#strawman?

[m3rricat]

Thinking about how much I love the spawn Astarion graveyard sex scene (well, 'scene' is a generous term, since it's fade-to-black, but that's part of why I like it). I personally headcanon that it was pretty spontaneous--that Astarion didn't bring Tav there for that purpose, that he had originally intended just to show the one he loves the place where his life first ended to talk about his new life beginning. But, when the mood shifted just right, Astarion took a chance and grasped the feeling.

If it was spontaneous, it would probably have been the first completely uncalculated sex that Astarion can remember having. Sex that was far more about the emotions surrounding it than the sex itself. Yes, it's in the open on a grave, but it's not played off as done for the thrill or anything like that--if the place that held meaning for Astarion had been indoors, he would have done it there. It was about overwriting this place of horror with an act of love and intimacy and enjoyment (and there's an edge of defiance to it that is so Astarion, ugh I love it), a first step in Astarion writing his new life. And, with the fade-to-black, reinforcing that he is done with performance.

[ceasarslegion]

Infuriating: guy whose entire political ideology hinges on the idea that everything will be perfect and good if all the Good People just Win the One Big Battle is calling you naive for saying that you have to at least like, try to make positive change work with what we have now while we work on how to make it better

[itsapmseymour]

I’m in a curious mood,

What are the weirdest “strawman” moments you’ve seen or heard of?

[siryouarebeingmocked]

Ironic that quantum-dragon is supposedly against "unreasonable" bigotry, but apparently a) blocked everyone who replied, and b) pre-blocked me.

Doesn't seem very reasonable.

The supportive notes are still there, of course.

[hollow-dweller]

i think it's time for fandom to accept that some AUs are simply A Bad Idea. your lilo and stitch au with two white dudes is a bad idea. your portrait of a lady on fire au with men is a bad idea. your encanto au with a white family is a bad idea. culture and gender and race *matter* in many source texts, and erasing or appropriating that in order to see your two favourite white guys hug is, you guessed it, a bad fucking idea.

[bartex-x]

I don't feel safe saying this on twitter, but genuinely, where is all the jimmy x curly shipping I keep hearing about? Y'all talk about it like it's one of the core problems of the fandom, but I've seen maybe 6 fanarts of the ship. Most of the drawings and writing with them together just portrays the abuse in different ways and in no way advertises the idea that Jimmy and Curly were/are/should be in a romantic or sexual relationship.

Genuinely where are you finding all that?

[disteal]

Me: man it’s kind of terrifying to live in the frontier of AI generated media. Like as if it wasn’t hard enough to navigate a hypernormalised late capitalism, already so full of misinformation it’s basically pure noise. Now there’s hundreds of cheap, dubiously sourced generators for everything from art to nudes to eerily accurate replicated voices. It’s not hard to imagine the worst case scenarios for any one of these, as it just makes existing fraud/scalping ludicrously easier, faster and more accessible, but on this scale? It seems inevitable that ai generated images overwhelm us to the point not trusting any images or videos you see of war, or a country, or a classical painting, or a historical event is a future that is rapidly approaching. And I especially don’t like how many of these data libraries are being managed and owned by nazis.

Some booger on tumblr: omfg the misinformation I can’t. Actually if you knew anything about ai you’d know the sprinkl.io and grimble engines are ethically trained and this is pure fearmongering. God it’s sad to see how much female hysteria exists on this website 🙄 hope you don’t wrap everyone else up in your period meltdown

[saturncoyote]

So how do ya'll feel about doomed toxic yuri

[canonkiller]

I can't draw right now to put this into Enjoyable Comic Form but please remember that you have choice. even if you are depressed or otherwise neurodivergent or disabled or Stuck there are always things you can do to improve your situation. even if they are small things like tidying up your immediate area or silly things like listening to a new radio station or scary things like trying to get help, you can do them. it might suck and it might hurt and it might be difficult but you can do it and it's worth doing. If nothing else just go sit or stand somewhere unusual to remember you have free will. Love yourself

[local-hellhound-steals-spaghetti]

Genuinely would love to meet the "purely positive" dog trainers that aversive/balanced trainers keep talking about. You know, the ones that are so against using force that they just let their dogs walk into traffic.

Boy, they sure must lose a lot of dogs every year and honestly I'm amazed they're still alive themselves if they're getting dragged in front of a semi trailer every time they go out for a walk...

[murderofsomeone]

I swear I won't maul you like a wild animal if you engage with me, I will be normal I promise

[genderkoolaid]

“Pride is for perverts” man I wish ppl weren’t as fucking acephobic as they were, what abt sex repulsed aces? Ppl with sexual trauma? Ppl who just don’t want to see sexual stuff? I’m not against wearing harnesses and leather at prides, rock on, but you can’t be doing straight up sexual acts (like full on sex) and then get mad when people don’t feel comfortable around that

Fuck yeah leather daddies but don’t suck dick on a public street, this whole “actually all queer people are perverts and that’s a good thing and we should laugh at those pRuDeS who don’t like sex” is just��. Kinda gross and acephobic

prude/pervert is not about having sex but whether your relationship to sex is normative & restrictive (square?) or non-normative, expansive, & queer. asexuals can be perverts. maybe not you though

[siryouarebeingmocked]

Canadian Newspaper Globe And Mail: Conservative Leader wants harsher jail sentences for repeat offender auto thieves.

Nora Loreto, self-described Socialist: Stealing cars is a victimless crime!

Loreto: Also, most people in our jails are innocent!

Loreto: As long as you use the extremely technical definition of “jail” that means “a place where people are usually held before trial and are therefore legally innocent”, which is not how it is generally used.

Loreto: I say this while ignoring how car theft means there is a victim, by definition.

Me:

Some idiot also claimed the real issue was car manufacturers making a ‘defective product’, and the “logical step” should be the government going after them for obvious collusion with insurance companies.

The intellectual titan agreed.

Even though about five seconds thought would go “wait, wouldn’t having an insecure car reduce sales? And don’t insurance companies try to avoid paying out money? And isn’t car insurance mandatory anyway?”

She has a substack post about it, and it’s, uh, special. As in Ed. (archive)

>For me, I understand a victim to be someone whose life is irrevocably impacted, negatively, by forces they cannot control.

>You’re not a victim if things can be made well through consumption.

If someone spills my drink in a bar, I'm still a victim even if they or I buy me a new drink. It doesn't un-spill the drink.

Even if I get a new car, that’s a lot of trouble to go through.

>You’re a victim if you’ve experienced something that means that you’ll never again be the person you were before.

Because no one's ever been permanently traumatized by someone using force to take their stuff. Even leaving aside the times where the thief assaulted and seriously injured the car owner.

>My immediate, half-serious reaction, that jailing people for a victimless crime is ridiculous, caught a lot of heat.

Ah, yes, the classic "I wasn't serious (except when I was)" dodge.

>Thousands of men told me how much they love their cars, how their cars hold them at night and make love to them. My emails and direct messages filled up with lots of “if you steal my car I will kill you”s and “where do you live so I can steal your cars”es. The people were mad that I could assert such a thing.

Along with the classic "let's make this a gender issue, for some reason" and "talking about the harassment so I look more like a victim while ignoring the actual criticism".

>It’s the formulation that this object is so premordial that anything that may befall a car, whether a jacking or an overpacked highway, is a personal attack on the car’s owner. It’s silly.

And naturally, a red just starts making up entirely new arguments for and assumptions about the critics from thin air instead of addressing the actual criticism.

A carjacking is a violent theft of an occupied car.

Which means the operator must a) be removed, by force and/or threat of force, or b) become a hostage of the 'jacker. Sometimes both.

It's amazing that this intellectual titan can even type while she's staring so hard at her navel. Or...another body part. From the inside.

[reality-detective]

So many seeds dropped 🤔

[coraniaid]

People in the Buffy fandom love to rail against the idea that a vampire's personality has nothing to do with who they were as a human being. I've lost track of how many times I've seen a post on here pointing out how hard this stance is to justify and how ridiculous it is that the writers in general and Giles in particular keeps claiming it to be true. Which is interesting, since what I've just described is a position that both Giles and the show more broadly never actually takes.

The one time Buffy suggests this might be true -- when she tells Willow that "a vampire's personality has nothing to do with the person it was" in Season 3's Doppelgangland -- she is clearly meant to be wrong! Angel very obviously is about to correct her when he chimes in with "well, actually...", and she knows he is about to disagree with her which is why she glares at him to make him stop. What's more, what Buffy is telling Willow in this scene has no bearing on anything the show has said or shown before. We are not meant to think Buffy is accurately descibing the show's position. We're not even meant to think it's something Buffy herself believes. She's very obviously just saying it to try to make Willow feel better. This is not subtle!

The very first human we see on the show who gets turned into a vampire is Season 1's Jesse in the opening two-parter Welcome to the Hellmouth / The Harvest. Human!Jesse is, not to be too charitable, an unpleasant creep who is weirdly obsessed with Cordelia Chase. Vampire!Jesse is ... also an unpleasant creep who is weirdly obsessed with Cordelia Chase. Don't you think this is an odd creative choice if the show wanted you to really think that a vampire's personality was nothing like the human they used to be?

This trend of linking a vampire's personality to that of their former human life continues throughout the first season. Why would Giles warn Buffy (in Never Kill A Boy On The First Date) that the human Andrew Borba, who they suspect has been sired as the Anointed One, was wanted by the police for "questioning in a double murder" if a human's personality had no bearing on the vampire they would become? And indeed, a couple of episodes later, in the same season's Angel, Giles will explicitly tell Buffy that "a vampire [...] may have the movements, the memories, even the personality of the person that it took over."

Having established this back in its first season, it remains a part of the show's lore in every future season. It's one of the elements of the show's often mutable world-building that remains the most consistent. Angel and Spike will both talk about things that "they" did as humans. Giles will continue to warn Buffy that the current vampire of the week was a horrible murderer before becoming a vampire [see: the Gorch brothers in Season 2's Bad Eggs, or Zachary Kralik in Season 3's Helpless], which only makes sense for him to do if he thinks that has a bearing on how dangerous they are as a vampire. Drusilla, as a vampire, is shown to be insane because of pyschological torture she was subjected to by Angelus while she was a human. (If a vampire's personality was entirely separate from that of the original human, how would this work?) Buffy admits to Ford in Season 2's Lie To Me that a vampire "walks and talks and [...] remembers [it's former] life". And so on, and so on.

And yet, without fail, every couple of months, somebody will announce that a vampire's personality in Buffy very often mirrors the personality of the human who died to become that vampire, as if this is somehow a radical and subversive reading of the text. Well, yeah, no shit. That's explicitly how it's always worked.

What's next: a post bravely insisting that -- no matter what Joss Whedon might want you to think -- vampires on the show really do hate sunlight and crosses and holy water? That maybe being a Slayer might be a metaphor for something? That there are subtle clues and hints scattered throughout the show's final seasons that suggest that maybe Marti Noxon and Doug Petrie are wrong, and that Willow might not be straight?

[honorthysalad]

Seems like Yoshiki’s eyes are starting to lose shape whenever he’s stressed out, starting with his left pupil getting more jagged when he’s putting back ‘Hikaru’s head in ch22, and then in ch24, his left iris moves to the side.