#someone put a stupid holier-than-thou post on my dash again!

[skinfeeler]

one of the grand failures of advocates of prison abolition, non-disposability, and ‘accountibility over retribution’ (all of whom borrow from each other’s theory and rhetoric) is that they do, in my opinion, largely misjudge the motivations of those who act in such a way that is often labeled punitive.

to demonstrate this, i’d like to speak about a commonly-advocated alternative, that of the transformative justice process that is so often extolled as defined by the chrysalis collective: one of its important aspects is that the survivor is allowed to state their needs from the process, especially in relation to the person who commited harm against them. often such things include desiring to see a genuine effort for change, perhaps an apology— but almost always, in my experience with more informal processes, the desire to have a voice. having a voice is critical to all of us in order to feel empowered in the actions we take and around the people we let close to us. being deprived of one, either during certain acts of harm in which we were unable to protest or afterwards in which our ability to advocate for ourselves and state the harm done for us can be just as traumatic as (if not moreso than) the act of harm itself, be it a sexual violation or something else.

power, voice. real factors in the healing of and desires of many survivors.

having thus acknowledged that, if we present the victim who desires to pummel a rapist with a baseball bat to simply be acting on a moralist (perhaps christian) drive that dictates that meeting harm with harm is right and just, even when we know this person is in our circles and is probably more than familiar with the kind of theory being peddled? in many cases, i believe it’s a desire to simply no longer feel powerless against someone who at some point had the power to dominate you utterly, harm you in such an awful, irreversible way during which you were powerless to defend yourself.

i think in many cases it’s both, and this is why i believe that it is childish, smug, self-satisfied behavior to leave out the desire to be re-empowered out of our discussions — or perhaps, mention it as a side note, or when further prompted — when we talk about violence against those who have committed violations on sexual territory presently or in the past. it serves nobody, it certainly can’t be said to be effective in altering the beliefs and actions of those whose retributional drive we misjudge and mischaracterise, which i presume is the point.

or maybe, a familiar topic which at this point is basically treated as if it were always a big joke, a pathetic, infantile sort of behavior: the callout. are all callouts made with the intent to punish or to exile? i really, really don’t think they are, especially not the ones which concern emotional or sexual abuse.

maybe you could argue that the reason people have a desire for their perpetrators to be hurt doesn’t matter, that the results of further harm whether it takes the form of bodily harm, exile, disposability, the forgoing of any sort of healing process are what we must focus on.

but it does matter. the problem with this confused worldview which on one hand, only considers consequences and the way they appear to us — a rapist in intensive care, someone duly disposed of from everywhere they found belonging and who now lacks the support they need to try to act more ethically even if they wanted to — but on the other hand assumes (or at least, singularly focuses on) intent makes it so goddamn easy to gloss over cases of actual punishment and disposal, it can easily result in a situation where actual systems of revenge and punishment are labeled not such simply because their adherents and perpetrators have managed to make up a different justification for them than those that they project on rape victims.

far too often, this pure rhetoric (as opposed to the structural transformation it is supposedly meant to be) is useless to discern what is the right thing to do and what is not, and instead, is a way for people to feel moral, fundamentally different from those with the wrong worldview. it’s a common heuristic to believe that what you, personally did, is different, that it’s not like those people, with the wrong beliefs. this is the inexorable result of this egocentric moralist kind of navelgazing.

when we malign people’s own stated, real, powerful motives for doing what they feel they must do in order to recover at the same time as we insist that our motives vindicate our horrid, harmful actions completely, transformative justice has become a farce. little wonder that this worldview (which i still view as true and necessary) has become so completely unpersuasive to real and actual victims as they exist in the real world — even those who believe the end of such patterns of punishment to be true and necessary, as i do — let alone the revenge fetishists among the left who we are up against ideologically, meaning that so long as people talk about the topic this way, we will never end incarceration or cycles of revenge in general.

[mokomodukedom]

Some saying that although Carrot faced Katakuri in the latest chapter, she still lost and cried. Luffy is finally back, just for breaking the mirror. Even though Nami was doing badass stuff, some kept saying it was so out of character, Sanji has been taking lots of Ls cause he's being crying a lot and getting beaten, Chopper has no defining moments besides defending Sunny. People saying that they won't have reactions to Pedro's 'death' anymore. And to people keep insisting to hurry up to Wano.

(assuming this is the same anon from the previous ask or at least continuing from it)

In referencing to the earlier ask, I always find “X fandom is ruined” type overly dramatic and highly performative (”others are stupid while I know what the correct opinion is”). Any fandom that’s large enough has its share of drama, and different parts of the fandom have different experiences so just because someone’s personal corner of the fandom has a lot of rants demanding more battles doesn’t mean that the whole fandom has fallen (for example, until this ask I hadn’t seen a single person criticise Carrot for crying in the newest chapter). 

I am aware that there are readers who complain very fast if there isn’t a battle in the most recent chapter, but I’ve found it very easy to just ignore them. Especially on tumblr it’s pretty easy to choose who to follow, and since I don’t care for reading posts from power level/battle junkies (or from overly devoted shippers, or holier-than-thou rants on why Oda is so problematic yet again etc), I just choose not to follow blogs that would put content like that to my dash. 

(and I thought Carrot’s case was fair build up and Luffy, Nami and Sanji have been pretty cool lately [though I find that Chopper’s performance has been pretty lackluster and I really don’t care about Pedro’s “death” thanks to both Pell Effect and finding Pedro a pretty boring character], but I don’t think it’s really my business if someone else feels differently.)