each other.

[chimaerakitten]

Hi i ADORE the essay (ariticle?) you wrote about Tortallan heraldry! Is there anything you'd like to see Pierce incorporate more into the Tortall series in that arena? Any fiefs you want the coats of arms for or anything like that?

oooooh good question! I definitely would love more data points in general, just to see whether any of my theories are correct—a few more knights' shields might tell me if bordures have a meaning in Tortall, and if that meaning is related to the Lady knights' Orle at all—or I might be able to find out when the nontraditional tinctures were introduced, and which ones are common compared to others. I'm particularly curious about Naxen and Queenscove in this aspect, as they're some of the oldest and most powerful fiefs in Tortall, with the mosts knights contributed (I believe Neal also lists Legann and ha Minch as among the oldest) and that data could be very helpful, as currently Conté is the only house we 100% know goes back to the founding of Tortall. We know Macayhill is in the Book of Gold, and probably so is King's Reach and Queensgrace before it rebelled, plus Haryse and Masbolle, but it's not 100% confirmed that the families in the book of gold predated Tortall as a nation or if they were simply enobled very early (and besides, we only have arms for Macayhill and King's Reach, of that list) It's also like a sample of the arms of families explicitly in The Book of Silver, so I can properly place things on a timeline better than "Macayhill oldest, Mindelan newest" I'd also love to know how Tortall handles grants of arms precisely. Getting a knighthood is obviously directly tied to getting an arms grant ("getting one's shield") but clearly some people get arms of their own (Alanna, Kel) and some people maintain cadency labels (Conté heirs) or are granted arms that are identical to other members of their families (Kel implies her brothers have the same arms, which...defeats the entire purpose of individual heraldry...) having some sort of arms is inherent to knighthood in Tortall, but there's clearly some changes based on circumstance behind the scenes, even if it is only a matter of request by the knight/preference by their family/special arms being awarded for special distinctions like being the First Lady knight in centuries. More data would help me puzzle that out, I think. On a similar note, I'd also like to know how non-knights get arms—if they're allowed to use their head of house's arms plus cadency and inherit arms when they become head of house by default even without a knighthood, or if they have to have completed some form of education, or hold a position at court, or what. There's at least two coats of arms in the meta belonging to people (the second aspen vale son who's a mage and George Cooper) who definitely aren't knights, and I'd like to know how that works when arms are part of the award of knighthood.

[fierceawakening]

So this post is going to be a bit rough and rambly but… I don’t know how we put this genie back in the box.

Do any of you remember when I’d freshly left the abusive relationship I was in and I read VORACIOUSLY, trying to figure out how I’d been taken in by such an awful person? (I vividly remember telling my dad about her saying I’m sure I’m gay because on my previous relationships with men I never thought I was in love, but this was so intense… well. I still wasn’t sure but I wondered if it might be.)

I read stuff like Why Does He Do That? and I Hate You, Don’t Leave Me. I also read things like The Sociopath Next Door and one of Hare’s books on psychopathy. I’m pretty sure my ex just had BPD, and I hasten to say even there that I have known many other people with BPD who I emphatically don’t think would treat me the way she did. I was trying to make sense of her, not trying to condemn anyone with a label I don’t have. (There are prosocial psychopaths, too.)

Mostly I was trying to make sense of her lack of remorse. She presented it as sexy and exciting—oh no, I don’t ever worry about taking kink too far, I don’t care what people think of me, I never give someone who wronged me a second chance.

I now see these as huge red flags and worried about them even then, but I tend to be someone who obsesses over whether I’m giving people a fair shake, so the idea of getting with her sounded like a fun vacation from scrupulosity.

It was actually “surely the leopard won’t eat MY face,” but I didn’t see it then.

Anyway. Around that time I got into a lot of arguments with people here who felt that putting too much stock into those books was inherently ableist.

The things the books said about lack of empathy, about how someone who lacks empathy treats even close loved ones as objects of use and not as full people, resonated with how I’d been treated by someone who professed to care about me. But it ruffled HARD the feathers of people for whom “lacking empathy” just means “beepy boopy, but not uncaring.” I have no solution to this—I think they’re two different phenomena that unfortunately have the same name (on tumblr. Not sure they do offline.)

Any double way. One thing I kept coming across in that research was the specter of the sociopathic leader. A charismatic public figure who charms a whole community or nation, and once they do that, rule with an iron fist.

The appeal was eerily similar to why I’d latched on to such a gross girlfriend. “Don’t you ever just want to go ape shitt,” basically. What if you don’t have to care? What if you get to put yourself, your family, your tribe, America First?

Doesn’t that take a load off your mind?

Those weird leftists who don’t understand God or gender or American exceptionalism… what if you don’t have to understand them anyway?

What if all you have to do is win?

My books said THAT is why we should continue to think of sociopathy as bad and people who have it as predators. Not because human rights stop mattering if someone isn’t neurotypical but because the attitude is infectious.

A person who thinks that way by default, if they’re charismatic (and many are), can EASILY get someone who doesn’t think that way to start wondering why they bother with perspective taking and empathy and remorse anyway.

Dehumanization is a virus, and people like that are carriers. The more power they have in a society, the more virulent the strain.

Do most people eventually snap out of it? I mean I’d better think so, my sister in law is German.

But how long does it take?

That I don’t know. And that’s what makes me think Trump might win.

And why I continue to think fighting ableism is important but ALSO to think acting like empathy is superfluous is playing with fire.

[naoko-world]

Men aren't inherently bad

As a context I can sometimes see some people talk seriously about men as if them being men make them bad people. I could even see some people extending it to trans men!

But if you see, for example, more men being predatory than women, that's wrong to say every one of them are predators. They can even be strong allies!

To prove it to you I'll talk about some men who proved they were good people and far from predatory. Of course, I could talk about men I personally know but it will be better to concentrate on celebrities since talking about people I know won't make you that interested and will not prove anything to you.

But first, a bit of chauvinism

Still, I'll start by being a big chauvinist and talk about two french youtubers I see as feminists! (Even if none of them actually said they were.)

Le joueur du grenier (the gamer of the attic)

To introduce him a bit : He started his main emission by being inspired by the angry video game nerd and the nostalgia critic, and is one of the most popular youtuber in France. In his videos he's talking about bad old games, and sometimes talks about tv shows or other kinds of things that aren't games but are nostalgic (like old advertisements). He's also doing other things but I'll stop here since I'm not here to convince you to watch his videos.

In one video about Barbie games (this one in his second channel) he said as a joke "Pourquoi je joue à ça ? Parce que c'est marqué 'Software for girls', donc moi je veux prouver que même les mecs ils peuvent y arriver aussi." (Translation: "Why do I play it? Because it's written 'Software for girls' so I want to prove that the guys can do it too.") I don't know you but I always found it absolutely hilarious! And incredibly feminist!

Even better, in his most recent video he talked about Wii games for girls and, in it, he showed us a world where he's a woman (his role is played by an actress of course) and is playing the games with three other girls. The best is that it doesn't feel like a bad parody, you can really see him in this woman! It's not a stereotype!

Squeezie

OK now I'm talking about Squeezie, who's the Youtuber N°1 in France! He's basically the french Mr.Beast/Pewdiepie with a lot of concepts. His most popular is Who's the imposter, for which he added dubbing for one of the episodes.

To tell you about something pro-feminist he did, I could talk about his video about Kathrine Switzer, who's the first woman to run the marathon at a time where it was forbidden for women to run it. I could also mention his video where he invited one actress who was here to promote La maison des femmes (the house of women) which is a place where women can receive some care for various cases like when they're victims of violence.

Even better, in his emission Le pire date (the worst date), in the second episode, he was playing with 2 other men, but also one woman. Among the dates there was also one man. So we could see one woman trying to win some women's hearts (they're all actresses of course) and the men were seen trying to win a man's heart (also an actor).

Now for american celebrities!

It's time to talk about people you may know!

Keanu Reeves

This one surprised me a lot! Because I would never have thought about what he's praised for: not touching women when doing photos with them.

I personally did photos with celebrities and each time they were touching me because it's some kind of a automatism. It never bothered me because I never thought that I had the choice to refuse or accept being touched. So, hearing that Keanu Reeves don't touch women because, by default, he considers he doesn't have their consent... That makes me feel so happy! Also thinking about the possibility I could refuse to be touched during a photo.

Frederick Douglass

Here is an example of a man who escaped slavery to finally become a leader of the abolitionist movement in New York and Massachusetts. He was pretty famous for being a good orator and his writing against slavery but, according to a pdf from the secretary of the commonwealth of Massachussets, he was also fighting in favor of women's right to vote. I quote it: "Frederick Douglass’s lifelong commitment to women’s rights reflected a belief that rights should be universal, not limited by race or gender. He believed that disenfranchised groups should support each other."

Nice!

Fred Rogers

Well, this one I couldn't know them and I'm so happy I could learn about his existence!

For what I understood of it, he animated the children show Mr.Rogers's neighborhood, where he talked about many societal issues such as divorce or how to deal with issues of race. He also added in the show a recurring character who's an african-american police officer (played by François Clemmons), another character who is a mayor who is an african-american woman (played by Maggie Steward), and he showed his puppet Lady Elaine Fairchilde travel to Jupiter and discover a planet...

That man seemed to be a really good one who was embracing feminist values, as well as the anti-racism.

Danny DeVito

In an interview for The guardian, Danny DeVito has been asked if Hollywood is unfair to women. I love his answer, which is: ""I don't think it's only Hollywood, I think it's just generally speaking. Most men somewhere in their psyche are still dragging women around by their hair. It's terrible. I have two daughters, but even before my kids were born I always thought that it was terrible."

If we're asking about his actions, when Mara Wilson's mom got Breast cancer during the filming of Matilda he and his wife cared a lot for the girl, even inviting her at their home so she could forget a bit about her mother's illness. You can see more details on an article from Thelist.

Nonetheless that's so sweet of him!

Tom Hiddleston

Honestly when my friends suggested Tom Hiddleston because "he's a feminist" I was pretty skeptic. Especially since I heard men calling themselves "feminists" but being jerks outside of this.

But then, when looking for proof of it, I found this video showing many times where Tom Hiddleston was respectful toward women... Which convinced me he earned his place in my post... Especially with how many times in the video he's praising actresses he worked or is working with! Like OMG Tom I hope you really think that! Also... If I were them, I'd be touched by those words.

SquidTips

Back to YouTube with a man who made me question how I support trans people: Alex from the channel SquidTips.

Why is that? Because he's straight and cisgender but is showing the LGBT flag and trans flag in his logo and in his shorts where they're visible behind him (for example in this video). You can see in the screenshot that he even wears t-shirts with these flags.

He's also promoting LGBT rights in his longer videos, like in this one about why transgender women belong in women's sports.

What else do you want? He's awesome!

David Tennant

When thinking about good men one of the first people I thought about was David Tennant.

Like if I got fed up with him as The doctor since he returned in the role to be another incarnation of it, I still appreciate some things he has done and is probably still doing.

In the said things there's this t-shirt you can see him wearing during the promotion of Good Omens season 2, which is saying "Leave trans kids alone you freaks", and the trans and non-binary pins he sometimes put on.

In the same topic, he also said some things that are very pro-transgender and non-binary as the Media ThePinkNews reported.

And as a last one... My favorite...

Rick Riordan

Rick Riordan is, of course, Percy Jackson's author. He also wrote the sequels The heroes of Olympus and The trials of Apollo, as well as the spin-offs The Magnus chase and Kane Chronicles, and standalone books related to that universe.

Let's say that I admire this man... He included a lot of representations in his books after Percy Jackson ; which had been reproached to him by some parents who didn't want their children to learn about homosexuality, trans identity or other things he included ; but, in the first series, you can also see something awesome: strong and smart girls and women who aren't here only to please the male characters! I even think that Annabeth, Percy's soon-to-be-girlfriend, could have been the main character instead of Percy.

In the first series you can even see a daughter of Aphrodite and a daughter of Ares being besties and deeply loving each other (officially without them being in love with each other, especially since one of them has a boyfriend and the other one found her love interest at some point)... That's pretty touching! What is awesome is also how none of them are shamed for being either girly or not enough, they're only both two girls with different tastes.

I love these books, I love this man, I want to be a writer like him !

Adding that, outside of his books, he also created the imprint Rick Riordan presents, where he highlights books about other cultures or mythology written by other authors who asked to join the imprint. You can see a list of these books here!

Conclusion

As a conclusion I will only hope I could convince you that claiming that men are naturally predatory is a bad way to fight for women's rights but also incredibly wrong. Like I chose these examples but I was given many names ! No, being a man doesn't make anyone a bad person.

Also we can't fight for equality between the genders if we're stuck with the idea that the entirely male gender is an enemy of women. Furthermore, this idea brings some questions like "Do you consider that trans men are enemies too?" (Well, I saw some people who would reply "yes" to that question) and "What about non-binary people? Are they enemies or not?”

[spitblaze]

Cis Men run... every institution. Cis men are at the head of every government in the world, Cis Men created the system we all have to live in and made themselves the Societal default. It's kind of hard to feel sympathy for Men on anything other than an individual level when in a broad sense, Men are the reason for literally all of their own problems. Men are the ones who protest ANY form of progress, even if it would be beneficial to them, even when it means addressing and getting rid of things like Toxic Masculinity and allowing them to live in a freer, less rigidly definitive way. Men are the reason we literally all have to be scared all the fucking time just to stay safe. That's not TERF shit. That's literal centuries of oppression and the result of everyone who isn't a Cis Man having to learn very quickly how to keep themselves safe FROM Cis Men. Masculinity isn't the problem, Maleness is not inherently the problem, not all Men are inherently the problem. But in an abstract sense, assuming all Men are untrustworthy or potentially dangerous is the only way to keep yourself safe. I'm a Trans Woman. Yes, the TERF movement is primarily made up of Cis Women. But when I go outside the reason I try to make myself as unnoticed as possible, the reason I am afraid for my safety, the reason I don't present unless I have people around me, is because of what a Man could potentially do to me. Because of what Men HAVE done to me. And I'm not an outlier. It's all very well and good to say "viewing Men and Maleness as inherently bad is wrong" in the abstract? But in practical terms if I suddenly let my guard down I'm fucking dead.

Hi, I'm a trans man. I know exactly what you're talking about, I've been there during the time before my egg cracked, I've been there AFTER my egg cracked, and I'm not about to tell you you should innately trust every man or masculine person. Unfortunately, for a lot of people, it's the most surefire way to stay safe. I get it, I've had that moment where a man approaches me in a way where I'm positive I'm about to become a statistic, I've seen the kinds of grifts run by men to convince other men that the only way forward is domination and fascism, I've seen how many men see any sort of pushback on their privilege and place in the world and go berserk. 'Misandry' is a loaded word thanks to MRA shitheads, and it's not one I like to use. Cis men have historically not faced sex discrimination anywhere in the GALAXY of the magnitude of women.

The point I am making is not that you have to trust and love and tolerate every single man. I would be a goddamn hypocrite if I told you to do that, I don't even do that. What I'm saying is that there are a lot of people who, for whatever reason, see men as inherently inhuman, inherently incapable of love, inherently predatory. It's what fuels TERFs in their ideology, the idea that someone within spitting distance of masculinity has only one goal, and that is harm. There are people who look at men expressing their love for other men and mock them or react with disgust, not because of garden variety homophobia, but because they are men, and who could possibly love a man? You see people in queer spaces get uncomfortable when someone who doesn't shave their facial hair walks into the room, exclude trans men and nonbinary amab people on the basis of their proximity to manhood. I understand why it happens, but getting jumpy right off the bat in situations like this helps nobody. Designating women as the 'victim' gender and men as the 'predator' gender is reductive, and while I understand a lot of this behavior is an overcorrective (healthy) fear of strange men, the real fact is that, like...most men aren't dangerous. There are a lot who are, and I'm not asking you to lower your guard on the bus or whatever, just to realize that like. Someone being a man does not preclude them being inherently predatory or regressive, and someone being a woman does not preclude them being 'safe'. That's all.

[kojoty]

It is funny that everyone can point to the aesthetification of punk or emo and read it as a hollow, capitalized, defanged version of a counter culture alternative grouping of communities that commodifies and takes the power from an actual threat to capital (and, in the truest forms of expression, anti colonial, anti racist, anti bigot etc)-- the commodification of a lifestyle is to inherently eat it and then present an Angler Fish predator of illusionary revolution that nonetheless reproduces the system with which it has been hive minded into-- and yet. And yet, except in very specifically fringe groupings of historians and other, well, hippies, I don't see the same awareness or cohesive 'oh duh' moment to the caricatureization of hippies and freaks.

Ofc, to give nuance, many of the true counter cultural folks just moved on with the times and ended up just in a less defined 'aesthetic' as is the grouping I usually just umbrella default to 'folk' (which yes, has been commodified, but not in the same sense that 'alternative' has been commodified).

But one of the greatest psy-ops of the 20th century Imo was the way in which 'hippies' (by which I really mean the Freaks, a term that was arguably used more but is less commercially friendly to be calling an entire movement when you caricature and debarb it) was so fully caricatured, and a movement was completely erased.

To give the obvious sidebar and second caveat-- yes, I'm aware of the 'problematic' and less than stellar political optics of the 'hippie' movement. But in the same vein that talking about Marxism on this site and rebutting with 'well what about tankies!' is just a praxied conversational stop gap of bad faith interpretations and willful nuance-killing ignorance, this post isn't about interrogating those that even at the time were hopping on the coattails of an incredibly powerful social movement for less political motivations.

And at some point, I would like to pour through soke of the literature I have on the topic and write a fully researched academic deconstruction of the movement, because I really do think the Freaks of the 60s mirror a lot of the political activism occurring now, and lest we learn from the past, I'm afraid of this, too, being caricatured and defanged before it has a chance to win.

('Win.' Also a complex term that would take a paper to define.)

But the salient thesis here being that, at its core, the Freaks and Hippies of the 60s were, by 1969, creating a multicultural, social, and political revolution that was cross-racial, cross-gendered, cross-cultured, cross-sexual etc, intent on tearing down the structures of power in place that operated on capital and subjugation to hold 'peace' as a contractual perk for maintaining injustice. And that, this intercrossing of revolutionary communities and countercultural groupings (much like the end of the 1860s and 1870s post war) was registering as a threat to the establishment, and thus needed to be divided. The Hippie movement didn't commit suicide and poisoned by it's own political messaging; it was, like the CIA and other government institutions have done before, methodically and rititualistically poisoned, and when it was murdered, the gun was planted on the corpse. The caricaturization of the Freaks is money in the pockets of those that killed peace.

[there-was-a-hole-here-itsgonenow]

“A silly, terrible play”

“Humans are a unique type of pest, multiplying and poisoning our world, all while enforcing a structure of their own. A deeply unnatural structure. Where others saw order, I saw a straitjacket. A cruel, oppressive world dictated by made-up rules. Seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years, decades. Each life a faded, lesser copy of the one before. Wake up, eat, work, sleep, reproduce, and die. Everyone is just waiting. Waiting for it all to be over. All while performing in a silly, terrible play, day after day.”

Just thinking again about how much this quote applies to the Wheeler family. The concept of the perfect suburban home in the cul de sac, with the perfect—straight in more ways than one—nuclear family as a model for social idealization… it’s an unnatural default structure. This structure applies to anywhere that has a general default for societal perfection. It is a pushed ideal, a safe ideal too as formed by [poisonously] long-bred societal expectations. It is metaphorically like being straight-jacketed. The rules are made-up but you are insane/against the ‘natural’ order/wrong if you don’t follow such rules. This insistence of a ‘natural’ order can lead to unnatural performance.

There is so much that has been said about the way Henry has taken his understanding of such a structure and adapted himself as a predator—a predator against the predatory, oppressive world and what he experienced as a child. We additionally know Will’s correlation to Henry. We know the ways Will parallels but is opposite to Henry regarding the way they’ve been treated/viewed. Same with the Byers. We can also clearly see Mike and his family within Henry and his family—within this part of Henry’s monologue. We know the Wheeler family is a farce on a visual level. They visibly fit the structure, but it is performative. Unlike the Byers family, who don’t visibly fit the ideal structure, the Wheelers and Creels do. The Wheelers look picture-perfect and seem to have the picture-perfect background.

But we know better and see the cracks. We have seen the cracks through every season with the Wheeler family in general. With Mike, he hides so much of himself but we notice the signs of what he’s hiding—more than just his sexuality of course, though this would be the most glaring concern to the structure. He’s well-aware of the basic routine Henry speaks of (and what I painfully think of nearly every day for how simply effectively it hits): “Wake up, eat, work, sleep, reproduce, and die.”

I’ve talked about this line before and how it whittles an individual down to their most basic functions and expectations—the biggest expectation being to reproduce. Reproduction is traditionally associated with heterosexuality. This is inherently untrue and having children should simply be someone’s own choice regardless, but for many it is an expectation by means of basic function. This was a fundamental expectation that was drilled into me while growing up in the oppressive structure I was in (a religious cult for me). At a young age, adults were already talking to me about the man I would marry. About the children I would bear. As in, I have the body that is ‘meant’ to bear children and that is what I had to grow up to do.

This used to give me so much anxiety as a child, and as a young adult, because (though I didn’t fully comprehend my bisexuality or what my true wants were due to the muddled programming I was receiving) I could realize I wasn’t fitting in. I already wasn’t fitting in socially (nerd, outcast, etc), but the older I got the more I realized just how much more I wouldn’t fit in. So I tried to pretend I was. When delving into Mike, as so many on the Byler tag have so articulately done, we can realize he is pretending; especially as he gets older. And have evidence upon evidence for what he is pretending. And we can easily gather why. It’s a performance a lot of us understand.

When Henry speaks of the oppressive world structure as as a silly, terrible play (a meaningless one via performing the basic functions and enforced, made-up rules that disregards the individual and their individuality), it’s easy to think of Mike. So many of the characters in ST fit here, but for Mike we can see the performance within the “silly, terrible” role he feels expected to play.

[fedorahead]

in sword and board, beginner rule is don't move your shield. expert rule is move your fucking shield. you have to learn how to fight with a still shield before you start to harness it as a mobile appendage.

in the queer community, there are a lot of beginner rules. sexual deviancy/kink/alternative lifestyles aren't inherent to queerness, we are normal people just like you and we deserve equal rights just like all other normal people. sexuality is innate and cannot change. gender is something you know in your heart, something you're born with and is nobody's fault or choice. anyone who likes people of their same and other genders, to any degree, is bisexual. sharing your pronouns signals that you're some degree of ally. "they" is a safe default if you don't know someone and don't have the opportunity to ask. trans doesn't mean gay. queer people are not predators. asexuals aren't that way from trauma. etc. there are millions of them.

feminism is about women's rights and liberation.

autists don't like being overstimulated.

furries aren't hypersexual "weirdos".

we created these rules to protect ourselves, and to explain simply in words that will make sense to people who don't actually need to look deeper. there are contexts where they are true, and often those contexts are the majority. and for anyone who isn't a member of the community, isn't familiar with members of the community, doesn't have the depth of understanding necessary to engage in the deeper discussions, it's all they need.

behind closed doors, it gets a little deeper. when we're not in danger by the listeners, we'll open up a little more and discuss a little more and even debate and argue and come to different conclusions.

sometimes these discussions come out of our backrooms, and they get corrupted by the people who don't have the context to understand.

sometimes when that happens, we default back to our beginner rules, and reiterate them, and deny the deeper conversations because the people who've misheard or misunderstood or gotten us wrong are dangerous and they draw stupid conclusions and they make stupid assumptions.

and for some fucking reason, and i know the reason is self-preservation, but it's so dumb because it doesn't work, for some reason our response every time is to gaslight them.

a queer person does something shitty, and the community reiterates queer people are not shitty instead of publicly making it clear that the person doing something shitty is both queer *and* shitty. and doesn't represent us. and that every single one of us is a person with positives and flaws and the spread of shitty people across the queer community is comparable to the spread of shitty people across the wider community. we tell them we're not shitty, and the thing they're seeing with their own eyes does not exist.

we're scared. we know what people say about us. we know that trans men are compared to detransitioning girls/other and that people think we're trying to escape womanhood. we know that trans women are compared to predators and that people think trans women are trying to invade womanhood. and it's horrifying because that's not who we are, that's not who i am, that's not our community.

just like religious people who deny predatory priests because that's not our catholicism.

luckily for the queer community, we don't have the history of enabling, secreting away in the night, protecting, supporting, paying off, intimidating, that the catholic church does.

but we do have a history of telling people the thing they think they see before their eyes isn't real because we don't want it to represent us.

i was in a pro trans detransition group for years on facebook. i wanted to know what i was looking at if i decided to transition and regretted it. and the girls/other in that group were varied, and they were all real people with very personal reasons to detransition. one, he couldn't pass no matter what he did and he couldn't handle the stress being in the middle ground for 10 years did to him so he decided to just live as a woman. one, he transitioned succesfully, but being a man in this world was so isolating that his depression pushed him to decide, detrans or take the other way out. one girl in her mid 20s had grown up a tomboy, didn't like how society treated her as a woman, fully transitioned and lived as a man for 8 years, and discovered that she felt further from herself. and she had to transition back to a woman. she found a lot of love and support in the company of trans women who were helping her through things they had been through, and felt at home with them because suddenly she was closer to them than any trans man or cis woman in her experience. she was a very sweet girl and she was so sad.

and these people exist! they're real! most of them are very kind, very sweet people with good intentions and real struggles. none of them were willing to interview with any media; the last girl kept her journey very private because she knew what harm telling her own story would do in this climate.

when some ignorant asshole meets one of these people, and learns their story, and uses it to hurt people, telling them that nearly no one detransitions or that it's not a real issue reinforces their belief that we're lying, misleading, corrupting. because they see that some people do. and we can use real world statistics until we're blue in the face but that doesn't change minds, not really.

when the expert level discourse comes out into the big stage, we have to address it, not deny it. some people detransition; the trans community should be the place of support for those people as much as it is for people who wish with all their hearts they could transition. some trans people are predators (ok, i have firsthand experience with three so i'll say with certainty that three trans people are predators, and likely more, but obviously not a statistically relevant number) and acknowledging that these individuals are predators is important because holding their transness above their predation enables them. maybe i'll tell my story about my ex on here at some point, but i will say that the fact that they are trans is a major reason the well-meaning liberals they're surrounded by chose not to do anything about what they did. because they felt like holding a trans person accountable for something like that could hurt other trans people. and to be honest, with this deny and gaslight approach, it might have, at least in our small community.

still sucks to see them at LARP campouts, but whatever.

anyway. i'm glad to see this discussion progressing. i think we need more practice with these higher level discussions though, because when i hear some legislator-friendly "gender is immutable and inherent" line get thrown at a queer person in a queer group used as a gotcha to point out the interloper instead of as a jumping off point for further discussion, those backrooms get a little smaller and the deep shit that used to be housed inside them gets a little more pressed out into the public eye. and maybe someday humanity will be ready to have an open conversation on the interactions between early childhood trauma and lifelong sex repulsion without invalidating the swathes of asexuals who do not share that experience. or the people who do transition hoping to escape the societal pressure of their assigned gender without judging that very normal impulse or treating them as some sort of traitors.

i'mma keep having these conversations either way because i can't shut up. but it'd be cool if more people a little more eloquent than me were featured more often doing so because i'm clumsy and irritable and i fuck up pretty much every point i make.

anyway if this made sense to you feel free to add me. i would love to have these discussions with the understanding that all participants enter with complete respect for the subject matter and whoever has input... and if i start to get stupid or irritable or black and white, just bonk me with an inflatable hammer or something i guess. it's fun and healthy to talk about.

[paragonrobits]

I've seen a few takes suggesting that vampires would be considered disabled because of their need for blood, with a tone of writing assuming this was the default, and its honestly kind of fascinating and I honestly wonder how this came about.

I have, quite literally, never seen vampires depicted like this outside of this site. So I'm forced to contemplate why this has become any kind of natural thought about vampires.

I suppose the first thing to consider is a leaning towards thinking of vampires as disenfranchised, oppressed, or otherwise having to deal with accommodations or unique problems they have. And this is genuinely surprising to me because the element most common with vampires in modern work (dating back to at least the 90s from media I personally remember, and certainly much older than that with multiple decades spanning vampires becoming increasingly less used as antagonists and becoming romantic, however threatening or even genuinely malicious), is power.

Vampires are powerful. This sort of requires that they be supernatural in nature (a lot of the ideas I see here suggest them as people with unusual dietary needs, which I find a lot less interesting than them grappling with the monster inside), but can apply in a more mundane context. But over everything else, vampires are powerful. They are physically powerful; they're almost always far stronger than humans, either by default or because they can develop the power to rip you apart like wet tissue paper, throw trucks around, and similar feats.

Powers of mental influence, domination and mind control are incredibly common, almost universal. This also factors into the idea of vampires as predators and... well, to be blunt, another kind of predator. Vampires can force you to do things you don't want to; take over your mind, make you think and feel and do things and make you think you WANT to do them. They can coerce you.

This element of potential coercion also factors into another aspect of vampiric power, being that they have almost universally been depicted into two ways until very recently. The first one is wandering undead abomination; the corpse that rises from its grave to prey on the living (and this one is SO OLD that when people claim that vampires are inherently sexual, or that lust is a core aspect of a vampire, it kind of ignores that the entire vast body of folklore that created the idea of a vampire across many different cultures very rarely has anything like that). This type of vampire is not relevant here, but it IS worth noting that until recently, most vampires were like this.

The second one is power in the sense of social status. Vampires were almost always depicted as wealthy and ridiculously rich if they weren't borderline feral thugs and brutes. This leads towards metaphors about the rich and powerful, literally eating the poor. The coercive nature of the vampire is instead reflected here in their wealth and social status, and the privilege it accords them. This particular aspect is so overwhelmingly common that whenever vampires are treated as people, this one became the rule. If vampires were treated as individual beings with some capability for moral choices, they were rich and/or aristocrats of some kind, such as old money families for modern works. Vampires that were not rich (such as animalistic vampires, ones desperately holding themselves back from killing people to satisfy their hunger) were a glaring exception to the rule.

above all else, a recurring motif is that vampires take. Sometimes they physically require blood to live, or if they're genuinely undead, prolong their existences. (Specifically, at the expense of others.) They might be monstrous, undead predators who feed off the life and pain of others. Sometimes they are monstrous, but are capable of moral decisions and choosing not to hurt others as much as possible (and then, a big draw of the concept is the struggle between restraining the beast within and how good it feels to let loose and embrace that monster).

So with that all, it begs a question; where exactly did this idea of vampires as victims or at least a more or less defanged take become more prominent?

Personally my take is that its the logical conclusion of the increasing emphasis on a vampire as tragic and romantic, while minimizing the more harsh aspects of the vampire and making them more useful as metaphors in some way, though it runs the risk of losing what actually makes vampires interesting in favor of a disability metaphor that honestly feels to have come from nowhere and, in all honesty, also feels potentially really iffy when you consider what vampires otherwise tend to be.

[ganymedesclock]

Clowns are great, tell us what you like about clowns!! Everyone seems scared of them to the point that a nice clown is an inverted trope...

I think that people initially get unsettled about clowns for a lot of the same reasons people get unsettled about dolls- the presumption of innocence that can be subverted, the 'that's not quite a normal face' affected by the makeup, and to a degree that circuses have become a little less common and a little more something regarded as fantastical or strange. (I attended a Cirque do Soliel performance- Cavalia- once in my life! It was extremely impressive)

I think on top of that, as you say, the trope of the monster clown, popularized by figures such as the Joker, has become so widespread that people tend to think of clowns as scary by default, a kind of monster category. Which is just kind of a shame and many people are taking that back. For me personally, I'm a bit more of a fond of old-school aesthetics/ court jester image than I am on the classic clown but I still think circus aesthetics are pretty fun.

For me, a lot of the appeal of this is twofold: I think "a performer" is an interesting psychological state to present a character in, especially someone like a clown who generally has a persona on and off and who drastically changes their face (with paint, wigs, costuming) between. The clown is designed to be funny- to affect a foolishness or otherwise harmlessness- and it is a performance taken on deliberately by others. At their core, clowns are actors, and their performance is to entertain one way or another.

This is an interesting thing to think about for me personally because I'm someone who tends to reflexively fear being not taken seriously, being found funny, harmless, ineffectual by others- but the key thing about a performance is that it is at the discretion of the performer. They are putting themselves, their art, and their control into it. At the same time, they're skillfully palming elements of themselves so the audience doesn't see who they are fully or clearly.

That can be used for horror, to be fair- the idea that someone is behaving harmless or benevolent when the actual person they are underneath is not necessarily. But at this point, the clown facade is so often associated with evil that it'll lose a bit of effectiveness before your audience unless you play it really well.

It can also be used for something interesting! I don't call myself a profound or storied batman aficionado, but I think it actually is interesting that the Joker has a "clown aesthetic" in some ways but that one of his most commonly depicted fatal flaws is pride- he dresses as he does to laugh at everybody around him but cannot stand the idea of being mocked or derided- he's not the one to take the pratfall, and any time he does, he hits the roof about it. Not someone who actually values the clown as an entertainer, but someone who wants to insinuate everybody around him belongs in the circus and he won't respect them.

But I think there's a plentiful amount of room for characters associated with clowns who are depicted as more of a clever hero; someone who performs and deflects, disarms and pleases, from the shrewd perspective of a person who knows they aren't being taken seriously. The core viewpoint character in one of my personal projects- Avery from Bevyverse- is raised by a circus and while he doesn't exactly keep up the clown makeup after leaving it behind, it still strongly affects his ideology about role, identity, performance and entertainment; to the point where, as an abandoned child with no known history, he takes the surname of the setting's equivalent of Robin Goodfellow- a role he came to thrive in at a key point in his upbringing.

I think there's not necessarily anything wrong with a scary clown, but I think that there's a trick and artifice to horror, in that fear is a very reflexive, instinctual response. There's a reason that the jump scare is the cheapest trick in the book and half the time we see it coming, but it rarely fails to get your heart rate up. As living creatures, on an instinctual level we want to keep going. We get startled by things not by any moral failing but by an assessment of risk that goes by so vanishingly fast in the depths of our brain we are left only with a sense of lingering unease- or a moment of direct terror, cued by our entire body shifting into high gear so we have the energy and resources to- hopefully- fight, fly, freeze, or fawn our way out of it.

But because this is so reflexive, and because many primal fears are intuitive- a fear of disease, a fear of injury, (and from those, a false-positive unease at anything that seems "like us, but not quite" or "us, but not moving right") a fear of predators, a fear of parasites, a fear of fire and shifting stone, asphyxiation and other natural hazards that could kill or profoundly injure us- in writing and designing horror we don't actually need to think about this stuff. So someone can think, hey, that horror movie I saw with a scary clown was really gnarly, right? I think I can capture that feeling in my own work!

I think that, if I have to cite one thing as the most important part of writing- for myself, which I'm sure many people can and ought to disagree with because there's never just one way to do art- it's interrogating the elements of your story, even to yourself. Not all of it needs to go into a story, but for me, someone who is very fond of conceptual horror, I feel like it's a good idea to not take things for granted, but challenge them to yourselves- why a clown? what's scary about a clown? If we unspool these reflexes and instincts, what do they lead us back to?

And I don't mean this as a reason you shouldn't have an evil clown! If you really want to have an evil clown, asking these questions will help you make the thing a lot scarier- it'll give you a clearer thesis of what, exactly, is the horror element here, what about this is scary- and hopefully help you avoid bigotry in horror, which can be a real problem in the genre when prejudice is to a degree rooted in fear, and fear is not objective- we can train our feelings to lead us astray, and while that isn't a mark of how we're a bad person- we often aren't given a choice in it- it's important to return to the source and ask yourself what's scary and if that is inherently so.

[sixty-silver-wishes]

When I was a kid, one of my favorite books was a nonfiction picture book called "Animals Nobody Loves," which was about exactly what you'd think- parasites, roaches, vultures, snakes, you name it. I was fascinated by these animals, and picked up the book because I wanted to prove it wrong. Somebody had to love those animals. I loved many of them.

When I was older, I was really into Lord of the Rings, but had the same critique of it that many other people do- despite the elves, dwarves, men, and hobbits being complex characters with "good" and "bad" traits among them, the orcs, trolls, and goblins were "bad" by default. I'd read the books and watch the movies, where there were whole armies of orcs and caves full of goblins, and I'd think, "there are thousands of orcs and goblins there. Surely there has to be at least one good one. They can't all be bad."

It's startling, too, how this logic of "good" and "bad" populations can spread from the world of fantasy and animals to ideas about real people. When I was in high school, I cut off a former friend because he'd developed extremely racist beliefs towards Black people. He had a bad experience with one Black person, and then came to the conclusion that the entire Black US population was somehow like this one person. I argued to him that, if about 13% of the US population is Black, 13% of a population couldn't all think and act the same as one person; that would be ridiculous. He responded by calling me a "liberal snowflake," I blocked him on social media, and that was that. Looking back, I wish I'd cut him off sooner.

Recently, some friends and I were talking about animals and fantasy races in fiction, and how the concept of entire species or fantasy races being ascribed as "good" or "bad" can tie into real-life racism and other forms of bigotry. We talked about Lord of the Rings, and the flaws in the movie Zootopia in its attempt to present an anti-racist metaphor by using sentient animals as stand-ins for real-life racial issues. From my perspective, such flaws in storytelling were obvious, as it made literally no logical sense to suggest that every single member of a certain population, whether real or fictional, has the exact same mindset, moral values, mannerisms, beliefs, and experiences. Zootopia's metaphor fell apart because the "predator" animals actually did use to hunt the "prey" animals in the film, leading to harmful implications associating marginalized people with aggression. But then I remembered that kid from high school, and realized that not everyone approaches the issue of generalization as I do. Some people really do think that entire populations are entirely good or bad, and that morality or immorality is somehow inherent just based on where someone is from or what they look like, and that can lead to serious harm.

As a writer, that's one of the things I want to be extremely cautious to avoid. Of course, diversifying your characters always makes for more interesting writing, but in addition to diversifying the beliefs and moral compasses of fictional populations, like elves and dwarves, it's even more important to do the same when it comes to writing characters who represent real populations. If you look at fascist propaganda, you'll always see marginalized people compared to animals or monsters, because animals are "safe" to generalize. In folklore, we're used to sly foxes and gentle sheep. We look at insects and rodents with disgust. And so when populations of people are compared to creatures we associate with "evil" traits, it dehumanizes them and attempts to justify discrimination.

I think while there's always been a discomfort for me to see fictional creatures generalized as "all bad" or "all good," while I may be able to see myself in those creatures (the thread above mainly discusses neurodivergence, but it can also easily be applied to queer perspectives, or any other marginalized identity), the main issue comes from how these groups are presented as "the undesirable other," and what that says about how people seen as "different" are viewed.

creature in fiction: *is portrayed as bad and mean*

8 year old me: but what if there was a good and nice one :0

[aclosetfan]

the pet peeve/pettiest opinion i have abt this fandom is how sometimes ppl portray the blues w/o any substance and/or any sort of depth like they do the greens and reds🤝

I don’t even think this is petty, it’s just true 🤷‍♀️ it seriously irks me to no end. I’m so glad you brought this up!!! lmaooo short response is I 100% agree with you.  unfortunately, I agree with you so much I wrote a whole freaking essay, which can be found under the cut. I could rant about this all day long. I don’t even care. The blues are such a disappointing couple :( I wish fic writers would cut out the cutesy pure bs that you find so often with these two.

I really think that the biggest problem with the blues (and Boomer) is all rooted in Bubbles’ characterization. I think she’s the most difficult for people to write because she’s the least “problematic.” And a lot of people don’t know what to do with her because no one can relate to unproblematic. She’s written as (excuse the annoying early 2010s expression, but it fits) the perfect cinnamon bun and there’s no conflict if a character doesn’t have some kind of internal conflict, they’re boring! They get tossed to the side!! Blossom is often written struggling with leadership and perfectionism. Buttercup is often written struggling with impulsiveness and aggression. People relate to them because they’ve “gone through things” most people have experienced themselves. Fic writers like writing Bloss and BC for the same reason because you can only write what you know! But shoot, writers still got to place Bubbles in somehow! So she’s either an airhead, or a crybaby, or too innocent/naïve, or the uwu character, which is good for a few laughs but 🤷‍♀️ it gets pretty 2D and old real quick. Her biggest issue in the show was people babying her, but usually, that conflict is written off in fics with one simple “OH so she’s actually a badass” scene and that’s like it?? It’s never visited again?? (Even though all her solo episodes focus on her accepting who she is despite what others think so idk if badass scenes actually do her justice. She’s a lover not a fighter at the end of the day tbh.) It’s understandable though. I struggle with Bubbles because I’m not as optimistic as her character, and I certainly don’t relate to being “the joy and laughter.” It’s hard writing someone whose fanon character is interpreted as practically flawless. In ppg fics you’re also juggling a big group of characters, so it’s advantageous to rely on the simpler archetype tropes. So, I think it’s easier for people to set Bubbles up in a relationship than explore her more thoroughly since she’s the sensitive one who would be into the lovey-dovey stuff. Further, if you want to give readers a break from the heavier themes of your main plot, having a cute side pairing is a good safe escape. Not a lot of thought is needed to make those relationships work. And since Boomer’s just there and also underdeveloped, they get paired together. And because people (rightly) want to stray from the predator/prey trope because Bubbles is just so Pure(tm) and the trope feels assault-y, writers make Boomer inherently good. But now you’re just stuck with two good, cute characters. That’s it. And because their plot in the story revolves around their romantic relationship, it's their relationship that is the only thing that aids in their character development. The blues make up the lighthearted B-plot (but probably more like C-plot because the greens are usually B-plot material) The blues seem to follow two tropes: 1. Pure childhood crushes—Boomer was always good and wants to do good by Bubbles and she wants to “protect” him from his “mean” brothers 2. Bubbles “fixes” Boomer, but he really doesn’t need any fixing in the first place because he was good all along, he just needed encouragement. (Weird side note, have you noticed how Bubbles is always like “Boomie you’re NOT stupid” and then all the sudden it’s like the boy has a PhD) And I'm not faulting anyone for having a b-plot relationship with the blues. If it’s done right, being in a relationship does wonders for people! But relationships are work and without the blues having their personalities developed OUTSIDE the relationship, there’s no “work” to be done. They’re just the Perfect Couple and it’s boring. Don’t get me wrong, I like the pairing (it’s v cute), but what’s nice about the greens and the reds is that each individual character has usually been personalized (Butch not so much, in my opinion, his character generally revolves around BC, but bear with me for argument's sake), which makes their relationships with other characters fun to read. The greens and the reds are flushed out because their most basic archetypes are the most relatable and easiest to write. The Blues, though, just seem to get together. Bubbles is a hard character to write, so by default, so is Boomer. They have no conflict outside each other that would trigger character development. They flirt, sometimes Bubbles resists, then they’re together. She’s the cutest thing ever and he’s a simp for it. Easy, fluffy, they fade to the background because now that they’re together what happens to them next?? Irl people either get married or they break up. Most of these fics are high school AUs, so they can’t get married, and no one wants the cute ones to break up, so they just start to enter and exit the story as convenient segues. And that’s disappointing because individually they could be so interesting. Bubbles has to struggle with the fact that people infantize her. Her ideas are often dismissed, people treat her like a ditz, and her ability to be a hero is often called into question because she’s the one who seeks peaceful alternatives, and when she DOESNT seek those alternatives, people in the show freak out and become scared. Like I said before, most bubbles centric episodes focus on her accepting her sensitive side and using it to overcome a conflict. Also, HIM’s like her main villain in all her episodes. and, shit, one of her nicknames is literally Chubbles. She’s been called fat a few times. There’s so much a writer can do with her conflict-wise. Optimism and sensitivity don’t equal naivety, we don’t have to make her Pure. In fact, it’d be way more fun to see her trying to show everyone that she’s no longer a child but a young woman. And Boomer has like 3 episodes, right? Maybe 4? Literally in all of them, he’s a bratty little boy. He carries slugs in his pockets. He’s bad at trash talking. Easily distracted. Fights with his brothers. Dumb and chaotic. Good at spitting. He doesn’t put Bubbles on a pedestal. He wants to beat her up. He’s not a good guy. Bubbles thinks he’s cute. That’s literally all we know about him lmao. He wouldn’t be soft so why would what we know translate into a boring unproblematic underdeveloped boy?? You can write him unfulfilled. You could write him stuck in his brothers’ shadows. You could write him as a weirdo who’s obsessed with bugs (to match bubbles animal obsession). In my head, if Brick’s the smart one and Butch is the strong one, I make Boomer the charming one. And charming boys are dangerous boys 🤷‍♀️🤷‍♀️he probably had to charm his way out of plenty of dumb situations. I also make him unluckily lucky since he gets captured by the girls in one episode, but he still makes it out just fine. Everything bad that could happen happens to him but Boomer’s like “eh 🤷‍♀️ It’ll blow over. Lol already died once. What can ya do?” So you've got a girl who is never taken seriously and a boy who takes nothing seriously and yall really think their relationship would be unproblematic??? Individually, these two characters could be fun to write if the fic author plans it out correctly! Idk why their relationship wouldn't be either. If you want a compelling romance, you’ve got to make compelling characters. 

[n7punk]

Not that I'm defending sword as strap, but I think most people who do that do it so that with the hc that by using the sword she can 'feel everything' so to speak. Plus I would say post s5 where Adora is able to access She-Ra without the sword and literally materialise it out of thin air becomes less an actual sword and more a physical manifestation of her power (like the green lantern or whatever i guess)

See, I also don't think it makes much sense for her to be able to feel through the sword (though as just a fun magic thing to write about, sure, again I've read those fics and like them just fine, this is just why I'm not doing writing it myself). I both do and don't agree with that interpretation of her power post-S4. It tracks with what we see, but it is called the "Sword of Protection" (and in the original, truly is supposed to be a sword), which kind of implies its default is being a sword. Remember, She-ra is a runestone princess, and the sword hilt bares her runestone. I think it's a weapon, based around her runestone and made from magic, that she can summon and manipulate. However, did the Sword of Protection only gain that name after the First Ones shackled it as a weapon that defaulted it to the form of a sword? Quite possible, though the original canon informs my opinion otherwise, but this is removed from the original canon as well.

I was actually going to make a post about this once, but my headcannon for how the First Ones tech version of the Sword of Protection was made is that they had the current She-ra (who was a First One, and predated Mara since she was unaware of what they were turning Etheria into and the tech of the Sword was the key) summon the sword, then built the tech around her runestone, trapping it within the Sword. We know that the Heart, the runestones, and all of Etheria is connected from the ends of season 1 and 4, so clearly they figured out how to interface with the magic of the runestones. Once trapped inside the tech version of the sword, the runestone could only respond to the touch of a First One.

Does that mean that a sword was its inherent default, or that the runestone was even meant to be housed in a weapon? No clue. Maybe She-ra's used to pass on a tiara with the runestone in it, but given that a sword is such an important emblem for the entire franchise, I would say that it is supposed to be housed in the weapon the current She-ra uses, it is an actual weapon that she can summon and is made from magic, and the majority of time it is a sword, although certain She-ra's might have preferred another form as their default, and it can be transformed into various shapes as necessary.

[bigskydreaming]

Which Batkid do you think Dick feels is the favorite?

Quick caveat here just to clarify (not assuming anything about you here, just clarifying for my own purposes) that like, I'm hugely not a fan of DEFINITIVELY declaring that Bruce has a favorite kid, or that Alfred does, or even that any of them have a favorite sibling. Because I honestly think that's pretty much impossible to ever fully separate just from our own fannish character preferences and preferred character rankings. And like....I don't think that ever meshes well with the idea of a found family that doesn't actually benefit from or explore anything via a forced hierarchy of favoritism that's like....based entirely on which characters any given fan likes best and thus WANTS to be their other favorite characters' faves in turn.

BUT. I'm not saying that has anything to do with your ask or that I think that's what you were asking, I just wanted to include that upfront just for like....context for my actual answer.

Because all of that said, that doesn't mean that the characters don't ever have ASSUMPTIONS about someone being someone else's favorite, that sorta thing. That's born largely of insecurities and like, is totally natural and understandable. I'm totally down for exploring that. Its just validating or confirming those fears of favoritism via like....Word of Author that I'm opposed to.

As far as Dick goes......having known Bruce the longest and probably having the FULLEST understanding of him, not necessarily the best but just the most varied, the understanding that contains the most time, context, variables to factor into his view of things Bruce-related....

I think Dick does absolutely at times think or assume or fear that someone is Bruce's favorite and its definitely not him. But I think WHO that is tends to be fluid.....

And its always whichever kid is the FURTHEST from Bruce at any given time.

Because the thing about Bruce is that he is undeniably brilliant. He's smart as fuck, meticulous, well-reasoned, and I actually think he understands people a hell of a lot better than a lot of us give him credit for. Given that like.....it tends to be largely agreed upon, that Bruce is good at manipulating people or getting them to do what he wants/needs them to do....and to accomplish that you actually do need to understand what makes people tick, what they've got going on under the surface.

No, Bruce is absolutely a genius, just as I believe everyone in that family is, and while he's not the most emotionally intelligent of the family, I don't think he's as ill-equipped there as he tends to be advertised being.

BUT. I also think this is the EXACT THING that so often gets in Bruce's way, and causes a lot of conflict between him and his children specifically.

Because the danger inherent in all of the above, is I think Bruce sometimes is a bit too quick to make assumptions. To assume with all that he does know, the information he does have, the understanding he does possess of what motivates people and makes them behave the way they do....

AS WELL AS.....being someone who absolutely IS aware of and reflective upon a lot of his own worst flaws.....

I think Bruce has a tendency to act upon what he THINKS he 'knows' about what his children are thinking or WHY they did something....before he bothers actually asking them, or talking it through with them. I think he too often leans into the commonalities he shares with his children, the things he builds upon as a foundation for his entire relationship or dynamic with them....before remembering that his kids have influences other than just him, many that PREDATE his influence in their lives, and like.....the things he seems himself reflected in when he first meets most of them are like....a starting point, at that fixed point in time.

They can and do all grow beyond just who they are then and there, and that growth includes a lot of overlap with him and his own views and characteristics....but it also includes stuff totally divorced from him and coming entirely from their own history, their own beliefs, their friends, teams, etc, etc.

And so the problem this creates is Bruce - who very much is a man of action, even given as much time as he devotes to thought, planning and contemplation - I think Bruce is so often so eager to leap into 'fix-it' mode, and tackle any problem that arises between him and his children....and he's so USED to leaning on his own intellect and knowledge as the tools he uses to address or fix problems, as well as leaning on his own awareness of people and of HIMSELF, who he sees as so often overlapping with who his kids are....

That sometimes he charges headfirst into a problem that isn't remotely what he assumes it to be, and he tries to handle it with a plan of attack/action entirely unsuited to addressing the problem it ACTUALLY is, relying on tools that are just.....not what the job in question actually calls for.

And when that happens.....he's like....stumped. This is when and where he defaults to just freezing up and doing nothing or breaking off and avoiding further acknowledgment of the problem whatsoever. Because he doesn't know WHAT to do, because he's not sure where he went wrong in the first place. He's not sure which of his calculations he got wrong, and why the tools and plan he defaulted to as the necessary 'fix' were such a poor choice....and without understanding that, being able to identify where he missed the mark....he doesn't know how to come up with a NEW plan to ACTUALLY address the situation. And a Bruce who doesn't have an actual plan, is a Bruce who doesn't know what the FUCK to do with himself. And it shows. And it gets awkward, and he gets snappy, and everything devolves into more and more of a trainwreck from there.

And so to bring this back up to your question.....I think Dick at least perceives Bruce's favorite as usually being the one furthest away from Bruce at any given time....because Bruce tends to romanticize his dynamic or history with his kids when they're NOT right in front of him.....actively contradicting his assumptions of them and what they need and want, and throwing him offcourse and into uncharted waters where he doesn't know how to swim.

Because the kid who isn't right in front of Bruce.....Bruce can reimagine/reinvent his dynamic with to be anything he wants it to be. That kid is the one Bruce GETS.....because they're simply not present to act or behave in a way that Bruce DOESN'T get. There's no conflict. No indication that Bruce doesn't actually know them as well as he assumes or that they don't actually have as much in common with him as he takes for granted (and which he defaults back to as seeing the root of the sapling he grafted into his own family tree to make one...super...tree).

And that....Bruce knows what to do with. That's a status quo he can work with, be comfortable with, take comfort IN.....because it doesn't NOT align with what he takes for granted or assumes to be true....and thus it can't ever create problems that he can't fix because he doesn't know how and hasn't ever stopped moving long enough to wait and listen to his children actually explain where he assumed incorrectly and they all got offtrack.

And to be fair, all of this is like, my headcanon for what Dick would answer AFTER the family is like...full grown. I do think that when he was younger and it was just Dick and Jason for instance, Dick likely assumed Jason was Bruce's favorite due to specific things like Jason being both Bruce's partner and his adopted son at a time when Dick was distinctly neither of those things and lacking reassurance as to his place in Bruce's life and heart without definitive MARKERS to show what that place was, like adoption or wardship papers or the linked names of Batman and Robin. But by the time the family includes multiple siblings, I think this is Dick's assessment of things.

He does know Bruce loves him, loves all his children. He does believe, I think, that Bruce doesn't CONSCIOUSLY favor one child over the others. But I also think he knows and understands Bruce well enough that he can see Bruce better knows how to relate to people - his children especially - when they're acting in ways he GETS and understands.....and his kids all have a tendency to throw him off and do the unexpected in person. So its always the one furthest from Bruce that reaps the (largely intangible) rewards of Bruce temporarily favoring them simply due to them being less.....complicated in his mind. Less another inevitable seismic upheaval waiting to happen, reminding the man who really really values knowing what the hell is going on and how exactly to deal with it, that like.....his children are not often obliged to cater to that tendency of his.