#stops being infodumping starts being mansplaining

[sera-wasnever]

Popular internet neurodivergence is all fun and games until you realise people have decided that cause they're cool with people with like fandom hyperfixations and no other symptoms that they have to see via social media, any cruelty they show for autistic traits irl is okay and not ableist

[thecottageinthedark]

That's not being pretentious though. That's literally not what the word means.

Pretentiousness is not about Actually Being Enthusiastic about stuff. It's about PRETENDING to find and appreciate Depths in something so as to make yourself look Intelligent and Deep.

That's where the gatekeeping bit comes in. Because people who are being pretentious about something value being smarter than other people about the thing. That's different to valuing the thing itself.

(Sometimes people can do both. That's when you get things like gatekeepy fan communities that are also genuinely passionate about their fandom. But the two things aren't the same and each can exist independently of the other. People can be pretentious without any true passion, cultivating an appearance of Liking Something without actually liking it much or at all-or they can be deeply passionate without any pretence at all.)

To illustrate my point, here's a hypothetical example:

Ann, Beth, and Cathy all say they are into classical music. But each of them means something different by that

Ann's interest in classical music is motivated primarily by the fact that she feels that classical music is elegant high-class, intellectual, refined. Therefore being a fan of it reflects well on her. She isn't really interested in it for its own sake, so her knowledge about may stay fairly shallow no matter how much time passes, if she can get the same social benefit from only an beginner-level amount of knowledge about the subject.

Beth genuinely enjoys classical music; she has Opinions about conposers and pieces, and has over the years amassed a LOT of knowledge on the subject. However, she also feels that loving classical is a sign that she's more intelligent and cultured than most. She likes conversing with other classical music nerds, but she's invested in that group remaining a walled garden for people she feels are as intelligent and cultured as she is. She is often shocked and suspicious when someone she'd stereotyped as not on her level turns out to actually also appreciate and understand classical music.

Cathy, like Beth, genuinely loves classical music, has Opinions and can happily talk about it all day....but unlike Beth, she doesn't think of her interest as a Smart People Thing or a High Class Thing. It's just her particular interest thst she finds endlessly fascinating and beautiful. Cathy will actively try to get people into classical, or at least try to explain to them in ways they can understand why she loves it so much. She wants to share the joy classical music gives to her, and will probably become upset or demoralised if the general feeling in her community is that classical is 'not worth their time, especially if they opine that it is only for boring snobs.

Ann is pretentious. Beth is passionate but also pretentious. Cathy is just passionate.

This kind of misuse of terminology is rife on tumblr and twitter, and in my opinion it really needs to stop. It makes it harder to communicate, and associates positive or neutral things with strictly negative ones. We all remember that tweet Grimes made where she claimed to love being mansplained to; that's the kind of misunderstanding that this can produce. She used the word as if it meant 'being infodumped to by a man about his interests' when the actual meaning is 'being condescended to by a man about things you know perfectly well already'. And don't even get me started on widespread misuse of the word 'codependent'....

Words are important. You're not being pretentious by having a deep interest, no matter how nerdy or unusual that interest is. You're being passionate. Don't insult yourself by claiming the love you feel is a character flaw.

I really do think that it’s good for the soul to be unironically pretentious about something. Not in a gatekeeping kind of way but in a “yes, it really is that deep and I would love to enthusiastically and passionately explain why” kind of way.

[why-this-kolaveri-machi]

Grand Titans Rewatch: 1.01

so! i only really got into the show around the 6th episode, which means that while i was intrigued by the first five, i didn’t really pay a lot of close attention the first time ‘round. so i’m going to try and rewatch the entire series over the next several weeks and bring you Thoughts, because um. well. I Will Have Them.

SPOILERS for pretty much the entire series, though i will be covering only the pilot episode in this post. let’s see how this goes.

1. i’m just such a sucker for eerie dreamscapes, so i’m definitely biased when i say that this is a promising start. what’s really intriguing, though, is rachel dreaming of dick’s past well before she’d met the guy. after eleven episodes, the extent and even the very nature of rachel’s powers is still nebulous; this ability to dream about people she hasn’t even met only comes up this once, as far as i remember. (again, my initial viewing was superficial, so i might’ve missed it coming up/referenced again.)

1.5. a doylist explanation for this? hint at a special relationship between rachel and dick right off the bat, set the tone for the rest of the series, establish a character-development-by-dreamscape precedent, give us a gander at the origin story of the most iconic character in the ensemble, and set the broader arc of the season—an acceptance of and an ascent out of inner darkness—in motion with these two characters.

an in-universe search for an answer is potentially more interesting, however: why should these two be connected? i like to think that trigon’s influence started here, pushing rachel further and further down the path that would lead her to free him. i mean, handwaving aside the comic-booky implausibility of trigon foreseeing the exact pattern of random events that would lead to the moment rachel pulling him out of the mirror in 1.10 (he’s an interdimensional being! i don’t know! *flails hands*), i like the symbolism of it: both batman and trigon as phantom fathers that rachel and dick run away from, only to be pushed together. this is not to imply any broader equivalency between trigon and bruce wayne, of course; but it goes some way in explaining why this dick is especially traumatised and brutal, and why it would’ve had to be an especially traumatised and brutal bruce wayne that taught him everything he knows.

1.6. HAH at the ‘flying’ in the ‘flying graysons’ sign fizzling out just before the rope snaps, tho! so corny but also so upsetting.

(‘so corny but so upsetting’ – a valid tagline for titans)

1.8. oh but the set-up around rachel is so intriguing, tho! this is both the greatest strength and the greatest pitfall of the show: each of its characters can occupy a genre show of their own; because the first three episodes focus so heavily on rachel, it seems like the tone of the show changes when the titans finally get together, and like a lot of interesting, painstakingly slow set-up for rachel is just dropped and wasted.

2. the first glimpse we get of dick grayson is in the rearview mirror of his car. FUCK. i’m going to start a count.

MIRRORS, MIRRORS EVERYWHERE: 1

Ok. things i love about this little two minute introduction to dick grayson:

a) look at this broody asshole. i love him so much.

b) right away we have this push-pull re: his robin identity. he hates it, resents it, but can’t quite let it go. his officer grayson persona isn’t enough for all the evil in the world, even if it means losing control and falling farther and farther down a spiral of self-loathing.

c) he’s so damn mired in crime and tragedy, tho: officer grayson by day, vigilante robin by night. MAKE A FRIEND, DICK. GET A BEER, DICK.

(so true to character, tho: a suffering dick grayson is usually a determinedly self-isolated dick grayson.)

d) AMY ROHRBACH! i refuse to believe they’d just unceremoniously kill off such an iconic character. i fully expect to see her in s2.

e) “you do your thing. i’ll do mine.”  a poorly functioning dick grayson picking up unhealthy coping cues from his mentor.

f) i love how implicit it is that gotham is a carnival of unending horror among the officers in the precinct, and probably every other city in america.

3. the clawmarks on rachel’s mother, tho! fuck, i wish they’d carried over more of this eeriness in the second half of the season. oh, and also:

MIRRORS, MIRRORS EVERYWHERE: 2

i realise why we had to get a move on with the plot, but i can’t help but wonder if we could’ve gotten an even slower build-up to rachel’s powers, because honestly? i know you’re lying, i always know when you’re lying, and the vicious slut! in the school bus window? actually more unsettling than watching rachel liquefy some baddie from the inside.

(tho. um. don’t get me wrong. that’s plenty disturbing, too.)

4. conflicted!brooding!vigilante!dick, here to chase away the images of dead women splayed over living room floors with bullet holes in their heads.

4.5. the fight scene was brutal, sure—but to be fair, most of batman/robin’s fights teeter on the fine line between causing enough damage to keep the bad guys down for a bit and outright brutality. it’s difficult to bring that to life on screen (in a series that touts to inject grittiness/realism into proceedings, no less) and portray a robin who’s definitely crossing some lines without going into some real brutal territory.

4.6. so far i’m loving how economical the storytelling is when it comes to dick—how quickly it’s established, then underscored, how being robin is so important to him and the last thing he wants. his curdling resentment at the thugs immediately looking for batman the moment they see him, and his inability to move on from being the other half of batman-and-robin. he feels compelled to play both parts at once when he’s fighting, and he hates it. all of these things are playing out right underneath stretched-too-thin skin, jagged and awful and ugly.

4.65. and the editing and sound choices keep emphasising how this is not dick in his natural state—how, in a lot of ways, robin is not his natural state anymore.

4.8. dick, brooding in his open-plan apartment, broodily listening to vinyl records and cleaning his armour of blood, while brooding. did i mention that i love this asshole?

(i don’t know where the bruises came from, considering that it seemed like the thugs couldn’t get a single hit in during the fight.)

MIRRORS, MIRRORS EVERYWHERE: 3

4.9. a dick timeline: the zucco thing happened, what, two years ago? robin hasn’t been seen in over a year. and dick moved to detroit a month ago. hmmmm.

5. rachel’s alter-ego-self as a manifestation of her powers continues to be fascinating. as is the fact that that alternate self appears less and less as she grows more accepting of what’s inside her and learns to control her abilities.

5.25. so, what, was sally a part of the cult that wants to kidnap rachel specifically, or just a Bad Person in general?

5.5. “you got that thing for helping kids” – i love that dick has this reputation barely a month into his time in this department. like. this guy is broody and closed-off and clearly traumatised, but hey, he’s good with kids!

MIRRORS, MIRRORS EVERYWHERE: 4

5.8. “you’re the boy from the circus” is super-dramatic and all, but how did rachel recognise adult!dick when she’s only seen kid!dick in her dreams? and also, why did she dream of dick at all?

5.99. side note: officer!dick’s hair is the best. it never gets better than this for the rest of the season at least until he becomes trigon’s demon acolyte.

6. KORY!

6.5. so… did the car accident cause the amnesia? do we ever find out why exactly she couldn’t remember anything about who she is? she doesn’t look injured; just dazed.

6.6. her passport was issued in 2014—so she’s been here a while, searching, researching. or not, because it’s probably a fake-ass document. stop reading so much into this, emmram!

MIRRORS, MIRRORS EVERYWHERE: 5

6.8. her super-convenient amnesia means she’s forgotten her identity but not human language, mores or customs. i like this extra layer of… alien-ness? that this brings to her: so now she’s not only a stranger to the rest of the world, but to herself. again, so many interesting things are set-up here that the show never really follows through with for the rest of the season—imagine re-discovering kory’s identity along with her, piecemeal, rather than an impersonal infodump near the end of the season!

6.9. also given that portrayals of starfire (at least those that i’ve seen/read) make liberal use of the ‘born sexy yesterday’ trope, i rather like this take—she’s already learned everything she needs to know about assimilating into human society, and it’s a question of rediscovering that knowledge instead of having some dude patronisingly mansplain the world to her.

6.95. why did she snap that russian dude’s neck, tho. that’s just brutal. i’d forgotten about this.

7. i like to think here that when dick says i’ll find someone who can help you, he’s not just thinking of law enforcement, but also of people in the super-community—psychics, or telepaths, or somebody who has experience with both. there’s still so much about dick that’s kept in the dark for most of the season, but given the length of time he’s been with batman and the easy familiarity with which he talks about other heroes in the finale’s dreamscape, i’m going to assume that he’s more than well-connected.

7.5. but he’s shuttered himself away for so long, and robin’s return has been far from well-received. i like this little moment where he steps outside and just… lets himself be overwhelmed. just for a bit.

7.7. i like that amy says “sidekick” first instead of “partner”. on-the-nose, but i like it!

7.8. the glibness of he and i had different ideas of how to do the job is making me laugh. oh, dick.

i guess the idea of batman sours quite a lot when you’ve spent most of your life as his partner. i get that he’s projecting losing his own sense of self to a role he just isn’t cut out for onto bruce, but it’s sad anyway.

7.9. gosh i just want these two to bond. i don’t care how you do it Show but bring back amy next season, yeah?

MIRRORS, MIRRORS EVERYWHERE: 6

8. is there any particular significance to the repeated security-cam footage shots we’re getting in this episode?

(gosh, i love the cinematography so much in this scene.)

8.4. so… kory had to use some sort of russian mob and come all the way to vienna to find rachel?? why??? are we ever going to find out?

8.5. on a happier note, i love love this version of starfire’s ‘innocence’. like. she’s baffled, almost apologetic about it, but she isn’t going to take any shit about it, either. also, the music when she uses her powers for the first time, man. FUCK.

9. aaaaand there’s the liquefying-a-guy’s-insides bit. i both love and hate this show’s self-indulgence.

9.5. i gotta say, this episode makes a lot more sense on rewatch than it did the first time ‘round. i remember being so confused by evil!cult!guy, but then again, i was pretty distracted at the time. i only really picked up the show because i was so amused by the over-the-top reactions fans had to the trailer. now look at me, writing 2k+ word reviews dissecting its every moment. *shakes head*

10. *rachel stares at dick’s porsche*

“this is yours?”

“family heirloom.”

“… from the circus?”

“not the one you’re thinking.”

I LOVE EVERYTHING ABOUT THIS EXCHANGE.

10.5. i love these two Dramatic Kids.

11. beast boy cameo! just to assure us all that yes, he is in this show, and that, yes, he is the Best of them all.

12. you guys, this episode is so much more fun that i remember it being. you’ve got an amnesiac interstellar super-spy in kory, a straight-up supernatural horror story in rachel, and a psychological case study whatever genre batman’s supposed to be in dick. each of them could easily fill their own show, but i love that titans wants to connect them with something more than just a team falling together just because.

[flyingpurplepizzaeater]

i just saw a post that is like “dear autistic boys, when you are infodumping on a girl, that’s not the same as mansplaining” and etc etc which i like the sentiment but it’s just 

everything 

is so complicated all the time 

i mean like what makes what someone is doing good or bad isn’t their gender or disability status really. not that those things are irrelevant! um 

like 

idk how to phrase this 

ok 

like, so a lot of autistic people get taught that infodumping is Inherently Bad!! when it is NOT, it’s can be a really great communication/connection tool and the message can be really really... everything about you is inherently horrible. and then 

people sometimes swerve to Infodumping Is Inherently Good, It Is Never Bad, which it *is* good, but like, everything is so complicated! like, sometimes complimenting ppl is a bad idea. or idk, talking about horses. or the weather. or like anything can be bad 

but sometimes just deciding Infodumping Is Good (or: protocol: assume info dumping is good absent specific situational evidence otherwise) is the necessary thing, cuz if you try to analyze it every time you do it you’ll just never say anything and fall prey to those old ideas about being inherently bad 

but also when you realize that This Thing Is A Disability Trait So It’s Definitely Fine can sometimes go wrong or even badly wrong you can start to feel like there’s no truth to it at all, bc it’s like this oversimplifying thing is the only weapon you have against the ingrained belief that everything about you is terrible, other then deeply analyzing every conversational turn which will take 1000000000000 hours 

and like i have my issues with the idea that “Robert does a thing” and “Robert, who is disabled, does a thing” are totally different scenarios but on the other hand if i physically do not have the motor skills to not make other people uncomfortable well that doesn’t make their discomfort stop mattering. but also eg i can’t just like go buy some motor skills at walmart because you don’t like my face!

there is no clear bright line between disability and morality  

this isn’t very thought out i was just thinking about it i don’t have really clear ideas about it

[spring-awakinning]

Just gonna use this to vent for a second bc don't wanna be vulnreable on main and I've already vented too much in the discord

Holy shit my mom has just been progressively adding onto her guilt trip about me being a guy huh?

She said right before quarantine started that she though she's getting better with my pronouns, she's now found it difficult to think of girls that she knows are girls with she/her, and thinks of them with he/him pronouns instead, and slipped and said that once and got a weird look

And when I decided to go ahead and do a self-enforced quarantine bc I'm in the high-risk category, before the official shelter-in-place started, she said that at least I wouldn't be binding so she wouldn't have to see my pretending

And my voice dropped a lot when I was on t but I can't use my natural voice around her because I "sound angry and grouchy" so I have to force my voice up half an octave and it honestly kind of hurts because I don't have time away that I can use my actual voice anymore

And she started making fun of my name because it reminds her of a donkey braying and so she started sometimes making a donkey sound instead of my name

And she stopped using my name and started using my deadname again because "it doesn't matter because it's only us and it's so hard for me to do that when it's not the name I gave you" when it's literally one letter difference

And she stopped using my pronouns for the same reason

And I was infodumping about cats today and she said I was "fucking mansplaining" because I was talking about the same thing for so long and going overly in-depth with it even though it's the same level of infodumping I've always done and she herself infodumps to the same level bc we're both nd

And every time I speak to her now she calls me the wrong shit and usually guilts me about being trans

And my dad is better about my pronouns and sometimes uses my name but he still treats me in regular life not like his family but like a fucking employee that is on the verge of being fired

And I just want to stop I can't do this anymore I don't want to die but I can't take this it was getting decent and now I can't even get out of the house, I can go work in the fields for an hour or two but I can't talk to anyone or see anyone and then I'm back here where I just get constantly shit on and I've been crying so much over the past 3 months that I've had to increase my water intake to accommodate the crying and it's so hard not to start doing it again and the only reason I haven't is because I can't find it and I just want the quarantine to be over so I can be around people who don't hate me and make me hate myself even more than I already do

[doberbutts]

Perhaps it's because when I say something like that I don't say 'capitalism', but 'society'.

There are many experts who believe RSD wouldn't be as severe, or perhaps not even a thing, if kids with ADD weren't immediately ostracized as 'the weird kid' in literally all of their social groups. If we had the proper support growing up, would our brains go into a serious depressive episode when someone doesn't react to our best attempts at social behavior the way we imagined it?

If medication was met with more widespread acceptance, if doctors would just quit with the 'but have you thought maybe you're just a failure and you need to try harder', if parents weren't obsessed with 'fixing' or 'ignoring' and were more dedicated to 'supporting' and 'accepting', if researchers actually had the time and money to provide better medical answers than the laundry list of side effects that causes many (me) to go off their meds for a better QOL... maybe we could stick to our half-started projects, maybe we could succeed in areas we genuinely want to succeed in, maybe we could stop feeling like fuckups for more than 5 minutes at a time.

If we took the shame out of executive dysfunction, maybe we'd be able to seek out coping methods to be able to actually pee like a normal person instead of doing a wiggle dance on our way to the bathroom because we knew we had to pee 5 hours ago but we reeeeeally had to finish reading the 80 different wiki tabs we had open.

If we found an outlet for the manic portions that was also okay being shelved when we just feel like flopping in bed like a blob for 5 days straight, maybe we could spend our time feeling fulfilled instead of always anxiously buzzing to do *something*.

If we could self-talk out loud without fearing someone might judge us for 'speaking to ourselves', if we could just enjoy our complex and ongoing lifelon daydream plots without fearing that we're 'crazy' and all the stigma associated with it, if we could just infodump about our passions and hyperfixations without someone saying we're talking over them, mansplaining, or 'being rude' by being excited to speak on something with someone who - we think - finally understands why we like that thing so much, maybe we would be able to idk socialize and enjoy social relationships without feeling like those people are just looking for an excuse to get rid of us.

I am very aware of the fact that capitalism is not actually the problem here, and that it's society at large, because I actually have that support system now in my personal life, I've worked hard to make aure to have it in my work life, and my biggest struggles come from when society at large cannot give me the support I need to be able to feel some semblence of peace from my now-unmedicated ADD.

It's not to say that you would be neurotypical if society was better. It's that your neurodiversity would simply be another aspect of you, rather than something that negatively imapcts your quality of life, if you and me and everyone else with this disorder (and any disability, really) had the support you needed.

After all, we rarely think of people needing glasses or contacts as a disability, and thanks to widespread support for the visually impaired, no one except extreme cases would consider themselves disabled for needing help to see.

Getting a little bit tired of posts that are like “adhd is only a disorder because of capitalism” as if it’s mr monopoly man’s fault that i struggle to stay committed to artistic projects i undertook personally for myself and that I enjoy, have trouble regulating my emotions, and procrastinate on eating and going to the bathroom.

I get what they are trying to say, but even if capitalism didn’t exist I would still want to have things like “the motivation to clean my living space and the ability to actually notice that it’s dirty.” I know this is part of the misperception of adhd, but adhd doesn’t just affect academics and work. It affects EVERYTHING, including your personal goals and your own basic needs