#that's a text post

[sunflowerchester]

@miltonka:

Why do fans of two characters who love each other more than anything in the world fight so hard? You can love them both. Try to understand them both. They both made mistakes, but they are both just people. Each can identify more with the other, understandably. But you have to try to understand them both.

I know this is the way Tumblr used to work, but it feels weird to start a convo on someone else's post by replying in a thread. So I am just going to keep doing it this way to sequester my uninvited replies to my page, to be ignored or responded to as the feed feels fit!

I do think that this comment was saying "let's just all be friends because we love the same show," but I do want to address the sort of consistent false equivalence that is constantly brought up when people say "you can love them both equally." I do believe this is true, you can love both Sam and Dean equally, but we cannot reduce them to the lowest common denominator and pretend they are the same person.

I think the reason Sam fans and Dean fans fight is because some people find it hard to hold criticism and love for a character at the same time and become defensive. Do the boys both make mistakes because they are both human? Of course they do. But they don't make the same mistakes nor do they make the same amount of mistakes, and eventually we have to admit that when criticism of one character outweighs the amount of criticism for the other, maybe the reason is that one character deserves more criticism because of the patterns of behavior they have established.

This doesn't have to mean you don't love that one character as much as the other. It can just mean you see him for how he truly is and demand better. This is how I feel about Dean.

My criticism of Dean doesn't mean I don't love him. It just means I'm not going to ignore his flaws in favor of some ill-fated effort to treat the boys "equally" by pretending that means they are the exact same person. Treating them equally would be holding them to the SAME STANDARD and going from there.

I think this is why Dean fans find criticism from Sam fans tough to take, because they demand that people who claim to love them both to discuss them equally negatively/positively, period. I would do that if the dynamic between the boys was as equal as the fandom demands we treat the boys, and warranted that, but it doesn't. Pretending otherwise to change the standard to cut Dean some slack wouldn't be fair to Sam.

What is fair is seeing things as they are, then being able to hold loving a character while also accurately identify when the character deserves criticism at the same time. Criticism does not equal hate, it is just part of fandom discussions and analysis.

[bizarropurugly]

My Pokemon Teams Thru the Years

RED Charizard Ninetales Flareon Moltres Nidoqueen Nidoking

BLUE Blastoise Persian Vaporeon Articuno Kingler Sandslash

YELLOW Pikachu Jolteon Persian Charizard Blastoise Venusaur

SILVER Typhlosion Persian Pidgeot (I think) Umbreon Espeon Suicune

gen3 skipped

PLATINUM Luxray Flareon Lucario Kadabra Floatzel Drifblim

gen5 unfinished

X Delphox Aegislash Sylveon Simipour Noivern Venusaur

SUN Incineroar Purugly Mimikyu Leafeon Luxray (shiny) Kommo-o

SHIELD Cinderace Liepard Perrserker Dracozolt Golurk Glaceon

[koobiie]

shoutout to everyone who wants to infodump but cant string together coherent thoughts to form sentences and instead just look at you like this

[gabrielora]

When I was younger and researching the autism diagnosis criteria and symptoms, I thought “oh I couldn’t POSSIBLY be autistic.” Because when I read “takes everything literally” I thought it literally meant EVERYTHING and I was like “I don’t take EVERYTHING literally, just most things!” And I just realized the other day that it didn’t actually mean EVERYTHING and that was an overstatement.

[noctude]

maybe i shouldn’t respond to wrong number texts any more

[sleeplessv0id]

what doesn't kill you makes you weird at intimacy

[realwizardshit]

Combat log: The effect Ibuprofen has ended.

Me: *instantly ragdolls*

[nondivisable]

I need to say something and I need y'all to be calm

if it isn't actively bad or harmful, no representation should be called "too simple" or "too surface level"

I have a whole argument for this about the barbie movie but today I wanna talk about a show called "the babysitters club" on Netflix

(obligatory disclaimer that I watched only two episodes of this show so if it's super problematic I'm sorry) (yes. I know it's based on a book, this is about the show)

this is a silly 8+ show that my 9 year old sister is watching and it manages to tackle so many complex topics in such an easy way. basic premise is these 13 year old girls have a babysitting agency.

in one episode, a girl babysits this transfem kid. the approach is super simple, with the kid saying stuff like "oh no, those are my old boy clothes, these are my girl clothes". they have to go to the doctor and everyone is calling the kid by her dead name and using he/him and this 13 year old snaps at like a group of doctors and they all listen to her. it's pure fantasy and any person versed in trans theory would point out a bunch of mistakes.

but after watching this episode, my little sister started switching to my name instead of my dead name and intercalating he/him pronouns when talking about me.

one of the 13 years old is a diabetic and sometimes her whole personality is taken over by that. but she has this episode where she pushes herself to her limit and passes out and talks about being in a coma for a while because of not recognizing the limits of her disability.

and this allowed my 9 year old sister to understand me better when I say "I really want to play with you but right now my body physically can't do that" (I'm disabled). she has even asked me why I'm pushing myself, why I'm not using my crutches when I complain about pain.

my mom is 50 years old and watching this show with my sister. she said the episode about the diabetic girl helped her understand me and my disability better. she grew up disabled as well, but she was taught to shut up and power through.

yes, silly simple representation can annoy you if you've read thousands of pages about queer liberation or disability radical thought, but sometimes things are not for you.

[millenianthemums]

diet culture people make me feel like i’m going crazy. you want me to take an experimental pill that destroys my appetite?? you want me to remove part of my stomach??? you want me to stop eating bread and rice, two of the staple foods most inherent to humanity????? why exactly? because my stomach is big? because you don’t like the way i look, and you think it’s reasonable to tell me to carve pieces off of myself and try random drugs and ruin my own life so i can look more visually pleasing to you? and you somehow don’t see how absurdly cruel and selfish that is to ask of somebody???? while pretending you care about their HEALTH????????????????? FUCK YOU!!!!

[valeriehalla]

I am so utterly fascinated by “Saki”, the 18-year-running mahjong manga in which you, the reader, become gradually, frog-boilingly aware (over the course of nearly two decades’ worth of mahjong tournaments) that none of these girls are wearing underwear and most of their boobs are slowly expanding.

I need you to understand that I have, like, an anthropological level fascination with this comic. From the perspective of someone who is also a comic artist and writer, two things delight me about it:

the fact that I understand completely how an artist gets from “the fans can have a little hint of skirted asscheek” to “the pussy is completely out on center page” over the course of 18 years; and

the way in which the pussy being out is treated by the characters and diegesis as being utterly unremarkable.

Okay. Point 1. The frog-boiling.

Let me put this in perspective for you. There was already a meme about how the characters in “Saki” don’t wear underwear when I was in middle school. I am thirty now. Okay? And it’s still going.

In the time since, this has stopped being a joke. It is now indisputable canon. This is not because anyone outright says it at any point. It’s because the underwear ran out of places to hide. I’m obsessed with this thought: somewhere in the over 20 volumes of “Saki”, there is a panel in which underwear was objectively deconfirmed. And it would be so hard to figure out where that panel actually is. Maybe the artist didn’t even realize it when she drew it! The frog? Boiling!!

And of course there is also the breast expansion. I don’t know how to put a spin on this. They are just expanding. Like, this happens a lot with artists: you define a character as being, in your mind, “the one with the big boobs”, and over the years you emphasize that trait further and further so that the signal doesn’t get lost in the noise. It’s just that normally—in like a wildly popular manga series about mahjong published by literally Square Enix, for example—normally there would be a point at which the boobs stopped getting bigger. Like, an editor would step in or something. Or you would get to the point where you cannot draw the character in the same panel as her mahjong tiles without her breasts spilling over the tiles, and you’d go, “Well, this is now untenable.”

That did not happen. There is no ceiling. The frog is soup.

Point 2. The complete and utter mundanity of all of this.

It’s like this, okay: there’s no shortage of trashy ecchi manga out there. There’s a million other comics doing wildly bawdier things with wildly more improbable bishoujos.

The vibe with “Saki” is different.

It’s hard to explain this, but it feels like the world of the comic is fundamentally uninterested in the fanservice happening on the page. I cannot describe it as “leering”, because I cannot conceive of a person in the story from whose point of view one would leer. I think the artist is probably into it—I can’t imagine anyone is making her do this—but “Saki” the comic has no opinion on the matter.

There are essentially no male characters in “Saki”. Like, there was one guy? Kind of? At the very beginning? But he is gone now. They put him back in the toybox. He does not exist. It appears to be some level of canonical that in the world of “Saki”, almost all humans are women. Those women are sometimes romantically into each other. According to comments the artist has made on Twitter (which I cannot source), they have lesbian baby technology, so it’s no problem. It’s so much not a problem that the story is about mahjong, instead of any of that.

So, like, the fiction here appears to be this: this is the, like, meta-narrative of the fanservice of “Saki”, right: it’s just normal that they don’t wear underwear and their boobs are arbitrarily big. It’s been normal. It was normal before the story of the manga began. It’s just how things are. Nobody bats an eye about it, and if they do, it’s in sort of a lesbian kind of way so like what’s the problem, we love lesbians here. This is literally normal for girls.

The fanservice simply diffuses into this all-encompassing aura of disembodied, ambient sluttiness. The framing of the panels demands you acknowledge it, and the story demands you already be over it, because it’s mahjong time now, and we’re playing mahjong.

Do you get??? why I’m so fascinated??? Are you not a little enraptured???

Anyway, I have no idea how to end this weird post. I guess the conclusion is that women stay winning????

[dragonpyre]

Ngl I totally forgot fandom discourse was a thing. I don’t care man, I have car payments

[sunflowerchester]

So I just realized that on Serializd you can rate and review every single episode of Supernatural, and since I have been trying to get my bf to watch s1-3 for the last year AND I have tons of live blogs I wrote and perfectly tagged BY EPISODE NUMBER (through 11.08 bc that’s when I quit) at my fingertips, I could ABSOLUTELY do that this year. 

👀

So I think I might. 

If I endeavor to do this ENORMOUS task, I will share here as I go. ALSO, I will live blog the new episodes I watch that I’ve never seen before (11.09ish to whatever the episode is before the series finale). 

WOW this is a lot but I am EXCITE. (Also I used to write and engage with SO much Spn meta, find that here.)

This used to be a Spn blog, did you know? 😂

[marinaratrench05]

[stargoyle]

"This person has a secret onlyfans!" "This artist does NSFW commissions!" "This author writes porn on the side!" I cannot begin to tell you how swag and awesome that is.

[theredtours]

why yes I AM making boop gifs from screen recording