#societal flaws

[mindlesscakepilot]

"I'm not like other girls" isn't a joke or a weird fad.

It's a rebellion against the system that's telling men and women and teens and children and all of society that being a female is inferior.

That liking "girly" or mainstream things is stupid instead of normal (why do you think those things are mainstream to begin with?)

That liking pink somehow makes you dumb, but it is a pretty color.

That having feelings means you must be irrational, when really allowing yourself to feel can make you more caring and compassionate.

That crying means you're being manipulative, but it is just emotional release.

That bleeding once a month means you're definitely crazy, when really it is just the beauty of the human body taking care of itself and preparing for a potential life.

Being a woman is not a character flaw.

[mallory-likes-whales]

It's very interesting to me how much power parents have over their children. Yeah, some level of guardianship is valuable, and a certain level is necessary, but... There's a point where it gets really dangerous.

Parents have control of food, shelter, healthcare, education etc. Anything considered necessary is determined to fall into the jurisdiction of the parent. It's so important to the child that they cannot be trusted to make good decisions.

How does that sound? Not great, right? Yeah? Maybe I'm biased because of who my parents were, but that doesn't sound like a good idea to me. If a child's parents are, for lack of a better word, awful, this goes bad very quickly.

Let's say a parent cares very much about grades? What if they force a child into isolation for not meeting expectations? How is that in the best interest of the child?

How bout a step further, let's say a teenager winds up pregnant. They might wind up homeless or worse at sixteen because their parents decided that they no longer deserved to live under their roof.

Let's say a child realizes that they are trans, and upon talking to their parents, find out that the parents consider it a mental illness. Even if they could have gotten assistance in transitioning, or even just staving off puberty, their parents won't do anything to help. Now the child could live in fear of losing those necessities if they step out of line at all.

None of those are even getting into violence. None of those get close to the true horrific extent of what parents are allowed to do. Starvation, violence; a parent has more power to commit harm than anyone else in a person's life.

And what makes it worse, is that parents decide what normal is. A child could be treated worse than dirt for their entire life. But they can have so little of a reference for any of it that they think it's normal. Healthy even.

I have no idea how this could be solved. There must be a line drawn somewhere I suppose. But this isn't where it should be. 18 is not some magic number. Yes, maturity is important for making important decisions. I'm just saying that requiring a parent's approval for seeing a therapist maybe isn't the smartest.

[this-world-of-beautiful-monsters]

one of my pet peeves is any attempt in hotd fic to present the driftmark fight as uniquely the fault or evidence of evil in any particular kid/group of kids/color team, like-they were children socially programmed to look down on each other for being girls, bastards, and/or dragonless, were further influenced by their parents' intergenerational baggage, had their navigations of these hierarchies thrown off balance by various forms of extreme trauma, and THEN were given access to sharp objects and living nukes. somebody was going to get seriously hurt at some point, it was inevitable no matter who reacted to what stressor. then the only course of healing modeled by adults on either side of the conflict was bloody revenge, which only exacerbated the issue.

the whole point isn't pointing out extreme moral flaws in these children, it's that they're forced into increasingly violent situations before they can really develop any personalities at all and the adults in their lives are so marked by their own violent upbringings that instead of realizing "hey, our kids being taught to hate each other for the stupidest reasons imaginable resulted in one of them being partially blinded, we need to change how we interact with one another extremely fast before they end up dead" they double down. because hotd doesn't work as a story of good vs evil, despite fans (and show runners) attempting to frame it that way, it's the story of an incredibly sick social hierarchy's self-destruction via how it treats and mistreats its young.

[rapha-reads]

Me: I want to talk about Louis de Pointe du Lac in the books and how he's constantly haunting the narrative whenever Lestat is the narrator, even when he's not physically present or Lestat isn't even consciously thinking of him, because Lestat is actually always thinking of him and remembering him and using him as his humanity compass, and...

The tiny rational part of me: can you PLEASE go to bed, you'll write a love letter to Louis once you've had more than 4 hours of sleep, I am begging you, your eyes are burning, your neck is aching, you're starting to get a headache and you're being slightly delirious.

Me: but Louis.

Rational me: LATER.

Anyway I love Louis and I love how Lestat completely adores Louis and I love how every single vampire of the Court, from the most ancients to the youngests, know that they belong together and no one should ever try to separate them.

Also Louis noping out of the entire drama with Amel and those clone guys to go peacefully read in his crypt far away from the entire drama is so FUNNY AND RELATABLE, like same mate, saaaame, I'm good reading about it, don't wanna live it, no thanks.

[guayabana]

elden ring attracting so much attention from audiences that usually wouldn't touch a fromsoft game has been so annoying when it comes to discussions about its story.

like maybe ironic considering grrm was involved in the writing this time, but the response to elden ring & specifically SOTE feels very similar to what happened with game of thrones, where the story is pretty explicitly about the dangers & violence & cruelty inherent in certain systems of power, and 95% of the audience response is to look at that & be like "wow i hope my fave character gets to be the good ruler who fixes everything because they're so cool & nice :D"

[martyrbat]

habeas corpus – detective comics #1086

(ID in alt!)

[kiisaes]

mha is like an estranged awkward father to me. i try not to make my connection to it obvious but i secretly care a lot about it (sometimes against what i desire) and when ppl talk serious shit about it i get defensive. like yea i understand that it's not the best series writing-wise, it's got a good amount of problems and that its mere connection to me makes me cringefail ... but i'll always find some sort of unexplainable comfort in its arms despite its flaws bc there's still a good amount of it to genuinely enjoy without a constantly ironic state of mind that all media must be critiqued with nowadays and i don't expect anyone to understand this odd relationship but myself

[liminalweirdo]

News outlets who report on criminals has "having autism" might as well report whether they have celiac as well, or green eyes.

These arbitrary facts have nothing to do with their actions. When 1-3% of the world has a trait, whether it be celiac, autism, or green eyes, it a simply a common trait, shared by millions of people. This is ableism and it should be called out, especially in the face of the attacks being misogynistic attacks.

This has nothing to do with autism and it's ableist as fuck to suggest otherwise. People — the news — are desperate to find something in these people that marks criminals out as different from "us".

Autism is an unrelated factor. Just like uncommon eye colors. Just like whether or not someone can eat fucking gluten.

Next time you read that a person who has committed a crime has autism, stop and ask yourself if it fucking matters. Next time someone does something terrible, I wanna know if they can eat bread. Like??

Because here's the thing: for the past several years, autism has been used as a crutch or a shield to assure abled people that they are somehow removed from someone who would commit an act like this.

Painting criminals as monsters because of their mental health problems (or painting them as monsters at all tbh) only serves as an excuse to turn our face away from the problems that exist in our society. Autism is not the culprit, but the way the world functions right now definitely drives some of these people to do what they've done. So how do we address that?

We need to put the blame where it really belongs. This has nothing to do with the DSM-V.

[frankensteincest]

my two cents on the whole ‘evil isn’t interesting to explore in fiction’ take is that (1) yeah it’s a non-issue and this stance seems to me like an extension of the mandarin-sharing, horror is for love, make everything nice and simplistic trend and (2) in the cases when it is an issue. well, I think morality is an interesting concept actually, and good and evil are a part of it. evil has just occasionally been written about in deeply uninteresting ways. blame the interpretations, not the concept.

[myrfing]

i'm an sb liker yes but it does still make me laugh that a japanese company took a shot at writing a story about imperialism in the fantasy east and not only did they make china Japan 2 alongside with a preexisting Actual Japan 1 & nearly completely ignored SEA (going so far as to call fantasy Vietnam like, a "historically insignifcant nation" in ShB), they wrote their titular postpatch tragedy in part about how the locals in fantasychina did some evil sexual slavery shit and thus paid for it by being colonized and ruled by their vengeful victim who was given power by their imperial rulers. Like huh.....damn...Oh you want to write about fantasy south america with motifs of the start of the columbian era now

[j-esbian]

wild fucking take i saw and like. i know it’s funny to make fun of catholics bc of historical oppression but i don’t think it’s unreasonable that, if you are an unbaptized person at a catholic religious ceremony, you’re expected to not take communion. you came into their house

[hotsugarbyglassanimals]

i think beastars would've worked way better if the desire to eat the meat of herbivores by hunting them down and killing them wasn't inherent to all carnivores and wasn't this like... weird uncontrollable urge. as a story that muses on what would happen if an animal society with parallels to ours existed, its an interesting concept but it falls apart -really- fast when people attempt to compare it to the racial dynamics of our reality (the author heavily advises against this, but I think it's a significant issue if people continue to think of it this way regardless of her intent). and it also falls apart when considering something like harm reduction and rehabilitation. with the latter point i would chalk that up to an issue of execution and lack of understanding on the author's part

god this post is so much longer than I thought it'd be uhhh

carnivores viewing herbivores as a potential food source is something that's considered inherent to being a carnivore. Not the craving for meat or adequate sustenance, but viewing another sentient living being as food which i think is a significant difference. It's treated as a matter of fact within the text and isn't disputed in any real way. In fact, a lot of the really ... "questionable" (understatement) societal dynamics are presented as like. just being the way things are with characters accepting it without any real heavy objection to it in some instances (there is a specific story in beast complex I'm thinking about right now). Haven't even touched upon the gender bioessentialism but maybe I'll get to that in another post

There's a strange sort of Both Ways dynamic between carnivores and herbivores where herbivores have the significant disadvantage in physical strength but outnumber carnivores by a large margin. Herbivores are also significantly more represented in some career prospects while carnivores have to follow social rules to be as non-threatening as possible. (As a note female carnivores are presented as straight up not being as dangerous or aggressive as the male ones. and while there are ones that predated on herbivores they're portrayed as mentally unwell or manipulative, or in some cases their predation has a twinge of sexuality to it... male carnivores generally are portrayed with a bout maliciousness in their predator instincts until they receive treatment and "go back to normal")

Let me summarize what I think wouldve been far more interesting to consider: how punitive justice doesn't work to prevent crime and doesn't stop people from repeating crimes, how people who lack resources are driven to desperation and how that can enable them to commit violent acts, how oppression isn't born out of fear of the oppressed group but rather a means of seeking domination over the oppressed group.

I really hesitate to put carnivores in the role of an oppressed group and with what i can gather from beastars I'm starting to think that was avoided on purpose, but I'd have to reread it in order to give a better analysis

I think it'd be interesting overall if the issue was that carnivores aren't getting enough sustenance and in turn are quite malnourished. Maybe they didn't eat meat of herbivores but instead the meat of non-sentient fish, but that was viewed as a slippery slope that leads to eating herbivores. Stuff like synthetic meat or anything resembling meat (and like the manga, stuff like bugs not counting) was banned. So even though fish meat would be a worthwhile option to consider, it is still illegal due to moral views despite the illegality causing far more damage to society as a whole. This could Still be like, not ideal in a story sense I feel like but as beastars exist right now it's much more concerning

I've read the entire manga and yes I know fish meat was considered a solution at the end but the whole thing was so fuckin flimsy that it felt like a bandaid solution to the problems that were portrayed in the beginning

[idiosyncraticrednebula]

I feel like whenever people discuss "gender roles" on social media and just in society at large, they simplify it way too damn much.

[fromtheseventhhell]

Catelyn is honestly so anti-smallfolk, it’s hilarious… like in ACOK, Edmure bring all of his people into the castle to protect them from the advancing Lannister army because he cares about their well being and Catelyn think, “Only my sweet brother would crowd all these useless mouths into a castle that might soon be under siege.”

I think the smallfolk of the North will be incredibly glad she’s not there to bar the door in their faces when the Others decide to show up. This attitude is exactly why Sansa turned out so classist. She learned it from her mother.

I think it's really interesting to look at different characters and their values. I don't think Catelyn is any more classist than the majority of highborn characters, but it is interesting to have the comparison between her and other, less classist POVs (also interesting that we get a character directly effected by this with Jon). Classism at times can feel very subtle in the books, but it's definitely been there and explored since the beginning. We have characters who make a point of helping those of lower birth or means, and then we have other characters that remind us of the status quo.

A large part of the War of the Five Kings was us seeing how the smallfolk were suffering because of the war, from both the Starks and Lannisters. I think this often gets ignored on the part of the Starks as they're seen as morally superior by a lot of people. I also think, because this classism is coming from well-liked characters, people have a habit of minimizing what it is. Catelyn considers the people Edmure has decided to protect as "useless mouths" which could just be read as a harsh truth, but we see how desperately the smallfolk need this protection. Their turmoil doesn't exist outside of the war they've decided to wage and they do bear responsibility for it. I think this moment is nicely contrasted by Dany and her ruling arc. Several times it's noted by others that a majority of the people who follow her are non-combatants who are slowing her down and using up supplies. Yet, she still insists on protecting them because she knows it's her responsibility after freeing them. So Edmure protecting his people is a nice thing to do but it's also should be seen as his responsibility as a leader. Sansa takes after Catelyn in many ways, and her adherence to social norms is one of them.

It's comical to think of how the show tried (and I use that word loosely) to incorporate this in the show by pretending that the characters cared about the smallfolk after doing absolutely nothing to consider them. It feels like something they lifted from the book because it was the final episode and they were running out of ideas. I am very interested to see how this idea plays out in the books though. I can't imagine that there's been such an emphasis on classism, the suffering of the smallfolk, and the ones who fight for them only for it not to be a big part of the story later on.

[yioh]

the whole csm discourse on twitter is so dumbbbbb oh my god😭

[spioderman]

One thing I love about this episode, and the show overall, is the exploration of the different ideologies and societal structures

Ellie argued for Fedra in this episode, partially because she was raised within it and has been fed propaganda for it. The argument for Fedra is they can, if allowed, keep society in order and help keep things functioning and running. This is the good they feel they have to offer. Their fault, as Riley points out, is not everyone can make change. Riley experiences systemic racism, preventing her from reaching the place of authority and ability to change the system that Ellie would be granted. Riley is right in this that Ellie’s missing a big aspect of the oppressive nature of Fedra because Ellie isn’t really experiencing it.

Riley argues for the Fireflies, who want to take out Fedra as the facist military party they are, they also seem to want to bring society back to a better place, the difference is we don’t know how they will do it, we are shown they can blow up and take down Fedra, but to Ellie’s point, can they sustainably run a society? Can they build a better system?

The third group we see is Kansas City’s uprising, a city that has been oppressed in what seems to be a much worse way than Boston, these people don’t know how to run a city better, but they desperately want to, this group is however still grieving and processing what they’ve lost, and they're angrier at Fedra then willing it seems to try and build a better life for themselves, especially Kathleen, leading to what looks like an unsustainable future as a collective.

The last group shown (so far) is Jackson, a communist structured group that functions of a collective mindset. That has movie nights and families. Is careful and hidden, a group that is more interested in preservation than fixing the whole world. Jackson is the most sustainable and well-functioning group we are shown.

For Riley and Ellie, this argument about Fedra and the Fireflies is about them trying to figure out what would lead to the best future. As Ellie says, 'we're the future', and they get to decide what happens next and what social structure and ideology they want to subscribe to. But both are being given two flawed options and being fed propaganda for each, and they don't know that there are other options out there and that they could potentially build a better new system. This reality just isn't being presented to them yet.